![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeWhat did you recently finish reading?
I was so disappointed by season 5 of The Expanse that I went and read the seventh and eighth books, and adored them so much that I was inspired to reread Leviathan Wakes. And man, that was not a good book. I don't understand how it got a sequel, let alone a pile of awards and an acclaimed adaptation, but I have to respect James S. A. Corey's glow-up.
More recently: The Secrets We Keep, a contemporary middle grade by Nova Weetman. The heroine starts rebuilding her life following the destruction of her home and the loss of her mother in a house fire. Only she may have exaggerrated when she told her new friend that her mother is dead.
I saw the twist coming a mile away, but then, I'm considerably older than the target audience, and half the pleasure of Weetman's work is watching her put the story together. She has a knack for finding the right balance between angst and joy.
What are you currently reading?
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix. This is going to be someone's favourite book. It's very, very good, but doesn't quite click for me for reasons that are more about my own pedantry than anything else. I'm going to finish it, though, because I want to see how it ends, and I'm enjoying how much it feels like a Rivers of London AU where the Folly has a retail arm.
(The heroine's love interest is genderfluid with a vast wardrobe of couture suits and dresses, an equally impressive collection of weapons, and a snarky yet loving relationship with his sister, if that's the kind of thing you're into.)
What do you think you'll read next?
I have The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall in my Libby app -- that's an Australian SF novel which is being marketed very hard as litfic and not any type of filthy genre. So that could go either way. (Sometimes this ends in a great novel; more often in a book which clearly suffers from having had an editor who wasn't familiar with the genre.)
But I also have a growing pile of Australian middle grade and SF to read, and I think the next one I pick up will be Tiger Daughter by Rebecca Lim.
I was so disappointed by season 5 of The Expanse that I went and read the seventh and eighth books, and adored them so much that I was inspired to reread Leviathan Wakes. And man, that was not a good book. I don't understand how it got a sequel, let alone a pile of awards and an acclaimed adaptation, but I have to respect James S. A. Corey's glow-up.
More recently: The Secrets We Keep, a contemporary middle grade by Nova Weetman. The heroine starts rebuilding her life following the destruction of her home and the loss of her mother in a house fire. Only she may have exaggerrated when she told her new friend that her mother is dead.
I saw the twist coming a mile away, but then, I'm considerably older than the target audience, and half the pleasure of Weetman's work is watching her put the story together. She has a knack for finding the right balance between angst and joy.
What are you currently reading?
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix. This is going to be someone's favourite book. It's very, very good, but doesn't quite click for me for reasons that are more about my own pedantry than anything else. I'm going to finish it, though, because I want to see how it ends, and I'm enjoying how much it feels like a Rivers of London AU where the Folly has a retail arm.
(The heroine's love interest is genderfluid with a vast wardrobe of couture suits and dresses, an equally impressive collection of weapons, and a snarky yet loving relationship with his sister, if that's the kind of thing you're into.)
What do you think you'll read next?
I have The Mother Fault by Kate Mildenhall in my Libby app -- that's an Australian SF novel which is being marketed very hard as litfic and not any type of filthy genre. So that could go either way. (Sometimes this ends in a great novel; more often in a book which clearly suffers from having had an editor who wasn't familiar with the genre.)
But I also have a growing pile of Australian middle grade and SF to read, and I think the next one I pick up will be Tiger Daughter by Rebecca Lim.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-11 11:45 pm (UTC)Huh!
I read Leviathan Wakes because I'd heard so many folks gushing about The Expanse, and... I also thought the book was just Not Very Good, lol. It's interesting to hear they get better—do you think it'd be possible to just jump to the latter books without bothering with, I dunno, books 2 or 3? Or would it be too confusing (e.g. are the plots episodic or more overarching)?
no subject
Date: 2021-02-11 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-11 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-12 02:14 pm (UTC)I'm particularly impressed by Pastor Anna, especially as I gather that neither half of James S A Corey is a churchgoer, as she feels completely convincing to me as a clergy person, and that's so often not the case with fictional clergy.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-12 09:32 pm (UTC)Uh, WOW. She felt real to me, too, just from lurking around Clergy Twitter and so forth, but I'm extra impressed now!
(Can I just say that if I had known that Catholic nuns were allowed to have Twitter accounts, I might have been less horrified when my parents tried to tell me I should consider entering a convent.)
no subject
Date: 2021-02-12 12:26 am (UTC)I wish someone would take that kind of chance on my book. But I'm not two well-known screenwriters.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-12 09:35 pm (UTC)Yeah, the first ... two seasons of the show were so much better than the book. I'd say the next two are roughly on par, and season 4 does some sensible genderswapping.
