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FMK: Asterix, Truckers, Locke Lamora, stats
Asterix le Gaulois/Asterix the Gaul by Goscinny and Uderzo
I sat down the other night and read the French version, without a dictionary or Google Translate or anything. I was going to keep the English one open next to the French as a crib, but that got annoying fast so I just went through the French first.
Probably the most salient thing to note here is that I have never studied French at all, not even informally on Memrise or with a self-teaching book or anything. The closest I've come is being in Les Mis fandom. Nor have I ever lived anywhere with a large proportion of French speakers. So I was "reading" it based just on my knowledge of early English and Spanish and a little self-taught Latin, and French words I've picked up here and there.
Then I read the English to see how accurate I was.
I did not manage to figure out why Obelix couldn't drink the potion (I got that it was something to do with him as a baby, but that was it), and I didn't quite manage to figure out Asterix's plan when he got captured and how the whole fake-out with the potions at the end worked. But with pretty much everything else, I knew what was going on. Except the bit where the magic potion was made of Marmite, which was new to me.
I probably got none of the puns or any of the subtleties, and it is unclear even to me how much I figured out from the French as opposed to the pictures. But honestly I think I still enjoyed reading the French version more than the English version? I think it's at least partly because so much of the language play in it depends on the fact that they are all speaking French. So when I read it I was going "what is this horrifying bastardized Gaulish Latin they expect me to understand???" and it was delightful. That effect doesn't happen when it's in English.
Also maybe because I was unable to be annoyed by bad puns when I didn't get them. :P
Truckers by Terry Pratchett
So this turned out to actually be a re-read of the first Terry Pratchett I ever read, but it had been twenty-five years. I definitely enjoyed it more this time. I think if you had asked me at age eight, I would have said wasn't a bad book, but it was upsettingly intense.
I don't know that I would say I was "too young" for it, but I think there were too many things I didn't have quite the context for - like, a lot of the bits that were supposed to break the tension relied on you knowing stuff about British department stores in the 80s, and at the time my only context for proper department stores (not counting Boscov's in the mall) was a terrifying kids' show on PBS that must have been Today's Special since I refuse to believe there were two of them, so to me "Department Store" just meant "chamber of horrors" and did not lighten the mood at all.
So a lot of the stuff that in context to me as an adult was clearly supposed to be scary to the characters but not to us, who know it's a department store joke, was just plain scary to me as a kid, because I didn't get the joke.
Also there is a lot of fairly intense philosophical stuff about the nature of belief and knowledge, and how societies work, which I was absolutely up to thinking about as a kid, but I don't think anybody had ever thrown it at me quite that densely before. Also, I think as a kid I was expecting something more like The Littles and less like an even more intense Rats of Nimh. And as a kid, I was really sensitive to books with death in them, and this one has a LOT of death for a kids' book.
Reading it as an adult, it was a fun Terry Pratchett book with really neat worldbuilding, and I am totally interested in looking up the rest of the series.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
On Tumblr, long ago, there was a post (two posts? it was Tumblr, I will never find it again) that talked about how to get readers invested in a story, in terms of good way, bad way.
The first one was Good way: hide information from the characters. Bad way: hide information from the readers. I was thinking about that one a lot earlier this year when I read Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty, which, as it's a murder mystery where all the characters start the book with amnesia, you'd think it would be a shoe-in for the good way. But instead, the entire mystery hinges on things the POV characters have known the whole time, but that the author forces them to withhold from you until the dramatic moment. And I spent the whole time reading it thinking, "I should really like this book, but somehow I don't give a damn, aughh."
The second one was Bad way: make the readers wonder what's going to happen. Good way: make the readers wonder what your characters are going to do. That doesn't mean you have write Hamlet every time, but it means when you are setting up suspense you should go for, not "will they fall off the cliff?" but "how are they going to avoid falling off the cliff?"
I got all the way to the beginning of Part 2 of Locke Lamora - the entire length of a *normal* fantasy novel! - before there was any suspense about what the characters were going to decide to do. Locke did a lot of exciting stuff, but we never found out about it until after the fact, so there was never any chance for me to get invested in his choices. I hung in there for the worldbuilding and for science, but I didn't actually give a damn about anything until well into Part 2.
Also I got all the way to the beginning of part three before there were any female characters who did anything. (And after that one scene, I had to wait until part four before they reappeared.) I heard that the third book in the series takes a hard turn to feminism; does that mean it's all about the Spiders making Locke dance on their strings? Because that would be beautiful.
Other than that - if you think you would enjoy a book written by someone who really liked the old Bond films and Godfather and also always wanted to dual-class a Rogue Cleric, this is probably a book for you (once you get through Part One, anyway.)
