meganbmoore: (too many books)

What are you currently reading
Legend of the White-Haired Demoness by Liang Yusheng, ch 14. I think it's been about a month since 7 Seeds completely took over my kindle time, so I'm still playing catch up and trying to remember who all these secondary characters running around are.

What did you recently finish reading?

Finished Georgette Heyer's The Black Moth. Slow start but entertaining overall, though it's more a case of you can see the elements that eventually became Heyer's strengths than that it's really good on its own. I doubt I'll be reading These Old Shades, as "redeem the rapist" plots don't appeal to me. (And while it may have been a failed rape attempt in this book, not only was the intent still there, but he was obviously successful more than once in the past.) I'm curious, though, to see if we start getting some adaptations of Heyers books over the next few years, as they start entering the public domain.

Caught up with 7 Seeds, which I posted on separately.

The Last Dragon by Jane Yolen and Rebecca Guay. Graphic novel set in a medieval-lite world in which a dragon is born 200 years after the last of the dragons were supposedly chased away. When a dragon begins attacking a town, several young men are sent out to find a "hero" to fight the dragon, and instead return with a braggart more familar with spinning stories than fighting. Meanwhile, the local healer's youngest daughter comes up with plans of her own to beat the dragon. It's simple and straightforward and relies more on wit and creative thinking than flashy heroics, and is more concerned with how the dragon affects people's daily lives than with the dragon itself. Very nice little book.

Steel's Edge by Ilona Andrews. Fourth book in Andrews's "The Edge" series. I liked it more than the last 2 books in the series, but less than I do most of the Kate Daniels books. The first half is pretty much the protagonists setting out to destroy every human trafficker they can find, and it later branches out to wrap up most of the threads from previous books. I think it's supposed to be the last book in the series, but if so, I suspect it'll get revisited once or twice later down the road to focus on the teen characters as adults. My favorite part was when the heroine would invert healing magic to make her enemies sick, as I've always wondered why people with healing magic in fantasy worlds aren't able to do that more. (Sadly, the book didn't go where I wanted with that. Oh well.)

Black Bird Vol 1-3 by Sakurakoji Kanako. I read a little bit of this when it first came out, and couldn't quite remember if I disliked it or wasn't quite grabbed by it when I saw that the library had the first 10 copies, so I checked out the first 3. I feel like i need to read about 30 columes of good manga to make up for this.

The heroine, Misao, has blood that is superduper extra yummy blood that makes demons stronger. Her One True Love is a tengu named Kyo who was her childhood friend, and is now a teacher at her school. His saliva can cure wounds. Naturally, Misao is constantly bleeding. (I will pause a moment to ponder what Clamp and/or Kaori Yuki would do with this idea. Whatever it was, it'd be better than this.) The healing is frequently over Misao's protests, and often staged to look like sexual assault. This is aside from Kyo's regular sexual assaults (often at school) that are ok because they're in love and she's his destined bride. Kyo is also fond of deliberately terrifying Misao to teach her that she has to rely on his body for protection, and Misao thinking that there's no reason to refuse Kyo's sexual advances if he loves her, and that it's touching when he's cruel to her because he's trying to teach her to rely on him out of lurve. There is, I think, an average of about 1.3 rape attempts (not including anything from Kyo) per volume. All by people Kyo has warned Misao to avoid. In fact, I think every person Kyo has told Misao not to talk to (which is everyone but his servants) has tried to rape and/or murder Misao. She has to learn her lesson about never having an independent thought or decision of her own somehow, amirite?

