Reading Wednesday
Jun. 18th, 2014 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Traveling with the Dead by Barbara Hambly. James Asher happens to glimpse a London vampire and a man he knows is a Hungarian spy boarding a train to Paris. Convinced that if governments start hiring vampires it would be the Worst Thing Ever (particularly in the build-up to WWI), he impulsively decides to follow them and find out what's going on. When (shockingly!) the authorities in Paris do not take his warnings about vampires seriously, he's forced to continue tracking them to Vienna and then Constantinople, teaming up on the way with the vampire's also-a-vampire wife.
Meanwhile, James's wife Lydia is aware of who in Vienna is likely to team up with vampires (since she's been reading the medical journals and knows who has been doing experiments on blood and youthfulness) and follows James to warn him. She teams up with Ysidro, their former vampire ally, who also has an interest in making sure vampires and governments do not team up. However, Ysidro, being a dude from the 1600s, refuses to travel with Lydia unless she has a chaperone, and Lydia, being a modern 1908 woman, refuses to put her maid in danger by involving her in vampire politics. So Ysidro uses his vampire magic to convince a poor governess that she and he are ~immortal reincarnated eternal true loves~, sending her dreams of their centuries-spanning melodramatic adventures together (all of this is a fairly hilarious parody of vampire romances; I particularly liked Lydia pointing out that the waltz "wasn’t even invented in the sixteenth century!"). Lydia agrees to let the governess come along on the condition that Ysidro not eat any humans for as long as they're traveling together. Obviously everyone eventually meets up for Dramatic Climax Adventures.
Very important information: there is actually a canon threesome! (Or, well, acknowledged attraction of a V-shaped sort. It hasn't been acted on, but there's three - soon to be four - more books in the series.) I had some problems with the ending, where James and Ysidro agree to keep important information from Lydia, but I'm willing to wait and see how that develops.
The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson. A woman has confessed to shooting her husband and burning down the house around him; Walt is nonetheless convinced that she's innocent, and so he goes undercover in the local small town to find out what really happened. I liked this one much better than I liked the previous few books in the series - there were some nice slashy appearances from Henry, the introduction of a minor character who I loved (and who of course died by the end, sigh), and a very dramatic climax, taking place on a empty plain during a snowstorm, complete with Walt being drugged, shot, having a broken foot, needing to rescue a small child and tame a wild horse. Drama!
Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold. Although set in the same universe as the Vorkosigan saga, this book is almost entirely detached from it: set hundreds of years earlier, in a new place, and with no repeating characters (I almost want to say "they're all OCs", but that doesn't really make sense outside of the context of fanfiction). It's also fairly different in tone from the rest of the Vorokosigan saga: this is definitely hard SF. According to a review I read, it was originally intended to be the first of a trilogy. You can't tell from the book itself, but I would totally love to read more about these characters.
It's a universe with colonies on multiple planets and space travel, but without artificial gravity, so to save money, one company decides to genetically engineer a batch of humans with two sets of arms and no legs (along with some other, more subtle changes involving blood pressure and bone density), adapted to living their entire lives in free-fall. These quaddies, as they're nicknamed, are entirely owned by the company, not even as slaves but in the manner of inanimate tools or mechanical property. Just as the oldest quaddies reach adulthood, another company invents artificial gravity, rendering the whole project a waste of money and the quaddies without a place. It's a great novel about how technology affects society, and about coming into the responsibilities and freedom of adulthood.
What are you currently reading?
Ramayana by R. K. Narayan. Ah, this book is so short and yet I keep putting it off.
Junkyard Dogs by Craig Johnson. More Walt Longmire!
Traveling with the Dead by Barbara Hambly. James Asher happens to glimpse a London vampire and a man he knows is a Hungarian spy boarding a train to Paris. Convinced that if governments start hiring vampires it would be the Worst Thing Ever (particularly in the build-up to WWI), he impulsively decides to follow them and find out what's going on. When (shockingly!) the authorities in Paris do not take his warnings about vampires seriously, he's forced to continue tracking them to Vienna and then Constantinople, teaming up on the way with the vampire's also-a-vampire wife.
Meanwhile, James's wife Lydia is aware of who in Vienna is likely to team up with vampires (since she's been reading the medical journals and knows who has been doing experiments on blood and youthfulness) and follows James to warn him. She teams up with Ysidro, their former vampire ally, who also has an interest in making sure vampires and governments do not team up. However, Ysidro, being a dude from the 1600s, refuses to travel with Lydia unless she has a chaperone, and Lydia, being a modern 1908 woman, refuses to put her maid in danger by involving her in vampire politics. So Ysidro uses his vampire magic to convince a poor governess that she and he are ~immortal reincarnated eternal true loves~, sending her dreams of their centuries-spanning melodramatic adventures together (all of this is a fairly hilarious parody of vampire romances; I particularly liked Lydia pointing out that the waltz "wasn’t even invented in the sixteenth century!"). Lydia agrees to let the governess come along on the condition that Ysidro not eat any humans for as long as they're traveling together. Obviously everyone eventually meets up for Dramatic Climax Adventures.
Very important information: there is actually a canon threesome! (Or, well, acknowledged attraction of a V-shaped sort. It hasn't been acted on, but there's three - soon to be four - more books in the series.) I had some problems with the ending, where James and Ysidro agree to keep important information from Lydia, but I'm willing to wait and see how that develops.
The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson. A woman has confessed to shooting her husband and burning down the house around him; Walt is nonetheless convinced that she's innocent, and so he goes undercover in the local small town to find out what really happened. I liked this one much better than I liked the previous few books in the series - there were some nice slashy appearances from Henry, the introduction of a minor character who I loved (and who of course died by the end, sigh), and a very dramatic climax, taking place on a empty plain during a snowstorm, complete with Walt being drugged, shot, having a broken foot, needing to rescue a small child and tame a wild horse. Drama!
Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold. Although set in the same universe as the Vorkosigan saga, this book is almost entirely detached from it: set hundreds of years earlier, in a new place, and with no repeating characters (I almost want to say "they're all OCs", but that doesn't really make sense outside of the context of fanfiction). It's also fairly different in tone from the rest of the Vorokosigan saga: this is definitely hard SF. According to a review I read, it was originally intended to be the first of a trilogy. You can't tell from the book itself, but I would totally love to read more about these characters.
It's a universe with colonies on multiple planets and space travel, but without artificial gravity, so to save money, one company decides to genetically engineer a batch of humans with two sets of arms and no legs (along with some other, more subtle changes involving blood pressure and bone density), adapted to living their entire lives in free-fall. These quaddies, as they're nicknamed, are entirely owned by the company, not even as slaves but in the manner of inanimate tools or mechanical property. Just as the oldest quaddies reach adulthood, another company invents artificial gravity, rendering the whole project a waste of money and the quaddies without a place. It's a great novel about how technology affects society, and about coming into the responsibilities and freedom of adulthood.
What are you currently reading?
Ramayana by R. K. Narayan. Ah, this book is so short and yet I keep putting it off.
Junkyard Dogs by Craig Johnson. More Walt Longmire!
