Recent Reading
Jul. 26th, 2025 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeThis was going to be titled 'Books ambyr gave me edition' only then I kept reading more books beyond these first two.
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.
I had a lot to say about this but that was two weeks ago. It's very good. It's a dual time-period novel about AIDS. In the eighties, Yale is seeing friends die around him, taking refuge in his monogamous gay relationship when that lifestyle choice has gone from 'a bit unusual in this community' to 'possibly a matter of life and death,' and trying to handle a tangled bequest of what may be incredibly valuable art for the gallery where he works. In the 2000s, Fiona, family to the first man we see die back in the eighties strand, is grown up and trying to track down her daughter, who fell out of contact in circumstances relating to a cult. Hanging over the book, notably undiscussed as the 2000s strand proceeds, is: who is dead by the time of the present? How did the events of the eighties play into what's happening later? The two time periods let the book be about AIDS as a disaster that happened, but also as a disaster that kept happening, and kept on having happened; and the plot brings in the political malice of American AIDS education and healthcare, and is about the way history never sits still, and how AIDS took a vibrant room full of people and swept it empty - but never quite empty. It's a book full of tension-questions about what the ending will be, since very quickly it's clear that nothing resembling a conventional happy ending is going to be possible but also that the book will balance its tragedies to a bearable degree. I was happy with all its choices. (I mean, not happy. But.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
I have read Cyteen and it was amazing and I bought more Cherryh books and proceeded to not read them. Later, unrelatedly, I read Rider at the Gate and it was a slog but in a 'we will enjoy having gone in this hike in the rain' kind of way. But this I just found gripping and involving. I've already got the sequel on order at the library.
Sandor is a marginer, running small freight cargos in his beloved spaceship Lucy, absolutely not within the fringes of the law but pretending to be. His life is small wagers, and small profits, and talking his way out of anything, and knowing that everything he has could be taken away from him at the snap of a port official's fingers. He has no choice but to be constantly prudent. And then, in a bar, he sees a beautiful woman who is entirely out of his social class and potentially dangerous even to interact with, and something in him goes, 'Well I have to be living for some reason, don't I?'
Allison is senior crew on the starship Dublin, one of the great merchanter Names, and... I won't actually summarize why she has any interest in Sandor at all, because her point of view chapters start a bit later and it's fun to be as lost as Sandor is initially, but despite being structured around eyes meeting across a crowded room, this book isn't necessarily or exactly a romance, so much as about two people who each discover that the other may represent both opportunity and risk.
I want to compare this to Bujold - mostly to sell it to members of my family who like Bujold and have bounced off Cherryh, it is true. And because it's space opera with jumpship logistics. But also because it's about characters with very intense emotional situations generated by well-realised economic situations, in whichbeing Vor having a Name matters deeply. This book is bleak at points but much less so than Cyteen, or for that matter, Mirror Dance.
After Merchanter's Luck, I tried to go back to reading The City In Glass, a Nghi Vo novel that I've started and expect I will like. Except I'd already felt as though the mundane world of her Gatsby retelling was anchoring the supernatural in a way I liked, while The City In Glass is much more wall-to-wall numinous magical touches. I think I'll like this, but I did turn from Cherryh feeling strongly as though I didn't want to read about demons doing magic, I wanted to read about uncomfortable humans solving logistical problems in spaceships.
Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Fromrachelmanija's rec. This was great! A+ uncomfortable humans solving logistical problems in spaceships. For fans of creative alien biomes being encountered by humans who would love to know if anything's going to eat them in the next ten minutes. A corporate-dystopia-ish human expansion fleet discovers a noxious moon which seems to be screaming on all available radio bands, and the reason seems to be 'aliens.' There is no light on the moon of Shroud, and the atmosphere is very weird, and no one in their right minds would plan a piloted mission to the surface instead of just using drones, but some of the higher-ups in the company do not share this perspective, which is part of how our protagonists find themselves very unhappy. And something on Shroud may be trying to understand them with just as much interest as they're trying to understand Shroud.
I had read the first of Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt books and gone 'yeah this is okay.' I actively disliked And Put Away Childish Things, his Narnia novella. But no one had ever told me those books were good, and lots of people have told me that lots of his other books were good, so I kept going, and he really does seem to be a hydra of a writer: if you don't like one of his books, by the time you've finished reading it he's already written two more that are totally different.
(Literal-insect count: low but non-zero. Things-kinda-like-insects count: fairly high.)
And then having finished Shroud last night, confronted with a whole interesting pile of library reserves, I ignored them all and read the first half of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. After the prologue I thought 'I cannot bear to read very much of this staid, formal butler narration in one go, I'll break my streak of reading only one book at a time and alternate this with something else.' Then I read the next half of the staid formal butler novel in one go. It gets rather compelling. I sort of already knew the main things this book was doing, since the friend who leant it to me described a pivotal scene very near the end and then saying 'Oh, I guess I shouldn't have enthused about that part.' It is a novel about someone who has made his own life and perspective achingly narrow - and why he did that, and what it's caused. It is also energetic and funny. (There's a sequence where the butler narrator has been tasked with telling a young man about the birds and the bees, except he keeps approaching the subject with such subtlety and decorum that the young man thinks he is literally just a nature enthusiast.) A book that lives or dies on its voice and seems to be living.
ambyr gave me edition' only then I kept reading more books beyond these first two. The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.
