Reading Wednesday 2/02
Feb. 2nd, 2022 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI'm happily working my way through this year's stash of Chanukah / birthday / Christmas presents
Recently(ish) read:City of Brass by SA Chakraborty. (c) SA Chakraborty 2017, pub 2018 Harper Voyager, ISBN 978-0-00-823942-8. cjwatson, who is very enthusiastic about the series, gave me this. It's very much my sort of book, high fantasy in an original setting, and I found it quite unputdownable though I didn't like the central romance.
Not surprisingly I loooooove the setting. It's fantasy-equivalent vaguely ye olde culturally Muslim middle east, in the same way that conventional post-Tolkien fantasy is vaguely Christian Europe in the not that temporally specific olden days. I love the whole civilization of different tribes of Djinn, and I love that the book doesn't laboriously explain its references, it just assumes that readers can engage standard fantasy-reader protocols and build it up from context.
CoB is incredibly pacy, I kept wanting to read just one more chapter to find out what would happen next, and there was lots of excitement and twists and very little pointless exposition. The story as a whole is not hugely original; it follows well-worn tropes, the human street urchin turns out to have magical powers and becomes tangled up in the court politics of powerful magical beings. But the originality of the setting and the strong storytelling makes it sing.
Chakraborty is very much of the school of modern fantasy writers who cut their teeth on fanfic. There's Diversity! And lots of very intense emotions and the style of writing about romance and sex that you find in good fanfic. However, I was really thrown out of the book by the attempt to set up a romance between Nahri the human (or is she?!!!) protagonist, and the djinn Dara. Dara is clearly supposed to be a hot bad boy like the love interest in any paranormal romance from Twilight onwards. But he's not just sexy-bad, he's actively evil. It's one of those books where there's some convoluted reason why the mass murderer isn't technically morally responsible for having committed genocide, but I couldn't buy Dara's back story as 'ooh, dark past!'.
In general, the book attempts a kind of, geopolitics is complicated, there's right and wrong on both sides, sort of stance, but I felt didn't quite pull that off, partly because the narrative takes far too much glee in detailed descriptions of the atrocities committed by both colonizers and terrorists trying to throw off their yoke. It's definitely good to break out of the mould of a war between the Forces of Evil and the Good Guys, but instead of moral ambiguity I was left with the feeling that I wanted absolutely all of them to lose.
My favourite character is Ali, the young, overly pious warrior prince whose major flaw is that he wants everything to be that simple contest between Right and Wrong, and politics just doesn't work like that. But I don't like that he is cast as the third leg in a love triangle. I can't decide if I'm more annoyed by the fact that the narrative wants Nahri to reject likeable if misguided Ali in favour of (literally) smouldering but inconveniently evil Dara, or the fact that the really promising friendship between Ali and Nahri turns into boring old romantic rival tropes. Or possibly the way the love triangle is resolved at the end by judicious killing people off.
Anyway, CoB is good, I can see what the hype is about, and I'm probably going to look out for the rest of the trilogy,
Rashi's daughters I: Joheved by Maggie Anton. (c) Maggie Anton 2005; pub 2007 Plume; ISBN 978-0-452-28862-1. So my little sister found this trilogy for me and correctly identified it as the most Liv-bait book it's possible to write.
It's absolutely obvious from the author bio and notes that Anton has a very similar Jewish intellectual heritage to mine. And she's written this absolutely typical women-centric historical fantasy – the blurb says 'for fans of Tracy Chevalier' and that's a pretty good description of the target audience, except that I don't really care for Chevalier, so perhaps it should say, for fans of TC and especially forliv. The really good thing about Joheved is that Anton knows at least as much as I do about Mediaeval Jewish life. Which isn't exactly a high bar, but it's one that many other similar accessible historical romances don't meet.
Anton makes a credible effort to present her characters as people of their time, but also sympathetic to the modern feminist reader. And that includes the sex scenes; she's trying really hard to make the kind of standard romance-novel-good-sex descriptions somehow work for characters in the 11th century. She almost succeeds; I only needed to suspend disbelief the smallest amount. I love her characterization of Rashi, Joheved and her sisters and their love interests. And she's a bit tempted to infodump all her Historical Research, but I can forgive that for a fun, readable novel. Rashi's family invent (or at least popularize) champagne! Of course she has Rashi teach his daughters what amounts to 'Feminist / sex-positive Talmud 101' across the course of the book, I could basically predict all the sources she was going to discuss. I thought the vaguely pornographic fake Talmud tractate was an invention but no, it actually exists.
The weaker part of the book IMO is the original Christian characters. Anton is very keen to convince the reader to reject the stereotype of all of Mediaeval Christianity being about constant anti-Jewish violence. And I'm sure she's right that in the early Medieaval period at least, in some parts of northern Europe, there were at least as good relationships between Jews and Christians as between Jews and Muslims in the more famous setting of Al-Andalus. But the Christian friend characters are really quite cringey, from the central European slaves reluctantly (of course, they are good guys!) acquired by the household, to the Christian childhood friend who has to go into sex work because Christian society was much more oppressive of women than the Jewish community.
That aside, this book is absolutely perfect id-fic for me, even though I don't on the whole like historical romance as a genre. I'm looking forward to the rest of the trilogy, and much impressed with my sister for predicting my tastes so well.
