Dinklage as Miles?

The nice people at Jezebel put up a link to a tribute to the compelling Peter Dinklage. While watching it, I decided that Dinklage was the only actor I could imagine who had both the physical characteristics and the charisma needed to be Miles Vorkosigan, should he ever want another series to do after Game of Thrones ends. I really can't stand Miles - and with my luck, they'd have terrible casting that would put someone like Julianne Moore in as Cordelia, shudder - but I'd watch a Vorkosigan series if Dinklage played Miles.

my co-worker is brilliant!

I was talking to a co-worker just now, and she asked what I thought of Ender's Game, so I started to go on about it, enthusiastically. As you do. She said she thought it was like Harry Potter, which surprised me. I was inclined to disagree, until she mentioned the parallel between Ender's army of misfits and Dumbledore's Army. So now I'm very amused, and I think my co-worker is a genius.

NPR's top 100 SF/fantasy books

NPR has a new list of their top 100 SF/fantasy books. I've put the ones I read into bold type, and written comments in italics.

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams Read it, but didn't particularly enjoy it. I read it as a teen, and then tried it again in my 30s, and it's just not my cuppa.

3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card Clearly deserving of a place in the top 10!

4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert

5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin This ranks higher than I would have guessed, and I'm curious about whether that's because of the new TV series.

6. 1984, by George Orwell

7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury I can't believe I've never gotten around to reading this!

8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov Last week, someone at the library came up to me and said, out of the blue, "The Emperor Cleon is dead!" I said, "Oh, you've been reading Foundation!"

9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman Started it, couldn't finish it. I like the movie, but it's all a bit precious for me.

12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan Again, this seems high on the list to me. I should say that I am reading this list and commenting on it in order - I don't know what's coming up.

13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell I dutifully read this at some point, but didn't particularly enjoy it. Also: is it really SF/fantasy?

14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson I am a bit surprised this wasn't higher on the list!

15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore

16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov I might have read this - can't remember. I read quite a bit of Asimov in high school!

17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss

19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick

22. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood How on earth did this heavy-handed tale place so high?

23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King

24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

25. The Stand, by Stephen King

26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

28. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman I've read parts of it. Plenty for me, because I'm not a huge Gaiman fan. Also, it's uneven in quality, so I think it got this spot on reputation.

30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams

33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey Seriously? I mean, I loved this book, but it's not great literature. Certainly, it doesn't deserve to be higher than anything by Connie Willis or Lois McMaster Bujold!

34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein

35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller

36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne

38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys Love this one, but is it really SF/fantasy?

39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells

40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny

41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings Really? I would have put this lower on the list.

42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley I assume this is here because it's an accessible stand-alone MZB title. I think MZB wrote better books. MoA wasn't bad, though it has some baaaad writing.

43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson

44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven

45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin

46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White Again, one I should have read by now!

48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman Ooookay, enough with the Gaiman love!

49. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke

50. Contact, by Carl Sagan

51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons

52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman Sigh. I'm beginning to suspect the makers of this list.

53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

54. World War Z, by Max Brooks

55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett

58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson

59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold Are you freaking kidding me? There's no way Thomas Covenant is better than the Vorkosigan books. And speaking of Bujold - who is absurdly low on this list - where is The Curse of Chalion?

60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

61. The Mote In God's Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind Not a comment on this book, but a general one: Lots of men on this list, and no children's or YA books! Where's Patrick Ness, or L'Engle, or Pullman? I mean, some of the books here *coughCovenantcough* wouldn't compare favorably to the best of SF/fantasy for children and teens.

63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist

67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks I picked these up many, many times as a teen. Couldn't make myself do them.

68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard

69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb

70. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson

72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne

73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore

74. Old Man's War, by John Scalzi

75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson

76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

77. The Kushiel's Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey

78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin

79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury Again, I think I read this, but I wouldn't swear to it..

80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire Um, no..

81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson

82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde Funny and clever? Sure, but not great SF/fantasy. I just checked, and saw that NPR listeners voted on this, not an editorial board. I feel better now, but still - people are prone to vote for some odd books!