Brain bleach required. Very glad I only grabbed a few volumes, because I probably would have felt to read the rest if I'd grabbed them.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn. This is kind of like reading Astro City in prose form. That's not a criticism. Celia West is the non-superpowered daughter of her city's (the world's?) superheroes. At 17 she became emancipated and ran away to college, and is now a forensic accountant who does her very best to avoid her parents' superhero lifestyle. Unfortunately, her parents' secret identities were exposed when she was a teenager, and she's been kidnapped so many times that it's become boring, and the prosecutor trying her father's archnemesis for tax fraud has decided that it'd be good publicity to have her hepling on the case. There are elements of a parody in there and a pretty strong critique of superhero/vigilante culture and romanticism (one that appears to have made some Amazon and Goodreads reviewers cry in agony at the book daring to resist), and the general feel is of Silver Age surperheroes giving way to more modern superhero through the eyes of someone on the outskirts. While I haven't read superhero comics in probably 5-6 years, I read enough in the 15 years before that to see a lot of the twists coming, but that didn't affect my enjoyment.

The Adventures of Sir Balin the Ill-Fated by Gerald Morris. Part of Morris's irreverent "The Knights' Tales" series of children's books (not to be confused with his YA series, "The Squire's Tales," which can also be irreverent depending on Morris's opinion of whatever tale he's adapting at the time, but is another beast entirely). If you're familiar with the tale of Balin and Balan, you're probably going "but how do you make that a children's book?" The answer is "by relentlessly mocking obsession with fate and destiny." Light fluff, but entertaining and funny, and a quick read.

Rasetsu Vol 1-9 (complete) by Shiomi Chika. I read and enjoyed the first couple volumes of this when Viz first started publishing it a few years ago, then wasn't able to continue buying it because of finances, but the library now has the volumes I didn't, so I finally read all of it. Rasetsu is about a 18-year-old psychic named Rasetsu who was cursed by a demon when she was 15, with the demon claiming that he'd claim her for his own if she didn't find her "true love" by her 20th birthday. Thankfully, while the "find your true love" element isn't completely shelved, there isn't much of a focus on it more often than not (it's there and not something she can exactly forget, but there are other things going on) and most of the focus is on Rasetsu and her coworkers fighting malevolent ghosts and demons. There's a romantic plotline and something of a triangle, but it's generally well done (I say "generally" because I wasn't fond of the third party or his behavior, but it fits the overall plotline) and I liked the actual romance more than expected. My only real beef with it is that, as usual, Shiomi tends to surround her heroine with several men, and no other major female characters. It's connected to Shiomi's other series that was released by Viz, Yurara, in that Rasetsu's love interest, Yako, was in Yurara, and both heroines are psychics, but you don't need to read Yurara to read this.

What do you think you'll read next?

I have Natsuo Kirino's The Goddess Chronicle and the latest Kate Daniels book, and since I've read a bunch of Carrie Vaughn's standalone books, I went ahead and checked out the first couple books in her urban fantasy series. I also have the ATLA tie-in books that my library has, as I recall some listies liking them. I was going to say "I should back off a bit from manga for a while before I OD," but then I was at the Library's main branch this morning after a doctor's appointment and they had just acquired a lot of manga i haven't read yet, so that might not be happening. I also still have Kelley Armstrong's Omens to read.
meganbmoore: (pillars: alienna reading)
(I remember a time when about 70% of my content was posts on individual books.)

The Black Hawk by Joanna Bourne: Romance novel about a French spy and a British spy who have been freinds, lovers, enemies and rivals in various combinations over the course of a quarter of a century, beginning in the French Revolution. I don't recall Bourne's first 2 books incredibly well, but I remember both having interesting and rather different premises but the books not quite living up to them, and the heroines being rather out of the norm but being defanged somewhat to make the romances work. I rather loathed the hero here at times but I suspect my subconsciousness recalls him better in the previous books than my consciousness does, and my reaction is more related to that than this book, a few scenes aside. Not as good as it could be, but quite different from most of the genre.

Ghost Story by Jim Butcher: The short and unspoilery version is that the 13th installment in the Dresden files is a fun and entertaining book in which the most interesting things, sadly, are the things going on offpage with the supporting characters, and which Harry (and so we) only see a bit of or hear about. Molly has been slowly becomin the character that interests me the most over the last few books, and that held true here as well. I like to think that my hopes that Molly will eventually be Maggie's mentor are supported by this book, but am sure that my not-so-secret desire that the series eventually switches from Harry to Maggie as the central protagonist will never happen. The resolution to the mystery from the end of the last book was fairly predictable, but that's OK.

