Reading Friday
Jul. 31st, 2015 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dhampyresa(Sometimes I wonder if anyone ever reads these and what they think I look like if they do. Somehow reading back my old entries, I always get the image of myself in a chaise longue on a beach somewhere with a colourful drink in my hand -- which is odd, because I should know better than anyone that that was absolutely not how I read those books, ie: in the metro and/or in bed with the book falling on my face because I'm tired.)
What did you finish reading
Thor and the Warriors Four, by Alex Zalben (Writer) and Gurihiru (art): A very cute comic in which Power Pack teams up with various people, including, yes, Thor. Thor is the one who ends up most involved in the plot, but Power Pack also teams up with the Pet Avengers and, in the back up comic, with Hercules (the artist for the back up comic is different, btw). I really enjoyed it! It's clearly a comic aimed at kids, but the writing isn't dumbed down and the art styles are very clean and nice. The big block of colours approach to colouring looks deceptively simple, but fits the story and tone nicely. (I'd advise against reading so parts of it while listening to Manau's Le Dernier Combat, though, because the combination of that song + Power Pack's grandma being in the hospital brought me close to tears.) I would definitely reccomend it, including to children.
Counting this as "Book by an author you've never read" on the Serious Card.
Alcools, by Guillaume Apollinaire: I said pretty much all I want to say here. Long story short: I liked it, there is no punctuation at all and my favourite poem was Crépuscule. (Also, there is one poem where Apollinaire refers to two past lovers, one male, one female.)
Counting this as "non-fiction book written 50+ years ago" for the Serious Card (because I am not going through the rigmarole of 'is this book part of the French canon?' or 'Well, Le Pont Mirabeau was a school requirement, but not the rest of it...').
La Croisade des Carpathes, by Vanessa Callico and Diana Callico (both on writing): I originally thought there was going to be zombies, but then it turned out to be people turning into giant flies/scorpions/etc, at which point I threw up my hands, realised I had no idea what was going on and decided to enjoy the ride. And what an enjoyable ride it was!
This is a French novel that is very hard to summarise without sounding like it's crack of the highest order.
There are three different narrative threads: the not-slow-at-all decline of our civilisation in the face of disasters of Biblical proportions (worldwide possession epidemic, rising of Atlantis/sinking of Iceland causing worldwide massive tsunamis, etc), Vlad the Impaler and Mehmed the Conqueror being at war both against each other and against something else as well as the plotline tying the two: Eva time travelling to recruit the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (of which Vlad is one).
It's a lot more coherent and readable than you might think based on the above and especially if I tell you there's some sort of romantic relationship between Eva and Vlad or that I don't think there was any editing done. There's some head-hopping through-out, with is a bit annoying, but there wasn't that much of it and I got used to it eventually.
I was dubious about Eva being sent back in time and having a romance with Vlad, because that was liable to turn her into an OTT wish-fulfilment fantasy (and not in a fun way), but ended up really liking how it was handled. Eva is completely and utterly out of her depths and keeps fucking up as a result which always have consequences. She reacts to suddenly being in the 15th century by having a total meltdown. She's not an action girl. She freezes up in dangerous situations as her first instinct -- but she does manage to shake herself awake enough to try and do something, which often doesn't help any, usually because she has no idea what she's doing.
I also don't mind the romance, although I could have done without it, because it feels part of the supernatural side of the story: that the force that's bouncing Eva through time needs her and Vlad to do certain things and that's the best way to get them to do it. They also don't spend that much time together and the time they do spend together is mostly occupied by plot, not romance.
I have two more quibbles and then we can get to the good stuff.
One is that events are moved around in the timeline: Vlad's marriage to Ilona Brankovic (1466) happens before Dan III's revolt (1460) which itself happens between the Night Attack and the Battle of the Danube (1462), if memory serves (I've loaned the book so can't check).
The other one is the lack of Radu. I was, luckily, forewarned, because I talked to the authors at Japan Expo (where I bought the book) and it came up. It would have been very disappointing to find that out on my own.
That said, I ended up thinking about it and I think the lack of Radu completely explains everything that felt off about Vlad and Mehmed's characterisation. Like, they're essentially strangers to each other because Vlad, without wee!Radu to protect decided to rebel as much as he could against his status of royal hostage and so got sent away to do other stuff (he was a stable boy, iirc). As an adult, he feels kind of brittle, I suppose, much more than I'm used to Vlad being, which, again can be explain by him having no support system in the Ottoman Empire without Radu there.
