2014 Reading, Books 124-126

124) Manga Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream adapted by Richard Appignanesi and illustrated by Kate Brown

This one didn't work quite so well for me as the manga Much Ado About Nothing because the adaptation choice seemed to fight with the glorious language rather than enhance it--a sort of classical yet futuristic version of Athens that just didn't quite work for me. Still, Shakespeare.

125) All the Truth is Out by Matt Bai

I was a teen when the Gary Hart scandal broke in 1987, too young to vote still but more than old enough to pay attention. The scandal horrified me to the depths of my young Baptist soul--I didn't have any idea then just how commonplace adultery was among the powerful throughout history.

Now...what would appall me as a wife I can tolerate as a voter. Hart was certainly no worse morally than earlier politicians whose affairs were ignored by the press (Kennedy, etc.), or than later ones who survived scandal and were forgiven by enough voters to win elections (Clinton, etc.). He was just caught at the exact point in history WRT journalism, mass media, and celebrity culture to be destroyed by it, and we probably lost a capable president in the process. At the very least, the last quarter century or so would look very different if Hart rather than Bush Sr. had been elected in '88.

Bai also makes a case that we've lost something in how the Hart scandal led to much more packaged and trained candidates--it makes it easier for shallower, less competent men and women to win high office, because anyone can learn the right sound bites, and it's probably easier for someone who isn't that intelligent, thoughtful, or insightful to stay "on message" and consistent.

126) Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Rift Part 3 by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru

The final book in a trilogy and therefore interesting to fans of the series but utterly obscure to anyone else. I enjoyed this outing for a glimpse into the kind of mature avatar Aang became and some more hints at the roots of the technological and political changes that led to Korra's world decades later.

2014 Reading, Books 28-30

Most of my energies continue to be focused on the post-Battle of New Orleans book, but I do manage to squeeze in some reading time.

28) Daughter of the Sky, by Michelle Diener.

I tend to be wary of self-published books unless I have a lot of experience with the author. There's too much poorly edited or downright unedited work out there, and I'm sensitive to such things. As noted in my post on Rita Book #7, for me bad grammar or inept writing in a good story is like a singer who doesn't have the range for it attempting "O Holy Night" or "The Star-Spangled Banner." It's nails-on-a-chalkboard painful, and I can't hear past the voice to the story or song.

But Daughter of the Sky got a positive review from a site I trust, and I decided to give it a try largely for the sake of the unusual setting. I'm glad I did. While my inner copyeditor "tsk-tsked" in a few spots, it was smoothly written overall, and the story of an English girl orphaned in a shipwreck, taken in by the Zulu, and then caught in the middle of the Anglo-Zulu war is thoughtfully told. At least to my white, American eyes it seemed to avoid the most obvious pitfalls--the British are clearly in the wrong as the colonialist power invading a sovereign nation under a flimsy pretext, but the individual British characters are varied and often sympathetic, and the Zulu are portrayed sympathetically without ever seeming like Noble Savages.

My one major issue with the book echoes that of the review I linked above--the resolution feels a bit too hasty, and I would've liked to see more about how the hero and heroine coped with the trauma they experienced in the war and built a life together.

29) Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839, by Fanny Kemble.

In 1834 the noted English actress Fanny Kemble left her stage career behind to marry an American, Pierce Butler, apparently unaware that he was heir to plantations in Georgia, and therefore to slaves--or at least without having fully thought through the implications. I'm not clear on that part. In any case, they spent the winter and spring of 1838-39 on their rice and cotton plantations on the Georgia Sea Islands, and Kemble was appalled by what she saw and learned. I don't have time or space to do the book justice here, but I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a first-person account of American plantation life and the conditions of slavery by a thoughtful, sensitive observer. (Though in proper 19th-century style, she often stereotypes and patronizes even when she's being remarkably forward-thinking. E.g. when she's saying there's every reason to believe blacks could take their place as equal, self-supporting and upstanding free citizens if only they had more education, better nutrition, etc., she says something along the lines of, "Look at the Irish! You should hear how they're talked about in England, and just a generation or two in your country makes them a thrifty, industrious addition to your laboring class!" And as a descendant of Southern "poor whites" myself, I bristled a bit at some of her descriptions of my people.)

30) Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Rift Part 1, by Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, Dave Marshall.