It seems to get sold as a caper story, but it is totally not. The best they manage as a caper is an overelaborate version of the Spanish Prisoner, which they fail at, and don't even have a backup plan after failing. (The impression I got in fact is that they were basically just running the Spanish Prisoner over and over again.) The Leverage team would pat them on the head and call them adorable little puppies. Moist von Lipwig would say "that is not a con artist, that's a religious fanatic" (and then carefully make sure you don't say anything about the goddess Annoia.)
It's a pretty good fantasy Bond story, though. And I will admit to going weak at the knees whenever Jean or Locke suddenly go all cleric at somebody. Once I got toward the middle, it was fun. Definitely didn't need to be that long or have that few female characters, though. I think it's going with Melusine and Kushiel's dart under "hang onto maybe but don't need to go looking for sequels right away."
So halfway in, here are our stats:
27 books voted F
23 books voted K (due to several weeks with not enough K votes for a winner)
295 books voted M
The most votes in a poll was 60 (for award winners); the least was 17 (for last week's anthologies.)
OF the books voted F, 10 were keepers: Enchantress from the Stars, Growing Up Weightless, Asterix, Castle in the Air, Locke Lamora, Melusine, Truckers, Captain Blood, and The Sunbird.
5 were definite kills: Grimspace, Electric Forest, The Female Man, The Snow Queen, and Juniper Time.
4 I still haven't quite made up my mind: Kushiel's Dart, Princess and the Goblin, Discount Armageddon, Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe
7 I have not read yet. But I'm working on it! No more super-long ones for awhile, except Han of Iceland.
If the keep/kill stats for books I have read keep up, I will end up with about 1300 keepers once I have read everything I currently own. ^_^
Of the 23 books voted K, there were 4 where I also got to dump the rest of the series (Gor, Darkover, Rogue Wizard, Callahan's)
There are an embarassing number that I still kind of want to read first, of which I read two: one was a keep (Rocket Ship Galileo) and one was a kill (Tarnsman of Gor.)
The overall K loser so far is Richard Adams, with 3 K! (He is probably disadvantaged by being first in the alphabet.)
The only female authors to win K so far are Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Meanwhile, 16/27 F winners are female. So y'all are predictable there!
Okay, enough of that, now onto the yuletide letter polishing.... My yuletide match this year did not require any extra canon review? WHAT AM I GOING TO READ FOR THE NEXT MONTH? Oh right, those 7 fmk up there.
I sat down the other night and read the French version, without a dictionary or Google Translate or anything. I was going to keep the English one open next to the French as a crib, but that got annoying fast so I just went through the French first.
Probably the most salient thing to note here is that I have never studied French at all, not even informally on Memrise or with a self-teaching book or anything. The closest I've come is being in Les Mis fandom. Nor have I ever lived anywhere with a large proportion of French speakers. So I was "reading" it based just on my knowledge of early English and Spanish and a little self-taught Latin, and French words I've picked up here and there.
Then I read the English to see how accurate I was.
I did not manage to figure out why Obelix couldn't drink the potion (I got that it was something to do with him as a baby, but that was it), and I didn't quite manage to figure out Asterix's plan when he got captured and how the whole fake-out with the potions at the end worked. But with pretty much everything else, I knew what was going on. Except the bit where the magic potion was made of Marmite, which was new to me.
I probably got none of the puns or any of the subtleties, and it is unclear even to me how much I figured out from the French as opposed to the pictures. But honestly I think I still enjoyed reading the French version more than the English version? I think it's at least partly because so much of the language play in it depends on the fact that they are all speaking French. So when I read it I was going "what is this horrifying bastardized Gaulish Latin they expect me to understand???" and it was delightful. That effect doesn't happen when it's in English.
Also maybe because I was unable to be annoyed by bad puns when I didn't get them. :P
Truckers by Terry Pratchett
So this turned out to actually be a re-read of the first Terry Pratchett I ever read, but it had been twenty-five years. I definitely enjoyed it more this time. I think if you had asked me at age eight, I would have said wasn't a bad book, but it was upsettingly intense.
I don't know that I would say I was "too young" for it, but I think there were too many things I didn't have quite the context for - like, a lot of the bits that were supposed to break the tension relied on you knowing stuff about British department stores in the 80s, and at the time my only context for proper department stores (not counting Boscov's in the mall) was a terrifying kids' show on PBS that must have been Today's Special since I refuse to believe there were two of them, so to me "Department Store" just meant "chamber of horrors" and did not lighten the mood at all.
So a lot of the stuff that in context to me as an adult was clearly supposed to be scary to the characters but not to us, who know it's a department store joke, was just plain scary to me as a kid, because I didn't get the joke.
