The Land of Nowhere

Enjoying that this seems to be the moment where everyone is rereading Murderbot (even those uninterested in the TV series).

Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells. Reading in chronological rather than internal publication order this time. Yay Detective Murderbot on Preservation Station!

Network Effect, Martha Wells. About a third of the way into this so far; I remember finding it confusing to follow everything that was going on in my first read-through, but I'm doing better at it this time. I appreciate getting to spend more time with everybody, and raising the emotional stakes; Murderbot is still very competent, but also pretty upset. Amena is still great as a teenage sidekick who gets off to a rocky start with Murderbot.

Henry VI, Part III, William Shakespeare. And we're finally done with this disaster king (who it was a lot of fun to chew the scenery with)! Also OMG this play has so much plot -- despite being part III -- and no comic relief, I think this is before Shakespeare learned to write comic relief. (OK, there are some scenes in part II which I think are intended to be comic relief, but the humor hasn't aged well, apart from the line about killing all the lawyers.)

System Collapse, Martha Wells. I'd just been remarking the other week that Murderbot would love to be a TV/movie producer, so this was great! Apart from that one bit it didn't really stand out to me, but I'm looking forward to where the series goes for me.

The Will to Battle and Perhaps the Stars, Ada Palmer. Rereads. Finally back to these after taking a break to catch up on Murderbot. it appears I still don't have that much to say about The Will to Battle, but I think that's partly because it's overshadowed by Perhaps the Stars, whose epicness I'm particularly enjoying, even in the bits that aren't as self-consciously epic. (OMG! I have so much book! I'll probably be interrupting my reading again to travel, but I'm not in a rush to get through it.)

Henry VI, Part I, William Shakespeare (and possible coauthors). This does in some ways feel more like Marlowe than other Shakespeare plays do -- I see why he's hypothesized to be one of the coauthors. But even though it may not be 100% Shakespeare, it is still a fun play -- Talbot is great. And though he's not the main focus of the play, OMG Henry VI is a boy king in way over his head, as will only become more apparent in the sequels. And Joan of Arc gets to be an interesting character even though the play is clearly pro-English propaganda and I am not on board with the Act V character assassination. Looking forward to the next two parts of this one!

Network Effect, Martha Wells. Reread. Only made a bit of progress on this in the past week, distracted by other stuff. Still yay Murderbot, will report more on this later on.

Hold on To Love/The Dragonfly Years, Mollie Hunter. Reread. So anytime anyone mentions Mollie Hunter on DW, I jump in to rave about her autobiographical novel A Sound of Chariots. That book -- about grief, and being a poet, and growing up poor in rural Scotland surrounded by WWI vets, is really good and I recommend it! (It is very out of print, but available on OpenLibrary.) This is the sequel to that book, and covers our protagonist from ages 15-18 while she is working in a flower shop in Edinburgh and writing in her spare time, all during the build-up to and start of WWII. And the evocation of Edinburgh and that time period is great! On the whole, though, the story is definitely of the type that mrissa calls "too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby" -- I originally read this book as a teenager with the title Hold on to Love, and only just learned that other editions use the title The Dragonfly Years, which is a better title, but really Hold on to Love is actually a better title in terms of reflecting the story, which is focused on the romance arc -- which has some sweet moments, but is generally pretty cliched.

(Content notes: depiction of racism (mostly toward Indigenous Highland Travellers) and anti-Semitism. The blatantly racist characters are portrayed as unsympathetic and our protagonist is shown as trying to be better than them, but it's still a story where it feels like the characters from marginalized groups mostly are there to support the protagonist's arc. Also there's a character who the protagonist thinks of as "Fat Liz", but I didn't notice any specific fatphobia in how she was portrayed, and she is shown to have her strengths. But really you should be reading A Sound of Chariots, not this.)