LRRC Week 16
It has come to my attention that the next time I upload a blog post........
IT’S GONNA BE MAY!!!
Yes yes yes the inexorable passage of time, yes, and also I know the NSYNC joke is probably almost decade old but whatever, it's still funny to me.
#31: FAREWELL MY LOVELY by Raymond Chandler
I read this book mostly as research for my own murder mystery, which I want to inject with noir flavour, and to me Raymond Chandler is the ultimate old school noir writer. I've read The Big Sleep multiple times (all of which for different undergrad classes) and thought it was fun, though having some flaws that speak to the time in which it was written (and also the fact that one murder in it just straight up doesn't get solved, which remains hilarious to me).
Anyway, I like Chandler's style. Marlowe is a weirdly likeable character despite all his flaws, and I find the experience of reading these books to be pretty entertaining. I also have found that his female characters tend to be pretty interesting, and allowed to be complex in ways that seem rare even for the modern day.
Of course, there's still some issues. This book in particular suffers from era-typical racism in similar ways that The Big Sleep suffers from era-typical homophobia, which is not great. Mostly what I want to learn from Chandler is style, so I can turn it to my own noir murder mystery, which is of course queer as hell.
#32: THE BROKEN KINGDOMS by N.K. Jemisin
It's a pretty well-known fact that I'm bad at reading sequels (see previous blog posts) but I'm trying to be better about it!
The Broken Kingdoms is a sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and if you want to know more about that, you should check out my podcast, where we covered it a couple weeks ago (https://brodaciousbookclub.buzzsprout.com/903883/3123268-the-hundred-thousand-kingdoms-by-n-k-jemisin). (Extremely unsubtle plug I know.)
Anyway, I quite liked this as a sequel! It's a very different beast in a lot of ways than the first book, which is fine. This book follows a different main character, though we do still get to see the characters from the first, ten years after those events. It feels like a very natural continuation of the main story and the themes that Jemisin was going for with the initial book.
I like the new main character, her magic is really interesting, and the expansion of the world and the mythos is all pretty interesting. It's cool to see new godlings, and to see new places and more people. The first book is very contained, which I think works really well, but I loved getting to learn more about the world.
All in all, I'm excited to pick up the next one!
NEXT WEEK'S AGENDA:
#33: The Silence of Bones by June Hur
#34: In Veritas by C.J. Lavigne