netgirl_y2k

The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett (reread)
A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett (reread)
Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett (reread)
Bedlam - Christopher Brookmyre
Bareback - Kit Whitfield
Midnight Never Come - Marie Brennan

Obligatory Discworld reread this month was the Tiffany Aching books, and now I feel I really must read I Shall Wear Midnight next, so as I've done the full set.

Bedlam is Christopher Brookmyre's first science fiction book (unless you count Pandaemonium, which I don't in any way except vaguely wondering if it was cruel, getting those monkeys drunk and forcing them to write the end of his book) but this one was really, really good. The premise is what if one day you woke up inside a video game. There's also a lot of interesting stuff about could technology ever get sufficiently advanced to make a copy of the human mind, then would that copy qualify as alive and who would have ownership of it. But mostly it is about waking up one day inside a video game-- The only thing is, I know less than nothing about gaming, it's just not my brand of geekery, and I don't think it affected my enjoyment of the book, but there were likely a few injokes and Oh! moments that I missed.

Bareback is about werewolves, and like a lot of people I am sick to the back teeth of werewolves, but the twist in this one is that 99% of the population are werewolves, and the 1% that aren't are the oppressed minority charged with managing the others at full moon time. Really liked the worldbuilding and the mystery plot was solid as well. Highly recommended. Did think it had kind of an unfortunate title, though.

Midnight Never Come is about a secret court of fae underneath Elizabethan London, and it was... fine. One of those books that you finish and then go, Well... that was a book that I... read. There's apparently a whole series of them but it's definitely a case of if and when I trip over them in the library.

Thank you to everyone who offered advice on my last post about anxiety and panic attacks, it was very helpful, and not that I'm taking pleasure from your misery or anything, but I think there's a certain degree of "you are not alone-ness" that does help.

Between the sudden proliferation of brain-weasels and some kind of mutant flu thing that I still haven't managed to entirely shake most of February vanished right out from under me. The flu I blame in equal parts on Tequila Boy and the Scottish national rugby team.

See, we were watching the six nations and becoming confused by Scotland's sudden ability to win matches (once by playing really quite well against Italy, and once by playing rather badly against an Ireland side who couldn't find the try line with both hands and a map) and there was a lot of uncalled for hugging and sitting with our arms round each other. It turns out that twelve year old baby!lesbian me was right, close physical contact with boys will lead you to a bad end.

So, mostly I have been lying under a duvet, reading and feeling vaguely sorry for myself. Which brings me to my excuse for posting, really, February Booklog.

Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Chosen - Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey
Cold Days - Jim Butcher
So Much Pretty - Cara Hoffman
Etiquette and Espionage - Gail Carriger

So Etiquette and Espionage is a YA prequel to the Parasol Protectorate series, but I don't think you really have to have read the first series to follow this one, apart from the bit where you will be tickled pink when you recognise young Sidheag Maccon and baby Madame Lefoux. Basically it's about an all girls finishing school/secret academy for spies and assassins, with steampunk, and top hat wearing werewolves, and lines like "Who doesn't want an exploding wicker chicken?" I ate it up with a spoon and am already highly anticipating the next one.

So Much Pretty I picked up because of this review which was doing the rounds on tumblr. The review is excellent, the book sadly less so. It jumps around all over the place, different timelines, different tenses, different povs, and the ending is just one twist too far. It's strange, because I think that coming of age moment lots of girls have where you realise that with the best will in the world there will always be those who see you as ever so slightly less human than the boys is something that should be written about more rather than less, but in the end I thought it was an interesting novel, maybe even an important one, but not necessarily a very good one.

Cold Days is the first Dresden Files book I have really enjoyed in, well, quite a few books. It's also the first one in a while, what with Harry's sidestep into being a bit dead, where I felt like the overarching plot was moving on a bit. Although maybe that's just that the fae courts are my favourite part of that world, and I love the idea of Harry and Molly being more involved with them, also that I don't share a large part of the fandom's fascination with Marcone, so I didn't so much clock his absence.

The first Kushiel trilogy I read on a recommendation from a friend, and ended up liking it much more than I was expecting to. They were books I'd passed over before because of the bdsm themes (obligatory disclaimer: making no judgements, etc) but in the end I rattled through them. Loved the characters, adored the worldbuilding, loved that the driving conflict was between the heroine and her fascinatingly Machiavellian female lover. That said, I'm taking a break between the first trilogy and the second because there are lots of dub-con elements in there that, yes, are mostly pretty delicately handled, but after three long books have cumulatively gotten to me, so I'm going to read something completely different next.

