Petunia, The Girl Who Was NOT a Princess - M.R. Nelson

Verdict: 2 thumbs up + a grin (followed by a request to read a book with a pink mermaid on the cover...)

I wan't too sure how this book would be received by the resident 7-year-old who is about as much of a princess as you can be, given who her parents are. If something is pink and has ruffles, she wants it. If the story is about a princess, she wants it. So I was a bit concerned that she might not love this particular book.

Turns out that Petunia appeals even to the princesses out there. She is the kind of kid who would be fun to play with, and the illustrations are excellent. There was lots of giggling while I read this book out loud. It is all about friendship, and finding common ground with people who aren't quite like you. Even pushing your boundaries a little.

Next up I think I'll try this one out at Brownies - we're doing a unit on positive body image and self-acceptance, and I think this book will go over really well with the girls.

Between Two Thorns - Emma Newman

The subject of a Big Idea post over on Whatever. Newman doesn't actually describe the book at all, but this paragraph caught my attention:

"At first it disguised itself as a short story about a shopkeeper and a woman returning one of his products; a faerie trapped in a bell jar. The woman thinks it’s a frivolous gadget sent by her husband abroad, with no idea that she’s in possession of a real faerie which could destroy her life. The shopkeeper, feeling merciful, sends her away with a fruit cake recipe after casting a memory loss charm on her."

I wanted to know more about a world where you could accidentally wind up with a faerie in a bell jar, and I definitely wanted to know why it could have destroyed her life. From the very first page I couldn't put this book down. The characters are awesome, the setting is really really cool - the world of Faery has been split from the Mundane world, and in between the two lies the Nether where only those mortals sponsored by the Fae may live, and time does not pass (or at least, doesn't affect those living in the Nether). The Victorian society of the Nether juxtaposed with modern society in the Mundane world was a lot of fun. The little glimpses we get of Exillium, the Faery realm, are very intriguing and more than a little scary. The story itself is great - embedded in the setting, and well wrapped-up within a single novel.

I can't wait to read more. I'm already reading the short stories set in the Split Worlds, and I'm anxiously awaiting the next book!

Roman Fever - Edith Wharton

Emily, over on Evening All Afternoon (who hasn't posted in ages...and whose posts I miss terribly) wrote about Roman Fever, and I was especially intrigued by her mention of Wharton's treatment of the cultural baggage surrounding marriage. I'm not generally disappointed by the books recommended over there, even though they're way outside my usual comfort zone, and this one did not disappoint.

The setting for these stories is early 20th century upper class American society - although they are not necessarily set in the United States, but often concern Americans living abroad. This was particularly fascinating to me as I've been reading quite a lot of Georgette Heyer's regency romances lately, and the society of Roman Fever is a lot closer to that of Regency England than to modern day. Women do have more freedom, and there is a lot more travel, but society imposes its restrictions far more than nowadays.

I really enjoyed all the stories, although the title story was definitely my favorite. I can't say much about it without ruining it though. I found all the stories fairly quick and easy to read. Many of them were downright hilarious - especially Xingu which is about a book club and how people deal with trying to avoid looking stupid. Several of them were fairly sad, but on the whole they left me feeling hopeful.

This is definitely going on my list of books to re-read.

Rapture of the Nerds - Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross

As a fan of both Stross & Doctorow, I figured this book would definitely be worth reading. I wasn't wrong, but instead of combining my favorite aspects of both writers, it wound up combining my least favorite elements of both their styles...which still made for a very enjoyable book.

Humanity has figured out how to upload itself to the cloud, but of course not everyone is ready for that just yet. Huw Jones hasn't forgiven his parents for uploading when he was a teenager, and is attempting to live as technology free a life as possible. Unfortunately for Huw the universe has other ideas and he winds up far more involved than he ever wanted to be. In the process we get to see a little of what has happened to people still living on the planet, which isn't too pretty. The US seems especially bad with its combination of religious cults and swarm of ants which eat everything they can get their mandibles on.

Huw is not especially loveable, and I found him really irritating for the first half of the story. He's being dragged kicking and screaming away from his nice, electronic-free life as a potter, and in the process appears to be complicating things for everyone. Finally things start to make a lot more sense as we find out why horrible things are happening to Huw in particular, and at that point I started to really enjoy the book. Possibly I will like it a whole lot more on a second read.