I had a lot to say about this but that was two weeks ago. It's very good. It's a dual time-period novel about AIDS. In the eighties, Yale is seeing friends die around him, taking refuge in his monogamous gay relationship when that lifestyle choice has gone from 'a bit unusual in this community' to 'possibly a matter of life and death,' and trying to handle a tangled bequest of what may be incredibly valuable art for the gallery where he works. In the 2000s, Fiona, family to the first man we see die back in the eighties strand, is grown up and trying to track down her daughter, who fell out of contact in circumstances relating to a cult. Hanging over the book, notably undiscussed as the 2000s strand proceeds, is: who is dead by the time of the present? How did the events of the eighties play into what's happening later? The two time periods let the book be about AIDS as a disaster that happened, but also as a disaster that kept happening, and kept on having happened; and the plot brings in the political malice of American AIDS education and healthcare, and is about the way history never sits still, and how AIDS took a vibrant room full of people and swept it empty - but never quite empty. It's a book full of tension-questions about what the ending will be, since very quickly it's clear that nothing resembling a conventional happy ending is going to be possible but also that the book will balance its tragedies to a bearable degree. I was happy with all its choices. (I mean, not happy. But.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
I have read Cyteen and it was amazing and I bought more Cherryh books and proceeded to not read them. Later, unrelatedly, I read Rider at the Gate and it was a slog but in a 'we will enjoy having gone in this hike in the rain' kind of way. But this I just found gripping and involving. I've already got the sequel on order at the library.
Sandor is a marginer, running small freight cargos in his beloved spaceship Lucy, absolutely not within the fringes of the law but pretending to be. His life is small wagers, and small profits, and talking his way out of anything, and knowing that everything he has could be taken away from him at the snap of a port official's fingers. He has no choice but to be constantly prudent. And then, in a bar, he sees a beautiful woman who is entirely out of his social class and potentially dangerous even to interact with, and something in him goes, 'Well I have to be living for some reason, don't I?'
Allison is senior crew on the starship Dublin, one of the great merchanter Names, and... I won't actually summarize why she has any interest in Sandor at all, because her point of view chapters start a bit later and it's fun to be as lost as Sandor is initially, but despite being structured around eyes meeting across a crowded room, this book isn't necessarily or exactly a romance, so much as about two people who each discover that the other may represent both opportunity and risk.
I want to compare this to Bujold - mostly to sell it to members of my family who like Bujold and have bounced off Cherryh, it is true. And because it's space opera with jumpship logistics. But also because it's about characters with very intense emotional situations generated by well-realised economic situations, in which
After Merchanter's Luck, I tried to go back to reading The City In Glass, a Nghi Vo novel that I've started and expect I will like. Except I'd already felt as though the mundane world of her Gatsby retelling was anchoring the supernatural in a way I liked, while The City In Glass is much more wall-to-wall numinous magical touches. I think I'll like this, but I did turn from Cherryh feeling strongly as though I didn't want to read about demons doing magic, I wanted to read about uncomfortable humans solving logistical problems in spaceships.
Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
From
rachelmanija's rec. This was great! A+ uncomfortable humans solving logistical problems in spaceships. For fans of creative alien biomes being encountered by humans who would love to know if anything's going to eat them in the next ten minutes. A corporate-dystopia-ish human expansion fleet discovers a noxious moon which seems to be screaming on all available radio bands, and the reason seems to be 'aliens.' There is no light on the moon of Shroud, and the atmosphere is very weird, and no one in their right minds would plan a piloted mission to the surface instead of just using drones, but some of the higher-ups in the company do not share this perspective, which is part of how our protagonists find themselves very unhappy. And something on Shroud may be trying to understand them with just as much interest as they're trying to understand Shroud. I had read the first of Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt books and gone 'yeah this is okay.' I actively disliked And Put Away Childish Things, his Narnia novella. But no one had ever told me those books were good, and lots of people have told me that lots of his other books were good, so I kept going, and he really does seem to be a hydra of a writer: if you don't like one of his books, by the time you've finished reading it he's already written two more that are totally different.
(Literal-insect count: low but non-zero. Things-kinda-like-insects count: fairly high.)
And then having finished Shroud last night, confronted with a whole interesting pile of library reserves, I ignored them all and read the first half of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. After the prologue I thought 'I cannot bear to read very much of this staid, formal butler narration in one go, I'll break my streak of reading only one book at a time and alternate this with something else.' Then I read the next half of the staid formal butler novel in one go. It gets rather compelling. I sort of already knew the main things this book was doing, since the friend who leant it to me described a pivotal scene very near the end and then saying 'Oh, I guess I shouldn't have enthused about that part.' It is a novel about someone who has made his own life and perspective achingly narrow - and why he did that, and what it's caused. It is also energetic and funny. (There's a sequence where the butler narrator has been tasked with telling a young man about the birds and the bees, except he keeps approaching the subject with such subtlety and decorum that the young man thinks he is literally just a nature enthusiast.) A book that lives or dies on its voice and seems to be living.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-26 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-26 02:58 pm (UTC)(Let me know if I'm spamming you too much.)
