Reading Wednesday
Dec. 13th, 2017 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Penric’s Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold. Another novella about Penric, a sorcerer – which in the rules of this fantasy series means he is possessed by a friendly chaos demon. Penric’s is named Desdemona and has possessed ten women – plus a lioness and a mare – before him, giving it a rather female personality. Penric’s Fox follows fairly closely after Penric and the Shaman (link to my review of it), wherein he met Inglis (the shaman of the title) and Oswyl (a sort of police detective). In this one, Penric is spending a pleasant day fishing with Inglis when Oswyl arrives to ask for their help –
another sorcerer has been murdered and her demon is missing. This sets off the murder mystery that ends up being the main plot: Who murdered her, of course, but also how on earth could anyone sneak up on a women with a demon, and where exactly has that demon has gone off to? And most importantly, who was the real intended victim: the woman or the demon?
When it seems the demon may have jumped into a passing fox, Penric and the others begin to search the forest and its hundreds of local foxes, a task much like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Their task is complicated when they find signs that the still-unknown murderer is also looking for a certain special fox.
I really enjoyed this novella. The Penric series (and the larger series it’s a subthread of, The World of the Five Gods) are all light, fun short stories, absolutely charming ways to spend an afternoon. I loved reading about Inglis and Oswyl again, as I'd liked them previously and was glad to see their friendship with Penric deepening. It’s also intriguing to see that Bujold seems to be setting up future stories to further explore the relationship between the magics of sorcerers and shamans, a topic that I’m very interested in her take on and so I will be looking forward to reading whatever comes next.
My one complaint is that, late in the novella, there's a development that seems to draw on the real-world issue of police brutality. I don’t think Bujold handled it offensively, but it’s a brief digression and that's not a great way to deal with such a sensitive topic. I wish she had either gone into it with real depth or had just not brought it up at all. As it is, it feels half-hearted, which isn’t fair to such a serious matter. But this is literally only a few pages out of two hundred, so I certainly wouldn’t un-recommend the novella for that alone. On the other hand, it did bother me, so I wanted to mention it.
Overall, a fantasy series that takes a digression into murder mystery. Certainly worth reading if you’ve enjoyed other books in the series, but not a good introduction to the world or characters.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Death Trick by Richard Stevenson. A murder mystery set in 1979 Albany, starring Donald Strachey, a private detective and gay man. The writing definitely shares some traits with the sparse, hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but Don has a sense of humor and tendency toward cheerful sarcasm that lightens the cliche and makes him a fun character to spend time with. He's in a fairly committed relationship (though unfortunately we don't get much background on that in this book) but struggles with monogamy; both halves of the couple sleep with other people in the course of the plot.
Which, by the way, is this: Billy Blount, a young gay man, spent the night dancing at a club with the DJ, Steven Kleckner. They were seen leaving together. The next morning Steven is found stabbed to death in his bed and Billy has gone into hiding. Don is hired by Billy’s parents to find where he’s gone and convince him to come back home – the parents have already worked out a plea deal with the judge and DA. However as Don investigates he slowly becomes convinced that Billy isn’t the killer, and his parents don’t have his best interests at heart.
The real fun of this book isn’t so much the mystery itself but the rich world of the gay community in a small city in the pre-AIDS era. No single person (including Don) gets much depth, but the setting as a whole is crowded with recognizable characters quickly sketched out with a few well-chosen details. There are hustlers and cruising in the park, poppers and bath houses, radical anarchist groups and drag queens, gay bars with lightless back rooms raided by the cops, and lots and lots of disco, music and pop culture references (which I mostly didn't recognize, to be honest; I am not familiar enough with the 70s). It’s not all fun, of course; Don also deals with homophobic cops and mental institutions using electroshock therapy to cure teenagers of their ‘poor social adjustment’ (aka gayness).
Death Trick is the first of a 15 books series. The cover is, uh, kind of appalling (unless you enjoy cheesy 90s stock photos, I suppose)(also why is there a dog? There’s no dog in the book!), but I really enjoyed reading it, and will absolutely be checking out more of the series.
What are you currently reading?
What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank. I’ve been meaning to read this book for ages, given that it has a good reputation, but it also came out in 2004 and what’s still relevant in politics changes fast. On the other hand, I just saw some article citing it as still topical in the Trump Era, so I've decided to finally pull the battered copy off my to-read shelf and open it up.
