Recent reading

[luzula]

Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison
♥_♥ OMG, I love this! This is a fairy tale, and rather than describe it to you, let me just quote for a bit: So she turned herself into a black bear then and there and picked up the baby in her mouth, blanket and all, and growled her way out of the Bower at the back of the King's hall, and padded out through the light spring snow that had melted already near the hall, and through the birch woods and the pine woods and into the deep dark woods where the rest of the bears were waking up from their winter sleep.

This book was written in 1952, apparently as a response to The Hobbit (Mitchison knew Tolkien), and I can see that. There are some bits about dragons and treasure and especially about heroes that are pretty different. Let's just say that this book is not sympathetic towards sword-swinging heroes:

"I thought it was you," said Steinvor [a Valkyrie who collects dead heroes for Valhalla], kicking her feet out of the stirrups, crossing one leg over the other and rearranging the hero so that he hung down tidily at each side; his skull had been knocked in, perhaps by a stone. [...]

"His brains are dripping out," said Halla rather disgustedly.

"He won't need them," said Steinvor. "Never did really."

And then it turns out that the hero died in a street fight when a woman dropped a heavy pot on him from a window. Heh. Okay, I'll stop now before I quote the whole book. I am already planning which people I want to lend it to.

Permanence, by Karl Schroeder
I enjoyed this! It's hard SF, I guess, though it pays attention to social issues as well. There are some pretty cool aliens, and it's a fast-paced book with an interesting plot and interesting ideas. The sentence-level writing is nothing special, though, and I didn't quite connect with the characters.

Comments

[mergatrude]

Ooh! Am already googling the first to see if I can find a copy! Thanks!

[ride_4ever]

Also check out her SF writing : Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

[luzula]

I think you'll love it. : ) And I second the rec for Memoirs of a Spacewoman, though that's a very different book. (Although maybe not all that different? Both are about traveling women.)

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

Naomi Haldane Mitchison! Wow! I was "raised on SF" and I only knew her as an SF writer (her Memoirs of a Spacewoman). I didn't know about this fantasy book of hers and will go looking for it (love that part about the dead hero's brains!).

What's making me LOL, now that I see about her fantasy writing, is that I know she actually did go to "Dragon School"! (It's a boarding and day school founded in Oxford, England in the 1800's and still in operation today...but alas, it does not really have dragons.)

[luzula]

Oh cool, I just discovered "Memoirs of a Spacewoman" recently (I wrote about it here). I'd never heard of it when I was younger. Apparently she was a very prolific writer? The university library here has some of her historical novels.

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

Oh dear! How did I miss that? Not the first time I've missed one of your posts and then made a redundant comment...now I'm thinking about starting from 2006 when you began LJ and going through all of them (which would be the first time I'd have gone all the way back to the very start of someone's LJ).

[luzula]

Oh, no problem, I probably miss posts all the time. It's hard to keep up with the internet! : )