Book: An autumn war
Sep. 15th, 2010 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Daniel Abraham
Details: (c) 2008 Daniel Abraham; Pub Hachette Digital 2008; ISBN 978-0-7481-2077-2
Verdict: An autumn war is just heartbreaking.
Reasons for reading it: It's the third in the Long Price quartet, and I enjoyed the first two though I wasn't absolutely wild about them.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel said that the series gets better as it goes along, and I certainly did care enough to want to know how the story continues.
How it came into my hands: The internet, I think probably in the person ofpapersky, informed me that, in typical publisher stupidity, there is never going to be a paperback edition of the last two books in the series to match the first two that rysmiel gave to me. I'm blatantly not going to buy or read a double volume in hardback, so I thought this was a good candidate for my first ebook purchase. Although I have some reservations about Abrahams so far, I like his books well enough to want to give him money.
It took quite a lot of poking around to find the book and figure out how to buy it and download it. Partly because a lot of booksellers seem strangely reluctant to actually tell you what the format of their ebooks is (so how can you tell if it's compatible with your particular brand of ereader?), and partly because the DRM nonsense means you have to download some stupid program from Adobe and register with several different companies, the seller of the ereader, Adobe, and the bookseller, and then fiddle around a bit to actually make the book show up on your device. But once I'd got through that, it was a perfectly pleasant experience reading it. I felt I'd got my money's worth; the ebook edition is formatted and proofread to the standard I'd expect from a professionally published paper book. I found that reading on screen was perfectly easy on my eyes, and the shape of the device is very convenient. I actually got sucked into reading in bed, which I pretty much don't do with codex books, partly because the story was so exciting, but mainly because it's a lot easier to read in bed with something so light and operated one-handed. Also definitely easier for reading on a crowded train!
There were only a couple of downsides: the biggest was that I felt a little uncomfortable reading from an expensive electronic gadget in the bus station after dark. Also, the page-turning is fast, but not quite fast enough; I found that I was losing my place in a sentence while waiting for an appreciable fraction of a second to move from one page to the next. The machine rather wants you to read linearly; I usually do that anyway, start at the beginning and work steadily through to the end, but I do occasionally want to reread a significant or complex passage, or flip ahead a few pages out of curiosity. If you turn off the device and come back to it, it sends you to approximately where you left off, but not exactly; I don't think it's any slower to find your place than it is to flick through a book, though. It takes slightly under a minute to go from a cold start to actually reading, which is less than ideal (I have a bad habit of reading while I'm waiting for a bus for 3 minutes, or whatever), but it's not too bad either; it's balanced by being quicker to grab out of my handbag than a normal paperback would be to get out of my backpack.
I generally don't like apocalyptic / Last Battle type novels, especially not if they're sequels to a secondary world fantasy where I have become invested in the setting, and I really don't want to witness the destruction of said world. However, An autumn war handles this theme extraordinarily well. It packs an amazing emotional punch, and I'm really looking forward to reading how things will go after the destruction of civilization depicted here. I even cared about the extended descriptions of military issues and encounters! The technique of bringing in the Galts' point of view as well as that of the Khaiem works incredibly well. It's a tragedy, where it's obvious from almost the beginning that everything is headed towards disaster, but there's still a lot of tension because you don't know exactly which form of possible disasters will prevail, and there's plenty of short-term hope, and the viewpoint trick means that you really don't want either side to be defeated. The characters I'd come to care about from the earlier volumes are clearly vulnerable and mortal, without any cheating; this makes the book both exciting and moving.
One thing I really like is the balance of ordinary interpersonal stuff with a backdrop of world-shaking events, and aAW handles this about as well as I've ever seen it done. There's a sense of proportion, the simultaneous sense that whether someone's loved ones live or die is just one more statistic in the widespread slaughter, yet still of immeasurable importance to that particular character. There's some really interesting character development, people with complex motivations and loyalties, and a really strong sense of the damage that understandable yet wrong or treacherous decisions can cause. I also appreciated the fact that the familiar characters from the earlier volumes are middle-aged by the time of aAW, and seem believably more mature than their younger selves.
aAW succeeds in being moving and sad rather than just depressing, though the subject matter is extremely dire. All in all it's a really accomplished book. The weight of the earlier two volumes is definitely needed to give this sequel its power, and though it's a much better book, it wasn't exactly a chore to read the first two either.
