Bookish Thoughts

Sometimes you're at a used book sale and you see a different edition of a book you already own. But you love the book so much that you have to buy this new edition. And then you have to read it to justify the purchase. This is probably the best method for revisiting an old favorite. I first read this book nearly a decade ago. I then proceeded to work through everything else Bujold had written in the next few years. She's still writing some - releasing a novella or two a year. But it was so nice to dive into a full-length adventure from her again, and to remember why I fell in love with her writing in the first place. This story focuses on Cazaril. He has just escaped from several years of slavery and is hoping to spend the rest of his life quietly and anonymously with some small, easy employment. But when he is assigned to be the secretary-tutor for the princess, he finds himself thrust into politics. And when he finds himself the chosen vessel of one of the gods, politics and ...

This book is 100 pages long and it took me two weeks to read it because November was so non-stop. I liked it a lot. It's fun and comforting with a twist that I saw coming just in time. And one or two lines that reminded me why I love Lois McMaster Bujold so much. I just wish I'd been able to read it a bit quicker.

The Penric and Desdemona novellas remain a lovely little slice of escapism. I'm glad that Bujold is continuing to write and publish them regularly. This is a world (like all of her worlds) where the people in charge are both generous and competent, which means that any problem is quickly solved and everyone gets a happy ever after. It makes for a wonderful fantasy world.  This one is about a plague, and I gotta say that it was interesting to read about a plague during a plague. Especially since this one only lasted a few weeks, while the real one has been going on for months. Still, some of the beats were similar, which the plague being better understood, the death rate going down even as the infection rate went up because they were learning how to handle it. Also, Penric's separation from his family (and new baby) both because he was so busy and because he didn't want to infect them was heartbreaking to read about. Also too relatable were his fears about contracting the di...

Lois McMaster Bujold remains an auto-buy and auto-read for me. It doesn't matter what she writes or when, as soon as I hear about it I buy it. And then I read it as soon as I can. It probably helps that her "retirement project" has her releasing e-novellas for less than $5 each. They're the perfect impulse buys. That said, I think Bujold's best work may be behind her. Her Penric and Desdemona series is a light-hearted fun, and I always enjoy the adventures these two go on. But they don't quite have the depth of some of the mid-late Vorkosigan books (particularly Memory ). Not that there's anything wrong with that. A quick, light adventure can be exactly what I want to read. It helps that everyone is competent and well-intentioned and everything always works out for the best in the end. I think Bujold is becoming more of an idealist in her old age. Or at least she's writing books that embrace an idealism, perhaps as a response to what's going on...

Bujold recently released a new Vorkosigan novella, and the truth is that there just isn't that much to say about it. The Flowers of Vashnoi  takes place shortly after Captain Vorpatril's Alliance  and is told from Ekaterine's point of view. It sees her and Enrique testing out a new batch of butter bugs that the hope will consume the radiation in the Vashnoi district and make it habitable sooner. In the course of this project, they discover people living in the irradiated zone, and they have to figure out what to do about it. This is a pretty short story, and for good reason. You have competent, compassionate, and above all privileged people encountering a problem and immediately doing everything within their power to solve it to everyone's benefit. It's an exercise in wish-fulfillment. What if the people in charge genuinely cared about their people and could quickly bring about meaningful change to better their lives? What if knowing about a problem was nearly t...

The Prisoner of Limnos  is pretty much the definition of a feel-good story. Lois McMaster Bujold is incapable of not giving her characters the happiest possible ending. So there are no real surprises here. There's excitement but not much tension. And everyone ends up right where you hope and know they will. There's a lot to be said for comfort reads like this. Where characters clearly state what they want, value open, frank communication, and find their way to the same page. It's nice to watch characters do what they're good at and do it well. It's nice to know that two people who are so clearly meant for each other will end up together. It's not that there aren't obstacles. But they're met head-on by mature adults, and it turns out that they aren't so hard to overcome after all. The only downfall of a story like this is that there isn't a ton to be said. I love Bujold. I'm so glad she's continuing to publish novellas. I wish there we...

Penric's Fox is a murder mystery. Except that in this case, Oswyl is the dogged detective following up on every lead and Penric is the excitable reader who jumps to the answer about a third of the way through the story. So there's not much mystery at all. Still, it's always a pleasure to spend time in one of Bujold's worlds. So many of her characters are genuinely good people. The fact that she seems to care about them even more than the reader guarantees that they'll all come through alright. Everyone has a happy ending waiting for them. Except for the villains, who don't seem quite so cartoonish against the current political landscape and always meet justice in the end. It was also fun to revisit the characters from Penric and the Shaman , the second installment in this series. Bujold does so by going back in time a bit to before Penric's Mission . It's a little disappointing to not find out what happens next after that particular story, but it...

