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Book report
The trailer for Prince Caspian is up! Eeee! Yeah, yeah, say what you will about the Narnia books, I know you're probably right about all of it ... but I still get a childish echo of wonder and glee when I think about them, and the first movie did a lovely job of capturing all that I loved about the series when I was a kid. And from the look of things, they've done wonderfully with the second, as well -- it was never my favorite of the books (actually, I found most of it pretty dull) but I adored that first scene in the ruins; I've always been a sucker for ancient archaeological wonders, and the clips of that scene in the trailer made my heart lift. Also, Caspian's a bit of a hottie, isn't he?
I've been wanting to start writing about the books I'm reading, and, inspired by Narnia and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
naye, I believe I'll start doing that. Although my book reports won't be anywhere near as in-depth as hers. So ... here's what I've been reading lately ...
Birth of a Nation by Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin & Kyle Baker - This was brilliant. The best graphic novel I've read in ages. I've had it in my to-read pile for literally years, but kept bogging down on the first couple of pages because of the unusual storyboard-ish style of narration. But this time I pushed through, and wow. It's just wonderful in pretty much every way -- it makes you laugh and think and flinch, sometimes all on the same page, and I loved the flawed, cuttingly-satirized characters. Basically, East St. Louis secedes from the U.S. and forms its own country ("Blackland"). As they struggle to build a nation, the U.S. government figures out what they're up to and lets slip the dogs of war. According to the introduction, Hudlin originally visualized this as a movie, and I would love to see that, even though you'd lose Kyle Baker's wonderful caricatures if the book was translated into live-action form.
Black Powder War by Naomi Novik (Temeraire Book 3) - Still really enjoying this series. Must get the fourth book!
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - Famous as it is, I've actually never read this book before. And I liked it a lot more than I was expecting that I would. From all I'd heard, I thought it'd be much more of an, er, feminist manifesto. I appreciate a good manifesto now and then, but not with a thin veneer of fiction wrapped around it. But it was more anti-authoritarian than anything else, and actually a really fascinating portrait of human nature. I alternately enjoyed and was annoyed by the stream-of-consciousness narrative style.
(Speaking of thinly disguised manifestos, incidentally, my partner's reading Atlas Shrugged and I've been getting a hilarious Cliff Notes version of it as he goes along. The moral seems to be that Ayn Rand needed a good editor with a well-used red pencil, or else to simply condense the damn thing into a 50-page brochure on Objectivism and forget the fiction part.)
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole - I really loved this autobiography of a Jamaican nurse, who traveled through Central America and the Crimean in the 1840s/1850s. Besides the fact that she's dry and funny and just a lot of fun to read, it's also a really amazing "yes, you can do whatever you want with your life" story -- a middle-aged black woman in the 1840s who traveled around the world, owned her own businesses in several different countries, and generally lived a very fascinating, exciting life. It's also a peek into a time period in history that looks very different through the eyes of someone who had access to, and interest in, areas of society that your average (white, male) historical chronicler didn't.
The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud - YA fantasy novel about a teenage wizard who summons a demon to carry out his complicated revenge plan, told in alternating chapters from the demon and the boy's point of view. The writing is excellent; it's funny and exciting and the world-building is good ... but it's got one fatal flaw: the characters are utterly unlikeable! It was well-written enough to keep me reading to the end, but I don't think I'll be getting the next one in the series because I just have no interest whatsoever in anything that happens to any of them! (I did peek at the plot synopses for the rest of the books -- it's the first in a trilogy -- and from the look of things, if anything they all just get more unpleasant as time goes by. Oh well.)
Casualties of War by Elizabeth Christiansen (SGA tie-in novel) - Well, it was better than the last two books by this author that I've read. (And yet I keep reading them. Shut up.) It's also her first solo outing; the last two have been co-authored with Sonny Whitelaw. She's good with the characters, just not so good with the plots -- like her previous books, this one was too political and dense, and tried to cram too much in. I thought it would've been a lot stronger if it had scrapped most of the OCs and moved things along at a faster clip; the best subplot, a really tense one involving Ronon and Teyla, was over in just a chapter or two. However, it had some good moments and didn't make me want to fling it across the room, which was my reaction to Exogenesis, so that's an improvement. (god I hope the author isn't one of the people reading this, under some fannish pseudonym. I, er, apologize if that's the case.)