Unsurprisingly in a Doctorow/Stross collaboration this book explores the implications of life as an uploaded entity. I had never thought about what happens when everyone lives as a simulation in the computer and then you create new simulation - the new sim is effectively a person, they are indistinguishable from all the other folks who consider themselves people, so you can't just go killing them off by shutting them down once you're done, that hardly seems fair. Then what if you spawn other versions of yourself? Your clones become separate entities almost immediately, you wouldn't want to suddenly find yourself deleted as not being quite as up to date as some other version. Also, what about overclocking? If you are running on a really fast computer, you effectively experience time passing more quickly than someone running on a slower processor. How do you allocate resources? Emotional reactions are another thing - when you can artificially modulate your emotions, is this any less valid than someone who has learned to modulate their emotions by meditating?

On the whole, I'd have to say I enjoyed this. The story was mostly fun, the characters got to be more enjoyable as things progressed. Huw is actually a sympathetic character once you finally wrap your head around why he is acting the way he is. Most readers would probably empathize more with his parents than with him, since I assume anyone reading this story would be more likely to upload themselves to the cloud than now, and yet his overreaction to being abandoned by his parents is totally understandable.

The Dazzle of Day - Molly Gloss

Jo Walton reread The Dazzle of Day over on Tor.com. She titled the post "Quakers in Space" which is a really good one line description. It is set on a generational starship, but the folks on the ship aren't the ones who built it - they're one of the few groups who actually had the guts to abandon Earth. So while they have all sorts of high tech gear, they're a very low tech society. Obviously there are folks who have to maintain the ship, and learn how to repair the sails as they arrive at their destination so that the ship can slow down properly, but mostly they are farmers and artisans. And the society is very egalitarian with all decisions being made at Meetings (which obviously makes things difficult because you have to have a large group of people coming to an agreement about things - difficult things - deciding to change the world by actually landing on the planet their ancestors set out for instead of staying in their nice safe (but gradually decaying) ship). So it is entirely different in flavour from any other generational starship story I've ever read. Which is awesome. And yet...like Jo says in her post, her 11-year old self would have hated this book, and maybe I'm not really old enough to enjoy it yet. It was almost too real for me. There was a lot of death and disability - in fact a very realistic amount of death and disability - but it was of the sort that in your standard sci-fi story wouldn't have happened - people would have been saved at the very last minute. Instead, the dramatic rescue attempts don't necessarily succeed, or don't succeed fully, and we get to explore the effect of that on the survivors - who are very human. Which is interesting, and it was a very compelling read, but a bit depressing on the whole - and yet not, because people do survive and go on to create lives, happy lives, for themselves and their descendants on this new planet.

The one thing I really enjoyed was the family and social structure. Marriage is very much a thing, but people don't get married and move into their own houses, you continue living with family - but exactly which family (or friends) you live with depends a lot more on personalities than on precedent. People regularly move around if they stop getting along with the folks they are living with and have a better option. Also, children when they reach age 12 are expected to move elsewhere for their 'green years' in order to experience different family environments. Generally moving in with aunts & uncles or other relatives. Each individual dwelling is part of a larger community, so that sleeping, cooking and eating would be done with your family group, but communal spaces are available for working and bathing. Within a very constrained society this seems (to me) to allow a large degree of personal freedom. If you aren't happy, you can leave - you aren't going very far, but far enough.

So I think I really enjoyed it, but I think I might like it better in 20 years. Definitely worth reading especially as it is quite short.

Servant of a Dark God - John Brown

This was one of the first Big Idea posts that sounded cool to me, I think it was mostly the way Brown told the story of being chased by a bull, I figured that if I'd enjoyed the brief piece so much, I would probably enjoy the longer story, also the idea of people being farmed like cows intrigued me. In theory we're smarter than cows, so convincing us that being farmed was ok should be a bit trickier.

The story was easy to fall into, Talen is the protagonist and the first chapter where he is trying to locate his missing pants was fabulous and did a lot to give me an idea of his character and how his family worked. The next few chapters where it became clear to the reader that all was not quite right with the world were a lot of fun. Talen is still pretty young and still believing that the people in charge are good and right and when they say someone is bad and dangerous that person should be turned in to the authorities, but it is clear that the rest of his family isn't nearly as naive and that shortly Talen will figure things out and wind up on the right side. It takes rather a long time for Talen to realize that the authorities are not on his side and that breaking the rules is the right thing to do. On the one hand that is awesome - it really makes the situation believable, that you have this civilization built on a pile of lies, the fact that it takes Talen a long time to overcome the indoctrination is very realistic. On the other hand...you spend more than half the book in a bit of a panic that Talen is going to do something absolutely disastrous, which makes it very difficult to just relax and enjoy the story, and I found it really broke the immersion. Once things did get going it was totally fabulous, and I really liked the way things came together in the end. I think that realizing this was the first book in a trilogy before I started reading it (which was clear from the Big Idea post, but not from the cover of the book) would have helped a bit, although I really did get a sense of closure at the end of the story - but things aren't done yet, they're only just getting going with saving the world! And this world really does need saving.

