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Sep. 10th, 2009 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseI've been doing a lot of rereading of Pratchett or reading of new but relatively light romance (Jennifer Crusie), so I don't have a lot to say about a lot of new books. Just started Red Seas Under Red Skies for a total change of pace, though, and I imagine I'll have a lot to say about that.
However, there was one older reading I meant to say a few things about around Mammothfail*; that being, obviously, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Spirit Ring. (The book Bujold tried to use as her get out of fail without eating her own foot, not the book Mammothfail is about, which I have decided not to read even though I usually like Wrede's work.)
The Spirit Ring is set in a very beautifully realised Renaissance Italy. It's early Bujold, so the plot isn't perfectly smooth, but she still pulls of a compelling story overall. Fiametta is the daughter of a sorcerer who creates art objects for the nobility (Inspired, she herself admits, by Cellini). She is herself trying to learn the trade; the artistic metalwork with her father's blessing, and the magic with a certain amount of misgiving on her part. However, he and his patron are both slaughtered in front of her, and she ends up on the run, trying to stop necromancy with the help of Thur, a burly young Swiss metalworker who'd been coming to work for her father. It depends occasionally on an excess of coincidences, on the characters' cleverness paying off more than it deserves, but never to the point of eye-rolling.
The thing however, that wants examining in the wake of Mammothfail, is Fiametta herself. Her mother was Ethiopian. In short, she's a black heroine, and clever and resourceful, and isn't that good?
Well... yes. Good, but not... great. For one, there were black people in Renaissance Italy (Including in at least one of the major families that held a city-state), and it's good to see that acknowledged, to give a not-small nod to their historical presence.
However... Fiametta's mother died in childbirth. Realistic, yes, but I couldn't help notice that it conveniently wiped out any chance for Fiametta to be raised anything other than 100% Italian. Fiametta's mother was "a good Christian" - not only acceptable, but likely - but came from another country with another language, and if she'd stayed around, would have taught her daughter something of that country and that life as well. And Renaissance-era Ethiopia, while far form as easy to research as Italy, isn't impossible to detail. So what we end up with is an Italian heroine of a different skin tone, not an Italian/Ethiopian biracial. I actually would have found the latter cooler.
It's still better than not having her at all. It's a step forward. But a step forward is the first step, not the last. So Bujold did pretty well so far. But... then she never followed it up. She never took the next step; I don't think she's had an explicitly PoC major character (Not even main character, but on screen for a significant time) in any series. And that's not abnormal; she's done a similar dance with alternate sexualities,s tepping forwrd then shying back (And while I suspect Ethan of Athos is one of her least-successful novels commercially, I cite an unusually weak plot and an abnormally unconvincing romance as reasons, far more than having one of the two major protagonists be a gay male.)
Note, I liked the book. It's a keeper -- few Bujold books are remotely failures. Her failures are often stronger than the successes of many. I just felt it was worth discussing, if only because of where and how she put herself forward in the last few months.
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Now, having probably harshed someone's squee by griping abut flaws in a good book, and race-related flaws at that, let's go mindless for a while, and post another old review that never made it onto LJ from the rough draft. How old? Er, it was around Christmas I was reading these.
I borrowed the first of the Cat Who books from mom the last few months, and have read them spaced out a bit. Technically, these are rereads, as I read the first umpteen books lo those many years ago, but some books or tidbits I remembered (I certainly remembered how the murder was done in the Cat who Saw Red, which is about gourmet food and potters), and some forgot.
My greatest fear on rereading, especially of an ongoing pop series, is that I will discover I read absolute dreck. More when other readers have griped about the jumping the shark aspects of later books. The good news is, the first of these books are eminently readable still.
I rather liked the early conceit that he *wasn't* a crime reporter currently, but gets shunted from art to home decorating to gourmet food. I like that the cats act like cats far more often than not, even taking into consideration how often their actions help solve crimes. I really like that we don't get their point of view, a conceit I've heard of in other mystery series' with cats, and which turns me off before I even open the books (Though I believe some of the books my mom is fond of do this). I DON'T quite buy how often Qwilleran mentions the brains of his cats to people he's just meeting, or how often they put up with it, or How many of his compatriots believe it (Or humour him).
