book reviews: unreal books
Nov. 9th, 2012 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraHad that dream last night where I read the first two books of this amazing brilliant trilogy and was at the library trying to figure out if the third one was out yet but it was not and I will never get to read it because these books do not actually exist. (There's another variant where I'm delighted to discover at the comic shop that some series that I thought had ended has new issues out! A series that never existed in the first place, of course.) The brilliant plot of these brilliant books sadly did not survive an attempt at waking reconstruction - I think there may have been ghosts, and international spies.
Josh has discovered that it is much easier for him to read books on his phone than in the traditional printed format and so I am now reading some books that we both want to read on my phone. I still really dislike not being able to quickly flip back - don't get me wrong, text searching is *awesome* if you have some good keywords, but my brain still maps by "distance ago" too, and the little slider bar is inadequate for that. Anyways, grump grump. I think for anything I wanted to really dig into I'd want both electronic and paper copies.
Anyways, what have I actually read?
Ready Player One is a near-future scifi 80s nostalgia-fest. It was interesting to read with Josh as it falls right into the generally-invisible gap between our ages (or more specifically, the ages we were in the 80s), in the extent to which it was mostly primary nostalgia for him but often secondary nostalgia for me ("received nostalgia", the things older geeks introduced me to in college). (Also I was a *girl* in the 80s which was also different.) Anyways, this was good. Well-structured, and I thought it managed to do a surprisingly even-handed job of thinking about the central question about the pros and cons of virtuality. Recommended.
The Wise Man's Fear is the second of the Kingkiller trilogy, the first of which I read and reviewed recently. I liked Wise Man's Fear a lot more than Name of the Windbag - there were several laugh-out-loud funny bits, and there's *potentially* some interesting stuff going on with narrative. The story-Kvothe-is-telling still has the problem where Kvothe is the only dynamic character and no one else has any plot or arc or sometimes even *motives*, but in fact the secondary characters seem much more alive in the *frame* story, the present day of Kote in the inn, and so maybe the cardboardness in the tale is a deliberate artifact of it Being Told? I don't particularly love that as an authorial choice, but it's more interesting than if it's just bad writing. There are definitely other deliberate writing choices going on that were not at all to my taste; I had to skim all the parts where Kvothe really gets talking with Denna and Felurian because the versifying squicked me. Still too long and I can't really like anything where the author seems to think that *women* are different than *people*, but I enjoyed it enough to read some online discussion of it (where they caught the sorts of things I might have caught if I had the first one to look back at, or was able to flip back and forth easily within it, grump grump), and I'm now sort of looking forward to the third one, which I understand we'll get in 2015 or something.
Josh has discovered that it is much easier for him to read books on his phone than in the traditional printed format and so I am now reading some books that we both want to read on my phone. I still really dislike not being able to quickly flip back - don't get me wrong, text searching is *awesome* if you have some good keywords, but my brain still maps by "distance ago" too, and the little slider bar is inadequate for that. Anyways, grump grump. I think for anything I wanted to really dig into I'd want both electronic and paper copies.
Anyways, what have I actually read?
Ready Player One is a near-future scifi 80s nostalgia-fest. It was interesting to read with Josh as it falls right into the generally-invisible gap between our ages (or more specifically, the ages we were in the 80s), in the extent to which it was mostly primary nostalgia for him but often secondary nostalgia for me ("received nostalgia", the things older geeks introduced me to in college). (Also I was a *girl* in the 80s which was also different.) Anyways, this was good. Well-structured, and I thought it managed to do a surprisingly even-handed job of thinking about the central question about the pros and cons of virtuality. Recommended.
The Wise Man's Fear is the second of the Kingkiller trilogy, the first of which I read and reviewed recently. I liked Wise Man's Fear a lot more than Name of the Windbag - there were several laugh-out-loud funny bits, and there's *potentially* some interesting stuff going on with narrative. The story-Kvothe-is-telling still has the problem where Kvothe is the only dynamic character and no one else has any plot or arc or sometimes even *motives*, but in fact the secondary characters seem much more alive in the *frame* story, the present day of Kote in the inn, and so maybe the cardboardness in the tale is a deliberate artifact of it Being Told? I don't particularly love that as an authorial choice, but it's more interesting than if it's just bad writing. There are definitely other deliberate writing choices going on that were not at all to my taste; I had to skim all the parts where Kvothe really gets talking with Denna and Felurian because the versifying squicked me. Still too long and I can't really like anything where the author seems to think that *women* are different than *people*, but I enjoyed it enough to read some online discussion of it (where they caught the sorts of things I might have caught if I had the first one to look back at, or was able to flip back and forth easily within it, grump grump), and I'm now sort of looking forward to the third one, which I understand we'll get in 2015 or something.
