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Posts Tagged ‘other people’s books’

Books read, August 2013

Lost quite a bit of this month to travel and being ill. Feh to the latter. (I did, however, get massive amounts of photo-editing done. This is not reading, but it is satisfying.)

Sorcery and Cecelia, Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Re-read, because I felt like it. Still an enjoyable little romantic alt-Regency fantasy romp.

Child of a Hidden Sea, Alyx Dellamonica. Not yet published; read for blurbing purposes. I’m still trying to put my thoughts into words, but it’s a nifty adult portal fantasy about Stormwrack, a world made up of hundreds of islands, with dozens of different cultures among them. The ways in which the Fleet maintains peace in Stormwrack are interesting.

Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton. Had started this ages ago, then got interrupted. This is about as different of a book as one can get from A Natural History of Dragons while still having both books be describable with the words “Victorian” and “dragons.” If you’re the sort of person who would be entertained by seeing nineteenth-century literary tropes recast with a lot more teeth and claws and fire-breathing, this book is for you. I was entertained.

The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com. Didn’t actually read all of this, but given its RIDICULOUS SIZE, I feel quite comfortable with deeming it an entire book’s worth of reading regardless. Tor.com released a free ebook containing the first five years of fiction published on their site. As you might expect from anything that large (with that many editors choosing what to buy), the quality is highly variable — hence me skipping stories. Some just weren’t my cup of tea, but some were actively bad, and not every author has a good handle on how to write a tie-in story to promote their novel. (Some of them, however, have a very good handle on it. So it isn’t like you should just skip all the tie-ins.)

Brief aside for a rant: my GOD is this ebook badly formatted. The text itself is generally fine, but the table of contents?

  • 4. The Department of Alterations, by Gennifer Albin
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Notice
  • Contents
  • Begin Reading
  • mac29_ep04
  • mac30_ep05
  • mac31_ep06
  • mac32_ep07
  • mac33_bm01
  • 5. The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model, by Charlie Jane Anders

It’s all like that. Separate ToC entries for every element in the book, many of them with useless names, like those five lines of gibberish. And for at least three-quarters of the story, the ToC entry for the actual text is “Begin Reading,” which means that the running footer doesn’t actually tell you which story you’re reading. I hope that if Tor.com does this again, they take a moment to clean up the text, because the formatting here looks really unprofessional.

The Spice Islands Voyage, Tim Severin. I’ve been reading this in bits and pieces for, ye gods, I don’t know how long. It’s written by a guy who sailed around Indonesia in a locally-built prahu to recreate the voyage Alfred Wallace was on when he figured out evolution. (There’s an aside about how we don’t know, but have reason to strongly suspect, that Wallace’s letter to Darwin did not in fact arrive right after the latter figured out evolution for himself, but right before, and played a large role in Darwin’s work.) The text goes back and forth between telling the story of Wallace’s voyage, and recounting how the modern crew are checking up on the state of the environment and wildlife in the places he went. In many cases, the latter is kind of depressing — but not always. I sort of wish the book had been more firmly one of those things, rather than being both, but it was still a useful read.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/596557.html. Comment here or there.

Signal-boosting for various things

SF Signal is giving away two copies of Clockwork Phoenix 4 (which, you may recall, includes my Anglish story “What Still Abides”). Trade paperbacks, and all you have to do is send in an e-mail to enter.

Daily Science Fiction is running a fundraising drive via Kickstarter, to cover a year and a half of publication costs. They’re two-thirds of the way there, with eleven days to go; take a look, both at the project and the site itself, and if you like what you see, give ’em a bit of love.

Laura Anne Gilman has a new book out, Heart of Briar, which is loosely based on “Tam Lin.” And you know how I loves me some “Tam Lin” retellings . . . .

And finally, just for grins, “The Devil Came Up to Boston.”

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/594610.html. Comment here or there.