But at this stage, Braun knows how to write. Plots move briskly. Characters tend to be reasonably distinct. She plays with particular verbal tics, sometimes but not universally to excess. There are a number of running conceits - not always jokes - that are, at this stage, bearable. Qwilleran's attitude towards women, and theirs for him, is simultaneously respectful and seriously old-fashioned. He appreciates smart professionals, but can't seem to get out of seeing women as prospective dates first and people later. I was a little surprised at how dark some of the side stories get - the body found and then cut loose in the lake in one story, and an incest subplot - considering that these are the kinds of cozy murder mysteries where, aside from the murders themselves, the writing is light, and clear, and portrays the world as essentially sunny, and warm, and full of good cats, entertaining companionship, interesting if not always good-tasting food, with murders and violence discreetly offstage.
I'm also entirely willing to stop the series here; where he's had his first taste of inherited wealth and small-town life. The inherited wealth conveniently removes the sorts of real-world considerations that drove the first few books - the need for a paycheque that made him willing to take newspaper work in odd departments (Admittedly, that couldn't have been kept up long, either.) But it doesn't add a new dynamic in its place. It allows him to stagnate in place. I half suspect the decision to make him independently wealthy and living in a small obscure town ultimately led to the downfall of the series; I do remember liking the books less as I went along, and they've gone many many more years and many more volumes since. I'd like to feel fond of the ones I liked, and not run it into the ground. Especially since, as I've said, I've read enough to take waning that they do jump the shark entirely.
Hmm. Not mindless enough. Let's talk tv.
This was a five-part miniseries instead of a third season - and probably marks the end of the story, considering that the ending leaves very little of the cast remaining. But OMFG that was good. That was what both the prior seasons wanted to be if they ever grew up. It starts slow, with a rather creepy incident; all across the world, all the children freeze in place for two minutes, then resume their activity. At the same time, a young doctor is trying to get the Torchwood team to look at a number of disappearing corpses; all different ages, several ethnicities - none white. But by Day Two, it's starting to get uncomfortable; the children first start letting out a screaming noise when they freeze, then speaking words in a not-childlike voice. "We are coming." And then they blow up Captain Jack. And then things keep rolling and rolling. Colin went to bed over an hour late because stopping before the last episode would have meant an even more sleeepless night.
Good things; Rhys is a real character now, and even gets to help out his wife. Ianto's dialogue, except when trying to actually talk to Jack about relationship - or maybe even then, but then painful rather than wonderful. Gwen actually has a moral centre instead of us being told so while she does whatever the hell she does, as in first season. While the alien villains are a bit cardboard in their mysteriousness, and a bit too easily evil in their threatening of children, the revelation of their plans is wrenching because it's so... bloody small-minded. And because they know it and don't care. And the human villains... are horribly human. Everyone makes horrible moral-dilemma choices until, by the time Jack makes his final decision, which is the opposite choice of the one made by others, you get to find out, explicitly, how that's a horrible choice too.
Colin and I have been recently watching through the Sharpe tv series. And I've been enjoying them, and especially the character of Sharpe's sergeant Pat Harper. People who like Napoleonic work, well acted war stuff in general, or even Sean Bean, will find things to appreciate.
I like the character of Richard Sharpe some of the time, and his approach to duty. I like Napoleon using him horribly to solve sticky problems in the most thankless way. And the attitudes and actions of his troops. Most of the stories are entertaining to positively fun to watch. After the first four or five episodes (Only a story or two after he loses his first wife) I started rolling my eyes every time a female offered to kiss him or have sex with him. (And I almost cheered the one time his attainment of a woman actually hurt another character, and had real-world consequences, even though I'd have cheered more if the other character, old and not handsome, had actually got the girl.) I am also aware, and rather frustrated, that most of the female characters are present only because they are his love interest, or weere, or are someone plot-relevant's wife/sweetheart -- even those, like his first wife Teresa, who were also fighters in their own right. It fails the bechdel test badly. On the other hand, it's a historical about soldiers.
