Sakura of DOOM

My romance-reading spree seems to be over, although sadly, nothing has stepped in to take its place. I hope the non-reading brain does not last for long, as I find myself at a loss as to what to do and end up playing endless rounds of Spider Solitaire. Books! Horribly bad for my schoolwork, but at least still more satisfying than digital cards!

Anyway, if only the non-reading brain came with blogging-the-giant-backlog brain as well! Instead, I will make even more entries with inadequate notes...

The Seducer - The first of Hunter's Seducer series about a group of men who practice fencing together. Diane Albret has grown up in a French boarding school, while her guardian, Daniel St. John, has visited dutifully every year without ever taking much note of her. Now she's grown, and he does notice. He takes her to London and presents her to society for some convoluted revenge scheme. I actually don't have guardian/ward romance squicks emotionally, although intellectually, the power dynamic can bug me (I chalk this up to several guardian/ward romances or teen romances I read as a kid). This doesn't ping my squicks, as Daniel hasn't been very present in Diane's life at all to date. However, there is a power differential between them, and Diane is very aware of it. This hit a lot of my emotionally dysfunctional romance buttons, though that may just have been when I read it. Hunter's prose hasn't impressed me much since, so I reserve judgment for a reread.

The Romantic - The fifth of the Seducer series. Julian Hampton has been in love with Penelope Laclere his entire life, despite the class barrier. He's the lawyer to the Laclere family, which features largely in this series, and she is unhappily married to the Count of Glasbury. When she comes to him for help, he vows to do all he can for her. I expected to like this a great deal—unrequited childhood love, non-alpha male, upper-class woman/lower-class man class differential—but the book fell short of expectation. Penelope has very little personality beyond damsel in distress, and although we are informed of the depth of Julian's love for her time and again, I never thought it fully came through on the page. Part of this was because Penelope had so little character that I couldn't imagine her inspiring love of that depth, but part was also Hunter's desire to make Julian completely stoic. Alas, that only works if you get hints of inner turmoil every so often, and sadly, reams of unsent love letters didn't cut it for me, especially since they were so poorly written. Also, more BDSM as a stand-in for villainy, as well as some race issues. (spoilers) I very much liked that the villain's illegitimate daughter with a slave got to kill him but am nevertheless disturbed by how the pain of the slaves is there mostly to illustrate how mean the villain was so we felt sympathetic toward Penelope, and how the daughter was there only to provide a deus ex machina for Julian.

Lady of Sin - Second of a duo that is related to the Seducer series. Charlotte, nee Laclere, the widowed Baroness Mardenford, ends up sleeping with notorious lawyer Nathaniel Knightride (he was in The Romantic) during a masked orgy. Together, they fight crime! attempt to amend the laws about divorce! Well, she does, and she mostly manages to drag him into it. Either I read this when I was not in romance mood, or Madeline Hunter's charms had worn thin by book 3, because all I remember is being very bored by this. Charlotte and Nathaniel are supposed to be the opposites attract, sparks fly type of couple, but the dialogue was nowhere near zingy enough, and I still have problems with the premise of the plot. Meh.

The other Hunter books I started I didn't like enough to finish (The Rules of Seduction, By Arrangement, and The Sins of Lord Easterbrook). The last I had to stop reading even though I was eating noodles by myself and had no other books in my purse! It was suffer through free minutes with no books or risk throwing the thing at a wall in public thanks to a plot depending on the British trading in China in the 1800s.

Via glass_icarus, Princeton University Press is having an online sale in the US and Canada until March 31!

I am currently thinking of getting Classical Chinese Supplement: Selections from Historical Texts because I feel I should work on all the 文言文 I memorized in high school, Intermediate Reader of Modern Chinese if it'll work on my iMac, and India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England.

I am sad how many books on POC are being written by white people =(.

Things I am not sure I should get but am convinced someone on my r/flist should (all from the "under $15 bin, since I did not allow myself to look outside it for fear of temptation):

• Complexities: Women in Mathematics


• Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle


• Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures


• Enough to Say It's Far: Selected Poems of Pak Chaesam


• Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their Students


• After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets (alas for oracne, this is WWII, not WWI)


• Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization

... and there is probably a lot more, but I zoned out after a while. Still. Academic books! For relatively cheap! OMG Chinese textbooks!

