fub | Entries tagged with book

I’ve written about picking up reading again before. With the end of the year, it’s time to look at the stats page and reflect on my reading.

I read 40 books with a page total of 17.551 pages. I have been reading a lot, and not doing a lot of other things I could have done. I might tone it down a bit next year, I also have a writing project that I want to kick off. Let’s take a look at some of the other stats:

I’ve been relatively consistent in reading, and the number of pages per book is largely the same across books, because the two lines largely overlap. In January I read the four thinner books of the “Tale of Shikanoko” series, so there the pages line is below the books line. And in December I finished the Dragonlance Chronicles Collector’s Edition, which collects the three books in one volume, so there the number of pages is over the books like. But other than that, the number of pages per book is pretty consistent. I think that’s an interesting average.

I get a lot of my books from the local library, which has a good selection: those are all the print books. But there are also ebooks that I loan through the ‘online library’ and get from elsewhere. I prefer print books for relaxed reading, but my little tablet with a ebook on it is easier to take with me when traveling. And if the print book is not available in the library, I get the digital release — our bookcases are filled to capacity already, and I don’t feel often that I have to own books anymore. Certainly there would not have been space for these 40 books!

The print books I get from the library are in Dutch, ebooks are usually English. So it’s not a big surprise that the language distribution largely mirrors the print versus digital distribution.

Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels add up to 7 books, and I read her historical/fantasy novel The Familiar after that, so she comes at 8 books read this year. The Glass Throne series is also 7 books, but I’m not reading anything from Maas after that, so she is stuck at 7 books. Lian Hearn wrote the “Tale of Shikanoko”, so I technically read 4 books by her, but they’re thin books so it’s kinda cheating… I am 3 books into T. Kingfisher’s Paladin series, which is very enjoyable, and I will be sure to read the fourth as well.

I have a lucky draw for deciding what to read: my average rating is 3.53 with 4 stars being the largest number of ratings, so I tend to enjoy the things I read. 5 books (so 1 in 8) got a five star rating from me. The first I gave was my review for Six of Crows, it is so adventurous and had the perfect pacing. The second was my review of Ruin & Rising, also by Leigh Bardugo — this is the third and final book of the Shadow & Bone trilogy which actually precedes Six of Crows, but that’s not the order in which I read them. It’s such a satisfying end to a grand adventure!

The third is my review for Project Hail Mary. Pure semi-hard SF, really interesting how captivating a story set in a confined environment can be! Fourth was my review of Dungeon-Crawler Carl which is as wacky as it sounds, but with very serious undertones. And the fifth is for a book I finished yesterday, my review of The Fifth Season. That book just has everything I love about fantasy.

I set out to read mostly Young Adult fantasy, and while 10 books (so 25%) are tagged with ‘Young Adult’, the conclusion must be that 75% of what I read was not YA. And the majority of my 5 star ratings are also OA books — I guess my taste is for more mature stories. But the ratings for the books tagged YA are towards the higher end of the spectrum, so I do enjoy reading them. My to-read pile is 79 books now, so there’s plenty to choose from. And it’s fun to breeze through a book and enjoy the perspective of a younger protagonist. And 34 books (so a full 85%) are tagged as fantasy, so at least I am reading lots of fantasy as was my intention.

I do not set goals for myself — reading is a hobby, not a competition for me. That being said, I did join the StoryGraph’s January Pages challenge to read at least one page each day, just to see what it is like to have a goal like that.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: relaxed

I finished all books in the “Grishaverse” by Leigh Bardugo. There’s seven books in total, same as the Glass Throne series, so I thought it would warrant a write-up as well.

The setting is fantasy, circa 18th century. The main focus is on the kingdom of Ravka, analogous of Tsarist Russia, with the same kind of problems. But the extra element are the Grisha: people with supernatural powers. Grisha are born, and in Ravka each child is tested for Grisha-abilities. Those that test positive are taken to the “small palace” in the capital to be trained to harness their powers, after which they are put in the Second Army to defend Ravka against its enemies (mainly the Fjerd, equivalent to the Fins; and the Shu Han, the China-equivalent) under the command of The Darkling — the only Grisha with powers over darkness.

