Tag: books

The concluding sequel to Karen Traviss’s Crossing the Line, The World Before comes to an unsatisfying end. Traviss’s shallow character development finally becomes a fatal flaw, especially when coupled with her transparent plotting of relationships. The final fifty pages or so are painfully clunky, with the final denoument being drawn out until the final paragraphs. The only question is whether the author is going to screw the reader, not how the relationships will resolve. And really big plot elements that are used for dramatic tension through the book are left hanging totally unresolved.

Readers may be happiest confining themselves to the first Wess’har book, City of Pearl.

by Karen Traviss

So I ran out and bought the second one. Crossing the Lineis just as much of a page turner as City of Pearl. I love the ambiguity and complexities of the title pun. And I’m eager to see how it turns out in the third volume. (This one is not satisfying in itself.)

All is not what it seems. I’m just sayin’.

by Karen Traviss.

I bought City of Pearl a while ago, but yesterday I needed a commuting book and finally picked it up. This morning at 2:00 I put it down. (Well, I did put it down while I was a work.) Yes, I wanted to see how it ended that badly. Some of the plot resolutions towards the end were predictable, but it was satisfying nonetheless. It reminded me of Julie Czerneda’s Species Imperative series. I’d certainly welcome a sequel (though this book is complete in itself).

(Lo and behold, I discovered Traviss has a website, and that there are two sequels, already in print. Yippee.)

Here’s a great essay on race and Earthsea at The Infinite Matrix by Pam Noles:

I can look at this current world of genre and keep whining, or I can take note of the positive changes that have come down over the years and hope that more will come in the future. And if it matters that much to me, I’ve got to figure out what I need to do to bring that future into being rather than just waiting for it to magically appear.

(via Ramblings of an African geek, also just discovered.)

There’s a certain type of book that I reread on a regular basis, which feels a lot like comfort food. I rarely find new insight, although sometimes I’ll notice something new. Occasionally I’ll realize I don’t like the book as much.

The past fall and winter have been trying, and so I’ve done a lot of rereading over the last several months. Herewith, the list:

Raymond E. Feists’s Riftwar Saga

Magician: Apprentice

Magician: Master

Silverthorn

A Darkness at Sethanon

Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry

The Summer Tree

The Wandering Fire

The Darkest Road

Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall Trilogy

Dragonsong

Dragonsinger

Dragondrums

Suzette Haden Elgin’s Ozark Trilogy

Twelve Fair Kingdoms

The Grand Jubilee

And Then There’ll Be Fireworks

No insights; no new discoveries; no great change in how much I enjoyed them. They provided just the comfort of familiarity that I needed.

Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire continues at its idiosyncratic pace. Martin says this volume started off as half of a book. Of course there’s no telling when we’ll get the other half. (He divided it by character and location, rather than chronologically, so there are whole story lines that don’t appear at all.)

I like long, all-consuming books, but it makes me grumpy to have to wait.

I decided to read Stephen Covey’s book because I was interested in the FranklinCovey planning system. While Covey has some ideas and suggestions that may work for me on the level of technique, his assertions that he’s promoting some sort of universal truths that go deeper than technique don’t fly with me. I found his endless examples to be full of hierarchical, elitist, and power-over thinking (even though he preaches win/win). (And yes, I mean preaches.) There were a few places where I wrote things like “manipulative bastard” in the margins.

He lists basic principles (his seven habits are entirely premised on universal principles that “map the way things are”) in only two locations (pages 34 and 323 in my edition). They include such things as fairness, integrity, human dignity, service, quality, potential. Those lists are fine, as far as they go. But he also repeatedly equates “principles” with “natural law.” When someone as highly educated and widely read as Covey uses the words “natural law,” he can’t be ignorant of the implications of that phrase, and he demonstrates that he is no friend of mine.

In the “About the Author” statement in the back of the book, it says, “As a father of nine and grandfather of forty-three, he received the 2003 Fatherhood Award from the National Fatherhood Initiative, which he says is the most meaningful award he has ever received.” Well, Stephen R. Covey, I have a couple of principles for you: sustainability, carrying capacity, right sharing.

Leo Hickman is a journalist at the Guardian, where he undertook an extended experiment in ethical living. This book is the result. I picked it up in a bookstore in Birmingham and finished it just after I returned home to Boston.

I had seen it in passing in a bookstore in London, and when I decided I’d look for it in B’ham, I went up to a clerk and said I was looking for a book with “naked” in the title and “a year of living ethically” in the subtitle. He eventually found it for me!

It’s a good book, and it raises some real questions, but it also shows its roots as a series of newspaper features.

Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About Mythology is an engaging, funny read. I learned a lot about world myths, as well as learning a fair bit about the European myths with which I was already familiar. I enjoyed his cheeky, sometimes breezy pop references. I loved some of his wordplay. (Inanna’s withering gaze she learned from her sister was a favorite.)

The chapter on African myths turned out to be interesting, although as the chapter began I was struck by how much it was written for Euro-Americans (like the whole book). The structure of the book reflects the largely Western European point of view of mainstream America, as well as the European bias of academia.

This is the first “Don’t Know Much” book I’ve read, and as an introductory overview, I thought it did well. If I become curious about what I don’t know about US history or world geography, I’ll certainly think about turning to Davis’s other books.

A light introduction to the subject, Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth includes many sweeping generalizations. I’m more excited about another recent book, Don’t Know Much About Mythology, which I’ve just begun.