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Book meme! Day 3
Jul. 23rd, 2010 07:35 pmDay 03 - The best book you've read in the last 12 months
I thought I had already written about how much I loved Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer, but I just skimmed the last year of my journal (an easy task when I typically post once a month or so it seems) and I guess I never did. I think I just gushed about it in comments in other people's spaces.
There were so many things I loved about Daniel Abraham's book (and the whole series, but especially the sensation of reading the first book).
First, it had flawed characters that I actually liked. For me, it managed the trick of having antagonists who weren't shown as evil so much as just having different goals. And protagonists who weren't necessarily heroic. Selflessness wasn't always the right choice, and neither was selfishness. I loved the moral world and the system of moral costs and rewards the author created.
Second, it was well-reviewed fantasy that other people thought was clever, and I actually enjoyed reading it. After a long run over the last year of trying to read books that were well-reviewed by people I trusted and having reactions that ranged from boredom to hatred to did-not-finish wall-banging, it was a huge cathartic relief to me to actually like a book that other fantasy readers and critics liked. My taste in romance lines up better with critical response than my taste in fantasy, and it was starting to make me feel like an irritated outsider in the fantasy reading world. The pleasure of getting to agree with people can't be entirely discounted.
Third, I thought the magic and the economics were both brilliant - like a jigsaw puzzle that fits together really well AND shows a picture that you enjoy seeing revealed as it assembles.
Fourth, I thought the writing was really good on a technical level - my impression was of clean, straightforward sentences that managed to express complicated feelings without falling all over themselves.
Speaking of feelings -
Fifth, it was a book with a big picture plot where feelings were important, and they were feelings that I could actually believe real people who didn't have major pathologies might have!
I know that sounds like a bunch of negatives - it didn't fail this way, it didn't fail that way, etc. But I think there are so many ways that a book with that kind of ambition can fail - and reading this book for me had all the tension of a watching a highwire act with jumps and unicycles in it - wow, they didn't fail that way! oooh, they cleared that tricky bit! wow, they didn't fall when they stood upside down on the unicycle! At first, I really thought I wouldn't like it - the first few chapters had me engrossed in the writing but hating the world as too bleak - then the way the characters twist away from that entranced me (and books later - when the consequences of that first choice played out, that entranced me too).
Books by authors I already know and love don't have quite that same exciting sensation to them, but the close second for me would probably be the feeling I got reading Laurence Yep's City of Fire - it reminded me of all that I loved about Dragon of the Lost Sea as a kid, plus I just completely enjoyed the setting because I spent a year living in Hawai'i when I was about the same age as the kids in the story or a little younger. Laurence Yep's realistic/historical fiction isn't as enjoyable for me because it tends to be a little bit sadder, so I'm really looking forward to the later books in this new fantasy series.
( Book meme list )
I thought I had already written about how much I loved Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer, but I just skimmed the last year of my journal (an easy task when I typically post once a month or so it seems) and I guess I never did. I think I just gushed about it in comments in other people's spaces.
There were so many things I loved about Daniel Abraham's book (and the whole series, but especially the sensation of reading the first book).
First, it had flawed characters that I actually liked. For me, it managed the trick of having antagonists who weren't shown as evil so much as just having different goals. And protagonists who weren't necessarily heroic. Selflessness wasn't always the right choice, and neither was selfishness. I loved the moral world and the system of moral costs and rewards the author created.
Second, it was well-reviewed fantasy that other people thought was clever, and I actually enjoyed reading it. After a long run over the last year of trying to read books that were well-reviewed by people I trusted and having reactions that ranged from boredom to hatred to did-not-finish wall-banging, it was a huge cathartic relief to me to actually like a book that other fantasy readers and critics liked. My taste in romance lines up better with critical response than my taste in fantasy, and it was starting to make me feel like an irritated outsider in the fantasy reading world. The pleasure of getting to agree with people can't be entirely discounted.
Third, I thought the magic and the economics were both brilliant - like a jigsaw puzzle that fits together really well AND shows a picture that you enjoy seeing revealed as it assembles.
Fourth, I thought the writing was really good on a technical level - my impression was of clean, straightforward sentences that managed to express complicated feelings without falling all over themselves.
Speaking of feelings -
Fifth, it was a book with a big picture plot where feelings were important, and they were feelings that I could actually believe real people who didn't have major pathologies might have!
I know that sounds like a bunch of negatives - it didn't fail this way, it didn't fail that way, etc. But I think there are so many ways that a book with that kind of ambition can fail - and reading this book for me had all the tension of a watching a highwire act with jumps and unicycles in it - wow, they didn't fail that way! oooh, they cleared that tricky bit! wow, they didn't fall when they stood upside down on the unicycle! At first, I really thought I wouldn't like it - the first few chapters had me engrossed in the writing but hating the world as too bleak - then the way the characters twist away from that entranced me (and books later - when the consequences of that first choice played out, that entranced me too).
Books by authors I already know and love don't have quite that same exciting sensation to them, but the close second for me would probably be the feeling I got reading Laurence Yep's City of Fire - it reminded me of all that I loved about Dragon of the Lost Sea as a kid, plus I just completely enjoyed the setting because I spent a year living in Hawai'i when I was about the same age as the kids in the story or a little younger. Laurence Yep's realistic/historical fiction isn't as enjoyable for me because it tends to be a little bit sadder, so I'm really looking forward to the later books in this new fantasy series.
( Book meme list )
