Wednesday reading meme

[kindkit]

Currently reading: I've been re-reading the Aubrey and Maturin books, because I'm in a mood where I have to feel very, very confident that I'm going to like a book (and that it won't betray me with things like "Oh by the way this character you've been reading as queer is totally 120% straight") or I don't want to bother with it. I'm in the middle of The Thirteen Gun Salute right now and still enjoying almost everything on this third reading.


Recently read: I think the last non-Aubrey and Maturin book I read was Ben Aaronovitch's latest Rivers of London novel, The Hanging Tree. I had mixed feelings. It wasn't a bad book by any means, and I love the series as a whole, and I love most of the characters, but the Faceless Man plot has dragged on far, far too long. I could just about live with that if the worldbuilding was still as good as it initially was, but I don't feel we've learned anything really interesting about magic for a couple of books now. I'm also uncomfortable with the way women's magic was handled in the book. It makes sense, given that women were excluded from formal training in the European magical system, that they would have developed their own tradition, but nevertheless something about "oh, women's magic is so natural and instinctive and not stuffy and academic!" makes me cringe. In fact everything about it makes me cringe. And finally, not enough Nightingale.


What I'm planning to read next: I'll probably finish the Aubrey and Maturin books before I move on. After that, I don't know.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

The "women's magic" didn't bother me as much as that trope usually does, because it seemed to me like that's what Lady Helena herself thought, but her abilities and Caroline's were actually very similar to Peter and Nightingale's, and from the same tradition. Lady Helena reminded me of a lot of older women who have dabbled in a suitably exotic culture and so consider themselves terrifically more bohemian than anyone else - there's a few of them who have retired to my area, in a nice holiday house with a sea view and Tibetan prayer flags on the verandah!

I was hoping to see more of other traditions, like the Taoist magic we very briefly glimpsed way back in Whispers Under Ground, but this wasn't it. And Nightingale was constantly sidelined in increasingly blatant ways.

[kindkit]

That might well be--I probably wasn't reading very carefully. I do think Aaronivitch could have done something more fresh and interesting, though. Why not, for instance, a formal and even scholarly women's tradition, still based on Newton but developed in handwritten commentaries and so on that men just never saw or cared about?

As regards Nightingale, I think maybe Aaronovitch is having the Charles Xavier problem. Nightingale is so powerful that he almost has to be sidelined for plots to work. *sadface* It's a pity in a characterization sense, too, because the Nightingale of the earlier books certainly had vulnerabilities, emotional if not magical, and those made him interesting.

[halotolerant]

I did pretty much give up on Rivers of London myself. I mean it's good enough, as far as I can see from you and others who've posted about it, but somehow it's never at the top of my 'to read' list.

I *should* also re-read Aubrey and Maturin though, so brilliant, and it's been a good 10 years now since I consumed them all!

[kindkit]

The first RoL book was great, I think, and it got me hooked on the characters to the point where I can't seem to stop reading even though many of the subsequent books have been disappointing in one way or another.

I'm enjoying the re-read a lot, especially now that I'm getting to the late books, which I read in a bit of a daze the first time through. Things keep happening that I don't remember, so there's novelty as well as the comfort of familiarity.