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Post by Solana on Dec 20, 2022 16:22:46 GMT -5
Speaking of authors like that, my friend and mentor at work has never read any of the 'Discworld' novels! I must remedy this tragedy at once!
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Post by Rune Lai on Dec 24, 2022 22:07:15 GMT -5
Finished Legend of the Galactic Heroes Vol 5. It took a while for the volume to turn into a page turner for me. Part of that is the series' more distant storytelling style. It's written as a description of a conflict that happened a long time ago, and as such it occasionally spoils whether or not a character survives or how a particular incident affects them in post-war life, which ruins some of the suspense.
But now that the series is at its halfway point, things have escalated with Yang and Reinhard finally in a direct face off for the first the first time since the opening chapters of the first book. It really doesn't feel like the time to remind the reader that Reinhard ultimately will reunite the universe. I know the series isn't over, so I knew there wasn't going to be a decisive win for anyone, but it was a bit irritating.
But once Yang and Reinhard's respective plans are set into action (about halfway to two-thirds of the way through the book) it gets really good. The thing is, though I can be sympathetic to Reinhard, he stopped being an underdog a while ago, and the book, critically, tells us how Reinhard deduces Yang's ultimate goal and how he intends to trap him, leaving us in the same position as Yang. How is Yang going to find his way out of this?
While Reinhard has ultimately overcome his faction-specific obstacles and now has nothing but his own hubris and personal ghosts to stop him, Yang has constantly been hamstrung by his own government throughout the series. He's nicknamed Miracle Yang because he's constantly hauling butts out of the fire when it shouldn't be possible, and usually half the damage is self-inflicted by his own side because few people outside his own subordinates want to hear what the guy is saying. Even Reinhard feels that Yang's potential is limited by his own bosses. (Seriously, sometimes it feels like his government is saying "Well, if what you say is true, then you can just haul our butts out of the fire again" instead of, you know, taking appropriate defensive measures.)
All this makes Yang extremely sympathetic, especially when facing off with a guy with a plan to utterly crush his armada.
What I both like and hate, is how the conflict stops. Obviously it has to stop because this is not the end of the series, but since this is also a rematch we want to see who will actually win and we're deprived of that. Their first encounter ended in a stalement, but Yang (as would be a habit going forward) was coming from behind with his forces already badly damaged by the time he was able to take command. This time, he has complete freedom to enact his plan.
So my gut feeling is that I want to count Yang as the superior stategist and tactician. Reinhard knows that if not for the intervention he got, he would have lost. And, if Yang had been anyone other than who he was and disobeyed orders, Reinhard would have lost. But the only reason that intervention happened is because Yang left a certain place undefended, so some of Reinhard's forces acting independantly from him managed to scoot around and force a cease fire. In a pure Yang vs. Reinhard face-off, yes, Yang won, but in terms of the greater conflict, he was stupid, and the reason I don't like it is because the book was not explicit (or I missed it) that Yang was literally leaving vast swathes of his home territory, particularly this one very important planet, undefended. Like, why would you ever do that?
I like that after so many volumes, Reinhard and Yang finally get to meet face to face, and of course this brings up a nice "what if" scenario, if Yang had been born in the empire. If that was the case, the Free Planet Alliance probably would have been steam-rolled in short order as Yang would likely be content in a well-managed dictatorship and Reinhard's reforms have been pretty good.
I have a feeling that we're going to be in for a timeskip with the next book. A lot happened at the end of this one to shake up the status quo and there are a lot of coals in the fire with people heading off into hiding and/or other personal missions. Not to mention a "surprise" Yang left behind at the very start of the book that will likely come into play later on.
I don't have volume 6 yet, but will probably pick it up after the holidays if a family member hasn't gifted it to me already. (I haven't opened my presents yet.)
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Post by Rune Lai on Dec 28, 2022 3:09:05 GMT -5
Knocked out two more books. One was The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang. It's actually a graphic novel rather than a prose one, but it's clearly a self-contained work and not a series. It's a fairly basic coming of age story about being true to yourself, mostly involving a gender non-conforming prince who happens to love looking fabulous in dresses, but is terribly afraid of disappointing his traditionally masculine father. The ending didn't really feel that great to me, since I knew it would either go one of two ways: his parents would hate it, or his parents would be fine with it, since there isn't much room for anything in between without it being a longer story.