This is embarrassingly late even for Lunar New Year. I'm hoping "better late than never" still applies.

As with sequential art, I totally sucked at writing things up this year. Grad school: worst time suck ever! Sadly, this means I haven't reviewed almost half of the books on my best-of list. As usual, the list of books here are my favorites read in 2009, not published 2009. And in fact, I have some books on the list that are being published this year, thanks to the wonder of ARCs.

This year, I continued to do , despite completely failing to post at the comm. I think I was doing better in terms of percentages than I was last year, and then I hit November, school started really sucking, and all I could read were historical romances, which are super White. As such, I have roughly the same percentages of women and POC read this year as I did last year. At least there was no backsliding?

I feel like I should say something more intelligent about what I was reading, except I don't think I was a particularly intelligent reader this year.

Anything not linked in the giant list has not been written up; feel free to ask me about anything in the comments.

• ( Kim Anderson, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood )



• ( M.T. Anderson, Octavian Nothing: The Kingdom on the Waves )



• ( Minister Faust, From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain )



• ( Nalo Hopkinson, The New Moon's Arms )



• ( N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms )



• ( Many Ly, Roots and Wings )



• ( Ramesh Menon, The Mahabharata: A Modern Rendering )



• ( Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved )



• ( Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body )



• ( Sonia Shah, ed., Dragon Ladies )

Also recommended: Swati Avasthi, Split; Mary Balogh, A Summer to Remember; Jacqueline Carey, Naamah's Kiss and Santa Olivia; Kristin Cashore, Fire; Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, The Graveyard Book; Joey W. Hill, A Witch's Beauty; Nisi Shawl, Filter House; Sherri L. Smith, Flygirl; and Drew Hayden Taylor, The Night Wanderer.

Total read: 122 (8 rereads)
45 by women of color, 60 by POC, 101 by women

( All books read in 2009 )

On a more serious note: via sanguinity, An Indigenous Olympics is a good look at the branding of the Vancouver Olympics and the problematics thereof.

Warning: the following commentary will have way too many exclamation points and allcaps and squee.

( Spoilers for men's short and pairs )

Ha, these are tags I don't use often!

I have been dorkily following figure skating ever since I got Tivo and realized I could program it to record figure skating, so now, I bore everyone by going on (and on and on) about figure skating come this Olympics!

(Also! Taiwan is in the winter Olympics! 1 luger, and I doubt we'll win, but still! TAIWAN! WINTER OLYMPICS! Even if we are still listed as "Chinese Taipei"!)

(Also also, I feel so bad for the poor technicians backstage going, "OMFG how did the OLYMPIC TORCH go WRONG at the ACTUAL CEREMONIES I AM SO SCREWED.")

(We won't go into my long-standing issues with the nationalist to-do that always seems to happen over the Olympics, the terrible quality of the US anchors, the way medals go to countries with enough dollars to pour into their sports programs, and etc.)

( Much geekiness within )

Claymore readers might be interested in this post on women warriors and the male gaze. Spoilers through v. 15. I kind of noodled in the comments, but my brain is too dead to come up with anything coherent.

So far, two hits, two misses, and one in the middle. Jewel so far tends to focus on the male POV and on male pleasure during sex, which is relatively different. As such, sometimes it has the man losing control during sex, but not always, and the focus on male pleasure while sometimes outright ignoring female pleasure takes away from why I like romances in the first place. Still, her later historicals focus on people who are not conventionally pretty and/or handsome, and there's a lot of character-driven romance without many Big Misunderstandings or other plot devices.

Alas, the one and half paranormals I've read by Jewel kind of suck.

( Indiscreet )

( Lord Ruin )

( Scandal )

( The Spare )

( Stolen Love )

Worth reading: Scandal (probably best of the bunch), Indiscreet if you can stand the evil pashas and the Orientalism, Lord Ruin if you can get past the dubcon set up.

These are books 3 and 4 of Hoyt's Legend of the Four Soldiers quartet, which is about four survivors of a British regiment ambushed by Indians in the not-yet-United-States. (I will get to this rant in a moment.)