Definitely looking forward to reading the next two books, probably going to recommend this to a bunch of other people.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance - Lois McMaster Bujold

I practically inhaled Bujold's Vorkosigan saga when I first found out about it a couple years ago, so I was really excited when I found out she was writing a new book, especially when I discovered that it was going to star Ivan Vorpatril. Miles Vorkosigan had really gotten too powerful, and Cryoburn was a bit of a disappointment. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance was exactly what I was hoping for and then some.

To begin with, I love that this story stars Ivan actually being Ivan. I was really worried (especially given the title) that Ivan was going to have to step up and into Miles' shoes, presumably in order to rescue somebody. But instead, it is Ivan, thrust entirely unwilling into a situation he doesn't want to be in, bright enough to see all the implications, but not wanting to get involved unless he can possibly avoid it. Unless of course there's a pretty girl and a chance of getting laid.

The bit which made me incredibly happy, is the love story. I've been reading a lot of Georgette Heyer lately, and my favorite type of love story is the one where the couple gets married first and falls in love later. Ivan is the perfect candidate for this sort of story since he's been avoiding marriage so assiduously, but when he finds himself accidentally (and temporarily) married to Tej, he is totally happy - which shouldn't surprise anyone who has ever been happily married. A happy marriage is a very comfortable place, and Ivan likes being comfortable.

Then there's the bit of the story where Ivan has to step up and be the hero, because we all know that Ivan can and will be the hero when he is in a corner and has no choice in the matter. Simon is involved too, and he's mostly recovered from the loss of the memory chip, so getting to see his relationship with Lady Alys and with Ivan is a lot of fun. Also the Jewels...they're pretty cool. In fact Tej's whole family is pretty fascinating.

I laughed out loud at the end of the book when I read through the timeline plot summaries for each novel and hit the one sentence description for this one: "ImpSec. Headquarters suffers a problem with moles." It perfectly describes the part of the story which is going to impact the people of Barrayar, and yet manages to be entirely misleading. Awesome.

Jo Walton has a post up on Tor.com about this which was fun to read, but I'm glad I held off until after I had read the book. It was so much fun going into this story not having any idea what might happen. I'm definitely hoping for another Ivan book though.

Dodger - Terry Pratchett

I was disappointed because I was expecting Discworld, and this isn't Discworld, it is the fictional story of Charles Dickens' inspiration for Oliver Twist, mainly for the character of the Artful Dodger. Also, it is a YA novel, so it's a bit shorter than you might expect, except that it is printed in a slightly larger font, on slightly thicker paper, so the book is about the same size as Snuff.

Once I readjusted my expectations, I quite enjoyed this. Dodger is a great character, and I did appreciate this being set in the real world rather than in Ankh-Morpork. The fantasy setting of the Discworld lets Pratchett point out a lot of things that are wrong with our society, but Dodger doesn't need the fantasy setting, because it has a historical setting, and I think the book is more powerful for having that historical setting. Especially in a novel targeted at young adults, it is great to have a book which references some of the cultural history - the story of Sweeney Todd, the origins of the London Peelers, the different layers of society, and some pretty significant research into the state of London's poor.

Overall a great book, and now I want to go read Oliver Twist with a fresh perspective.

Snuff - Terry Pratchett

The latest Discworld book, starring Sam Vimes. Usually one of my favorite Discworld characters, but somehow I didn't love him quite as much in this book as I usually do. Possibly because this story was a bit bleak, and I wasn't always sure he was going to survive...and I was sometimes worried that something horrible was going to happen to Sybil or young Sam. Possibly I will enjoy this more when I re-read it one of these days, but I was definitely a bit anxious - especially because the villains in the Sam Vimes books are truly bad and don't tend to stay captured. Also, Vimes has become a rather powerful character, so in order for things to actually threaten him, they need to be extremely dangerous.

