Reading Wednesday
Jan. 4th, 2017 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardWhat I'm currently reading
I am mostly finishing up rereads of books that I didn't finish before the end of the year -- Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly, which is one of my favorite Hambly novels, and Sunshine by Robin McKinley. I've got a couple other books that are currently on the backburner and which I'm trying to finish the others before going back to -- Blood Maidens, the third Asher/Ysidro Hambly novel, and Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans by Gary Krist, which I'm trying to decide whether I want to keep reading or not. I've also apparently started rereading Barbara Hambly's The Time of the Dark again.
(I don't actually recommend reading multiple books by the same author at the same time; it's a little bit disconcerting, and the recurring themes and character types sometimes get really obvious.)
What I've just finished reading
Weirdly, a lot of short stories. I don't read short stories very often, and I tend to only do so if it's an author whose novels I also like. But I started off the year by going through Scott Lynch's four shorts -- "In the Stacks," "A Year and a Day in Old Theradane," "He Built the Wall to Knock It Down," and "The Effigy Engine: A Tale of the Red Hats." Then I picked up the anthology Night's Edge and read the Charlaine Harris short "Dancers in the Dark" (fine at the time, but in retrospect I'm kind of distressed by how stalker-y the vampire love interest is) and the Barbara Hambly short (a reread) "Someone Else's Shadow," which always amuses me just because of how clearly it's dated to the early '00s. I bounced off the Maggie Shayne short in the anthology and only got a chapter in before noping out.
Also, the T. Kingfisher novel Summer in Orcus, which I liked but which also somewhat unexpectedly set off my current set of Issues -- Summer is chosen to go to Orcus because she knows how to listen, since her mother is the kind of person who's always "woe is me," and as a result Summer has a great deal of practice being soothing. I can absolutely see why this is the kind of fantasy heroine who might appeal. It's just that the dynamic between Summer and her mother kept making me think about how a lot of X and my conversations have gone over the past year, and "being soothing" being a superpower is...making me feel (a) incredibly uncomfortable and (b) incredibly inadequate, given that part of the reason we broke up is because I apparently lost the ability to be soothing, or was not soothing enough, or...something. But I've spent so much of the past year and a half being the one doing the (virtual) shoulder-patting and soothing, and having my concerns (and my meltdowns) being transmuted into her concerns and her meltdowns that seeing this portrayed in fiction as a Good Thing (though the narrative is pretty clear that the dynamic between Summer and her mother is uncomfortable at best for Summer) is also kind of horrifying. But that's very clearly my issues and given how many people I've been crying on about this breakup obviously the ability to listen is an important thing to have. So...my issues, and maybe the wrong time for me to have read this novel. But on the other hand, were-house.
What I'm reading next
I've got a stack of library books out, but I really want to do Gentleman Bastard and Circle of Magic rereads, so we'll see.
I am mostly finishing up rereads of books that I didn't finish before the end of the year -- Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly, which is one of my favorite Hambly novels, and Sunshine by Robin McKinley. I've got a couple other books that are currently on the backburner and which I'm trying to finish the others before going back to -- Blood Maidens, the third Asher/Ysidro Hambly novel, and Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans by Gary Krist, which I'm trying to decide whether I want to keep reading or not. I've also apparently started rereading Barbara Hambly's The Time of the Dark again.
(I don't actually recommend reading multiple books by the same author at the same time; it's a little bit disconcerting, and the recurring themes and character types sometimes get really obvious.)
What I've just finished reading
Weirdly, a lot of short stories. I don't read short stories very often, and I tend to only do so if it's an author whose novels I also like. But I started off the year by going through Scott Lynch's four shorts -- "In the Stacks," "A Year and a Day in Old Theradane," "He Built the Wall to Knock It Down," and "The Effigy Engine: A Tale of the Red Hats." Then I picked up the anthology Night's Edge and read the Charlaine Harris short "Dancers in the Dark" (fine at the time, but in retrospect I'm kind of distressed by how stalker-y the vampire love interest is) and the Barbara Hambly short (a reread) "Someone Else's Shadow," which always amuses me just because of how clearly it's dated to the early '00s. I bounced off the Maggie Shayne short in the anthology and only got a chapter in before noping out.
Also, the T. Kingfisher novel Summer in Orcus, which I liked but which also somewhat unexpectedly set off my current set of Issues -- Summer is chosen to go to Orcus because she knows how to listen, since her mother is the kind of person who's always "woe is me," and as a result Summer has a great deal of practice being soothing. I can absolutely see why this is the kind of fantasy heroine who might appeal. It's just that the dynamic between Summer and her mother kept making me think about how a lot of X and my conversations have gone over the past year, and "being soothing" being a superpower is...making me feel (a) incredibly uncomfortable and (b) incredibly inadequate, given that part of the reason we broke up is because I apparently lost the ability to be soothing, or was not soothing enough, or...something. But I've spent so much of the past year and a half being the one doing the (virtual) shoulder-patting and soothing, and having my concerns (and my meltdowns) being transmuted into her concerns and her meltdowns that seeing this portrayed in fiction as a Good Thing (though the narrative is pretty clear that the dynamic between Summer and her mother is uncomfortable at best for Summer) is also kind of horrifying. But that's very clearly my issues and given how many people I've been crying on about this breakup obviously the ability to listen is an important thing to have. So...my issues, and maybe the wrong time for me to have read this novel. But on the other hand, were-house.
What I'm reading next
I've got a stack of library books out, but I really want to do Gentleman Bastard and Circle of Magic rereads, so we'll see.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-01-05 08:50 pm (UTC)What makes "Someone Else's Shadow" so dated?
Summer in Orcus sounds horrifying to me, tbh.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-01-06 01:21 am (UTC)I'll repost what I said on Tumblr about Someone Else's Shadow --
I’m a little amused at how precisely you can sometimes date urban fantasy from the past twenty or thirty years (probably contemporary mystery and lit too, but I don’t read enough of it to know), especially things that were written at the point when I was old enough to actually start paying attention to the world around me – like, the novella I just finished reading is very, very clearly set between 2002 (because it references 9/11) and about 2005, though actually if not for the 9/11 reference I would have set it earlier. (The copyright date is 2004, so my bet is that it was written in 2003, maybe 2002.)
The indie musician has to have CDs made if he wants anyone to hear his music (while I know indie musicians today who only do CDs, most I know do YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, and a couple other places), the pro dancer MC has to bring CDs with her to her gigs (these days I think people just tend to plug in their mp3 players or phones), there are CDs in the first place, no one has cell phones, e-mail still pings with an incoming messages…but there are e-mails in the first place, run-of-the-mill college students have laptops…
I liked Summer in Orcus a lot, and her ability to listen isn't really presented as an unqualifiedly good thing, but it was definitely not the story I needed to read right now.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-01-07 10:22 pm (UTC)Thank you for the link!
Wow, that's so cool! I don't know that it would have occurred to me to think about those things.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-01-08 01:23 am (UTC)