An altogether lighter read...albeit still focused on culture clashes. More filling in the gaps between Avatar and The Legend of Korra, and it looks as though this series will focus on Toph as the previous one did on Zuko.

2013 Reading, Books 100-102

My reading pace has slowed down with the fall, but I'm finally past the century mark!

100) Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Search, Part 3, by Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante, Bryan Konietzko, Dave Marshall (Editor).

The biggest mystery left open at the end of the original Avatar: the Last Airbender series was the fate of Zuko's mother. It was SUCH a mystery, and speculated about SO much by fans of the show, that its ultimate resolution in this graphic novel series was all but doomed to disappointment. And...I was a little disappointed. I'm glad her story wasn't as dark as it could be, but the resolution felt almost too easy--except for the part where there was no sign of resolution for Azula's character. But maybe there will be another series that redeems her, or at least reveals her eventual fate.

Non-Avatar viewers, I'm sorry for all the random babble, but this is the kind of story you'd only be into if you know the series backwards and forwards.

Incidentally, when I went to Amazon for the link, I saw that the book has an average rating of 2 stars. At first I thought, "Wow, people must've been SERIOUSLY disappointed with the ending," but it turned out lots of people who preordered the Kindle version got an entirely different book delivered. Which...that's extremely annoying, but is the star system really the right way to deliver that message? It seems to me the rating is about the quality of the product, and that it's not fair to the creators to have their rating dragged down because Amazon bollixed its delivery. That said, as an author I'm not without bias in how I evaluate rating systems, their purpose, and their effects.

101) Blood of Tyrants, by Naomi Novik.

Eighth in what apparently will be a nine-book series. I raced through it breathlessly in two days. It's always good to see Temeraire again, and I was fascinated to see how Novik kept the general outline of Napoleon's Russian campaign while working in both sides' dragon armies. It was also cool to finally meet American dragons, though I did question her world-building a bit. We've seen all along that dragons in the non-European world are better treated than the Aerial Corps of the European powers (at least before Temeraire and Lien came along), and I can sort of buy that even by the early 19th century the British wouldn't have a clear understanding of how the draconic and human communities coexisted in, say, Africa or East Asia. But since it's clear America's colonial history played out at least somewhat similar to that of the real world (albeit clearly with Native Americans maintaining more power and autonomy because of their alliance with American dragons), I can't see why Britain and France couldn't have learned to treat dragons better from their experiences here.

But that's nitpicking, and I do love this series. I'm only annoyed at Novik for ending on such a cliffhanger! I hope Book 9 won't be too long in coming.

Incidentally, isn't that a beautiful cover?

102) French Napoleonic Infantry Tactics 1792-1815, by Paddy Griffith.

I realized early on upon starting to draft my current work-in-progress, which is set during the French invasion of Russia in 1812, that due to my relative lack of knowledge about the French army compared to the British army of the same era, I'm floundering for humanizing details of my French military characters' lives. So I've set my manuscript aside for the time being and am giving myself a crash course on all things French and Napoleonic. This particular book is as basic a survey as you could find, but it busts some of the myths about the French army (they did not inevitably attack in column rather than line!), and gives me a sense of what my French hero would've experienced serving during the heights of the Grande Armee's glory 1805-07 and how much it had gone downhill by 1812.

Susanna's week of reading, graphic novels edition

What can I say? I've been busy, and sometimes nothing hits the spot quite like a book with lots and lots of pictures.

82) Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise, Part Three. The final book in what it's now clear will be the first of at least two trilogies set between The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. I knew where this story had to be going for The Legend of Korra world to make sense, but it was still fun to see how it plays out. In this story in particular, Aang and Zuko both come across as the extremely powerful, extremely well-intentioned teenagers that they are, with all the emotional volatility that means for them and their world. This is my favorite Avatar comic to date, and I look forward to the next trilogy about the search for Zuko's mother.

83) A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel. Normally I find graphic novel versions of books I've already read in prose form distracting and a bit off-putting, so I doubt I would've read this book if my husband hadn't bought it for himself and left it lying around. But in this case the format actually worked for me, and left me with a clearer picture of the story and themes than I had when I first read the book, 20 years ago or so. Very well done. I've now left it lying around in my 8-year-old's room, hoping it will become an almost unique case of a book our whole family can enjoy. The only others I can think of so far are Harry Potter and Narnia.

