Reading Wrap-Up: June 2023
Jul. 13th, 2023 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justanorthernlightThis is very late due to a combination of health junk, family visiting from out of state, and school issues, but here goes:
Magic Steps & Street Magic (The Circle Opens #1 & #2) by Tamora Pierce (audiobooks, rereads) -
Several years after the original Circle of Magic quartet, the kids -now fully accredited mages- depart from Winding Circle into the broader world. Along the way, each acquires their own apprentice and gets involved in some kind of murder/crime mystery.
In Magic Steps Sandry discovers a young dance mage and helps her great-Uncle unravel the murders of several members of an amoral merchant family in Summersea. In Street Magic Briar travels to the distant city of Chammour, finds a stone mage whose life on the streets is not so different from Briar's own past, and gets involved in a gang war financed by a powerful but bored noblewoman.
I read both of these many years ago in print, looking back it's interesting to see that this is the point where many of Pierce's plots turn from adventure to mystery/crime drama. A lot of the in-universe slang tested out in Magic Steps shows up again in the Beka Cooper books in the Tortall universe, which are all also crime mysteries.
They recast some of the voice actors from the original quartet (most notably Briar, definitely preferred the original), and Bruce Coville did the main narration for Street Magic. It's too bad there are no audiobooks for Cold Fire and Shatterglass, the remaining two books in the quartet, and no real plans to get them made.
The Grief of Stones (Cemeteries of Amalo #2) by Katherine Addison -
Sequel to The Witness For The Dead and also set in the same universe as The Goblin Emperor. This is another mystery plot wherin Thara, an elf with a magical ability to communicate in a limited way with the recently deceased, is asked to determine whether a death was a murder, and in the process stumbles upon an even bigger set of crimes that are not quite within his remit to investigate.
I found it pretty enjoyable, but I feel that it, like The Witness For The Dead, handled worldbuilding in a much shallower way than TGE did. The setting is a fantasy world undergoing its steampunk-y Industrial Revolution but there is very little discussion of it. The exposition might have flowed better in TGE because the POV character Maia was a newcomer trying to keep up with new surroundings and ideas while Thara is much more entrenched in his environment, but as a reader the comparative lack of detail is kind of annoying.
A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined A Nation by Scott Nations (nonfiction) -
A very fascinating look into the causes of the stock market crashes of 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008, and 2010. The author does a really good job of making the narratives captivating easy to follow, even if I didn't quite grasp some of the technical details. The running theme is that often times new financial contraptions that work in the small-scale and under "normal" stock market conditions begin to proliferate, but when an external catalyst of some sort puts stress on the whole system the new contraption exposes itself as the weak link.
The section on the absolute absurdity that went into the 2008 financial crisis was particularly good.
Star Wars: Doctor Aphra Volume 5: Worst Among Equals (Doctor Aphra Annual #2 & Issues #26-#31) written by Simon Spurrier, art by Caspar Wijngaard, Emilio Laiso, & Andrea Broccardo -
It has been almost exactly two years since I've read any of this series. That is partially because it went out of print in physical edition for a while and partially because I'm not a huge fan of the direction Simon Spurrier has taken the story compared to the previous writer, Kieron Gillen. The past few volumes have felt like nonstop torture-porn, and this one was no exception.
Dr. Cornelius Evazan (the guy who picked a fight with Luke in the cantina scene in A New Hope) has implanted bombs in both Aphra and the droid serial killer Triple Zero that will go off if they move more than 20 meters apart or if one of them dies, as well as hacked Triple Zero's optical sensor so he can watch them torment one another (an eventually broadcast their mutual misery to other people) similar to what Triple Zero did to Aphra back in Volume 3.
All the while, Evazan keeps up a monologue on the ~beauty~ of evil (again, very similar themes and speech patterns to Triple Zero's monologues while also voyeur-ing on Aphra for the sake of emotionally torturing her back in Vol. 3) while Aphra and Triple Zero try to remove the bombs and avoid both the Imperials and the local authorities without getting blown up in the process. The ending had some mildly interesting character development, but that did not make up for the fact that I hated a solid 2/3rds of it. I really love Aphra as a character, but at this point I'm only sticking out the next couple of volumes in the hope that the Alyssa Wong run is less torture-porn-y.
2023 Reading Goal Progress: 35 of 50 total books, 12 of 7 nonfiction.
Currently Reading: For nonfiction in the time it took me to write this up I finished How to Behave Badly In Elizabethan England by Ruth Goodman, which was delightful, and I started The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. For fiction I'm about 1/4 of the way through Translation State by Ann Leckie, which I am enjoying a lot.
Magic Steps & Street Magic (The Circle Opens #1 & #2) by Tamora Pierce (audiobooks, rereads) -
Several years after the original Circle of Magic quartet, the kids -now fully accredited mages- depart from Winding Circle into the broader world. Along the way, each acquires their own apprentice and gets involved in some kind of murder/crime mystery.
