Reading Wednesday
Jun. 19th, 2019 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redrikkiYou know what I did this evening before I sat down to write this? Spread mulch in my front landscaping and paid my bills like an adult. I'm still not fully sure how this happened. I literally had a dream about middle school a few nights back and now I apparently own a house where mulch is something I care about.
Anyhow, on to the book review.
Teckla by Steven Brust. In book three of the Vlad series, our hero learns that his wife has become involved in a revolutionary movement when one of her colleagues is murdered and spends the rest of the book running around making everything worse for everyone in the name of keeping her safe. This is by far my least favorite book in the series thus far. Don't get me wrong; it's still a pretty good book. It does a lot of interesting world building, raises some interesting political questions, and forces our hero to do a bit of soul searching. The problem is that it's not fun. The series I signed up for in book one featured a fun, smart ass asshole main character surrounded by fun, smart ass asshole friends working together to foil the schemes of even bigger assholes via hijinks and con artistry. This book finds Vlad largely alone, depressed, moping, and literally suicidal at one point.
To me, the biggest problem with it is the relationship between Vlad and his wife, Cawti, and my emotional disconnect from it. Literally everything Vlad does in this book is to keep Cawti safe, but a) she's demonstrably capable of taking care of herself, and b) Brust has not laid the ground work to make us, the readers, care if she's safe. She's barely present in the first book and, in the prequel, she is introduced when she straight up murders our main character. Their courtship seems almost entirely based on mutual lust and the fact that they seem to be gender flipped versions of each other. Cawti is given almost no backstory and never really gets a chance to explain why she got involved with the revolutionary group, why she hid it from her husband, or what any of it means to her. Throughout the course of the book, Vlad interviews each of the revolutionaries and learns their backstories and why they're involved. Why doesn't the author ever give Cawti the same courtesy. Her involvement in the revolution is basically a plot device to get Vlad involved in the revolution without Brust actually have him be a revolutionary. We're supposed to care about her because Vlad cares about her and, given the emptiness of her character development and the fact I never really bought into their romance in the first place, I don't.
I'm not sure what I want to read next. There are a bunch more books in this series, but this month's Smithsonian is waiting to be finished. Plus, there's my massive backlog of books I haven't already read before. Do I want to read the next one? Re-read Good Omens before I watch the series? Read something else entirely? ::Shrug::
Anyhow, on to the book review.
Teckla by Steven Brust. In book three of the Vlad series, our hero learns that his wife has become involved in a revolutionary movement when one of her colleagues is murdered and spends the rest of the book running around making everything worse for everyone in the name of keeping her safe. This is by far my least favorite book in the series thus far. Don't get me wrong; it's still a pretty good book. It does a lot of interesting world building, raises some interesting political questions, and forces our hero to do a bit of soul searching. The problem is that it's not fun. The series I signed up for in book one featured a fun, smart ass asshole main character surrounded by fun, smart ass asshole friends working together to foil the schemes of even bigger assholes via hijinks and con artistry. This book finds Vlad largely alone, depressed, moping, and literally suicidal at one point.
To me, the biggest problem with it is the relationship between Vlad and his wife, Cawti, and my emotional disconnect from it. Literally everything Vlad does in this book is to keep Cawti safe, but a) she's demonstrably capable of taking care of herself, and b) Brust has not laid the ground work to make us, the readers, care if she's safe. She's barely present in the first book and, in the prequel, she is introduced when she straight up murders our main character. Their courtship seems almost entirely based on mutual lust and the fact that they seem to be gender flipped versions of each other. Cawti is given almost no backstory and never really gets a chance to explain why she got involved with the revolutionary group, why she hid it from her husband, or what any of it means to her. Throughout the course of the book, Vlad interviews each of the revolutionaries and learns their backstories and why they're involved. Why doesn't the author ever give Cawti the same courtesy. Her involvement in the revolution is basically a plot device to get Vlad involved in the revolution without Brust actually have him be a revolutionary. We're supposed to care about her because Vlad cares about her and, given the emptiness of her character development and the fact I never really bought into their romance in the first place, I don't.
I'm not sure what I want to read next. There are a bunch more books in this series, but this month's Smithsonian is waiting to be finished. Plus, there's my massive backlog of books I haven't already read before. Do I want to read the next one? Re-read Good Omens before I watch the series? Read something else entirely? ::Shrug::
