Reading Wednesday
Oct. 15th, 2014 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh. The second in a trilogy about the Opium Wars. This book focused mostly on Canton, a city in China, in 1838-9, and the foreign merchants there. Neel from the first book gets a job as secretary for Bahram Modi, a rich Parsi merchant from Bombay who trades mostly in opium, and who is the father of the illegitimate Ah Fat. Paulette signs on as assistant to an English botanist who's searching for a rare Chinese flower said to have near-magical healing properties, and meets an old childhood friend of hers, a gay painter. All of them are caught up in the chaos and in-fighting as China attempts to slow down and then out-right bans the opium trade, angering the merchants who've grown rich off it, especially the British and American ones. There are constant arguments about Free Trade and morality and rights, which sounds boring but actually ends up being pretty fascinating. By the end, there's been a riot, people have been executed, the British navy has arrived, several thousand pounds of opium have been poured in the river, and the town has been evacuated. The Opium War still hasn't actually started yet though, which presumably will be in the third book. But that unfortunately isn't out yet, so I'll have to wait a while to find out.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. A slow-moving but very sweet fantasy novel about an unloved, abused younger son who abruptly, unexpectedly becomes king of all the Elflands. There's sort of a plot about finding out who assassinated his father and the other heirs, but the book is really much more about Maia adjusting to his new life and figuring out who he's going to be.
I really enjoyed a lot of the world-building, especially the sense of history to the world. It's much deeper and more complex than I would expect for a single novel (rather than the start of a series). I particularly liked the use of 'thee/thou' and singular 'we', to mimic another language's formality levels in English, though I don't think it entirely worked. I think because the rest of the dialogue felt a bit too modern to me, and it clashed with the 'thous', but I'm glad Addison made the attempt. I do wish she would have been more explicit with the world-building. I know everyone is told that info-dumping is bad and should be avoided and it's always better to feed the exposition in subtly and slowly, but come on. Sometimes it's just better to straight-up say what the reader needs to know instead of trying to hint at it in little bits and pieces. It's much clearer, if nothing else! There's a rivalry, or tense alliance, or some sort of cultural mixing, between the elves and the goblins which I would have loved to know more about rather than the few little references we did get.
But ah, well. Overall it's a great book and well worth the read.
What are you currently reading?
Don't Let Him Know by Sandip Roy. A novel about three generations of an Indian-American family, also from NetGalley.
The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. In preparation for Yuletide! I was trying to read a bunch of stuff to see if I wanted to request/offer it.
River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh. The second in a trilogy about the Opium Wars. This book focused mostly on Canton, a city in China, in 1838-9, and the foreign merchants there. Neel from the first book gets a job as secretary for Bahram Modi, a rich Parsi merchant from Bombay who trades mostly in opium, and who is the father of the illegitimate Ah Fat. Paulette signs on as assistant to an English botanist who's searching for a rare Chinese flower said to have near-magical healing properties, and meets an old childhood friend of hers, a gay painter. All of them are caught up in the chaos and in-fighting as China attempts to slow down and then out-right bans the opium trade, angering the merchants who've grown rich off it, especially the British and American ones. There are constant arguments about Free Trade and morality and rights, which sounds boring but actually ends up being pretty fascinating. By the end, there's been a riot, people have been executed, the British navy has arrived, several thousand pounds of opium have been poured in the river, and the town has been evacuated. The Opium War still hasn't actually started yet though, which presumably will be in the third book. But that unfortunately isn't out yet, so I'll have to wait a while to find out.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. A slow-moving but very sweet fantasy novel about an unloved, abused younger son who abruptly, unexpectedly becomes king of all the Elflands. There's sort of a plot about finding out who assassinated his father and the other heirs, but the book is really much more about Maia adjusting to his new life and figuring out who he's going to be.
I really enjoyed a lot of the world-building, especially the sense of history to the world. It's much deeper and more complex than I would expect for a single novel (rather than the start of a series). I particularly liked the use of 'thee/thou' and singular 'we', to mimic another language's formality levels in English, though I don't think it entirely worked. I think because the rest of the dialogue felt a bit too modern to me, and it clashed with the 'thous', but I'm glad Addison made the attempt. I do wish she would have been more explicit with the world-building. I know everyone is told that info-dumping is bad and should be avoided and it's always better to feed the exposition in subtly and slowly, but come on. Sometimes it's just better to straight-up say what the reader needs to know instead of trying to hint at it in little bits and pieces. It's much clearer, if nothing else! There's a rivalry, or tense alliance, or some sort of cultural mixing, between the elves and the goblins which I would have loved to know more about rather than the few little references we did get.
But ah, well. Overall it's a great book and well worth the read.
What are you currently reading?
Don't Let Him Know by Sandip Roy. A novel about three generations of an Indian-American family, also from NetGalley.
The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. In preparation for Yuletide! I was trying to read a bunch of stuff to see if I wanted to request/offer it.