Unlike the other stories so far in the Penric series, which take place years apart, this one is a direct sequel to the previous one. It picks up hours after Penric, Nikys, and Adelis narrowly escaped their pursuers and follows the rest of their journey to safety in Orbas. They stop briefly in a brothel to recover and get their bearings, where Penric gets the idea to disguise himself as a wealthy, semi-retired courtesan, with the aid of one of Desdemona's previous hosts. This disguise, of course, leads to shenanigans and makes for a fun farce. It also complicates the developing relationship between Penric and Nikys. What had been a slow-burn, seemingly inevitable romance between the two is thrown off. This being a Bujold story, I was expecting a happy ending. I was pleasantly surprised to discover something much more ambiguous. It was refreshing to get a story from her that wasn't all wide-eyed optimism and love-conquers-all. I love those stories, of course. The great comfor...

Bujold's Penric  series, her "retirement project" has been a nice way to continue to get new fiction from her, even though she's not planning to write any more books. Instead she's been releasing this series of novellas as e-books. And as much as I prefer physical books, the electronic format isn't so bad for these shorter installments, which I can often read in one or two sessions. The third installment jumps forward in time. Penric and Desdemona have been together for over a decade now, and they have a seamless partnership, with a deep knowledge of and respect for each other. It also throws the reader right into the action, with Penric getting kidnapped and thrown into a dungeon in the first chapter. Structurally, this story is a lot like Cryoburn, with kidnappers, shady governments, and shaky partnerships. Adding to the comparison is the fact that Penric is acting more and more like Miles with each passing story. This can probably be chalked up to the c...

The nice thing about Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga is that you know everything's going to be alright. There are exciting adventures with misunderstandings and obstacles galore. But at the end of the book, everyone will get their happily ever after. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen  is likely the last book in the saga. Bujold claims to be retired and seem focused entirely on a series of novellas that take place in her fantasy world. But if this is the last one, it's a fitting conclusion. It's slower than the books that came before. The problems here are interpersonal and revolve around fairly low-stakes questions. Or, at least the kinds of questions that people who aren't characters in space operas find themselves facing. Should I take that job? Do I want kids? Will her family be okay with us dating? I know the shapes of these stories, and the optimum outcome, the one Bujold would no doubt pursue, was evident about halfway through the story. But it was still nice to sau...

By the time I got to the fourth and final Sharing Knife  book, I was used to the slow, meandering pace of these books. I was happy to just hang out in this world with these characters for a couple hundred pages until the excitement started. Bujold has created a fascinating world and populated it with a wealth of nice, interesting characters who I enjoyed spending time with. If there's a fault with this book (and series really), it's that Bujold can't quite bring herself to let anything all that bad happen to her characters. There's certainly something to be said for that. It's nice to read a book where you know everyone will be safe. Though it does drain a lot of suspense out of the action scenes. This is all to say that it took a while for this story to grow on me. It's slow and not much happens, which is different from a lot of stories you get. But I did end up coming around, and I ended up really liking this book and series. I can definitely see myself re...

The third book in Bujold's Sharing Knife  series is incredibly slow. It follows the first half of Dag and Fawn's honeymoon. Which is largely an idyllic time. Which is kind of boring. Most of the book chronicles their trip downriver on a boat. But it takes about 100 pages to get there. And since it's clear that that's where everything is leading, I was just impatient to get there. Instead Bujold spends a lot of time setting up new characters and potential conflicts and generally building up the world a bit. The climax does eventually kick in, and it's thrilling a satisfying. But I struggled with the rest of the book. What's interesting is that I'm finding I like it better in retrospect (and having finished the fourth book). Bujold ultimately convinced me that it was fun to just hang out in this world with these characters, and I'm remembering the book fondly. I'd probably enjoy it more on a re-read than I did the first time through.

The second Sharing Knife book picks up mere hours after the first one ends, and then it takes a while to get started. A lot of that is probably due to the fact that the book was split up in separate installments to sell better. But it works out alright if you read them back to back. And when the action finally does kick in, it's well worth the wait. This pick, as I expected, picks up and ties off most of the threads that were left dangling at the end of the previous book. Fawn's family has been mollified, but there's still the issue of Dag's family. Fawn and Dag are firmly a couple at this point, so there's less courtship and more stability between them. Which means a bit less excitement. Which means that it's time for the monsters to come back. And Fawn can use all the stuff she learned in the previous book to save the day. There's a lot of fun world building in this book. A lot of characters working at cross purposes to either uphold the status quo (wh...

This may be the longest I've gone between buying a book and reading that book. I picked it up at a used book store a year and a half ago because it was written by Lois McMaster Bujold. But then I found out that it was part of a series and, this being Bujold, I knew I'd want to read the whole series. What's more, the series is supposed to be more like a single novel broken into four installments than four distinct books. So I waited and looked for the other books and never found them and this one sat neglected on my shelf. This may have been a good thing. In my quest for the rest of the series I learned that, while it's billed as fantasy, it's much closer to romance. That knowledge helped me adjust my expectations. I knew going in that the book was going to focus more on the relationship between Dag and Fawn than on the supernatural malices that populated their world. And in reading The Vorkosigan Series I came to expect Bujold's fondness for May-December roma...

