series that eat your life
Jul. 27th, 2010 12:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
metisket...in a good way! :D
So the overly ambitious KHR fic is, at long, long last, in beta. YAY. Now all I have to do is finish crazy!Ed, and then...well, then I'll instantly bog myself down in a million other projects, but at least they'll be DIFFERENT PROJECTS.
Meanwhile, book recs!
The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold
In sci-fi, it often seems like the authors get so sidetracked by shiny futuristic toys and abstract space-time puzzles that they forget about characters. Not that I don't enjoy shiny toys and weird physics as much as the next person, but...you know, in a novel, it's nice to have something else going.
This series DOES NOT HAVE that problem. The characters are some of the best I've seen in any genre.
The first book is about Aral and Cordelia, who turn out to be the parents of the main character of the rest of the series, Miles Vorkosigan.
...It's telling that I can't even type his name without shrieking in glee a little. XD
Over the course of the series, as he grows up, you can SEE the influence his parents have had on him, the nature and the nurture both. It's. It's incredible is what it is. And it's not just Miles; all the characters grow, they learn, they change. After a while, it's hard to believe they're not real people. Life is every bit as sadistic and irrational in the books as it is in...well...life, but wow, the CHARACTERS. The series is like a lesson on how to be strong.
Harra: You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on.
Miles: What do you find on the other side? When you go on?
Harra: Your life again. What else?
Miles: Is that a promise?
Harra: It's an inevitability.
That makes it sound all serious business, and sometimes it is. But more often, it's funny as hell. Miles has this headlong determination to do more than any human could possibly do. Sometimes he crashes and burns very, very badly, but other times, OH MY GOD, it actually works. You never know whether to cheer for him or throttle him.
Meanwhile, there are the normal people. (Oh, Ivan, your life just isn't fair.) And then, equally entertaining, there are people who look normal by comparison to Miles, but are actually anything but.
I love these books. It's not that each individual book is the best damn thing you've ever read in your life, but the overall series, charting the course of a person's life--amazing. Cordelia's Honor is the first book. Eee, happy memories! :D Quotes!
"We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement."
Galeni: Schizoid or no, not even you can compartmentalize yourself to that extent.
Miles: I am not schizoid. ...A little manic-depressive, maybe.
Galeni: Know thyself.
Miles: We try, sir.
"Ekaterin hadn't looked behind her; she gripped the balcony rail and stared intently down at Richars as though willing him to pop an artery in the speech centers of his brain."
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
My biggest problem with this series was that I, with my usual complete failure of willpower, was useless for everything but reading until I'd finished the damn thing. That took a week or two. A week or two during which I was sleep-deprived, kept forgetting to eat, and was habitually late for work.
The good news is, almost everyone has more willpower than I do.
The main character is Harry Dresden, Chicago's finest wizard. He's in the yellow pages. That doesn't make the Wizard Council very happy, but then, nothing Harry's ever done including being born has made them happy, so whatever. He has bigger problems. Well, sometimes he has bigger problems.
"Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face."
It is the best noir meets the best fantasy. Also, I love the way Harry is a smartass the way people are in real life. By which I mean he genuinely DOES NOT KNOW when to shut up. His alligator mouth, as my father would say, is constantly overloading his jaybird ass. This pleases me, because rarely are clever people clever only when they ought to be. Clever people are the type, indeed, who mouth off to people pointing guns at them.
REFLEX.
Next, there is Karrin Murphy, she is the police. And Harry Dresden is a supernatural trouble magnet who refuses point blank to explain anything to her.
It's so good that their relationship improves over the series. There was a time when I thought Murphy was just going to shoot Harry, the end, and the series would thereby out-noir Dashiell Hammett. But see what friends they are now!
Murphy: One more short joke and I'm taking a kneecap.
Harry: Murphy! Petty violence is beneath you. Which is saying something.
Murphy: Keep it up, wise guy. I'm always going to be taller than you once you're lying unconscious on the ground.
*happy sigh*
There is Thomas, he's a man of mystery. Or something. Also a vampire. He and Harry are...friends? Let's call them friends.
Harry: You are not a spectacularly helpful sounding board.
Thomas: I'm so pretty, it's hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.
...I could probably go on forever, but will stop. Before even mentioning Bob the skull and his collection of romance novels. Or Marcone, who is my favorite even though I sort of passionately wish he weren't. Ramirez! Butters! Sanya! CHARITY!