Mehmed, meanwhile, seems to be lacking focused, unmoored, unsure of his path in life (one character even comments that in her time/in the 21rst century, they'd call him depressed, and I think she's right). A lack of focus is really odd for Mehmed, until you take into account the fact that without Radu there, what purpose does he have once he's conquered Constantinople? I don't know if Radu loved Mehmed or if it was Stockholm syndrome or a political gamble or a mix of all three, but Radu was important to Mehmed. He wasn't just a pretty face, Mehmed listened to him (I would be very very surprised if Radu had nothing to do with that decree granting safe passage/etc to Christians in the Ottoman Empire). Without Radu, Mehmed is really alone and I think that's something that got to him.
In short, I'm sad that there was no Radu in the book, but it did a brilliant job of characterising Vlad and Mehmed in his absence. The good stuff is that so far (this is book one of what I think is a trilogy) the worldbuilding makes sense, I like Eva and while there isn't that much Vlad and Mehmed interaction, they do spend a lot of time thinking about each other, on account of it being 1462. There's a bit where Mehmed thinks about how it hardly seems fair to show up with so many troops to fight Vlad and another where he reflects that Vlad is a ~worthy opponent~ and he will definitely fight fair next time? And I sitting there reading and going 'ah, yes, more of this, please'. They do at one point team-up to fight the biblical Apocalypse.
(The lack of Radu also serves to explain the timeline issues: whatever happened that made Radu not be, could also have also easily, shifted the rest of the timeline around.)
Eva has A Very Specific Skillset that gets to be put to good use: she's doing a doctoral thesis on the Apocalypse which means she is uniquely suited to handle the weirdass supernatural bullshit going on in this story -- and it's all-but-stated that that's why she's "the Chosen One".
Also, Mara Brankovic does not appear on page but gets to be a badass anyway.
Shit, y'all, it even has a grumpy scientist going on a roadtrip with Eva!
I found this book an absolute joy to read and I will definitely be reading the next one. (Also I am linking to the post about Wallachia and the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century again.)
Counting this as "book with a female protagonist" on the Serious Card.
I know I said I'd do carthaginians this time, I don't really have the time and haven't finished Beyond Cannae, so I'll do it next time. Plus, I'll have read Ghosts of Cannae and Contes et Légendes de Carthage by then, so between Darkness Over Cannae, Tumulte à Rome, Beyond Cannae, Ghosts of Cannae and Contes et Légendes de Carthage it will be ALL CARTHAGINIANS ALL THE TIME, yes.
This makes 0/25 on the Mix'n'Match Card, 21/25 on the Random Card and 11/25 (+3) on the Serious Card forhamsterwoman 's reading bingo.
What are you reading now
Still stalled on The Art of War, The Kick-Ass Writer, La véritable histoire de Carthage et de Hannibal, Les Fleurs du Mal, Métronome, Ghosts of Cannae and Rome's Revolution. Also stalled on Le Jardin des silences.
The Grass-King's Concubine, by Kari Sperring: Have not made progress on this either (see hype/hype avoidance cycle and me being an idiot), but I'm going to talk about what I've read of it so far anyway.
It took me a while to realise why I was getting such a vivid mental image of the house the main character grew up in, why I could see the golden light swelter in the courtyard, smell the fermenting grapes and hear the winds through the olive trees. Not that the descriptions were bad (not at all!), but more like I was bringing something of mine to the book, something I wasn't sure where it was coming from. Then I saw her name again, Pèlerin des Puiz, thought it felt familiar and got off the metro. In the street, I stopped walking when it occured to me that the name felt familiar because I know the des Puiz. I know these people. Not personally, of course, but i know where they live, I know how they live, I know who they are. I was standing there in the street and I was almost crying, because for maybe the first time I could see the parts of my family who make wine where they've always make wine and the parts of me that is still a small child with summers of orange gold and lavander purple in a book. It was perfect.
I don't know if the rest of the book will be as good as this one moment of sudden realisation and although I hope it is, I don't care. Just for that, it will have been worth it.
(The house I saw, btw, was a mas, the big kind with an inner courtyard.)