Books read, July 2013

I forgot to record books this month until nearly the end of the month, which has left me with the nagging feeling that I missed one (or maybe more than one). But I can’t remember what it would have been, so if there is indeed something missing, then clearly it wasn’t very memorable to begin with.

(Except that possibly the thing I was forgetting was The Tropic of Serpents, which I just remembered to add. Um. Please disregard above statement about my own book not being very memorable. Please.)

The Tropic of Serpents, Marie Brennan. My own books don’t count, of course, but they get listed anyway. This was copy-editing, aka What I Did With My Early July.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code, Margalit Fox. Very readable nonfiction about the decipherment of Linear B in the early-mid twentieth century. Its specific argument has to do with the significance of Alice Kober to that process, and more to the point, how Alice Kober’s contribution has not been sufficiently recognized (in large part because apparently her papers weren’t available until quite recently). It gets a bit depressing toward the end, because a) you know from the beginning of the book that Kober died before she could finish the job, so you’re sitting there watching the clock tick down and b) it’s the 1940s, so you get to watch her being jerked around by Penn professors pretending that no, no, the fact that she’s a woman has nothing to do with them questioning whether they want to hire her for a cool job, and for bonus frustration the guy who’s trying to finally publish all of Evans’ Linear B inscriptions is basically using Kober as his transatlantic secretary and wasting vast quantities of her time — time that could have been spent cracking the code. But anyway. If you like reading about extremely nerdy people (and oh, the nerds in this book), and the mechanics of deciphering a script when you don’t recognize either it or the language it’s being used to write, this is a fun read.

The Book of Fire. The most recent L5R release, and the first one for which I was an official freelancer (though my part in here is very minor). Not the sort of thing anybody will pick up who isn’t looking to play L5R, but I will say that the sections on sword-smithing and glass-blowing and poetry were quite nifty. (No, those aren’t the parts I wrote.)

The Magic Circle, Jenny Davidson. A novel I picked up at Writers with Drinks, because Davidson was one of the other people reading, and she billed this as a book about LARPs and the Bacchae and how could I say no to that? Alas, the book itself isn’t what I’d been hoping. The early part is more about ARGs than LARPs, and even the latter isn’t the kind of LARPing I’m used to. Furthermore, the characters and the story never really cohered for me.

Daily Life in Ottoman Turkey, Raphaela Lewis. One of the installments in that Dorset Books series — you know the ones I mean, with the solid-color covers and the little box with an image on the front. (Er, some of you know the ones I mean.) This was published in 1971, so take it with appropriate grains of salt, but on the whole it did what I needed it to, which was to give me a starting image of the society. And that’s pretty much what books like this exist for.

Secrets of the Empire. I bookended my month with proofreading. This book (another one for L5R) hasn’t been released yet, but as a freelancer I can and have signed up to proofread things before they go to press. It looks like it will be very shiny, but my NDA says I can’t say anything more about it. 😛

Books read, March 2013

I almost posted this yesterday, because really, as such posts go, this one is a joke. I did many things in March, but reading books? Not really one of them.

Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett. Returning to my leisurely saunter through [personal profile] swan_tower Finally Reads Discworld. I have now been properly introduced to Sam Vimes, previously encountered as a minor character in Monstrous Regiment (before I started reading things in order). I like him, though not as passionately as some people seem to — possibly I will grow more attached in time? I liked Sybil quite a lot, and the reflections on how her brand of confidence is both personal and class-based. I was mostly meh about the bad guy’s scheme, but on the whole, much fun.

the memoir that is still untitled Re-reading the second book of the series preparatory to revising it (which is what I’m in the middle of doing now). It still needs a title. I will have to fix this soon.

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, David Gaider. Read for research, as [profile] kniedzw and I have begun running a Dragon Age game. Not really worth your time, unless you are a rabid completist for that franchise. It offered little in the way of worldbuilding information I didn’t already know, and, well. This is David Gaider’s first novel, and boy howdy does it show. Hopefully he improves with the later ones, since I need to read those, too.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/581287.html. Comment here or there.

