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Happy birthday, coalescent!

Recent Reading (well, relatively, going back to before Wiscon)

And given the amount that I might have read in that time, don't seem to have got through that much, considering. And a lot of it was fairly light travel reading:
J D Robb, Creation in Death (2007) (Robb is perfect for plane reading); Laurel K Hamilton, The Harlequin (2007) (okay, I have a disturbing guilty weakness for the ongoing adventures of Anita Blake), Mike Carey, Dead Men's Boots (2008) (realise I muddled this with Vicious Circles in my last post, they are both good and standard is keeping high), Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Legacy (2007) (still not really warming up to this series); Elizabeth Moon, Victory Conditions (2008), which I thought a successful conclusion to this space-opera series. All these to and from Madison.

Also, devoured on the busride from Madison to O'Hare and finished in the food court at O'Hare over coffee, L Timmel Duchamp, Stretto (2008), which was absolutely stunning. Completely gripping (I hardly looked out of the window of the bus at all, which I usually do quite a lot), and very satisfying as a conclusion to the Marq'ssan Cycle, by not neatly tying off all the dangling threads and by leaving in ambiguities. This is a magnificent series with enormous depth and complexity. I now want to go back to the beginning and re-read - since I am sure that there will be interesting reflections and foreshadowings - but may leave this a few months in the hope that there may be a panel at the next Wiscon.

Read during my frantic fortnight at home:
H G Wells, Joan and Peter (1918) - started before I left. Oh dear, isn't Wells an 'and then... and then... and then' storyteller? Though I will concede that he does keep one reading, possibly with a certain skimming over some of the 'what is wrong with the world and how to put it right' passages. And why couldn't Joan have had a slightly sordid fling as well? Rather coarse and unsubtle about pacifism - the much-maligned John Buchan was a whole lot more complex on the subject in Mr Standfast. And whoa, quasi-incest - okay, they weren't actually siblings but they had been brought up as siblings.
Mary Gentle, Ilario: The Stone Golem (2007). I thought I was enjoying this, and then I suddenly hit the wall that I tend to come across in Alt-Hist: if this had changed and that is different, why does the other still bear a rather too-close resemblance to something in the history of the world we know? I finished it, and there were things I liked a lot about it, but this really weakened it for me.
Betty Macdonald, Anybody Can Do Anything (1950): I read this in adolescence in an omnibus edition of Macdonald's works, and this more or less underscored my recollection that I had enjoyed it less than The Plague and I and Onions in the Stew, though it was agreeable enough. However, I think my tolerance for hapless first person narrators of the misadventures that befall them has declined steeply since then.
Tamora Pierce, Terrier: Beka Cooper (2006). I don't know what it is with Pierce, I find her books start out well and engage me and yet there is a point at which my interest begins to fade and finishing seems a bit of an effort. I like so much of what she is doing, and yet somehow it doesn't quite do it for me.
Theodora Goss, Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2008). This is a lovely little book (from Aqueduct), of well-chosen poems by these three writers using themes of faerie or witchcraft or other fantastic motifs, with sensitive critical essays by Goss and some of her own poems which riff off similar themes and are part of the same poetic dialogue. I need to go back and read all the poems over more slowly and with more care.

To, in, and from Minneapolis:
Re-reads: Emma Bull, War for the Oaks (1987), on the plane going over, latest of many re-reads, still as excellent as ever. Joolz Denby, Stone Baby (2000): harrowing (is Denby ever not?) about the horror that comes from being human and the things that humans can do, but brilliantly, brilliantly written.
Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: : How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (2006). This looked intriguing when I picked it up and flipped through it in the bookshop, but read in one sitting I found there was a certain amount of repetition from section to section. I also was not entirely convinced by his statement that the British Raj privileged Hindus over Muslims (but this is something for which my own ideas are derived pretty much from something in Journal of Think I Saw It Somewhere Studies about the perceptions of the effete Hindu vs the manly martial Muslim). Plus, felt that there were a whole lot of gender issues either unexamined or not clearly seen about the nature of various fundamentalist movements he observed, which seemed very much about recovering a macho kind of manliness.
Catherynne Valente, The Grass-cutting Sword (2006). Intense. My only problem with this was that I wasn't sure whether I should be reading it in one concentrated undistracted burst, or in really short takes, and which way would get the most out of it.
Several okay thrillers: Dana Stabenow, A Deeper Sleep (2007) - a Kate Shugak, and much better than the non-series thriller of hers I tried to read some months ago. This was okay, if not the best of them. Edna Buchanan, Love Kills (2007) - Britt Montero meets the Cold Case Squad crossover, okay. Elaine Viets, Murder with Reservations (2007) - looks as though she may have got the series protag out of the hole she was in - but if so can the series continue?
Anne Aguirre, Grimspace (2008). Not bad at all space opera, except for the introduction of what is virtually a deus ex machina (for which no real preparation had been made) towards the end to get the heroine and her cohorts out of the fix they're in. Shall look out for other work by Aguirre, however.
Simon R Green, The Man with the Golden Torc (2007). A surprise find in Barnes and Noble in the Mall of America. Really quite good paranormal thriller with UK setting - not quite as noir as Carey.
Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (1994). A sensitive novel of adolescence, framed by glimpes of the narrator's troubled marriage, good of this kind of thing. Also has evoked some thoughts which may become a (nother) post about the literary tropes of female friendships.

Since my return - several things still unfinished, put aside so I could read Diana Wynne Jones, House of Many Ways (2008). Which may not be right up there with her top work, but is still pretty good - is there indeed such a thing as a bad DWJ?