Author: Nicky

A Book Blogger’s Manifesto

Posted October 26, 2015 by Nicky in General / 5 Comments

There’s been a couple of manifestos floating about in the wake of Joanne Harris’ Writer’s Manifesto. It got me thinking about what I promise as a blogger and reviewer, what I think is important. So I thought I’d do a quick manifesto myself.

I promise to give you my real opinion. Even if I’m friends with the author or the publicist or someone’s feelings might get hurt.
I promise to remember that everyone has feelings. I’m not going to attack someone, tweet a critical review directly at the author, etc. Everyone has feelings, and it’s just courtesy to do your best to avoid hurting them.
I promise to reply to comments and return your visits. You put in effort to engage with me, and I’ll make the same effort to engage with you.
But, when I’m stressed out and things are hard, I reserve the right to take time off. Even if my scheduled posts are still going ahead. Even if I post something that generates a lot of discussion. I’m a human being, and I need time off too.
I promise to let you know of my bias. When a book is by a friend or I’m doing something as a favour, then I will let you know. If I’m not aware of my bias, then I can’t tell you, but…
I promise to be open to criticism. It’s not easy, but I know I’m as fallible as any other creature. I may react badly, but I promise I will think about what you say.
I promise to be open to new things. I’m sure there’s things I’m neglecting and things I haven’t tried yet, many of which I may love. I’ll be open to them when they come my way.
I promise to review books that I’m given for that purpose. Whether I like them or not.

I’m sure once this goes live I’ll think of something else, so I might add to this. Feel free to borrow the idea, the wording, link to this, whatever you like, if it speaks to you.

Tags: books, discussion

Review – Dark Metropolis

Posted October 26, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 7 Comments

Dark Metropolis, Jaclyn Dolamore

I was recommended this initially because there’s some LGBT content and an asexual character. Well, just to deal with that upfront: there’s a character who is, at least, not straight, and there’s a character who isn’t interested in sex. However, she’s not interested in sex because she’s not human, so that’s kind of… not asexuality. If you interpret her as ace, though, she’s also arguably aromantic.

Still, it’s an interesting story/world. It’s got a reasonably unique take on zombies, and an interesting historical background — there’s history and economics driving the plot, which makes it feel that much more fully realised. The main characters are all pretty young, and they mostly seem to react to things in a normal way for their age. Pacing and writing are reasonably good, too.

I think the only reason this is standing out, though, is because of the LGBT/ace characters; it has potential, but it didn’t sparkle for me. It was easy to read, but not unputdownable. I know there’s a second book, and I’m not in any hurry to get hold of it. It lacks a compelling spark of life, I think.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, queer fic, SF/F

No Book Buying Challenge: Organisation

Posted October 25, 2015 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

I keep almost forgetting to do this post! Here’s October’s one. This month’s prompt is about how you organise your shelves. Well, right now I have permanent shelves with books I’m keeping at my parents, while I have books I haven’t read yet mostly at my grandmother’s, since I’ve been here the last couple months for healthcare and now to take care of her. In both places they’re sorted by genre — poetry, non-fiction, SF/F, crime/mystery, historical, general. Within that, they’re sorted by author’s last name and within that, by order of publication.

I enjoy occasionally overhauling that and shaking everything up, though.

Here’s my general updates on the #ShelfLove challenge and my New Year’s Resolutions. The colour scheme should be familiar by now…

49/51+ already owned books read from prior to 2015 (last one recorded: Moon-Flash, 25/10)
Spent: £21 out of ~£30 budget (budget is 10% of my income) for January
Spent: £20 out of ~£25 budget for February
Spent: £22 out of ~£25 budget for March
Spent: £15 out of ~£16 budget for April
Spent: £45 out of ~£30 budget for May
Spent: £18 out of ~£40 budget for June, plus stuck within holiday budget
Spent: £45 out of ~£50 budget for July
Spent £51 out of ~£60 for August
Spent £30 out of £40 for September
Spent ~£20 out of £20 for October

Not good pay at all this month — somehow the billing cycle means I barely earn anything this month. Sigh.

Here’s my more general progress on resolutions:

No books impulse-bought
Read every day
Bed before midnight
Up before ten every day
Only bought one book from a series at a time
Posted to the blog every day
Commented on at least one other blog every day
Tithed 10% in every month so far
Done 8o hours volunteering total
Reading/reviewing books from NG/etc (70%!)

Not bad at all, right?