I greeted 2013 by head-butting a dog.

It's not as bad as it sounds. I overslept through Baxter's usual walking time. And he reacted by jumping up on the bed, putting his front paws on either side of my shoulders and barking right in my face. I woke up, and some recently unconscious part of my hindbrain went: ARGH! WOLF! I sat up, and clattered my forehead off his teeth.

Start as you mean to go on, and all that.

*

I might have had a quiet New Year but not everybody did, because two of my friends got engaged and I've been asked to be the Best Man at their wedding. Best Girl. Best Person. Whatever. How cool is that? It's the second time that I've been as best man, which I'm choosing to believe is reflective of nothing more than the fact that I'm pretty funny and look good in a kilt.

So, I've got six months to write a speech, either that or assume that as it's a straight wedding no-one will have seen Imagine You & Me and crib Coop's speech from that.

*

I read 69 books in 2012, which felt like very little to me, but, eh, other things going on.

* particular recs
~ particular non-recs

( January - November )

And in December:

65. Sorry - Zoran Drvenkar. Bleh thriller with a ridiculous premise and ridiculous twist after ridiculous twist. Finished out of a sense of morbid fascination, and cheerfully abandoned in Starbucks.

66. When She Woke - Hilary Jordan. I liked this a lot, possibly mostly because it was preaching to the converted on the subject of abortion. But if you can only read this or The Handmaid's Tale, then go with Atwood, always always go with Atwood.

67. The Sealed Letter - Emma Donoghue. Another good one, in a sort of Tipping the Velvet type way.

68. Who Fears Death? - Nnedi Okafor. I so, so wanted to like this, female-centric post-apocaliptic tale set in the Sudan. But the world-building felt half-hearted, the way magic was supposed to work never quite made sense, and the ending was too easy and actually kind of skeevey.

69. The Chosen Seed - Sarah Pinborough. I ended up really liking the Dog-Faced Gods series. I'd figured out the twist - the identities of Mr Bright and the First - it'd been pretty clearly telegraphed, but it was still well done.

The Devil You Know - Mike Carey
Vicious Circle - Mike Carey
Dead Men's Boots - Mike Carey
Thicker Than Water - Mike Carey
The Naming of the Beasts - Mike Carey
Redshirts - John Scalzi

The Felix Castor books by Mike Carey were one of the things that were suggested to me the last time I was asking for book recs, and it's fair to say that I liked them quite a bit. Usually when I'm reading a series, even if it's one I'm really into, I like to split the books up with other things I'm reading, which is why it took me about eighteen months to get through the Vorkosigan Saga. Which actually reminds me that I've still to acquire Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, really must get on that. But with these I rattled through all five books one after the other. This, children, is why the amazon kindle store is dangerous and now has all my money. And as soon as I'd finished them I wanted to read them all again. I didn't, though, because that would have been silly.

Anyway, Felix Castor, imagine a cross between The Dresden Files and Rivers of London. Felix is an exorcist in a world where there are ghosts. I mean, there's the usual pantheon of supernatural beasties, but it all comes back to ghosts; zombies are ghosts that have risen in their original flesh, werewolves are ghosts that have tried to mould an animal body to their will, with varying degrees of success. And Felix himself has this wonderful noir-ish sarcastic sense of humour that I really like. But, typically, it was one of the secondary characters who stole my heart. Juliet Salazar who is a demon from, like, the ninth circle of hell who decides to live on earth, gets a job as an exorcist, and marries a nice girl. And there's something about a lesbian succubus who threatens to rip people's lungs out for perceived misogyny but sometimes fails at entry level feminism with her own girlfriend that punches me right in the id. I've been feeling slightly bereft that there isn't a fandom, because I want all the fic about this woman, and, really, all the characters.

Anyway, after that I read Redshirts, and now feel like all those hungover student mornings and, uh, early afternoons, lying in bed watching the Original Series weren't wasted. But then again, I'm a Trek fan of old, grew up with the DS9 and Voyager and love the whole universe unironically, while admitting that it is, in many ways, kind of rubbish. So this pastiche was right up my alley, even the things that would have otherwise annoyed me, didn't. Like, I was assuming that Duvall being the only woman in the group was a send up of the Smurfette principle and not an example of it.

