Wednesday reading
Jan. 29th, 2014 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitCurrently reading: Oliver Sacks's Seeing Voices, which is about sign language and its history, particularly in the education of deaf people. The book could be deeper and more detailed; in particular I'd have liked more about the structure of sign languages rather than just Sacks marvelling at their uniqueness and complexity. But it's interesting, especially Sacks's discussion of the way that misguided late-ninteenth-century theories about normalization, combined with the belief that sign languages were just gestural pidgins without grammar, ended previously successful programs of education using sign and written language and led to a hundred years of deaf children being forbidden to use sign language and instead forced to learn to lip-read and speak, both of which required immense amounts of special teaching and led to the children's general education being neglected. Educational theories are such dangerous things.
Recently read: I finally got the chance to read Amy Griswold and Melissa Scott's Death by Silver and enjoyed it a lot. It's set in an alternate late Victorian England in which "metaphysics," a complex form of magic involving written incantations, is taught in schools, and being a metaphysician is a fairly respectable profession for a gentleman. One of our heroes, Ned, is a new metaphysician struggling to establish a practice, and the other, Julian, is a consulting detective/metaphysician who is not entirely unlikely Sherlock Holmes. Ned and Julian were childhood friends, nearly childhood sweethearts, who've grown somewhat apart, so there's a relationship arc as well as a mystery. And there's an excellent supporting character in Miss Cordelia Frost, herself a trained metaphysician from the only college that will admit women, but who as a woman is unable to find work in her field and ends up as Ned's secretary. The worldbuilding is good although not as thoroughgoing as I'm used to seeing from Scott, and there's an unusual and interesting plot thread about Ned and Julian's school years, and the severe bullying they both experienced and of which they still suffer the aftereffects.
I do have a couple of quibbles. The relationship arc relies much too heavily on a misunderstanding that could be (and eventually is) cleared up with a five-minute conversation; this is not one of my favorite tropes and I'd have liked to see some kind of real tension between them, something they'd have to work to overcome. I also felt like one particular big revelation about what Julian went through at school was just kind of dropped into the narrative and then left hanging; I have a feeling it'll turn out to be important in the next book, but as it was, that revelation felt perfunctory and somewhat out of place.
Still, this was a book I liked a lot, and I'm looking forward to the sequel.
The only problem is, it made me want to read more good sff books with gay male protagonists, and there aren't any I haven't already read, and my disappointment at life led me to spend the next three days reading mediocre novel-length Sherlock fanfics. Though I did at least stop reading the one that, about five pages in, used "insight" in place of "incite."
What I'm reading next: Maybe I'll unearth a hidden treasure trove of sff with gay male protagonists? Otherwise, Robert Harris has a new novel out about the Dreyfuss case; I might see if I can get that from the library.
Recently read: I finally got the chance to read Amy Griswold and Melissa Scott's Death by Silver and enjoyed it a lot. It's set in an alternate late Victorian England in which "metaphysics," a complex form of magic involving written incantations, is taught in schools, and being a metaphysician is a fairly respectable profession for a gentleman. One of our heroes, Ned, is a new metaphysician struggling to establish a practice, and the other, Julian, is a consulting detective/metaphysician who is not entirely unlikely Sherlock Holmes. Ned and Julian were childhood friends, nearly childhood sweethearts, who've grown somewhat apart, so there's a relationship arc as well as a mystery. And there's an excellent supporting character in Miss Cordelia Frost, herself a trained metaphysician from the only college that will admit women, but who as a woman is unable to find work in her field and ends up as Ned's secretary. The worldbuilding is good although not as thoroughgoing as I'm used to seeing from Scott, and there's an unusual and interesting plot thread about Ned and Julian's school years, and the severe bullying they both experienced and of which they still suffer the aftereffects.
I do have a couple of quibbles. The relationship arc relies much too heavily on a misunderstanding that could be (and eventually is) cleared up with a five-minute conversation; this is not one of my favorite tropes and I'd have liked to see some kind of real tension between them, something they'd have to work to overcome. I also felt like one particular big revelation about what Julian went through at school was just kind of dropped into the narrative and then left hanging; I have a feeling it'll turn out to be important in the next book, but as it was, that revelation felt perfunctory and somewhat out of place.
Still, this was a book I liked a lot, and I'm looking forward to the sequel.
The only problem is, it made me want to read more good sff books with gay male protagonists, and there aren't any I haven't already read, and my disappointment at life led me to spend the next three days reading mediocre novel-length Sherlock fanfics. Though I did at least stop reading the one that, about five pages in, used "insight" in place of "incite."
What I'm reading next: Maybe I'll unearth a hidden treasure trove of sff with gay male protagonists? Otherwise, Robert Harris has a new novel out about the Dreyfuss case; I might see if I can get that from the library.