83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks

84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart

85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher

87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn

89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan

90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock

91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley Weirdly, this is the one McKinley book I couldn't finish. I made it about halfway.

93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge

94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov I enjoy this more than Foundation.

95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson

96. Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis Finally! Inexplicably low, except that NPR listeners might not be savvy?

98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville

99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony This makes the Connie-Willis-in-97th even more of an insult!

100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis Better than Narnia? Yes, it's the end of the list, and no children's or teen books ever appeared!

a weak Foundation

I was chuffed to see a new book by Mercedes Lackey about the Heralds of Valdemar. I was surprised that she called it Foundation; seems to me that there should be only one Foundation in SF/fantasy, and it isn't hers.* And then I was wearied by the poor editing. Mags, the hero, dreams of someday seeing those things he'd heard about, called "books". And then about twenty pages later, someone is reading a book to him, as they often do at mealtime. In other words, Lackey forgot that he had been longing to see a book - I suspect these two scenes were written well apart in time. And then about 30 pages later, Mags is tremendously excited to see a book for the first time. The same thing happens with a chalkboard/slate and chalk; it's a normal occurrence for his teachers to use chalk to write on the board when he is young, but when he arrives at the Collegium he has no idea what chalk is, and the concept of chalk and slate needs to be explained to him.
The plot itself is not terribly interesting - Mags is like Alberich, in that he has awkward turns of speech and a similar "only he sees the corruption at the Collegium" storyline.

*Yeah, I know. I'm a fuddy-duddy. And yes, of course, it's true that Asimov was not a great stylist himself. But still, I'd bet that in 30 years, more people are reading his Foundation than hers.

Nina Garcia, and more fluffy reading

I just finished Nina Garcia's book about the 100 items every stylish woman should own. Interesting, if totally irrelevant to me.
I've been reading a bunch on the computer - it's not that I don't read at all. Some of it is every well-written. I quite liked the Sharon Shinn book I read last week, Heart of Gold. But by and large, I've been reading fluff lately, barely worth mentioning.
I'm away from home for the next eight days, and for an 11-day trip (I'm on day 3, natch) I packed 17 books. 17! True, a few were just for reference, not for cover-to-cover reading. Two or three are very quick reads. But still - what on earth was I thinking? Part of it was that I couldn't settle on what to read, so I packed a bunch of books in the hope that one would catch my fancy.

'the other had fair fair, too'

The title for today's post comes from Sayers's Gaudy Night. A mysterious woman corners a beautiful young man and tells him two things: that "Shrewsbury College was a place where they murdered beautiful boys like him and ate their hearts out; secondly: that 'the other [another young man] had fair hair, too'."
That bit of Gaudy Night has been in my head for the last day or so, as I continue reading Mercedes Lackey. She has plenty of main characters - the ones I read about were Darkwind, Elspeth, Skif, Lavan, Firesong, Dirk, Karel, Kris, Talia, Selenay, Alberich, Vanyel and Kerowyn. Some of them (Talia, Skif, Vanyel) have horrible childhoods, while others have trauma in their adult lives. (Talia gets raped and tortured, Selenay's husband tried to kill her, etc. Both of them, however, are as little scarred by these events as possible).
But I think it's worth noting that in my list above, only four aren't happy in the end. Karel's blinded, which is too bad, though Lackey makes it clear that he'll still keep his girlfriend and his career. So I'm not sure how unhappy he really is. In contrast, Lackey tries to make it seem as though Firesong is pretty happy, but really he's settling for something less than what he wanted, now that his once-beautiful face is scarred. The other two beautiful men, Kris and Vanyel, are the only ones in my list to wind up dead.
(And by the way, Kris, Vanyel and Firesong are the only ones in the series who are aware of their good looks. Especially Vanyel and Firesong, who dress carefully to match them. And oh, by the way, Firesong and Vanyel are the only openly gay characters, which makes all of this even more problematic).
Everyone else winds up more or less happy - ugly Dirk and plain Alberich are fine, and the attractive women are fine. So why does Lackey have this disturbing propensity to wreck the lives of her good-looking (and, in two cases out of three, gay) male characters? A friend suggested that Lackey makes everyone go through angst, to make the story more heroic, and my friend is (as usual) right. But in every other case, the hero lives through the horrible events.
I can't remember whether Lavan in Brightly Burning is especially good-looking. He certainly winds up dead, though.
So - I don't know. I don't have the answer to this. Despite my colleague's good sense, I can't help but wonder whether Lackey's psyche is something like Shrewsbury College.