Books read - start to summer reading

I've signed up for the Seattle Public Library's Adult Summer Reading Program.  Every three books I read this summer, I earn another entry in a drawing to win a Kindle.  Mind you, I already own a perfectly good second-generation regular Kindle AND a Fire, but this is still enough to get my competitive juices flowing.  If I win, I'll just give it to Miss Fraser (who otherwise will get her first e-reader for Christmas) or use it as a raffle basket prize at ECWC.  That said, I've given myself something of a handicap in speed-reading this summer in that I've started reading War and Peace on my lunch hours at work, so that's half an hour a day not going to nice short-to-medium-length novels.

Anything I finish between June 1 and August 25 counts toward the reading challenge.  (August 25 because the library shuts down for a week before Labor Day because of budget cuts, which has been going on since the dot-com bust recession back in 2001 or so, and I still think it's depressing.  Really, it's not helping the economy to furlough a bunch of librarians and shut down a service that for many is their only access to books, information, and the internet, and what we need is more stimulus and to save worry about deficits for when unemployment gets back down to 5% or so, but if I keep going this post will get very political very fast.)

Anyway, books.  I finished #48 before the challenge started, so I've just earned my first entry in the drawing.

48) If Walls Could Talk, by Lucy Worsley. An overview of how the major rooms in our houses and their furnishings and functions have changed over the past few centuries, focusing on Britain but with occasional comments on American and French homes. It doesn't go into a lot of depth, but it makes you think on how changeable the most basic functions of everyday life actually are.

49) Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March, by Adam Zamoyski. I've never been an admirer of Napoleon's, and every time I read about that campaign I want to go back in time and just scream at him or something. So many wrong-headed choices that led to so much death. That said...I now have some story ideas based around the invasion.

50) Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Promise Part 2, by Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino, and Bryan Konietzko. Second in a graphic novel trilogy filling in some of the blanks between The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, and likely to be the only overlap point between my summer reading and my daughter's.

51) Too Hot to Touch, by Louisa Edwards. Not only does Edwards write a sexy romance, her love of food and big city life shines through. Her books are among the few contemporary romances I seek out.

Books read, week of 1/31

I had a busy week of reading, though most of these books were extremely short.

13) Book Which Must Not Be Named (#2 of 8). Another Rita entry, like #11 a book filled with words collected into sentences, about which I will not comment.

14) Catching Jordan, by Miranda Kenneally. If this book was one of my Rita entries, I'd give it a perfect 9. It's a YA romance that I loved despite being, oh, 20-25 years older than the target audience. Aside from that, it could've been written for me. The heroine, daughter of an NFL quarterback, happens to be the best high school quarterback in her state, and she dreams of playing for an elite program in college. Given my love for college football (War Eagle!) and the fact I was always more one of the guys than a typically girly girl, I couldn't NOT enjoy this book.

15) Book Which Must Not Be Named (3 of 8): Another Rita entry.

16) Wellington's Generals, by Michael Barthorp. This one wouldn't be of interest to anyone who isn't a devoted scholar of Wellington's army, but for me it was a useful reminder of how the command structure worked and what divisional and brigade commanders did. (The hero of my current manuscript is a fictional major-general.) Also, I'll probably be scanning the color plates of generals in uniform to include with my cover art information sheet once the book is finished and in production. Not that I get too worked up over whether every single detail is right, but I'm hoping I can keep my streak of heroes actually wearing clothes on my covers going for at least a couple more books...

17) Book Which Must Not Be Name (4 of 8): Halfway through my Rita entries! Since I'm avoiding any hint of identifying information, I think I'm safe in saying this one was an especially sweet, satisfying mini-gem of a story. And it's NOT one of the ones I expected to enjoy based on the cover blurb. The one I thought I'd like best in fact got my lowest score so far.

18) Avatar: the Last Airbender - The Promise Part 1, by Michael Dante DiMartino, Brian Konietzko, Gene Luen Yang, and Bryan Gurihiru. I was late to the party on Avatar:TLAB, only discovering it last summer because my daughter is into anime, manga, and anime-esque shows and I thought she might like it. I'm glad I found it, because IMHO the storytelling is on par with Buffy or Deep Space 9 at their best (i.e. my all-time favorites). I'm even more excited for The Legend of Korra this summer than I am for the second season of Game of Thrones. So naturally I got the first entry in the comic book series bridging the two as soon as Amazon would bring it to my doorstep.