And season 5 -- well, I seem to be in the minority in terms of hating it, but wow, was I ever disappointed!
Is that their background? I thought one was an established fantasy author and the other was GRRM's personal assistant. (Though that alone is enough to get a meeting, at least.)
no subject
Date: 2021-02-12 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-13 10:35 am (UTC)I tried reading Leviathan Wakes and yeah, I never made it past the halfway mark lol. It felt very... written by white men.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-13 08:58 pm (UTC)HOO BOY.
First of all, Naomi's story. It's the whole reason that Nemesis Games is my favourite book in the series, and this is a really faithful adaptation of that -- but it turns out that experiencing it through Naomi's eyes is quite different to watching it on a screen. There came a point where we were just watching a black woman suffer endlessly for our entertainment, and it was awful.
"At least in the end she gets the catharsis of survival," I told my flatmate -- BUT NO! She just had to go and blame herself for Alex's death, so we don't even get that. Like Cas Anvar got to screw over one more woman before he left.
Second, and maybe bigger, I hated Drummer's story. It felt like a ham-fisted attempt to squish her arc into Michio Pa's, instead of considering what would be true to Drummer's character.
Like. Michio starts out as Bad Decision Lady. She makes bad calls on the Behemoth, and she signs up willingly with Marco. When Michio appears in book 6, she's hit rock bottom -- she and her family have deserted the Free Navy and turned to piracy, and Michio's arc is about learning to trust her moral compass and become a leader.
Here, Drummer is a pirate and ... that's meant to be okay? (And we're meant to go, "Sure, the woman who has always been the voice of moral authority for the Belt is a pirate now? That makes sense!") She's coerced into supporting Marco, and her family turn out to be gaslighting douchebags (and, unlike in the books, they're all roughly the same age and appearance, so basically interchangeable), so she's lost all her agency. I'd feel bad for her, but hey, pirate.
As if to rub salt into the wound, they cast a white woman as "Michio" (who has no discernible personality, so why even bother using the name?), and cast black women as Marco's most fanatical supporters. (I was suuuuuper uncomfortable with Karal's fate, and the way the audience is expected to cheer the violent death of the only dark-skinned woman in the cast.)
I was thinking about that, and THEN I got to thinking about how much less powerful Avasarala is compared to the books, and how much greater Bobbie's struggles are, and the resulting picture wasn't very pretty.
Oh, speaking of Bobbie -- well, of the Mars arc -- instead of Bobbie and Alex doing some perfectly competent detective work, as in the books, and Alex meeting with Commander Duarte himself, we have ... Alex hitting on a woman who isn't interested? Super not fun to watch!
(Also, the books have Bobbie and Alex going on the run in the Razorback with the Martian prime minister in the back seat, and it's HILARIOUS. I completely agree with the decision to drop that, but I missed that levity, and I do think we didn't learn enough about the attacks on Mars.)
Anyway, with all these problems nagging at me, other cracks started to show: the sets looked cheap, the Roci seems to be crewed by Miller and Bull instead of twenty cool Tycho professionals, a lot of actors sounded uncomfortable with Belter accents and were doing racist imitations of Jamaican instead.
TL;DR, it stopped being fun to watch, and I'm on the fence about watching season 6. I probably will, because my flatmate hasn't read the books, and while she also didn't care for this season, she wants to know what happens next. But I don't have high expectations.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-13 09:40 pm (UTC)I was also uncomfortable with the way Marco, the violent, abusive man of colour, is juxtaposed against Holden, the all-American white man whose anger is always justified and who Treats Naomi Right. In a season full of 9/11 allusions, that felt like an early '00s throwback we could have done without. If Holden and Marco had both been played by men of colour, that wouldn't have stood out to me as much.
I do have criticisms of Season 5, as I do of the entire series, but for me it didn't damage my overall enjoyment.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-13 10:28 pm (UTC)RIGHT? A lot of things would be improved if the showrunners had remembered that at least one of Holden's parents was Latinx and cast accordingly. But this show has a whitewashing problem -- even Holden's doomed girlfriend on the Cant is recast as Norwegian, as opposed to Nigerian in the book.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-14 12:58 am (UTC)I wish the white writers and the white male members of the cast would shut up and just let the women do the talking, because some stuff they say in interviews is so self-congratulatory and off-base. Ty Franck in particular comes across sometimes like the guy who sat through the Social Justice 101 lecture so now thinks he has nothing more to learn because he is an Ally. Sometimes he gets it, sometimes he really doesn't. Just let Dom and Cara do the talking, Ty.