Books read, April 2013

Happy May Day!

I really, really want to list as one of the books I read this month, “the first third of Quicksilver.” Because really. I read and read and read, and and it was an entire book’s worth of reading. It just wasn’t the entirety of that book. Not by a long chalk. Stephenson, you are engaging, but also a very wordy bastard.

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The DWJ Project: Reflections

A belated entry to this series, on account of it not being out yet when I finished my re-read of all of Diana Wynne Jones’ books.

Reflections: On the Magic of Writing is a collection of various essays and lectures she gave, on various subjects related to writing (her own and that of others). A couple of these I had read before; “The Origins of Changeover” was the foreword to the edition I read, and I tracked down scans of “The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey” after seeing it referenced by [personal profile] rushthatspeaks. (Very glad to now have a proper reprint, as the essay does wonders for my ability to understand certain parts of Fire and Hemlock.) Most of this, though, was new.

It makes for interesting reading, though certainly a few details get repetitive — these pieces span decades, and there are certain things, particularly biographical incidents, that she brought up more than once. The two things that fascinated me most were her knowledge of pre-modern English literature (much of which I haven’t personally read), and her comments on her own books. The former made me feel in places like I was reading [personal profile] pameladean‘s Tam Lin, because it threatened to leave me with a reading list of rather obscure works. The latter . . . I don’t know. Sometimes it strips the magic away to know how the magic got made, but I think that here it just turns into a different sort of magic for me, because I can think about her books as a writer as well as a fan. When she talks about similarities between her characters, I nod at some and blink at others, and wonder if she didn’t see the similarities elsewhere, or simply didn’t bring them up. (Upon reflection, I see what she means about the commonality of Torquil and Tacroy, and also, after much more reflection, Thomas Lynn and the Goon. But what about Tacroy and Thomas, and also Howl? Or for that matter, Mark and Herrel, who are a straight-up deployment of her habit of “splitting” a character type and using different facets?)

I wish we had more of that stuff. I would love to know what sparked the ideas for all of her books, because Diana Wynne Jones wrote books that are nothing like mine, and knowing where they came from helps me understand the result. I also, quite selfishly, want to read all the unrevised first drafts and unfinished beginnings she had stuffed into drawers, because I crave more, and I’m (probably) never going to get it. I know it wouldn’t be the same, and it very well might not be good, but I crave it anyway. This book made me sad all over again that Diana Wynne Jones is dead, and that I never had the chance to meet her. I would have liked to thank her in person, and having read this book, I feel certain she would have understood.

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Weather forecast: rain. LOTS of it.

Back in 2010, I decided that (as with the Wheel of Time before it), I was done reading A Song of Ice and Fire until the series was finished. I hadn’t read any of the books since A Feast for Crows came out in 2005, and knew I would need to re-read to refresh my memory whenever A Dance with Dragons finally emerged — and then would have to re-read again some years after that, when we got book six, etc. Better to just stop and wait, however long that took. I sold my copies of the first four (to free up shelf space) and washed my hands of it.

About a month later, Martin announced the Really No We Mean It publication date for Dance, but that was okay: I was at peace with my decision. It came out in 2011, and I didn’t read it, and I went on not reading it.

But in discussing the show with friends, I’ve grown tired of dodging spoilers (sometimes unsuccessfully). So I kind of wanted to read the book, just to fix that problem. On the other hand, it had now been more than seven years since I read the books, and I knew that without a refresher, I wouldn’t find Dance as satisfying as I otherwise might. And yet, I didn’t want to take the time to re-read that much stuff. On the other other hand, [personal profile] teleidoplex told me I wouldn’t find it satisfying whether I re-read or not.

Reader, she was right.

