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Books
Elizabeth Bear: One-Eyed Jack
This is absolutely one of my Yuletide requests this year.
Right, it's a lovely book. A great big mix of lovely characters - One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King, boyfriends and genius locii of Las Vegas. Vampire Elvis. And then there are the media ghosts - most especially the Russian/Nikita and the American/Sebastian - fictional entities that has attained actual existence (if not awareness of their own nature) and run around in a life out of a certain 60s spy show, only to end up in early 21st centure Las Vegas, fighting the media ghost of James Bond trying to murder them, and the genius locii of LA trying to take over the city. And it's lovely. I need more of these characters.
Seth Dickinson: The Traitor Baru Cormorant
I'm not sure why I didn't particularly like this book. It has plenty of the right ingredients - economic warfare! lesbians! culture clashes! everything bloody complicated and ruthless! - and it just doesn't work for me.
Tessa Gratton: The Strange Maid
I'm sad to say I enjoyed this less than The Lost Sun - not that Signy Valborn isn't a perfectly fine character, but there was not nearly enough of Soren and Baldur and Astrid. Basically, the usual problem of falling for a specific set of characters in the first book of a series and then the next book is about completely different people that I don't care about...
Katarina Mazetti: Blandat blod
This was a bad book - it's just so bloody flat. It sounded so promising, what I could find, it has so many fine ingredients - vikings, Rus, a powerful völva, same-sex marriage - and then it's just so bloody flat.
Kim Newman: Dracula Cha Cha Cha
The series still entertains me - the intertextuality, it speaks to me. (Also, what's with books making a certain 007 agent a villain in my latest picks?)
Åsne Seierstad: En av os
Well, this was a slow read. For reasons. Just lock him away and throw away the key, okay?
Marianne Vedeler: Silk for the Vikings
So, apparently most of the silk found from viking age Scandinavia is from Persian and Byzantine areas, some perhaps as close as Greece. Just a little bit is thought to be Chinese in origin. So, not an overwhelming proof of extensive contact with China, even though multiple layers of merchants.
David Weber; Out of the Dark
I'll admit that if you came expecting DW's usual military sf, then the twist might have been a bit odd - and it could have been signaled better early on. For instance, instead of Agincourt, he could have written aliens observing one of Vlad the Impaler's battles - that'd be plenty bloody enough to scare them. But honestly - all those goodreads reviews bitching about the vampires in their precious gun porn sf and how clearly David Weber just didn't know how to end his alien invasion story - point the first, the novel is based on a novella where the vampire bit is the core story, and point the second, the novel is dedicated to Fred Saberhagen, a man who wrote both military sf and some of my favourite Dracula books. So.
Anyway, I had read the novella and I specifically came for the vampires fighting aliens, and I'm sad that there's no sequel to this one - partly because I want more of big, African-American methodist-preacher's-son US Marine Stephen Buchevsky, who at the end of the novel asks one of his friends not to let his methodist-preacher-dad know that his son ran off to be a vampireand boyfriends with Dracula - who is so terribly fond of "My Stephen" - I need Yuletide fic for these two idiots
Comics
Mike Mignola: Hellboy In Hell: Descent
Osamu Tezuka: Phoenix: Dawn
Brian K. Vaughan: Saga vol. 5.
Total number of books and comics read this month: 11
Currently reading: 1016 - The Danish Conquest of England by Per Ullidtz and Sandheden om snaphaneløgnen by Sixten Svensson
Total number of books and comics read this year: 85
Elizabeth Bear: One-Eyed Jack
This is absolutely one of my Yuletide requests this year.
Right, it's a lovely book. A great big mix of lovely characters - One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King, boyfriends and genius locii of Las Vegas. Vampire Elvis. And then there are the media ghosts - most especially the Russian/Nikita and the American/Sebastian - fictional entities that has attained actual existence (if not awareness of their own nature) and run around in a life out of a certain 60s spy show, only to end up in early 21st centure Las Vegas, fighting the media ghost of James Bond trying to murder them, and the genius locii of LA trying to take over the city. And it's lovely. I need more of these characters.
Seth Dickinson: The Traitor Baru Cormorant
I'm not sure why I didn't particularly like this book. It has plenty of the right ingredients - economic warfare! lesbians! culture clashes! everything bloody complicated and ruthless! - and it just doesn't work for me.
Tessa Gratton: The Strange Maid
I'm sad to say I enjoyed this less than The Lost Sun - not that Signy Valborn isn't a perfectly fine character, but there was not nearly enough of Soren and Baldur and Astrid. Basically, the usual problem of falling for a specific set of characters in the first book of a series and then the next book is about completely different people that I don't care about...
Katarina Mazetti: Blandat blod
This was a bad book - it's just so bloody flat. It sounded so promising, what I could find, it has so many fine ingredients - vikings, Rus, a powerful völva, same-sex marriage - and then it's just so bloody flat.
Kim Newman: Dracula Cha Cha Cha
The series still entertains me - the intertextuality, it speaks to me. (Also, what's with books making a certain 007 agent a villain in my latest picks?)
Åsne Seierstad: En av os
Well, this was a slow read. For reasons. Just lock him away and throw away the key, okay?
Marianne Vedeler: Silk for the Vikings
So, apparently most of the silk found from viking age Scandinavia is from Persian and Byzantine areas, some perhaps as close as Greece. Just a little bit is thought to be Chinese in origin. So, not an overwhelming proof of extensive contact with China, even though multiple layers of merchants.
David Weber; Out of the Dark
I'll admit that if you came expecting DW's usual military sf, then the twist might have been a bit odd - and it could have been signaled better early on. For instance, instead of Agincourt, he could have written aliens observing one of Vlad the Impaler's battles - that'd be plenty bloody enough to scare them. But honestly - all those goodreads reviews bitching about the vampires in their precious gun porn sf and how clearly David Weber just didn't know how to end his alien invasion story - point the first, the novel is based on a novella where the vampire bit is the core story, and point the second, the novel is dedicated to Fred Saberhagen, a man who wrote both military sf and some of my favourite Dracula books. So.
Anyway, I had read the novella and I specifically came for the vampires fighting aliens, and I'm sad that there's no sequel to this one - partly because I want more of big, African-American methodist-preacher's-son US Marine Stephen Buchevsky, who at the end of the novel asks one of his friends not to let his methodist-preacher-dad know that his son ran off to be a vampire
Comics
Mike Mignola: Hellboy In Hell: Descent
Osamu Tezuka: Phoenix: Dawn
Brian K. Vaughan: Saga vol. 5.
Total number of books and comics read this month: 11
Currently reading: 1016 - The Danish Conquest of England by Per Ullidtz and Sandheden om snaphaneløgnen by Sixten Svensson
Total number of books and comics read this year: 85