Also the ending weirdly undercuts itself with saying that royalty doesn't matter as much in this day and age (it feels very late 19th century, possibly even early 20th) so who cares if a prince wears a dress. But it felt like making that statement trivializes what the prince goes through.
The dressmaker's story is a little more straightforward. She wants to be a famous designer, but she can't be known as the dressmaker behind his alter ego's dresses when she's also known as the prince's personal seamstress.
The writer/artist has an interesting afterward with concept sketches and apparently she did two versions of the opening when she was trying to decide whether to make the protagonists adults or teenagers. She ended up going teenager, which I think was the right call since the struggle for self-acceptance and pleasing one's parents is a common thing in adolescence and works well with the story's themes, but I think that it could have been a very different and still interesting work with adults instead.
The other book is The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson, which I'd been meaning to read for years. It sounds funny given how long I put it off, but his narration is like brain candy for me, it's aspirational in its use of description and how he lays words on the page. I really should have gotten to it sooner. He's known for being very technical with his worldbuilding. His magic systems have very specific uses and limitations, and his characters work around their limitations in creative ways that make his work popular with the gaming crowd.
Unfortunately I think it's a little too technical in some areas, as I didn't quite follow the two different magic types people can be born with, other than they seem to be powered differently, but this might be because the Wax and Wayne series that Alloy of Law belongs to is part of the Mistborn universe and I haven't read any of the other books. (Mistborn looked more straight medieval fantasy and I became interested in Alloy ofLaw because it looked like a fantasy western, but it's actually more gaslamp fantasy as it ends up taking place mostly in the city.) I only really understood things once I got to the author's notes at the end of the book.
Still, it's a pretty breezy read (and short) for a Sanderson story and I had fun with it. The fact the two main dudes are called Waxilliam and Wayne so the series can be called Wax and Wayne is kind of groan-inducing, but aside from that it's fine. Wax is a pretty good protagonist, though I don't really care for Wayne. I generally don't like characters that lean too heavily into buffoonery as a way of life and he's mostly there to give Wax someone to play off of since he's otherwise quite straight-laced.
I wish there was a solid female lead, but Marasi, while she did stuff and had her own POV segments, felt like she was third wheeling too much since Wax and Wayne are long-time buds. Steris interests me, because there just aren't too many characters like her, but she doesn't seem the sort for an adventuring life so I'm not sure there will be more of her later in the series.
And speaking of series, I knew this was the first in one, but I thought the installments had been published with years in between (likely my mistake) so not everything wraps up by the end. Fortunately, it concludes in what is definitely a book end and not a chapter end. I hate books that end with no resolution and simply a cliffhanger. Resolution plus plot detail that needs follow-up in a later volume is fine.
Going to see if I can get one more book in before the end of the year.
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Post by Rune Lai on Dec 30, 2022 17:37:56 GMT -5
I picked Crest of the Stars Vol 1 as my next book because it's another that's been on my backlog. I missed its first American translation by TokyoPop due to (what ended up being well-founded) concerns that the series would ever be finished, and figured I would never get to read it in its entirety in English.
But then J-Novel Club licensed it and I figured it would sit in a long translation queue, as it's not uncommon for me to hear about new licenses as part of my news feed when a convention happens, while the actual releases themselves disappear as they're spread out throughout the year. Crest/Banner of the Stars, while considered a prestige series, is also an older series and the anime is not available streaming anywhere (in fact I don't believe it ever has been). But I loved it back in the late 90s/early 2000s when I was in my first phase of anime fandom.
By chance I discovered earlier this year that all three volumes of Crest of the Stars and all six of Banner of the Stars were released in three hardback omnibus volumes in English. These are really high quality physicals, among the nicest I have on my shelves, and Amazon had them at a steep discount. Afraid they could be going out of print, I scooped up all three omnibuses and they've sat on my shelf until now.
The series is known for having an extremely deep made-up language, Abh, that its characters speak, and if you watch the anime, all the in-universe text is written in it. This created issues where the male and female leads' names were written as Jinto and Lafiel in previous English releases, but written as Ghintec and Lamhirh by diehard fans who wanted to use the Abh spelling, and the current book release uses Jint and Lafier because the translator noted that "ec" is silent in Abh but he wanted to keep an easy-to-read spelling for English readers (and Japanese renders the English final "t" sound with "to" even if no "o" exists). Similarly, the reason for "Lafier" is because "rh" is apparently a rolling "r" sound in Abh, whereas r/l is usually up to interpretation in Japanese.