And then I didn't read anything else because I keeled over with some sort of mutant throat infection and spent the rest of the month in bed subsisting on tea and cheese crackers, and eventually watching those episodes of Once Upon a Time that I'd taped forever ago, and which the internet had led me to believe was a show about a bitter lesbian divorce and custody battle, and also fairy tales. It isn't. Except for the part about fairy tales, which is true. But it's still great fun.

Sabriel - Garth Nix
Graceling - Kristin Cashore
The Drowning Girl - Caitlin R. Kiernan
Fire - Kristin Cashore
God Collar - Marcus Brigstocke
It's Not Rocket Science - Ben Miller
Lavinia - Ursula Le Guin

The Old Kingdom trilogy comes highly recommended, and I do read a fair amount of YA these days, but I wonder if Sabriel skewed maybe very slightly too young for me, I probably would have loved it of I'd read it when I was the right age though.

I'm torn about the Kristin Cashore books, though. Graceling is about a world where some people are born with graces which make them unnaturally skilled at one thing or another, and our heroine Katsa is born with the grace of killing or so she thinks, and I loved it, loved the characters, adored the worldbuilding. Fire was a harder sell for me, it's technically a prequel to Graceling, but the geography and supernatural elements were so different that it may as well have been set in a completely different universe. Instead of graces the protagonist Fire is a human Monster, someone so impossibly beautiful that people fall in love with her on sight, something that allows her an element of control over people but also puts her in danger as sometimes this love makes people want to hurt her. You see how this could have a troubling element, yes? But mostly it's handled delicately and well. The bigger problems with Fire are the pacing, which is so stop-start as to make the book harder to get through than I was expecting, and the presence of Leck who made such a great villain in the first book feels kind of pasted on here. That said, I am very much looking forward to reading Bitterblue.

The Drowning Girl was an unconventional ghost story which I like a lot for being beautifully written and having all the major relationships be between women. But it was kind of a downer, so after that I read God Collar more because I've enjoyed Marcus Brigstocke's appearances on Radio 4 than because I was particularly interested in the subject matter. I've read a lot about atheism over the years, and for one thing it's preaching to the converted, and for another once you accept that you can't prove a negative there's very little to say beyond name calling. It's Not Rocket Science is a pop science book by the one who doesn't do Pointless off Armstrong & Miller.

Lavinia is one of those books I can't be rational about on account of how it's everything that I've ever wanted. It takes a character who's only a name in The Aeneid and gives her a life and a backstory and a voice and I want to cry real tears of joy. On a mostly unrelated note, I did actually read The Aeneid at university, not for university, just while I was there. The things I will do to avoid whatever I'm supposed to be doing, they are epic and ridiculous.

Having had my nose in one for nearly a month I have finished the Mistborn books. Everyone who recommended them to me, you were right; they were brilliant! But nothing on my to-read list is really grabbing me. So, read any good books lately?

Things I like: Sci-fi, fantasy, pop-science, pop-history, thrillers that live up to their name, the odd bit of literary fiction; humour, world building, varied female characters.

I also have a Library Thing, which is basically a giant list of things I liked enough to finish.

The first half of the month I was afflicted with the same reader's malaise that had eaten much of April, which mostly led to me starting books and abandoning them before page fifty. Including but not limited to:

Kafka on the Shore
The Final Empire
She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (that was a particular low point)
The Knife of Never Letting Go
Jamrach's Menagerie
Temeraire

And because I can't tell if I didn't like them or if I was just feeling apathetic and sorry for myself they have been shoved back into the to-read pile to be given another shot at a later date. On the other hand I did watch all seven seasons of The West Wing on DVD, so my time wasn't completely wasted. At least, not until the later seasons; CJ as chief of staff is basically the sole reason for re-watching those, right?

I did manage a couple of re-reads when I was trying to force myself to like books again:

Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett Having to force myself to read a Discworld book, especially a witches one, was a weird experience. And I definitely remember liking this one from before, which was why I picked it.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - JK Rowling I still don't necessarily like Snape, but I find I have much more sympathy for his situation now that there's not a huge fandom determined to make a woobie out of him.

I snapped out of it a bit when my Gran got readmitted to hospital with an infection, and I should be worried and I am, but I also can't help but feel that a bit of respite care may be just what the doctor ordered for us both. Also, there's nothing like staring at hospital waiting room walls for hours at a stretch to rekindle your interest in reading, so I read:

The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson On the theory that a bit of non-fiction might jolt me out of my slump, and it did. The diagnosis of psychopaths seems like a strange subject to be able to write about with humour and charm, but Ronson manages it.

