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nineveh_ukWhere can I buy a copy of Winterfair Gifts without buying Miles in Love?
Where would you recommend I start my parents on Bujold? I am convinced they'd like them, but my mother seems never to have read any SF, and my father seems virulently allergic to it. They are otherwise open-minded readers who like Patrick O'Brien and Sayers, and I'm convinced they'd like Bujold if only they could open it in the first place. Would Komarr be impractical for my mother, who enjoys Heyer?
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Seen in a remaindered bookshop at lunchtime, a book on Finnish cooking. I let it stay remaindered - any book that thinks beestings is commonly obtainable anywhere there's dairy farming (hands up if you are not a dairy farmer and have ever heard of it) is not a book that I want to rely on serving me edible food.
Where would you recommend I start my parents on Bujold? I am convinced they'd like them, but my mother seems never to have read any SF, and my father seems virulently allergic to it. They are otherwise open-minded readers who like Patrick O'Brien and Sayers, and I'm convinced they'd like Bujold if only they could open it in the first place. Would Komarr be impractical for my mother, who enjoys Heyer?
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Seen in a remaindered bookshop at lunchtime, a book on Finnish cooking. I let it stay remaindered - any book that thinks beestings is commonly obtainable anywhere there's dairy farming (hands up if you are not a dairy farmer and have ever heard of it) is not a book that I want to rely on serving me edible food.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 01:35 pm (UTC)Wouldn't starting your parents with Shards of Honour and Barrayar (aka Cordelia's Honour) be the way to go? Adults dealing with an adult problem, rather than manic adolescent Miles starting his career of running into walls? In many ways the initial books are only incidentally SF, depsite Bujold using SF possibilities to dream up even more moral dilemmas.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 05:48 pm (UTC)Alas, I don't think that "only incidentally SF" is going to be a winning argument when there are space-ships involved ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 06:10 pm (UTC)I wouldn't personally start anyone on Komarr or later if I could avoid it just because Memory is such a powerful book that I think it's best to read it unspoiled. (That's biased by it being my favourite of the series though)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 07:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 10:14 pm (UTC)Thanks for that info about Winterfair Gifts. As someone whose most exotic form of on-computer reading is PDFs (which I convert to rtf/doc files if I can, because they're invariably quite difficult, ie far more difficult, to read) all those formats sound dismaying. Must look into it, though - obviously no other solutions!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 01:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2010-08-06 03:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 10:56 pm (UTC)Would you like me to send you a copy of it to play with, and how it works out? (You can always then choose to pay them the two pounds if you feel it's worth it...)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-10 05:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 02:28 pm (UTC)*checks*
Ah, yes. "Irresistible Forces"
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 03:28 pm (UTC)I admire your turn of phrase. I bought Irresistible Forces thinking 'Ah, a Bujold story and a chance to see whether some other authors I've heard of are my kind of thing!' but the only other story I really enjoyed was the Jennifer Roberson one, and I already knew that I liked some of the things Jennifer Roberson writes and was less keen on others, so it was all a bit of a wash-out from that point of view.
It just seemed like a genuinely odd choice of stories to bundle together - are there really that many people who like stories with an angel for a hero and cutesy descriptions of heaven and futuristics full of people ham-fistedly discussing Monty Python and stories set in the 1500s, as well as LMB?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 04:06 pm (UTC)I confess I swiped it from somewhere (although I can;t remember where).
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 05:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 05:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 02:34 pm (UTC)I know some parents are a) slow readers b) insist on finishing everything and c) feel entitled to condign vengeance if they spent hours reading something they hated because of a recommendation, but if yours are not, then the worst that can happen is they'll get a few pages into a Bujold book and say, "This really isn't engaging me."
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-05 06:02 pm (UTC)My parents are happily (d), but I would like Dad to get further than the half-a-page he managed of "The Left Hand of Darkness". Actually, I made a mistake with TLHoD; I told him it was SF and looking at the first page would turn me off, too. I ought to have told him it was a seminal work of women's SF dealing with issues of gender, sex, community and self. He might have kept going.
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Date: 2010-08-05 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2010-08-06 03:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 08:14 am (UTC)I didn't know what beestings was until a Finnish cookery teacher I was teaching English to asked me about it and I rang my dad who said his great aunt used to refer to beestings but he'd never heard anyone else use it in living memory. I think it got into a Finnish-English dictionary at some point and has fossilised. If I was translating the recipe, I'd have said colostrum, with a footnote pointing out that it is illegal to sell colostrum in the UK and you will have to actually be a dairy farmer to make the recipe.
As to Bujold, I would recommend Komarr as that's where I got into it again after being put off by bouncy Miles. After Civil Campaign I then went back as far as Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance (in one volume) and feel I could even cope with early Miles again now. I ended up discussing them with my mother this week as a result of lunchtime conversations about cloning (dairy cow milk crisis) but don't know where to start her either as she's not particularly into romances. However, she does read Ian M Banks and many years ago lent me The Left Hand of Darkness.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-06 03:22 pm (UTC)I incline towards Komarr for Mum at least - I liked Cordelia's Honor, but she doesn't read Heyer for the romance, and there are lots of spaceships and violence. Komarr feels more of an ordinary novel that happens to be set on another planet. I still haven't read Borders, Brothers, or Mirror Dance - I started with the Cordelia ones, then went to Komarr, then back to the beginning with Miles so am still catching up.
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