Category: General

Stacking the Shelves

Posted July 7, 2018 by Nicky in General / 14 Comments

Hello, folks! Once more, I’m out and about this weekend — time to go spend a day with my grandparents-in-law, but before I go, here’s the haul from last week’s paper (two year) wedding anniversary trip. Shoutout to both the American Book Center and Stanza Bookshop in the Hague for being lovely. <3

Oh, and here’s Breakfast reacting to the full haul (I’m splitting it in two to post!).

And let’s get to it!

Non-fiction:

Cover of Wonderful Things Cover of From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C Dennett Cover of The Broken Spears Cover of The Planet Factory by Elizabeth Tasker

A bit broad in scope, as ever. I’d been looking for something on the Aztecs especially, so I’m glad I found that!

Misc:

Cover of The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull Cover of The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith Cover of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

All a bit classic. I’ve been meaning to reread Rebecca, and my wife picked it up for me mostly because the owner of Stanza Bookshop is so lovely.

Received to review:

Cover of The Dreaming Stars by Tim Pratt Cover of City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender Cover of Hidden Sun by Jaine Fenn

Thank you, Angry Robot! And Tor. I need to get to reading my ARCs!

Books read this week:

Cover of Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine Cover of The Deep by John Crowley Cover of The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams

Cover of The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson Cover of The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope 

Reviews posted this week:

–Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett. A lot of fun, with a heck of an ending. 5/5 stars
–Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart. I keep coming back to this, and I think part of it is the mature view of love the characters have. It’s just… lovely, even if other parts of the novel are decidedly not. 4/5 stars
–Immune, by Catherine Carver. A good rundown of the immune system, at a fairly basic level. 3/5 stars
–Sleeping Giants, by Sylvain Neuvel. A reread to get back in the swing of things. So many little things I’d forgotten! 5/5 stars
–The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, by Catherynne Valente. Another lovely entry in the series. 4/5 stars
–The Ruby in the Smoke, by Philip Pullman. A fun reread for me, and Sally is still awesome. 3/5 stars
–Almost Human, by Lee Berger and John Hawks. A really fascinating account of finding hominin remains and what they might mean. 4/5 stars

Other posts:

–Discussion: Deciding What To Read. What it says on the tin. Are you lister, or a random grabber?
–WWW Wednesday. The weekly update on what I’m reading.

Whew! That’s that. How’s everyone doing? What’ve you been reading or stacking onto your overflowing shelves?

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WWW Wednesday

Posted July 4, 2018 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

The three ‘W’s are what are you reading now, what have you recently finished reading, and what are you going to read next, and you can find this week’s post at the host’s blog here if you want to check out other posts.

Cover of The Devil in the White City by Erik LarsonWhat are you currently reading?

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. I didn’t expect to find it quite this captivating, actually, but somehow it’s really moreish. The dichotomy between the design work for the World’s Fair in Chicago and what H.H. Holmes is doing is kind of jarring, even though the one informs the other, but somehow it works anyway. I’m very curious about Larson’s other work now: none of it sounds like it’d appeal to me a ton on the surface, but there’s something about his writing…

Cover of The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren AdamsWhat have you recently finished reading?

The Notting Hill Mystery, by Charles Warren Adams. It was one of the first detective novels, and the fact that there’s no established conventions does show a bit. It’s an interesting bit of writing, though. The plot revolves around mesmerism and the bond between twins; a little far-fetched, perhaps, but a fun read, even with the stuffier bits.

Cover of Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha LeeWhat will you be reading next?

As ever, goodness knows. I should probably get on with one of the books I’ve already started — like, you know, Revenant Gun — but Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence by Michael Marshall Smith is kinda tempting me. I only bought it this weekend, but I have a grasshopper mind.

What are you reading at the moment?

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Discussion: Deciding what to read

Posted July 2, 2018 by Nicky in General / 10 Comments

With such a massive reading list, sometimes I end up spoiled for choice. There’s a gazillion and one books I want to read at once, so how do I choose?

Welp, I’ve found that any kind of constraint tends to just make me contrary. Have to review it by next week because it releases soon? Let me ignore it altogether for at least another month. Planned to read it for a readalong? Often, that just leads to meh as well. In the end, I’ve come to terms with this — I had a really great conversation over on Beeminder’s forum about my attitude to books and goals in general a few weeks ago, which really helped elucidate that I was making it into work, and it really doesn’t need to be.