Magic Under Stone by Jaclyn Dolamore: Sequel to Magic Under Glass, featuring a good story and a woefully whitewashed cover. Everything in the book springs pretty much directly from the first, including the new characters and their plots. This one focuses a lot more on the fae and the fae court, but it's not to the detriment of the book as a whole. (Though, if you're like me and watch Once Upon A Time, one particularly dramatic and serious scene might accidentally become funny because you picture Josh Dallas popping us and asking if you've tried "True Love's Kiss.") The world remains a very engaging blend of history, steampunk and fantasy, though I wish more of it would be explored beyond the pseudo-Europe beyond Nimira's memories of her homeland.

Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George: Light and largely adorable medieval-lite MG book about about a 12-year-old princess in a castle that's always changing (rooms and corridors move and change size, conditions and dimensions, new rooms spontaneously appear) who, along with her teenaged brother and sister, has to protect the castle (and kingdom) from advisors and a foreign prince when her parents disappear and are declared dead. A bit heavy heanded with the "place as character" at times, but probably not as much so from the perspective of the target age group, and less reminiscent of the "Castle Perilous" books than I had expected, with lots of spy!princess shenanigans and some political maneuverings that are amusingly naive at this point in life, but which I probably ould have thought brilliant when I was 12.

The Squire's Quest by Gerald Morris: This is I think the 9th or 10th book in the "Squire's Tales" series. Good but not one of the best in thr series, this adapts "Cliges," a source text which Morris seems to look at about the way he views "Tristan and Isolde," only moreso. It's most notable, probably, for being one of the few books to focus primarily on the series's titular character, Terrence, and his running around investigating things and being suspicious of Mordred was considerably more fun than the "Cliges" parts. I think there are only one or two books after this, given the presence of Mordred and his obvious plotting.

Cloaked in Red by Vivian Vande Velde: A collection of 8 adaptations of "Little Red Riding Hood," the best part is probably the author's foreword, in which she spends several pages boggling at the tale and it's popularity. The stories themselves are a bit hit-and-miss, and largely have little to do with the fairy tale beyond the surface. My favorites were "Little Red Riding Hood's Family" (a bit of a nod to urban fantasy) and "Granny and the Wolf" (in which the wolf is female and Granny's pet, and Granny has an unwanted suitor), but while a couple made me go "Err...what...?" (possibly deliberate) it's a pretty entertaining, light read.
meganbmoore: (camelot 1967)
The Knights' Tales is completely unrelated to Morris's The Squire's Tales series, despite natural character overlap as both are based on Arthurian legend. Despite the overlap and sharing an author, the characterization of the shared characters, while having a similar base, is very different in the two series. TKT is aimed at a much younger audience than TST (the books are about 100 pages long with large print and illustrations-they take about 30-40 minutes each to read) and are basically entertaining (if less involving) farces that try to cram as many legends as they can in without really digging deeply into them.

The first book The Adventures of Sir Lancelot the Great is funny but a bit lackluster. It's entertaining, but you can tell Morris is switching gears and hasn't really found his footing yet. The Adventures of Sir Givret the Short actually focuses largely on the story of Erec and Enid, and is closest in tone and format to the TST books. Which is probably why it's my favorite. The Adventures of Gawain the True, though, is probably the solidest in terms of voice, and Morris seems to have decided that he will play the role of Parsifal in these books. "But WHY are all the knights who don't live in a castle evil and/or bandits? But WHY would you lop a guy's head off in the banquet hall even if he asked you too and everyone was restless? But WHY are they all always the most beautiful maiden, and WHY does that matter? But WHY are men charging at each other with sticks? But WHY are you always charging off on a quest? WHYWHYWHY? is there really logic to all this stuff?"


