reading

[dragonlady7]

telemetry

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so i don’t read much. no, really, i don’t.

it’s because i love reading. i kind of love reading like an alcoholic loves the drink, though. and once i’m into it it’s really hard for me to set it aside again.

Dude drove us back from the farm, so I had five hours uninterrupted. I made myself do a little sewing, and I made myself finish a proofreading pass on a story I’ve written collaboratively and will be posting sometime soon. (It needs one more proofreading pass; I have to decide on a couple of small details.) (Listen I’m just excited I managed to collaborate with someone. I am not a laid-back sort of person, though I desperately wish to be, and there’s an element of going with the flow one must have to successfully collaborate, I think, and it’s something I can muster but it’s hard-won, and I’m just delighted I seem to be able to muster it at all. Possibly it is due to my writing partner’s patience, but. I’ll still take it.)

Anyway, then I let myself read Fugitive Telemetry, which I’d bought as soon as it came out but had not yet found time to read, and then I was so hungry for more book that I checked my library app and discovered to my astonished delight that the sequel to The Goblin Emperor was indeed available as an ebook. So I also devoured The Witness For The Dead on this rainy boring car ride.

cut for discussion of both books, including potential spoilers

FT was fine, but it’s not a sequel to the last one, it’s going back and filling in a bit, and that’s fine but I’m hungry to know about the next bit, so– I’ll slot it in on a reread where it really should be chronologically, and enjoy it more then. This, was fine, and had a lot of quite-good introspection from Murderbot– the moment that stood out to me most was when someone shot Murderbot, which of course didn’t kill it the way it would a human, but there was this extremely elegant bit of not-description where it was so clear that poor Murderbot was so horribly offended to have been shot, but wouldn’t even quite let itself think that, and just– dealt with it and moved on, and– well it was a fairly subtle book, really, and so while it didn’t floor me on first reading I imagine I will really sink into it on rereading, because of course it does not say almost as much as it says. (That Murderbot was offended– couldn’t be offended– was struggling with the notion that it was entitled to be offended– summarily rejected the notion of even being enough of an entity to file charges for the offense– etcetera. It was a lot of layers, most of them unsaid.)

Witness, though– well, TGE of course was about the Emperor, and so you got so little of a picture of the wider culture. This one, the protagonist is older, worldly, rather battered by events and circumstances, and lives a common lifestyle, slightly under-funded, concerned with logistics like secondhand clothing and getting enough to eat. He is such a good character, so self-effacing, so beaten-down, and yet so principled. I enjoyed him a great deal, and am delighted by recent news that this is to be the first of a trilogy of his adventures.

If you haven’t gotten into any of the Goblin Emperor stuff, I do recommend it, but either you have to, like me, not be overly concerned at keeping the names of minor characters straight (and mostly I was able to follow along and infer who was who just from context), or you just get a piece of notepaper and write down characters’ names as they’re introduced so you can refer back. (I did do that on my first readthrough of TGE, because it helped me puzzle out the politics– which are supposed to be bewildering, as they are to the POV character, but it’s a bit much.)

Witness was either more accessible or just shorter, so it overwhelmed a bit less. I was expecially delighted by the multiple intertwined plots, some of which really connected and some of which only circumstantially did– it was a good way to do a murder mystery, and also somewhat realistic or at least less-contrived– it gave a fuller picture of Celehar’s life that he was witnessing for several cases at once, and then there was a completely unrelated side-quest in the middle that pulled him away and then set him on another side case that then had some exciting things happen– anyway it meant for an engaging read, that then resolved satisfyingly. (Your picture was not posted)