Gail Carriger's Soulless, a Victorian steampunk urban fantasy, received a certain amount of favorable comment among people I know, so I ordered it on impulse. This was a mistake: I did finish it out of obligation, but I was disappointed and do not expect to read the rest of the books in the trilogy.
Alexia Tarabotti is, as the title says, soulless. We are assured in chapter one that as a result,
words like I and me were just excessively theoretical for Alexia. She certainly had an identity and a heart that felt emotions and all that; she simply had no soul. . . . If she had no soul, she also had no morals, so she reckoned she had best develop some kind of alternative [by reading Greek philosophy from age six on].
Which doesn't make very much sense to me, honestly, but the execution could be interesting, so okay. But as the book progresses it seems more that being soulless allows Alexia to be feisty and independent and conveniently modern in her outlook (which is deeply peculiar), and then it seems that soul is simply a quantitative measure of how suspectible one is to being changed into a supernatural creature. (Alexia, having none, can actually negate the supernatural abilities of anyone she touches.) Both of which seem like a waste of potential to me.
The narrative also head-hops distractingly and unnecessarily, a characteristic I associate with bad romance novels, and indeed there is a romance that is so obvious that I found it tedious rather than entertaining. Like I said: disappointing.
Moira J. Moore's Heroes series are light SFF novels that I would never have heard of, let alone picked up, if not for Pam's review (some spoilers) comparing them to Doris Egan's Ivory books. There are four of them so far: Resenting the Hero, The Hero Strikes Back, Heroes Adrift, and Heroes at Risk. The fifth is coming out at the end of July, and the series is envisioned as finite.
The thing that interests me most about these books is the worldbuilding. The characters live on a planet that was colonized through spaceships and the usual science fiction means, but are managing to survive there only through the efforts of Sources and Shields, pairs who are able to redirect the planet's many natural disasters through inherent talents. Something is going to be revealed about the way those pairs actually work, and I want to know what it is. I have Suspicions (ROT13: gung gurl'er npghnyyl hfvat zntvp), but they seem so difficult to pull off successfully I don't actually know if I want to be right.
The characters' home continent is casually multiracial, and one of the main characters is of Asian descent (whitewashed on the (quite terrible) covers, of course). In the third book they go to a southern continent that felt more stereotypical to me, but I think it's reasonable to see the overall story as undercutting the harmful stereotypes.
Basically these are light fast reads with some interesting stuff in the background. I wouldn't suggest you run out and get them now, but I may revise that when the series is finished. (Oh, unless you have a low tolerance for first-person narrators who aren't particularly good at reading or expressing emotion, in which case you should just skip them.)
I'd planned to log something else tonight, but since exhaustion wars with my promise to myself, I will go with a book easily discussed, Georgette Heyer's Cotillion. This is one of the ones people usually recommend for people new to Heyer, and I can see why, because it's a lot of fun, the kind of book that "frothy" was invented to describe. But I also think that it might be more appreciated by those with some familiarity with the Regency romance genre, because a good deal of what it's doing is constructing and examining conventionally unsuitable relationships. Not that unsuitable, I hasten to add—it's pretty obvious that there is a certain threshold of class and money below which Heyer's heroines may not sink. (Women always marry up in genre romances, unlike in fairy tales.) But still, unsuitable in some obvious ways, which is pretty cool.
To take another mystery series that I read from the library: Laurie R. King's The God of the Hive is the direct sequel to The Language of Bees. Alas, I cannot recommend it.
This book entirely abandons the device of the novels as Mary's manuscripts, making instead her POV one of many, and then plays ridiculously transparent and manipulative tricks with the multiple POVs. It introduces a character that I find very troublesome when it comes to problematic stereotypes. And it seems to be an entirely different story than its prequel, and a less interesting one at that.
I'm not sure I'm going to buy either of these, now.
The most recent of J.D. Robb's novels, Fantasy in Death, is much better than the last. The SF content is still silly, but a step up from "deeply ludicrous"; nothing about the plot made me want to gouge my eyeballs out, including its treatment of gamers and fandom; and though I spotted the murderer and motive quite early, it was at least fairly done. So yeah, I guess I'll keep reading for a while more.
More backlog: three classic Loretta Chase stories, Lord of Scoundrels, "The Mad Earl's Bride," and The Last Hellion, which share some characters.
Lord of Scoundrels is almost entirely adorable. It is genuinely funny and charming and romantic and except for one small thing it would be perfect. It takes the "tragic childhood leads to male romantic lead becoming complete jerk" and turns it upside-down and inside-out and into a real character arc. It gives the female character desire, romance, and practicality that all work together. And the two of them are, I'm sorry but, adorable together. (This appears to be one of the classic books to give people who don't read genre romance, and with the caveat below, that seems like a good idea to me.)
"The Mad Earl's Bride" is a novella (in the anthologies Three Weddings and a Kiss or, just printed, Three Times a Bride) about a couple who get married because the man is dying and his family wants an heir to continue the line, and the woman wants money and social standing to establish a scientifically-run hospital. The plot is sadly obvious but it has more charming gender reversals and characters who are friends as well as lovers. I am very fond of it.
