Dream with Our Eyes Open

I've been reading a lot, but a fair amount of it was re-reads for Yuletide and for comfort reading.

The Mr. and I are hooked on two new (to us) manga. I like Witch Hat Atelier better than Delicious in Dungeon (although I may cover that one later). Both are seinen fantasy series.

The setting of Witch Hat Atelier is a medieval Euro-type land where magic works but was turned to evil ends not that long ago. As a result, magicians who wish to operate openly have to follow strict rules of behavior and limits on what thei magic can do. For example, performing magic on living bodies is forbidden - even for healing! Coco, a young girl living alone with her mother, glimpses a magician's spell one day (virtually all the spellcasting shown so far depends on written sigils). She innocently tries her had at it herself ...(SPOILER) ...and inadvertently turns her mother into a statue.

The magician, Quifrey, realizing that the child has great raw magical talent and takes her with him to his "atelier," a business specializing in magic works of all kinds for pay. There he already has three young female apprentices, as well as a gruff overseer, Olruggio, who is supposed to ensure that everything in the atelier is done legally.

If you're getting a little skeeved out at the idea of four young girls under the supervision of two young-ish men, all I can do is note that this is actually not that odd a set-up for seinen manga of the "moe" (innocent and cute) type. The girls' Kendo team series Bamboo Blade was another example. Although I can't prove that things will remain innocent, I'm guessing that they will. We did have the girls in "bath wraps" (basically draped and tied bathing dresses) in vol. 6, everything was more modest than a typical U.S. beach of the 21st century.

Quifrey's other students - Agott, Richeh, and Tetia - have varying reactions to the newcomer, who has none of the educational background that they do. Intense, ambitious Agott, in particular, is pretty hostile to her. As one might expect, friendly, naive Coco eventually wins them over, but her acceptance by Agott is definitely well-earned. Along the way are all sorts of wonders and some fairly serious philosophical discussions about the history, use, and misuse of magic in this world.

The art? The art is frickin' gorgeous -

My understand is that the mangaka was inspired by childrens' book illustrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It shows, but I am familiar with some of those (the art for E. Nesbit's fantasy classics, for example), and this is even better.

Vol. 7 is due out in paperback in just a few weeks. I can hardly wait!

I should have mentioned earlier about reading the first volume of the manga My Brother's Husband, by Gengoroh Tagame. This is about a single dad in Japan who, after his twin brother's death abroad, gets a surprise visit from the brother's Canadian husband. Mike Flanagan has traveled to Japan to meet his husband's family and learn about his early life. Yaichi is extremely unnerved by this hulking, hairy foreigner, but his young daughter Kana likes him almost instantly. Mike ends up staying with them for a while, and from interactions with him and other people's reactions, Yaichi begins to confront his own attitudes toward his late brother's homosexuality.

The book presents a lot of truths about Japanese society, not all of them positive. Gay people still cannot marry in Japan, people with tattoos are not welcome in a lot of gyms or public baths, and one of Kana's friends is told she can't visit Kana anymore because Mike is a bad influence.

Tagame's usual genre is erotic manga for gay men (he is gay himself). His drawings are very bold and clean, yet at the same time detailed. People tend to be a little short and blocky, but Tagame line work is attractively sensitive in a way that reminds me most of recent work by Fumi Yoshinaga (!).

I also read, weeks ago, A Skinful of Shadows, by Frances Hardinge, which is up for to new YA not-a-Hugo award. This is a grim but gripping historical fantasy set in England just before the Civil War. Makepeace lives in London with her single mother, both of them sharing a closet of a space in the house of some relatives who barely tolerate them. Mother subjects Makepeace to harsh, weird discipline, making her stay overnight in a cemetery chapel at one point. It becomes clear that Makepeace can perceive ghosts, and that her mother is both trying to hide her daughter and make her strong. The first turns out to be futile: mother dies, and Makepeace's father's family come for her. Although they clearly despise her, she has some sort of mysterious value. Eventually, to her horror, she finds out why. I will say that the ending, although hardly sunny, is not completely tragic, and I intend to re-read the book at some point: it's very good.