Where's Skif?

I realized tonight that part of Mercedes Lackey's popularity is her ability (and by "ability", I here mean "inability to do otherwise") to make the protagonist of any given book the most important person in the universe. This is a bit surreal, though, when the characters surrounding the protagonist were main characters in their own books, once upon a time. So in the scene I was reading tonight, our protagonist Elspeth* rides with a whole big group of people into the palace, and they're all formally received by the Queen. So Talia (another heroine from a different book) came running out to greet Elspeth, and they all go in - except that somewhere in the last dozen pages, Lackey misplaces Skif. Who, yes, was also the star of a book, and who is one of Talia's best friends and Elspeth's official traveling companion. His girlfriend is there, various bit players appear - but this fairly major character has just disappeared. Talia doesn't greet him, he's not with the other Heralds, he's not anywhere.
Does this matter to the plot? No, but it's a fairly noticeable mistake, and lately I've been all about making fun of Lackey.
* I'm amused, by the way, at how Lackey's characters have obscure (Talia, Elspeth, Alberich) or misspelled (Jeri, Myste, Keren) names from 20th-century USA. At least when Marion Zimmer Bradley gave all of her characters Celtic names, she explained it by saying they'd come from Europe originally.

Brightly Burning

I just added a post about Catherine Jinks, and thought to mention Mercedes Lackey, but that post was getting rather long. So I started a new one. Here's the thing: I read two Lackey books this week (read, not skimmed, I mean). One was By the Sword, which wasn't too bad. Yeah, there were improbable uses of magic (two characters meeting in dreams for almost a decade, when no one else has ever been able to do that?), and a ridiculous, laugh-out-loud plot twist when the heroine gets promoted in her new job. But compared to much of Lackey's body of work, that's minor.
And especially compared to Brightly Burning, which was so crazy that even now, days later, I am a bit dazed. I had to keep putting it down. It's strange, because I read two critical (in every sense of the word) reviews of it, but I found very few unfavorable reviews from readers. People liked this book, and didn't find the following aspects of it intensely disturbing:
1) Well, this character is crazy, basically. It's pretty well restrained by his Companion for most of the book, but he's pretty unstable and prone to uncontrollable rages throughout the book. So why was he Chosen? (those are Lackey's caps, not mine, btw). It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Companions, in all their wisdom, knew there'd be a war coming up, and Chose this unstable firestarter as a weapon. That's just messed up, especially because
2) There are healers at the school, close at hand, who could have helped this poor kid, Lavan, deal with his rages and feelings of guilt (more about that guilt below). But for whatever reason - possibly just to keep this kid unstable? - they don't. They let his Companion (who could have been injured or killed at any time) deal with
3) Lavan's rages. His literally murderous rages. I mean, he killed four schoolmates and badly injured some others! And when he feels guilt about it, and a parent of the dead is crazily grief-stricken herself, they're both told (essentially) that the dead kids earned it, and Lavan's not responsible, because Lavan was bullied by the kids he killed. Which is true - but wow. It's all the more bizarre, because this was published only a couple of years after Columbine. Yes, of course it's terrible that Lavan and his classmates were being bullied in a fairly extreme way - but to say that there's no need for guilt is not okay.
4) And then there's the Companion. In the books, Companions and Heralds bond telepathically. Not every pair can speak to each other telepathically (though Lavan and his Companion can), but there's definitely a bond. For some reason, Lackey chose to give them an extra bond, a Lifebond, which usually is something that happens between two people who have an unusually strong emotional connection.
No, let me say that again, for emphasis: Lackey Lifebonded this kid and his horse! That's not okay, and even several characters in the book point out the lack of compatibility in gender (though I'm not sure why that matters), age and species. He's in love with his Companion, and vice-versa, virtually guaranteeing that he'll never have a strong emotional tie to a human. Not that he has a chance, because of course
5) there's a war, which happens just as Lavan is fully trained (handy, that!). So he's rushed off to the front, and uses his firestarting powers to, well, burn things down. He doesn't burn people - at least, not at first, not until he starts to really like this fire thing. And then when his Companion is killed, he goes insane and burns the whole dratted army. Not his own army, thanks to some lucky foresight on the part of his countrymen. He goes insane, burns the army, and burns himself up in the process. Nothing but ash left.
Well, by that point, I was relieved to have the poor kid die. It wasn't a necessary death, especially if #2 and #3 had been properly handled, but there was a certain grandeur to it. But heavens, that book was really disturbing. Lackey's sang-froid about all of the above is not okay.

too many winged creatures

Hey, remember when I was complaining about Myste last week? That's minor compared to the Lackey books I'm reading now (Winds of Change, Winds of Fury - that trilogy). I mean, I'll take Mary Sue characters any day, compared to Mary Sue characters (now that Elspeth's the main character, she has become brilliant and psychically gifted) who spend all their time around a bunch of dratted, telepathic birds and gryphons. Really, I just don't get the appeal of birds as companion animals. So I have been wildly skimming these books.
So, why am I still re-reading? Well, partly because I'm determined to get through the month without re-reading any books - a week or two ago, I realized that that was the case, and I like the idea of once having a month with no re-reads.
The reason why a month is relevant is because I have a notebook with every book I've read for the last three or four years. Each month has its own section, and each new book I read is noted as such. So - yeah, that would be neat.
ETA: I should say that these books I'm wildly skimming won't end up on the list of books I've read this month, of course, because I skimmed them. It's just that if I don't read these at all, I won't understand the next trilogy, because a bunch of these irritating characters will be dragged into scenes with characters I like. It's just so messy - I mean, Lackey has thrown mages and magical creatures and a half-cat-woman and psychic powers and queens and horses in, like some sort of ghastly pick-one-from-each-column fantasy mishmash.

fish in a barrel

I've switched back to the prequels to the Heralds of Valdemar series (those Mercedes Lackey books - see the last three posts), because I like to read series in order. So, I'm reading Exile's Honor, and bearing up pretty well under the main character's faux-Germanic syntax (all the verbs are at the end). What I can't deal with is Myste. Although most Heralds are Chosen (Lackey's capitals, not mine) when they're in their teens or early 20s, this one is Chosen in her 40s. She wears glasses, isn't particularly athletic, but is really smart and has special psychic gifts.
I could live with all that - barely - if her name weren't Myste. It's irritatingly spelled, and (so far as I can tell) can only be pronounced Mist or Mist-ee. Either one isn't okay, because do you know what Mercedes Lackey's nickname is? Misty.
I joked around the other day about how there weren't any characters names "Mary Sue" in Valdemar, but "Myste" has that beat.
On another topic, I've fallen in like with the lolcatbible (Genesis 3:12, where Adam's describing his being tempted by the apple to God, goes like this: "At first I was liek "Noes!" but then, I was layk NOM NOM NOM."). So for now, kthxbye!

Arrow's Flight

You know The Forbidden Tower, by Marion Zimmer Bradley? Ok. So, pretend that's what we're talking about. Got it? Now take out about half of the main characters (Ellie and either Damon or Andrew). Take out the miscarriage, the betrayal, the wedding, and the murder for good measure. So what are you left with? Two people, holed up for the winter, obsessing about the woman's psychic gifts and how she can't make them do what she wants.
Yeah. Sounds fun, right? That's pretty muich Mercedes Lackey's Arrow's Flight, in a nutshell. Except that in Bradley, there were certain world-changing implications to Callista getting her head in the game (as it were). Here, not so much.

wish-fulfillment

So, I'm reading Arrows of the Queen, amusing myself by noting the similarities between this book and Anne McCaffrey's first two Harper Hall books. But then it just got crazy. I was expecting the mischievous, helpful Piemur-character to show up, and he did. I didn't expect Talia's friendship with an old musician Herald, who accepts her for who she is (coughPetironcough). And then I was gobsmacked when Talia turns out to have skill playing a pipe, and a nice little singing voice (which the old musician is obligingly training). So when a murder attempt on Talia almost succeeds, and she only saves herself by her newly found telepathic powers, I was shaken. Especially now that it turns out there's a Circle of telepaths at the school. A Circle! Sadly, no one has the Alton gift, to put Talia to death and me out of my misery.
The telepathy makes me cranky, because this is a Paolini level of copying from other works (the Circle, etc., are pure Darkover. I guess it was handy for Lackey to write all those Marion Zimmer Bradley fanfics first!). Also (and possible less forgivably, it makes Talia some sort of walking wish-fulfillment bundle. I guess "Mary Sue" isn't a name found on Valdemar.