The Last Hellion took a while for me to warm too, because at first it felt too much like Lord of Scoundrels. Eventually I came to like it, perhaps because it managed to do what I would have thought impossible: make Bertie Trent (a character in all three) not only likeable but actually kind of awesome. It does also share the completely incomprehensible (and, I think, randomly bisexual, alas) villain of Scoundrels, which is the flaw in both books: the plots are in many ways not worth speaking of. But except for wishing there wasn't that random passing reference to the villain's bisexuality (I think), I don't care.
Let me pick a fairly recent read out of the queue for today's vacation booklog backlog entry: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy (which, by the way, is a rotten name for the series). This is a Swedish thriller that is an international bestseller; I read it translated into English by Reg Keeland.
Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist who has just been convicted (yes, criminally; legal systems, they vary) of libel. He needs to disassociate from his magazine, Millennium, for a while, and takes a job purportedly writing a CEO's memoirs but really investigating the decades-old disapperance of his niece. A private investigator named Lisbeth Salander also becomes involved; their stories proceed in parallel at first (Lisbeth investigated Mikael before the CEO hired him and then became interested in the libel case) and then come together.
I can sort of see why this became a bestseller, though it hardly seems inevitable. There are some clunky bits: it's written in what I think of as thriller omniscient, where the POV jumps to whatever character would be convenient at the time, and its roots as something written several years before it was published show, because the Palm handheld that Lisbeth uses is I-don't-even-know how many years away from being top-of-the-line tech. (Larsson wrote three books and handed them all to a publisher shortly before dying; I'm not sure how much time there was for revisions, or if they weren't supposed to be set in the present anyway. I am told that the three published books do not end on a cliffhanger.) But it has a good central mystery that made me want to find out what happened. Lisbeth is a fascinating character for all that she gives me appeal of the lawless elite twinges (Mikael is less interesting and has a whiff of Mary Sue about him, frankly). And—what particularly interests me—it burns with outrage at sexism and violence against women [*], in a way that makes its handling of such violence (and some of it is quite terrible) urgent and distressing. In, I think, a non-exploitative way, and in a way that shows awareness of the issues that would arise if its women were solely victims.
[*] When the epigraph to Part One is, "Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man," and the others are similar, you can't say you weren't warned.
Recommended if you like that kind of thing, in other words.
Iain M. Banks's Transition is, alas, entirely unworthy of its terrific opening line:
Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get.
Honestly I can barely remember what happened in it, and I can't have read it more than six months ago (barely any time at all, when it comes to this backlog), so whatever the plot was, can't have been very interesting. I do recall that it takes forever to get going, which may have something to do with it straddling the SF and mainstream genres (it was published in the U.S. as SF and in the U.K. as mainstream). It has an entirely unbelievable and rather tedious sexual relationship. And it completely squanders its opening line: you just can't have a first-person narrator going around saying "but maybe I'm lying to you! Aren't I cute!" when you also have ordinary third-person narrators recounting the same story.
Not recommended.
And since I'm doing backlog catchup and have already written one Dortmunder entry, let's go to the next installment in the slo-mo Donald E. Westlake Memorial Dortmunder Re-Read. Nobody's Perfect is what Tiny later calls "the pitcha switch": a wealthy wastrel enlists the gang for a spot of insurance fraud involving a painting called "Folly Leads Man to Ruin" (also something that sharp-eyed readers will spot in later books). Complications, of course, ensue, not least of which is that the wastrel has also enlisted a killer to ensure Dortmunder's compliance . . .
This is the one with the great courtroom scene at the start, and the international trip at the end, which for no obvious reason always strikes me as somewhat more surreal than the usual conclusions of Dortmunder books. In terms of the series, this is Tiny Bulcher's first appearance. The guys at the O.J.'s bar are now officially regulars (though meaner than my usual conception of them; 'ware racial slurs.) Not much of May and Murch's Mom.
Nothing major about this jumped out at me as flawed, but I still don't think of it in the top tier of Dortmunders, and I'm not sure why. Still, it worked very well when I was in a discontent "I don't want to read anything" mood.
The last of Donald E. Westlake's books, Get Real, both is and isn't a conclusion to the Dortmunder series. You could read it as just another entry, if you didn't know that it was Westlake's last book: a reality show producer wants to make a show about Dortmunder and the gang pulling a job, which frankly is a premise that I couldn't wait to see Westlake take on. And the satire about reality T.V. is great, though at a couple of points I thought the plot was a bit loose, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.
But on another level, I noticed that everyone in the gang got a chance to make a specific useful contribution to the plan, which is not something that happens in all (or even most?) of the books. And, well, Jo Walton puts it better than I could:
Dortmunder hasn’t aged and now he will never die, because the one person who could have killed him chose to spare him. Dortmunder is immortal now, and in this last adventure, he smiles twice in one day.
I don't know whether Westlake thought this book would or might be the last, but there are far worse notes to end on.