July 2013

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: July 2013

1. The False Prince by Nielsen, Jennifer A.
2. City at the End of Time by Bear, Greg
3. Inside Job by Willis, Connie
4. Lexicon by Barry, Max
5. Appointment with Death by Christie, Agatha*
6. The Brides of Rollrock Island by Lanagan, Margo
7. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong
8. Gunpowder Empire by Turtledove, Harry
9. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Sayers, Dorothy L.
10. Five Red Herrings by Sayers, Dorothy L.
11. 2312 by Robinson, Kim Stanley
12. Northanger Abbey by Austen, Jane*

Italics indicate library books; asterisks indicate audiobooks. I didn’t finish numbers 2, 6, or 8.

Mysteries. I read the first mystery by Qiu Xiaolong, and while it was enjoyable, I did not adopt it as my series-to-read-straight-through. That honor goes to Dorothy L. Sayers, although I haven’t been reading the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in publication order: I haven’t been able to find some titles and will have to wait on requesting them via interlibrary loan.

Hard SF. Although I didn’t care for (or understand) Greg Bear’s novel, I quite liked this year’s Nebula Award-winner by Kim Stanley Robinson. After an attack destroying the only city on Mercury, the eccentric, artistic Swan Er Hong travels the solar system to try to understand what happened and to carry on her grandmother’s political career.

Audiobooks. It would be hard to choose between such a classic Agatha Christie novel and Jane Austen’s first-written-posthumously-published Northanger Abbey, a Gothic-novel parody. Both narrators were excellent, and the stories had me laughing. I think I will attempt the 16-disc Fellowship of the Ring next.

WWW Wednesday Jul 3

What are you currently reading? The City at the End of Time by Greg Bear. I’m about a third of the way into this hard SF novel, and I’m still not entirely sure what it’s about. Three people living in something like today’s present have access to sum-runners, which are stones that allow them to dream the extremely distant future, where Chaos is about to overtake the city of Kalpa. And a couple of beings in Kalpa, who are connected to some of the present-day humans, are about to go exploring the chaos. I think.

What did you recently finish reading? The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen. Sage is an orphan who is in training to pretend to be the long-lost Prince Jaron, except he actually is the long-lost Prince Jaron and doesn’t end up having to pretend at all. Yes, I know, I gave it away. This book would have been awesome if I were eleven.

What do you think you will read next? Lexicon by Max Barry or Inside Job by Connie Willis, both on reserve for me at the library. Unfortunately, due to tomorrow happening to be the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted 237 years ago, the library is closed. Grumble. I will have to forestall the decision at least until Friday.

June 2013

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

1. Death Comes to Pemberley by James, P. D.
2. Dodger by Pratchett, Terry*
3. East by Pattou, Elizabeth
4. Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury, Ray*
5. London Falling by Cornell, Paul
6. The Golem and the Jinni by Wecker, Helene
7. Good Omens by Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett*
8. Sailing to Sarantium by Kay, Guy Gavriel
9. Lord of Emperors by Kay, Guy Gavriel
10. D.A. by Willis, Connie
11. Cybele’s Secret by Marillier, Juliet

Italics indicate library books, asterisks indicate audiobooks, and I didn’t finish reading (or listening to) numbers 2, 3, and 4. For the reasons of not great as an audiobook, 250 pages longer than it needed to be, and read by a terrible narrator, respectively.

This month I loved the Sarantine Mosaic duology by Guy Gavriel Kay and also highly enjoyed The Golem and the Jinni and Cybele’s Secret. Considering that I moved, ended a job, took a vacation, and started a new and better job, eleven-including-three-audiobooks is a respectable turnout for what was a very eventful month.

Plus I wrote a bit of Chapter Two to a Chapter One I hadn’t touched since March, so that’s good too.

January 2013

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: January 2013

1. The Rook – O’Malley, Daniel
2. Quiet – Cain, Susan
3. Drawing Conclusions – Leon, Donna
4. Run – Patchett, Ann*
5. Beastly Things – Leon, Donna
6. Hawkwood – McGee, James
7. Ysabel – Kay, Guy Gavriel
8. The Girl with Glass Feet – Smith, Ali
9. Death of an Englishman – Nabb, Magdalen
10. Invisible Cities – Calvino, Italo
11. Use of Weapons – Banks, Iain M.
12. Ship Breaker – Bacigalupi, Paolo
13. The Unconsoled – Ishiguro, Kazuo
14. The Graveyard Book – Gaiman, Neil*
15. The Name of the Rose – Eco, Umberto
16. Remake – Willis, Connie
17. Speaking from Among the Bones – Bradley, Alan

Asterisks indicate audiobooks. Italics indicate library books. See previous post for this month’s unfinished books.

