Reading Wednesday
Apr. 22nd, 2015 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livRecently read Tea with the black dragon by RA MacAvoy. (c) 1983 by RA MacAvoy, published Bantam Books 1983, ISBN 0-553-23205-3. I picked this up at a con, quite possibly an Eastercon ages ago but it might have been the recent Worldcon. I think I looked for it because Jo Walton (whose tastes overlap substantially with mine) praised it. And because the premise is just wonderful, though in some ways spoilery; I can imagine it being better to read the book without looking at the blurb.
Anyway, Tea with the Black Dragon is exactly my sort of book, it's really original, outside the groove fantasy, and the characterization is just beautiful. And it was the perfect contrast to Imajica; it's a tiny short little book where every word counts and the emotions are so real that you can empathize with the characters without ever being directly told how they're feeling.
It has an odd sort of fold in the middle; the first third is almost all character, it's a meeting between two people and a lot of dialogue and getting to know them and seeing their relationship develop. Absolutely gorgeous, and even if you find that kind of thing dull it's 50 pages. Then suddenly one of the POV characters vanishes and it's a pacey thriller with kidnapping and skullduggery and a desperate race to rescue people before they're killed. Still told in the same sparse, very much show-not-tell style. And it has some of the most realistic violence I've ever encountered, nothing about it is in fact thrilling, not pleasurably exciting or even gory, it's just nasty and painful. A character gets shot and is realistically incapacitated and spends the rest of the story in really plausible pain; there's neither a grandiose description of how painful it was nor the usual skimming over how difficult it is to actually keep going after being seriously injured. There's a truly distressing torture scene in similar vein, purely brutal without being at all glamourized or needing to invent new extreme ways of inflicting pain.
I love the central conceit of the book, the way Mayland Long is introduced and it's only gradually revealed that what seemed at first like metaphor is literally true. And his relationship with Martha Macnamara is one of the most beautifully romantic things I've read in a long time, without at all being over-emotional. I like the secondary characters too, the bad guys the people who are not particularly special but doing their best in a situation out of their control and falling more or less short.
Some of the setting feels kiiiiind of orientalist, I have to say, it's about zen and tao and the Black Dragon of the title is a Chinese dragon, with these things packaged for a presumed western Anglo audience. I liked it a lot, it's refreshing compared to the kind of vaguely Celtic elves on motorcycles trope of early urban fantasy. But I can imagine other readers finding this kind of thing really annoying.
Currently reading The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It's one of the genuine Hugo nominees for best novel this year, and I'm looking forward to discussing it, including at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bookatorium. I happened to be in Keele when I finished TwtBD and didn't have anything to hand that would fit in the next slot for my Bringing Up Burns challenge. Given I want to read at least some of the award-nominated stuff, Hugos especially, before Worldcon, I was happy to step aside from the challenge and buy the ebook of this from Waterstones. (It was reduced to £4.50 which I consider a reasonable price for a book published this year, especially since Tor do the ethical thing and sell non-DRM ebooks.)
I'm enjoying it a lot so far, it's a really sweet traditional fantasy about a young half-goblin who finds himself emperor of the Elflands. The worldbuilding and politics feel really deep, it's not just D&D-land. And it's highly readable. I don't love the thing where the goblins have literally black skin and the elves literally white, in the sense that our mixed protagonist is described as having grey skin, particularly with the lower status black-skinned goblins being oh so much better at gender and class equality than the higher status white-skinned elves. Also it's making a bit too much of the 18-year-old young man who has never interacted with a woman since his mother died when he was a child, obsessively sexualizing all possible female characters. I predict he's going to fall in love with the opera singer, though I kind of hope I'm wrong about that (don't tell me). Anyway I've read about a third and I'm excited to find time somehow to read on.
Up next Probably still Suite française by Irène Némirovsky or Atonement by Ian McEwan. Plus the rest of the giant pile of marking that seems to have fallen on my head with barely a break from the last lot...
Anyway, Tea with the Black Dragon is exactly my sort of book, it's really original, outside the groove fantasy, and the characterization is just beautiful. And it was the perfect contrast to Imajica; it's a tiny short little book where every word counts and the emotions are so real that you can empathize with the characters without ever being directly told how they're feeling.
It has an odd sort of fold in the middle; the first third is almost all character, it's a meeting between two people and a lot of dialogue and getting to know them and seeing their relationship develop. Absolutely gorgeous, and even if you find that kind of thing dull it's 50 pages. Then suddenly one of the POV characters vanishes and it's a pacey thriller with kidnapping and skullduggery and a desperate race to rescue people before they're killed. Still told in the same sparse, very much show-not-tell style. And it has some of the most realistic violence I've ever encountered, nothing about it is in fact thrilling, not pleasurably exciting or even gory, it's just nasty and painful. A character gets shot and is realistically incapacitated and spends the rest of the story in really plausible pain; there's neither a grandiose description of how painful it was nor the usual skimming over how difficult it is to actually keep going after being seriously injured. There's a truly distressing torture scene in similar vein, purely brutal without being at all glamourized or needing to invent new extreme ways of inflicting pain.
I love the central conceit of the book, the way Mayland Long is introduced and it's only gradually revealed that what seemed at first like metaphor is literally true. And his relationship with Martha Macnamara is one of the most beautifully romantic things I've read in a long time, without at all being over-emotional. I like the secondary characters too, the bad guys the people who are not particularly special but doing their best in a situation out of their control and falling more or less short.
Some of the setting feels kiiiiind of orientalist, I have to say, it's about zen and tao and the Black Dragon of the title is a Chinese dragon, with these things packaged for a presumed western Anglo audience. I liked it a lot, it's refreshing compared to the kind of vaguely Celtic elves on motorcycles trope of early urban fantasy. But I can imagine other readers finding this kind of thing really annoying.
Currently reading The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It's one of the genuine Hugo nominees for best novel this year, and I'm looking forward to discussing it, including at
bookatorium. I happened to be in Keele when I finished TwtBD and didn't have anything to hand that would fit in the next slot for my Bringing Up Burns challenge. Given I want to read at least some of the award-nominated stuff, Hugos especially, before Worldcon, I was happy to step aside from the challenge and buy the ebook of this from Waterstones. (It was reduced to £4.50 which I consider a reasonable price for a book published this year, especially since Tor do the ethical thing and sell non-DRM ebooks.) I'm enjoying it a lot so far, it's a really sweet traditional fantasy about a young half-goblin who finds himself emperor of the Elflands. The worldbuilding and politics feel really deep, it's not just D&D-land. And it's highly readable. I don't love the thing where the goblins have literally black skin and the elves literally white, in the sense that our mixed protagonist is described as having grey skin, particularly with the lower status black-skinned goblins being oh so much better at gender and class equality than the higher status white-skinned elves. Also it's making a bit too much of the 18-year-old young man who has never interacted with a woman since his mother died when he was a child, obsessively sexualizing all possible female characters. I predict he's going to fall in love with the opera singer, though I kind of hope I'm wrong about that (don't tell me). Anyway I've read about a third and I'm excited to find time somehow to read on.
Up next Probably still Suite française by Irène Némirovsky or Atonement by Ian McEwan. Plus the rest of the giant pile of marking that seems to have fallen on my head with barely a break from the last lot...
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-22 03:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-24 11:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-22 06:03 pm (UTC)I may have read that one ;) Or more than one.
Goblin Emperor sounds very interesting, as does Tea With the Black Dragon. In fact Tea's incapacitated character overlaps with something I've been plotting out, which may make it worth reading just to see how they handle that.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-24 12:11 pm (UTC)The thing is, I do like the early, pre-Paranormal urban fantasy stuff, even when it's a bit too much American take on Celtic. But as often happens a few really great examples (I'm most fond of War for the Oaks which is literally elves on motorbikes) made it a bit of a cliché.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-24 12:50 pm (UTC)*The annoying thing being I really rather liked Lackey's solo Diana Tregarde fantasies, but they stopped mid-series and the co-written spin-offs started up instead.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-23 07:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-04-24 12:14 pm (UTC)