And Now For Something Completely Different! Ferrets! I find the fact that ferrets are ferrets in particular fascinating given their emphasis (so far) on how much they changed when confronted with Marcellan. You see, ferrets are born with smooth brains (unlike pretty much every other mammal) and the gyri only appear over the course of their lives. That's why their brains are studied a lot in neurology, btw, because it allows us to look at processes that happen prenatally in humans. So the fact that these people have, as far as I can tell, have their thought processes completely or at least severely altered from what they were before and are also ferrets is really interesting.
I don't think it's intentional, but I think it's interesting anyway.
What are you reading next
GHOSTS OF CANNAE. 2231rst anniversary of the Battle of Cannae, here I come. Then L'Homme Noyé, I think. (Watch me read something else entirely, lmao.)
Books that I have already: Pyramids of London, by Andrea K Höst, Prisoner (Echo's Wolf, Book 1) (Werewolf Marines 2) by Lia Silver, Darkness Over Cannae by Jenny Dolfen, Taking Stock by Scott Bartlett (yuleswap book 1), February by Lisa Moore (yuleswap book 2), The Demigod Diaries by Rick Riordan, The Skull Throne, by Peter V. Brett,Hostage by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown.
Books that are out and that I haven't got: Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen, by Garth Nix, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, Melting Stones and Battle Magic by Tamora Pierce, The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Beginning Place by Ursula Le Guin, Seraphina by Rachel Hartman, The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, the last two books of Kate Eliott's Spiritwalker trilogy, The Missing Queen by Samhita Arni, Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, whatever's out of the Craft Sequence series, Chroniques du Pays des Mères by Elisabeth Vonarburg, Le Graal de l'Inframonde by Vanessa Callico and Diana Callico, Lord of the two Lands by Judith Tarr.
Books that aren't out yet (and when they're out): The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan (Autumn 2015), The Sleeping Life (Eferum, #2) by Andrea K. Höst (2015), Benjamin January #14 by Barbara Hambly (no idea), the Tris book by Tamora Pierce (2015), The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard (caveat), Dogs of Peace by Ada Palmer and whatever Jenny Dolfen's next project is.
Books what I'm not sure if I want to read them: City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett: Still IDK.
Additions to the list: Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter (from a rec over at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ladybusiness ) and Barbara Hambly's vampire series (via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wordsofastory ).
What did you finish reading
Thor and the Warriors Four, by Alex Zalben (Writer) and Gurihiru (art): A very cute comic in which Power Pack teams up with various people, including, yes, Thor. Thor is the one who ends up most involved in the plot, but Power Pack also teams up with the Pet Avengers and, in the back up comic, with Hercules (the artist for the back up comic is different, btw). I really enjoyed it! It's clearly a comic aimed at kids, but the writing isn't dumbed down and the art styles are very clean and nice. The big block of colours approach to colouring looks deceptively simple, but fits the story and tone nicely. (I'd advise against reading so parts of it while listening to Manau's Le Dernier Combat, though, because the combination of that song + Power Pack's grandma being in the hospital brought me close to tears.) I would definitely reccomend it, including to children.
Counting this as "Book by an author you've never read" on the Serious Card.
Alcools, by Guillaume Apollinaire: I said pretty much all I want to say here. Long story short: I liked it, there is no punctuation at all and my favourite poem was Crépuscule. (Also, there is one poem where Apollinaire refers to two past lovers, one male, one female.)
Counting this as "non-fiction book written 50+ years ago" for the Serious Card (because I am not going through the rigmarole of 'is this book part of the French canon?' or 'Well, Le Pont Mirabeau was a school requirement, but not the rest of it...').
La Croisade des Carpathes, by Vanessa Callico and Diana Callico (both on writing): I originally thought there was going to be zombies, but then it turned out to be people turning into giant flies/scorpions/etc, at which point I threw up my hands, realised I had no idea what was going on and decided to enjoy the ride. And what an enjoyable ride it was!
This is a French novel that is very hard to summarise without sounding like it's crack of the highest order.
There are three different narrative threads: the not-slow-at-all decline of our civilisation in the face of disasters of Biblical proportions (worldwide possession epidemic, rising of Atlantis/sinking of Iceland causing worldwide massive tsunamis, etc), Vlad the Impaler and Mehmed the Conqueror being at war both against each other and against something else as well as the plotline tying the two: Eva time travelling to recruit the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (of which Vlad is one).