Next in the to-read pile: The Lies of Locke Lamora (for which I blamenaye) and Toni Morrison's Beloved.
I've been wanting to start writing about the books I'm reading, and, inspired by Narnia and
naye, I believe I'll start doing that. Although my book reports won't be anywhere near as in-depth as hers. So ... here's what I've been reading lately ...Birth of a Nation by Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin & Kyle Baker - This was brilliant. The best graphic novel I've read in ages. I've had it in my to-read pile for literally years, but kept bogging down on the first couple of pages because of the unusual storyboard-ish style of narration. But this time I pushed through, and wow. It's just wonderful in pretty much every way -- it makes you laugh and think and flinch, sometimes all on the same page, and I loved the flawed, cuttingly-satirized characters. Basically, East St. Louis secedes from the U.S. and forms its own country ("Blackland"). As they struggle to build a nation, the U.S. government figures out what they're up to and lets slip the dogs of war. According to the introduction, Hudlin originally visualized this as a movie, and I would love to see that, even though you'd lose Kyle Baker's wonderful caricatures if the book was translated into live-action form.
Black Powder War by Naomi Novik (Temeraire Book 3) - Still really enjoying this series. Must get the fourth book!
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - Famous as it is, I've actually never read this book before. And I liked it a lot more than I was expecting that I would. From all I'd heard, I thought it'd be much more of an, er, feminist manifesto. I appreciate a good manifesto now and then, but not with a thin veneer of fiction wrapped around it. But it was more anti-authoritarian than anything else, and actually a really fascinating portrait of human nature. I alternately enjoyed and was annoyed by the stream-of-consciousness narrative style.
(Speaking of thinly disguised manifestos, incidentally, my partner's reading Atlas Shrugged and I've been getting a hilarious Cliff Notes version of it as he goes along. The moral seems to be that Ayn Rand needed a good editor with a well-used red pencil, or else to simply condense the damn thing into a 50-page brochure on Objectivism and forget the fiction part.)
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole - I really loved this autobiography of a Jamaican nurse, who traveled through Central America and the Crimean in the 1840s/1850s. Besides the fact that she's dry and funny and just a lot of fun to read, it's also a really amazing "yes, you can do whatever you want with your life" story -- a middle-aged black woman in the 1840s who traveled around the world, owned her own businesses in several different countries, and generally lived a very fascinating, exciting life. It's also a peek into a time period in history that looks very different through the eyes of someone who had access to, and interest in, areas of society that your average (white, male) historical chronicler didn't.
The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud - YA fantasy novel about a teenage wizard who summons a demon to carry out his complicated revenge plan, told in alternating chapters from the demon and the boy's point of view. The writing is excellent; it's funny and exciting and the world-building is good ... but it's got one fatal flaw: the characters are utterly unlikeable! It was well-written enough to keep me reading to the end, but I don't think I'll be getting the next one in the series because I just have no interest whatsoever in anything that happens to any of them! (I did peek at the plot synopses for the rest of the books -- it's the first in a trilogy -- and from the look of things, if anything they all just get more unpleasant as time goes by. Oh well.)
Casualties of War by Elizabeth Christiansen (SGA tie-in novel) - Well, it was better than the last two books by this author that I've read. (And yet I keep reading them. Shut up.) It's also her first solo outing; the last two have been co-authored with Sonny Whitelaw. She's good with the characters, just not so good with the plots -- like her previous books, this one was too political and dense, and tried to cram too much in. I thought it would've been a lot stronger if it had scrapped most of the OCs and moved things along at a faster clip; the best subplot, a really tense one involving Ronon and Teyla, was over in just a chapter or two. However, it had some good moments and didn't make me want to fling it across the room, which was my reaction to Exogenesis, so that's an improvement. (god I hope the author isn't one of the people reading this, under some fannish pseudonym. I, er, apologize if that's the case.)
Next in the to-read pile: The Lies of Locke Lamora (for which I blame
naye) and Toni Morrison's Beloved.