On the other hand, there were many things I absolutely loved about this story - Willikins is a fabulous character and gets into the action a bit more than usual. The goblins are just wonderful. Vimes figuring out how to deal with the Summoning Dark is pretty fascinating too. Possibly my favorite aspect of the Vimes books nowadays is the fact that young Sam & Elli are the same age, and Pratchett has taken to publishing some of the books Vimes reads to young Sam - and so I've been reading them to Elli. We're currently reading "The World of Poo" and Elli seems to find it every bit as entertaining as young Sam, although thank goodness she isn't even a little bit interested in starting her own poo collection...mostly just in giggling every time the word poo comes up. Then there's Sam's relationship with Sybil, which is just wonderful. Every love story should end up this way, in a marriage where there is a huge amount of mutual respect. And the fact that they both go about changing the world in their own totally different, yet very complementary ways.

The Long Earth - Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter

I'm always nervous about collaborations between a beloved author and one I've never heard of before, but as usual I should just trust Terry Pratchett to know what he's doing. Also, I appear to be living under a log to never have heard of Stephen Baxter and now intend to go hunt down his other novels.

The idea behind The Long Earth is that there are a possibly infinite number of alternate versions of Earth, each only as far as a thought away. Up until very recently only a very few people were able to step between them, but now the schematics for a "Stepper", a device which allows one to step between worlds, has been published on the internet, and suddenly everyone is Stepping. Except for the few who can't. Also, iron does not move between worlds for reasons no one understands.

Joshua Valienté is a "natural stepper", and unlike those who need a device in order to Step, he doesn't get nauseous as he steps from one world to another. This makes him an ideal companion for Lobsang, either a sentient computer or a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated inside a computer, who plans to travel as far across the long earth as possible. There are a few other characters who stay closer to home, allowing us to see what happens to society when people can step pretty much anywhere they please. What happens to crime when theft is unbelievably easy, but there is enough space and resources for everyone? What happens when your gold supply becomes effectively infinite? Why farm when there is enough space for everyone to enjoy a hunter gatherer lifestyle?

The social implications of The Long Earth are fascinating, but by far the most interesting bit as far as I was concerned involved the alternate versions of Earth. The landscape changes slowly as Joshua and Lobsang travel farther from Datum Earth, and this does appear to be the only version of Earth which produced humans, but there are other sentient beings out there which are likely the basis for our legends of trolls & elves. But it is the landscape itself that I find the most fascinating, the unfolding of different possibilities.

Overall this felt like an introduction to the concept of the Long Earth, setting the stage for an infinite number of possible stories and I'm very interested in seeing where Pratchett & Baxter take this. Step Day is a singularity with huge potential, and it wouldn't surprise me if other authors wanted to come play in this particular sandbox.

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

I saw a preview for the movie, and then when I saw the book sitting on my friend's desk I couldn't resist borrowing it. It is a fascinating book, largely because of the style in which it is written. It consists of 6 short stories, each split in half. You get the first half of each story in chronological order, followed the the second half of each story in reverse order, so that the 6th story which happens at the furthest point in the future is uninterrupted. The most fascinating thing about it, for me, was that in each story following the first, the main character discovers the previous story in some form or another.

Several people I spoke with found the 6th story very frustrating to read because of the language it is written in - set in the far future, English has changed rather a lot from what we use today. It definitely slowed me down, but I really enjoyed the social implications of the language - you can infer a lot about the history of a society based on its language, and Mitchell did a beautiful job of creating the language.

For me, the most frustrating thing was not really understanding what the whole thing was about until the very last page when finally things came together in a way that was incredibly satisfying. I think that in order to enjoy this fully, I need to sit down and read it over again - it would definitely go faster the second time, but I'm not sure I loved the characters enough to be willing to do this. Certainly not right away. Although I'm definitely tempted to go see the movie, which is apparently much easier to follow if you've already read the book.

The Crimson Petal and the White - Michel Faber

This came highly recommended by a friend, and I was a little shocked when it arrived at the library by exactly how big it was. 800 pages! But it is a fairly large print, and not particularly dense prose, so I finished it faster than I was expecting.

This is mainly the story of an extraordinarily intellectually intelligent prostitute named Sugar. She is beautiful, very unique looking, and very good at figuring out what people want. She is a great character. You can't help but want her to succeed, even when you see her working so very hard at something that you are sure isn't going to make her happy.

The narrative starts very oddly, with the narrator talking to you as if you are actually physically present in 1870s London, following people around, hoping to make connections that will eventually lead you to the upper crust of London society. I really enjoyed this, and it was very similar to what everyone in that society is trying to do - work their way as far up the social ladder as they possibly could. I also especially loved Caroline, the first prostitute you meet in the story. Her life is fairly horrible, she has lost everything that you would figure makes life worth living, and yet she is a fundamentally happy person, able to enjoy the little things that are left to her, and caring deeply about the people in her life.