But dear lord, int he face of all I like - is Sharpe sometimes the worst of Mary Sues or what? (For those who insist a Mary Sue can only exist in fanfic, a Canon Sue.) Every attractive woman wants him, even those he's too noble to get involved with, or who are otherwise his enemy. Everyone who disagrees with him is a scumbag or a coward, or not as clever as he, or not as moral as he. He can't be wrong. He has to be able to solve everything. And when he suffers, he suffers beautifully, or someone else falls in love with him because he's suffering, or uses their support for him in his suffering to prove their love (Female) or soldierly loyalty (Male). And all of these sometimes happen to an extent that warps the story.
It's sometimes been said that any case of a strong competent attractive character is eventually accused of being a Mary Sue. Not so; in fact, in one case, when I critiqued a story a friend had written that was skirting Mary-Suedom, the one thing I most firmly said was that she should not Make her heroine *less* competent. For me, the real tests are these two: is everyone who hates them somehow wrong or evil? and Does the story sometimes get bent just so they can be Right, or loved? This is decidedly true here.
And yet, We've now watched to the point where he's back in England, after Elba, and before Waterloo (And after his second wife leaves him). IE, almost to the end. I'm almost betting on his current lady-love dying tragically for him in the next show or two.
I also have to admit that I've watched the full first season of the British show Merlin. Which is simultaneously mindless fun and hits the right buttons to keep me watching. There's NO history in it, and almost as little mythology. But to the extent where this becomes a shameless flaunting, not a random fail. I also heard it accused on serious slashiness which, in the early episodes, not so much. In the later episodes, it shows up, but isn't sustained. (OTOH, as far as the whole first season goes, how exactly they're planning to get Arthur and *Gwen* together, EVER, strains credulity. Arthur and Morgana, in a hot minute - although in this version, they aren't related. That we know of.)
it starts with two episodes that are mostly predictable and mildly mediocre, but by the Poisoned Chalice, it picks up nicely, and the next episode, Lancelot, though the dialogue gets clunky again, makes up for it with Lancelot himself (Played by Santiago Cabrera, previously Isaac in Heroes - and yay, coming back sometime in season two) and with one of the few endings that worked for me - I disagree with Lancelot, but it made good tv. And after that, though it frequently undermines itself by making the decision to do things a certain way because "That's how fantasy stories go", it starts to make much more entertaining watching.
However, there's that "We finished this way because that's how fantasy stories go" or worse, "That's how tv series go, and we don't want to mess up our set-up" - the old reset-to-zero a the the end of the episode. It left me twice wanting to rewrite the last five minutes of an episode to make it bloody make sense (The Moment of Truth, where Merlin Fails at friendship - and I could totally see a way to write that to leave it ambiguous how much Arthur knows instead of just making him temporarily Too Stupid to Live - and To Kill the King would have been better if Someone had finally stabbed Uther, the bloody bastard. Ideally, Morgana saying, "You feel bad about murdering an innocent man .. but only because it upset me? What about him and his family, you piece of ****?". And I'd like to tweak the season ender, but less. I'd rather mess up their nice little set-up by killing off Uther than *spoiler*.)
Anyhow. I like Gwen virtually all the time; she so needs more stuff to do. Seriously. (In this, she's a blacksmith's daughter and Morgana's lady in waiting, and she's self-effacing and funny and sweet.) I like Morgana when she's twisting Arthur around her finger or politicking. I like Merlin when he isn't being a moron or totally failing to hold to his morals. I like Arthur especially when he's failing his high ideals or doing the wrong thing because he thinks it's what a Prince Has to do (I'd hate to be having to talk to someone like that, but as a character, it's a lot of fun to watch. I hate Uther quite happily (He's so fun to hate. Anthony Head can pull of as compelling an Obsessive A**hole as he can a befuddled librarian.) In short, while the writers occasionally fail the actors and give them some clunky dialogue, the main actors rarely fail the writers or the viewers.
Anyhow. No high art, but a lot of fun.
