Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

What I’ve Read

Dracula by Bram Stoker – I cannot believe I failed to mention that I finished Dracula in my last post! I enjoyed it and I could absolutely see why it’s a classic, but I am gonna say – I don’t see it as being nearly as dear to me as Frankenstein. Stoker’s writing is engaging and I love that he’s so devoted to the documents and journals and letters so we can get each character’s voice. I cared, quite deeply, about each of these people. However, Stoker is so into doing each character voice that it gets honestly kind of obnoxious to read Van Helsing’s speech and writing – he’s given a Funny Foreigner Accent and it’s conveyed phonetically, so it carries into his writing in a way that undercuts his authority as a scholar. Also, the book got aggressively religious in the last third as Mina gets progressively more vampirized, and it feels repetitious. Jonathan’s fierce love of her redeems a great deal! Not all. But, overall, compared to the beginning, the ending of the book felt rushed and nowhere near as loved. Dracula, the character, had completely disappeared from the novel, in pursuit of Dracula the monster, and the death blow felt like a fizzle. If you want to have a fun little side quest, look up all the phrenologists that Stoker lists in here by name.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu – I read this after Dracula because a friend pointed out that Carmilla predates Dracula, and it seemed like a short read. Highly recommend – no one is kidding about the lesbian subtext; the book burns with it! The commonalities between Carmilla and Dracula are already subject of better minds than mine, but I do feel like Stoker improved on one element – grafted on the historical Vlad Tepes Dracula makes for a far more engaging fake aristocratic background than the one created whole cloth for Carmilla. I also see the same element of the Character of Carmilla disappearing inside the Monster Carmilla once the vampiric nature is revealed. It’s quaint and charming and worth a read!

The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow – Adored this book. Told from the first person, the main character is absolutely the kind of specific voice that renders the particular themes of the book most clear – when the author makes this kind of structural choice for their book, they are already working from such a point of strength! The main voice of the book is a soldier whose complicated relationship with patriotism and fealty wend their way into his scholarship of his country’s founding myth, and what it means for the warrior heroine of his country’s darkest hour to have been a real person who bled and wept and wanted nothing more than to stop killing people. Excellent book, go in spoiler free if you can. This book was so good and so specifically *for me* that it is actually making it challenging to read books that are too similar because I keep wishing I were re-reading this.

Platform Decay by Martha Wells – Murderbot Diaries #8 – Hm. I liked this fine. I think there was an element of emotional growth for Murderbot that felt…. A bit too on the nose. A bit too close to home. I often love narratives where an imperfect victim of neglect is allowed to be a bit rough and a bit messy and make some mistakes, and this is not NOT that. But it’s possible that Murderbot is perhaps becoming more mentally healthy than me, and I feel weird about that. The plot is solid, if nothing particularly new for Murderbot. I really liked Three getting some sidequests and fucking them up in new and delightful ways.

What I’m Reading
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgeson – I’m trying to not compare everything that is vaguely magical and monarchical to The Everlasting, but, well, it was a good book, and good books have a long hangover! I am also trying to not compare this to the Tensorate Series by Neon Yang. But. Well. I don’t dislike it, either on a sentence or paragraph or chapter level- I am waiting to see how the book comes together before I finally judge it. But – I am trying to NOT read into the book more Asian-coding than it actually calls for, and I’m failing? It feels like a Pan-Asian restaurant, rather than a specific era and time with a specific understanding of itself, and that’s not necessarily a flaw! Good characters so far, and I’m not even a third in.

The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri – This, unfortunately, I really did have to set aside for when I’m in a more charitable mood. I found myself quibbling with sentences and pacing and paragraphs and that no way to read a book. It’s working on some themes similar to The Everlasting, and I loved that book immediately and this one deserves a fair shake on its own terms.

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer - Audiobook – Excellent! Hugo nominated. Funny and informative and charming. I am even getting over the unexpectedly English narrator. (Seriously, why.)

Ancient Magus’s Bride Vol 4 – On hold for now, I have lost some oomph but I will come back to it.

Code Switching by Therrae – I picked this up to re-read because the series is the most unlike the Everlasting I could think of while still fitting my current mood.

What I’ll Read Next
Tomb of Dragons Katherine Addison - reread for Xing Book club
Ancillary Justice Ann Leckie for Necromancy Book Club

Hugo nominations still to read:

Novels
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Novellas
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK)
The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK)