wednesday books are back!

[landofnowhere]

It's been too long since I posted here! I do mean to make a post on the memoirs of Clara Kathleen Rogers, yet another 19th century woman composer who lived a fascinating life and wrote about it! Other books that I read and have not written about include The Affairs of John Bolsover by Una Silberrad, Chroniques du Pays des Mères (finished!) and Le Silence de La Citè by Elisabeth Vonarburg, Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and probably something else I'm forgetting. In the interest of getting caught up I am not going to write about them now but ask if there's anything you're curious about.

Darksight Dare, Lois McMaster Bujold. Another Penric! I liked this one, and the series continues to be cozy.

Radiant Star, Ann Leckie. This time Leckie has written a nineteenth-century novel In Space, and this turns out to be a sort of thing that I really like. As someone who also reads nineteenth-century novels for fun, trying to explain this to people who haven't read as many has helped crystallize some thoughts about what makes a nineteenth-century novel (which is of course a very diverse genre). It's also interesting because the narrator is from a later time period than whan the book is set, which it's really the equivalent of a nineteenth-century historical novel, of which I've only read a handful (and books of that type can, ironically, hold up less well to the test of time).

Diary of a Cranky Bookworm, Aster Glenn Gray (osprey_archer). I wasn't sure at first if I wanted to read this one -- I've been a cranky teenage bookworm, do I need to go back there? I spent the first half of the first Scholomance boook waiting for the protagonist to Grow Up Already. But skygiants' review sold me on the book. Sage may be a cranky bookworm, but she also has a delightful group of close friends (of the sort that I wish I'd had at that age), and the book provided plenty of fluff to pad out the moments of teenage angst.

Comments

[luzula]

How was Children of Strife compared to the previous installments? *curious* (Please, no spoilers.)

[landofnowhere]

I liked it better than book 3 but not as well as the first two books! I liked one of the big worldbuilding ideas, and enjoyed the backstory with the awful tech billionaires.

[luzula]

Okay, cool! I also wasn't that fond of the third book.

[hamsterwoman]

I was not aware of either the new Penric or the new Leckie -- thank you for alerting me! :)

[landofnowhere]

yw!

[ursula]

Hmmm, Radiant Star read to me specifically like one of the 19th century novels set about fifty years prior, rather than a more distant historical like Sir Walter Scott.

[landofnowhere]

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure -- Les Mis is one of the obvious points of comparison, but the book has less historical remove. I've read neither A Tale of Two Cities or War and Peace which seem like the obvious comparisons, and do have roughtly the time gap you mention.

While there are definitely some differences from Scott (I have only read Ivanhoe and not the Waverley novels which are closer to the time gap you mentioned, or any of the other works.) I do feel like the book is interested in some of the same themes as Scott, depicting an community occupied by outsiders which is in the process of undergoing assimilation. I also feel like further-back historical novels are allowed to be more pointed in their critiques of organized religion as Radiant Star is.

[ursula]

I was thinking of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, which has a forty-year gap--and I've been chatting in my own journal about comparisons to Middlemarch, which is also a forty-year-gap book, though written about twenty years later. (I think of these as before and after the railroad books, the way a historical novel written now might be before or after the rise of the Internet.)

[landofnowhere]

I did not realize that Shirley was written that far in the past, maybe I should read it! I feel like there's a discontinuity between historical novels set in times that the author lived through (e.g. Les Miserables) vs novels set before the author's birth (e.g. A Tale of Two Cities). I haven't looked at Radiant Star closely enough to tell whether I can tell which side it's on. It looks like Shirley is the second sort while Middlemarch (which I was also thinking of) is the first sort.

[lunabee34]

That Ann Leckie sounds delightful. You've sold me.

[landofnowhere]

I hope you enjoy it, and will be interested in your take on it as a scholar of 19th century novels!

(Have you read anything else by Ann Leckie? This book stands alone but is probably harder to read if you haven't read anything else in the Imperial Radch world, in the same way that a period novel is harder to read if you don't have general awareness of the culture and politics of the time.)

[lunabee34]

Yes! I've read all those except Translation State. Do you think I should reread them in order to get the best experience from this newest book?

[landofnowhere]

No, you should just go ahead! I haven't reread them, and I might have gotten a bit more out of them if I'd reread the Ancillary trilogy first. There are no character overlaps, and the entire book is set on a planet we haven't seen before; the other books just provide some of the larger cultural / political backdrop to what's going on.

[lunabee34]

Okay, cool.

[abangaku]

Welcome back!

[greenwoodside]

The new Ann Leckie sounds mouthwatering. Sadly my library service doesn't seem to be aware of it yet, though it's been good with new Adrian Tchaikovsky and T Kingfisher books. I may just buy it at the end of June as a present to myself if I've been disciplined and not spent lavishly on plants.

And a new Lois McMaster Bujold! Always happy to have more Pen and Des, or whatever else she chooses to write.

[garonne]

a nineteenth-century novel In Space

Ooh, this sounds excellent. I loved the only other book by Leckie that I've read (Ancillary Justice).

[landofnowhere]

I am enjoying seeing how many people I've been able to sell on this description of the book, and hope you all like it! (This book is set around the same time as the last book of the Ancillary trilogy, so it gives away some things about the ending of that series but really I think they can be read in either order (and if you've read one Ancillary book already that will make it easier to adjust to the worldbuilding of *Radiant Star*).)