This was a lovely, quick read that probed deeply into questions of responsibility and free will. I've come to expect nothing less from Bujold. The first Penric story managed to make demon possession into an almost cuddly coming of age tale. So it's no surprise that she manages to do the same thing with a grisly murder. The story shifts between three points of view: Penric (and his demon), a murderer on the run from authorities, and the man hunting the murderer. The fun comes in the fact that they're all incredibly sympathetic. Even the murderer. Bujold hasn't written a pure villain since Falling Free , so I should have expected that there would be more to the story than met the eye. I also love the world that Bujold set this story in, and I'm always glad for a chance to return to it. The Curse of Chalion  is how I found her in the first place, so this setting has a special place in my heart. The world is a little disparate. Other than the gods, it's hard to ...

With this act, I bring one death into the world . That quote has been circling in my head since early in my pregnancy. It's something I've been trying to come to terms with, but I'm not sure I ever really will. We created a life. A whole entire life. And it's quickly going to get beyond our control. Thanks to this quote, I've been pulled to re-read this book for months now. It took me a while to get around to it. It always does. My stack of books is big enough that months often pass between me deciding to read something and actually reading it. Sometimes years. In this case, the delay ended up working out well. I re-read Barrayar when I was just about 5 months pregnant, which is how pregnant Cordelia is when the attempt on Aral's life throws everything into chaos and her fetus is transplanted to a uterine replicator with slim hope for survival. It's not often that you get a science-fiction book about pregnancy. I can't think of any others off th...

It's been a few years since I started the Vorkosigan series, and I wanted to go back and revisit the beginning for a number of reasons. Partly because the only unread book I have left is the new Cordelia book, and I wanted to brush up on her and Aral's relationship before I picked that up. And partly because Cordelia's pregnancy in Barrayar has been on my mind since I got pregnant. Shards of Honor is short and in the same omnibus as Barrayar , so it was easy to just go ahead and read it, too. I was worried that this book wouldn't hold up. The series as a whole gets much better as it progresses, both as the world becomes more detailed and as Bujold becomes a better writer. Plus, I tried to make Kevin read this once, and he never finished it. So I was pleased to discover that I enjoyed this book even more the second time through. A lot of that is how familiar I am with these worlds now. The history of Barrayar is familiar to me, so I'm not constantly puzzling ou...

Until recently, this was the last book in the Vorkosigan Saga . As such, reading it is a lot like hanging out with a good friend. The novel opens with Miles escaping from a kidnapping, which is the first time since Borders of Infinity that the story starts mid-action and catches the reader up as it goes. It was nice to just be thrown in immediately, without any prologue or preamble before the excitement. The mystery is pretty straightforward, and Miles does what he does best in cutting through to the center of it. The big idea in this book is cryo-freezing, and how that effects society. When people opt to be frozen instead of dying, in the hopes of extending their lifespan at some future time, then what becomes of their money? Their voting power? On this planet, it gets held in trust by corporations who are on the verge of taking over the entire world, causing an ever-widening gap between the richest and the poorest. Miles does what he does and blows this whole scheme apart with t...

Diving back in to Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga is always great fun. And while I was wary of this one at first, as it focuses on Ivan rather than Miles, I really ought to have known better. The book is part farce, part heist, part romance, It draws expertly on thirteen previous books of history such that the myriad misunderstandings and reveals had me laughing out loud at times The book starts with Ivan once again getting comandeered for a mission above his pay-grade. He is kidnapped and held hostage almost immediately. I was surprised when the action started up so quickly, and glad that it took a while to really slow down again. When it did slow down, it was mostly for a parade of cameos from Ivan's friends and family on Vorkosigan. I'd be more irritated with the slow middle if I wasn't having so much fun seeing all these characters again. It was especially fun to see them from Ivan's point of view, since it's so different from Miles'. But the heist portion ...

Diplomatic Immunity  was not quite as good as the preceding Vorkosigan books. That speaks more to how fantastic those books were, than to any major flaws in this one, though. It lacked nothing except that little something extra that I've come to expect from Bujold. The way she has with words and characters that leaves my laughing out loud and crying tears of both sadness and joy. There was one incredibly awe-inspiring scene, when the quaddie ballet is being described. I really wish it was something I could actually witness. The quaddies were originally designed to be null-gee workers, but with the advent of artificial gravity technology they instead established a mostly null-gee colony in an asteroid belt. Their society has been based there for 200 years, evolving and changing and slowly reintegrating into the world of downsiders, as they call humans with legs. As for the rest of the story...maybe I'm just getting used to the formula. Miles is sent to quaddie ...