So yeah, you’ll find that I might miss review deadlines by a mile, but review something that’s been out for five years the day after I got it. Or vice versa. In the end, it comes back to something I’ve said on here a couple of times: this isn’t my job. I do this for fun. This may not always be a winning strategy with publishers (ugh, my Netgalley ratio is appalling) but it works for my brain and keeps the dreaded reading slumps mostly out of my way.

So what’s your strategy? Reading lists, never own so many books you have to make choices, whatever’s got a deadline on it…? And how on earth do you stick to it when there’s such new shinies out there?!

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Stacking the Shelves

Posted June 30, 2018 by Nicky in General / 12 Comments

Hi all! This would actually be an Unstacking week if I weren’t still highlighting my purchases from when me and my sister went on a post-exam shopping spree. But fear not… today is me and my wife’s trip to the Hague (including a book museum and the excellent American Book Center), so I’m pretty sure I’ll have new books next week. Today’s batch showcases the non-fiction books I grabbed during that shopping trip with my sister, though.

Other than that, it’s been a quiet reading week because a) I’ve decided to write my entire dissertation in a week, no pressure, and b) I have the attention span of a gna

Bought:

Cover of Prehistory by Colin Renfrew Cover of Genghis Khan by John Man Cover of A Lab of One's Own

Cover of How the Irish Saved Civilisation

Bit of an odd mix, perhaps…

Read this week:

 Cover of Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Reviewed this week:

–Kin, by John Ingraham. Not well edited, moderately interesting, but really I’d rather read Nick Lane’s work. 3/5 stars
–The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, by Catherynne M. Valente. Enormous fun, as always, though I missed Ell and Saturday. 4/5 stars
–Deadline, by Mira Grant. I don’t 100% love Shaun as the main character/narrator, but there’s still a lot of awesome stuff going on, and I enjoy the greater focus on epidemiology. 4/5 stars
–Mystery in the Channel, by Freeman Wills Croft. Solid writing and I did kind of get into the plot — enough to be disappointed that the mystery wasn’t solved the way I wanted. 4/5 stars
–Science and the City, by Laurie Winkless. Just… not my thing at all. 2/5 stars
–The Black God’s Drums, by P. Djeli Clark. A lot of fun, and there’s badass nuns. 4/5 stars

Other posts:

–Discussion: Hugo for Best Series. Pondering on how that award works (and doesn’t).
–WWW Wednesday. The usual weekly update on what I’m currently reading and what might be up next.

So how’s your week been? Been doing anything exciting?

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WWW Wednesday

Posted June 27, 2018 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

The three ‘W’s are what are you reading now, what have you recently finished reading, and what are you going to read next, and you can find this week’s post at the host’s blog here if you want to check out other posts.

Cover of Waking Gods by Sylvain NeuvelWhat are you currently reading?

I’m partway through Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel, part of rereading the Themis Files books. I picked it up intending to read a few sections and then go to sleep. That did not happen. I read something like 200 pages. It’s just so compulsive — you read one section and you think, ahh, what will one more hurt?

I’m pretty excited for the final book.

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Sleeping Giants, but before that it was Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside. I can’t wait for that to be out to talk about it more and see other people’s reactions! I got so hooked on that, too. I’m not gonna say much about it, but I’ve never been so emotionally invested in a key before. My review’s posting sometime in the next week, so keep an eye out.

Cover of Blackout by Mira GrantWhat will you be reading next?

I don’t know, but Only Human (Sylvain Neuvel) might be a good bet. I’m also partway through reading a bunch of other things, of course, like The Summer Tree and (oops, this has been on pause so long) Kushiel’s Chosen, and there’s Blackout (Mira Grant) to read, and, and…

Yep, plenty that I might read.

What are you reading right now?

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Discussion: Hugo for Best Series

Posted June 25, 2018 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

I ended up having an interesting chat with one of my colleagues from Beeminder a few days ago, which prompted me to write this down as a post idea. We both follow the Hugos and try to vote, or at least decide how we would vote, and he mentioned being torn on the subject of the Hugo for Best Series.

To refresh our memories, here’s the requirements for the Best Series award:

“The best science fiction or fantasy series of at least 3 volumes and 240,000 words, with a work published in the prior calendar year.”

In some ways, it does seem a little unbalanced to have a whole series being judged at once. Sometimes the first book is amazing and the most recent book ruins everything, or vice versa, but you still want to reward the worthy book. Sometimes a series just by virtue of being a popular or long-running series gets a huge advantage — think of the Wheel of Time, for example: people were worried that it would win by default by just having had a lot of time to attract fans who would vote for it. (That didn’t turn out to be the case, though.)