At this point, I am wading (ha!) through Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, climate sci-fi set in New York City after the sea level has risen 50 feet (~15 m). This is so not going at the top of my Hugo vote for Best Novel. Info dump, info dump all the way home. KSR plainly thinks I should be interested in his Big Ideas about economics and how it interacts with climate and so on. He's wrong. Also, for the first 20% of the book, I was completely uninterested in any of the characters, especially the so-brilliant young financial wiz Franklin Garr, who speculates in half-drowned real estate and is clearly meant to be (as much as anyone is) Our Hero.

The binding thread for the eight viewpoint characters is that they all call a single building home. The descriptions of this building and its neighbors, and the waterways that make drowned NYC the "New Venice," can be pretty cool at times. There are a couple of entertaining young boys, but I'm 80% of the way through the novel at this point and I still can't tell them apart, aside from their names. The society depicted here is rather odd too. We have men and women of all ages, but aside from our two young rapscallions, I can't recall any children. No one of any consequence seems to have a family. Two of the characters have exes, but that's about it. And that, to me, is just wrong. Conventional marriages may be on their way out, but all the people *I* know still have some sort of family.

Anyway, having come this far, I am bound and determined to finished this book, but it is a slog. I am certainly not this doorstopper's intended audience.

A digression. When I was a little cho, I loved books with main characters like Dido Twite in Joan Aiken's Wolves series and Goth in James Schmitz' The Witches of Karres: wiry, adventurous girls who could almost be mistaken for boys. I knew I would never be any of those girls, because I was chunky and unathletic and bookish and shy and near-sighted.

Last night I finished Provenance by Ann Leckie. People who wanted more hardcore space opera (and yes, I think it's OK to call it that) like the Ancillary trilogy have been grumpily posting their displeasure with the book around the Intarwebs. Because although Provenance is set in the same universe, and people in the story are talking about the events that occurred in that series, the star of Provenance is not an unstoppable corpse soldier turned engine of vengeance, like Breq. The protagonist is, instead, a chunky, self-deprecating, messy, naive young woman named Ingray Aughskold. And whether you enjoy Provenance, I suspect, will have a lot to do with whether you sympathize with Ingray or think she's a fool.

Ingray has Mommy issues. Mom is a powerful politician who adopted three children, intending to eventually make the most suitable one her heir. This is not an uncommon practice on the world of Hwae. One child made herself scarce as soon as she could legally do so, leaving Ingray to complete with their confident and obnoxious brother Danach. Both Ingray and Danach are certain that Danach will be the heir; nevertheless, Ingray would like to secure some of their mother's regard for herself. So she invests all her own money in a scheme that starts with breaking a famous thief out of the smarmily named prison world Compassionate Removal and goes on from there. As james_davis_nicoll puts it, it is "a very bold scheme, a scheme so well planned that it does not go off the rails until shortly before the book begins."

If the book sounds like a caper novel, that is indeed one part of what it is. It is also a coming-of-age story, a story that addresses the idea of symbols and what part they play in our personal and national stories, a novel that explores families and what parents can do to children, and a science fiction story full of aliens and robots and stolen starships. I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Next, I've started a non-fiction book that is not much like anything I would have picked on my own, but a book club has started at work, and it involves some colleagues that I should get to know better, so. It's called The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. The blurb describes it as "How a Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality." I'm about 5% of the way into it, and so far author Michael Lewis has been discussing the idea of using statistics to help make better choices in selecting athletes for pro sports teams. I suppose this is a topic of great interest to many, but not to me, so I hope the book gets into something else quickly.

I also have waiting for me the first volumes of two new-to-me manga series, Golden Kamuy and Complex Age, and also the first collected volume of the comic The Wicked and the Divine.

After I finished The Cuckoo's Song, I didn't feel like reading anything else substantive for a bit, which sometimes happens after I read something very involving. So I read some fanfiction, excerpts from a favorite comfort read (Rumer Godden's Thursday's Children), and magazine articles (in the Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic, and Washingtonian).

Monday (despite the holiday), I got some manga from Great Big River: Gangsta. vol. 7 (this is a hyper-violent and nihilistic seinen action series that deserves a more complete write-up) and vol. 1 of A Silent Voice.