weird po-mo Menolly loop

So I was reading a book review journal (Booklist or Library Journal, maybe), and it mentioned a new Anne McCaffrey book that didn't sound as egregiously bad as her last few, so I checked it out. And then it sat around and gathered dust for a week or ten days, until I read a review so scathing and funny that I decided to return the book unread. I was struck by a passage from the review that implied that this new McCaffrey effort was a Mercedes Lackey ripoff - essentially, it seemed, Lackey re-creates the Harper Hall from Anne McCaffrey, but with fencing and horses thrown in.
I only knew of Mercedes Lackey from her work in all those Darkover anthologies I'd read in high school and college. But I realized that if I'd read short stories from her and hadn't hated them, and she writes derivative versions of books by Anne McCaffrey that I like, that I should check her out.
And seriously, it has been well worth it. I've been reading Arrows of the Queen, and I have to stop every five or ten pages to boggle at how similar it is to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong and Dragonsinger. I mean, similar in the smallest details:

McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: ordinary, conservative people live in Holds
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: ordinary, conservative people are called Holderfolk
McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: main character both timid and unexpectedly competent. And poor, so she's humbled by her new surroundings
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: yep
McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: heroine's dark, curly, unruly hair
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: yep
McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: the people wear tunics
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: yep
McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: heroine studies in a place where both Harpers and Healers learn
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: yep, but they're called Bards, and there are Heralds thrown in
McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: rich students, not officially Harpers or Healers, who are bullies
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: yep
McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: heroine has a special role in her new craft, that only she can fill
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: yep
McCaffrey's Dragonsong/singer: heroine "Impresses" fire-lizards
Lackey's Arrows of the Queen: Heroine "Chosen" by a horse, with the same sort of mental link

There are more parallels, but I just can't be bothered to mention them all. And I'm only 100 pages into the book! That said, I'm enjoying this Dragonsinger rip-off, because Dragonsinger is a favorite of mine.
So, I'm reading Lackey, because McCaffrey ripped off Lackey in the new book I didn't read, but that's okay because Lackey ripped off McCaffrey 20 years ago.

omg! fanfic!!

A few weeks ago, I was doing a web search for something entirely different, and I happened to stumble on a long (over 100,000 words) fanfic (don't click on it if you don't like slash, which it turned out to be. Again - not what I was searching for!) about Miles Vorkosigan. As I've mentioned, I'm not a Miles fan - but the story also starred Gregor, and I do like Gregor, so damned if I didn't read all 100,000 words. And then, a few nights later, the 100,000-word sequel.
So now I've gone from avoiding fanfic entirely, to being fascinated by it. I still don't read much of it - really, very little that's not based on Bujold's books - and I skip right past anything that's capitalized or punctuated like my title today. I've been sticking to fanfiction.net, because I can't believe how much fanfic is there. There are categories I'd expect (a gazillion Harry Potter and Tolkien fanfics), but also some I wouldn't. I mean, there's Little House on the Prairie fanfic! And some is rated for adults! I can't bring myself to read any of it, because - however fictionalized the Little House books might have been, those were real people, for heaven's sakes. My SO and I spent about half an hour just looking at the different categories, and marveling at how much was there, without reading anything at all. It's surreal.

Kissing the Bee, and D.A.

