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Jun. 5th, 2016
#40: Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin. 3. This tale of vampires on steamships is a nice bit of horror, with some truly Grand Guignol scenes here and there, but he never really figures out a good way to handle the time jumps and infodumps, so there are some rather awkward chapters.
#41: Briar Rose by Jane Yolen. 3.5. A retelling of Sleeping Beauty, entwined with the Holocaust. The core story works surprisingly well, but the framing story opens up a lot of questions that are never answered. Rebecca's relationship with her sisters, for example, is set up as a major element and then never delivered on. To be fair, it wilts in comparison to the story she discovers about her grandmother, but then why spend so much time on it to begin with?
#42: Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories ed. by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. 5. Really excellent collection of steampunk stories, some of them well out of the usual mold. (The steampunk ancient Roman Empire was a particularly nice touch.) The graphic stories didn't win my heart as much, but they're a nice way to break things up. Link's own contribution is a very interesting story, but the only one of the batch I wouldn't actually classify as steampunk.
#43: Embassytown by China Mieville. 5. Intensely cerebral. This is a story about a woman who is part of a language she doesn't speak and whose hometown is shattered when an ambassador to their alien hosts accidentally (or not) hacks their brains...and there's really not much more that can be described pages of additional information. It's incredibly dense, and takes awhile to wrap your head around what's going on. The climax depends on the nature of language itself. Difficult but rewarding--I found it really cool, and the ending deeply satisfying.
#44: Civilization and capitalism 15th-18th century, Vol. 1: The structures of everyday life by Fernand Braudel. 4. Incredibly broad and dense look at elements of daily life around the world, including housing, food, money, clothes, transportation, and more. Exhaustively researched, and very insightful. His points tend to get away from him though. It's less of a problem in the middle, but in the chapters on population and later on cities, he gets lost in his own argument and then just hares off on random points before dropping the entire line of inquiry. Also, weighted very heavily towards European history. But a fantastic overview with ambitious breadth.
#41: Briar Rose by Jane Yolen. 3.5. A retelling of Sleeping Beauty, entwined with the Holocaust. The core story works surprisingly well, but the framing story opens up a lot of questions that are never answered. Rebecca's relationship with her sisters, for example, is set up as a major element and then never delivered on. To be fair, it wilts in comparison to the story she discovers about her grandmother, but then why spend so much time on it to begin with?
#42: Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories ed. by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. 5. Really excellent collection of steampunk stories, some of them well out of the usual mold. (The steampunk ancient Roman Empire was a particularly nice touch.) The graphic stories didn't win my heart as much, but they're a nice way to break things up. Link's own contribution is a very interesting story, but the only one of the batch I wouldn't actually classify as steampunk.
#43: Embassytown by China Mieville. 5. Intensely cerebral. This is a story about a woman who is part of a language she doesn't speak and whose hometown is shattered when an ambassador to their alien hosts accidentally (or not) hacks their brains...and there's really not much more that can be described pages of additional information. It's incredibly dense, and takes awhile to wrap your head around what's going on. The climax depends on the nature of language itself. Difficult but rewarding--I found it really cool, and the ending deeply satisfying.
#44: Civilization and capitalism 15th-18th century, Vol. 1: The structures of everyday life by Fernand Braudel. 4. Incredibly broad and dense look at elements of daily life around the world, including housing, food, money, clothes, transportation, and more. Exhaustively researched, and very insightful. His points tend to get away from him though. It's less of a problem in the middle, but in the chapters on population and later on cities, he gets lost in his own argument and then just hares off on random points before dropping the entire line of inquiry. Also, weighted very heavily towards European history. But a fantastic overview with ambitious breadth.