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Reading New Orleans
Late last year I started rereading Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries. I began with my usual practice of alternating rereads with something new, but ... look, I was tired, I was burned out, there came a point where the new books stopped being opened.
Reread opinions: overall I still like the books I've always liked and am meh on the books to which I was indifferent. The changes mostly came later in the series, once I hit books I haven't reread much or at all. Murder in July turns on a weak coincidence, but the Paris flashbacks are sufficiently interesting that I can be forgiving; I loved Cold Bayou and enjoyed Lady of Perdition much more on a reread, but House of the Patriarch remains my least favourite of the series -- Benjamin is separated from his usual cohort of supporting characters save the Viellards, and then there's a whisper of a promise that he and Chloe will team up ... except, of course, that is impossible, so instead he gets P T Barnum? And I simply do not find the religious movements of upstate New York in the early 1840s interesting.
On the other hand, Death and Hard Cider is a welcome return to form (and New Orleans). And it delights me how often Benjamin is forced to confront the probability that his female relatives would absolutely do a murder if they had to, and probably wouldn't feel bad about it. (The jury is out on Dominique, but given her willingness to sass thieves and slave stealers, I wouldn't turn my back on her.)
UNFORTUNATELY nothing lasts forever, not even nineteen-book series. But while nosing around in search of more diverse fiction (having just read 19 consecutive books by a white lady), I found a series by an African-American author about a Haitian-American Vodou priestess who FIGHTS CRIME in post-Katrina New Orleans.
I'm about 55% through the first book now, and it's mildly enjoyable -- but the heroine's love interest is an asshole cop who disparages her religion, intimidates her, steals from a Vodou priest, threatens to beat up her teenage friend, and is all around awful, yet she talks about him as if he's One of the Good Ones. Whether I order the second book depends entirely on how this unfolds.
Finally, I finished playing Assassin's Creed III. It was basically airline food in video game form -- it wasn't very good, but there also wasn't enough of it. Where the modern AC games have massively bloated maps and go on far too long, AC3 felt like half a game compared with its predecessors. And while the writers clearly put a tremendous amount of research into the Mohawk nation for their protagonist, they forgot to give him a personality.
AC3 came with a companion game which I was going to skip, because it had very poor reviews ... and then I realised that it's set in French Louisiana, and the protagonist is the daughter of a slave-turned-placée who FIGHTS CRIME and also COMMITS CRIME, SPECIFICALLY MURDER, which is sort of inherent to being an assassin. So clearly I had to play it at once. I'm in the early stages so far, and the writing is a thousand times better than AC3 -- except that the plot is incredibly simplistic. Which is a shame, but you can't have everything.
Reread opinions: overall I still like the books I've always liked and am meh on the books to which I was indifferent. The changes mostly came later in the series, once I hit books I haven't reread much or at all. Murder in July turns on a weak coincidence, but the Paris flashbacks are sufficiently interesting that I can be forgiving; I loved Cold Bayou and enjoyed Lady of Perdition much more on a reread, but House of the Patriarch remains my least favourite of the series -- Benjamin is separated from his usual cohort of supporting characters save the Viellards, and then there's a whisper of a promise that he and Chloe will team up ... except, of course, that is impossible, so instead he gets P T Barnum? And I simply do not find the religious movements of upstate New York in the early 1840s interesting.
On the other hand, Death and Hard Cider is a welcome return to form (and New Orleans). And it delights me how often Benjamin is forced to confront the probability that his female relatives would absolutely do a murder if they had to, and probably wouldn't feel bad about it. (The jury is out on Dominique, but given her willingness to sass thieves and slave stealers, I wouldn't turn my back on her.)
UNFORTUNATELY nothing lasts forever, not even nineteen-book series. But while nosing around in search of more diverse fiction (having just read 19 consecutive books by a white lady), I found a series by an African-American author about a Haitian-American Vodou priestess who FIGHTS CRIME in post-Katrina New Orleans.
I'm about 55% through the first book now, and it's mildly enjoyable -- but the heroine's love interest is an asshole cop who disparages her religion, intimidates her, steals from a Vodou priest, threatens to beat up her teenage friend, and is all around awful, yet she talks about him as if he's One of the Good Ones. Whether I order the second book depends entirely on how this unfolds.
Finally, I finished playing Assassin's Creed III. It was basically airline food in video game form -- it wasn't very good, but there also wasn't enough of it. Where the modern AC games have massively bloated maps and go on far too long, AC3 felt like half a game compared with its predecessors. And while the writers clearly put a tremendous amount of research into the Mohawk nation for their protagonist, they forgot to give him a personality.
AC3 came with a companion game which I was going to skip, because it had very poor reviews ... and then I realised that it's set in French Louisiana, and the protagonist is the daughter of a slave-turned-placée who FIGHTS CRIME and also COMMITS CRIME, SPECIFICALLY MURDER, which is sort of inherent to being an assassin. So clearly I had to play it at once. I'm in the early stages so far, and the writing is a thousand times better than AC3 -- except that the plot is incredibly simplistic. Which is a shame, but you can't have everything.
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