Following rachelmanija's Read-a-Thon

I belatedly started reading (and reading in the wake of) rachelmanija's Read-a-Thon. Her book reviews are always super helpful and interesting and I have gotten many great book recs from her journal over the years so am happy to support her read-a-thon! I encourage you to support it too!

Extra bonus..

a) I have some Amazon credit burning a hole in my pocket right now.
b) I am bored, restless, and stuck in bed.

So that means I can read along with her -- at least partially...

So far I have read Le Guin's Voices and then its sequel, Powers. (I read Gifts, the first book, a while ago.) I love this series and will recommend it to lots of people. We definitely need more books about adventuring revolutionary poet-librarian-magicians!

I also read Rosemary Sutcliff's Frontier Wolf which didn't please me as well. I have never been able to roll with Sutcliff. I get what she is doing but still find something deadly boring and annoying about her books, which are so clearly meant to be inspiring and awesome and which have lots of preciously beautiful description scenes. Every few years I try one again thinking that I might have missed something or might change my mind.

Frontier Wolf did it again. I could not like it! Angsty young Roman screws up, is sent to the border to lead a fort. By any rights I should automatically like this! Then lots of jolly bonding and proving himself to the rough semi barbarian border guards of the fort, and with the local Celtic tribes complete with slashy wrestling and wolf-killing and competing with the young new chieftain of the tribe. Why don't I like it?! I can't pin it down but it has something to do with a sort of flat sameness of tone, and the way it is supposed to be eliding or cleverly implying but which make me wince.

I also just don't CARE about this angsty dude and don't like the setup that one's coming of age happens by being upper class and successfully bossing some lower class people and also fighting and killing one's dear friends because of, omg duty. It feels like such a moldering trope to cultivate young people for the trenches, which Sutcliff fetishizes like crazy. (This from me, who can shed a tear even while reading sentimenally warmongering nationalistic tripe like "The Lost Prince"...)

But I know tons of people I respect people love these books, so go figure.

I kept thinking of Keladry at the border fort in Protector of the Small and how much better that series is!

Onward, to The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, which I've heard of for a long time but have never read!