The book probably goes a little too crazy with its fictional Abh language, but that might be more because I'm used to reading words with the Roman alphabet whereas Japanese readers are less fluent in English so seeing Roman letters to render a fictional space language is less likely to trigger mental confusion. It's just something to gloss over. The primary issue is that Abh does not conveniently map to English or romaji (or Spanish or German, which I'm also familiar with) so while it is learnable in the fashion of Tolkien's Elvish, most readers probably aren't going to bother learning the pronunciation and grammar rules.
Having a translator who is clearly a big fan of the series, but also wants to keep it readable, is good, though I'm not sure I'm a fan of his (or his editor's) choice to bold all the words that had been replaced by their English equivalents. Basically, the Abh word will be used once in italics for effect with its English translation noted in parentheses and then from that point onward the term will be bolded in English, so the reader knows an Abh word was used there in the original text without being constantly bombarded with Abh words for things like as "noble," "trainee," or "patrol ship." It is possible to see five or six bolded words in a single paragraph, so I can understand a reader's mind freezing over on seeing that many made-up words and not being able to keep them straight. The bolding is also distracting, but I suppose it's the best compromise so we at least know the author's original intent.
Language aside, the reason I love Crest of the Stars so much is the position it puts Jint in. He's the son of the planet Martin's president, and at age ten (by our reckoning on Earth), the Abh show up, destroy Martin's only real orbiting spaceship (more of a museum piece), and demand they surrender and become a part of the Abh Empire.
The Abh are very prepared, and since the armada is led by the Crown Prince he basically lays out all the terms, the bulk of which is not negotiable, and gives the planet three days to surrender or die. The prince is clearly bored with this, having done it many times before, and his terms aren't really that bad. The Abh are adding the planet to their empire, but expect the citizens to more or less administer to themselves as they've always done, with the exception that they'll have a noble installed to rule over them to handle interplanetary affairs, and for the moment, that will be the Empress herself.
Jint's father surrenders, despite the fact much of the population wants to fight. Realistically Martin is technologically outmatched. The book makes it clear they have jack squat in the way of a fighting fleet, but nobody likes submitting to a foreign empire. However, Jint's father makes an unusual negotiation move to protect the planet. If they must have an Abh installed over them, make him that noble so someone native to their planet is looking after their interests. This is supposed to be an altruistic move in the book, to get Martin the best deal possible (I think in the anime the Abh just did it without his asking, making Jint's situation even less voluntary), but much of the population sees him as a traitor, so Jint is hurriedly shuttled off planet and we skip ahead seven years into the future with Jint getting ready to go the Abh military academy that all Abh nobles are required to attend in order to hold their titles.
This puts Jint in the unusual position of being a member of the Abh nobility despite not looking like it because he's not ethnically Abh. He's an ordinary, non-genetically modified human and by dint of circumstance is now heir to a fiefdom that hates his father's guts and is not content to be ruled over. The interesting thing is watching how Jint deals with belonging to one group while not looking like it, and being unable to go back to the group he used to belong to. By his own admission he can't even speak his planet's language that well anymore since he stopped using it after he left.
He also doesn't know how to comport himself as a high ranking member of the Abh nobility (Martin was a desirable planet and presumably that's why his father was made a count rather than something lower like a baron) and Abh culture is alien to him. Though they rule a large swath of planets, they are very few in actual number so it's not impossible for there to only be a handful on an entire planet. The Abh appear to be genetically modified humans, though it's unclear when and why they branched off (at least in this book) and they were one of the first to discover faster than light travel through the portal system. The reason they're hellbent on conquering a bunch of planets is they intend to prevent other human colonies (which are usually widespread and unable to communicate with each other having been colonized by generation ships that traveled at sub-light speeds) from independently discovering FTL and going wild with it. If everyone is ruled by the Abh, and the Abh manage the portal system, there can be no interplanetary war.
But the wrinkle is that the Abh aren't the only humans to have discovered the portal system, so there are a few other alliances mentioned in the book that don't particularly like the Abh. The Abh don't attack them or their territories, choosing to focus on unaffiliated colonies like Jint's, which had no clue there was a wider humanity out there, but it seems like the Abh are the big dogs of the portal system users so the other four groups have all but allied against them.
