October novel-reading

[garran]

Since I don't think I'm going to have any personal reading time to speak of for the remaining few days of the month (I'm right in the middle of a three- or four-week period of unusually intense schoolwork, which is also in large part why I haven't been writing here), I may as well post my October reading now. In keeping with the new tradition, I'll once again happily elaborate on my experience of any of these if asked.

Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting
C.J. Cherryh, Brothers of Earth
Peter S. Beagle, Tamsin
Steven Brust, Agyar

Comments

[tanetris.livejournal.com]

I am curious as to your experiences with C.J. Cherryh, both with this month's book and those from last month (and even other books by her you know, if applicable). My only knowledge of her is from The Sword of Knowledge, which I enjoyed thoroughly, but which was written between her and 3 other authors, thus I don't know how much of my enjoyment was actually her.

[garran.livejournal.com]

Whoops, this is rather later than I originally intended. Sorry about that!

According to wikipedia,

Cherryh did not write the three novels in the Sword of Knowledge series, but received co-author's credit because she penned a foreword to each.

The Sword of Knowledge page itself goes so far as to say that she "may have helped plan the storylines", but for the most part it looks like you have still to try her for the first time.

There's a weird sense in which I only just discovered her myself; I read my first series of hers more than ten years ago, but after that I didn't read anything else until this past summer. That series was the 'Morgaine cycle', about a dangerous and powerful woman who travels with her feudal vassal between a series of worlds connected by magical or technological 'gates', carrying out her ancient mission to close as many of the gates as she can. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it -- in fact, I've reread it several times in the interim -- so I'm really not sure why it took me so long to investigate her further. Actually, I think that I did pick something up, once, when I was in exactly the wrong mood for it and couldn't get past the first page, so that might have had something to do with it.

Then, this summer, after a long, quiet buildup period of overhearing people talking about her like I was really missing something remarkable, I finally picked up Cyteen, which is, in fact, something remarkable. (How to describe it? It's about cloning and slavery and politics and the nature of genius. This description makes it sound rather more boring than it is.) That book is set in the same future history as most of her science fiction and possibly some of her fantasy, so I was immediately motivated to seek out more; I read Rimrunners, which is similarly good but on a very different scale, and then everything after that you've seen. I'm slowly working my way through her entire corpus, which I pleasantly expect to take years.

So, I like her and recommend her. Her work is characterized by:

• A certain degree of subtlety, most especially manifested in a slightly sideways approach to giving background information (though she's not as subtle about that as some other authors I read).
  
• What seems to be an abiding thematic interest in suffering and politics, both personal and large-scale.
  
• Characters, including protagonists, who are very and plausibly foreign in their mindsets.
  

Even though it isn't where I started, I think that The Pride of Chanur is probably the best place to start, if one wants to try her out; it's likely her most accessible book. It is a space opera about a grizzled, humanoid-lioness trader captain.


-Garran