Books read in January 2013

You know, I really don’t think it was necessary for WordPress to become more like Tumblr.

Anyway, I am aiming to blog more frequently this year, while also meeting my various other commitments.  It’s totally doable.  Really.

Accordingly, my monthly list of books will be going here instead of on Dreamwidth.  That way we’re guaranteed at least one post a month, and I swear I’ll get back to the Malory Towers posts as soon as real life stops making demands of me.  Why, I just spent the last half hour staring at my cat as he slept under a bench in the backyard!  YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF THE PRESSURES THAT I’M UNDER!

The books I read last month:

…Okay, I did not expect it to past like that! But hey, look how organised it all is!  I wonder why it didn’t get the genre of the last book?

Anyway, this was a pretty good month! Two Australian authors! A nice range of genres!  Some really good books!

Particular recommendations:

• I already blogged about Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts; 
• The Sacred Art of Stealing was the selection for my RL book club, and it was amazing.  Scottish crime/farce/social commentary/comedy that rewards close attention — I had to go back and read the first few chapters when I was finished — and was generally fun to read.  And it came in the middle of a series!  Well, it’s the middle book in a trilogy that forms part of a loose series.  I didn’t even hate the phonetic dialogue, which is usually a major turn-off for me.
• Captain Marvel vol 1: In Pursuit of Flight – lots of people have been talking the new Captain Marvel series up since it started, and it turned out I’d read a lot of this via Tumblr posts.  I know nothing at all about the previous Captain Marvel mythos, or about Carol Danvers, the character who takes on the title at the beginning of the story, but I really enjoyed this.  It kept returning to the role of female soldiers and aviators in the 20th century, with a neat twist and a forgivable villain, and loads and loads of different kinds of women in different kinds of roles.
• I enjoy theatrical history, social history and books about the Depression, so Furious Improvisation was pretty much a winner for me.  (It makes me a bit sad that most of the popular histories of the Depression are American, but that’s the way it goes, y’know?)  It’s a well-written look at the period of the New Deal, and the unpopular choice to direct government funds towards live theater.  Because actors, stagehands, directors, they all need to eat too, y’know?  And along the way, some terrible theatre is produced, as well as some groundbreaking, game-changing stuff like Orson Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth, the first professional production of Shakespeare with an all-black cast.  (Things which should also be the subject of a book in their own right!)
• For Darkness Shows the Stars is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion as YA science fiction.  Set in New Zealand, no less, although I didn’t pick that up until I read the prequel novella, Among the Unnamed Stars, even though I did notice that the heroine is a woman of colour.  I thought the transplant worked remarkably well, taking the basic situation of Persuasion — a young woman in a position of privilege turns down a chance to make a new life with a man from a lower class, and instead takes on the duties her feckless relatives ignore, and putting it in a post-dystopic environment.  (I say post-dystopic because it’s a major theme that the issues faced by earlier generations are falling away, and a new industrial revolution is taking place.)  I appreciated the many riffs on Austen, but I also liked the book in its own right.

Less to my taste:

• Thief of Lives is a slightly disjointed short story collection.  I liked the stories individually, but they didn’t work for me together.  I was amused to realise that Lucy Sussex is also the editor of She’s Fantastical!, an anthology of feminist SF that I read in my early teens.  I distinctly remember finishing that book and thinking, “Wow, this feminism business is complicated, and also really weird.”  I should go back and give it another look sometime.
  
• For the Thrill of It was a good overview of the Leopold and Loeb murders, but it committed an unforgivable crime against non-fiction: it put thoughts and feelings into the heads of historical figures.  The extensive footnotes and citations make me think most of it had a basis in fact, but it’s a style that I really hate in non-fiction.
• One Con Glory is an indie novel about a cranky fangirl having a close encounter with the leading man in a TV series based on her favourite Marvel comic.  It had its moments, but didn’t really work for me, mostly because it’s full of fannish types that I know and detest.  I avoid those people like the plague in real life; I don’t enjoy having them play major roles in the fiction I read!  Most disappointing of all, I found myself actively disliking the heroine, and not just because she dissed Kathryn Janeway.  I usually like a bit of crankiness in my fictional ladies, but here I felt it was frequently unjustified, and not balanced out by any other moods.  And the other female characters were pretty one-dimensional.
• I needed a whole blog post to process Losers in Space.

So that was January!  February is … well, it’s happening.  I’m reading books.  Books are being read.  And someone needs to come and forcibly detach my Amazon account from my credit card, because I seriously need to stop buying Kindle books.