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Post by Solana on Apr 26, 2020 10:50:10 GMT -5
AHHHHH, he kept his promise about including badass librarians! YESSSSSS!!!
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Post by Rune Lai on May 27, 2020 11:35:57 GMT -5
Hadn't been reading much. The start of the shelter at home blunted my appetite for new things, and I had trouble getting a hold of new installments of comfort reads (not wanting to order from an overloaded Amazon with its stressed out workers).
But I finally picked up a new book, The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard. When it came out people were comparing it to Sherlock Holmes, if Holmes was an Asian woman in the far future and Watson was a spaceship. That comparison is halfway right. Long Chau is blunt and abrasive, doped up on drugs, but still possessing a keen intellect focused on making deductions. She's very Holmes, including taking daring (and probably illegal) risks while running on sheer confidence.
The Shadow's Child, the ship, is the POV character, much like Watson is for many of the Holmes stories, but I wasn't really getting any Watson vibes from her. Granted, I don't remember much about how Watson and Holmes met, so it might have been acrimonious, but The Shadow's Child is largely frustrated with Long Chau (who is her client, not the other way around). A lot of The Shadow's Child's hang-ups are also very specific to de Bodard's Xuya setting since she's a mindship. (If you've read Anne McCaffrey's Ship series, the Xuya mindships are very much like that, except that the people inside the mindships have been genetically engineered for this purpose.)
This was a fast read, being a novella, and both lead characters are engaging, with the promise of more adventures if the sell rate encourages it (being a novella it's not as visible or as popular as a novel), but I wasn't quite as satisfied with the mystery aspect of it as I wanted to be. It's not possible for the reader to follow along, which is my preference for mysteries, and some of that is likely due to the Xuya setting, which is too expansive for the reader to have the same knowledge depth as the characters. It's great setting, don't get me wrong, I like the Chinese-Vietnamese inspired future, but it's like trying to solve a crime involving the various neighborhoods of Paris when you've never been to the place. So I pretty much just had to follow along and accept what information came my way, and that made the ending feel a little too straightforward for me.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 7, 2020 13:58:24 GMT -5
It took a while, but finally got physical books again. Started with My Next Life as a Villainess: All Roads Lead to Doom! Vol 1 as a result of enjoying the anime. Though the anime seems to be loosing sight of itself in recent episodes (it sounds like they're actually filler?) the first novel reads pretty good. It was translated into roughly three and a half episodes in the anime (the half being a part of what otherwise felt like a filler ep) and Katarina is a lovely first person narrator with fair number of blind spots.
To deal with the blind spots, each chapter is appended with the POV of a different character (usually whoever she interacted with the most) regarding a shared event. This lets us see why Katarina changes their lives the way she does even if she herself doesn't understand it. Most of the time, this is extra viewpoint is lost in the anime. And it doesn't always matter (like Mary is pretty perceived much the same), but it really helps with a character like Nicol who barely speaks and has trouble expressing how he's feeling.
Light novel authors aren't always that skilled as writers. I think a good idea goes farther in Japan than it does in the English speaking world, likely due to being less competitive, so it's more common for people to become first time novelists in their 20s than say 30s or 40s like in the English speaking world, before they've spent as much time on their craft or life experiences in general. So reading one can be a mixed bag. Baccano is really well crafted, but even though I like Spice & Wolf a lot, it's more because of the characters than for Isuna Hasekura's writing chops. And Saga of Tanya the Evil was in desperate need of an editor.
Fortunately, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Roads Lead to Doom! falls into the pretty easy and fun to read category. The multiple first person POV segments is a little odd since we rarely do that in English (though William Faulkner certainly did it, and they teach him in high school!) and I don't think Satoru Yamaguchi is quite skilled enough at character voices to make it clear which new character is narrating if they didn't introduce themselves at the start of the non-Katarina POVs, but aside from that, no issues with his craft.
Last note, but I was surprised to learn that the author seems to be a dude (I've never heard of Satoru being a woman's name). Considering that this is about a girl reincarnated in an otome game, and deals with the tropes of the genre, I'm surprised that this is what he wanted to write. It's not that guys can't play otome games. But I haven't met many that like the romance genre enough to focus their creative pursuits around it.
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Post by Solana on Jun 7, 2020 15:17:22 GMT -5
Team Hatoful has only one female in the group for voicing the Hatoful games. Xaq was the one who made the novelizations into game format, wrote a few extra Shrine visits, and even made two mini fan-games.
(I'm still hoping they'll voice Tohri's route someday.)
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Post by Solana on Jun 13, 2020 12:24:09 GMT -5
So it turns out that there are three novels after season five of 'The Tribe', not just two. I'm currently re-watching season five, will read the first book, and order the next two.
I'd forgotten how funny (and how much of an ass) Ram is.
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Post by Solana on Jun 16, 2020 9:21:28 GMT -5
Finished that one. It has a good story, and puts some interesting twists on what may have REALLY happened in season five. But holy moly, that book needed some editing.
Now I'm re-reading 'The Turn', the prologue to the 'Hallows' series by Kim Harrison. Maybe not the wisest choice while investigating the researcher path for myself...
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Post by Rune Lai on Jun 18, 2020 12:57:57 GMT -5
Finished Artificial Condition by Martha Wells. I wasn't originally going to read the later Murderbot Diaries novellas because I thought the first one ended so well, and I didn't want to ruin it by reading a sequel I didn't like. (Because boy howdy, that has happened before.)
But novellas 2-4 were given away for free as part of a promotion for the first full length Murderbot novel, so I scooped them all up because I figured I couldn't get too disappointed if they're free.
Like the first book, the second one took me a little time to slip in, but once I did, it was pretty good. The new AI character ART (***hole Research Transport) is great and I loved it playing backup to Murderbot's soul searching investigation. Having two AI characters muck about trying to get one of them to pass for human and maneuver around humans when neither of them fully understand how humans function, was pretty entertaining. (And they both like cheesy TV dramas.)
The main plot is that Murderbot has decided to revisit the mining installation where everything went wrong for it some years ago (part of its backstory in the first novella, and why it started calling itself Murderbot). And that was good. It's a plot thread I hadn't considered, but also made sense. An intelligent AI it might be interested in the events that defined it.
Or at least that what seemed to be the main plot. Murderbot can't just waltz down to the surface of a mining planet without credentials, which leads to a second plot, where it presents itself as a human security consultant (with technological augments) in order to get the appropriate clearance. I didn't mind the second plot initially, but the resolution of the first plot (what really happened) happens about 60% of the way through the story and the climax is the resolution of the second plot. While the climax was entertaining due to Murderbot's unorthodox behavior by human standards, it didn't feel emotionally satisfying because there wasn't really any resolution or change to Murderbot itself.
Also I have no idea where Murderbot's going next or what it intends to do. While that was okay the first time, because it was basically the blank slate "a new beginning" sort of ending, there's no sense of that this time around.
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Post by Solana on Jun 30, 2020 16:01:00 GMT -5
Started the next 'Tribe' book. Great story, and they obviously got an editor this time around. Far fewer typos and grammar errors. I love that Tamora Pierce's books are helping me with studying Indonesian now. She used that country for inspiration, even for the language. In the 'Beka Cooper' series, the commands given to the hound are in a modified Indonesian, and I'm remembering those for the verbs.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jul 4, 2020 18:47:35 GMT -5
Finished 86 Vol 1 by Asato Asato.
I picked up this one mostly because I'd read a good review on Anime News Network. Though it has some common light novel pitfalls (particularly in the early portion of the book it has some aggravating amounts of telling rather than showing to describe out competent characters are), there's a lot of good worldbuilding and even things that I had originally written off as being yet another laughable instance of teenagers being veteran mecha pilots has a reason for it. On a grand strategy level I was wondering why the head of military command wasn't doing certain things, only to learn that there's a reason for that too.
That the storytelling parts I had the most issue with were ultimately answered later on was really good. And what's surprisingly good as well, is that the book does a better than average job of tackling racism and privilege despite being written by a Japanese author. (I assume. They write under a pen name, so I suppose it's possible the author is fluent, but not actually Japanese.)
The premise is that the Republic and the technologically superior Empire entered a war nine years ago, and the Republic lost a lot of its land, crowding its population into the remaining 85 districts. To make room for its limited resources, the ethnic majority, the Alba, voted the minority ethnic groups as non-human and sent them to live outside the protective walls in internment camps as the 86th, from the title comes.
To fight the Empire's mecha, the Republic uses "unmanned" drones that are in truth piloted by 86ers. Each squad is commanded by an Alba who remains safe behind the walls in central command. The book follows one squad and their well-meaning handler.
And what the book gets is that being well-meaning is not enough when it comes to being racist. Lena is a nice person, and as the narration points out, her squad does not think of her as a bad person, but they do not call her a good person either. Lena is horrified by the racism as she learns more and more about the conditions her squad faces, but what the book understands is that even as a "nice person" she is guilty of racism as well.
Over the course of the book she learns a lot of truths she was conveniently blind to. True, nobody spelled it out to her (until they did), but if she had looked hard enough, she could have known without anyone telling her. But acknowledging the truth would (and does) make her own daily life harder to accept.
I don't like everything about race in the book (the different ethnic groups just seem to be trotted out for show rather than any cultural depth), but it does an adequate job of painting how individuals can react to and participate in racism without being people wearing swastikas or wearing pointed white hats.
Particularly noteworthy is Lena's friend, who as a child could have saved the minority family living next door by convincing her parents to hide them. The only way she can paper over the guilt of not having done so is by convincing herself it's not possible to fight the system, and in turn, convincing Lena that it's futile to try protecting her squadron. Like Lena, her friend is not a "bad person," she's not out there to stomp the less fortunate, but it's easier to turn a blind eye than do the work of fighting the system.
That the book is able to handle this while also delivering plot twists regarding the war itself is a remarkable amount of juggling for a light novel.