* Patricia C. Wrede wrote a book about magical pioneers in North America. A North America with plenty of mammoths, and no native human population at all. 'nuff said.
However, there was one older reading I meant to say a few things about around Mammothfail*; that being, obviously, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Spirit Ring. (The book Bujold tried to use as her get out of fail without eating her own foot, not the book Mammothfail is about, which I have decided not to read even though I usually like Wrede's work.)
The Spirit Ring is set in a very beautifully realised Renaissance Italy. It's early Bujold, so the plot isn't perfectly smooth, but she still pulls of a compelling story overall. Fiametta is the daughter of a sorcerer who creates art objects for the nobility (Inspired, she herself admits, by Cellini). She is herself trying to learn the trade; the artistic metalwork with her father's blessing, and the magic with a certain amount of misgiving on her part. However, he and his patron are both slaughtered in front of her, and she ends up on the run, trying to stop necromancy with the help of Thur, a burly young Swiss metalworker who'd been coming to work for her father. It depends occasionally on an excess of coincidences, on the characters' cleverness paying off more than it deserves, but never to the point of eye-rolling.
The thing however, that wants examining in the wake of Mammothfail, is Fiametta herself. Her mother was Ethiopian. In short, she's a black heroine, and clever and resourceful, and isn't that good?
Well... yes. Good, but not... great. For one, there were black people in Renaissance Italy (Including in at least one of the major families that held a city-state), and it's good to see that acknowledged, to give a not-small nod to their historical presence.
However... Fiametta's mother died in childbirth. Realistic, yes, but I couldn't help notice that it conveniently wiped out any chance for Fiametta to be raised anything other than 100% Italian. Fiametta's mother was "a good Christian" - not only acceptable, but likely - but came from another country with another language, and if she'd stayed around, would have taught her daughter something of that country and that life as well. And Renaissance-era Ethiopia, while far form as easy to research as Italy, isn't impossible to detail. So what we end up with is an Italian heroine of a different skin tone, not an Italian/Ethiopian biracial. I actually would have found the latter cooler.
It's still better than not having her at all. It's a step forward. But a step forward is the first step, not the last. So Bujold did pretty well so far. But... then she never followed it up. She never took the next step; I don't think she's had an explicitly PoC major character (Not even main character, but on screen for a significant time) in any series. And that's not abnormal; she's done a similar dance with alternate sexualities,s tepping forwrd then shying back (And while I suspect Ethan of Athos is one of her least-successful novels commercially, I cite an unusually weak plot and an abnormally unconvincing romance as reasons, far more than having one of the two major protagonists be a gay male.)
Note, I liked the book. It's a keeper -- few Bujold books are remotely failures. Her failures are often stronger than the successes of many. I just felt it was worth discussing, if only because of where and how she put herself forward in the last few months.
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Now, having probably harshed someone's squee by griping abut flaws in a good book, and race-related flaws at that, let's go mindless for a while, and post another old review that never made it onto LJ from the rough draft. How old? Er, it was around Christmas I was reading these.
I borrowed the first of the Cat Who books from mom the last few months, and have read them spaced out a bit. Technically, these are rereads, as I read the first umpteen books lo those many years ago, but some books or tidbits I remembered (I certainly remembered how the murder was done in the Cat who Saw Red, which is about gourmet food and potters), and some forgot.
My greatest fear on rereading, especially of an ongoing pop series, is that I will discover I read absolute dreck. More when other readers have griped about the jumping the shark aspects of later books. The good news is, the first of these books are eminently readable still.
I rather liked the early conceit that he *wasn't* a crime reporter currently, but gets shunted from art to home decorating to gourmet food. I like that the cats act like cats far more often than not, even taking into consideration how often their actions help solve crimes. I really like that we don't get their point of view, a conceit I've heard of in other mystery series' with cats, and which turns me off before I even open the books (Though I believe some of the books my mom is fond of do this). I DON'T quite buy how often Qwilleran mentions the brains of his cats to people he's just meeting, or how often they put up with it, or How many of his compatriots believe it (Or humour him).
