2013: books 11-14
Jun. 24th, 2013 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanThere are people on my f-list who do these posts once a week and list a half-dozen books each time. Along with audiobooks in some cases.
Still working through the stacks in no particular order. The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection is the 1989 release of a yearly anthology that started in 1984 and is apparently still going strong. I highly recommend it, the quality of the selections was really good. And there was a lot of variety in the types of stories and voices that were included, which is something I really appreciate in an anthology.
It's entirely possible I'm still scarred by my Swords Against Darkness experience.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tam is a story about eight women. Four immigrated to San Francisco from different parts of China shortly after the Japanese invasion and the other four are their daughters. The chapters focus on the relationships between these women in a series of chapters which (and I didn't know this until I read the Wikipedia page) are structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters. (The "Joy Luck Club" of the title is the name of a regular Mahjong game that the older women organized among the four of them.)
It's beautifully written and really drew me into the heads of the characters. This is a re-read for me and I thought it was interesting that the stories that I remember most clearly were those of the older women. Their daughters all seemed to run together for me, and even on the second reading I had to keep flicking back to the earlier chapters to get clear in my head which of the matriarchs they were associated with.
Moo by Jane Smiley.
What an odd book.
The setting is a snapshot of facilty staff and students at an agricultural college in the American midwest in the late-80s/early-90s. I can tell you that I felt much hilarity was added by the fact that I attended an "aggie" University in Southern Ontario in the late-80s, and students at some of the other schools called us "Moo U". I had classmates who had never ridden on a bus before arriving in Guelph, they would have been right at home in this story.
There isn't so much a single plot as a network of stories all linked by the fact that the characters work or take classes at the college. I found the characters all very stereotyped, but the way the book is written that kind of works - like a battle of archetypes. Reading the reviews it looks like some reviewers thought the book was intended to be a comedy. I can see that, but to me it felt more like droll satire than written for laughs.
I also found it singularly depressing that the politican who convinces the voters that he's a "regular guy" by imitating "plain folk" language and then proceeds to screw over those very people once he gets into office was already an established thing at the time this book was published.
The Sudden Weight of Snow by Laisha Rosnau.
I'm only about half-way through this one, so I'm not reading any reviews yet. It falls into the category of "coming of age" story. A teenage girl who has grown up in a tiny milling town in British Columbia. Her mother is a member of a strictly conservative evangelical church. Like almost everybody I have ever known who has grown up in a small town she spends her spare time getting drunk and high, and if she follows the Standard Operating Procedures of small towns, she will shortly move on to sex because there is pretty much nothing else to do. She falls for a guy who lives at a nearby hippie commune, and stuff happens.
This isn't normally the type of novel that interests me but I have to say the writing is evocative and lovely. The story takes place from November to February and so much of the writing is about the atmosphere of winter, that it's almost jarring to emerge from the text and find myself sitting on a porch in a muggy Toronto summer.
Still working through the stacks in no particular order. The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection is the 1989 release of a yearly anthology that started in 1984 and is apparently still going strong. I highly recommend it, the quality of the selections was really good. And there was a lot of variety in the types of stories and voices that were included, which is something I really appreciate in an anthology.
It's entirely possible I'm still scarred by my Swords Against Darkness experience.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tam is a story about eight women. Four immigrated to San Francisco from different parts of China shortly after the Japanese invasion and the other four are their daughters. The chapters focus on the relationships between these women in a series of chapters which (and I didn't know this until I read the Wikipedia page) are structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters. (The "Joy Luck Club" of the title is the name of a regular Mahjong game that the older women organized among the four of them.)
It's beautifully written and really drew me into the heads of the characters. This is a re-read for me and I thought it was interesting that the stories that I remember most clearly were those of the older women. Their daughters all seemed to run together for me, and even on the second reading I had to keep flicking back to the earlier chapters to get clear in my head which of the matriarchs they were associated with.
Moo by Jane Smiley.
What an odd book.
The setting is a snapshot of facilty staff and students at an agricultural college in the American midwest in the late-80s/early-90s. I can tell you that I felt much hilarity was added by the fact that I attended an "aggie" University in Southern Ontario in the late-80s, and students at some of the other schools called us "Moo U". I had classmates who had never ridden on a bus before arriving in Guelph, they would have been right at home in this story.
There isn't so much a single plot as a network of stories all linked by the fact that the characters work or take classes at the college. I found the characters all very stereotyped, but the way the book is written that kind of works - like a battle of archetypes. Reading the reviews it looks like some reviewers thought the book was intended to be a comedy. I can see that, but to me it felt more like droll satire than written for laughs.
I also found it singularly depressing that the politican who convinces the voters that he's a "regular guy" by imitating "plain folk" language and then proceeds to screw over those very people once he gets into office was already an established thing at the time this book was published.
The Sudden Weight of Snow by Laisha Rosnau.
I'm only about half-way through this one, so I'm not reading any reviews yet. It falls into the category of "coming of age" story. A teenage girl who has grown up in a tiny milling town in British Columbia. Her mother is a member of a strictly conservative evangelical church. Like almost everybody I have ever known who has grown up in a small town she spends her spare time getting drunk and high, and if she follows the Standard Operating Procedures of small towns, she will shortly move on to sex because there is pretty much nothing else to do. She falls for a guy who lives at a nearby hippie commune, and stuff happens.
This isn't normally the type of novel that interests me but I have to say the writing is evocative and lovely. The story takes place from November to February and so much of the writing is about the atmosphere of winter, that it's almost jarring to emerge from the text and find myself sitting on a porch in a muggy Toronto summer.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-24 06:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-24 09:10 pm (UTC)