Sugar is a more complicated character. She is not at all happy with her lot in life, and grasps at the opportunity to change things when William Rackham comes along. He is initially infatuated with Sugar, and she works very hard to make herself utterly indispensable to him so that he will not lose interest. It is fascinating that although Sugar doesn't love William, in fact she doesn't like him in the slightest, she is so invested in making him love her that she winds up acting and feeling very much like someone desperately in love.

William's wife Agnes is another fascinating character. Initially she seems utterly crazy and it would be very easy to write her in such a way that the reader would simply despise her, and yet you wind up really caring about her and wanting things to work out somehow so that she will be alright. The situation with her daughter Sophie just left me shaking my head in disbelief at the entire 19th century and their attitude towards women.

Overall I think I really enjoyed this book, but it has some really horrible moments that left me feeling pretty depressed. On the other hand, if you want a very graphic example about how much the situation of women has improved over the past 200 years, this is a very good book to read.

Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty

This wound up on my reading list because of an intriguing post over on Evening All Afternoon

"I've been writing a lot lately about feminist musicologistSusan McClary and her ideas about the need for an alternative narrative practice. McClary goes in search of a mode of storytelling that does not dwell in a land of perpetual desire, of constant striving for a climax or resolution which, once achieved, spells the end of the story (the so-called "phallic" or "heroic" narrative arc), but that instead stresses pleasure over desire, that glories in what McClary calls a "voluptuous 'being-in-time' quality" - an examination of what we have and who we are, rather than what I want and who I would rather be."

which made me really curious to see what a novel without resolution would be like.

Delta Wedding is a week in the life of a large family in the Mississippi delta. One of the daughters is getting married and outlying family are coming for the wedding. There is very little plot. One of the characters, Laura McRaven, is 9 years old, has recently lost her mother, and is back for the wedding and quite possibly to stay permanently rather than living in a far away town with only her father. Another character, George, is dealing with the fact that his wife Robbie has just run away and it isn't entirely clear why, or whether she is going to come back. Then there's Dabney, the bride, who is marrying 'beneath' her, and it becomes obvious that she doesn't actually know Troy all that well, and that they don't actually spend much time together. The day after the wedding where several different groups head into town to run errands not realizing that it is Sunday and all the stores will be closed. So many little things which in an ordinary book would drive the typical big problem, increasing miscommunication, eventually leading to huge misunderstandings, and finally some sort of resolution.

Instead life goes on. Things which could lead to huge misunderstandings instead get resolved, often with very little effort because the people involved really do love one another and are very used to living together. Issues get sorted out, problems get solved at least temporarily, and life goes on. Laura gets invited to stay on the plantation with her aunt & uncle, and of course says yes (it is what she's expected to say after all), but then thinks to herself that she probably won't stay. But of course she is only nine, and her aunt will almost certainly convince her father to let her stay, and she will probably be quite happy there...and you can sort of see how she is going to wind up belonging in two places at once.

It is pretty fascinating. There are so many people and so much activity that there is very little privacy. Everyone is quite aware of what everyone else is doing, and yet it is easy to wander off on your own, and everyone definitely has their own private thoughts. It is a comfortable place where there are lots of adults to share the responsibilities for taking care of all the children, and yet there are so many different children that it won't be particularly easy to see when someone is having a problem but not being really noisy about it. There will be a lot of benign neglect along with any number of assumptions about what particular children want to be doing...which won't coincide with what they actually want. Especially with Laura. And yet the fact that she will have a place there, will belong to this family is likely going to be really good for her, even though she won't have the undivided attention that she might get living in town with her father.

I'm not really sure what I thought of this. It is beautifully written and was enjoyable to read once I got over trying to anticipate where the story was going (it wasn't going anywhere, it was just hanging out and enjoying the scenery). I read it up at the cottage, and was a little bit depressed from time to time...which might be because of the book, or the fact I wasn't sleeping all that well. I'm not sure I would read it again, and yet I am finding myself thinking quite a bit about it.

Child of Fire - Harry Connolly

This was the subject of a Big Idea piece a while back, and the concept intrigued me. Also, the windbreaker. And it really didn't disappoint. This story is quick, fun, and different.