I am putting this behind a cut because a) it’s long and b) if your personal parade is a happy one, I don’t want to rain all over it. Because I was not impressed with this book. No, that falls short: there are things in here that decrease my enjoyment of previous books. If reading about that is going to make you sad, then click away now.

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Batman had it easy

Only just now remembering to link to it, but this months’ SF Novelists post is “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” in which I challenge the notion that so-called “gritty” fantasy is a) realistic and b) superior on account of its realism.

(Both that post and the rest of this one discuss sexual violence — quelle surprise, given the obsession gritty fantasy has with that topic — so if you don’t want to read about them, click away now.)

This is part of a much larger discussion floating around the internet right now, which I keep encountering in unexpected corners. The most recent of those is “The Rape of James Bond,” which makes a lot of good points; toward the end, McDougall talks about her own decision-making process where fictional sexual violence is concerned, and whether you agree with her decisions or not, her questions are good ones.

But the part I found the most striking was where she talked about reactions to Skyfall and the first encounter between Silva and Bond.

Cut in case you haven't seen the movie and want to avoid a spoiler.

last chance for the Ides of March Book Giveaway

Just a reminder that this is your last chance to enter the Ides of March Book Giveaway, with seventeen books from seventeen fantastic authors, including people like Kate Elliott and Mary Robinette Kowal (I know I have fans of both among my readership). And, y’know, a copy of A Natural History of Dragons, too. Go forth and enter! You have until midnight EST, which is seven hours from this posting.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/579562.html. Comment here or there.

Books read, February 2013

The Devil in the Dust, Chaz Brenchley ([personal profile] desperance). On one of the flights for my book tour, the woman in the seat next to me apologized for not alerting me that the drink cart had come by. “You looked so wrapped up in your book,” she said. And I was. Sometimes in a disturbed fashion, since Brenchley really gets the pathological, Stockholm Syndrome extremes of medieval Christianity, but sometimes in a good way. I was fascinated by the not!Christianity of the setting and the utter weirdness (only partially explained thus far) of Surayon, and I want to know more about the djinn. Clearly the solution is to obtain the next book.

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Advance uncorrected manuscript, read for blurbing purposes. Intrictate political fantasy about the half-goblin son of an elven emperor, who inherits the throne when everybody ahead of him gets killed. Maia does not have an easy time of it, but watching him learn the hard way how to run a country was satisfying.

Spirit’s Princess, Esther Friesner. Part of Friesner’s “Princesses of Myth” series; this one follows Himiko, a figure in prehistoric Japan. I sort of wanted this either to be shorter, or to be combined with the sequel to make one fat book, because so much of its length is spent on “Himiko can’t have the life she wants.” Obstacles are good, but you don’t actually get the results of Himiko overcoming/bypassing them in this volume.

Kat, Incorrigible, Stephanie Burgis. AKA A Most Improper Magick. A fun fantasy-Regency YA. I think my favorite thing in this was the sisters: the first couple of pages primed me to see them as Evil (Not-Step-)Sisters, but they’re nothing of the sort. Kat’s relationship with them is complicated, with them getting along on some matters and not at all on others — which is entirely realistic. And I’m a sucker for good sibling relationships. The second book of this series is about to come out in paperback (in the US, I think? Already published in the UK?), with the third in hardcover next month, so I’ll probably zoom through the rest of these soon.

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Deborah Blum. Read for a book club. Basically about the invention of toxicology as an investigative art during the early twentieth century, in the face of opposition from New York’s massively corrupt city government. Full of grotty details about “wet chemistry,” so if you’re squeamish, consider yourself warned. But also very interesting, and horrifying — as much or more for all the ways you could accidentally get poisoned by everything around you back then as for the actual deliberate murders.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/578646.html. Comment here or there.

Ides of March Book Giveaway

It’s better than a dagger in the back . . . .