The series consists of a trilogy and two duologies. The first trilogy, which starts with “Shadow and Bone”, follows Alina who discovers she is a Lightbringer. The Darkling immediately takes her under his wing — ostensibly to get her help in “curing” the dark land that splits Ravka in two. Of course there is more going on, and Alina has to forge some unlikely alliances and assemble a ragtag band of rebels to save Ravka.

I think this is the strongest part of the series. It all has a certain medieval fairy-tale quality, even though flying machines enter the picture at some point. The story has a certain “quest-like” feel to it, with a set of companions traveling towards certain goals all across the world (though mostly in Ravka), an excellent way to showcase the characters. (A bit like how “The Lord of the Rings” uses travel to showcase the characters, come to think of it.) Because characterisation is where Bardugo shines: we get these little pieces of backstory to all the characters which explains how they got to be the way they are, and it all makes sense. In two pages she can explain how someone has been reacting the way they did, all without info-dumping. The characters are really what elevates the story to greatness.

The second part is a duology, which starts with “Six of Crows”. A gang of scoundrels, living in the equivalent of Amsterdam, get hired to retrieve a prisoner from the Fjerds who knows the formula for a drug that makes Grisha very powerful, but that is also very addictive. Having this information out in the open is a danger to all Grisha, as it can (and has been!) used to control them. And the Fjerds, who burn Grisha at the stake for being “witches” are of course intent in doing as much damage as they can with this knowledge.

This is actually the first book in the series that I read, and while there were some things that made less sense to me, it was perfectly OK to start with. Though if you have the ambition to read the whole series, I would strongly recommend you start out with “Shadow and Bone”. The depiction of Ketterdam was really believable: the mercenary pursuit of profit at all costs, with those with the biggest pockets able to shape policy to their own advantage… Yup, sounds like the Dutch!

This has a much more “modern” feel than the first trilogy, because the technology has made a jump forward — mainly military technology, like it always happens. I had to check when it was written, because it could have been published as a setting for the Blades in the Dark RPG! The similarity is really uncanny, but this seems to have been a case of parallel development and neither influenced the other. If you like a good heist story (and who doesn’t?), then this is definitely for you.

The last duology starts with “King of Scars” and sees the young king of Ravka try to stabilise his country while fending off his enemies. I think it’s the weakest part of the series, but it has some nice twists and turns. I appreciated the increased depth of the “Grisha-lore” and the narrow escapes are very tense and well-written. It’s fun to see cameos of some of the characters of the previous books, though that’s more of a gimmick than actually driving the story forward. Most of the characters get a decent ending, and while there is an opening left for another book, I don’t think we’ll ever see a continuation — maybe that’s for the best, because the story has been told. And by now it has drifted from the fairy tale-like feel of the first trilogy that it’s not quite the same anymore.

It’s Young Adult fantasy, so it’s an easy read — though some of the themes and events are pretty heavy, so I wouldn’t recommend it for very young YAs. And it’s incredibly chaste: holding hands and kissing is the worst that happens. There is literally only one instance where people have sex, but that’s very much given the “fade to black” treatment. I don’t know how we are supposed to believe that a hedonist like Nina (my favourite character in the series, she’s so unapologetically herself!) is content with a few kisses even though she has ample opportunity for much more?

I highly recommend the series, especially the first trilogy. And I already have another, non-Grisha, book by Bardugo lined up, I really like her writing.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: content

I haven’t been posting here for some time now, because composing a blog post would cut into my reading time. Remember kids: if you are determined enough, you too can turn reading into a vice!

When I was a Young Adult myself, YA was not a distinct category, and thus I read Old Adult sci-fi and fantasy. So I read Tanith Lee, Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, Ursula LeGuin, and many more. In retrospect, I don’t think all of them were appropriate for a 15-year old, but hey — I got away with it because the adults didn’t care, in true Gen X fashion.

I’m reading for fun, so I’m not looking for anything too heavy, and there is a lot of YA fantasy. So it seemed like a good place to start, and there are thousands of websites with lists of recommendations of what to read. And I thought that, once I got underway, I would find more books to read that are similar to the ones I started out with. And one series that consistently pops up in those recommendation lists is the Glass Throne series by Sarah J Maas. And my local library has all seven books (in the Dutch translation) so I set out to read that — the first book in the series is the first book I tracked on the Storygraph and might be the first book I loaned from the local library.