I am very curious about what is being packaged as Merchanter's Luck's sequel because it doesn't have one! The Cherryh books that are most similar to it in tone and content are probably Finity's End and the Chanur series (these have to be read in order, though the series breakdown is Pride of Chanur, standalone; next three books, trilogy of the one-book-published-as-three-due-to-size-constraints sort; pendant sequel with new protagonist, probably works as standalone, exceptionally light-hearted for Cherryh).
The City in Glass is the most living-alone-during-lockdown novel I have ever read, say I, a person who lived alone during lockdown. I liked it better than you, but I felt like the demon didn't have quite the edge it needed, particularly with the human inhabitants of its beloved city. Siren Queen is my favorite of her novels so far; given what you've said about her other work, I think you would at least find it closer to The Beautiful and Chosen than to The City in Glass. It feels anchored in early Hollywood and -- maybe even more solidly -- anchored in the ways humans make use of each other.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-26 06:26 pm (UTC)I feel compelled to point out I only gave you one of those, unless "stood next to you while you purchased" counts as giving.
he really does seem to be a hydra of a writer: if you don't like one of his books, by the time you've finished reading it he's already written two more that are totally different.
Indeed! Also like a hydra: exhausting to contemplate, and thus I have read very little despite liking all that I have read. I suppose the hydra metaphor also suggests solutions to that exhaustion, but not ones I wish to implement.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 12:34 am (UTC)It’s not exactly being marketed as a sequel, but I went for the next Merchanter standalone in Wikipedia’s list that our library actually had, I think either Tripoint or Rimrunners. I have been reading people say Chanur is a good starting point so, again library permitting, I might jump there next.
I hadn’t run across Siren Queen, thank you for the rec! I do intend to finish and expect to like City In Glass, just not right that minute, but this does make me think I’m liable to like Siren Queen more. (Though I am very curious about her Gatsby-retelling sequel, but I want to read Gatsby itself first.)
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 12:40 am (UTC)Even if I was not discovering lots of other writers whose back catalogues I want to chase up, there’s no danger of me becoming a Tchaikovsky completist. (Who’s the last really prolific writer I kept up with? Pratchett, until his final few books; Sanderson, until I got fed up.)
I’m not sure how to extend the hydra metaphor to the vanquishing part. Maybe distract him with ideas for really big, slow, complicated books? I have a nasty feeling he’d just write them at the same pace.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 12:44 am (UTC)I'm glad!
The Gatsby retelling sequel works much better as a Gatsby retelling because it is from Nick Carraway's perspective instead of Jordan Baker's, and as you will see if you read Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is significantly more important to Nick Carraway than he is to Jordan Baker.
Both Tripoint and Rimrunners are considerably grimmer than Merchanter's Luck, and, as a content note, involve a lot of sexual violence. I actually struggle with how Tripoint treats rape, in the sense that I struggle violently with the implicit narrative perspective, which is not an issue I have with, say, Cyteen. Maybe I'll feel more reconciled with the next reread.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 09:38 pm (UTC)However, this is me noting that my history with extremely prolific writers is vexed. Basically there's Pratchett and Sherwood and... do we count Kage Baker as prolific? Anyway I can't think of anyone else who's routinely published more than a book a year who I feel strongly positive about. Even Pratchett I like more once he gets comfortably enough established that he's only putting out three books in two years, rather than four to six.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-28 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-29 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-29 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-30 01:09 am (UTC)Long story, but the short version is that I followed him for most of his career -- and also Auster -- until eventually I decided he'd jumped the shark. (And also Auster). The pivot book was Never Let me Go, which a lot of people love for its understated restraint. They key differentiator here seems to be that most of the people who love it don't read a lot of speculative fiction -- I experienced it as underconceptualised to the point of inanity. I never read his follow-up fantasy novel, the one Le Guin pilloried. But the trend of his development seems to be that he started out writing dignified, quiet viewpoint characters who fail to understand themselves or their surroundings, and leaned in more and more over time, with relatively little change in the surface presentation of his writing, but a progressive shift towards a larger and larger disconnect between that surface and the reality we're meant to infer.
All of which I mention because I've never gone back and reread the early books. Very curious to know whether I'd still find Remains of the Day impressive, or whether the superficial resemblance to the later books would poison it for me. Glad you liked it!
And, footnote, it got possibly the ideal screen adaptation -- from Merchant Ivory, who are *very* good at quiet, elegant surfaces, and cast Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson to provide the complex depths.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 01:17 am (UTC)Oddly, this leaves me more curious about The Buried Giant, since if I was going to hate one it seems likely to be that one and I may as well cut to the chase. I do like inferring realities from characters who have little to no idea about them. (Still looking for a copy of Soldier of the Mist.)
I am very keen to see Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson as those characters!