Morris's TST series is, IMO, pretty easily the better of the two, but these are an entertaining way to spend and afternoon (or a few breaks and lunches at work, if you're me) and would definitely be a decent intro to Arthuriana for kids. Though, it does include some of the gory bits. like lopping off heads and then the headless person picking up their head, plopping it back on, and being all "Okey dokey! Be back for yours in a year!"
meganbmoore: (camelot 1967)
There are I think 2 books in the series that I haven't read yet because they're not out in paperback. Morris's Squire's Tales series is a usually-lighthearted, frequently-cynical (that's the default, actually) MG retelling of various Arthurian legends, usually avoiding the best known parts save as subplots. (Also, I can't remember if Merlin was ever even mentioned.) Mallory is frequently Morris's base, though he also alsoincorporates De Troyes and the older Welsh stuff.


The first two books-The Squire's Tale and The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady-are Gawain-centric, retelling a variety of Gawain stories and a few extras through the eyes of his squire, Terrence. Terrence will remain Gawain's squire forever because it's more fun that way. The third book is Lynnette and Gareth's story, The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf, told almost entirely through Lynnette's POV. Book four is Parsifal's Page, told through the POV of Piers, a blacksmith's son. The Ballad of Sir Dinadan is the first (and only, so far) book told through the knight's POV and incorporates "Tristan and Isolde," as well as other The Princess, The Crone, and the Dung Cart Knight is the one most centrally based on De Troyes and is told through the POV of Sarah, another OC central character. The Lioness and Her Knight retells Ywain and Laudine's tale through the POV of Laudine's companion, Luneta, made Gaheris and Lynnette's daughter for the purposes of the series. The Quest for the Fair Unknown is about the French tale of Beaufils and the Grail Quest.


I read these largely as I acquired them as opposed to in chronological order, but they stand alone very well. It's a shared universe with characters that show up frequently (Gawain and Terrence most notably, but Morgan and Lancelot have a habit of suddenly popping up and Kay has a habit of tagging along-sometimes to laugh and point-and/or have practical if grumpy opinions, and generally be secretly smarter and wiser-and more crotchety-than anyone else once he's matured a bit) but the books are largely self-contained and offer few spoilers on other books, though some characters have interesting growth throughout the series. (It actually made me interested in how Lancelot grew and changed throughout, if mostly off screen, and that's rather unprecedented.)


As mentioned before, the books are rather cynical and Morris is prone to portraying many more famous figures as rather ridiculous and/or overdramatic, and frequently foolish. In early books, many of then tend to remain that way throughout, though eventually more and more characters grow wiser throughout the course of the story. TBH, The Ballad of Sir Dinadan went so far into the cynicism that I think Morris didn't have nearly as much left for the rest of the books. The cynicism in that one was a but much for me but it's probably my favorite of the ones that didn't have a female POV (the three with female POVs aren't my favorites just because they have a female protagonist-though I'm not about to try denying that that's likely a factor- but they also tend to have more character growth, particularly for the lead and the lead's self-awareness, and have ome of the more interesting main plots.) if only for Dinadan, Kay and Bedivere going around shaking their heads in hooror at idealistic fools, and for having the whole "epic romance that spans years" thing ending with the lovers mutually being all "If I were to get married, I'd marry you, but really, I prefer just being single..."


The books vary in quality, as most series do, though I don't think there are any thatwould qualify as bad. Though, due to the nature of the various legends and their having plot similarities, some plots draw inescapable comparisons to others. For example, Parsifal's Page and The Quest of the Fair Unknown deal with a young man who's only exposure to human society is his mother entering the wide world with no clue how people think and operate, and who makes endless "social blunders" and has a habit of asking questions non-stop. I prefer Beaufils to Parsifal as a character (though, like Lancelot, I find this Parsifal much more interesting than I usually find the character) and think The Quest of the Fair Unknown is a better book than Parsifal's Page, but there's no escaping the feeling of rehashing familiar ground a lot of the time.


Regardless, while not perfect, the books are very fun and have some interesting commentary on various legends and the behaviors of mythic figures, and there's a heavy trend of stories reshaping themselves and growing with every retelling, which is a narrative trope I have a bit of a thing for.

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