Also there is a lot of fairly intense philosophical stuff about the nature of belief and knowledge, and how societies work, which I was absolutely up to thinking about as a kid, but I don't think anybody had ever thrown it at me quite that densely before. Also, I think as a kid I was expecting something more like The Littles and less like an even more intense Rats of Nimh. And as a kid, I was really sensitive to books with death in them, and this one has a LOT of death for a kids' book.
Reading it as an adult, it was a fun Terry Pratchett book with really neat worldbuilding, and I am totally interested in looking up the rest of the series.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
On Tumblr, long ago, there was a post (two posts? it was Tumblr, I will never find it again) that talked about how to get readers invested in a story, in terms of good way, bad way.
The first one was Good way: hide information from the characters. Bad way: hide information from the readers. I was thinking about that one a lot earlier this year when I read Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty, which, as it's a murder mystery where all the characters start the book with amnesia, you'd think it would be a shoe-in for the good way. But instead, the entire mystery hinges on things the POV characters have known the whole time, but that the author forces them to withhold from you until the dramatic moment. And I spent the whole time reading it thinking, "I should really like this book, but somehow I don't give a damn, aughh."
The second one was Bad way: make the readers wonder what's going to happen. Good way: make the readers wonder what your characters are going to do. That doesn't mean you have write Hamlet every time, but it means when you are setting up suspense you should go for, not "will they fall off the cliff?" but "how are they going to avoid falling off the cliff?"
I got all the way to the beginning of Part 2 of Locke Lamora - the entire length of a *normal* fantasy novel! - before there was any suspense about what the characters were going to decide to do. Locke did a lot of exciting stuff, but we never found out about it until after the fact, so there was never any chance for me to get invested in his choices. I hung in there for the worldbuilding and for science, but I didn't actually give a damn about anything until well into Part 2.
Also I got all the way to the beginning of part three before there were any female characters who did anything. (And after that one scene, I had to wait until part four before they reappeared.) I heard that the third book in the series takes a hard turn to feminism; does that mean it's all about the Spiders making Locke dance on their strings? Because that would be beautiful.
Other than that - if you think you would enjoy a book written by someone who really liked the old Bond films and Godfather and also always wanted to dual-class a Rogue Cleric, this is probably a book for you (once you get through Part One, anyway.)
It seems to get sold as a caper story, but it is totally not. The best they manage as a caper is an overelaborate version of the Spanish Prisoner, which they fail at, and don't even have a backup plan after failing. (The impression I got in fact is that they were basically just running the Spanish Prisoner over and over again.) The Leverage team would pat them on the head and call them adorable little puppies. Moist von Lipwig would say "that is not a con artist, that's a religious fanatic" (and then carefully make sure you don't say anything about the goddess Annoia.)
It's a pretty good fantasy Bond story, though. And I will admit to going weak at the knees whenever Jean or Locke suddenly go all cleric at somebody. Once I got toward the middle, it was fun. Definitely didn't need to be that long or have that few female characters, though. I think it's going with Melusine and Kushiel's dart under "hang onto maybe but don't need to go looking for sequels right away."
So halfway in, here are our stats:
27 books voted F
23 books voted K (due to several weeks with not enough K votes for a winner)
295 books voted M
The most votes in a poll was 60 (for award winners); the least was 17 (for last week's anthologies.)
OF the books voted F, 10 were keepers: Enchantress from the Stars, Growing Up Weightless, Asterix, Castle in the Air, Locke Lamora, Melusine, Truckers, Captain Blood, and The Sunbird.
5 were definite kills: Grimspace, Electric Forest, The Female Man, The Snow Queen, and Juniper Time.
4 I still haven't quite made up my mind: Kushiel's Dart, Princess and the Goblin, Discount Armageddon, Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe
7 I have not read yet. But I'm working on it! No more super-long ones for awhile, except Han of Iceland.
If the keep/kill stats for books I have read keep up, I will end up with about 1300 keepers once I have read everything I currently own. ^_^
Of the 23 books voted K, there were 4 where I also got to dump the rest of the series (Gor, Darkover, Rogue Wizard, Callahan's)
There are an embarassing number that I still kind of want to read first, of which I read two: one was a keep (Rocket Ship Galileo) and one was a kill (Tarnsman of Gor.)
The overall K loser so far is Richard Adams, with 3 K! (He is probably disadvantaged by being first in the alphabet.)
The only female authors to win K so far are Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Meanwhile, 16/27 F winners are female. So y'all are predictable there!
Okay, enough of that, now onto the yuletide letter polishing.... My yuletide match this year did not require any extra canon review? WHAT AM I GOING TO READ FOR THE NEXT MONTH? Oh right, those 7 fmk up there.