In other ways, well, I love the idea of taking a step back once a series is over and thinking about whether it really hung together as a series, whether the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. There are some stories where the ending just turns everything else on its head, and I’d give all the awards to a series that really got me that way.

And yet, that’s not what the award is for: it doesn’t specify the series must be over, just that there must have been an installment published in the prior calendar year. That for me is the downfall of the series Hugo: instead of being about awarding something to a series that was really great as a whole, it becomes an award for a series which people are excited about. You have to start thinking about it in terms of just the last book, whatever that was, because you don’t know how everything is going to come together at the end.

That said, I’m really torn about the choices this year. I love both Marie Brennan’s books and Robert Jackson Bennett’s books, and I’d love to see both of them win all the awards ever — and in this case they’re both completed series, too, so they won’t have another chance next year (another thing I’m not sure I love about the series Hugo — is there anything stopping the same regular series being nominated again and again?). Gaaah.

So what do you think? Pro-Best Series award? Anti-Best Series award? Completely torn? Don’t care about the Hugos? (I’ll grant this post is, after all, really only relevant to my SF/F buddies!)

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Stacking the Shelves

Posted June 23, 2018 by Nicky in General / 12 Comments

Good morning, folks! It’s time for another installment of my post-exam book binge. This time, it’s the British Library Crime Classics edition. (Yep, I am addicted to these.)

Bought:

Cover of Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay Cover of Death of an Airman by Christopher St John Sprigg Cover of Scarweather by Anthony Rolls 

Cover of Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne Cover of The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Warren Adams

Books read this week:

Cover of The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne Valente Cover of Scarweather by Anthony Rolls  Cover of Deadline by Mira Grant Cover of The Black God's Drums

Reviews posted this week:

–The Secret of High Eldersham, by Miles Burton. Okay, the plot is bananas, but it’s a really compulsive read. 4/5 stars
–The Templars, by Piers Paul Read. Not just about the Templars, but about the Crusades more broadly. 3/5 stars
–Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. A favourite reread. <3 5/5 stars
–A Quick and Easy Guide to Using They/Them Pronouns, by Archie Bongiovanni & Tristan Jimerson. Pretty good, but not perfect. 4/5 stars
–A Little History of Archaeology, by Brian Fagan. Not quite everything I wanted, but fun enough and informative, if a little scatter-brained. 3/5 stars
–Feed, by Mira Grant. A reread to let me get back into the trilogy and finish it this time, and it was great fun. 4/5 stars
–Planetfall, by Emma Newman. Another reread, this one because I want to read the new book in the same world. Remains a great read, and I think I liked it more this time. 4/5 stars

Other posts:

–Discussion: Interacting with Authors. Advice for both authors and bloggers…
–Top Ten Tuesday: Summer TBR. What I might be reading this summer.
–WWW Wednesday. The usual update!

So what’ve you been reading? What have you been stacking your shelves with? I want to know!

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WWW Wednesday

Posted June 20, 2018 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

My exams are over, and all is freedom and binging on books! The three ‘W’s are what are you reading now, what have you recently finished reading, and what are you going to read next, and you can find this week’s post at the host’s blog here if you want to check out other posts.

What are you currently reading?

Cover of The Classical World by Robin Lane FoxI just started The Classical World, by Robin Lane Fox, which is rather slow going. I’ve seen some really enthusiastic reviews, but I’m not quite seeing it — at this point, at least. Maybe it doesn’t help that I studied classics at A Level, so none of this is really new to me.

I’ve also got started on my reread of The Summer Tree, which is just, gah. It’s not going to be long before the first big tragic event. I had to pause last night so I wouldn’t go to sleep on that note!

What have you recently finished reading?

Cover of Deadline by Mira GrantLast thing I finished was Deadline, by Mira Grant. Gah! A little slower than the first book, I think, but oh gosh that ending, and the increasing attention paid to the epidemiology! I should go write my review, actually. Before that, I think the last thing I finished was Anthony Rolls’ Scarweather: wow, that was a creepy scenario. Gah. The crime was obvious throughout most of the book, but the exact way everything came out wasn’t.

What will you be reading next?

Cover of Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha LeeI don’t know! As ever, I’m driven largely by whim. But most likely I’ll get back to Revenant Gun (Yoon Ha Lee) and pick up Blackout and maybe Feedback (Mira Grant). Then there’s more of The Summer Tree and the rest of that trilogy, and, and, and…

On I go, forever.

So what’re you reading?

