Book 30 - "Snakes and Ladders" by Gita Mehta

[tala-tale.livejournal.com]

I read this review of Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders by fiction_theory and decided to read the book -- I'm sooo glad I did.

I most heartily concur with the review fiction_theory wrote, so I'll let interested folks read that instead of repeating it all here, but in terms of my personal experience with the book... well, most fundamentally, I didn't realize how colossally ignorant I was about India's history until I started reading. Not only are Mehta's essays delightfully engaging, blending the humorous, the serious, the political, the historical, the personal, and the lyrical into a deeply seductive mix, but they left me hungering to know more, which is, to me, one of the hallmarks of good non-fiction.

I'm going to be keeping an eye out for good books on the history of India (both about the periods up to the publication of Mehta's book in 1997 and about what's happened since then) -- if anyone has any recommendations, I'd love to hear them!

(Tags: a: mehta gita, nonfiction, short essays, history, indian)

The Iron Hunt / Darkness Calls / A Wild Light (Marjorie M. Liu) [#7 / 8 / 9]

[chomiji]

It's highly unlikely that Maxine Kiss would ever fall for a sparkly vampire.

Maxine is the latest scion of a millennia-old family of demon hunters who are always female. She is also a living embodiment of the trope "Good Is Not Nice." Aided by a quintet of specialized demons who have assisted the Hunters throughout their history, Maxine ruthlessly annihilates evil wherever she finds it, and then she and her Boys go looking for more. Their usual prey are zombies, which in this scenario are humans possessed by relatively weak demons, but greater demons are in just as much danger whenever Maxine detects them.

This is not to say that Maxine is cold-hearted. In fact, she is fiercely loving. But her vulnerabilities are those of many badass male characters: her friends, her loved ones, her sense of honor. It makes me ferociously happy that her femininity is not used as a weakness.

During the course of these three volumes, Maxine discovers that she might, in fact, be not only the latest of the Hunters, but the last. She uncovers secrets about her family and her ancestry, learns about some of the other major players in the fate of the world (and finds that some of them are much closer to her than she would ever have guessed), and kicks a lot of ass. This is an Earth in which demonic chaos is constantly lurking behind the scenes, but most people are going about their ordinary lives with no knowledge of it. There are lots of pop culture references and in-jokes, and sometimes I think that Liu is working some of her shticks a little too hard, but generally the storyline races along with vivid language and terrific momentum.

I've seen these billed as paranormal romance, but although there is a small amount of romance during the course of the series, these are probably better classified as urban fantasy. There's considerable violence, too.