Reading Wednesday
13 February 2013 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerBah, sick. Though I think I'm over the fever, at least. Maybe I'll even catch up with things online today, instead of just reading like a lump. But speaking of reading -- the meme. Though original ordering seems a little off, so I'm going to try this variation.
What I've recently finished: Where "recently" means since the last post. A Stranger to Command, Sherwood Smith, an excellent prequel to Crown Duel. There's a little overlap in matter with the first section of Inda, but the different themes and cultural changes with time make it not feel at all like a retread. The requirement that it conclude with the opening state of Crown Duel does make the resolution a little bit of a soft landing, though. But the journey is carried through quite well -- recommended. ¶ Then a reread of Crown Duel, this time the Firebird omnibus instead of the separate volumes of Crown Duel + Court Duel. The story is tasty in either form. ¶ The Queen's Necklace, Alexandre Dumas -- which turned out to be a middle volume of a five-book series of historical romances circling around Marie Antoinette, framed by a long-term conspiracy to overthrown the French monarchy. In this installment, the larger political plot taken from history works well without prior knowledge, but the backstory of Dumas's invented characters would have been useful. ¶ River Marked, Patricia Briggs, the sixth Mercy Thompson book, in which her ancestry and nature are finally given more consideration than Mercy, at any rate, has been willing to before now. The plotty plot is unexpectedly straightforward (most of the other books have at least one more twisty turn in them) but at least it's not the most problematic book in the series, and the further opening of the world is welcome. ¶ Mahôka Kôkô no Rettôsei volume 6, Tsutomu Satô, in which our hero's revealed powers and limitations keep growing, as do the stakes (warning: is only the first half of the story). Still cheesy, still addictive. ¶ Zero no Tsuskaima ("Zero's familiar") v1, Noboro Yamaguchi, which is even more blatantly derivative of Harry Potter than usual for Extruded Fantasy Product with a school setting. It's also pretty dumb and the supposedly sympathetic hero can be a real creep when he sets his mind to actually doing anything. (The not!Dumbledore is even worse.) Amusingly, secondary sources, mined mainly for names so far, include Norse mythology and the works of Alexandre Dumas. ¶ Chu's Day, a picture book mentioned solely to note that Neil Giaman's text isn't really up to snuff for the genre (the ending doesn't come close to landing) but Adam Rex's art is primo.
What I'm reading now: Prose: I am Apache by Tanya Landman, a historical novel loosely based on the early life of woman warrior Lozen. Two thirds of the way through, whites have shown up and built a nearby fort, which means this cannot end well. The details of training for novice warriors comes through especially vividly. ¶ Poetry: The Book of Elizabethan Verse ed. William Stanley Braithwaite. The name is a little misleading: it actually covers everyone from Wyatt through Herrick, but as a title The Book of Tudor and Early Stuart Verse doesn't actually have the same snap. It's, btw, the first of four anthologies, where Restoration Verse covers Milton through Pope, Georgian is Gray through Keats, and Victorian is Tennyson through the century. But as for this volume, while it concentrates on lyrics, especially love poems, it's large enough that other modes and voices are coming through. Better: I'm meeting several poems outside of today's anthology war-horses. The arrangement of associative variation by theme, without solid boundaries by chronology or genre, makes this pleasant to read as well. Recommended. ¶ Language study: Japanese in Depth, Shigekatsu Yamauchi, a collection of columns from the Daily Yomiuri covering various introductory topics about the Japanese language for English language learners. Contra the name, the depth is not very far, but the topics are wide-ranging enough I'm picking up a fair amount, especially about idioms. (Night on the Galactic Railroad remains ongoing -- not surprising for something where a page counts as a my study for the day -- though it's not actually been daily, lately. My bad.)
What I'll read next: For prose, probably Joseph Balsamo, Alexandre Dumas, the first of those Marie Antoinnette romances -- or rather, the first half of it, as the jinormous thing is usually split in two, with the second part called Memoirs of a Physician (much like Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask are usually split off from The Viscount of Bragalonne). Unfortunately, it is not at all easy to find a clean ebook of this: the archive.org scans are pretty dirty with all the usual OCR issues, though at least prose fares better than poetry, and Project Gutenberg hasn't gotten to this yet -- and it's not commonly found in local libraries. The title character, btw, is also known as the Count of Cagliostro. For poetry, possibly return to the half-finished Poetica Erotica, or maybe on to The Book of Restoration Verse.
