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While I am certainly enjoying all my early American history nonfiction reading, I am finding that the highlight of my reading month is increasingly whichever installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga I have on deck. I decided to schedule these out so I didn’t burn out on the series but I’m increasingly finding that as soon as I finish one I really want to run right back to the library and pick up the next.
This month’s book was Komarr, in which our hero Lord Miles Vorkosigan, now an Imperial Auditor, accompanies another Imperial Auditor (formerly an engineering professor) to the titular planet to investigate a mysterious accident that had destroyed part of the planet’s terraforming infrastructure. Much of the book is from the POV of the other auditor’s niece, a Vor lady of about thirty, whose husband is the administrator of the department that includes the terraforming project. Ekaterin is a great character and I immediately found myself hoping that she got out of her shitty marriage with her shitty husband, which was in fact taken care of in a plot-appropriately terrible way that made it all nice and complicated but also very satisfying. Excellent look into the dynamics of an emotionally abusive marriage and what it can do specifically to very intelligent people that are, in fact, more intelligent than their partners, which the shitty partners are insecure about. (Obviously, this book might be upsetting reading for anyone who’s been in a controlling relationship with someone who used the same sorts of tactics, but a lot of the interesting psychological stuff that goes on in the Vorkosigan Saga comes with the same caveat, and I like that the book deals with stuff that regular people go through as well as dealing with insane space empire political and technological intrigues.)
This is one of the few books I’ve read in quite a while where the romance brewing at the end actually does have me all wound up and invested in it. I am chewing the drywall to see where this goes. So far the secondhand embarrassment is exquisite and the various mental tangles that Miles and Ekaterin are getting up to in rationalizing their feelings to themselves are excellently illustrative of both of their characters and situations. It also illustrates the difference between “being vulnerable and letting somebody take care of you” versus “being sloppy and making somebody else clean up your mess” in a way that has no business being woven into a story about mysteriously exploding terraforming equipment on Space Holland (trade oligarchy built on artificially reclaimed land. You tell me Komarr isn’t Space Holland).
Anyway this series really has it all and does it all; it is going off in directions I would not have foreseen from the first couple books but which nonetheless all make perfect sense for the series that it is. When is my June 1 hold coming in?
This month’s book was Komarr, in which our hero Lord Miles Vorkosigan, now an Imperial Auditor, accompanies another Imperial Auditor (formerly an engineering professor) to the titular planet to investigate a mysterious accident that had destroyed part of the planet’s terraforming infrastructure. Much of the book is from the POV of the other auditor’s niece, a Vor lady of about thirty, whose husband is the administrator of the department that includes the terraforming project. Ekaterin is a great character and I immediately found myself hoping that she got out of her shitty marriage with her shitty husband, which was in fact taken care of in a plot-appropriately terrible way that made it all nice and complicated but also very satisfying. Excellent look into the dynamics of an emotionally abusive marriage and what it can do specifically to very intelligent people that are, in fact, more intelligent than their partners, which the shitty partners are insecure about. (Obviously, this book might be upsetting reading for anyone who’s been in a controlling relationship with someone who used the same sorts of tactics, but a lot of the interesting psychological stuff that goes on in the Vorkosigan Saga comes with the same caveat, and I like that the book deals with stuff that regular people go through as well as dealing with insane space empire political and technological intrigues.)
This is one of the few books I’ve read in quite a while where the romance brewing at the end actually does have me all wound up and invested in it. I am chewing the drywall to see where this goes. So far the secondhand embarrassment is exquisite and the various mental tangles that Miles and Ekaterin are getting up to in rationalizing their feelings to themselves are excellently illustrative of both of their characters and situations. It also illustrates the difference between “being vulnerable and letting somebody take care of you” versus “being sloppy and making somebody else clean up your mess” in a way that has no business being woven into a story about mysteriously exploding terraforming equipment on Space Holland (trade oligarchy built on artificially reclaimed land. You tell me Komarr isn’t Space Holland).
Anyway this series really has it all and does it all; it is going off in directions I would not have foreseen from the first couple books but which nonetheless all make perfect sense for the series that it is. When is my June 1 hold coming in?