It's a lot more coherent and readable than you might think based on the above and especially if I tell you there's some sort of romantic relationship between Eva and Vlad or that I don't think there was any editing done. There's some head-hopping through-out, with is a bit annoying, but there wasn't that much of it and I got used to it eventually.
I was dubious about Eva being sent back in time and having a romance with Vlad, because that was liable to turn her into an OTT wish-fulfilment fantasy (and not in a fun way), but ended up really liking how it was handled. Eva is completely and utterly out of her depths and keeps fucking up as a result which always have consequences. She reacts to suddenly being in the 15th century by having a total meltdown. She's not an action girl. She freezes up in dangerous situations as her first instinct -- but she does manage to shake herself awake enough to try and do something, which often doesn't help any, usually because she has no idea what she's doing.
I also don't mind the romance, although I could have done without it, because it feels part of the supernatural side of the story: that the force that's bouncing Eva through time needs her and Vlad to do certain things and that's the best way to get them to do it. They also don't spend that much time together and the time they do spend together is mostly occupied by plot, not romance.
I have two more quibbles and then we can get to the good stuff.
One is that events are moved around in the timeline: Vlad's marriage to Ilona Brankovic (1466) happens before Dan III's revolt (1460) which itself happens between the Night Attack and the Battle of the Danube (1462), if memory serves (I've loaned the book so can't check).
The other one is the lack of Radu. I was, luckily, forewarned, because I talked to the authors at Japan Expo (where I bought the book) and it came up. It would have been very disappointing to find that out on my own.
That said, I ended up thinking about it and I think the lack of Radu completely explains everything that felt off about Vlad and Mehmed's characterisation. Like, they're essentially strangers to each other because Vlad, without wee!Radu to protect decided to rebel as much as he could against his status of royal hostage and so got sent away to do other stuff (he was a stable boy, iirc). As an adult, he feels kind of brittle, I suppose, much more than I'm used to Vlad being, which, again can be explain by him having no support system in the Ottoman Empire without Radu there.
Mehmed, meanwhile, seems to be lacking focused, unmoored, unsure of his path in life (one character even comments that in her time/in the 21rst century, they'd call him depressed, and I think she's right). A lack of focus is really odd for Mehmed, until you take into account the fact that without Radu there, what purpose does he have once he's conquered Constantinople? I don't know if Radu loved Mehmed or if it was Stockholm syndrome or a political gamble or a mix of all three, but Radu was important to Mehmed. He wasn't just a pretty face, Mehmed listened to him (I would be very very surprised if Radu had nothing to do with that decree granting safe passage/etc to Christians in the Ottoman Empire). Without Radu, Mehmed is really alone and I think that's something that got to him.
In short, I'm sad that there was no Radu in the book, but it did a brilliant job of characterising Vlad and Mehmed in his absence. The good stuff is that so far (this is book one of what I think is a trilogy) the worldbuilding makes sense, I like Eva and while there isn't that much Vlad and Mehmed interaction, they do spend a lot of time thinking about each other, on account of it being 1462. There's a bit where Mehmed thinks about how it hardly seems fair to show up with so many troops to fight Vlad and another where he reflects that Vlad is a ~worthy opponent~ and he will definitely fight fair next time? And I sitting there reading and going 'ah, yes, more of this, please'. They do at one point team-up to fight the biblical Apocalypse.
(The lack of Radu also serves to explain the timeline issues: whatever happened that made Radu not be, could also have also easily, shifted the rest of the timeline around.)
Eva has A Very Specific Skillset that gets to be put to good use: she's doing a doctoral thesis on the Apocalypse which means she is uniquely suited to handle the weirdass supernatural bullshit going on in this story -- and it's all-but-stated that that's why she's "the Chosen One".
Also, Mara Brankovic does not appear on page but gets to be a badass anyway.
Shit, y'all, it even has a grumpy scientist going on a roadtrip with Eva!
I found this book an absolute joy to read and I will definitely be reading the next one. (Also I am linking to the post about Wallachia and the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century again.)
Counting this as "book with a female protagonist" on the Serious Card.
