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FMK #9: Second Books
Note to self, things your circle is v. interested in: Library classification. Canadian art.
So, back on the wagon with FMK! I posted about Growing Up Weightless yesterday and I am very nearly done with Snow Queen. After that Electric Forest should be quick and then I will be caught up! Except the six library books! But we aren't talking about those!
Fewer of you than I thought voted that you change your poll answers after reading the comments! I am apparently in the more easily swayed group. :P
This week's theme is I Read the First One And It Was Good But For Years I Could Never Find The Next One But Then I Did So Here It Is Yay
(In a it's the first one I couldn't find instead of the next one, but close enough.)
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
If you want to be extra-helpful, bear in mind that it may have been two decades since I read the first on, and note whether I need to re-read that one first.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
So, back on the wagon with FMK! I posted about Growing Up Weightless yesterday and I am very nearly done with Snow Queen. After that Electric Forest should be quick and then I will be caught up! Except the six library books! But we aren't talking about those!
Fewer of you than I thought voted that you change your poll answers after reading the comments! I am apparently in the more easily swayed group. :P
This week's theme is I Read the First One And It Was Good But For Years I Could Never Find The Next One But Then I Did So Here It Is Yay
(In a it's the first one I couldn't find instead of the next one, but close enough.)
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
If you want to be extra-helpful, bear in mind that it may have been two decades since I read the first on, and note whether I need to re-read that one first.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
Poll #18276 FMK #9: Second Books
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 47
Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams (1996)
Chernevog by C. J. Cherryh (1990)
Invasion of Willow Wood Springs by Terry Ellis (1989)
Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (1988)
Apocalypse Happens by Lori Handeland (2009)
Heroing, or How He Wound Down the World by Daffyd ab Hugh (1987)
Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones (1990)
The Book of the Green Planet by William Kotzwinkle (1985)
Burning Water by Mercedes Lackey (1989)
The Tempering of Men by Sarah Monette (2011)
The Gypsy Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (1998)
The Wizard and the War Machine by Lawrence Watt-Evans (1987)
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The Monette/Bear...I voted F, but really that depends on how well you liked A Companion to Wolves. If the answer is "not at all", K.
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I kind of think that the Jones book would have been stronger if she hadn't tried to connect it to Howl's Moving Castle. It's not that it didn't work; she was too great a writer. It's that the connection wasn't necessary for the story to work.
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Oh, that happens way too often, with the sequel that didn't need to be one! But I can understand the impulse if you have something super-popular to try to ride its coattails as long as possible. (I think sometimes it's the publisher insisting on a sequel and the author not wanting to write the same thing again, too.)
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Castle in the Air isn't as good as Howl's Moving Castle, but all DWJ books are worth keeping, IMO.
Isn't The Book of the Green Planet the sequel to E.T.? Set on E.T.'s planet? That def gets my vote for "Would Most Like To Read Review Of That."
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The Jones is good, but I didn't love it the way I did Howl's Moving Castle, so it kind of suffered for being the (supposed) sequel.
Do you have a preference for how people vote/don't vote on the books or authors we've never heard of?
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No preference! Do as your conscience dictates. :p
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The Lackey is comfort reading for me (along with many of her other books). I don't recall seeing anything that hit me as especially racist the last time I read it; there are some racist attitudes expressed by the characters, but nothing that would make me think the author endorses them, so I take them as characterization. (AKA "okay, this guy is supposed to be an asshole".)
The Monette gets an F based on my having enjoyed her work in Shadow Unit and The Goblin Emperor (for which she used a pen name).
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The Gypsy Game is lackluster and unintentionally racist and Orientalist and Othering as all get out. Don't bother.
The Kotzwinkle was my FAVORITE BOOK EVER as a twelve-year-old and still holds a fond place in my memory as the best tie-in novel I ever, ever read. I have no idea if it holds up because I never owned a copy, I just basically kept the library one permanently checked out. I should hunt it down and reread. I desperately wished they would make a sequel film to E.T. using it as source material, but what I did not understand at that age was that nobody, but nobody, especially back in the early nineties, has that kind of budget. I mean I think they miiiiiiiight be able to afford to make it now but it would still be a stretch even with today's CGI. I hope it holds up. I loved that book so very, very much.
Castle in the Air is fun but minor DWJ.
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...it looks like he hasn't posted anything at all for about four years, though. I wonder what happened.
The comments on the Lackey seem to be based on its treatment of Aztec religion, which makes me curious; the last Aztec-based book I read was one of de Bodard's, which had a postscript about how she tried to be historically accurate except she thought some of the religious stuff wouldn't be palatable to her readers so she made it less weird (paraphrase). I wonder if that will seem better or worse in another thirty years.
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Yeah, Neuromancer is great for ambiance, for sure! Well-deserving of its status as modern classic.
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I agree with other statements I've seen in the comments that it really didn't need to be a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle though. Having the one be a sequel to the other is just asking for the two books to be compared, and imo they just have such fundamentally different feels that comparison doesn't work.
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As far as the Watership Down sequel, I don't think there's anything out and out bad about it. That is, I wouldn't get rid of it necessarily (but part of that is thinking that I might some day want to write fic for the fandom and want the supplementary canon). The copy I have is kind of pretty.
But Yuletide does better Watership Down stories.
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I think the Chrestomanci books work better as a series because they have more elbow room to each be a very, very different thing.
I remember thinking that, when reading some series by other authors (specifically Barry Hughart), people generally liked whichever one they read first the best. I don't think I've met anyone else who read Castle in the Air first, so I can't really judge whether these fit that mold.
*What was that reviewer's name? He reviewed for Asimov's during the mid-1980s. Was it Baird Searles or something like that? I remember that I agreed with him about most recent books but disagreed vehemently about almost all classic SF/fantasy. I was really disappointed when I branched out to other reviewers and discovered that I very frequently hated what they loved.
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