Penric’s Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold. Another novella about Penric, a sorcerer – which in the rules of this fantasy series means he is possessed by a friendly chaos demon. Penric’s is named Desdemona and has possessed ten women – plus a lioness and a mare – before him, giving it a rather female personality. Penric’s Fox follows fairly closely after Penric and the Shaman (link to my review of it), wherein he met Inglis (the shaman of the title) and Oswyl (a sort of police detective). In this one, Penric is spending a pleasant day fishing with Inglis when Oswyl arrives to ask for their help –
another sorcerer has been murdered and her demon is missing. This sets off the murder mystery that ends up being the main plot: Who murdered her, of course, but also how on earth could anyone sneak up on a women with a demon, and where exactly has that demon has gone off to? And most importantly, who was the real intended victim: the woman or the demon?
When it seems the demon may have jumped into a passing fox, Penric and the others begin to search the forest and its hundreds of local foxes, a task much like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Their task is complicated when they find signs that the still-unknown murderer is also looking for a certain special fox.
I really enjoyed this novella. The Penric series (and the larger series it’s a subthread of, The World of the Five Gods) are all light, fun short stories, absolutely charming ways to spend an afternoon. I loved reading about Inglis and Oswyl again, as I'd liked them previously and was glad to see their friendship with Penric deepening. It’s also intriguing to see that Bujold seems to be setting up future stories to further explore the relationship between the magics of sorcerers and shamans, a topic that I’m very interested in her take on and so I will be looking forward to reading whatever comes next.
My one complaint is that, late in the novella, there's a development that seems to draw on the real-world issue of police brutality. I don’t think Bujold handled it offensively, but it’s a brief digression and that's not a great way to deal with such a sensitive topic. I wish she had either gone into it with real depth or had just not brought it up at all. As it is, it feels half-hearted, which isn’t fair to such a serious matter. But this is literally only a few pages out of two hundred, so I certainly wouldn’t un-recommend the novella for that alone. On the other hand, it did bother me, so I wanted to mention it.
Overall, a fantasy series that takes a digression into murder mystery. Certainly worth reading if you’ve enjoyed other books in the series, but not a good introduction to the world or characters.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Death Trick by Richard Stevenson. A murder mystery set in 1979 Albany, starring Donald Strachey, a private detective and gay man. The writing definitely shares some traits with the sparse, hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but Don has a sense of humor and tendency toward cheerful sarcasm that lightens the cliche and makes him a fun character to spend time with. He's in a fairly committed relationship (though unfortunately we don't get much background on that in this book) but struggles with monogamy; both halves of the couple sleep with other people in the course of the plot.
Which, by the way, is this: Billy Blount, a young gay man, spent the night dancing at a club with the DJ, Steven Kleckner. They were seen leaving together. The next morning Steven is found stabbed to death in his bed and Billy has gone into hiding. Don is hired by Billy’s parents to find where he’s gone and convince him to come back home – the parents have already worked out a plea deal with the judge and DA. However as Don investigates he slowly becomes convinced that Billy isn’t the killer, and his parents don’t have his best interests at heart.
The real fun of this book isn’t so much the mystery itself but the rich world of the gay community in a small city in the pre-AIDS era. No single person (including Don) gets much depth, but the setting as a whole is crowded with recognizable characters quickly sketched out with a few well-chosen details. There are hustlers and cruising in the park, poppers and bath houses, radical anarchist groups and drag queens, gay bars with lightless back rooms raided by the cops, and lots and lots of disco, music and pop culture references (which I mostly didn't recognize, to be honest; I am not familiar enough with the 70s). It’s not all fun, of course; Don also deals with homophobic cops and mental institutions using electroshock therapy to cure teenagers of their ‘poor social adjustment’ (aka gayness).
Death Trick is the first of a 15 books series. The cover is, uh, kind of appalling (unless you enjoy cheesy 90s stock photos, I suppose)(also why is there a dog? There’s no dog in the book!), but I really enjoyed reading it, and will absolutely be checking out more of the series.
What are you currently reading?
What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank. I’ve been meaning to read this book for ages, given that it has a good reputation, but it also came out in 2004 and what’s still relevant in politics changes fast. On the other hand, I just saw some article citing it as still topical in the Trump Era, so I've decided to finally pull the battered copy off my to-read shelf and open it up.
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Date: 2017-12-15 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-24 11:50 pm (UTC)