AHEM. *shuts up*
In short! It's exciting and has awesome characters and a fascinating plot. Highly recommend even though Jim Butcher is occasionally eeeeeeevil.
The Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian
This series is everything I ever wanted from historical fiction, everything I dreamed historical fiction might be. Patrick O'Brian was clearly born into the wrong time, and he wanted to go back home to the Napoleonic war era, and, well, he made do with this series.
Lucky us.
The little details of daily life are magic. People talk about the hot new books coming out in 1802. They argue over the shiny and new early 1800s advances in science. God, the most maddening thing is when doctors do something correctly by accident. Someone asks them why they did it and they say, "Oh, my teacher used to rub people down with alcohol before surgery and he was very successful, so I do it, too. I guess it's a superstition of mine? Haha." NO. IT IS NOT A SUPERSTITION, IT IS A DISINFECTANT, ARRRGGGGGHHHH.
And the characters are in the Navy, so they travel everywhere, all over the world. It's so cool to have the big picture of the era like that. Wow, early 1800s Australia. So much more, um, exciting than I knew. D:
Patrick O'Brian, you rock.
The main characters are Jack Aubrey, of the British Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, a doctor/spy/mad Irishman who once conspired against the British. Somehow, they are best friends. Somehow, Stephen is currently in the British Navy himself, as a surgeon. It's all Jack's fault.
Jack and Stephen first met at a concert. They'd challenged each other to a duel by the end of it. Watching them go from that to being SO RIDICULOUSLY MARRIED by the end is...fun and charming and hilarious. And cute, did I mention cute? OH MY GOD, SO CUTE. They're both intriguingly complicated. They manage to be such good friends despite seemingly having little in common except for love of music, and yet it totally works.
Stephen is a fabulous doctor, but he pretty much fails the Navy. Jack has dark suspicions that he doesn't even know the difference between starboard and larboard. It drives Jack insane and also causes him to fret constantly (Stephen has a habit of pitching into the water, see). Stephen, meanwhile, is constantly nagging Jack about his weight and his health, etc. etc.
Stephen tends to be quiet and bad-tempered and extremely deadly when angered. None of that stops him from being adorable. Jack is almost always chatty and good-tempered...and extremely deadly when angered. *flails*
"Listen to this, Stephen, will you? 'Sir, I have the honour to acquaint you that pursuant to your orders of the third ultimo I proceeded to Tina [...] and, having eventually taken the Turkish contingent aboard, proceeded in adverse weather to the Mubara channel...where I made a complete cock of it.' Now the point is, how can I best say that without looking too much of a fool?"
Sophie: What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are so grateful to you.
Stephen: I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.
Martin: I am so sorry about Easter Island.
Stephen: So am I. I was vexed to the heart when first the Captain told me, but now I count it as just one more disappointment in a radically miserable life.
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth!"
:D There are dozens of extremely lovable characters. I even love Diana, which I realizes puts me in a minority, but. I mean.
Diana: Thou looks't like Antichrist in that lewd hat.
Cecilia: Oh! Oh! What a shocking thing to say! It's blasphemy, I'm sure. I declare I've never heard such a shocking thing said to me since Jemmy Blagrove called me that rude word. I shall tell Mama.
Diana: Don't be a fool, Cissy. It's a quotation--literature--the Bible.
Cecilia: Oh. Well, I think it's very shocking.
A quotation. Literature. The Bible. How can you not love her?
Yes. And unlike the Dresden Files, you can do other things while you read this series. You can even read other books between. It eats your life in a more sly way. You finish it and discover that you've somehow acquired three of the seven published volumes of Nelson's letters, that you mysteriously now have books on the Battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon, the early history of Australia...
Patrick O'Brian is trying to make you just like him.
Enjoy! ^_^
hallo!
Date: 2010-07-29 10:36 pm (UTC)Ahhh, the short stories! Did you ever read Backup? And I'm so scared for the Murphy POV story, so scared. ;_; Something tells me it'll make the evil cliffhanger even more evil.
Oh, Marcone. He's just part of a troubling trend, with me. If there's a ruthless, machiavellian, morally ambiguous character...I WILL LOVE THAT CHARACTER. It's worrying. At least Marcone has a lot of redeeming qualities, which is more than I can say for some of my other most beloved characters. ^_^;
He's so awesome, though. Calm, cool, collected. Ride of the Valkyries! No, by the end of Fool Moon, I was doomed. :D