December Booklog

[kmo]

 
I received some excellent books as Christmas gifts. I usually ask for things I've been wanting to read  but don't quite desire enough to buy myself and are too popular still to be checked out of the library. So, this year I received The Night Circus, The Magician King, and A Discovery of Witches. I'm particularly excited about the latter, since I have heard it is basically Lady Historian porn and my adviser is BFFs with the woman who wrote it. Who is actually in real life a big name Lady Historian of Early Modern Europe and coincidentally, a lesbian. We'll see if that makes the het romance in the book more or less believable.

In other news, I gave my BFF of 26 years Kushiel's Dart for Christmas. A few months ago, she asked me "Have you read Fifty Shades of Gray?" Should I read it?" And I was like "HELL to the NO." Friends don't let friends read bad porn, amirite? I told her that if she wanted to read a book about S&M, she could do better. And I meant to send it to her ages ago, but forgot. I have a feeling she'll enjoy it- she's gotten into ASOIAF (though more so, the tv series) so she's no stranger to fantasy epics. Prediction: she will love Phedre/Joscelin and the religious aspects because of our messed up strict Catholic upbringing. She will approach Phedre/Melisande with the same disapproval and lack of comprehension she displayed every time I pursued an inappropriate relationship with a mercurial older woman. (i have a TYPE, ok? and her name is Queen Bitch) I seem to remember she went through an angel phase during high school. If she can make it through the first 300 pages of ornate prose and intrigue, I think I might have a convert.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet- so after I tore through Cloud Atlas last month, I decided to read Mitchell's latest work and it was...pretty good. Not as good as Cloud Atlas, but solid. He did a really amazing job recreating the Dutch trading post in Tokugawa Japan, and all the imperial tensions of the era. But I have to say, the scenes in the trading post were my least favorite parts, amazingly rendered as  they were. Jacob came off at first as your typical gaijin in Japan with a bad case of yellow fever, 18th century style- fortunately this gets subverted later on. I found the POV chapters from the Japanese characers, especially Orito the midwife, much more enjoyable. The middle part of the book (no spoilers) seriously echoes the Sonmi chapters from Cloud Atlas. I read somewhere that all of Mitchell's works are meant to be part of the same fictional universe, so it was cool to know it was probably an intentional reference. It's very solid literary historical fiction, but it didn't make me squee to the level Cloud Atlas did.

The Dark Wife- this is a lesbian retelling of the Persephone myth, with a gender-swapped Hades. I'd been wanting to read it for awhile, and actually received it as part of my bookswap12 gift. I liked it, especially the way it paid attention to the queer sides of the Greek myths, such as the story of Pallas and Athena. Hades, in particular, was a character straight out of my id. (told you I had a type) But at times it skewed a little too YA for me- to the point where I wish I could put it in a time machine and send it back to myself. Because 16 year old me, struggling with my sexuality, would have loved and needed this kind of book. Kids these days with all their queer retellings of fairy tales and myths, they don't know how lucky they have it. *grumble grumble* It did do this one YA trope that I absolutely have come to hate- that thing where Demeter, the mother, is portrayed as this incompetent helpless victim, like Katniss' mother in Hunger Games. Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe (as someone who has a kind of walking martyr complex for a mother myself) I would just like to see more competent women portrayed in fiction and more nurturing, respectful mother-daughter relationships. But I find this trope kind of tired, even if I probably ate it up as a teenager. 

The Virtu, Doctrine of Labyrinths #2- so this is kind of a cheat as I still have a few more chapters yet to go. I liked Melusine and I liked this, but I have to be in a certain kind of frame of mind to read it- a dark one, I think, 'cause whoo boy is this universe bleak. The world-building is very clever, especially the names and places and the use of the French Revolutionary calendar. (woot!) But it's dense and sometimes a bit too clever. I have heard people complain that the Kushiel books are too dense and ornate, but at least Jacqueline Carey took the time to explain the rules of D'Angeline religion in those first chapters. Monette just name drops historical and religious figures from her fictional world, which adds a lot of color, but I'd like more than just color. I also felt a little lost, perhaps because I read the first one back in the summer. I think I should probably read the next two while the world of Melusine is still fresh in my mind. I looove Mildmay, Felix kind of annoys me. I keep wanting to smack the two of them and tell them "can't you two just TALK to one another for a change instead of making assumptions and treating the other person like shit?" I get the feeling that their miscommunication is kind of the point of the series, though. Mehitabel was a nice addition, I thought. I'm kind of pissed Mildmay killed Vey Coruscant, she sounded interesting. Moar wimmins, plz.