If you've found your way to this journal, it was probably via my Dresden Files fic. You're welcome to friend me, though now that I'm done with that it's mostly talkin' about books. Cheers!

Greetings, my fellow queer literates!

I haven't actually fallen off the face of the earth, I've just started -- of all things -- a business selling fetish gear and am actually turning a profit. It's kind of surreal. It's also consuming all of my free time, which is why I haven't had time to read anything except nonfiction books with titles like Online Marketing for Small Business Owners, and even less time to blog about it.

But! Books are my first love and I miss discussing them with y'all folks, so here's the game: I found a bunch of half-finished writing-about-reading posts that I'd started and then shelved when I couldn't hammer them into coherent essays. The plan had been to come back and polish them at some later point, but, well, once I've moved on to newer and shinier things that's not likely to happen. So I'm going to be doing a round-up, wrapping up my not-entirely-streamlined essays and tossing them online for public discussion. Your two cents are always welcome! :D

Today's post is about The Way of Shadows, by Brent Weeks, and how much it pissed me off. If rape is a sensitive issue for you, you may want to skip this one, because WoS fucking button-mashes it.

( "THROW HIM TO THE SODOMITES!" and other gems )

What I've been doing lately instead of reading.

Share it with all your kinky friends! ....I need the monies.

I prefer the chainmail.

I prefer the leather, but don't want to spend the $$ on it.

Have fun!

Arguably the sequel to The Drowning City, although they're in different settings with almost entirely different sets of characters, so knowledge of the first isn't necessary to read the second. I'd been pretty meh about The Drowning City, though with no more specific criticism than "It didn't grab me." I probably wouldn't have bothered with The Bone Palace except then I heard it had a transgender protagonist, and there are precious few of those in fantasy, so I was motivated to give it a try.

Verdict: better than the first one, but sharing most of the same flaws. Namely in characterization -- nobody really made me care. I'm still not quite sure what the secret to writing compelling characters is, but I suspect it has to do with CARING about things -- about a cause, about a person, whatever, it doesn't matter. As long as the character is passionate about SOMETHING, some of it will spill over onto the reader as well, but in Downum's books, all the passion is told rather than shown. And while it's very unusual (and therefore interesting) to have a book populated entirely by female protagonists, I would have liked more about Kiril and Nikos; seeing as how love-for-those-dudes was a primary motivation for some of the female protagonists, it wouldn't hurt to show us why those dudes were worth fighting for.

On the plus side, her world-building is rather good; very atmospheric, she has some cool ideas for magic, and she's clearly put a lot of thought into some of the commonly-overlooked aspects of creating a fantasy world. (Mind, certain aspects of her city of Erisin are also uncannily reminiscent of Monette's Melusine, and I would be very surprised if it turned out that Downum hadn't read Monette before.)

TL;DR version: I dunno, find something else, prolly. I'd recommend Santa Olivia, not because it's anything similar, but because it's the best thing I've read recently.

Gave up on Kari Sperring's Living with Ghosts today. She had some interesting ideas, queer overtones, and her world-building felt very realistic, but it was a chore to read and I quit on page 75. Too much description of the wrong kind, and I could not for the life of me give a damn about the characters.

Still on my desultory quest for books that bring new ideas to vampire fiction, and The Vampire Tapestry seemed, by all accounts, to be one such book.

( Verdict: It was okay )

Santa Olivia, by Jacqueline Carey.

Read it cover to cover in one go. It's easily the best book I've read since Kay's Tigana.

More coherent review to follow, after I come down from the reading high.

Recently I was listening to a sci-fi themed podcast in which the hosts were discussing science fiction's falling book sales, and what might be done to remedy that. One thing they suggested was that common sci-fi tropes, which have been calcifying (my word, not theirs) for decades now, might be making it difficult for new readers, unfamiliar with the jargon, to get into the genre.

Hmm, I thought. Yeah, that might make it difficult for new readers.

This just in: apparently I am new readers.

( Click here to find out how! )