Details: (c) 2008 Daniel Abraham; Pub Hachette Digital 2008; ISBN 978-0-7481-2077-2
Verdict: An autumn war is just heartbreaking.
Reasons for reading it: It's the third in the Long Price quartet, and I enjoyed the first two though I wasn't absolutely wild about them.
rysmiel said that the series gets better as it goes along, and I certainly did care enough to want to know how the story continues. How it came into my hands: The internet, I think probably in the person of
papersky, informed me that, in typical publisher stupidity, there is never going to be a paperback edition of the last two books in the series to match the first two that rysmiel gave to me. I'm blatantly not going to buy or read a double volume in hardback, so I thought this was a good candidate for my first ebook purchase. Although I have some reservations about Abrahams so far, I like his books well enough to want to give him money. It took quite a lot of poking around to find the book and figure out how to buy it and download it. Partly because a lot of booksellers seem strangely reluctant to actually tell you what the format of their ebooks is (so how can you tell if it's compatible with your particular brand of ereader?), and partly because the DRM nonsense means you have to download some stupid program from Adobe and register with several different companies, the seller of the ereader, Adobe, and the bookseller, and then fiddle around a bit to actually make the book show up on your device. But once I'd got through that, it was a perfectly pleasant experience reading it. I felt I'd got my money's worth; the ebook edition is formatted and proofread to the standard I'd expect from a professionally published paper book. I found that reading on screen was perfectly easy on my eyes, and the shape of the device is very convenient. I actually got sucked into reading in bed, which I pretty much don't do with codex books, partly because the story was so exciting, but mainly because it's a lot easier to read in bed with something so light and operated one-handed. Also definitely easier for reading on a crowded train!
There were only a couple of downsides: the biggest was that I felt a little uncomfortable reading from an expensive electronic gadget in the bus station after dark. Also, the page-turning is fast, but not quite fast enough; I found that I was losing my place in a sentence while waiting for an appreciable fraction of a second to move from one page to the next. The machine rather wants you to read linearly; I usually do that anyway, start at the beginning and work steadily through to the end, but I do occasionally want to reread a significant or complex passage, or flip ahead a few pages out of curiosity. If you turn off the device and come back to it, it sends you to approximately where you left off, but not exactly; I don't think it's any slower to find your place than it is to flick through a book, though. It takes slightly under a minute to go from a cold start to actually reading, which is less than ideal (I have a bad habit of reading while I'm waiting for a bus for 3 minutes, or whatever), but it's not too bad either; it's balanced by being quicker to grab out of my handbag than a normal paperback would be to get out of my backpack.
I generally don't like apocalyptic / Last Battle type novels, especially not if they're sequels to a secondary world fantasy where I have become invested in the setting, and I really don't want to witness the destruction of said world. However, An autumn war handles this theme extraordinarily well. It packs an amazing emotional punch, and I'm really looking forward to reading how things will go after the destruction of civilization depicted here. I even cared about the extended descriptions of military issues and encounters! The technique of bringing in the Galts' point of view as well as that of the Khaiem works incredibly well. It's a tragedy, where it's obvious from almost the beginning that everything is headed towards disaster, but there's still a lot of tension because you don't know exactly which form of possible disasters will prevail, and there's plenty of short-term hope, and the viewpoint trick means that you really don't want either side to be defeated. The characters I'd come to care about from the earlier volumes are clearly vulnerable and mortal, without any cheating; this makes the book both exciting and moving.
One thing I really like is the balance of ordinary interpersonal stuff with a backdrop of world-shaking events, and aAW handles this about as well as I've ever seen it done. There's a sense of proportion, the simultaneous sense that whether someone's loved ones live or die is just one more statistic in the widespread slaughter, yet still of immeasurable importance to that particular character. There's some really interesting character development, people with complex motivations and loyalties, and a really strong sense of the damage that understandable yet wrong or treacherous decisions can cause. I also appreciated the fact that the familiar characters from the earlier volumes are middle-aged by the time of aAW, and seem believably more mature than their younger selves.
aAW succeeds in being moving and sad rather than just depressing, though the subject matter is extremely dire. All in all it's a really accomplished book. The weight of the earlier two volumes is definitely needed to give this sequel its power, and though it's a much better book, it wasn't exactly a chore to read the first two either.
