What Have I Been Reading?
Dec. 19th, 2018 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAdulthood is a Myth (Sarah's Scribbles Collection) by Sarah Andersen - I had seen an assortment of these comics passed around Tumblr, but hadn’t actually read them in earnest. They’re fun.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger - I love anachronistic-order narratives, and it’s so rare that they’re done well, but this is as tight as a narrative can be. The foreshadowing is fantastic, as is the counterpoint of who knows what when. I also thought there were a bunch of hints dropped that make a sequel unnecessary—Henry’s fast aging in his 40s is clearly the result of spending a lot more time out of sync (he calls out the possibility he’s much older than his birthdays would indicate), which is likely him spending a lot of time with Alba. For that matter, Alba is mentioned to have actual control over her time-traveling, which would make her version of this story a lot more pleasant.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott – Bitingly Swiftian in its satire, this describes a two-dimensional world in which shape defines ability and function, an “obviously natural” caste system rife with the usual sexism, racism and pretense of social mobility. The math-based descriptions of the characters are interesting, but I think the real draw is in making the idea of any “natural superiority” of one person over another seem absurd when it’s applied to two-dimensional shapes.
Creature of Havoc (Fighting Fantasy) by Steve Jackson - This book is massive, and Jackson pulled out all the stops in terms of “interesting game book tricks”. There’s a whole underground map with a variety of areas that you can reach in different orders, and many of them are dead-ends if you go at the wrong time. Rather than prompt you that you need an item to pass, when you pick up a pendant that detects secret doors, it prompts you to add 20 to the page reference when you read a specific phrase—if you hadn’t seen that instruction, you’d never know there was a hidden door to look for! For a good chunk of the book, the monster you’re playing as can’t understand language, so all the spoke/written text is ciphered. Once you can crack it by learning to speak, the ciphers contain several alternate page references (“if you can read this, go here”). You need to have successfully gotten the pendent, learned language, and rescued an old man to get his magic ring. Then you can maneuver to the dungeon boss (via many of the otherwise dead-end areas), beat him and escape. (In any other book, you’d think this was the escape and the real ending, as you needed to hit several specific points and beaten the boss. You’d be wrong.) There’s an entire second half of the book, exploring the world outside (where thankfully you don’t need the cipher, because you have to have learned language to get there). This time, it “checks” if you have certain items by having you add numbers you’d only know if you really got them to the page references. Oh, and the only way to find the true endgame is if you remember to go back and decipher the very first writing you found after you can read, and figure out the riddle. Oh, and virtually all of the instant deaths are more than one reference deep from the choice that leads to them—just to make the book a little harder, you can’t just keep your finger in the page you came from. Devious!
The Human Division by John Scalzi – The fifth of the Old Man’s War books, dealing with the fallout of the human race’s civil unrest. The chapters were originally published as short stories, which shows from both the periodic appearances of characters who unceremoniously die before they recur, and the somewhat redundant exposition about tech and the nature of the world. Also, the main characters of the last four books don’t appear and are only mentioned in passing. It’s clever in the typical Scalzi fashion, and I may have to push the sequel further up my queue, because the ending resolves precisely nothing.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger - I love anachronistic-order narratives, and it’s so rare that they’re done well, but this is as tight as a narrative can be. The foreshadowing is fantastic, as is the counterpoint of who knows what when. I also thought there were a bunch of hints dropped that make a sequel unnecessary—Henry’s fast aging in his 40s is clearly the result of spending a lot more time out of sync (he calls out the possibility he’s much older than his birthdays would indicate), which is likely him spending a lot of time with Alba. For that matter, Alba is mentioned to have actual control over her time-traveling, which would make her version of this story a lot more pleasant.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott – Bitingly Swiftian in its satire, this describes a two-dimensional world in which shape defines ability and function, an “obviously natural” caste system rife with the usual sexism, racism and pretense of social mobility. The math-based descriptions of the characters are interesting, but I think the real draw is in making the idea of any “natural superiority” of one person over another seem absurd when it’s applied to two-dimensional shapes.
Creature of Havoc (Fighting Fantasy) by Steve Jackson - This book is massive, and Jackson pulled out all the stops in terms of “interesting game book tricks”. There’s a whole underground map with a variety of areas that you can reach in different orders, and many of them are dead-ends if you go at the wrong time. Rather than prompt you that you need an item to pass, when you pick up a pendant that detects secret doors, it prompts you to add 20 to the page reference when you read a specific phrase—if you hadn’t seen that instruction, you’d never know there was a hidden door to look for! For a good chunk of the book, the monster you’re playing as can’t understand language, so all the spoke/written text is ciphered. Once you can crack it by learning to speak, the ciphers contain several alternate page references (“if you can read this, go here”). You need to have successfully gotten the pendent, learned language, and rescued an old man to get his magic ring. Then you can maneuver to the dungeon boss (via many of the otherwise dead-end areas), beat him and escape. (In any other book, you’d think this was the escape and the real ending, as you needed to hit several specific points and beaten the boss. You’d be wrong.) There’s an entire second half of the book, exploring the world outside (where thankfully you don’t need the cipher, because you have to have learned language to get there). This time, it “checks” if you have certain items by having you add numbers you’d only know if you really got them to the page references. Oh, and the only way to find the true endgame is if you remember to go back and decipher the very first writing you found after you can read, and figure out the riddle. Oh, and virtually all of the instant deaths are more than one reference deep from the choice that leads to them—just to make the book a little harder, you can’t just keep your finger in the page you came from. Devious!
The Human Division by John Scalzi – The fifth of the Old Man’s War books, dealing with the fallout of the human race’s civil unrest. The chapters were originally published as short stories, which shows from both the periodic appearances of characters who unceremoniously die before they recur, and the somewhat redundant exposition about tech and the nature of the world. Also, the main characters of the last four books don’t appear and are only mentioned in passing. It’s clever in the typical Scalzi fashion, and I may have to push the sequel further up my queue, because the ending resolves precisely nothing.
