readerjane

I've been reading alll the Witcher fics in Astolat's catalog.

Next up (or soon, anyway) will be reading the original novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. This will be the second time I've found a new canon by way of fanfic, the first being when LightGetsIn's story A Temporary Inability To Go Either Up Or Down lead me to Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the experiences compare. I'm a little nervous that Sapkowski's canon will disappoint me. Astolat is such a strong writer, and this time I've read ten fic stories, not one, so I'm pretty invested in her take on the characters. And yet, the fact that someone whose own writing I enjoy so much, liked the Witcher world enough to spend that much time playing in its sandbox, must speak well of the canon, no?

I'm eager, though, to see how many of my guesses about the shape of canon turn out to be true. It will be like listening to someone describe a country that's unfamiliar to me, then traveling there and seeing it for myself. Wow, I love reading.

Today I finished Mishell Baker's Borderline, the first in her Arcadia Project series.

This is promising. There are some wobbles in the form of ungainly info-dumps, but Baker has presented her protagonist with a mysteriously vague job offer, so there's reasonable cause for Millie's prospective coworkers to be explaining things to her. And since Millie hasn't yet signed the employment contract, there's cause for them to be a bit mysterious with her as well.

I'd have liked more outlines for how Fae culture works with its Seelie and Unseelie courts. But Millie has plenty to deal with already: both physical and mental disabilities plus dwindling savings mean she has to focus on survival, and since this is a series, there will be plenty of time to fill in the wider worldbuilding later.

I can't go into detail on the real-world-analogue character, nor the trope that had me sputtering with laughter, without spoiling, so I won't. This one is definitely in the follow-up category.

I've recently started Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor.

This is a rags-to-riches story where the mixed-race child of the emperor's fourth wife is suddenly elevated to power when his father and elder brothers are all killed in an airship crash.

I'm liking the twisty maneuverings. I do find the protagonist Maia a little too wise for his years and life experience. Eighteen is still eighteen, for all that he has the advantage of having been raised by a compassionate mother (unlike his brothers who grew up in extreme privilege), and having been ruthlessly schooled by a majordomo who resented being assigned to a remote outpost. But I enjoy watching Maia's courtiers startle when he treats them like people instead of lackeys.

I'm not sure how deeply this story will delve into race. It's obvious that no one, including Maia, wanted him in power. He has internalized his country's scorn for his foreign appearance. Even the book's title underscores it. It will be interesting to see whether that racism remains a pervasive part of the background, or if Addison will turn her focus on it at some point.

It took awhile to get used to the name Maia for a boy. Had I been editor, I would have recommended changing that, since it could throw the reader out of the story during that crucial first plunge. But in compensation, I'm getting the joy of an author who has really put thought into the construction of her fantasy-world language. To read, "Michen-theileian", and *know* it means "smaller audience chamber" because one has already started putting the linguistic pieces together is satisfying. Male names in this culture end in -a, -is, and -et, so Maia: male.

And it makes me realize how much I've missed this: the thing one gets in really good SFF, being dumped into a different world where one must hunt for the edge and corner pieces, and slowly assemble a puzzle by trial and error, hypothesis and instinct. It's delightful.

Looking forward to the rest of this book and its sequel.

Finished The Lost Plot, Genevieve Cogman's fourth Invisible Library book, just this morning.

I'm enjoying this series more and more as I go along. The multiverse aspect plays out well, I think, as Irene visits the alternate Earths in search of rare books, trying to stabilize that temperate zone between order and chaos where human beings can flourish. In addition to the fun of "Now it's Imperial Russia! Now it's the roaring twenties!", we get to see the distinct dangers of worlds where either order or chaos is ascendant.

There are both worlds where women are discounted, and ones where a woman with absolute power is unremarkable.

Near the end of TLP, there's an extended scene where Irene must navigate the three-dimensional chess of a trial before a dragon queen, avoiding giving offense in a culture she's not familiar with, while maintaining the Library's neutrality. The push/pull of that delicate, dangerous conversation was marvelous.

This week I read Dangerous if Unbound, a Person of Interest fic by Astolat.

...and now I'm about to give POI another try with a whooooole different perspective. :-D

I've started The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. So far it's not grabbing me. I was intrigued by what seemed to be second-person POV at first. It wasn't second person, but an odd first-person narrative in which a regional god seems to be recounting another character's story to that character. Which could also be intriguing. (Has the other character lost his memory? Why does the god need to tell the other character the story of his life?) But there are long discursions into the god's own history that remind me of James Michener: a few pages of narrative, then we talk about how the tectonic plates in this region formed, then a few more pages of story, then back to the geological aeons. It's a lot to plow through.

Have been re-reading some favorite fic. I'll give TRT another try before deciding whether to finish.

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 )