Skip to main content

What I read -- July 2018

LHC#13: “Sorcerer to the Crown” by Zen Cho. It took me until about half-way through to connect with the characters. After that I quite enjoyed it.

“Cold Magic” by Kate Elliott. Ed was doing a re-read, so I picked it up. I guess I’m reading the series now… spoilers: Cat gets force-married on p. 80 and by page 150 is starting to like her random forced husband. Ick. But that wasn’t the direction things were going and it was a fun read.

“Cold Fire” by Kate Elliott. All three volumes of this series were around the house, and they’re library books so that wasn’t going to last, so here we are. I spent a lot of time wanting to slap the characters here. At least Cat has agency and the freedom to make bad sexual choices.

The situation didn’t change really for like 200 pages after Cat got to Expedition. It made me wish I was a faster reader (I don’t often wish this). It probably didn’t help that I read this section while sitting waiting a very long time for my number to be called at a government office.

I was thinking about why it rubbed me the wrong way so much and sort of realized that what she was doing with the relationship there is something I’m trying to do with a relationship that I’m writing (though with very different characters). So it made me think about what did and didn’t work for me and why. I felt like not only was Cat being really annoying, she was really unclear about her motivations.

But! I was at circus and I said something about wanting to make yam pudding. I don’t know why this came up. And it led to an interesting conversation with someone about KE, and Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman, and Diana Wynne Jones. It’s neat to find like-minded people.

“Cold Steel” by Kate Elliott. If it hadn't been a library book with an ambiguous due date, I might have put it down in the Lutetia section and just... never picked it up again. I was so glad when Cat finally left the mage house there. I didn't find the Mansa particularly convincing towards the end of the book. 

But it did have a satisfying resolution. I liked where the characters ended up. And the yam pudding was very good. 
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.
Read more

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...
Read more

What I read: March 2024

  LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by  Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence.  "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read.  LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes.  I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...
Read more