There were a few things which threw me off initially and almost made me put the book down without reading it. First of all, on the cover it says "A Twenty Palaces Novel" which made me think that it wasn't necessarily the first book in the series. Then, when you start reading, the main character makes many references to previous events - which is totally normal when you need to fill people in on the back story - but in such a way that it made me feel like there was definitely a previous book, and that I would probably be happier if I read that one first. It turns out this was the first novel published, but there is in fact a prequel...which I haven't read, but other people on the internet seem to think is worth reading. If my library had a copy, I would definitely get my hands on it, unfortunately this is the only book of Harry Connolly's they happen to have...and I enjoyed it enough that I'm seriously considering buying the whole series.

Ray Lilly has just gotten out of jail. He's been a car thief, he's killed his best friend, and now he's working for someone who hates him but who has for some reason agreed not to kill him (for the time being at least) and who has been instrumental in getting him out of jail, and he's flat broke. It turns out that he's actually a really good guy when you give him a chance. He really does want to save the world, and that makes him really quite lovable. He's definitely someone you want to have on your side.

The magic in this story is really interesting and fairly different from what I've seen other places. It isn't really well explained in the first book, largely because we're seeing the world through Ray's eyes, and while he would like to understand the magic a whole lot better, he doesn't actually know all that much about it. Yet. I'm really curious to find out what he's going to do next.

Ship Breaker - Paolo Bacigalupi

This was the subject of a Big Idea post which I think is really worth reading before you read the book. This is not a cheerful, happy book, it is a modern-day post-apocalyptic survival story. This is the story of what happens after we run out of cheap oil, global warming sets in, and the oceans rise. And it is about the people who will have to be coping with these things - the kids.

It is beautifully written, and because it is a young adult story with kids as the protagonists, they aren't sitting around bemoaning the world as it used to be - they are simply living in their world. And even though they can see how things used to be, and can imagine things being better, they have never experienced the ease of our lives, and so they are just coping - living their lives as best they can.

I really do like what Bacigalupi has done here. It would be really easy to have all the kids be good guys, and all the adults be bad guys, but he doesn't do that. None of the kids are perfect, and even when Nailer sets out to save the life of the girl he finds trapped on the boat, he has very good reasons for doing so - both logical and emotional - and even then he often questions this decision. He could so easily let her die and keep everything he can salvage from her ship. Instead he is aiming for a life that he almost can't even imagine - sailing on one of the beautiful white-sailed ships he sees on the horizon. But the struggle to get there is more than most people would have the strength for. In the end he persists, and you get to see the possibility of the entire world becoming ever so slightly a better place - someone in a position of power (potentially) has finally seen what life is really like for the folks at the bottom of the heap. Life is certainly looking up for Nailer, and probably even for the community he grew up in, although the cost hasn't been cheap.

This is not a happy story, although being written for kids it is not nearly as bleak and depressing as The Windup-Girl, but it is a very satisfying adventure. I would definitely recommend it, but it is the sort of book you probably want to read before handing it off to a young teenager.

The City and the City - China Mieville

This story is very nearly a totally ordinary murder mystery, but the author is China Mieville, so obviously it can't be just straight-up fiction, and yet there is no magic in these twin cities - neither in Beszel or Ul Qoma. It is hard to imagine how this situation came to be, two cities physically overlapping one another, with the inhabitants of each hard at work ignoring the city they don't belong in. At first it seems that there must be some sort of magic involved, but there isn't - just the power of belief.

Tyador Borlu is a cop with a dead body on his hands. He's trying to figure out who she is, why she was killed, and who killed her. In order to do so, he winds up moving between his home city, Beszel, and the city of Ul Qoma which exist in the same physical space, but occupy very different psychological spaces. We see the world through Tyador's eyes, which makes things interesting, especially when he interacts with foreigners who mostly find it impossible to "unsee" the city they are not supposed to be seeing. Clearly the existence of two separate cities is just a trick of the mind, and yet it works - the inhabitants of these cities act as though they live in physically separate places. Each city has its own transit system, a slum in one city can coexist with a very nice neighbourhood in the other, people make international phone calls to the house just up the street. It makes absolutely no sense, and yet this is a communal fiction with a total buy-in from the locals. It helps that breaking these rules and "seeing" the city you aren't supposed to be in is a crime, policed by the mysterious "Breach". Possibly there is magic involved there, but it isn't explicit.