A Silent Voice is about a restless, undisciplined young boy, Shoya, and the deaf girl he ends up tormenting and driving from their school. Actually, the most awful thing is how bad the other kids are, including the ones whom the teachers and administrators think are angelic. I'm hoping something humiliating happens to all of them eventually, especially the sweet-faced little meganeko who's the class representative. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, especially when she's saying tearfully (paraphrased) "How could you possibly think that I'd do anything bad to Shoko? You know I'm the perfect class rep!"

But! This is only the first volume of a series that has seven volumes out. At the end of the volume, there's a time skip. Shoya, now old enough to leave school, is totally aimless and (for lack of any other focus) obsessed by what he did. He cuts all his ties to his current life and travels to find Shoko. He encounters her again on the last page. So I clearly have to order some more of the series!

(Fact: it seems to be a shounen series. Huh.)

Then the latest October Daye installment, Once Broken Faith, arrived on my Kindle. I'm now about a quarter of the way through it. It starts with a very silly, enjoyable pajama party for the teen fae contingent at Toby's house, but in no time we're up to our ears in dirty court politics and new types of fae and Toby is defying royalty in her typical headstrong fashion. Some of the people she loves are in danger and others are not speaking to her. You know, the usual!

Yeah, I seem to be doing this monthly. *sigh*

What have you just finished reading?

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo. YA fantasy with a Slavic-based setting. The heroine is a prickly, skinny girl who is a cartographer with the army, but she turns out to be The Chosen One and gets swept off for special magical training. She's a duck out of water in a way that reminds me a little of Menolly in the Harper Hall in McCaffrey's Pern books, with the queen bee girls being rude and prickly to her. About midway through she suddenly becomes healthier and prettier because Plot Reasons, and then she starts to like to try on dresses, and I realized that I didn't like her nearly as much. I then had to castigate myself for this, because I'm sure lots of the intended readers would love that part. There was some silly romantical stuff too, which I also disliked. And then Bardugo completely confounded my expectations about what the last part of the book was going to be like. Well done, author! I still don't think it's a great book: too many things happening with too little run-up (for example, Alina's relationship wth her childhood friend Mal would have been better with more showing, less telling, of their shared history), but I think I'm invested enough to get the sequel.

The Snake Stone, by Jason Goodwin, is the second Master Yashim book. I begin to see what flemmings was saying about the hero's sex life. It's annoying because Yashim might as well not be a eunuch, except that it means he can visit the seraglio in the palace. He's starting to read more like a man with a slightly low-ish sex drive instead. The cultural and culinary details remain interesting, and I liked the info about pre-Victorian archeology and book-collecting.

The Little Death by Michael Nava is the first volume of a mystery series about a gay lawyer, Henry Rios. It features a tragic Boyfriend in the Refrigerator and lots of Evil Plotting by the rich and the famous. I like Henry, although his situation is somewhat depressing. I will probably try the next one as well.

Four British Fantasists, which is a critical study and comparison of authors Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, and Diana Wynne Jones. The author, Charles Butler, is a member of the DWJ online mailing list. The book was interesting, and now I'm wondering whether I should fill in some of the books that I haven't read that are discussed, especially by Lively and Garner. Although I remember bouncing off Garner's Red Shift, and the things he wrote after that are apparently even more experimental.

What are you currently reading?

Another re-read for a writing challenge, and also volume 10 of the manga Bunny Drop, which basically short stories about Daikichi and Rin that didn't make it into the main series (which ended, plot-wise, with vol. 9).

What do you think you'll read next?

I just got an Amazon order that includes volume 1 of Fumi Yoshinaga's manga series What Did You Eat Yesterday? Also, volume 3 of the hard yaoi manga Crimson Spell (by Ayano Yamane), and the latest volumes of Marjorie Liu's Hunter Kiss series (Labyrinth of Stars) and Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series (Broken Homes). The Aaronovitch has been getting mixed reviews, but I have to at least give it a try because the earlier books were so awesome. (These are both urban fantasy, for those unfamiliar with them, but very different in tone and scope.)

What have you just finished reading?

Some more odd serial art stuff from the Small Press Expo, most of which didn't make much of an impression. The one exception was Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, by Samuel R. Delaney and Mia Wolff. As most of you probably know, Samuel Delaney was one of the first successful African American science fiction writers. This is an actual, biographical story of how he met his life partner, Dennis, who was a homeless man living on the streets of New York. It's very explicit and frank; in parts it's very sad and in others, it's very tender and joyful.

