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Some books I've enjoyed lately
Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch - The second book in the series that starts with Midnight Riot a.k.a. Rivers of London. I'm still absolutely loving this series; Peter Grant and his mentor/boss Nightingale make a fabulous bantery team, and the supporting cast is just great. This book directly continues some of the plot and character threads from the first book, as well as bringing back minor and major supporting characters, which is one of the reasons why I love it so; it's really frustrating to be introduced to an interesting character only to have them wander offstage when their part of the story is done, and these books do a great job of fleshing out the world and making each minor character a fully realized person.
The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer - This was great! Although my favorite parts of the book were mostly concentrated in the first half, which totally hit all my "wilderness survival against all odds" kinks, I'm definitely going to pick up the next book in the series when it comes out, because I really like the characters and the world. It's adventure fantasy, but very different from your typical elves-dwarves-and-wizards epic fantasy. The characters are traveling with a merchant caravan trying to cross a dangerous mountain pass in early spring. Having to contend with avalanches and other hazards is bad enough when you don't have also have to deal with spies, secrets and an angry magician trying to kill you. The book is tense, fast-paced, and just when you think things can't get worse for the characters, something even more dire happens. (Also, one of my very favorite characters in the book only appears in a few scenes - he and his female sidekick/second-in-command remind me SO MUCH of Mustang and Hawkeye from FMA - and the ending of the book gives me a great deal of hope that they'll have a pretty big role in the next book. ^^)
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales - This book analyzes a number of life-threatening situations, from a mountain climber breaking his leg on a 20,000-foot peak to the World Trade Center collapse, and tries to draw conclusions about what causes some people to do all the right things and survive, while others panic and die. I think some of his reasoning is a little spurious (the author is a journalist, not a neuroscientist, but he tries to write like he's both) but a lot of the conclusions are really interesting and thought-provoking. I think this book also does a really good job of dismantling the idea that people die in life-threatening situations because they "did something stupid"; he spends a couple of chapters developing the thesis that "stupid" behavior in a crisis is simply our brains doing what has always worked for them in the past (in a person's individual past, as well as our past as a species) - however, some people are able to break out of that cycle and survive, and the book has a lot of interesting things to say about what might enable anyone to be able to do that. (I'd be happy to go into more detail in comments if anyone is interested, because speaking as someone who lives in a state - Alaska - that tends to throw life-threatening crises around at the drop of a hat, I got a lot of useful tips out of the book!)
Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson - Aww man, if you like to travel or if you daydream about traveling, this YA book is like crack. The main character, Ginny, receives 13 blue envelopes from her deceased aunt, and is instructed to open each one only after completing the instructions in the previous one. The envelopes take her all around Europe, doing things like leaving an offering for the Vestal Virgins or visiting an artist who lives in a castle in Edinburgh. The book doesn't have a whole lot of dramatic tension, but it's a wonderful road-trip story, all about the places she goes and the people she meets and the way that her adventures change her. There is a sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope, that I have on order from Amazon right now. \o/
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comments.
The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer - This was great! Although my favorite parts of the book were mostly concentrated in the first half, which totally hit all my "wilderness survival against all odds" kinks, I'm definitely going to pick up the next book in the series when it comes out, because I really like the characters and the world. It's adventure fantasy, but very different from your typical elves-dwarves-and-wizards epic fantasy. The characters are traveling with a merchant caravan trying to cross a dangerous mountain pass in early spring. Having to contend with avalanches and other hazards is bad enough when you don't have also have to deal with spies, secrets and an angry magician trying to kill you. The book is tense, fast-paced, and just when you think things can't get worse for the characters, something even more dire happens. (Also, one of my very favorite characters in the book only appears in a few scenes - he and his female sidekick/second-in-command remind me SO MUCH of Mustang and Hawkeye from FMA - and the ending of the book gives me a great deal of hope that they'll have a pretty big role in the next book. ^^)
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales - This book analyzes a number of life-threatening situations, from a mountain climber breaking his leg on a 20,000-foot peak to the World Trade Center collapse, and tries to draw conclusions about what causes some people to do all the right things and survive, while others panic and die. I think some of his reasoning is a little spurious (the author is a journalist, not a neuroscientist, but he tries to write like he's both) but a lot of the conclusions are really interesting and thought-provoking. I think this book also does a really good job of dismantling the idea that people die in life-threatening situations because they "did something stupid"; he spends a couple of chapters developing the thesis that "stupid" behavior in a crisis is simply our brains doing what has always worked for them in the past (in a person's individual past, as well as our past as a species) - however, some people are able to break out of that cycle and survive, and the book has a lot of interesting things to say about what might enable anyone to be able to do that. (I'd be happy to go into more detail in comments if anyone is interested, because speaking as someone who lives in a state - Alaska - that tends to throw life-threatening crises around at the drop of a hat, I got a lot of useful tips out of the book!)
Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson - Aww man, if you like to travel or if you daydream about traveling, this YA book is like crack. The main character, Ginny, receives 13 blue envelopes from her deceased aunt, and is instructed to open each one only after completing the instructions in the previous one. The envelopes take her all around Europe, doing things like leaving an offering for the Vestal Virgins or visiting an artist who lives in a castle in Edinburgh. The book doesn't have a whole lot of dramatic tension, but it's a wonderful road-trip story, all about the places she goes and the people she meets and the way that her adventures change her. There is a sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope, that I have on order from Amazon right now. \o/
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/366972.html with
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I think I saw the Whitefire Crossing at work . . . I'll have to check it out!
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Whitefire Crossing is a lot of fun - I haven't read a whole lot of straight-up fantasy that I've liked lately, but I really loved this one.
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Like, for example, the sudden acceleration accidents that were happening to Audis in the eighties. What was happening was people were shifting into gear with their foot on the gas instead of the brake, but when the car started to move, the reaction was always to floor it, because they thought they were pushing the brake and the brake was suddenly not working, rather than stopping and thinking, maybe my foot's on the gas. (These stopped happening because all cars now have a shift lock that keeps you from shifting into gear unless your foot is on the brake.)
Anyway. He also talks about the WTC, but this was written like a year later, when we were still mostly figuring out what had happened. But he makes a good point that what most people do in an emergency situation is follow a leader, even if that leader is Joe from accounts who doesn't know any better than you. The only way to break that instinct is to train the hell out of people so that when the time comes, they know the emergency procedures. For this, I do not resent the time spent in my office on fire drills.
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Since a number of people asked about Deep Survival, I went ahead and made a new post listing some of Gonzales's conclusions from the book. And you're right, he is absolutely Monday-morning quarterbacking, but he's very up front about that: he's trying to analyze a bunch of different survival situations and figure out what the survivors had in common. Sort of like analyzing Monday night's game to figure out what the winners did right, and repeat it next time ...
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hahahaha, really?! That's doubly adorable because I was thinking as I read the book that it could actually serve as quite useful research material for writing Sheppard. Apparently it's research material for playing him as well!
But I also found it fascinating because the actions that produced survival were pretty much the actions that produced my PTSD - and I guess that's no coincidence, because I was surviving something too. But the shutting down of thought and emotion, the single-minded goal of getting through an experience, the necessity of refusing to contemplate other scenarios . . . exactly the same pattern.
This and your exchange with
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and here you can see the front
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And I think RPGs are a great strategy for figuring out survival situations! I've learned a lot from reading fiction, too. It's true that a lot of what we try in RPG, TV or movies wouldn't work in real life, but I think fantasy is a great tool for playing through survival scenarios; it may even be why humans do it in the first place, who knows ...
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Yeah, the book was full of h/c, although it didn't really get to me as much as I would've liked -- I think it was way heavier on the "h" than the "c" for my tastes (mostly due to the characters not really knowing each other very well yet, so the thing that I really go for -- characters flipping out at their loved ones in peril -- wasn't really there). But I'm really looking forward to the next book; I love how they're all bonding at the end! This is definitely my favorite secondary-world fantasy novel that I've read in quite awhile. :D