Reading Wednesday

[chomiji]

Wow, I have been off-course with this. In my own defense, I had a writing project, and also the very rainy weather had me pretty gloomed out.

It seem to me that I read a lot of things, but I'm not recalling much at the moment. One thing I do recall, I will hold for FFFriday instead. In the meantime:

sholio has been doing a C.J. Cherryh read and re-read, so I am going through the Chanur series again. I'm just starting Chanur's Homecoming, which is my favorite of the series.

I grabbed a couple of Zoe Chant's paranormal romances for brain candy: Bearista and Pet Rescue Panther. As far as I can tell, I'm not really the intended audience: I enjoy the action sequences a lot more than the romance. On the other hand, I used to love running shapeshifter characters in tabletop RPG, and that's what these are all about. They remind me of Marjorie Liu's Dirk & Steele novels, in a good way. They're much quicker reads, but they have the same action-team + romance thing going on. I do plan to get the third in this sequence, Bear in a Bookshop.

The 2018 Hugo Reader's Packet was released this past week. It's a good thing I had already read most of the novels, because only a few were included in full this year. Still, it's a lot of books and stories.

One of the books that was included was Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale. Arden is nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. This is a YA fantasy novel based on Russian history and folk tales. I think it will please a lot of the people who liked Novik's Uprooted. Arden is an assured and fairly elegant writer, but the book did have some flaws that loomed large for me (possibly not for others):

1. A new character is referred to by his name several pages before the viewpoint character is actually told his name (and bad on the editor - that should have been caught).
    
2. Most people won't understand the title at all until 75% of the way through the book, and I only picked up half of it sooner than that because I know a little Russian. And the title is still not that great even once you understand what it means.
    
3. Arden completely pushes an annoying but ultimately innocent character under the bus, allowing this character to to die a horrible death. This is not a terribly nice character, but Arden shows us that the character could have been at least 50% of what our beloved heroine was, if not for different circumstances. And that really hit me hard, and I don't entirely trust Arden as an author now, if you know what I mean. Because part of why this character [spoiler: Anna Ivanova]was developed the way she was, was to provide a contrast and foil for the lead. She really seems a victim, and it left me with a bad taste in my brain.

Comments

[sholio]

It's okay if Zoe's books are not your thing! To be honest, the general genre that they are (paranormal erotic romance) is not particularly my thing, aside from a few individual authors that I like. Flattered that you're reading 'em tho'. :)

I realized when I reread the Chanur books (which I have now read all of except the Hilfy book) that I'm pretty sure I never read Chanur's Homecoming ... ever. Nothing about it was familiar, though I know I read the other books in the series. It's an interesting flashback to an earlier era when most of the books I owned were acquired piecemeal and usually out of order from used bookstores or the library. The series that I actually read all of, in order, from the beginning, were by far the minority.

[oracne]

Yay Chanur books!

[nenya_kanadka]

Ooh, Bear In A Bookshop must be the one with the dragon sister in it? Cool cool.

I very much enjoyed Pet Rescue Panther--quite liked the previous installment but this one with the adorable kittens getting everywhere was just the right amount of sweet for me. I'm another person who tends to be more into the action plots than the romance in this genre, but Zoe's work (I've mostly read this subseries and the Protection, Inc ones) seem to hit a number of points I enjoy. And without putting me too much off the romance--even if I don't intensely ship the leads, I tend to like them as people, which is better than a lot of stuff does.

And the image of all those kittens climbing over the panther shifter dude--and the bit where the kittens meet the Big Scary Dragon Mafia Boss!--was just a delight.