Currently reading: The order of time by Carlo Rovelli. This is a slim, very poetic popular physics book, recommended to me by an English professor, so I put it on my wishlist and was duly gifted it.
Up next: The song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Another present.
Recently(ish) read:
cjwatson, who is very enthusiastic about the series, gave me this. It's very much my sort of book, high fantasy in an original setting, and I found it quite unputdownable though I didn't like the central romance.Not surprisingly I loooooove the setting. It's fantasy-equivalent vaguely ye olde culturally Muslim middle east, in the same way that conventional post-Tolkien fantasy is vaguely Christian Europe in the not that temporally specific olden days. I love the whole civilization of different tribes of Djinn, and I love that the book doesn't laboriously explain its references, it just assumes that readers can engage standard fantasy-reader protocols and build it up from context.
CoB is incredibly pacy, I kept wanting to read just one more chapter to find out what would happen next, and there was lots of excitement and twists and very little pointless exposition. The story as a whole is not hugely original; it follows well-worn tropes, the human street urchin turns out to have magical powers and becomes tangled up in the court politics of powerful magical beings. But the originality of the setting and the strong storytelling makes it sing.
Chakraborty is very much of the school of modern fantasy writers who cut their teeth on fanfic. There's Diversity! And lots of very intense emotions and the style of writing about romance and sex that you find in good fanfic. However, I was really thrown out of the book by the attempt to set up a romance between Nahri the human (or is she?!!!) protagonist, and the djinn Dara. Dara is clearly supposed to be a hot bad boy like the love interest in any paranormal romance from Twilight onwards. But he's not just sexy-bad, he's actively evil. It's one of those books where there's some convoluted reason why the mass murderer isn't technically morally responsible for having committed genocide, but I couldn't buy Dara's back story as 'ooh, dark past!'.
In general, the book attempts a kind of, geopolitics is complicated, there's right and wrong on both sides, sort of stance, but I felt didn't quite pull that off, partly because the narrative takes far too much glee in detailed descriptions of the atrocities committed by both colonizers and terrorists trying to throw off their yoke. It's definitely good to break out of the mould of a war between the Forces of Evil and the Good Guys, but instead of moral ambiguity I was left with the feeling that I wanted absolutely all of them to lose.
My favourite character is Ali, the young, overly pious warrior prince whose major flaw is that he wants everything to be that simple contest between Right and Wrong, and politics just doesn't work like that. But I don't like that he is cast as the third leg in a love triangle. I can't decide if I'm more annoyed by the fact that the narrative wants Nahri to reject likeable if misguided Ali in favour of (literally) smouldering but inconveniently evil Dara, or the fact that the really promising friendship between Ali and Nahri turns into boring old romantic rival tropes. Or possibly the way the love triangle is resolved at the end by judicious killing people off.
Anyway, CoB is good, I can see what the hype is about, and I'm probably going to look out for the rest of the trilogy,
It's absolutely obvious from the author bio and notes that Anton has a very similar Jewish intellectual heritage to mine. And she's written this absolutely typical women-centric historical fantasy – the blurb says 'for fans of Tracy Chevalier' and that's a pretty good description of the target audience, except that I don't really care for Chevalier, so perhaps it should say, for fans of TC and especially for
liv. The really good thing about Joheved is that Anton knows at least as much as I do about Mediaeval Jewish life. Which isn't exactly a high bar, but it's one that many other similar accessible historical romances don't meet. Anton makes a credible effort to present her characters as people of their time, but also sympathetic to the modern feminist reader. And that includes the sex scenes; she's trying really hard to make the kind of standard romance-novel-good-sex descriptions somehow work for characters in the 11th century. She almost succeeds; I only needed to suspend disbelief the smallest amount. I love her characterization of Rashi, Joheved and her sisters and their love interests. And she's a bit tempted to infodump all her Historical Research, but I can forgive that for a fun, readable novel. Rashi's family invent (or at least popularize) champagne! Of course she has Rashi teach his daughters what amounts to 'Feminist / sex-positive Talmud 101' across the course of the book, I could basically predict all the sources she was going to discuss. I thought the vaguely pornographic fake Talmud tractate was an invention but no, it actually exists.
The weaker part of the book IMO is the original Christian characters. Anton is very keen to convince the reader to reject the stereotype of all of Mediaeval Christianity being about constant anti-Jewish violence. And I'm sure she's right that in the early Medieaval period at least, in some parts of northern Europe, there were at least as good relationships between Jews and Christians as between Jews and Muslims in the more famous setting of Al-Andalus. But the Christian friend characters are really quite cringey, from the central European slaves reluctantly (of course, they are good guys!) acquired by the household, to the Christian childhood friend who has to go into sex work because Christian society was much more oppressive of women than the Jewish community.
That aside, this book is absolutely perfect id-fic for me, even though I don't on the whole like historical romance as a genre. I'm looking forward to the rest of the trilogy, and much impressed with my sister for predicting my tastes so well.
Currently reading: The order of time by Carlo Rovelli. This is a slim, very poetic popular physics book, recommended to me by an English professor, so I put it on my wishlist and was duly gifted it.
Up next: The song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Another present.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-03 01:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-04 07:33 pm (UTC)If I recall correctly (which is absolutely not reliable, were the French leaving Egypt at the beginning? Timelines in Daevabad are definitely vague, but that would put the human parts ~1800.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-02-04 07:34 pm (UTC)