Book Recommendations
It’s been a fun couple of weeks for me because I actually got to read something that wasn’t my own sh**, I mean _work_, or submissions for Critical Mass. I have two books to recommend. The first is The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold. I enjoyed the book, but I also was really intrigued by the structure of the book, and how in the Hell she made it work. All the action is front loaded and almost the entire second half is about these two people trying to get married. Yes, I’m serious. They are from different classes, and backgrounds with a large age gap between them, and somehow she makes this fascinating. If anybody else has read this book, please, weigh in because I can’t figure it out. It’s a given she’s a good writer on a line by line bases, and she has always created great characters — witness Miles. Perhaps men wouldn’t find this at all interesting, and this book might breakdown on gender lines.
The second book I just finished last night. Actually early this morning. Damn you John Scalzi! 
I sat up to finish The Ghost Brigades until 2:00 am. This is a sequel to Old Man’s War, and again the author made an interesting choice. I knew that he was setting up something with John Perry and Jane Sagan, but he didn’t use either of the characters as the direct protagonist in Ghost Brigades. Instead he created a brand new character to interact with Jane. Jared Dirac was a terrific character and I’d so date him. I liked the character so much that I stayed up way past my bedtime to see what happened to him.
I’ve really enjoyed Scalzi’s books because I’m a huge fan of early Heinlein, particularly the juveniles, and the only two people doing Heinleinesque fiction right now are Scalzi and John Varley with the Red Thunder books. If folks have other people they can mention who fall into that category, I’d love to hear them.
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:06 pm
My favorite current “juvenile” series is Harry Turtledove’s Crosstime Traffic. In fact, I’m enjoying them more than I am a lot of his novels for adults, partly because they’re compact and self-contained. They are a series, not merely thematically but in having a shared background and some continuity from volume to volume, but each volume has new characters and a self-contained story.
Garth Nix’s Abhorsen books were published as YA, but I can’t quite take that seriously; it seems like something of a publishing accident based on the fact that the central characters are young women. In any case, they’re among my favorite post-Tolkien works of fantasy; I fell in love with them a few pages into the first volume, when Nix listed the marks his first heroine, Sabriel, had earned in English, mathematics, science, music, etiquette, swordsmanship at her girls’ boarding school, “and a runaway first in sorcery”! But they’re not at all Heinleinian.
I do agree with you in admiring the juveniles especially; I really consider them the height of Heinlein’s achievement as a writer. I’ve read several older post-Heinlein Heinlein juveniles, including Panshin’s Rite of Passage and Benford’s Jupiter Project, which I think got much less notice than it deserved; I think “Heinlein juvenile” could be identified as a distinctive subgenre with special traits not found in juveniles generally. In an odd way, Samuel R. Delaney’s “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line” is a Heinlein juvenile; in an even odder way, so is Fritz Leiber’s “Space-Time for Springers,” which I consider one of the most brilliant sf stories ever written, simultaneously funny and tragically heroic, with a hero who Does The Right Thing without a moment’s hesitation.
As to the Sharing Knife volumes, my cohabitant and I are going up to Mysterious Galaxy with a friend in a few hours, because Bujold will be there signing the third volume. I enjoyed several things about the first volume, from the entertaining foreground plot to the ingenious background about the Lakewalkers. You could almost look at them as a reworking of Tolkien’s Rangers, with a similar tragic backstory of fall from magical greatness, a similar current mission of protecting settled folk against dark magic threats—but with the social structure and customs that support this worked out in much more anthropological detail, and from a very different slant than Tolkien’s. In an odd sense they’re almost an idealized aristocracy, one that cultivates farmers without exploitation or brutality. The second volume was a bit less rewarding than the first; I’m curious to see that Bujold does with the third.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Lol, then I must be a male reader, because much as I usually love Bujold’s books, I couldn’t finish that one. Two people trying to get married just isn’t enough for me.
I think Scalzi’s newest will be more up my alley.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I know, it’s weird, Gabriele. I normally hate books like this, but somehow she pulled me right in. I think William might be onto something — it’s the man in this couple that has this sense of sadness and melancholy, and you want to see him find someone to ease that loneliness. Rather like what I wrote about my review in the Romantic Times. It’s the female readers going — “Oh the poor thing. Let me comfort him.”
There’s also the mysterious backstory about the Lakewalkers, which has me interested enough that I’m heading out to find book two the minute the paperback is released.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I have to tell you that one of my women friends, who’s a longstanding Bujold fan, read the first Sharing Knife volume and complained to me that she could feel her IQ dropping as she turned the pages. And my cohabitant, also a woman, isn’t very impressed with them either. On the other hand, I know at least three other women who quite like them.
For me . . . well . . . it’s one I definitely intend to read; partly because I’m seriously interested in the historical backstory, and partly because the story hits one of my specific emotional buttons: It’s about an intelligent and talented woman who undervalues herself, and who needs to learn her own worth. Elizabeth Moon’s novels often hit that same button for me. It seems that I personally enjoy romance as a genre, if it’s a certain kind of romance.
Others on my current “definitely intend to read” list are Banks’s Matter, Williams’s The Shadow Pavilion (all of the Detective Inspector Chen novels have been a delight to read, managing to fuse seemingly incompatible elements into a coherent fictional milieu), and Stirling’s The Scourge of God. Of these, the one that’s an experiment is the Banks; I’ve never actually read anything of his, but he’s been recommended by intelligent readers, and he’s been compared to McLeod and Stross, both of whom I quite like, so I’m going to find out if I like him.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I know, my lack of romantic feelings is going to be a problem. I don’t care reading about it - though I enjoy books with strong romance subplots if there’s enough other stuff going on as well* - and I have too little of it in my books. I got the melancholical or dark and brooding heros, but no girls to comfort them.
* Like fe. Gabaldon’s first novels which I liked, Lynn Vieh’s Darkyn series, or, strange enough, some of Georgette Heyer’s.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Lynn Viehl - somehing eats letters here. :p