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Top Ten Tuesday

Posted June 19, 2018 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

Text only: top ten TUESDAY www.thatartsyreadergirl.com

It’s been a long time since I did a TTT post, I know! But this week’s prompt is a summer TBR (it says beach reads, but everything is a beach read for me or nothing is), and I thought I could use the chance to reflect on that. So here goes…

Cover of Blackout by Mira Grant Cover of Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee Cover of City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett  Cover of Starless by Jacqueline Carey

  1. Blackout, by Mira Grant. I finished Deadline yesterday and I’m already itching to get onto this one. WHAT IS GOING ON.
  2. Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee. I’m partway through it already, but I really need to shuffle it to the top of the pile and finish devouring it. I got a little dangerously into it during my exam period and put it aside for a while, but now I’m freeeee.
  3. The Divine Cities trilogy, by Robert Jackson Bennett. I haven’t read the last book, despite being absolutely desperate for it at the time. I wanted to reread the first two, and time kept on catching up to me… bleh. But now I can!
  4. Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett. I got an ARC of this, and I’m very excited by the sound of it, so here’s hoping Bennett will wow me again. (Spoiler: pretty sure he will.)
  5. Starless, by Jacqueline Carey. I don’t think this is optional in any way. I have to read it. It’s Jacqueline Carey!
  6. Only Human, by Sylvain Neuvel. The end of this trilogy! I grabbed it on release and… got busy, of course. You might be sensing a theme in my life.
  7. Before Mars, by Emma Newman. Another one I got on release, but then got distracted from. Though I am at least partway through my rereads of the previous books in this case!
  8. The Lost Plot, by Genevieve Cogman. Actually, I can’t believe I haven’t got to this one already. Again, I want to reread the previous books, though, and do it in a glorious binge.
  9. The Testament of Loki, by Joanne Harris. I am still kicking myself that I didn’t buy a signed copy when I was shopping with my sister, but hey, I have the ebook! More glorious Loki twistiness incoming.
  10. I Only Killed Him Once, by Adam Christopher. I’ve been a great fan of the Raymond Electromatic books, and I can’t believe this one has been sitting on my ereader awaiting me so long already.

  Cover of The Lost Plot by Genevieve Cogman Cover of The Testament of Loki by Joanne Harris Cover of I Only Killed Him Once by Adam Christopher

Let’s face it, I have too many awesome books: my head might just explode. But I’ll be happy.

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Discussion: Interacting with Authors

Posted June 18, 2018 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

So today’s discussion post is something that used to come up all the time when I was on Goodreads, and has happened a couple of times here: interacting with authors. On Goodreads it was nearly always a bad experience, though Tony Hays (author of Arthurian mysteries) was great and a couple of others too, plus of course authors who just wanted to offer me a copy of their books to review. But quite often the author would come by to argue with my rating.

There’s always exceptions, so it’s hard to come up with simple rules. But here’s a couple I think authors could stick to:

  • Don’t react to reviews unless people have indicated they’re willing to discuss them with you.
  • Don’t spam people with offers of copies to review.
  • Don’t spam people with anything.
  • Don’t make everything about your book — other interactions may not seem like they’re directly gonna sell your book, but I’m more likely to buy your book if I’ve had meaningful interactions with you. Even if that’s about other books. Maybe especially if that’s about other books.
  • Remember that nobody owes you interaction, nobody owes you an explanation, nobody owes you their time.

Buuut sometimes I think reviews could use some rules in reply. Mostly I think they’re common sense, but then someone always comes along and ruins my idealistic dreams. So hey:

  • Don’t beg for freebies.
  • Don’t draw the author’s attention to a review unless they’ve indicated they’re interested in reading reviews of their work.
  • Remember there’s a difference between the author’s voice and their character’s voice and even, depending on the narratorial choices they’ve made, their real opinions.
  • Don’t, for goodness’ sake, proudly announce that you’ve pirated the author’s book. There are some authors who don’t mind this much (Cory Doctorow) or have found that their books sold better after one was available free (Neil Gaiman). But for the most part, you’re telling them that they’ve lost revenue. Even if it wasn’t illegal (it is), then telling people you’ve pirated is just poor taste.
  • Review the book, not the author. (It’s fair not to read something because the author is a raging homophobe, but then you don’t need to review the book, because even doing that is getting them oxygen to keep on raging to an audience.) Sometimes biographical details can be important in understanding a book, and sometimes you’re just making douchy assumptions or being a bully.

…Not that this is an exhaustive list (either of them, actually), but these are some of my pet hates.

How about you?

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