I didn't get much read this past month, and what I did read were all new arrivals, so nothing came off my To Be Read stack. At least what I did read was all cool.
Of course I started off by rereading the first six Harry Potters. Two of them fell apart on this go-round; the spines split and the pages now come in a few discrete chunks. (They still look better than my first copy of An Elegant Universe, which is held together by a rubber band, but I have to keep it because that's the copy with all my notes in it. Yes, I'm the evil kind of person who writes in books). But I finished off the rereading a few days before Book 7 was due so I plunged into Lois McMaster Bujold's Legacy, which is the second half of The Sharing Knife two part series. I liked it better than Beguilement, the first half; she took her world-building to some interesting places. She is trying to do something different here than with her Vorkosigan books or even her other fantasies, so you can't really compare them, but even so I felt like these were just slighter stories than what she usually does. A pleasant way to spend an afternoon or two, but I didn't get that buzz in my brain reading Bujold usually gives me.
I was still only two-thirds of the way through with Legacy when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turned up (I had ordered it from Amazon.com; I don't know why. I had the day off work just to read it, I certainly could have started the day with a trip to the grocery store to pick up a copy. Force of habit, I guess). It took almost exactly 12 hours to read it. On the one hand, she did lots of things I liked (not the least of which was not killing off Harry), but mostly I prefer that other version of Book 7. You know, the one I was writing in my head since I finished Book 6. My version took place at Hogwarts, went deeper into the history of the place, and had a lot more of Snape, Neville, and Ginny. I think when all is said and done, I'd rank Deathly Hallows after Order of the Phoenix for sure, that one's still my fave. It might be second or third after The Half-Blood Prince. I don't know; I'll let you know in a year when I've read it for the third time.
The next book I read this month was another one I plowed through in a day, The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, otherwise known as Lemony Snicket. I had no idea he had written other novels under his own name until Andrew Wheeler mentioned this one on his blog (and if you're like me and are on the look out for new things to read, his blog is the bomb. I could never read that many books, but Wheeler's tastes are a lot like mine (SF and fantasy but also mainstream and literary novels and even comics) and I've found him a pretty good guide to what's cool). You know, I have lots of writers I admire for one thing or another; Handler is one of the very few that makes me outright jealous. I wish I were half so clever with the word play. This book isn't for kids; it's about some kids in their last year of high school. It has elements of Heathers and Fight Club in it, but mostly it's Handler and well worth a look.
The only other book I read is actually a 3-in-1 of Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness books called The Magic of Reason. If there is one thing that bugs me about Harry Potter, it's that the magic has no rules or cost. If it's convenient to the plot, anything can happen because she doesn't really have a magical system she has to fit it into ("The wand chooses the wizard" might be considered a rule, but it's so lightly used it's really inconsequential. The fact that it becomes a major hinge point for the plot of book 7 is another reason why I prefered the one in my head. I don't get this business with the wand). At any rate, Larbalestier's books are the opposite of that. Her magical system is very clearly thought out, and it rocks. Different characters have different ways of perceiving magic (the MC Reason sees it as math, most of which went over my head in the most delightful way. I love a writer who doesn't feel she has to talk down to me just because I never made it farther than pre-calc). Even cooler than the clearly defined way magic works is the cost: the characters give up years of their life every time they use magic, but if they don't use magic at all they will go insane. So these 15-year-olds are constantly weighing the costs of any action they take: will they take a step closer to dying before they're even 20, or a step closer to madness? And just to show how suggestible I am by other people's use of language, when I was writing the other day one of my characters was in zero G and chundered. Delete, delete, delete; my characters are Greenlanders, not Aussies; they don't chunder. (The book actually has an index for all the Aussie-speak used).
Well, that's a brief wrap-up, but I'm hoping to get another 2000 words in today before I have to go to that picnic thing. I'm off!
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