1. The final book in Vatta’s War by Elizabeth Moon, Victory Conditions, was about on par with my expectations. I’d give the series as a whole a solid three and a half out of five, because it was a military space opera with some decent characterization and fun space battles. I particularly liked Stella, who came into the story in book two. The bad guy is almost never “on screen,” but it isn’t about the enemy anyway. It’s about the three protagonists’ rise to power.
Don’t think I’d reread it, but I’d recommend it as good entertainment, and I’ll take a look into the next series about Vattas, of which I understand the second is shortly forthcoming.
2. I finally, finally, finally finished listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I like to listen to audiobooks I’ve already read in print for the simple reason that if I listen only in 20-minute increments over a period of months, I won’t lose the thread of the story. The reader is excellent, the story is fabulous, the Gentleman with the Thistle Down Hair as sinister as can be, and the footnotes delightful. I listened on 1.25 speed without any difficulty.
My next audiobook will be Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman, which is less than seven hours long.
3. There are rarely any reasons to be thankful for the flu, but one is that I have been able to read two books in two days. The first was Artemis by Andy Weir, which I heard described as a bunch of Mark Watneys (from The Martian) on the moon, and it was rather like that. Jazz Bashara, a porter on Artemis, the only lunar city, wants to get rich quick, but instead she gets into a plot well over her head. Fortunately, she’s brilliant, if lazy, and well connected, if a bit of a jerk; thus she manages to jerry-rig her way into the middle of a multi-layered conspiracy. This book makes welding in zero gravity a high-stakes activity, much like Seveneves by Neal Stephenson did to calculating the speed of an asteroid. The Martian was better, but Artemis was still very good.
4. What was my second binge-read? You may thank the flu for making me too tired to say. Tune in next week for a somewhat more coherent post.
Advertisements Share this:
