Sea of Joker Devices; Nine Years' Science Defusing Little King

[maribou]

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
While this book is competently plotted, full of interesting history, and has some great characters, its true delight is language. Specifically South Asian dialects of English, and the dialogue and narration are DELICIOUS. (Heh, I just saw the PW review online and they ended with "The cast is marvelous and the plot majestically serpentine, but the real hero is the English language, which has rarely felt so alive and vibrant." Great minds think alike, only they polished theirs;).)
(75/275)

Devices and Desires, by KJ Parker (reread)
I liked this book almost as well this time as the first time, and that means I liked it VERY VERY VERY much indeed. All psyched to finish the trilogy, when I get somewhat caught up on library books.
(76/275, 4/75 )

The Joker, by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo
An interesting twist on the mythology, well-told and well-drawn, but it isn't on the level of a The Killing Joke or an Arkham Asylum, either. It kept me turning pages.
(77/275)

Nine Lives, by Dan Baum (ARC)
I thought the material was interesting (snapshots from the lives of nine people who experienced Katrina, going way back in time and drawing a picture of New Orleans as a city along the way), and many of the individual pieces were wonderful, but I didn't really like the book's structure. It was fragmented and occasionally repeated information in an awkward manner. Overall, the niftiness was more important than the awkwardness.
(78/275)

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 21st Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin J. Grant
As always, this volume of the series was worth it for the yearly summation essays alone. Besides those, there were some absolutely brilliant stories in here, as well as a few that fell really flat. Some of what Datlow likes is too explicitly unpleasant for me, and some of what Link/Grant select is much too poetry-over-plot for my tastes. BUT! Most of the anthology was excellent, including stories that made me fall in love (or stay in love) with the following authors: Daniel Abraham, Karen Russell, Elizabeth Hand, Eileen Gunn, Ted Chiang, Tanith Lee, Garth Nix, and Kij Johnson, and some other really good stories on top of those. I am very sad that there won't be more.
(79/275)

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008, edited by Jerome Groopman and Tim Folger
I suspect that Dr. Groopman and I have pretty different definitions of what constitutes "science and nature writing," and I particularly felt the loss of the "nature writing" side of the spectrum. That said, many excellent essays, including the introductions, and I thought John Cohen's essay about mammal hybrids was a hoot, while Michael Finkel's malaria essay and James Geary's piece about Litvenenko's assassination via polonium poisoning were especially fascinating.
(80/275)

Defusing the Angry Patron, by Rhea Joyce Rubin
Work stuff. Pretty solid, pretty basic, I was actually evaluating it for other people's use, more than reading it for my own purposes, and I think it will suit that use well.
(81/275)

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
The thing is, you can dress overly didactic polemical writing up with a fun story and interesting characters and chilling relevance to our present-day problems, and it's still overly didactic polemical writing, y'know? I might not have minded if I didn't have such high expectations of this author - and I seem to be in the minority for preferring his other novels to this one. Also it was a bit weird to me that the 17-year-olds were so much like the 17-year-olds I knew when I was seventeen in terms of taste, methods of communicating, slang, etc, and not so much like the late-teenaged people I know now (though I have totally heard similar rants about the pure awesomeness of the Beats from the teenagers I know now)... There was a bit somewhat near the end that had a lot more story and a lot less infodump and I really liked that bit.
(82/275)

The Lizard King, by Bryan Christy
I was afraid this book might be too "true-crime"-y for me, but it was awesome! Completely fascinating story about a reptile smuggling kingpin, the federal agent that brought him down through sheer tenacity (and some lucky international coincidences), and their assorted colleagues. Also lots of tasty tasty herpy details for the reptile- and amphibian-fancying crowd. A very satisfying and quick read.
(83/275)