I’ll have the usual book tour update for you all tomorrow, but I wanted to put this one out on its own: the Ides of March Book Giveaway, in which I join forces with sixteen other authors to reward the winners with a whole stack of books. To quote the official description:

Do you love books that take you somewhere you’ve never been before? Books with a unique sense of history or a fantastical premise, dark thrills or the sparkle of your favorite fairy tale–or perhaps all of these rolled up in one? Seventeen of your favorite, award-winning and best-selling authors have teamed up to offer this giveaway:

  • THE LANTERN by Deborah Lawrenson – NY Times bestseller modern gothic novel of love, secrets, and murder—set against the lush backdrop of Provence
  • THE FIREBIRD (ARC) by Susanna Kearsley – A twin-stranded story that blends modern romance with 18th-century Jacobite intrigue, traveling from Scotland to Russia
  • THE TWELFTH ENCHANTMENT by David Liss – In Regency England, at the dawn of the industrial era, magic and technology clash and the fate of the nation rests in the hands of a penniless young woman
  • COLD MAGIC by Kate Elliott – An epic adventure fantasy with a decidedly steampunk edge where magic – and the power of the Cold Mages – hold sway
  • THE MAPMAKER’S WAR by Ronlyn Domingue – Set in an ancient time in a faraway land, The Mapmaker’s War accounts the life of an exiled mapmaker who must come to terms with the home and children she was forced to leave behind.
  • DRACULA IN LOVE by Karen Essex – “If you read only one more vampire novel, let it be this one!” -C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen & The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
  • RED, WHITE AND BLOOD by Chris Farnsworth – High-octane supernatural thriller, a sequel to The President’s Vampire
  • THE HOUSE OF VELVET AND GLASS by Katherine Howe – The House of Velvet and Glass weaves together meticulous period detail, intoxicating romance, and a final shocking twist in a breathtaking novel that will thrill readers
  • THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL (ARC) by Carolyn Turgeon – An inventive, magical fairy-tale mash-up about Rapunzel growing up to be Snow White’s stepmother
  • THE BOOK OF LOST FRAGRANCES by M.J. Rose – A sweeping and suspenseful tale of secrets, intrigue, and lovers separated by time, all connected through the mystical qualities of a perfume created in the days of Cleopatra–and lost for 2,000 years
  • THIEFTAKER by DB Jackson – Combining elements of traditional fantasy, urban fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, Thieftaker will appeal to readers who enjoy intelligent fantasy and history with an attitude
  • GLAMOUR IN GLASS by Mary Robinette Kowal – Follows the lives of the main characters from Shades of Milk and Honey, a loving tribute to the works of Jane Austen in a world where magic is an everyday occurrence
  • DEVIL’S GATE by FJ Lennon – Exhilarating urban fantasy, with first class writing and characters that are unforgettable beyond the last page
  • THE MISSING MANUSCRIPT OF JANE AUSTEN by Syrie James – “A novel within a novel honoring what we love most about Austen: her engaging stories, rapier wit, and swoon worthy romance. Pitch perfect, brilliantly crafted.” —Austenprose
  • THE CROOKED BRANCH by Jeanine Cummins – “Wonderfully written, with strong, compelling characters, it is a deeply satisfying combination of sweeping historical saga and modern family drama, a gentle reminder of the ever-reaching influence of family”–Booklist
  • A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS by Marie Brennan – The story of Isabella, Lady Trent, the world’s preeminent dragon naturalist, and her thrilling expedition to Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever
  • THE RECKONING by Alma Katsu – In the tradition of early Anne Rice, a gorgeously written sequel to The Taker that takes readers on a harrowing, passion-fueled chase that transcends the boundaries of time

    • We’re giving away one set of books per 500 entries, so how many winners there will be depends on the number of entrants! To enter, fill in the form below — you have until March 15th. Please note that this contest is open to residents of the US, Canada and the UK only and by entering, you agree to be added to the authors’ mailing lists (don’t worry; you can always unsubscribe from any mailing list at any time).

    a Rafflecopter giveaway

    This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/578053.html. Comment here or there.