I read other books in between, but today I finished the last book in the series, and I have Thoughts.

In The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya, the expert swordsman, sees the Dread Pirate Roberts approach. He thinks to himself that it would be fun to fight left-handed, as a way to challenge his own skill. And to his surprise, his opponent fights left-handed as well — such an interesting situation! But his opponent is better than him and pushes him back towards the edge of the cliff where they are fighting. Then Inigo smiles, and when asked why he is smiling as he is losing, he says: “I’m not left-handed!” and switches to right-handed fencing. Now, Inigo drives back the Dread Pirate Roberts, but when he has been cornered, he confesses: “I’m not left-handed either!” and switches to right-handed fencing too and re-gains the upper hand! (I read the book, did not watch the movie, but this clip is of that part of the movie.)

To us, “I’m not left-handed either!” is shorthand for something being revealed that the reader (or viewer) had no way to know beforehand, an underhanded narrative trick. It’s funny in The Princess Bride because Inigo is playing this trick and then the trick gets played against him — but if a character in a story shows (or unlocks) an ability just in time, it’s a bit lazy. For sure, negative things happening to a character can be a great way for personal growth and sudden realizations, and of course you need a way to let the reader come down from that tension arc in some way. But if the only way you know how to do that is by having the character shout the equivalent of “I’m not left-handed either!” and do something that the reader had no way to see coming, then it becomes irritating.

The thing is that Sarah J Maas is so very good at it. She is well-versed in creating these desperate situations. The set-up is certainly grand and epic and sweeping, so there is a lot of room for evil plots coming to fruition and for the good guys to get into dire straits. And the series starts slow, so the tension arcs are longer and you have more time to think things through. But by the third book things heat up, and especially the last book, which has to resolve so many plot lines, has 900+ pages of these tension arcs, one after the other, almost all resolved by “I’m not left-handed either!” That made the first part quite a slog, but I was determined to finish the series, and as it progressed I fell for the trick, even if I saw it happening.

For example, the main character sends some letters out. And then in a later book, a fleet arrives to assist in a battle, and it is revealed that she called in some old favours and this means they narrowly escape destruction! As a reader, you had no way to know that one of those letters was to the commander of one of these fleets, and that they would heed the call. It’s just a deus ex machina, a ploy to save the characters from whatever dire fate was closing in on them.

And so the series becomes some kind of “desperation porn”: all seems lost and the enemies are closing in, and surely the characters won’t be able to escape this time. But lo and behold, it is revealed that one of the characters (it’s often the main character) is actually not left-handed either, and they get away semi-unscathed! And as the series progresses, that loop speeds up. By the last book, we get such a loop every few pages, it’s pretty exhausting.

I don’t think Sarah J Maas is a good writer. Her characters lack depth and most of them are kinda unpleasant (with Elide being the only notable exception). The characters are one-dimensional actors in a grand plot.

The real star is the plot — it is certainly grand, and I like that. In all fairness, some things were plotted out in advance and then the pieces of the puzzle fall in place and suddenly some things make a lot of sense. I liked that. I think she is very good in thinking of a plot and how that develops and gradually opens up, but it would have been better if someone else had done the writing of how characters in that world actually experience that plot.

There are also some… concerning… patterns in the book. Of course romances are part of the story. But almost all of them have a huge age gap — sometimes hundreds of years. And while she seemed to try her best to be ~diverse~, all the relationships that get any kind of space in the books are very heterosexual. In fact, all the main characters that do not end up in a ‘safe’ heterosexual relationship are killed off in the battles at the end. All of these are certainly some choices the writer made!

Was it a waste of time? Certainly not, I enjoyed my time reading the series even though there were quite a few eyerolls in there too. Do I recommend it? No, I don’t think I would — surely there’s better stuff out there. Will I read anything else by Sarah J Maas? No, I will not.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: cranky

So, I have been reading again. But I have had to adapt my book selection strategy quite a bit, and I have adapted my tech accordingly.