The best read of the month–and for the foreseeable part of the year–was Speaking from Among the Bones. Upon reflection, I would call it the best Flavia de Luce novel since the first one, and it has a tremendous cliffhanger. Flavia solves the mystery, of course, and with great aplomb, but the story of her family history is yet unfinished. I can hardly wait for the next book!

WWW Wed Jan 30

What are you currently reading? Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley. After work on Tuesday, when the fifth book in the mystery series starring eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce was released, I raced to the bookstore to pick up my reserved copy and tore it open the second I got home. And I haven’t been disappointed. Only sad that there aren’t ten more.

What did you recently finish reading? Remake by Connie Willis. I found this 1995 short novel at my favorite used bookstore and picked it up, of course, to complete my Connie Willis collection (I’m only missing a handful now). This lighthearted story is about Alis, a girl who wants to dance in the movies–decades after live-action film has given way to computer graphics. I recently recommended Blackout/All Clear to an acquaintance who likes time travel, because you can never go wrong with Willis.

What do you think you’ll read next? A library book, but I’m not sure which one. I have a choice of three good ones, each by an author new to me: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente (fantasy), Pure by Julianna Baggott (dystopian), or The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen (science fiction).

March 2012: 1 of 3

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: March 2012

1. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. When I’m ill with a cold (which invariably strikes every March and October, lasting the full ten days), I want to read something I know I already like. That’s why I reached for a Sam Vimes book. The Commander of the City Watch is part hard-boiled detective, part beat cop, part unwilling nobility. In this book, he goes back in time to save the city and train his inexperienced younger self.

2. Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Still ill, I moved to the next chronological Vimes novel. This time, in order to dispel the tension between dwarf and troll threatening to overtake Ankh-Morpork, Vimes dives into both psychology and history to solve the murder of a prominent dwarf. I am dying to read the latest Vimes book, Snuff, in which Vimes on vacation nevertheless encounters crime, but it’s still available only in hardback.

3. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. An offhand comment of Chera’s, I think, put me in the mood to reread one of the five funniest novels I’ve ever read (it keeps company with Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman). Willis’s story of time-traveling historians was even better the third or fourth time because she has since put out her masterwork Blackout/All Clear, which resolves some questions about slippage raised in this novel.

4. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (20%). The three dollars I spent on this introduction to Marr’s work was sadly fruitless as I could not finish the book. The premise of fairies in our modern world intrigued me, but the story turned out to be less a fairy tale and more a paranormal romance.

5. Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip. Therefore I migrated to a fantasy author I knew I liked. This story of Roes and her sister had real fairies in it, the dispassionate kind who live in the wood. Several tropes and motifs put me in mind of the Ballad of Tam Lin, which pleased me; I would class this in a category nearby one of my favorite YA novels, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope.

December 2011

And to wrap up 2011, here’ s the Stuff I’ve Been Reading post for this month.

1. Edgewood by Moi. Lest you think it mere padding to put my own novel on the list, I assure you that I sat down and read it front to end like a proper book. Which, of course, it is.
2. The Magician King by Lev Grossman.
3. The Hammer by K. J. Parker.
4. Solstice Wood by Patricia A. McKillip (25%).
5. The Darkness that Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker (20%).
6. The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House by Dorothy Allison, et. al.
7. The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin. The godling Sieh is the narrator of this exciting conclusion to Jemisin’s first–but I hope not her last–trilogy.
8. Miracle and Other Christmas Stories by Connie Willis. As it was a book I received for Christmas last year, I thought this read would be apt in December: gently Christmas-themed stories, all.
9. Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. Christmas in the Discworld is called Hogswatch–but what will happen to belief if the Hogfather is…inhumed…by the Assassins Guild? As it turns out, the sun may not rise. This book was also my first Christmas present (thanks, Sherri!).
10. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. Once you get past the turtle aliens, you realize this book is all about good stewardship of Earth’s natural resources.
11. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. It was beautiful historical fiction, about a Dutch clerk in Japan during the 1800s; but Cloud Atlas remains my favorite David Mitchell novel.
12. Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton. The back-cover blurb by Jane Yolen advertises this novel as Pride and Prejudice with dragons, and it’s really spot-on: a positive delight to read.
13. Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper. A reread, this first book in the Dark Is Rising Sequence is something I picked up on a lark as I was arranging my new acquisitions on the shelf.
14. The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper.

Best Christmas Book: Hogfather

Best Sequel: The Kingdom of Gods

Best Fantasy: Tooth and Claw and The Magician King

Goodbye, 2011, and hello, 2012. I hope and trust that the new year will be filled with many excellent books.