Reading Wednesday
Apr. 8th, 2015 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
The Demon's Mistress by Jo Beverly. Possibly the best of the Company of Rogues series! (At least, so far; I'm abandoning them and I'm not even halfway through.) In the opening scene, Lord Vendeiman attempts suicide, due both to his survivor's guilt after Waterloo and his impending bankruptcy. Maria interrupts and offers to pay him to pretend to be her fiance for the next six weeks. She's a widow, and since she has just discovered that it was her husband's secret business dealings that caused Van's bankruptcy, she feels obliged to fix things. This book was totally made for me (pretend dating! characters with self-destructive issues! experienced woman and younger man! tattoos!), but unfortunately it was more of a novella, because I would have read much more about them.
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow. This is a hard novel to describe; it's almost more like a series of interlinked short stories than a novel. One morning in the early 1900s, an upper middle-class suburban family finds an abandoned baby in their yard, a newborn black boy. They decide to adopt it, which leads to their involvement in the lives of the parents and, eventually, deaths and arson and national news around a flashpoint of racial justice. Meanwhile, various historical figures appear and disappear in the background: Houdini, JP Morgan, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Evelyn Nesbit, Booker T. Washington. It's a lovely and lyrical book, often turning away from simply depicting events to muse on philosophical or artistic points (several of the main characters don't even have names, for instance, but are referred to as "Younger Brother" or "the girl"). Which makes it all the stranger that it's apparently been adapted to a Broadway musical. I've read the Wikipedia article, but I still can't imagine how that worked.
Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith. YOU GUYS SHOULD READ THIS. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where some people have acquired X-Men-like superpowers ("Changed"), causing social tension with those who haven't ("Norms"), and plants and animals have become much more dangerous, and yet I think it's the happiest, most hopeful post-ap story I've ever read. The book starts with Ross, a lonely, desperate teenager who's being chased by a bounty hunter, arriving at the walled town of Las Anclas. There's a lot of characters (of all races and religions, plus gay couples both m/m and f/f, and a m/f/f triangle), but I loved the complex feel that gave to the worldbuilding. I also loved a lot of the little details (all the descriptions of food! intelligent pet rats! Mia's weapons and other inventions! Felicite's secret!) and am very glad that the sequel is already out, so I can go grab it immediately. Highly recommended.
What are you currently reading?
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters. A mystery with an archaeologist in Egypt in the 1880s! :D
Tibet Wild: A Naturalist's Journeys on the Roof of the World by George Schaller. Oh god, this book is so boringgggg. I would have abandoned it ten pages in, but I'm reading it for NetGalley and need to write up a review.
The Demon's Mistress by Jo Beverly. Possibly the best of the Company of Rogues series! (At least, so far; I'm abandoning them and I'm not even halfway through.) In the opening scene, Lord Vendeiman attempts suicide, due both to his survivor's guilt after Waterloo and his impending bankruptcy. Maria interrupts and offers to pay him to pretend to be her fiance for the next six weeks. She's a widow, and since she has just discovered that it was her husband's secret business dealings that caused Van's bankruptcy, she feels obliged to fix things. This book was totally made for me (pretend dating! characters with self-destructive issues! experienced woman and younger man! tattoos!), but unfortunately it was more of a novella, because I would have read much more about them.
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow. This is a hard novel to describe; it's almost more like a series of interlinked short stories than a novel. One morning in the early 1900s, an upper middle-class suburban family finds an abandoned baby in their yard, a newborn black boy. They decide to adopt it, which leads to their involvement in the lives of the parents and, eventually, deaths and arson and national news around a flashpoint of racial justice. Meanwhile, various historical figures appear and disappear in the background: Houdini, JP Morgan, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Evelyn Nesbit, Booker T. Washington. It's a lovely and lyrical book, often turning away from simply depicting events to muse on philosophical or artistic points (several of the main characters don't even have names, for instance, but are referred to as "Younger Brother" or "the girl"). Which makes it all the stranger that it's apparently been adapted to a Broadway musical. I've read the Wikipedia article, but I still can't imagine how that worked.
Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith. YOU GUYS SHOULD READ THIS. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where some people have acquired X-Men-like superpowers ("Changed"), causing social tension with those who haven't ("Norms"), and plants and animals have become much more dangerous, and yet I think it's the happiest, most hopeful post-ap story I've ever read. The book starts with Ross, a lonely, desperate teenager who's being chased by a bounty hunter, arriving at the walled town of Las Anclas. There's a lot of characters (of all races and religions, plus gay couples both m/m and f/f, and a m/f/f triangle), but I loved the complex feel that gave to the worldbuilding. I also loved a lot of the little details (all the descriptions of food! intelligent pet rats! Mia's weapons and other inventions! Felicite's secret!) and am very glad that the sequel is already out, so I can go grab it immediately. Highly recommended.
What are you currently reading?
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters. A mystery with an archaeologist in Egypt in the 1880s! :D
Tibet Wild: A Naturalist's Journeys on the Roof of the World by George Schaller. Oh god, this book is so boringgggg. I would have abandoned it ten pages in, but I'm reading it for NetGalley and need to write up a review.
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Date: 2015-04-09 09:19 am (UTC)(and felicite is my stealth favorite; i can't wait for the conclusion of her arc).
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Date: 2015-04-09 04:55 pm (UTC)Felicite is amazinggggg. I was really surprised that her secret didn't get uncovered, so I'm really interested in how that continues to develop.