As far as murder mysteries go, there's nothing incredible going on here, but this particular crime and the scene are inextricably intertwined. The setting is fascinating and weird, and Mieville really plays the reader's attempt to immerse themselves in the setting, and accept its bizarre rules as fact, against them when it comes to figuring out the mystery. I really enjoyed this, but I'm not nearly as enthralled as I was by The Scar. Still, I would recommend it to anyone who likes a good mystery and can cope with a very non-standard setting - or equally to anyone who enjoys SF...even though it really isn't SF or fantasy - it just requires the same reading protocols.

The Scar - China Mieville

This is the second book set in the world of Bas-Lag. While it comes after Perdido Street Station, it isn't exactly a sequel. Having an understanding of what the city of New Crobuzon is like helps a bit, but certainly isn't necessary.

The Scar is the story of Bellis Coldwine who has had to leave New Crobuzon following the events chronicled in Perdido Street Station (although she knows less about what actually happened there than you do if you've read the book). She didn't want to leave, and is deeply resentful of the events which have forced her to go, and of the places she is now forced to be. Bellis is an interesting character, hard to like at first, she is very cold and resentful, although it is easy to sympathize with her frustration at her current circumstances.

I think this may be my favorite Mieville story so far. The city of Armada is possibly the coolest city ever, and the world of Bas-Lag is totally fascinating. You get to find out so much more about the world than in Perdido Street Station. Mieville's in-cluing isn't nearly a subtle as some, but it is very well done. The characters themselves are wandering through a world which they don't fully understand, but simply have to accept and cope with, and the lack of upfront explanations for things forces the reader into this same mindset, which is really helpful when it comes to trying to understand a character like Bellis who is very cold and resists becoming involved with her new environment.

Armada is a floating city composed of hundreds of boats tied together. It travels, although very slowly, and is essentially a pirate economy. No one outside of Armada knows that it exists, and the Armadans work very hard to keep it this way. It has a really fascinating political structure with different individuals or groups in charge of policing the various regions of the city. I can't really imagine something like this working in reality. The effects of a large storm would probably be more severe than what's described in the story, and I can't imagine the boats themselves would be as structurally sound as they would have to be...but it is certainly plausible, and definitely interesting enough for me to happily ignore the fact that it probably shouldn't work.

Armada itself was my favorite bit, but there were so many other awesome bits too. The mosquito-people, the crazy library, the Ghosthead empire, the possible sword, the Lovers, Uther Doul. Every other page there was a fascinating new thing to think about, and the story unfolding as Bellis copes with life in Armada and her desperate desire to go home. The setting is almost better than the story...the story is just a scaffolding to hang all of the beautiful bits of scenery and background and character onto. Yet for all of that the story itself works too - it certainly doesn't detract from the scenery.

Overall, a ton of fun to read and definitely worth re-reading.

Embassytown - China Mieville

I'm on a bit of a China Mieville kick at the moment, having re-read Perdido Street Station recently. There was an interview with Mieville on BoingBoing recently and this bit really caught my attention:

Tom: Do you have a favourite among your books?
China: It will sound like a hedge, because generally I think my answer oscillates between three—can you oscillate between three things?—anyway, it does that. As a quick and dirty answer, the book that I think is probably the most seamless, the one that I think works best in its own terms, is The City and the City. The one that I think is in some ways the most ambitious, and that I've worked at the hardest over the longest time, is probably Embassytown. But the one that feels most kind of like an unmediated expression of my core, and that means the most to me for all its flaws, is Iron Council.

I don't know why I enjoy hearing an author's opinion of his own work so much, but hearing that this book was hard to write and then reading it...it is pretty hard to read too! Just wrapping my mind around what was going on and the aliens involved took effort. I can't actually imagine writing this, let alone coming up with the concept.

It contains aliens who do not think like humans, and thus find it almost impossible to communicate with humans. In fact, it isn't clear that anyone is actually communicating what they think they are communicating, but they have some sort of a system which appears to work ok. The only other place I've seen this is C.J.Cherryh's Chanur series where there are a couple species of aliens - methane breathers - who have a lot of trouble communicating with the oxygen breathers, but they've managed just barely enough to put together some safety regulations and avoid huge incidents, but not quite enough that anyone is really comfortable. Coming up with alien modes of communication, and then trying to get the concept across to the reader when the reader should clearly be unable to communicate with one of these races...it is difficult.