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Heee! My sister had said something similar along those lines.
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The 4th Temeraire book is good, but, uh, I gotta warn you-- the ending makes you want the fifth book so badly!!! Arrgh, why is it not out yet~!
Amulet of Samarkand-- I agree about the characters being sort of unlikeable, but the ending of the 3rd book totally makes up for it all-- I was sobbing into my sleeve as I finished. So, I'd recommend maybe giving it another chance...
Lies of Locke Lamora: why does this book keep following me, I swear-- everyone's mentioning it lately! But it's good, so I guess it's with good reason.
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Lies of Locke Lamora: why does this book keep following me, I swear-- everyone's mentioning it lately!
I think it's kinda funny how these fannish cycles occur, when everyone in fandom seems to be discovering the same things at once! I know several people who've enjoyed this book, so I figured it was time to give it a chance.
I might give the Jonathan Stroud books another chance later; it really is a wonderfully inventive world, and he's a good writer, but I couldn't get past the fact that I just didn't care about the characters at all.
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Great book! Hubby and I jsut finshed "Red Seas over Red Skies".
Casualties of War was kind of meh. I thikn I'm spoiled by fanfic and I'm not even talking about the type I enjoy. Fans have a much better grasp of teh chracters and a better imagination.
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I think one of the big problems with the tie-ins is that they're so very limited in what they can do with the characters. I was considering my own fic awhile back for possible tie-in-novelability, and NONE of my long fics would be suitable, nor would any of the ideas I haven't written yet. My own long stories either alter the characters or their situation too much, or they only focus on a subset of the characters rather than the whole cast. And most of the really good fanfic does likewise ... as do many of the really good episodes of the show.
The tie-ins are basically hamstrung by having to fit into continuity without changing anything (i.e. no character evolution is possible) AND to be instantly recognizable as SGA (i.e. can't take place in an alternate reality). I think it's still possible to write a stronger story than they have managed so far, but it'd be damned hard.
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Casualties of War - read that, thought it was the best of them she'd written at that time. Some good ideas, though perhaps a bit dense here and there. Love the whips!!!
The newest one, Blood Ties, is better (co-written with Sonny again), even if they make a slight canon error - which a lot of fans have made, including myself, about Ronon being immune to Wraith feeding. Apparently that's a misinterpretation of the scene in Runner, according to Joe Mallozzi, and perhaps as evidenced in Spoils of War. Still, it's a small error and Halycon had a similar (and more obvious to me) error in it about Ronon's tattoo (had the author not seen Trinity? Not noticed that Kell also had a tattoo?) but I still enjoyed the book! Hope that's not too spoilery!
I see the SGA books as fanfiction because they're not vetted for canon errors etc (unlike Star Wars books, which are all checked out by a Lucas company to make sure they don't contradict each other etc...). The same (fanfic) would go for the SG1 books if I could be bothered to read them! As 'glorified' fanfic goes, I've enjoyed most of the SGA books so far. As literary books...they've got their faults!
Haven't read any of the other books on your list - but that Mrs Seacole one looks right up my street.
And looking forward to Prince Caspian too...
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I agree with you, both on the matter of the whips (fantastic idea!) and the books being fanfic. Like I mentioned in a comment above, they have the additional handicap of being emotionally crippled fanfic, because they can't really make any major alterations to the characters or their universe, and (I'm guessing here, but going off the ones I've read) they have to utilize the whole cast more or less equally. I always think of my fanfic as being canon-compliant, but none of my long fanfics would have been suitable for tie-in novels.
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I think Martha's books are my two favs of the SGA tie-ins. (Forgotten her surname atm and too lazy to look it up, sorry!)
Assissotom
(Anonymous) 2008-01-17 12:33 pm (UTC)(link)Narnia
Re: Narnia
Re: Narnia
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Also - ooooooooh, pretty trailer. I loved Narnia, to the point where I have such a special relationship to the books that I didn't go see the movie, for fear of being disappointed. I'm usually really good at taking movies being different, but Narnia is... a symbol, almost. But the trailer really looks lovely, and I'm curious - was the first movie any good?
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(Anonymous) 2008-01-18 05:02 pm (UTC)(link)And the beavers were great.
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