readerjane

I knit my own socks. Partly because I love having socks that fit me exactly right. (My feet are short and wide; I spent most of my life wearing socks that either dangled in the heel or toe, or were painfully tight.) Partly because I've learned how to make socks, and I like doing things I'm good at. And partly because I find knitting soothing.

It bugs me just a little that the knit pattern in the heels and toes, which are knit back and forth, doesn't quite match the arch and ankle, which are knit round and round. So I decided to do a study, making six swatches, to try to find a way to make those sections match exactly.

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This week I finished City of Stairs, the first in Robert Jackson Bennett's The Divine Cities series.

There's a lot going on in this story. The flip/flop of colonialism: a not!Europe that once oppressed not!India and is now being oppressed by its former colony. Gods who act in the world, but who can be killed, whose miracles disappear with them. A woman from a progressive culture, doing her undercover/diplomatic/investigatory job in the midst of a traditionalist culture.

What impressed me most (and I had to look back at the title page to verify the author was really a dude) was that the authority figures were female. Mayors, generals, ambassadors -- there are men with agency here, but most of the movers and shakers are women.

Also, the climactic fight against a kraken set on and under an ice-covered river absolutely rocked.

Looking forward to book 2.

Finished The Burning Page, third in Genevieve Cogman's The Invisible Library series.

I'm still enjoying this series enough to continue, though I see elements that should have been smoothed out by her third published novel. Too much info-dumpy "as you know" dialog, even from Irene's novice librarian to Irene herself!

I was glad to see that my main concern - whether stealing rare books and archiving them in a place where no one but librarians will ever see them is justified as means of stabilizing the order/chaos balance - was at least acknowledged in this book.

This installment explored a bit of a world slanted more towards the Order end of the spectrum, and it turns out worlds like that tend to be totalitarian. Which I hadn't expected, but it makes perfect sense. In those worlds it is also much harder for Irene to wield her meta-Language. I'd like a better understanding of *how* that ur-language is different from the magic the Fae use. I'm afraid Cogman is playing with the net down when it comes to the Language: it seems able to do what the plot requires and no more.

I want to meet Irene's parents. I want to know how librarians die, if they retire to a place where they stop aging. I want to know whether Bradamant is really shady or just prickly. Looking forward to the next book.

Y'know how everybody has a spiciness threshold, where you still enjoy the flavor of the dish, but it's not hurting your mouth so much you have to stop eating? And for some people that's barely spicy at all, where others can chow down blazing-hot dishes?

Paul Cornell is my creepiness threshold.

I'm reading Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? the third in Cornell's Shadow Police series. Thematically, these books aren't that far from Rivers of London: British police officers trying to protect the public from what goes bump in the night, while letting that public stay unaware of the bump-ers. And there are certainly creepy characters and events in RoL, but the feel, the outlook of the police officers, makes SP much scarier to read, for me at least.

I like these police officers. And I'm intrigued by the idea of a city having its own zeitgeist so strongly that people whom the zeitgest remembers most can actually manifest, even if those remembered people are fictional. And I want to find out who SP's Smiling Man is, damnit, and see our heroes (hopefully?) defeat him.

But because I can't read Cornell's books at bedtime, I'm making very slow progress with WKSH. Which means I'm having trouble following the plot, because more time goes by between the small sections I read.

It's frustrating. Like if you can't eat a spicy dish at bedtime 'cause it will keep you from sleeping, but it's a supper food, not a breakfast food, so you may have to give up eating it at all.

I finished the third and fourth books in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series. Turns out the main character does have a name: he thinks of himself as Murderbot. I had originally thought he considered that to be a class of AI of which he was a member, but he does claim that as his name.

I'll definitely read this series again. To me, it's the reverse of a Pinocchio story: the main character had been a real person all along, but had thought of himself as an object because it made his slavery easier to deal with. He used to flinch away from thinking about what he wanted, because he knew that whatever that was, he couldn't have it.

The moment which rang the loudest for me was in the fourth novella, where ( SPOILER )

This week I started The Child Finder, by Rene Denfield. Story of a solitary woman who searches for missing children, some of them missing for years. I can tell the child she's currently hunting in this story will inform her own past in some way.

I like the way she understands that being friendly with the locals can yield vital information.

This story isn't wowing me, though. I wonder if I've grown too picky? To be sure, there are enough stories out there (and a better recs network for finding them, and easier ways to obtain those stories, than ever before) that there are probably enough stories I'd delight in reading to keep me busy for the rest of my life. It just feels snooty, somehow.