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline Using knowledge of 80s pop-culture to save the world - or, at least, win an outrageous amount of money and passingly consider using some of it to save the world - this one appealed to every geeky bone in my geeky body.

Cold Magic - Kate Elliot I am torn about this one. I loved the world building - a sort of victorian, steampunk, ice-age, magical fantasy thing- at the same time it suffers from that thing that afflicts a lot of first books in trilogies, where it's painfully slow to get going and you get the feeling that the good stuff is being deliberately held back for book two.

Blameless - Gail Carriger I read the first book in the Parasol Protectorate series with a sense of is that all...? See my above complaint about first books in series. But I've also liked each successive book more than the last, and I loved book three. Admittedly, although I adore Alexia and like Conall, I don't especially like their marriage, so the fact that they spent most of the book on separate continents probably helped.

Most of this month was spent plodding through The Deed of Paksenarrion - Elizabeth Moon. Well, plodding might be a bit of a harsh word for it, I must have been enjoying it because I'm not one of those people who feels compelled to finish a book I'm hating, but, well, it was 1200 pages, and the first third or so, where Paks is with the mercenaries was very hard going. Marching. Sword drill. More marching. Yet more marching. Laying siege to a city that is almost indistinguishable from the last three cities they laid siege to. But it perked up after that. I liked Paks's asexuality, and it played into all my female knight hot buttons, and if nothing else it's taken a fair chunk out of Mt. ToBeRead...

The Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley In which Cleopatra is vampire (sort of) which sounds like it should be completely mad but is, in fact, unutterably brilliant.

The Birthday of the World - Ursula Le Guin One of these days I am going to get around to reading more Le Guin than her short stories (both Left Hand of Darkness and Lavinia are lurking somewhere in Mt.ToBeRead) but I do really enjoy the short stories. And it was pretty cool to see what all those sedoretu AUs I've been reading were based on.

The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists - Gideon Defoe I am a child. I have no regrets.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling This was the one where Harry got a bit shouty, didn't he? Well, I always thought he a was a bit too well adjusted for a kid that had spent ten years in a cupboard. It was also the one which had me going: MCGONAGALL FOR KING!

Rereads:

Eric - Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - JK Rowling

Eric as part of my epic and yet glacial reread of the Discworld series in publication order, and the three Harry Potters as comfort reads and a displacement activity from family worries. And very good they were too. Although, it has given me the most peculiar craving to read epic Harry/Hermione fics. Odd, I'm sure I never shipped them before.

I also managed four new books.

New reads:

Bossypants - Tina Fey
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
The Reapers are the Angels -Alden Bell
The Last Werewolf - Glen Duncan

Bossypants was because I'd read Mindy Kaling's book last year, and thought it had a couple of very funny chapters, but mostly thought that it felt half finished and wished I read the Tina Fey book instead; so I did, and very good it was too.

The other three, I guess I was on a kick of, what's the term, literary genre novels? Damn I hate that term. But they were all excellent anyway. The Night Circus is just completely gorgeous, nineteenth century magical realism and the most amazing circus you could never imagine. I'd put off reading it for ages because I thought it sounded kind of... pretentious? But it ended up being the sort of book that I just wanted to swim around in. The Reapers are the Angels, well, I'm probably not the best judge, because of how I'm easy for zombies, but I really liked the setup of telling it from the pov of a girl born after the apocalypse, who doesn't know any other world and to whom zombies are just particularly aggressive predators.

I liked The Last Werewolf a lot, if not quite as much as the previous two. I really liked the premise that werewolves have to kill someone once a month, so locking yourself away for the full moon isn't an option. And given that it starts with the last werewolf on earth counting down to his own murder, well, it's pleasantly free of manpain, but it did do this thing that always annoys me ( spoiler )

All the books I've read since, um, the last time I did one of these posts, September, apparently. Gosh, I sort of feel like there should be more.

( Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms, Mirror Dance, Memory, Lord Edgware Dies, Hickory Dickory Dock, The Third Girl, The Death Maze, Relics of the Dead, The Assassins Prayer, Rivers of London, Moon Over Soho, The Windup Girl, Iron Council, A Spot of Bother, Goliath, Snuff, How to be a Woman, Ash, Red Glove, The Art of Racing in the Rain )