What Have I Been Reading? (2019 batch #3)
Apr. 8th, 2019 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroDiscount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire - Opens very much with a homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer; remains fairly standard urban fantasy, with a stock-in-trade romance subplot (I could pretty much guess where in the book they’d be banging) and the requisite twist betrayals. It’s got McGuire’s signature wit, but I think it shows that it’s the beginning of a series a little too much—too much of the little asides about what creatures exist get tossed in with no further reference. (McGuire does nothing by halves: In this, every cryptid ever imagined exists or had existed; In Indexing every fairy tale is real; in Wayward Children every mysterious alternate land exists; etc.) I’m more interested in following more of her other book series rather than continuing this one.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn - A disturbing story of terribly broken people and just plain terrible people. The prose is vivid without being purple and despite figuring out the likely twists (I had a pretty good idea of whodunit, but I’ll admit that I didn’t connect the teeth thing despite plenty of clues) it was still really interesting to see how she got there. This is what Lucinda Berry was trying to write, but wasn’t good enough to pull off. Flynn pulls it off.
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: A Modern Retelling of Little Women by Rey Terciero and Bre Indigo - A graphic novel with a modern-day mixed-race blend family of four sisters finding love and surviving hardships. They blend in a few plot points from the second book and rearrange a few bits, but the bones are all there and I think they do fun things with them. I would suspect it’s significantly less interesting if you don’t know the source material and what the references are. (I think Alcott would have liked it, if for no other reason that there’s a very good reason Jo and Laurie will never get together.)
The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang - The Prince likes to wear fabulous dresses, which is a secret he’d prefer not get out. He hires a personal seamstress and they both learn to follow their dreams in an anachronism stew that follows pretty much all the standard plot beats you’d expect. (Spoiler: It ends happily.) Cute, but unless you’re AMAB and like pretty dresses, it’s unlikely to change your life.
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith – From the creators of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, this is a non-serious, accessible non-fiction look at developing/upcoming technologies. Interesting and entertaining. Also amusing is that I know at least one of the cited scientists personally (Dr. Justin Werfel; we went to college together).
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn - A disturbing story of terribly broken people and just plain terrible people. The prose is vivid without being purple and despite figuring out the likely twists (I had a pretty good idea of whodunit, but I’ll admit that I didn’t connect the teeth thing despite plenty of clues) it was still really interesting to see how she got there. This is what Lucinda Berry was trying to write, but wasn’t good enough to pull off. Flynn pulls it off.
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: A Modern Retelling of Little Women by Rey Terciero and Bre Indigo - A graphic novel with a modern-day mixed-race blend family of four sisters finding love and surviving hardships. They blend in a few plot points from the second book and rearrange a few bits, but the bones are all there and I think they do fun things with them. I would suspect it’s significantly less interesting if you don’t know the source material and what the references are. (I think Alcott would have liked it, if for no other reason that there’s a very good reason Jo and Laurie will never get together.)
The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang - The Prince likes to wear fabulous dresses, which is a secret he’d prefer not get out. He hires a personal seamstress and they both learn to follow their dreams in an anachronism stew that follows pretty much all the standard plot beats you’d expect. (Spoiler: It ends happily.) Cute, but unless you’re AMAB and like pretty dresses, it’s unlikely to change your life.
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith – From the creators of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, this is a non-serious, accessible non-fiction look at developing/upcoming technologies. Interesting and entertaining. Also amusing is that I know at least one of the cited scientists personally (Dr. Justin Werfel; we went to college together).