I really enjoyed this one and will probably read Volume 2 next since Volume 1 ends rather abruptly, not even a cliffhanger but more of a chapter end. After poking around it seems Crest of the Stars was written more as a prequel to Banner of the Stars so it was done all in one go whereas Banner was/is being written more irregularly (as it's still not done and the most recent book came out in 2018). Because of this, I suspect Crest of the Stars will read more like a single book and like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings it was just chopped up into three parts because it was too long for expected reading conventions.
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Post by Rune Lai on Jan 1, 2023 1:50:19 GMT -5
Finished Crest of the Stars Vol 2 in what will be my final book of the year. This is very much a middle book as I recall the Crest of the Stars anime being really divided into two arcs, which is odd considering it was based on three volumes, so what we end up with is the resolution of the smaller conflict started in the second half of the first book, and a focus on new hurdle that is a side effect of the larger conflict started in first book.
Outwardly, it is Lafier's mission to escort Jint as a non-combatant to the Abh capital so he can begin his training as an officer in the imperial fleet, and that remains consistent in both volumes, but it's just they keep running into hurdles that make it very difficult to perform what should have been a straightforward escort.
Though Lafier is pretty interesting and I can see why the author was inspired to tell her story, Jint is the one who sells the story for me. The first "arc" ends with the acknowledgement that his children will not be produced in the human way, because even if he's genetically human, by the Empire's standards he is now culturally Abh, and so the expectation is that his children will be produced through genetic engineering according to parameters of his choice, within a few boundaries determined by imperial law so that they will be genetically as well as culturally Abh. It's not something that Jint needs to worry about now, but something he tucks away in the back of his mind for years down the road after meeting another human who was similarly promoted to an Abh noble through the deeds of a human parent, only this man's son did not turn out so well, so he offers to give Jint advice for when the time comes.
I really like how Hiroyuki Morioka worked out how Abh society functions. Since they were genetically engineered from humans themselves, Abh aren't accustomed to having nuclear families. Rather, when an Abh wants a child, they grow one after manipulating DNA, which can be their own or mixed with a partner's of either gender. (Apparently it's very romantic to ask someone to be a gene donor for your child to be, but there's no such thing as marriage and the next child could be with someone else.) Since they don't have families in the traditional human sense and genetics are manipulated, what matters to the Abh are not the preservation of family bloodlines, but family traditions, which I thought was very interesting.
The back end of the book has Lafier and Jint stranded on an Empire planet that has been "liberated" by the United Humankind, which is trying to free the population from the tyranny of Abh propoganda. The Abh are not perfect, and they're not necessarily kind, but it's pretty clear that the people of this particular planet were largely left to their own devices and to govern themselves in their own way. So they have democratic elections and everything. They do have the Abh overseeing everything from an interstellar perspective, but otherwise the Abh doesn't care for local governance so there's very little deprogramming to be done, which doesn't jive with the United Humankind's perspective and concern that they aren't being viewed as liberators.
Because Lafier is as ignorant of how to behave as a Lander human as Jint is about being an Abh, this switches their roles where he gets to be the active one and she's the one out of her depth It occurs to Jint that he could actually ditch her and likely survive just fine on his own because no one would suspect him of being an Abh noble, but of course he doesn't, which is the other juxtaposition I like, that even though he looks like a regular human, he knows he's not. A part of him is also Abh, as Lafier has been telling him the entire time when he starts to talk like he isn't.
I more or less know how the third volume is going to end, though it's been a long time since I watched the anime, but I think there must be more complications the anime cut out since I can't see more than a couple episodes remaining out of the material left in my head, but there's still a third of the trilogy to go.
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Post by Solana on Jan 2, 2023 12:00:37 GMT -5
I went to a B&N yesterday after picking up fabulous ingredients for my mortar and pestle. (Not the one I used to work at, it's still.... difficult to go to.) I started Mercedes Lackey's 'Jolene', and am enjoying the new atmosphere. The twangy narrating took a little getting used to, but it's a good read and keeping me engaged. I like how she jumps to different places for the Elemental Masters, from San Francisco to England to Wales to Germany and now to outside of Cleveland.
Old habits die hard, though. (Laughs) I heard a lady talking to presumably her daughter and searching fruitlessly for a book about the I Ching. She was in the wrong area. I popped over to the correct one, found a book, and brought it to her with my apologies for overhearing and explained that I had been a bookseller. She was absolutely delighted and not upset at all.
