books I've read recently

[lotesse]

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

I wanted to see if Pullman could find the parts of this universe I liked again; he sort of did, but there was also a lot of other bs.

Malcolm was a charmingly drawn child character of the type I feel Pullman overall does well; I enjoyed his interactions with Hannah, and the game of spot-the-legacy-MacGuffin that ensued with the various alethiometers. But. The entire last bit, with the magical folkloric population of Britain, felt entirely out-of-genre, and I don't really like or believe it.

Also, I feel that, both in this book and the current HDM show, I'm being talked up on Lord Asriel as some kind of Good Daddy, and, no. The key to this whole canon, for me as a child reader, was Asriel's moral failure to realize the horror of his plan when he reacted so badly to the idea of it happening to his own child. But he's shown being sweet and available or whatever to little Lyra, and I'm supposed to go for that, as if I don't know he's a child-destroying psychopath underneath???


Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Reading, I kept trying to remind myself that it all probably felt more fresh in the early 90s, lol. I liked the iron woobie mixed-race hacker/swordsman character, but the book kept skipping away from him to extraneous other business. The spunky girl character was cool until the unnecessary and squicky forced sex/seduction storyline, which, ew ew ew, never have I appreciated fannish warning mores more. The worldbuilding was cool, but all tied in to this very heteronormative religious/linguistics meta-narrative; there was this very lol-worthy passage where the hero reflected that sperm could carry both malignant viruses and "benevolent sperm," gag me, ugh.

The good bits mostly reminded me of Stargate SG-1 fanfiction, so also there's that. Tho I spose the fic might have been borrowing from Stephenson some, so not totally a case of convergent evolution?


Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones

I saw as soon as I started this one why I didn't take it out of the library as a young reader; I didn't come from that sort of fandom when I was young, didn't play D&D or collect cards or do MMORPGs. I liked folklore and epic, ideally at least a few centuries old, and 19th century girls' literature. So this sort of excellent satire would have been lost on me; and mostly just wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted a way into Elfland.

Now, though, as an adult with an ongoing research interest in geek culture politics, it's a blast.

I really, really grooved on Derk and his creations, animals and plants and children of various degrees of humanness, loving them all the same. I confess my attention did glaze a bit at some of the extended campaign logic bits. While I was mostly intellectually pleased by the ending, it does have the quality that I always seem to find in DWJ's fiction of being ever so slightly emotionally unsatisfying at the conclusion; I wanted bigger drama and h/c, and instead DWJ rather abruptly just settles it all. But little lizard lady Chancellor Querida, with her love for cats, intolerance for pain, and lust for beautiful big brown griffins, was well worth the reading time!