State Of The Bookshelf 3/17/23

state of the bookshelf 3/17/23

March is still cancelled, so I'm still ignoring my reading list

just finished re-reading Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie)

just finished re-reading A Hat Full of Sky (Pratchett)

finished re-reading Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, All Systems Red, and Artificial Condition (Wells)

finished Over the Woodward Wall (McGuire) - New book yay

Still reading Hamilton (Chernow)

Just started re-reading Wintersmith (Pratchett)

Just started re-reading Ancillary Sword (Leckie)

Murderbot 7 doesnt come out until November tho

ladies we need to start frantically and obsessively reading books in less than 24 hours again..remember how happy we were

It is my favorite thing in the world when I notice an author leaving sneaky little fun things in the text, especially when it relates to linguistics.

Terry Pratchett does this the most out of anyone I’ve read; I’ve just started The Fifth Elephant (reading the Guards series for the first time!) and there’s teeny little linguistic quips built into the very text itself.

“It’s one of the major towns in Überwald, sir,” said Carrot, balancing the umlaut perfectly.

…

“Klatch? But they’re even farther from Uberwald than we are!” -Sam Vimes

“A large country, Uberwald” [Vetinari]

Pratchett, in dialogue, only uses the umlauts when someone who knows how to pronounce it properly is speaking. And I think it’s doubly funny that Vetinari can’t pronounce it right.

Has anyone else noticed stuff like this in other Discworld books?

I feel incredibly slow on the uptake but I was re-reading some Pratchett today—Going Postal—and Vetinari mentions “the psychology of the individual” and it finally hit me that Vetinari is Jeeves.

Jeeves, with Ankh-Morpork to take care of instead of Wooster.

Preternaturally calm, fully aware that they are serving a very dim master that must be led without it realizing that it is being led, able to enter a room far more silently than you’d expect…has apparently had an Understanding with a surprising number of ladies off-screen…

I would almost have thought coincidence until I hit the bit about considering the psychology of the individual. Now I take my hat off to both.

I finished the ancillary justice trilogy (post forthcoming. Short version: I liked it and recommend it) and decided to ride the nostalgia wave back to ninefox gambit (by yoon ha lee). Finished that one (remembered it a little more than ancillary justice, but I also read it more recently) and picked up the sequel, raven strategem which I am experiencing for the first time

Friends, raven strategem is a different animal. It's a compelling one but it's a total POV change

Also my memory for character names (nonexistent) is doing its thing (forgetting who everyone is) so that's... fun. There's a lot of POV changes too which compounds the issue. I know I should make a cheat sheet but I'm sleepytired

Oh and there's some brothers who boink each other. And one of the POV characters is a trans man. Actually a whole handful of characters who have gender stuff going on in BG. Also lots of characters who experience queer attraction, also more or less tertiary to the plot. 👍

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.