What Have I Been Reading?
Jun. 30th, 2018 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroTroubling a Star by Madeline L'Engle - This crosses over with most of L’Engle’s other series, featuring a protagonist from one as a side character, and a location from another (Vespugia) as an important locale. Aa a travelogue / cozy thriller / teen drama, it only barely gets to actually qualify as speculative fiction. She violates the “one Steve rule” very badly, having four Adams, three of whom are all related and two of whom did basically the same trip. (Would it have been so much trouble to establish that Adam II went by “Junior” and Adam III is “Skip” or some nonsense? Why does Cookie even need to be Adam Cook?) Also, it hadn’t really dawned on me, but L’Engle’s protagonists are all very similar, regardless of gender, and very often have pleasant ongoing friendships with secretly-fascinating retired old people. Their journeys also tend to focus on a lot of the same sorts of details—places that L’Engle either visited or was fascinated by, and then used to fill out the meat of a novel.
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente - Jethrien had this one just right: It's Valente doing Douglas Adams meets Eurovision, which means we spend half the book on the ridiculous travels of a washed-up British glamrock star through space, and half on extensive backstory and world building. And the metaphors are insane and vivid like a pot-fueled post-orgy game of the Baron Munchausen RPG as played by library science grad students who collectively feel that HP Lovecraft's prose could have stood to be a little more purple and never met a run-on sentence they wouldn't run away to Vegas with for a quickie wedding that would put a pop starlet to shame.
Geek's Guide to Dating by Eric Smith - I feel mildly embarrassed that I considered writing basically this book when I was in my early 20s. He's aiming at teenage/20-something geeky boys (though pays lip service to geeky girls) and drowns you in 30 years worth of references (which feel like they’re trying too hard). It’s a bit of a one-size-fits all approach (particularly for things like fashion or social networks, which don’t have the same cultural connotations in different circles) but does manage to emphasize that you should appreciate the person you’re dating as a cool person—don’t monopolize the conversation, listen to what they say, don’t talk down or “neg” anyone, etc—rather than a reward. (Dating advice without the rampant misogyny? Who’d have thought it possible?) Credit for the book’s existence, even if the execution isn’t perfect.
How to Survive a Horror Movie by Seth Grahame-Smith - Exactly what you’d expect it to be, though I expect it would be tiresome to a real fan of horror movies—I found it fairly funny likely because I’m only moderately familiar with the genre’s tropes. I loved the advice to confuse the attacker (and the screenwriters) by doing something wildly out of genre, such as monologuing about your lifetime of regret in an English accent or loudly farting a lot. I also found it interesting to note that visiting Iceland actually meets a number of the horror movie criteria, including nights that never end, constantly being far from civilization, smoke and ash randomly billowing over the ground, and one token black person in the entire country. Still safer than BSD and Q’s wedding in the cabin-filled remote wooded area, though—I wish I’d had this book for staged readings during that weekend.
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente - Jethrien had this one just right: It's Valente doing Douglas Adams meets Eurovision, which means we spend half the book on the ridiculous travels of a washed-up British glamrock star through space, and half on extensive backstory and world building. And the metaphors are insane and vivid like a pot-fueled post-orgy game of the Baron Munchausen RPG as played by library science grad students who collectively feel that HP Lovecraft's prose could have stood to be a little more purple and never met a run-on sentence they wouldn't run away to Vegas with for a quickie wedding that would put a pop starlet to shame.
Geek's Guide to Dating by Eric Smith - I feel mildly embarrassed that I considered writing basically this book when I was in my early 20s. He's aiming at teenage/20-something geeky boys (though pays lip service to geeky girls) and drowns you in 30 years worth of references (which feel like they’re trying too hard). It’s a bit of a one-size-fits all approach (particularly for things like fashion or social networks, which don’t have the same cultural connotations in different circles) but does manage to emphasize that you should appreciate the person you’re dating as a cool person—don’t monopolize the conversation, listen to what they say, don’t talk down or “neg” anyone, etc—rather than a reward. (Dating advice without the rampant misogyny? Who’d have thought it possible?) Credit for the book’s existence, even if the execution isn’t perfect.
How to Survive a Horror Movie by Seth Grahame-Smith - Exactly what you’d expect it to be, though I expect it would be tiresome to a real fan of horror movies—I found it fairly funny likely because I’m only moderately familiar with the genre’s tropes. I loved the advice to confuse the attacker (and the screenwriters) by doing something wildly out of genre, such as monologuing about your lifetime of regret in an English accent or loudly farting a lot. I also found it interesting to note that visiting Iceland actually meets a number of the horror movie criteria, including nights that never end, constantly being far from civilization, smoke and ash randomly billowing over the ground, and one token black person in the entire country. Still safer than BSD and Q’s wedding in the cabin-filled remote wooded area, though—I wish I’d had this book for staged readings during that weekend.
