Finally. I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. To remind me what was going on in the story, I reread Deliverer and loved it again.
Conspirator was worth waiting for. I am always amazed by how Cherryh makes me feel more comfortable with the extremely etiquette-conscious aliens and really embarrassed about the humans.
Here’s a little more detail I wrote about this series when I first picked it up.
I’m in the middle of reading this trilogy for the third time. I’ve read all of Czerneda’s stuff, and I think this is the best three books. She’s so good at weaving together plot and character development and science. And it’s really interesting science–a lot of evolutionary biology stuff.
I guess if I really wanted to find something wrong, I could say that sometimes the lines delivered by one particular male character are a bit melodramatic, especially when he is trying to say something romantic.
But that is so minor compared to how Czerneda manages to go through a whole trilogy of really long books, juggling dozens of characters (many of them aliens) and giving them all distinct personalities with believable growth and change. I’m trying to write a single novel, with just a few characters, and I can’t figure out how to delineate one character from another. Something of this size and complexity, well, I’m very impressed.
If you like science fiction, read this. If you aren’t sure whether you like science fiction, read this.
I called this site “A Study of Reading Habits,” but really I don’t write about my reading habits much. I can describe my habits, though. I think I’ll describe them according to why I read them.
Mainly, I read in bed, just before I go to sleep. If I read something too troubling or thought-provoking or scary at that time, then either I won’t fall asleep or I’ll fall asleep and have terrible dreams. So before bed, I tend to read genre novels–because I know sort of what to expect. And I especially like to read genre novels (mysteries and fantasy novels, with some science fiction) that are part of a series, because then I really, really know what to expect and can judge whether I should be reading it before bed. And in addition to that, I tend to re-read a lot of my series novels.
In the past few months, for example, I’ve re-read for bajillionth time all the Lindsey Davis/Didius Falco Roman mystery novels. Plus I read the most recent two of those for the first time. That’s 18 novels.
I also re-read four old Barbara Hambly novels (the Dark books, plus A Stranger at the Wedding) and two newer ones (the Raven sisters books). I re-read an old Tanya Huff book (The Fire’s Stone) and the sixth Harry Potter and all the Vimes books by Terry Pratchett.
I’m sure I re-read more than that, but that’s all I can think of right now.
In the past few months, I read some books I hadn’t read before: the new Harry Potter and a young adult novel called Haters. Those were both entertaining. I read Haters because I went to a writing conference and my workshop teacher was the author, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. (She was a hilarious and attentive teacher, and she’s a great writer.)
And I got the new Tanya Huff book in the her space opera series, which rocks (both the series and the new book). I listened to two new Charlaine Harris books in series I’ve been reading (the one about the vampires and the one about the chick who feels dead people).
Then a blog entry within a blog entry got me interested in Nicola Griffith, so I tracked down her first two Aud Torvingen books, The Blue Place and Stay, which are pretty cool noirish kind of books. I like them a lot, though in the second one, Aud is recovering from the death of someone close to her, and I kept being annoyed because that character never felt to me like a fully developed character, so I can’t figure out why Aud is so fucked up over it. But aside from that, these books are good, and I’m planning to get ahold of the third one.
Finally, I read Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which was so good I can’t even write about it.
I like to read books and magazines about the physical activities I enjoy, so I read a lot of stuff about yoga and running and occasionally some stuff about bicycling. I . . . somehow never end up reading a whole book, though, because I skip over the stuff I already know and troll the index for things I’m interested in.
A few months back, though, I got re-interested in skating, so I read most of Rollergirl (about Austin’s recent roller derby resurgence) and skimmed Inline! (a how-to guide). I read only part of these books not because they’re bad or anything. I got more interested in doing some actual skating, so my non-bedtime reading time was limited. (No nonfiction at bedtime. I don’t know why. This is just a rule.) And then I hurt my stupid hip, so I had to lay off skating altogether, and I certainly didn’t want to read about it.
I skimmed through Chi Running, Body, Mind, and Sport, and Yoga for Depression. I’ve just started Jeff Davis’s book about yoga and writing, called The Journey from the Center to the Page (also because of the writing conference).
My brother has gotten interested in chef-ing and recommended some audiobooks about it, so I listened to Kitchen Confidential (I know, a decade after everyone else read it) and I’m now listening to Bill Buford’s Heat. My conclusion so far is that restaurant kitchens are just like I remember them, even though the ones I worked in were all crappy franchises and not at all like the starred restaurants described in those books. And also, chefs are a bunch of nutty motherfuckers.
I guess there are other reasons I read, too, but these have been the ones influencing my reading this year.
Let’s get this part over with: Joe Hill is Stephen King’s kid. There.
I listened to this, and it was not bad. At the risk of damning with faint praise, I’ll say that it was better than most horror genre stuff I’ve read, but it didn’t seem to break any new ground.
If you plan to read it, then stop reading this post here. What follows contains some general spoilers.
Really, I’m not an ideal horror reader. I don’t love gore, I’m suspicious of the tendency to put people through absolute hell and have them live, and I really, really hate to read about bad things happening to animals. These are all things that seem to happen in most horror novels. So what I’m saying is, Joe Hill is a fine writer (the dialogue was particularly good, and some of the imagery won’t leave my head), but the genre with all its conventions is really not my favorite.
I just finished the latest Foreigner novel, Deliverer. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I think it was too short. As usual with Cherryh’s books, it started pretty slowly and then about halfway through, a bunch of crazy stuff started happening so that I couldn’t put the damn book down. But it still seemed to be missing something, some kind of fullness that the earlier books have had. Or maybe I just think that because I read all eight of the earlier ones at once, so I felt more immersed in that world than I felt this time. Anyway, that’s a very minor complaint. This is a good book.