Wednesday reading summary
Jan. 9th, 2013 09:57 amThis is a sort of meme, originated I think by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oursin (ETA: apparently it was sartorias), meant to encourage conversation about what we're reading.
Currently reading:
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories, ed. Peter Haining.
Recently finished:
The Wooden Horse and The Tunnel, by Eric Williams. This was a re-read inspired by my receiving awesome Yuletide fic based on the books. I enjoyed them as much as ever, especially their unconventional, awkward, thoughtful frankness about the emotional toll of war, imprisonment, and escape.
Flora's Fury, by Ysabeau Wilce. The third in the Flora Segunda series, whose first two books I love dearly; this one sadly was somewhat disappointing. Flora, now sixteen, somehow comes across as much less mature than she did in the earlier books, negating all her emotional growth and making her rather unlikeable a lot of the time. The worldbuilding doesn't have the same inventiveness, either, and the prose feels flat, without the energetic charm of the first two books. It makes me wonder if the long gap between book two and Flora's Fury was the result of Wilce getting bored with the whole thing. (You know what I'd really like to see? A grown-up novel set in the same world, one about Tiny Doom and Hardhands and Buck and Hotspur and what must have been the extraordinarily complex emotional situation among them. Wilce has written a few short stories with these characters for an adult audience, and I'd like to see what she could do on a larger canvas that's free of the restrictions of YA, such as apparently not being allowed to use the word "fuck" or mention that queerness and queer people exist.)
There were things I really enjoyed about Flora's Fury, such as Octohands, and Wraathmyr when he wasn't being a jerk, but overall it just didn't gel.
What I'm reading next:
The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene, by Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne.
Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur. This is the only book on this topic at my library that was not written by an American; I'm hoping that it will avoid the pervasive jingoism and racism of USian accounts.
oursin (ETA: apparently it was sartorias), meant to encourage conversation about what we're reading.Currently reading:
The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories, ed. Peter Haining.
Recently finished:
The Wooden Horse and The Tunnel, by Eric Williams. This was a re-read inspired by my receiving awesome Yuletide fic based on the books. I enjoyed them as much as ever, especially their unconventional, awkward, thoughtful frankness about the emotional toll of war, imprisonment, and escape.
Flora's Fury, by Ysabeau Wilce. The third in the Flora Segunda series, whose first two books I love dearly; this one sadly was somewhat disappointing. Flora, now sixteen, somehow comes across as much less mature than she did in the earlier books, negating all her emotional growth and making her rather unlikeable a lot of the time. The worldbuilding doesn't have the same inventiveness, either, and the prose feels flat, without the energetic charm of the first two books. It makes me wonder if the long gap between book two and Flora's Fury was the result of Wilce getting bored with the whole thing. (You know what I'd really like to see? A grown-up novel set in the same world, one about Tiny Doom and Hardhands and Buck and Hotspur and what must have been the extraordinarily complex emotional situation among them. Wilce has written a few short stories with these characters for an adult audience, and I'd like to see what she could do on a larger canvas that's free of the restrictions of YA, such as apparently not being allowed to use the word "fuck" or mention that queerness and queer people exist.)
There were things I really enjoyed about Flora's Fury, such as Octohands, and Wraathmyr when he wasn't being a jerk, but overall it just didn't gel.
What I'm reading next:
The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene, by Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne.
Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur. This is the only book on this topic at my library that was not written by an American; I'm hoping that it will avoid the pervasive jingoism and racism of USian accounts.