I'm not sure why Kathe Koja is so underrated. I read Kissing the Bee in one sitting tonight (not difficult, because it's such a short book) and was very taken with it. I liked Talk just as much. Kissing the Bee, in particular, had a precision of language rarely seen outside a Cynthia Voigt novel, which was well suited to Dana, the main character. Koja has the gift of knowing when to stop - a lesser author might have stretched this book for another 50 pages, but the length (it was almost a novella) was just right.
Talking of novellas I've enjoyed, I read Connie Willis's D.A. this week. It was almost too slight in retrospect, but at the time, I really liked it. It wasn't Bellwether (easily my favorite Willis novel, more even than To Say Nothing of the Dog), but it had some similarities.

the saddest death

I read HP 7 yesterday, and it was good. I still think the character who came back to life (no spoilers here!) was a cop-out. I wasn't moved by that death, or the deaths of major characters, as much as I was moved by one character's literal march toward death, and especially by the character who died while joking around, who had always been a favorite of mine (my other two favorites survived, thankfully). Yesterday I thought the epilogue wrapped things up a bit too neatly, but today I'm okay with it. My favorite part, by far, was the radio broadcast.
I re-read Harry Potter books up until the seventh one came out, so now it's strange to read anything else. It doesn't help that I'm reading Warrior Woman, a shockingly bad pulp novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It's more plot-driven than Survey Ship, which isn't a compliment here, not where MZB is concerned (my favorite MZB is Thendara House, after all, which is all about character development).

SFBC significant SF novel meme

Below is a Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006.

The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love.


1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov*
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey*
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card*
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling*
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

What about you? Which have you read? Why was Bujold left off?

a mighty handy oracle

I'm sick (it's depressing, in retrospect, to think of how many posts in the last year have said this). Mostly getting over it, though, which is good. I finished Victoria Hanley's The Light of the Oracle tonight, in my quest to find new female fantasy authors. It was a mishmash of the usual: teens save the day, traces of Anne McCaffrey, and an overworld suspiciously like Marion Zimmer Bradley's. The SO tells me that a bunch of authors have a similar idea, way back to Lovecraft, but I think it's more like MZB.
Then I read the first book in Kate Brian's new series, Private. It was cracktastic: a mix between a boarding school story, Gossip Girl, and Harrison's Clique series. Much better than M. Apostolina's Meri Strikes Back, which I read this week, but which didn't live up to Hazing Meri Sugarman. The sequel to Private comes out next month, yippee!
Forgive my fangirl chatter - I'm too sick, and tired, to come up with anything insightful tonight.

Survey Ship, and other small communities

Last week I went to a used bookstore and bought a Marion Zimmer Bradley book I'd never seen before: Survey Ship. I read it with quite a bit of amusement, because it wasn't very good at all. It's about three men and three women in their first 10 days together on a spaceship. Because it's MZB, the technical details are secondary to the relationships between the characters. These six characters are going to be alone on this ship together for at least nine years, so of course they all jump into quick relationships, with every character getting propositioned at least once. I assumed that Survey Ship was just MZB's attempt to work out the dynamics between men and women that she explored in depth in The Forbidden Tower, so I was amused and chagrined when I looked it up, and realzed that Survey Ship was published three years later.
I finally finished Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, the first in the reading project I started back in January. I had trouble warming up to The Professor, and because I've been so burned out, I didn't want to use my limited mental resources on a book I wasn't excited about. I'll tackle Tom Brown's Schooldays next.
But first (a tip of the hat to the Chenbot and my current obsession, Big Brother 7), I'm going to go finish reading Among the Free, the last in the Shadow Children series by Haddix.

buying books

I'm behind at work, because I'm short-staffed, so I'm frantically trying to spend the rest of my book budget in the next few days. The fiscal year ends soon - at least here, it does. You'd think buying books would be fun - and it is, sort of, but this is the second Saturday night in a row I've spent buying books for hours on end. I shouldn't complain - there are far worse jobs to have, and at least I have a job. But I don't want my burnout to make even the fun jobs seem tedious.
I've also been reading early Vorkosigan - Cetaganda and The Vor Game - which I enjoyed more than expected. I guess it's not that I dislike Miles all the time - just when he's seemingly infallible.
I also got unabridged copies of The New Abbey Girls and The Abbey Girls Again yesterday. It's a miracle I didn't fall on them and lock myself up today for a good read, but - I had work to do. I've never read the unabridged New and Again before, so I'm very excited. This fits in nicely with my new late-night Sims obsession - I love building houses and renovating them. Sim lives and relationships are dull, by comparison. But I created a whole neighborhood of Abbey Sims, basing their characters, appearance, and decor on Oxenham's characters. To my amusement, hardly anyone likes Joy, and Maidie is somewhat clingy.