This week I read Calling My Name by Liara Tamani. It was recommended by another author I follow, and on kindle sale, so I grabbed it even though I'd never heard anything about the author.

Slice of life, teenage style. High school rivalries, budding sexuality in an oppressively churchy household. The thing that most engaged me about the character Taja was the creative way she survived demands to pay attention to long church sermons: by tallying the keywords so she looked like she was taking notes. And that's five for hallelujah, lord is closing in with three, four, it's amen for the win!

I felt like this story ended abruptly, though. The main character has an epiphanic moment, I didn't understand what it meant to her, and then whoop, the story's over.

Probably not gonna follow this author.

This week I finished a novella called All Systems Red, the first in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series. What do you get when you teach a person to believe he's an object? You get someone with trauma so deep he's barely aware of it, who self-medicates by streaming hours of soap opera. You get someone who takes it for granted his every action is monitored and will be punished if he breaks the rules without being sneaky enough. Someone who is deeply uncomfortable when he encounters a group of clients who treat him like a person. Someone who has no idea what he wants his life to be, because he's never been told he has any say about it.

I was impressed with this story, and will definitely be following-up with the series.

Currently I'm reading The Light Between Worlds, by Laura Weymouth. This story is very Narnia-like: much more so than The Magicians, which was among other things a deconstruction of Narnia. Only, Weymouth has chosen to focus on the saddest part of the portal story - the part where the children have been exiled to the mundane world and don't want to believe they're never going back. It reminds me a bit of Dr Who's School Reunion, where Sarah Jane tells the Doctor what it was like to re-adjust to normal life after he abandoned her. But tLBW also reminds me of Normal Again, the BtVS AU episode where the whole Slayer story had just been a delusion in Buffy's mind. Until halfway through tLBW, I was almost expecting to find the main character *was* delusional. She is certainly mentally ill with depression. Not until her brother and sister talk with her about their magical journey, in a way that is clearly not indulging a fantasy, was I sure that wasn't the way the story was going.

This is beautiful, but so, so sad.

I started reading As the Crow Flies, by Craig Johnson last week. This is the 9th of 20 in his Walt Longmire books, which I discovered by way of the television series based on it. I like the TV series a bit more, which is unusual for me, but I guess it's because that's what I encountered first. The books do have an advantage in that they're written from Walt's POV, so we get less of the frustrating "What on earth is going on inside his head?" vibe.

These are stories I return to when none of my most-favorite authors have anything new out. They're solid reads, though I wish Walt would stop referring to his BFF Henry Standing Bear as, "the Navaho Nation." Henry isn't a nation: he's an individual man with his own strengths and quirks. On the TV series, Lou Diamond Phillips brings that out so well.

What interrupted my Longmire read was that I discovered Laurie King had published another Holmes/Russell book: The Island of the Mad. Walt is on hold while I enjoy me some more Holmes/Russell!

I think I have spotted the answer to King's mystery early on, but I don't mind that. Still need to find out whether I was right, and I'm enjoying the journey.

I wish Laurie King would deal more with Holmes' aging. At this point in the series, he is really feeling his limits. It's hard to tell how much of Holmes' irascibility comes from that, and how much is just ground-state Holmes. Those limits are even-ing the power dynamic in this Galatean relationship. It will be interesting to see whether King addresses that by the end of Island.

I love holidays. Especially ones where I have lots and lots of time to read. I finished two whole books this week! Haven't had that kind of reading time in years.

Look Alive Twenty-Five by Janet Evanovich
A friend introduced me to this series after the first eight had been published. I got very, very invested, joined the world of fanfic, created my own wiki, and eagerly awaited the next installment. Eventually I had to accept the fact that this series was stuck on repeat and always would be. Those character arcs don't bend toward nowhere.
So I stopped buying the new volumes and switched to reading them from the library whenever I got around to it... and somehow my expectation level optimized to where I can really enjoy them again. I've heard a rumor that the series is being ghost-written nowadays. If that's true, then the ghost writer is way more attentive to continuity than Evanovich ever was. It's almost like they'd read my wiki. :-D

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
Take Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane, dial her back to eighteen, and plunk her down in a Minnesota liberal arts college in the 1970's. Janet is scary smart, not a little snobbish about literary analysis, passionate, rebellious, and single-minded when it comes to intellectual integrity. And she's able to accept inescapable conclusions, no matter how unlikely they may be. I liked this very much.