Tags: #ShelfLove, challenge

Review – Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Posted October 25, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 8 Comments

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

From the description and the photographs included, I expected this book to be creepier than it was. The story itself, though, didn’t really creep me out — the photos are weird, but having in-story explanations for them kind of takes away that mystery and power. It’s still pretty atmospheric, but not creepy in the way I expected. I was a little surprised to see the fairly lukewarm reviews, though, because I got caught up in the story that’s actually here, and didn’t really mourn the one I didn’t get. (Probably partially because I am a gigantic wuss.)

I had some issues with the characters — why are those people who are repeating the same day over and over, who are hundreds of years old, still acting like children? If they’re learning, why aren’t they changing? They don’t lose their memories, so how are they so static? Even though the headmistress does so much to try and keep them within her loop, and satisfied with it, she can’t stop them interacting, learning from each other and from new people. The situation simply couldn’t stay so fixed, even with the threats the little community faces.

Still, I enjoyed reading this; the narrative swept me along enough that I actually finished it in one sitting, and I’m pondering getting the next book right away. Something about it manages to be compelling, so that I didn’t even really ask these questions while I was reading. Perhaps one best not overthought!

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

Perhaps YOU should…

Posted October 24, 2015 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

This isn’t so much book-related, but hey, this blog is the platform I’ve got, so I’ll use it. And it can be related to books, since it comes up when people advocate for buying more books by authors of any minority identity, or for more books of a certain topic. It’s that argument I’m sure you’ve seen around…

“If you want [x], then YOU should do it.”

Which makes two assumptions: one, that when somebody wants something, it’s their responsibility to go and get it for themselves — even if they’re in a difficult position for that, even if what they want is fairness and equality, even if other people are in a position to help them. And two, that the person advocating for this thing is a hypocrite and is not campaigning in their own life for these things.

If you believe that fairness is not your responsibility, or the responsibility of anyone else, that’s fine, but I’m gonna sit here and judge you for it all I want.

But the second assumption — look, even if I was a hypocrite, all that says is that I’m a hypocrite, not that what I’m arguing for is wrong. And you better be damn sure while you’re at it that I am actually a hypocrite, or you look really fucking silly.

Tags: books, discussion

Review – The Last Witness

Posted October 24, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 8 Comments

The Last Witness, K.J. Parker

I love the way this novella takes the idea — that someone could perhaps look into your mind and take away your memories, at the cost of having to keep them themselves if there was anything distressing in them — and then develops it, runs with it, deals with what a character who could do that would be like, what they would be willing to do, what they’d feel about it. How they could profit from it, and what that might cost them.

The narrator is, of course, unreliable. He’s unreliable even to himself, because he doesn’t know which memories are his, and which memories might be missing. Truth is a malleable thing in this world, because it depends on what you believe, and he can change that. (It never really addresses what happens when someone has some kind of record of what he’s going to wipe.) Identity is malleable too — and his changes all the time as he takes on the memories of murderers and victims. It’s definitely a fertile ground for a story, and K.J. Parker makes great use of it.

This novella has convinced me I really need to get round to reading more of K.J. Parker’s work. He does an amazing job here of creating a character and a complex story from a simple seed — without it ever getting too tortuous.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, K.J. Parker, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves

Posted October 24, 2015 by Nicky in General / 13 Comments

Hello, everyone! Thanks for the good wishes last week — my grandmother’s operation went okay, and she seems quite well, all things considered. Hope you’ve all had good weeks too!

Bought

Suddenly, I’m mad about Phryne Fisher. Even considering watching the series, if it’s on the UK Netflix! I’ve read a bunch of these already.

Library

Yes. Uh. As I said.

Comics

I’ve been looking forward to this one since I first heard about it!

What’s everyone else been getting?

Tags: books, comics, Ilona Andrews, Kerry Greenwood, Stacking the Shelves

Paper book sales soar

Posted October 23, 2015 by Nicky in General / 7 Comments

You’ve probably seen a headline like this on Twitter; the particular one that broke this camel’s back is from CTV News Vancouver. On a light note, I’d like to point out that Canada are reporting paper book sales up just after I had a trip to Canada and filled my suitcase and my partner’s with new books from Indigo and various non-chain bookshops. Coincidence?

Well, yes, but I like it anyway. Even though I was in Calgary, not Vancouver. And made some of my purchases in Edmonton. You’re missing the point.

Anyway, I’m getting pretty sick of these headlines, which inevitably come with lines about how reading a “real” book is more satisfying. More interesting, perhaps, are the articles which I’ve seen that show teens are not big adopters of ereaders and ebooks. I’d love to see more about that, because this is a generation that has grown up reading from screens all the time. Maybe it’s because when we’re reading, we want to escape from the everyday world. When screens are your everyday world, maybe you want something that creates a bit more separation, and has no extra bells and whistles to let you know that you just got five emails.