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Post by Solana on Jan 4, 2023 10:52:34 GMT -5
'Jolene' was a good read, but the Elemental Masters' villains have been getting less and less screentime and less and less impact. I think she wrote more about Anna's journey to her aunt's house than the entire time the villain was shown. It's been like that the last few volumes.
I started my next new book 'Daughter of the Moon Goddess'. I'm also happy to read non-Celtic or non-European mythology in general. The writing is very lovely, and this promises to be the first in a duology. We'll see how it goes.
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Post by Solana on Apr 3, 2023 15:40:39 GMT -5
I haven't started it yet, but S. A. Chakraborty (author of the Daevabad trilogy) published a new book, 'The Adventures of Amina El-Sirafi'. A main character who is a retired lady pirate captain? Yes, please!
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Post by Solana on Apr 18, 2023 4:09:01 GMT -5
I started the book and it's even better than her last ones. The pirate captain goes to pick up her old poisoner when getting the crew back together.
"What is your trade now exactly?"
"Pharmaceuticals."
"Are you trained in that?"
"Oh, no, but it's just like poisoning, no? Only in reverse."
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Post by Solana on Jun 25, 2023 7:08:01 GMT -5
I finished 'The Shadow of the Fox' trilogy and was in the mood for something different, so picked up a copy of 'Jane Eyre'. That boarding school sounds very dreary, but it is very well written.
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Post by Solana on Jul 13, 2023 15:24:21 GMT -5
Why did I wait so long to get a copy of 'The Bear and the Nightingale'? It was super popular when I was still slinging books, and for good reason. There's a ton of references to old Russian fairytales and it's written in a similar style. Beautiful, with the darkness and danger that reminds me of the Grimm tales. If anyone enjoys Mercedes Lackey's 'Tradition' books, I highly recommend it.
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Post by Solana on Jul 15, 2023 8:42:21 GMT -5
Ambrienne, I'm curious if you've ever read 'The Invisible Library' series by Genevieve Cogman. The humor in it reminds me of yours quite a bit. There's a library between worlds that has Librarians that are to save rare books from worlds so that they can be preserved. I always love books with librarians as main characters because they are badasses when it comes to books and keeping them safe/available to all.
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Post by Ambrienne on Jul 15, 2023 14:28:38 GMT -5
I don't think I've ever read that series. I'll have to remember to check it out.
As for what I'm currently reading... um, lots and lots of stuff? That's actually an understatement. I'm currently alternating chapters between seven different books/series things on my Kindle (one of which is Talia Beckett's Fringe Colonies series), reading daily chapters of somewhere around 10 different Korean webnovels on Yonder (including Perfect Hybrid, The Academy's Undercover Professor, and Greatest Real Estate Developer as well as their webtoon counterparts), reading episodes/chapters as updated on Tapas of anywhere from 10-20 different things per day (I especially recommend Farmer of Spirits for all the Story of Seasons/Rune Factory lovers), and keeping up with dailies/weekly stuff on Webtoons as well (which includes Dr. Frost[psychological/mystery] and Senorita Cometa[phantom thief type with Latina twist]).
I am actually making decent progress on my unread pile, but a lot of them have been either mediocre or outright trash.
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Post by Solana on Aug 8, 2023 15:18:34 GMT -5
Fanfiction with Geist and Kamiizumi from the 'Bravely Default' series as dorky dads in love wasn't something I realized I needed to read, but there you go.
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Post by Ambrienne on Aug 11, 2023 15:53:54 GMT -5
I just recently finished Eun Na and the Phantom by Erica Laurie. It was a decent read, but the ending seemed a bit too abrupt when you consider the rest of the story's pace. Okay, so I also thought the villain was an idiot on the level of cartoon/childhood fairy tales, but it was still nice reading something with a bit of different flavor to it. Also, Dr. Frost recently got completed on Webtoons, so there's probably only a limited time during which it will be possible to binge read the entire series before it becomes Daily Pass if anyone's interested. And it did end decently considering all the mind trips involved, so I'm satisfied. I did acquire the first two Invisible Library series e-books (as they were at a significant discount), so they're in my to be read pile now. And my TBR is down by at least 25 or so books since the last time I posted. Funny how they changed the font on the Kindle recently to make the Delete Permanently option in red letters now. No, Amazon, I really AM deleting those books on purpose, so stop recommending more of the ones I disliked enough to get rid of that way (although there are a few cases where I deleted duplicates in the case of complete collection acquisitions). I wonder how many will be left when I've weeded out the trash.
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