But at this stage, Braun knows how to write. Plots move briskly. Characters tend to be reasonably distinct. She plays with particular verbal tics, sometimes but not universally to excess. There are a number of running conceits - not always jokes - that are, at this stage, bearable. Qwilleran's attitude towards women, and theirs for him, is simultaneously respectful and seriously old-fashioned. He appreciates smart professionals, but can't seem to get out of seeing women as prospective dates first and people later. I was a little surprised at how dark some of the side stories get - the body found and then cut loose in the lake in one story, and an incest subplot - considering that these are the kinds of cozy murder mysteries where, aside from the murders themselves, the writing is light, and clear, and portrays the world as essentially sunny, and warm, and full of good cats, entertaining companionship, interesting if not always good-tasting food, with murders and violence discreetly offstage.
I'm also entirely willing to stop the series here; where he's had his first taste of inherited wealth and small-town life. The inherited wealth conveniently removes the sorts of real-world considerations that drove the first few books - the need for a paycheque that made him willing to take newspaper work in odd departments (Admittedly, that couldn't have been kept up long, either.) But it doesn't add a new dynamic in its place. It allows him to stagnate in place. I half suspect the decision to make him independently wealthy and living in a small obscure town ultimately led to the downfall of the series; I do remember liking the books less as I went along, and they've gone many many more years and many more volumes since. I'd like to feel fond of the ones I liked, and not run it into the ground. Especially since, as I've said, I've read enough to take waning that they do jump the shark entirely.
Hmm. Not mindless enough. Let's talk tv.
This was a five-part miniseries instead of a third season - and probably marks the end of the story, considering that the ending leaves very little of the cast remaining. But OMFG that was good. That was what both the prior seasons wanted to be if they ever grew up. It starts slow, with a rather creepy incident; all across the world, all the children freeze in place for two minutes, then resume their activity. At the same time, a young doctor is trying to get the Torchwood team to look at a number of disappearing corpses; all different ages, several ethnicities - none white. But by Day Two, it's starting to get uncomfortable; the children first start letting out a screaming noise when they freeze, then speaking words in a not-childlike voice. "We are coming." And then they blow up Captain Jack. And then things keep rolling and rolling. Colin went to bed over an hour late because stopping before the last episode would have meant an even more sleeepless night.
Good things; Rhys is a real character now, and even gets to help out his wife. Ianto's dialogue, except when trying to actually talk to Jack about relationship - or maybe even then, but then painful rather than wonderful. Gwen actually has a moral centre instead of us being told so while she does whatever the hell she does, as in first season. While the alien villains are a bit cardboard in their mysteriousness, and a bit too easily evil in their threatening of children, the revelation of their plans is wrenching because it's so... bloody small-minded. And because they know it and don't care. And the human villains... are horribly human. Everyone makes horrible moral-dilemma choices until, by the time Jack makes his final decision, which is the opposite choice of the one made by others, you get to find out, explicitly, how that's a horrible choice too.
Colin and I have been recently watching through the Sharpe tv series. And I've been enjoying them, and especially the character of Sharpe's sergeant Pat Harper. People who like Napoleonic work, well acted war stuff in general, or even Sean Bean, will find things to appreciate.
I like the character of Richard Sharpe some of the time, and his approach to duty. I like Napoleon using him horribly to solve sticky problems in the most thankless way. And the attitudes and actions of his troops. Most of the stories are entertaining to positively fun to watch. After the first four or five episodes (Only a story or two after he loses his first wife) I started rolling my eyes every time a female offered to kiss him or have sex with him. (And I almost cheered the one time his attainment of a woman actually hurt another character, and had real-world consequences, even though I'd have cheered more if the other character, old and not handsome, had actually got the girl.) I am also aware, and rather frustrated, that most of the female characters are present only because they are his love interest, or weere, or are someone plot-relevant's wife/sweetheart -- even those, like his first wife Teresa, who were also fighters in their own right. It fails the bechdel test badly. On the other hand, it's a historical about soldiers.