Then there is Avice, the main character, who is also a simile in the 'language' spoken by the Ariekei. They speak only truth, and so when they want to say "this is like the girl in the room who ate what was given to her", they needed a girl to sit in a room and eat what was given to her, so they paid her to perform this little scenario so that they could then refer to it. Utterly bizarre. Anyway all of this means that they cannot lie, but they are fascinated by lies and lying because of the odd mental dissonance it produces for them. Avice is a good character. She grew up in Embassytown, and then left on a spaceship, and is pretty much the only person ever to come back. She isn't back because she wants to be, she's back because her husband is a linguist and is fascinated by the Ariekei. So she doesn't quite fit in with any particular group in Embassytown, and seeing through her eyes lets us see all the different aspects of the Embassytown economy.

The story is fascinating and weird. It was really interesting, but I didn't really engage with the main character. Possibly because she didn't really want to be there? She was trying to feel aloof for most of the story, which made things difficult for me. Towards the end she really starts to care about Embassytown and its future, and at that point I really started to care about things...at which point the book was basically over. Overall a very interesting book, but I'm not sure I would bother to read it again.

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars - Steven Brust

Jo Walton's review over on Tor.com really says it all.

This is the story of a young painter, Greg, who rents a studio with 4 other artists. They've been at this for 3 years, and none of them are earning a living from their art yet, they've mostly run through all their savings and are trying to figure out what to do next - throw in the towel or try to scrape together enough money to put on a show. Interspersed is the Hungarian fairy tale which Greg is telling them in installments, about a Hungarian Taltos who needs to find the sun, the moon, and the stars and put them in the sky so that there will be light. It is an old fairy tale, full of things which make no sense and I struggled with it. The story of Greg and his painting, and the other artists in the studio...was wonderful.

My favorite bit was definitely reading about the process of painting the monster painting which Greg is working on. I feel as though I learned quite a lot about art in the process, and I now want to go hang out in an art gallery for a while and read up on art history. The thing which I think could have been a lot of fun, but I don't have the background to appreciate: all the chapter titles were names of famous paintings (I think), and they may have been related to things going on in the story. So it might be fun to read through it again while reading up on all the title paintings.

I'm still pretty frustrated by the fact that I can't make any connections between the fairy tale and the story. Jo Walton suggests that the figures in the painting (Uranus, Artemis & Apollo) represent the sun, the moon, and the stars...but I'm not quite seeing how that works. And even if it does work, I still don't see enough connections to make the fairy tale work for me. On the other hand, the rest of the story was rather fascinating.

The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

This book has gotten some awesome reviews, but what made me really really want to read it was the Big Idea piece written by the author himself. The review over on BoingBoing didn't hurt either.

The thing which fascinated me most, and made the book a little hard to read, was the absence of a 'good-guy'. Anderson Lake is a calorie man living undercover in Thailand, and he wants to get his hands on Thailand's seed bank - purely for his own profit. Hock Seng is a Malaysian Chinese whose entire family was killed during the uprisings in Malaysia and is now scraping an existence in Thailand, where the 'yellow-card' Chinese are not allowed to take most jobs. He is lucky and happens to be employed by Lake, but he doesn't actually like Lake and is actively trying to steal the plans for the factory, as well as skimming as much cash off the top as he can. So he's sort of sympathetic, but he's been hurt so badly that he really is just out for himself. Then there is Emiko, the wind-up girl. She is a genetically engineered 'New Person' who has been abandoned by her Japanese owner in Thailand where the temperature is causing her physical problems, and the permits which keep her from being mulched are so expensive that she is basically being tortured by her employer and has absolutely no recourse or even hope for the future. She initially seems sympathetic, but is driven by her situation into actions which are not 'good'. Then there's Jaidee - the Tiger of Bangkok - who is definitely a good-guy, he's on the side of Thailand and against the calorie monopolies, but he is a fighter and his actions often seem terrible to the people he is ultimately defending, and then he winds up dead and it becomes clear that his second-in-command isn't quite on the right side.


So it is hard to find a character to sympathize with. By the time I got fairly close to the end there wasn't anyone I was rooting for - they were all fighting so hard for their own survival, but it was really hard to see how anything good could possibly come out of the whole mess. Honestly the only 'character' you can possibly be rooting for is Thailand itself. It has managed to keep itself afloat thus far, but destruction looms. There was no 'right' ending looming on the horizon. Everything seemed like a potential disaster, but somehow Bacigalupi pulled out a very reasonable ending which actually left a decent amount of hope for the future, both of the country and of some of the more sympathetic characters.

Overall I'm really glad I finally got around to reading this and I would highly recommend it to anyone - but it isn't a feel-good book. It is a fascinating book full of interesting ideas and a fairly terrifying view of the future.