How to write a long fantasy series

It took three years and two months rather than the two years I initially planned, but I have, at very long last, finished the Wheel of Time re-read and analysis. And as I promised quite some time ago, we’ll end with what I’ve learned.

This post, unlike the others, is not WoT-specific. I’ll be referencing the series, because it’s the primary source of my thoughts on this topic, but the point here is to talk about the specific challenges of writing a long epic fantasy series — here defining “long” as “more than a trilogy, and telling one ongoing story.” (So something like Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books wouldn’t count, since they’re a conglomeration of multiple trilogies.) My points probably also apply to non-fantasy series, but other genres are much less likely to attempt multi-volume epics on this scale, so I’m mostly speaking to my fellow fantasists.

I do not pretend this is in any way, shape, or form a recipe for commercial success with an epic fantasy series. After all, most of this is a checklist of errors I feel Jordan made, and you could paper the walls of Tor’s offices in fifty-dollar bills with the cash he made for them. Nor am I claiming artistic failure awaits if you fail to heed this advice; you might squeak through on luck, or just really good storytelling instinct. But I do feel that bearing these points in mind can help the would-be writer of an epic series avoid falling off some of the more common and perilous cliffs.

With all of that intro material out of the way, let’s get to it.

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(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: A Memory of Light (analysis)

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome.]

I pretty much covered my reactions to this book with the two liveblog posts. So now it’s time to set aside the straight-up “Oh my god I can’t believe this series is finally done I’ve been waiting for this for more than half my life”> stream of consciousness, and talk about this in a more sensible fashion.

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Books read, January 2013

The list of books I started reading and gave up on (permanently) is longer than the list of books I finished. <sigh> It was one of those months.

At least I’ve learned to give up on things, though. Once upon a time I felt like I had to finish every book I started, and that would have made this month substantially more boring. (We will ignore how many of these I kept reading after the point where I should have stopped, in the hopes that they would get better.)

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Recent offerings from Book View Cafe

book not done book not done book not done <pant pant pant>

But I’m surfacing long enough to post something I’ve had sitting around for weeks, which is the list of recent offerings from BVC. Before I get into the full list, I want to call out this one particularly:

Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, edited by Nisi Shawl

Eleven original stories by recipients of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship (2007 through 2012), plus a reprint of “Speech Sounds” by the scholarship’s namesake, Octavia E. Butler. This anthology also includes a brief memoir of Butler by her Clarion classmate Vonda N. McIntyre and an introduction by Nalo Hopkinson.

Every year, the Carl Brandon Society, whose goal is to increase diversity in the field of science fiction, presents scholarships to two students of color accepted to the prestigious Clarion and Clarion West writers’ workshops. The scholarships, named in honor of the brilliant African-American writer Octavia Butler, pay workshop tuition and housing fees for the recipients. Since 2007, they have made it possible for eleven students to attend the workshops.

Give a little, get a free ebook.

If you contribute a mere $8.01 to the scholarship fund, you can download Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, an ebook anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories by these students — the voices of the new generation of writers of color in speculative fiction.

This special ebook is available only until June 22, 2013, Octavia’s birthday. She would have been sixty-six this year.

Octavia taught at Clarion and Clarion West, and provided enormous support there — and elsewhere — to other writers of color. Through these scholarships, she continues to do so.

Help continue Octavia’s work.

Other new books, from Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Pati Nagle, Gregory Frost, and David D. Levine

A Memory of Light Liveblog, Part 2

Today I continue reading A Memory of Light, and subjecting you all to my stream-of-consciousness reactions as I go. (Where by “all” I mean “those of you who click on the cut tag,” which is probably not a lot, since at this point 95% of my audience probably falls into two groups: those who don’t care, and those who do care but haven’t read the book yet themselves and don’t want spoilers.)

First part is here, for those few who care and have read the book/don’t mind spoilers.

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