To Beguile a Beast - Mrs. Helen Fitzwilliam has finally decided to leave her keeper, the Duke of Lister, but she knows he'll go after her just to get her and his two bastard children back. She ends up trying to persuade naturalist Sir Alistair Munroe to let her stay as his housekeeper, since he desperately needs one. Alistair is the titular beast, as he was scarred and had two fingers cut off during aforementioned ambush. Thankfully, this book has relatively little about the ambush, which meant I could pretend to ignore it so as to not throw the book against a wall. Most of the plot revolves around Helen escaping the Duke of Lister, and amazingly, her two children are not nauseatingly cute. In fact, I actually really liked the very solemn and not at all cute Abigail. I like that the hero is actually scarred, as opposed to the usual "Oh WOES I am UGLY wait no it's only a mild scratch" thing, but I was rather unconvinced by how long the "I am not worthy of your love" thing was dragged out on Alistair's part. Overall, not bad, though I like her Princes trilogy better.

To Desire a Devil - ( Spoilers and rantiness )

helptheproject is a fandom auction to benefit the The Virginia Avenue Project, a free afterschool arts and academics program. 100% of participating children graduate from high school. 95% go on to college. 98% are the first person in their family to go. Many of these kids are POC, and the main area the Project draws upon is low income and majority Latin@.

Due to budget cuts, unless we can raise $15,000 by mid-March, we will lose our centerpiece program.

I am not personally involved in the project, but over the years, rachelmanija has told me a lot about her experiences stage managing for the Project and working with the kids, from ant infestations in their summer camp to incredibly awesome-sounding plays that have shadow puppets of a man getting eaten by a wolf getting eaten by a shark getting eaten by a whale!

I'm offering a review of a book/movie/tv show. Please bid and save me from Rachel and Yoon, who seem to have nefarious plans for me! ;)

In the not-too-distant future, Victoria Barnhardt is a former-hacker-turned-software-engineer for Visimorph, a ham-handed satire of Microsoft. In her spare time, she tries to create a conscious AI.

I am not sure this is a romance at all. In fact, I am not sure what it is, period. There seems to be too much suspense and running around and whatnot for a genre romance, and the worldbuilding is so shoddy that it hardly seems to be SF either.

This is all extremely unfortunate, as Vic is damaged, hates her own femininity, and still must somehow teach her now-sentient AI Jodie how to be human when she seems much more inclined to abandon humanity for computers. Jodie is sweet and innocent, given his status as a newly-sentient intelligence. By all rights, this would be an awesome, boundary-breaking book. Instead, it's quite a mess.

The main plot to steal Jodie from Vic is horrible even by bad suspense romance novel standards; the villains are patently cardboard, I can think of no motivation whatsoever for one of the characters, and another is somehow doing this out of love/obsession for Vic. The computer science is execrable. I found the means by which Jodie gets a human body to be morally and ethically shady, to say the very least, and the process by which this is done is unbelievable even for the usual AI-turns-human plot. And this is just stuff that has to do with the plot that I don't even care about!

Furthermore, although there are many really cool questions about gender, sexuality, and identity in the book, they are only thrown out there and then dealt with in the most summarily dismissive of fashions. Jodie decides he is a male program because he is logical and not emotional. Despite her railing at the sexism of the computer industry and her dislike of stereotypical femininity, Vic does not at all question that emotion and cooperation are biologically female traits, and from what I remember, what she teaches Jodie about gender and sexuality is cisgendered, heterosexual, and lines up neatly with all gender stereotypes. It is so frustrating! It could have been meta-commentary on how embedded these "default" notions about gender and sexuality are, even to those who hate the "default" framework, but instead, Squires doesn't even seem to think about the fact that she is bolstering the kyriarchy.

There are glimmers of neat things in the book, particularly Vic teaching the naive Jodie about basically everything, and although I found Squires' attempt to reconcile a human-computer romance somewhat silly, it was also charming ("I created you, but now you're too smart for me!") and would have been an actual conflict had the writing been better.

But there's just so much to dig through for that. In conclusion: extremely interesting premise, terrible, terrible execution.

Links:
- coffeeandink's write up