Also, the latest National Geographic, which had a rather disturbing story of a storm chaser who was recently killed by one of the tornados he was pursuing, along with a colleague and his own adult son, an accomplished photographer.

I am all caught up with the webcomic Yellow Peril. I have made an LJ feed for it, yellowperilcomi. LJ needs longer names for the feeds. :-(

Finally, I read vol. 4 of House of Five Leaves. I think I'm starting to get used to the mangaka's drawing style. However, I can't agree with the comments I've seen online about how wonderful it is.

What are you currently reading?

Still reading Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, which is getting really, really good. Things have taken a massive turn for the worse in the story; I'm mentally biting my fingernails.

For some reason, I have also started a re-read of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which I had downloaded onto my phone sometime ago. It's a pleasant enough diversion, except when the author goes off onto a spate of Rebecca-worship.

What do you think you'll read next?

Still haven't started ann_leckie's Ancillary Justice. Also, I've got my Yuletide canon re-read stacked up and ready to go, plus I need to do a canon review for some beta reading.

What have you just finished reading?

Marjorie Liu's Dirk & Steele books are beginning to become like potato chips for me: bet you can't read just one!

On oyceter's rec, I tried Shadow Touch next. Suddenly, for me, Liu has gone from the rather tentative romance author about whom I was "Eh … OK" in Tiger Eye to being very recognizably the author of the Hunter Kiss urban fantasy series (which I have enjoyed very much thus far). I really enjoyed this book, although it was so much harder-edged (particularly in the early scenes in the mysterious research facility) that I got a bit of mental whiplash.

Oyce's other rec was Eye of Heaven. About halfway through it, I suddenly remembered a series of RPG characters I played in my early 20s who were very much like the heroine of this story. Oh yeah! Anyway, the male lead in this book was one of the secondary characters whom I had especially liked in Tiger Eye. There is a lot of complicated Plot Stuff that's building up across the entire series and that is reminiscent of some of the plot elements of the Hunter Kiss series, making me wonder whether subsequent books in Dirk & Steele are going to have transdimensional world hopping and demons too. I'm amused by some of the reviews I'm reading of these: apparently people who like the more typical sorts of romances find these not romantic enough and too violent. Oh well … de gustibus non disputandum est.

I was at Small Press expo for the last 90 minutes of the event the other week, and one of the things I picked up on a blitz through the dealers' room was Back to the Grind, the first collection of Jamie Noguchi's webcomic Yellow Peril. I was attracted initially by the picture of lead character Kane on a recognizable Metro train on the cover and ended up talking to Noguchi, who drew me a cartoon on the inside of the book to go with his autograph. I enjoyed this and will have to catch up on Kane's more recent adventures online.

AND … I finally finished E. Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods! Arrrgggh. Nesbit generally seemed to respect her juvenile characters, but not in this volume. The kids are constantly getting into scrapes that are, to me as an adult, completely transparent. You can see the foolish errors coming from the first couple of paragraphs of any given adventure, and the eventual denouments are equally predictable. Also, I get tired of narrator Oswald's constantly put-downs of the girls in the little gang, and even though tomboyish Alice is usually described more kindly than the others, she still comes in for a lot of criticism and patronization. It's quite different from the children in the Five Children and It and its sequels, where eldest sister Anthea was a valued member of the group and little Jane's pouting and lack of fortitude were attributed to her age more than to her sex.

What are you currently reading?

Fanfiction, mostly. As noted elsewhere, I've been loading a lot of old favorites onto my iPad Mini.

I'm also about halfway through volume 3 of the manga House of Five Leaves. I'm enjoying it to some extent, but the art style is driving me nuts. I'm having a lot of trouble telling about half of the male characters apart, and that means I lose a lot of the impact of the various little criminal episodes and character revelations.

I have downloaded Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, which I had on my Amazon wish list (I don't remember whose review got me interested) and which was on sale for $2.99, as well as (free) The Count of Monte Cristo, which (shockingly, I suppose) I have never read, and which lady_ganesh recommended. Also, smilaraaq just passed me a steampunk romance to try ... it's by Meljean Brook, whom lawless523 was just recommending the other week.