But dear lord, int he face of all I like - is Sharpe sometimes the worst of Mary Sues or what? (For those who insist a Mary Sue can only exist in fanfic, a Canon Sue.) Every attractive woman wants him, even those he's too noble to get involved with, or who are otherwise his enemy. Everyone who disagrees with him is a scumbag or a coward, or not as clever as he, or not as moral as he. He can't be wrong. He has to be able to solve everything. And when he suffers, he suffers beautifully, or someone else falls in love with him because he's suffering, or uses their support for him in his suffering to prove their love (Female) or soldierly loyalty (Male). And all of these sometimes happen to an extent that warps the story.
It's sometimes been said that any case of a strong competent attractive character is eventually accused of being a Mary Sue. Not so; in fact, in one case, when I critiqued a story a friend had written that was skirting Mary-Suedom, the one thing I most firmly said was that she should not Make her heroine *less* competent. For me, the real tests are these two: is everyone who hates them somehow wrong or evil? and Does the story sometimes get bent just so they can be Right, or loved? This is decidedly true here.
And yet, We've now watched to the point where he's back in England, after Elba, and before Waterloo (And after his second wife leaves him). IE, almost to the end. I'm almost betting on his current lady-love dying tragically for him in the next show or two.
I also have to admit that I've watched the full first season of the British show Merlin. Which is simultaneously mindless fun and hits the right buttons to keep me watching. There's NO history in it, and almost as little mythology. But to the extent where this becomes a shameless flaunting, not a random fail. I also heard it accused on serious slashiness which, in the early episodes, not so much. In the later episodes, it shows up, but isn't sustained. (OTOH, as far as the whole first season goes, how exactly they're planning to get Arthur and *Gwen* together, EVER, strains credulity. Arthur and Morgana, in a hot minute - although in this version, they aren't related. That we know of.)
it starts with two episodes that are mostly predictable and mildly mediocre, but by the Poisoned Chalice, it picks up nicely, and the next episode, Lancelot, though the dialogue gets clunky again, makes up for it with Lancelot himself (Played by Santiago Cabrera, previously Isaac in Heroes - and yay, coming back sometime in season two) and with one of the few endings that worked for me - I disagree with Lancelot, but it made good tv. And after that, though it frequently undermines itself by making the decision to do things a certain way because "That's how fantasy stories go", it starts to make much more entertaining watching.
However, there's that "We finished this way because that's how fantasy stories go" or worse, "That's how tv series go, and we don't want to mess up our set-up" - the old reset-to-zero a the the end of the episode. It left me twice wanting to rewrite the last five minutes of an episode to make it bloody make sense (The Moment of Truth, where Merlin Fails at friendship - and I could totally see a way to write that to leave it ambiguous how much Arthur knows instead of just making him temporarily Too Stupid to Live - and To Kill the King would have been better if Someone had finally stabbed Uther, the bloody bastard. Ideally, Morgana saying, "You feel bad about murdering an innocent man .. but only because it upset me? What about him and his family, you piece of ****?". And I'd like to tweak the season ender, but less. I'd rather mess up their nice little set-up by killing off Uther than *spoiler*.)
Anyhow. I like Gwen virtually all the time; she so needs more stuff to do. Seriously. (In this, she's a blacksmith's daughter and Morgana's lady in waiting, and she's self-effacing and funny and sweet.) I like Morgana when she's twisting Arthur around her finger or politicking. I like Merlin when he isn't being a moron or totally failing to hold to his morals. I like Arthur especially when he's failing his high ideals or doing the wrong thing because he thinks it's what a Prince Has to do (I'd hate to be having to talk to someone like that, but as a character, it's a lot of fun to watch. I hate Uther quite happily (He's so fun to hate. Anthony Head can pull of as compelling an Obsessive A**hole as he can a befuddled librarian.) In short, while the writers occasionally fail the actors and give them some clunky dialogue, the main actors rarely fail the writers or the viewers.
Anyhow. No high art, but a lot of fun.
* Patricia C. Wrede wrote a book about magical pioneers in North America. A North America with plenty of mammoths, and no native human population at all. 'nuff said.