In Magic Steps Sandry discovers a young dance mage and helps her great-Uncle unravel the murders of several members of an amoral merchant family in Summersea. In Street Magic Briar travels to the distant city of Chammour, finds a stone mage whose life on the streets is not so different from Briar's own past, and gets involved in a gang war financed by a powerful but bored noblewoman.
I read both of these many years ago in print, looking back it's interesting to see that this is the point where many of Pierce's plots turn from adventure to mystery/crime drama. A lot of the in-universe slang tested out in Magic Steps shows up again in the Beka Cooper books in the Tortall universe, which are all also crime mysteries.
They recast some of the voice actors from the original quartet (most notably Briar, definitely preferred the original), and Bruce Coville did the main narration for Street Magic. It's too bad there are no audiobooks for Cold Fire and Shatterglass, the remaining two books in the quartet, and no real plans to get them made.
The Grief of Stones (Cemeteries of Amalo #2) by Katherine Addison -
Sequel to The Witness For The Dead and also set in the same universe as The Goblin Emperor. This is another mystery plot wherin Thara, an elf with a magical ability to communicate in a limited way with the recently deceased, is asked to determine whether a death was a murder, and in the process stumbles upon an even bigger set of crimes that are not quite within his remit to investigate.
I found it pretty enjoyable, but I feel that it, like The Witness For The Dead, handled worldbuilding in a much shallower way than TGE did. The setting is a fantasy world undergoing its steampunk-y Industrial Revolution but there is very little discussion of it. The exposition might have flowed better in TGE because the POV character Maia was a newcomer trying to keep up with new surroundings and ideas while Thara is much more entrenched in his environment, but as a reader the comparative lack of detail is kind of annoying.
A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined A Nation by Scott Nations (nonfiction) -
A very fascinating look into the causes of the stock market crashes of 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008, and 2010. The author does a really good job of making the narratives captivating easy to follow, even if I didn't quite grasp some of the technical details. The running theme is that often times new financial contraptions that work in the small-scale and under "normal" stock market conditions begin to proliferate, but when an external catalyst of some sort puts stress on the whole system the new contraption exposes itself as the weak link.
The section on the absolute absurdity that went into the 2008 financial crisis was particularly good.
Like so much industrial waste, nobody wanted to buy the riskiest tranches once a pool of mortgages had been split up. So bankers turned to alchemy to spin these undesirable tranches back into gold. They did this by buying and combining the worst tranches of several mortgage-backed securities into a new security of their own, with the safest tranche of this new security getting paid first until it had been repaid completely, at which point the payments would go to the next-safest tranche, and so on until every mortgage had been paid or defaulted.
The vessel for this alchemy was the collateralized debt obligation, or CDO, which promised that the diversification effect was so powerful that if enough crappy tranches were combined with other crappy tranches, the result would deserve an AAA rating.
And in this final insult to common sense, "synthetic" CDOs were created. The synthetic CDO didn't own anything. It assumed it owned certain tranches without actually buying them. It was merely a way to speculate on the performance of the tranches without actually acquiring them.
Star Wars: Doctor Aphra Volume 5: Worst Among Equals (Doctor Aphra Annual #2 & Issues #26-#31) written by Simon Spurrier, art by Caspar Wijngaard, Emilio Laiso, & Andrea Broccardo -
It has been almost exactly two years since I've read any of this series. That is partially because it went out of print in physical edition for a while and partially because I'm not a huge fan of the direction Simon Spurrier has taken the story compared to the previous writer, Kieron Gillen. The past few volumes have felt like nonstop torture-porn, and this one was no exception.
Dr. Cornelius Evazan (the guy who picked a fight with Luke in the cantina scene in A New Hope) has implanted bombs in both Aphra and the droid serial killer Triple Zero that will go off if they move more than 20 meters apart or if one of them dies, as well as hacked Triple Zero's optical sensor so he can watch them torment one another (an eventually broadcast their mutual misery to other people) similar to what Triple Zero did to Aphra back in Volume 3.
All the while, Evazan keeps up a monologue on the ~beauty~ of evil (again, very similar themes and speech patterns to Triple Zero's monologues while also voyeur-ing on Aphra for the sake of emotionally torturing her back in Vol. 3) while Aphra and Triple Zero try to remove the bombs and avoid both the Imperials and the local authorities without getting blown up in the process. The ending had some mildly interesting character development, but that did not make up for the fact that I hated a solid 2/3rds of it. I really love Aphra as a character, but at this point I'm only sticking out the next couple of volumes in the hope that the Alyssa Wong run is less torture-porn-y.
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2023 Reading Goal Progress: 35 of 50 total books, 12 of 7 nonfiction.
Currently Reading: For nonfiction in the time it took me to write this up I finished How to Behave Badly In Elizabethan England by Ruth Goodman, which was delightful, and I started The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. For fiction I'm about 1/4 of the way through Translation State by Ann Leckie, which I am enjoying a lot.
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Date: 2023-07-13 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-13 08:07 pm (UTC)