What have you just finished reading?

Busy week!

C.J. Cherryh's Russalka, which had a more interesting and touching ending than I remember. As is common with Cherryh, I could see ideas and issues that she has tried again or previously in other works, which doesn't bother me: they're interesting ideas.

Also, vol. 8 of Ooku by Fumi Yoshinga. This is still a cool series, and beautifully drawn, but I want more slice-of-life Yoshinaga (like Antique Bakery and Flower of Life) or yaoi Yoshinaga (like Ichigenme … The First Class Is Civil Law). I wonder whether she'll ever go back to her roots that way?

Then I read the first volume of the manga version of Durarara!. My reaction is basically "What the hell was that?" The story thus far has seesawed back and forth between cheery high school comedy and urban dark fantasy. I imagine it will take a couple more volumes before I can even tell whether I like it or not.

Volume 2 of House of Five Leaves was interesting, although the mangaka's distinctive drawing style is beginning to wear on me a little. Although it couldn't be more different in style from Fruits Basket, I'm having the same sort of difficulties telling characters apart.

Finally, I just finished Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire, the sixth October Daye book. I really liked it. I think it's partially because it is now definitely an ensemble cast. Given that it's written from Toby's POV, she has to be the center, but she has collected an extended family-of-choice that I very much like. So now there's only one more book available: Chimes at Midnight, which just came out a few weeks ago. And then I'll have to wait for one volume a year, according to her website: three more volumes, coming out 2014 - 2016.

What are you currently reading?

And still limping through The Wouldbegoods by E. Nesbit. I only read bits of it when I have nothing else to read, but I am determined to finish it.

I downloaded the first Marjorie Liu "Dirk & Steele" book, Tiger Eye. It's my first straight paranormal romance (as opposed to Liu's harder-edged urban fantasies about demon hunter Maxine Kiss), and for about the whole first chapter I wanted to thrown it against a wall for what I assume were romanticism elements. As an example, when Our Heroine is retreating through a crowd, and the whole scene has been from her POV, she's suddenly described as getting through the crowd "gracefully." Because, you know, when someone is worried about retreating from potential danger, she of course spends time thinking about how gracefully she does it. (Mary Sue, phone home.) But I'm getting much more interested in it as we get into the heart of the book, including everything from the comedy of trying to make a very tall exotic-looking man inconspicuous in Beijing (and trying to find normal 20th century cosmopolitan clothes to fit him, since he showed up looking like an extra from a Conan story) and the family-of-choice aspects of the firm. And the constantly broken-off almost-sex scenes aren't any more over-the-top than a lot of fanfiction. It's like Liu was really unsure of what she was doing for the first couple of chapters and then got into it more whole-heartedly.

What do you think you'll read next?

Uhhh … another problem for another day. I do have two novels in hand that I got off the bring one-take one shelf at work, but I'm not itching to start either one: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which was recommended by a colleague. Anyone have opinions on either of them?

What have you just finished reading?

Bound in Blood (vol. 5 of the Chronicles of the Kencyrath by P.C. Hodgell), vol. 2 of the manga series 21st Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa, vol. 11 of the manga series Fushigi Yuugi Genbu Kaiden by Yuu Watase (and boy, is there a style whiplash between those two series ... ), and Redshirts by John Scalzi. The Hodgell was a re-read of an old favorite (and hmmm, where's my copy of Honor's Paradox, the next volume?); the other three were new. I'll write up the Scalzi at some point: I enjoyed it, but it was fairly slight for the most part.

(Oh, and the mysterious re-read I was doing earlier was The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson.)

What are you currently reading?

I'm mostly reading bits and pieces of C.J. Cherryh's Regenesis (the sequel to Cyteen), for something I'm thinking about writing.

What do you think you'll read next?

Good question! Somewhere around the house is a copy of Among Others by Jo Walton: that's the last of the books I got for the winter holidays that I have not yet read. Or I could re-read N.K. Jemisin's Gujaareh books (The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun) so that I could write them up ... and the same with Jim C. Hines' Libriomancer. But there's an equal chance that I will dig out some old favorite to re-read, because that's my usual response to having finished something new.