August Booklog
Aug. 31st, 2015 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
netgirl_y2kA Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly
Cleopatra: A Life - Stacy Schiff
Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
When a Scot Ties the Knot - Tessa Dare
The Benjamin January series is one I've been vaguely aware of through fannish osmosis for a while now, and because I'm on the lookout for another long-ish series that I can dip in and out of between other books I decided to give the first book A Free Man of Color a shot. For some reason I had a really hard time getting into it. The 19th century New Orleans setting is different and well-drawn, the protagonist interesting and likeable. At the time I thought maybe the it was the language giving me a mental block - it's accurate to the time and place, but would be wildly inappropriate now. Now that I've finished I think it was a pacing problem; it took me three weeks to read the first three quarters of the book, then three hours to finish it. Suddenly there were women living as men, secret lesbians, and the twists and red herrings came thick and fast. The ultimate solution to the mystery was that best kind of twist where I never would have guessed it, but it didn't come out of left field, all the clues were there.
I haven't decided if I'm going to carry on with the series - I might read the second one and see if I have the same problems with the pacing.
Earlier in the year I read a book about Hatshepsut which had the premise that Hatshepsut had been forgotten by history because she was quite good at being queen, while we all remember Cleopatra because she was shite at it. And because all I knew about Cleopatra was the holy trinity of Caesar, Mark Antony, and Elizabeth Taylor I swallowed it whole. Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra argues the opposite: that Cleopatra was actually an excellent queen doing her best in really adverse circumstances, and that it only went massively tits up right at the end.
I suppose the lesson would be less that history forgets competent women and remembers the fuck-ups, and more that anything that can be sexualised will be.
Anyway, I thought it was a really good pop-history; interesting, and chatty, and easy to read.
Sharp Objects was Gillian Flynn's first novel, and it kind of feels it. The plot is a pretty straightforward one of a cub reporter sent back to her small hometown and family, with whom she has a fucked up history, to report on a missing person turned child murder. The twists are pretty easily guessable. The protagonist is one of Flynn's trademark slightly monstrous women, this one being a little more overwrought than her later ones. The writing was clunkier, too.
Overall, I didn't want to put this down without ever being sure if I was enjoying it, which is how I always feel about Gillian Flynn, so.
Tessa Dare is basically my favourite historical romance author; her books are funny, charming, and off-beat in ways that really work for me. And I'd been looking forward to third installment of her Castles Ever After series, not least because of the title. I don't know quite why When a Scot Ties the Knot didn't quite work for me. Maybe it was that I didn't warm to Maddie (an illustrator with crippling social anxiety) the way I had some of Dare's previous heroines. Maybe it was that the premise (our heroine invents a fake suitor to get out of London Season, and the letters she writes to him as part of the charade end up in the hands of an actual soldier) was played too straight for my tastes. Maybe it was the hero was just a little too good to be true, or maybe it was just the endless, endless bloody phonetic spellings of Scottish accents...
Filing this under: I wanted to like it more than I did.
As for what I'm going to read next, I got The Grace of Kings out of the library because I was intrigued by the idea of epic fantasy using China as a backdrop, plus silkpunk just sounded so cool, but ever since I read a couple of reviews complaining about a lack of female characters I've been eyeing it and going eh.
Cleopatra: A Life - Stacy Schiff
Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
When a Scot Ties the Knot - Tessa Dare
The Benjamin January series is one I've been vaguely aware of through fannish osmosis for a while now, and because I'm on the lookout for another long-ish series that I can dip in and out of between other books I decided to give the first book A Free Man of Color a shot. For some reason I had a really hard time getting into it. The 19th century New Orleans setting is different and well-drawn, the protagonist interesting and likeable. At the time I thought maybe the it was the language giving me a mental block - it's accurate to the time and place, but would be wildly inappropriate now. Now that I've finished I think it was a pacing problem; it took me three weeks to read the first three quarters of the book, then three hours to finish it. Suddenly there were women living as men, secret lesbians, and the twists and red herrings came thick and fast. The ultimate solution to the mystery was that best kind of twist where I never would have guessed it, but it didn't come out of left field, all the clues were there.
I haven't decided if I'm going to carry on with the series - I might read the second one and see if I have the same problems with the pacing.
Earlier in the year I read a book about Hatshepsut which had the premise that Hatshepsut had been forgotten by history because she was quite good at being queen, while we all remember Cleopatra because she was shite at it. And because all I knew about Cleopatra was the holy trinity of Caesar, Mark Antony, and Elizabeth Taylor I swallowed it whole. Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra argues the opposite: that Cleopatra was actually an excellent queen doing her best in really adverse circumstances, and that it only went massively tits up right at the end.
I suppose the lesson would be less that history forgets competent women and remembers the fuck-ups, and more that anything that can be sexualised will be.
Anyway, I thought it was a really good pop-history; interesting, and chatty, and easy to read.
Sharp Objects was Gillian Flynn's first novel, and it kind of feels it. The plot is a pretty straightforward one of a cub reporter sent back to her small hometown and family, with whom she has a fucked up history, to report on a missing person turned child murder. The twists are pretty easily guessable. The protagonist is one of Flynn's trademark slightly monstrous women, this one being a little more overwrought than her later ones. The writing was clunkier, too.
Overall, I didn't want to put this down without ever being sure if I was enjoying it, which is how I always feel about Gillian Flynn, so.
Tessa Dare is basically my favourite historical romance author; her books are funny, charming, and off-beat in ways that really work for me. And I'd been looking forward to third installment of her Castles Ever After series, not least because of the title. I don't know quite why When a Scot Ties the Knot didn't quite work for me. Maybe it was that I didn't warm to Maddie (an illustrator with crippling social anxiety) the way I had some of Dare's previous heroines. Maybe it was that the premise (our heroine invents a fake suitor to get out of London Season, and the letters she writes to him as part of the charade end up in the hands of an actual soldier) was played too straight for my tastes. Maybe it was the hero was just a little too good to be true, or maybe it was just the endless, endless bloody phonetic spellings of Scottish accents...
Filing this under: I wanted to like it more than I did.
As for what I'm going to read next, I got The Grace of Kings out of the library because I was intrigued by the idea of epic fantasy using China as a backdrop, plus silkpunk just sounded so cool, but ever since I read a couple of reviews complaining about a lack of female characters I've been eyeing it and going eh.