I know I said I'd do carthaginians this time, I don't really have the time and haven't finished Beyond Cannae, so I'll do it next time. Plus, I'll have read Ghosts of Cannae and Contes et Légendes de Carthage by then, so between Darkness Over Cannae, Tumulte à Rome, Beyond Cannae, Ghosts of Cannae and Contes et Légendes de Carthage it will be ALL CARTHAGINIANS ALL THE TIME, yes.
This makes 0/25 on the Mix'n'Match Card, 21/25 on the Random Card and 11/25 (+3) on the Serious Card for
hamsterwoman 's reading bingo.
What are you reading now
Still stalled on The Art of War, The Kick-Ass Writer, La véritable histoire de Carthage et de Hannibal, Les Fleurs du Mal, Métronome, Ghosts of Cannae and Rome's Revolution. Also stalled on Le Jardin des silences.
The Grass-King's Concubine, by Kari Sperring: Have not made progress on this either (see hype/hype avoidance cycle and me being an idiot), but I'm going to talk about what I've read of it so far anyway.
It took me a while to realise why I was getting such a vivid mental image of the house the main character grew up in, why I could see the golden light swelter in the courtyard, smell the fermenting grapes and hear the winds through the olive trees. Not that the descriptions were bad (not at all!), but more like I was bringing something of mine to the book, something I wasn't sure where it was coming from. Then I saw her name again, Pèlerin des Puiz, thought it felt familiar and got off the metro. In the street, I stopped walking when it occured to me that the name felt familiar because I know the des Puiz. I know these people. Not personally, of course, but i know where they live, I know how they live, I know who they are. I was standing there in the street and I was almost crying, because for maybe the first time I could see the parts of my family who make wine where they've always make wine and the parts of me that is still a small child with summers of orange gold and lavander purple in a book. It was perfect.
I don't know if the rest of the book will be as good as this one moment of sudden realisation and although I hope it is, I don't care. Just for that, it will have been worth it.
(The house I saw, btw, was a mas, the big kind with an inner courtyard.)
And Now For Something Completely Different! Ferrets! I find the fact that ferrets are ferrets in particular fascinating given their emphasis (so far) on how much they changed when confronted with Marcellan. You see, ferrets are born with smooth brains (unlike pretty much every other mammal) and the gyri only appear over the course of their lives. That's why their brains are studied a lot in neurology, btw, because it allows us to look at processes that happen prenatally in humans. So the fact that these people have, as far as I can tell, have their thought processes completely or at least severely altered from what they were before and are also ferrets is really interesting.
I don't think it's intentional, but I think it's interesting anyway.
What are you reading next
GHOSTS OF CANNAE. 2231rst anniversary of the Battle of Cannae, here I come. Then L'Homme Noyé, I think. (Watch me read something else entirely, lmao.)
Books that I have already: Pyramids of London, by Andrea K Höst, Prisoner (Echo's Wolf, Book 1) (Werewolf Marines 2) by Lia Silver, Darkness Over Cannae by Jenny Dolfen, Taking Stock by Scott Bartlett (yuleswap book 1), February by Lisa Moore (yuleswap book 2), The Demigod Diaries by Rick Riordan, The Skull Throne, by Peter V. Brett,Hostage by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown.
Books that are out and that I haven't got: Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen, by Garth Nix, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, Melting Stones and Battle Magic by Tamora Pierce, The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Beginning Place by Ursula Le Guin, Seraphina by Rachel Hartman, The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, the last two books of Kate Eliott's Spiritwalker trilogy, The Missing Queen by Samhita Arni, Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, whatever's out of the Craft Sequence series, Chroniques du Pays des Mères by Elisabeth Vonarburg, Le Graal de l'Inframonde by Vanessa Callico and Diana Callico, Lord of the two Lands by Judith Tarr.
Books that aren't out yet (and when they're out): The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan (Autumn 2015), The Sleeping Life (Eferum, #2) by Andrea K. Höst (2015), Benjamin January #14 by Barbara Hambly (no idea), the Tris book by Tamora Pierce (2015), The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard (caveat), Dogs of Peace by Ada Palmer and whatever Jenny Dolfen's next project is.
Books what I'm not sure if I want to read them: City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett: Still IDK.
Additions to the list: Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter (from a rec over at
ladybusiness ) and Barbara Hambly's vampire series (via wordsofastory ).