Winterfair Gifts, by Lois McMaster Bujold

[elfs]

So, having not read anything really compelling recently, I finally picked up Lois McMaster Bujold's Winterfair Gifts (huzzah for fictionwise!), which had been lying around in a dusty folder on my laptop since I had bought it for myself last Christmas.

I'm not going to give anything away, other than to say that it is not a science fiction story. Nothing SFnal happens. No exploding starships or menacing robots, no nanotechnological threats or reverse polarities. It is, like most of Ms. Bujold's stories, about people, and the way they interact with one another. It is a lovely story, told from the point of view of Roic, the armsman who was so cruelly humiliated in A Civil Campaign, and features Taura, the genetically engineered super-solider, uncovering a plot to make Miles' marriage hell.

Ms. Bujold is rapidly becoming a penbreaker for me: a writer who makes the tragic, the comic, and the tender so effortlessly easy that I can only reach the end of her books a little teary-eyed and muttering, "When I grow up, I wanna write like Lois."

(Yeah, and Helprin, and Clute, and Weber, and Lem, and Yoshino, and Ohnogi, and all the other stylists and writers over the years who I have admired.)

Comments

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. Must go find a copy!

[lapsedagnostic.livejournal.com]

Heya, just thought I'd drop a quick note. I remember reading your postings way back when on a.s.b., way back in the day, as they say. I'm on the poly list, and someone posted about an interview with Omaha Sternberg, and I had an insane need to find out, well, what happened. Apparently, you got married, had a kid, and are living happily ever after.

Rock on.

It's nice to see this wacky lifestyle work for people, and have the stability needed for a family. (Me? Kinky, kinda sorta poly, married for ten years, and have many daughters. Life does not suck.)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It does work, but along the way we made so many mistakes that it might take an iron consitution and sheer old-fashioned cussedness to make it work. Feel free to read on! (Sorry about the repeat; I just got my coffee.)

[lapsedagnostic.livejournal.com]

Yah, well, such is the cost of blazing your own trail, right? I can't imagine how much easier it'd be with actual successful role models. People who had mistakes we could learn from, instead of making our own all the time.

Meanwhile, we're interviewing a potential therapist tomorrow night. Not for any entertaining and cutting edge lifestyle issue, but because even after all these years we have diametrically opposed sets of needs and issues around rituals (like birthdays, anniversaries, ...).

(and lets not talk about Neeeeeds, shall we? Har.)

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Read any John Crowley? He's the one who regularly makes my jaw drop in awe. Some of his writing is fantasy, some is SF, and some is neither. His most recent book, which I'm still reading, is The Evening Lands: Lord Byron's Novel, and it is that, among other things.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Crowley, unfortunately, seems to leave me cold. I've tried, I've tried so hard to read Little, Big, and every time I get about thirty pages into it and hit the six deadly words: I don't care what happens next.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a shame. You might try one of his shorter works (such as Great Work of Time), but he might just not work for you.