Maybe it’s because many teens just aren’t that interested in books, and therefore won’t invest in an ereader, and teen purchases of books tend to be one-offs, in paperback. I don’t know; I’d love to see studies on why teens aren’t adopting ereaders/ebooks — link me, if they exist!

But what I really don’t get is the way people are crowing over the “failure” of ebooks. I walk into the eye clinic I volunteer at, and I clock at least three Kindles in each 2.5 hour session. They’re great for making books accessible. Large print books are usually not cost effective: the library I volunteer for have a collection of older ones, but I don’t think we’ve added a new large print title in years. They’re just not available for reasonable prices. But you can choose your own font size — uniquely calibrated to your needs and preferences. You can pick your own font, too. Some ereaders even have the font designed for dyslexic readers as an option.

I’m not seeing the failure here. People are choosing what works for them. Ebooks constitute 17% of sales in Canada, for example. That’s not nothing, or a failure. It’s people choosing the technology they’re comfortable with, and which suits their needs. The stats don’t even tell us anything about whether people use both.

For me, it doesn’t matter. I’m not “more satisfied” reading one way or the other. I love my ereader for the access I get to ARCs and the way ereaders create opportunities for short fiction and serialisation. I love paper books because, yeah, I like the smell of the pages, I like to own things. I like my ereader because it has a backlight which adjusts to current lighting conditions, and I can get new releases cheaper. I love paper books because they make my room look lived in. I love my ereader because I can travel, with all the books I want still at my fingertips. Kindle sales can be amazing, but there’s also the satisfaction of carrying home a nice stack of books.

It’s weird how invested people get in the “death” of ebooks, in how “artificial” they are or how they’re “killing” the book industry. Nope, Amazon across all book sales is much more of a threat than ebook sales as a whole, including non-Amazon sources.

I have no big investment in how other people read. Ebooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, audiobooks — whatever floats your boat. Just read, I don’t care in what format.

Tags: books, ebooks

Review – Lifelode

Posted October 23, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Lifelode, Jo Walton
Originally reviewed 16th March, 2011

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Jo Walton, but it’s so hard to rate them in relation to each other, because they’re each so different. I enjoyed Lifelode more than Tooth and Claw, but perhaps less than Farthing — yet I rated both four stars. I loved Among Others most of all her work so far, and I’m not sure Lifelode matches up… Maybe I should be rating all her work that I’ve read so far five stars, except Tooth and Claw.

Her range of work is fascinating. Her books are not like each other, and yet all of them are well-written and ambitious, and succeed very well with their ambitions. The narration of Lifelode, for example, is done in both past and present tense, because for one of the main characters, time is like that: all things happening at once. I expected to see more of the more distant past, through Taveth, but it was very much about that generation, the people she knew. It’s a very warm book, full of family bonds and love.

It’s also interesting in that polyamory seems to be the default, and Jo Walton treats that sensitively. There’s a sense of great strength in the relationships, but also an acknowledgement of the problems they’ll succeed. There’s also LGBT people, and one who seems pretty much asexual. She always writes about all kinds of people, and that’s another thing I really appreciate about her writing.

It’s also nice that the gendering of roles isn’t a really big thing here. Taveth is a housewife, but she chooses that, and her role is central to the functioning of her home. But even a female priest is still just called a priest, not a priestess.

I’ve managed to say all that and say nothing about the plot. It’s a domestic fantasy, although there is also a level on which it is about gods. I think the homelife is as important to the story as the bursts of fighting, and the magic — the bonds between people are, I think, more important, as they are what is under threat. Don’t go into it expecting a big showdown at the end, or something like that.

Rating: 5/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Flashback Friday, Jo Walton, SF/F

Review – Hard To Be A God

Posted October 22, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Hard to Be a God, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, trans. Olena Bormashenko

I was fascinated by the sound of this when I came across it in the library, because I really liked Roadside Picnic, and because the foreword mentions parallels with Star Trek and Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. However, I found this… pretty much unreadable. There’s a sort of opaqueness I associate with reading Russian novels in translations, but in spades. Supposedly, this translation is much more readable than the old one, which was done via German, but… if that’s the case, I hate to think what the old one was like.

It’s really disappointing, honestly, because the foreword makes it sound interesting, it’s blurbed by Ursula Le Guin, and the parallels mentioned are there. But I couldn’t even hold onto the meaning of the action — why did this character say that, what was the significance of that…

I might try again at some other time, maybe with the other translation, or with some future translation. The setting itself — being fairly traditional-fantasy-esque — doesn’t bother me, and I did, as I said, enjoy Roadside Picnic. Hm.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F