I'm a little surprised this is a series though, as the ending comes with a timeskip epilogue, and after doing some outside reading it sounds like it originally wasn't supposed to be, but there was such a good reaction to the first book the author signed up for more. Because of that I'm less certain I want to read books 2 and 3 since they cover the timeskip and without getting into details, I think some of the magic will be lost during that period, particularly with book 2.
But still, book 1 is pretty good, and despite its rough patches, I think this'll be one of my three favorite books of the year.
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Post by Solana on Jul 14, 2020 16:45:25 GMT -5
Finally, after years of waiting, there's a new book in the 'Dresden Files' series, "Peace Talk". Unfortunately, my university is a bit far from the bookstores, so I'll grab one this weekend. I cannot WAIT to continue the story!
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Post by Solana on Jul 18, 2020 9:07:36 GMT -5
YAY, more Aquaman comics to read! Even my beloved 'Waterfire' Saga takes a break with that. (Early birthday present.)
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Post by Solana on Jul 24, 2020 17:21:43 GMT -5
My poor 'Waterfire' series had to wait again as Jim Butcher's newest Dresden Files book came in the mail yesterday. (On a very good day- my bird was sick and I brought her to the vet, but luckily it's just a respiratory infection and not ataxia. So I read while keeping her company while she slept or danced.)
(Spoilers!)
It has been six years since 'Skin Game' came out and a few things have changed. Maggie is living full-time with Harry now, and it's adorable to see him teaching her how to flip pancakes in the company of a newly born spirit of intellect. His family is also growing, and he's giving advice to a father-to-be.
It's also lovely to finally see Harry and Murphy as a couple. We've been waiting for this for a long time. They've always been such a good fit as friends, partners, and investigators together.
Molly has also grown as the Winter Lady, and is showing the lessons she's had to pick up.
(End spoilers.)
This one is also very, very much a setup for the biggest bad yet, with Chicago as the battleground. The next one is going to be a doozy.
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Post by Solana on Aug 13, 2020 15:22:10 GMT -5
Augh, the last books in the 'Daevabad' and 'Shadow of the Fox' trilogies also came out. My wallet's taking a beating... Before starting my workday, I've been working on Duolingo and re-reading some of our goodies on here. Mine and Lark's 'Scrubs' parodies, Zero's Future Story, Saga stuff.... I have to say, we are damn good writers.
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Post by Rune Lai on Aug 20, 2020 14:01:02 GMT -5
Finished The Daedalus Incident by Michael J. Martinez. It's a very weird book, and I'm curious how the editor who acquired it managed to pitch it to the publisher to buy it. There are two stories that initially look unrelated.
In the 22nd century, we have a mining operation on Mars. The planet is supposed to be tectonically inactive, but while scouting for a new mining operation, an earthquake happens. But it's weird because even though the people exploring the lava tube when the quake happens feel it, the people back at base don't notice it all. And there's also a mysterious EM field that seems to be forming a ring near the base, but they don't know who set it up or way. It looks like it could form a rudimentary particle acceleration, but nothing that should be causing the quakes.
For the other story we have an alternate 18th century where sailing ships travel the Void between planets of the Known Worlds thanks to achievements in alchemy that allow them to ride the sun currents. The HMS Daedalus is on a journey on behalf of His Majesty when they are pressed upon to chase after a rogue alchemist who is stealing alchemical artifacts across the Known Worlds (everything from the Sun to Saturn) for surely nefarious reasons.
We know that somehow whatever's going on in the alternate 18th century must be connected to the 22nd century, but the book takes a much longer than expected amount of time for the two casts to meet. Instead each chapter except for the first and until they meet, consists of two parts. We get the 18th century crew to start, and the 22nd to finish. But because what the two teams are doing is not directly correlated to each other, the stopping points sometimes feel a bit arbitrary and I often found myself being irritated at the thought of reading more alt 18th crew stuff when I really wanted to go back to the 22nd century team. It's not that I disliked the 18th century crew, but I feel like I would have wanted to read them in small doses, whereas I was really invested in the solving the mystery of the weird phenomena from the 22nd team's POV. So I'd keep reading for one team, but not the other to get to the "good parts."
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Post by Rune Lai on Aug 27, 2020 17:08:08 GMT -5
Moved on to The Enceladus Crisis next, the second book in Michael J. Martinez's Daedalus trilogy. This one moves with four POVs; the two main POVs from the first book and two of the most important secondary characters (also from the first book). This one, though a more engaging read overall, also suffers from what I consider "middle book syndrome" in trilogies, where it's mostly setup for the final book and has no resolution on its own.
While it does end at a major turning post with at least one element foiled for the baddies, we still don't have a clear picture of what's going on or why some things are crossing dimensions again in specific locations. (The reason one of the crossings happens is pretty obvious given the activities happening simultaneously in both dimensions, but less so for the others.) I also don't know what the ultimate gameplan in for the multiple antagonistic factions, because I'm pretty sure they weren't be helping each other if everyone had the full story.
I think the 18th century team came out better in this book as I felt equally invested in both parties this time.
Fortunately, I have the last book already (having bought all three at a charity auction some years ago) so I can move on to the finale pretty quickly.
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