Reading Wednesday
Nov. 27th, 2013 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Riot: A Love Story by Shashi Tharoor. A novel about a small town in northern India, communal riots, and a white American woman who is killed during the riots. She was having an affair with an Indian official, while also tied up in some personal vendettas, or just possibly in the wrong place at the wrong time. The most interesting thing about this is how it's told. The entire book is snippets of different characters' writing: letters, poems, diary entries, newspaper articles, interview transcripts, work memos, and so on. All of the characters are unreliable narrators, and none of them have all the information, so reading it is a bit like putting together a puzzle. Tharoor apparently wanted to write a book that you could read in any order; I'm not quite sure that would work quite as well as reading it in the printed order, but it's a neat idea. I've read enough of Tharoor's other books to be well aware of his personal politics, but I think he did a good job of writing in the perspective of people from all sorts of different political stances.
Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger. This is a new series set in the same world as Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series (though the two series aren't directly connected), which means a steampunk 1800s with vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, and really neat worldbuilding (I love the idea that the reason the British Empire was so successful is because they were the only armies that employed werewolves). This series, unlike the first, is YA, and it really shows in this first book. I do like YA, but occasionally it can be very... shallow, or unsubtle, or some word I'm not quite thinking of, and this book suffers from that.
Sophronia, at 14, is a youngest daughter and a troublemaker, so her mother sends her away to a boarding school. However, this school– Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality– turns out to educate the students to be spies and assassins rather than the normal sort of society lady. Which is much more to Sophronia's interest. Also, the entire school is in a giant dirigible. And then there is a complicated plot involving the prototype of a new technology, that everyone– the Queen, the vampires, the Picklemen (an anti-supernatural organization)– wants.
Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger. The sequel! I liked this book much more than the first; the first was fun and forgettable, but this one was genuinely good (which is sort of how I felt about Carriger's first series, actually). This one has a love triangle between Sophronia, Soap (a "sootie", one of the lower-class boys who works on the school's dirigible by loading the engines with coal), and Felix (a rake-in-training, the son of a Duke and a student at Mademoiselle Geraldine's brother school, Bunson's, which educates young Evil Geniuses). I have been totally Team Soap all along, but I was willing to let Felix join as a third, but then he called Soap a "darkie" and now I'm having none of it. Kick him to the curb, Sophronia.
What are you currently reading?
City of Devi by Manil Suri. A novel about post-apocalyptic Mumbai.
Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold. Back to the Vorkosigan series! I've just started this book, but I'm finding Miles's attempts to feed himself hilarious.
Riot: A Love Story by Shashi Tharoor. A novel about a small town in northern India, communal riots, and a white American woman who is killed during the riots. She was having an affair with an Indian official, while also tied up in some personal vendettas, or just possibly in the wrong place at the wrong time. The most interesting thing about this is how it's told. The entire book is snippets of different characters' writing: letters, poems, diary entries, newspaper articles, interview transcripts, work memos, and so on. All of the characters are unreliable narrators, and none of them have all the information, so reading it is a bit like putting together a puzzle. Tharoor apparently wanted to write a book that you could read in any order; I'm not quite sure that would work quite as well as reading it in the printed order, but it's a neat idea. I've read enough of Tharoor's other books to be well aware of his personal politics, but I think he did a good job of writing in the perspective of people from all sorts of different political stances.
Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger. This is a new series set in the same world as Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series (though the two series aren't directly connected), which means a steampunk 1800s with vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, and really neat worldbuilding (I love the idea that the reason the British Empire was so successful is because they were the only armies that employed werewolves). This series, unlike the first, is YA, and it really shows in this first book. I do like YA, but occasionally it can be very... shallow, or unsubtle, or some word I'm not quite thinking of, and this book suffers from that.
Sophronia, at 14, is a youngest daughter and a troublemaker, so her mother sends her away to a boarding school. However, this school– Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality– turns out to educate the students to be spies and assassins rather than the normal sort of society lady. Which is much more to Sophronia's interest. Also, the entire school is in a giant dirigible. And then there is a complicated plot involving the prototype of a new technology, that everyone– the Queen, the vampires, the Picklemen (an anti-supernatural organization)– wants.
Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger. The sequel! I liked this book much more than the first; the first was fun and forgettable, but this one was genuinely good (which is sort of how I felt about Carriger's first series, actually). This one has a love triangle between Sophronia, Soap (a "sootie", one of the lower-class boys who works on the school's dirigible by loading the engines with coal), and Felix (a rake-in-training, the son of a Duke and a student at Mademoiselle Geraldine's brother school, Bunson's, which educates young Evil Geniuses). I have been totally Team Soap all along, but I was willing to let Felix join as a third, but then he called Soap a "darkie" and now I'm having none of it. Kick him to the curb, Sophronia.
What are you currently reading?
City of Devi by Manil Suri. A novel about post-apocalyptic Mumbai.
Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold. Back to the Vorkosigan series! I've just started this book, but I'm finding Miles's attempts to feed himself hilarious.