When I was a wee lad, living in a village with a decent-sized library in the 1980’s, I’d simply roamed the bookcases in the public library (mainly those with fantasy and SF) and selected the books that interested me. My choices were constrained by what was available, but because so much was available, it was not a problem to just keep reading interesting books. Then I moved to Nijmegen, and I got a library membership there. As you’d expect, the library there is much bigger and therefore there was much more choice. Again, I restricted my choices by what was available, but that was not a problem because there was so much. And inter-library loans are possible, but cost money and I didn’t care to pay for that.

And when I started working and I got more disposable income, I bought more and more books (infinite choice when ordering from the internet!) and I stopped going to the library — I’m pretty sure I hadn’t set foot in a public library in 25 years. And somewhere in the past 10 years, I kind of… stopped reading books (with the notable exception of RPG books).

I’ve written about it before, but after the move to the Tiniest Village, I had enough mind space to pick up a book again, and I re-discovered my love of sitting down with a book and just… read. I decided to become a member of the ‘local’ public library. There’s no library in the Tiniest Village, but there is one in the next village, the Slightly Less Tiny Village. But I had to change my approach to selecting books to read.

You see, the closest library is small. The collection is not that large, so simply wandering in and finding something, while possible, is also not viable in the long term. But there is a library system that it is a part of: equally small libraries in villages all around, and slightly larger libraries in slightly larger towns. And you become a member of this system, not the individual library. And request a book to be brought from one library to another within the system is free! So even though the individual library is small, you have access to the whole collection. That’s a good deal, but it does mean that the online catalogue is much more important. And because there is almost no serendipitous selecting a book, I turned to recommendation lists to find interesting books.

There’s blogs with lists of “the best YA fantasy” etc, but I’ve also started using Storygraph (like GoodReads but not owned by a fascist) to get recommendations based on my preferences and the books I have read. I’d still have to look in the catalogue of the library system if that particular book was available — and since this is a Dutch library with books in Dutch, that also involved finding out if there is a translation available. So I had been copy/pasting author names back and forth a lot.

But I noticed that a query in the library catalogue is done through a GET request, with the query as a parameter. And that means that, given the name of an author or book title, it is possible to construct a direct URL to the catalogue for that information. So I have installed the extension Selection Search and configured the catalogue search in there. So if I see a book title or author name, I select the text, click on it and select the configured search; and then a new tab opens with that query. (I tend to use author names because recommendations are mostly for English books but of course the titles are often different in their Dutch translation!)

If the book is available in ‘my’ library system, I favourite them so I have a convenient way to request a reservation when I get to that book. I also add the book to my Storygraph “to read” pile. Sometimes the book is not available in my library system, but there is an ebook that I can loan from the “online library”. In that case, I put the book in Storygraph as well.

I built up quite the list of books to read, and that pleases me.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: pleased

I don’t remember when I read a book for pleasure, on paper, all the way through. I’ve been reading RPG books and manga on my tablet, and some e-books. But with things quieting down in our lives, I had time to simply sit down and read again. I used to be a voracious reader, but somewhere along the line I just… stopped. I did create a little reading nook — we now have enough space that I can put a chair in a spot without TV or computers. The chesterfield chair is on it’s way, I’m using a rattan chair we still had standing around until it arrives.

When I was re-arranging the books in the bookcases to sort things out (we had dumped books to quickly empty boxes but had not really sorted them out) I came across a book I bought in a bookstore in Greenwich when we visited there in 2017, but I had never gotten started in it. It was the first two parts of The Tale of Shikanoko, based on old Japanese legends.

Somewhere halfway the first part I was gripped, but of course the second part was nowhere to be found these days — in the end I bought a set of four from a second-hand bookstore in the Netherlands.

The thing that I dislike about “historical” stories is the way that men of power casually enact violence against those of less privilege — including sexual violence. This series is no exception, because even though it’s fantasy, it’s based on historical novels. But it’s not the main focus of the story, and it never gets gratuitous — though there are some seriously unpleasant people. Almost everyone who has bad plans with others gets a bad ending, so there is poetic justice there.

I’m not sure if I’d recommend it. I found it fascinating, but if you’re not a weeb or otherwise interested in Japanese history, I would not recommend it.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.