What I've recently finished: Where "recently" means since the last post. A Stranger to Command, Sherwood Smith, an excellent prequel to Crown Duel. There's a little overlap in matter with the first section of Inda, but the different themes and cultural changes with time make it not feel at all like a retread. The requirement that it conclude with the opening state of Crown Duel does make the resolution a little bit of a soft landing, though. But the journey is carried through quite well -- recommended. ¶ Then a reread of Crown Duel, this time the Firebird omnibus instead of the separate volumes of Crown Duel + Court Duel. The story is tasty in either form. ¶ The Queen's Necklace, Alexandre Dumas -- which turned out to be a middle volume of a five-book series of historical romances circling around Marie Antoinette, framed by a long-term conspiracy to overthrown the French monarchy. In this installment, the larger political plot taken from history works well without prior knowledge, but the backstory of Dumas's invented characters would have been useful. ¶ River Marked, Patricia Briggs, the sixth Mercy Thompson book, in which her ancestry and nature are finally given more consideration than Mercy, at any rate, has been willing to before now. The plotty plot is unexpectedly straightforward (most of the other books have at least one more twisty turn in them) but at least it's not the most problematic book in the series, and the further opening of the world is welcome. ¶ Mahôka Kôkô no Rettôsei volume 6, Tsutomu Satô, in which our hero's revealed powers and limitations keep growing, as do the stakes (warning: is only the first half of the story). Still cheesy, still addictive. ¶ Zero no Tsuskaima ("Zero's familiar") v1, Noboro Yamaguchi, which is even more blatantly derivative of Harry Potter than usual for Extruded Fantasy Product with a school setting. It's also pretty dumb and the supposedly sympathetic hero can be a real creep when he sets his mind to actually doing anything. (The not!Dumbledore is even worse.) Amusingly, secondary sources, mined mainly for names so far, include Norse mythology and the works of Alexandre Dumas. ¶ Chu's Day, a picture book mentioned solely to note that Neil Giaman's text isn't really up to snuff for the genre (the ending doesn't come close to landing) but Adam Rex's art is primo.
What I'm reading now: Prose: I am Apache by Tanya Landman, a historical novel loosely based on the early life of woman warrior Lozen. Two thirds of the way through, whites have shown up and built a nearby fort, which means this cannot end well. The details of training for novice warriors comes through especially vividly. ¶ Poetry: The Book of Elizabethan Verse ed. William Stanley Braithwaite. The name is a little misleading: it actually covers everyone from Wyatt through Herrick, but as a title The Book of Tudor and Early Stuart Verse doesn't actually have the same snap. It's, btw, the first of four anthologies, where Restoration Verse covers Milton through Pope, Georgian is Gray through Keats, and Victorian is Tennyson through the century. But as for this volume, while it concentrates on lyrics, especially love poems, it's large enough that other modes and voices are coming through. Better: I'm meeting several poems outside of today's anthology war-horses. The arrangement of associative variation by theme, without solid boundaries by chronology or genre, makes this pleasant to read as well. Recommended. ¶ Language study: Japanese in Depth, Shigekatsu Yamauchi, a collection of columns from the Daily Yomiuri covering various introductory topics about the Japanese language for English language learners. Contra the name, the depth is not very far, but the topics are wide-ranging enough I'm picking up a fair amount, especially about idioms. (Night on the Galactic Railroad remains ongoing -- not surprising for something where a page counts as a my study for the day -- though it's not actually been daily, lately. My bad.)
What I'll read next: For prose, probably Joseph Balsamo, Alexandre Dumas, the first of those Marie Antoinnette romances -- or rather, the first half of it, as the jinormous thing is usually split in two, with the second part called Memoirs of a Physician (much like Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask are usually split off from The Viscount of Bragalonne). Unfortunately, it is not at all easy to find a clean ebook of this: the archive.org scans are pretty dirty with all the usual OCR issues, though at least prose fares better than poetry, and Project Gutenberg hasn't gotten to this yet -- and it's not commonly found in local libraries. The title character, btw, is also known as the Count of Cagliostro. For poetry, possibly return to the half-finished Poetica Erotica, or maybe on to The Book of Restoration Verse.
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Date: 13 February 2013 02:42 pm (UTC)(And yeah, the last line is total fan service. When I wrote it, I thought it would just appear on the website--which it did for a time.)
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Date: 13 February 2013 02:52 pm (UTC)---L.