Category: General

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted April 21, 2015 by in General / 22 Comments

This Top Ten Tuesday prompt is just evil — to list my top ten favourite authors of all time. How can I do that!? Well, let’s have a go.

  1. Jo Walton. Needless to say.
  2. Ursula Le Guin. I might not read and reread her work as much now as I did, but she certainly had a hand in forming my brain.
  3. N.K. Jemisin. She’s relatively new to my shelves, but nonetheless awesome.
  4. Guy Gavriel Kay. Only one or two of his books have failed to make me cry. He writes powerful relationships between complex people so well.
  5. Robin McKinley. I don’t know why Chalice of all her books lives in my mind so strongly, but that and Sunshine are going to be favourites for a long time to come.
  6. Patricia McKillip. Also relatively new to my shelves, but she writes a kind of enchantment I can’t get enough of.
  7. Jacqueline Carey. She can make Sauron sympathetic. How can you not be in awe?
  8. Mary Stewart. My comfort reading of choice. <3
  9. Dorothy L. Sayers. A love shared with my mum and which saved me from severe panic after my cholecystectomy!
  10. Scott Lynch. I’ve loved everything he’s put out so far. (Even if I haven’t finished Republic of Thieves.)

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No Book Buying Challenge: Progress

Posted April 19, 2015 by in General / 2 Comments

The time seems to be flying by, and apparently it’s time for another monthly update on this. This one’s easy for me, since I’ve been reporting my progress each month anyway. So here goes:

  • 16/51+ already owned books read (last one recorded: Tropic of Serpents, 17/04)
  • 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

Of course, my sister has helped by wildly indulging me — she’s bought me a couple of books, lately, including the £11.99 copy of Ms Marvel: Generation Why that I wanted, and the even more expensive Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. I also had Mum pay me for some secretarial work in book vouchers. So, um. I’m cheating, a little, but in terms of my actual written down budget, I’m sticking to it. Even when it’s difficult, like this month. I’m not earning much at all, and it scares me a little.

Here’s my more general progress on resolutions:

  • No books impulse-bought
  • Read every day
  • Bed before midnight… mostly
  • 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 January, February, March and April
  • Done 32 hours volunteering total
  • Reading/reviewing books from NG/etc… making some slow progress

I’m actually using a challenge on HabitRPG now to keep me accountable. There’s a big gem prize available if I lose by not reading enough by December 31st, so hopefully I’m going to do it. But it’s looking doubtful: I started with 54 books to read before I got to 80% ratio on Netgalley, and now it’s 55 thanks to some requests. Oops.

But I have been catching up with some ARCs, and I can only hope I get my skates on before December 31st.

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Stacking the Shelves

Posted April 18, 2015 by in General / 28 Comments

Good morning, folks! After a busy couple of weeks, I’ve been good this time. I had one library trip, and didn’t buy anything for myself when I went shopping. (Unless you count accessories for my Captain America teddy bear. Shush.)

Library books

 Cover of Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger Cover of Heartless by Gail Carriger Cover of Timeless by Gail Carriger

Yes, you can clearly see what I’m in the mood for at the moment!

Aaaand comics. Two single issues, and the TPB of Ms Marvel, which my sister bought me. <3

Comics

Ms Marvel Thor Cover of Ms Marvel: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson

What’s everyone else been getting?

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Top Ten Tuesday

Posted April 14, 2015 by in General / 16 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is “Top Ten Inspiring Quotes from Books”. Which is a little bit hard, because I don’t really keep track of quotes. But there are some that stick with me — maybe not inspiring, so much, but defining.

  1. “Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.” (I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith.)
  2. “If you marry a man like that and live his life, then I agree. You may not really want to hurt people, but you will.”
    “That is hateful. Hateful! To say it that way. That I haven’t any choice, that I have to hurt people, that it doesn’t even matter what I want.”
    “Of course it matters, what you want.”
    “It doesn’t. That’s the whole point.”
    “It does. And that’s the whole point. You choose. You choose whether or not to make choices.”
    (The Eye of the Heron, Ursula Le Guin.)
  3. Only in silence the word,
    Only in dark the light,
    Only in dying life:
    Bright the hawk’s flight
    On the empty sky.
    (A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin.)
  4. “For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you.” (Silver on the Tree, Susan Cooper.)
  5. “The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne’s are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.” (The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell.)
  6. “Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow, ‘Get out, you don’t belong here?’ Does the tree say to the hungry man, ‘This fruit is not for you?’ Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?” (The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman.)
  7. “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” (On the Road, Jack Kerouac.)
  8. “It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.” (Among Others, Jo Walton.)
  9. “Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.” (The Scar, China Miéville.)
  10. “That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.” (Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente.)

That was… surprisingly hard to choose. On the Road makes it only because of something else I once read that quoted that line; I’m afraid I don’t like the book itself.

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Stacking the Shelves

Posted April 11, 2015 by in General / 44 Comments

A somewhat acquisitive week for me! But at least I’m keeping from requesting loads of ARCs, given I have a challenge to meet that means reading 55 of them already… (Yes, that’s not even all my backlog. Just 30% of it. I am awful.)

Bought

Cover of Mortal Heart by Robin LaFevers Cover of Changeless by Gail Carriger Cover of Blameless by Gail Carriger

24965354 Cover of One Night in Sixes by Arianne Thompson

The first three, well, I planned to get them anyway, since I’m enjoying both series. The Tanya Huff I’ve been eyeing for ages. And One Night in Sixes is a bookclub read, if I recall rightly.

Comics

Captain Marvel Spider-woman

Looks like a tie-in event for Captain Marvel? Might not be so fond of that… And I am getting tired of seeing Carol looking terrified/helpless on covers. Spider-woman looks fun, though.

How’s everyone else doing? Up to anything interesting?

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Review – Dancing At the Edge of the World

Posted April 10, 2015 by in General / 4 Comments

Cover of Dancing at the Edge of the World by Ursula Le GuinDancing at the Edge of the World, Ursula Le Guin
Review from October 12, 2012

I think Ursula Le Guin’s collections of essays were the first non-fictional works that I really learned to appreciate. I was very much not a non-fiction person at the time, but Le Guin’s writing is always so full of clarity, so well considered, that it draws me in when it’s non-fiction as surely as when it’s prose.

Obviously some of these essays are somewhat dated now, written and edited in the 70s and 80s, but there’s still a lot of interest there. Le Guin’s thoughts on the gender issues in The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, years after it was published, years after she originally wrote about it, for example. Or her reflections on her mother’s life, or on Jo March as one of the few female writers in fiction to be a writer and have a family at the same time… A personal gem for me was coming across, in the section containing book reviews, a review of C.S. Lewis that almost inevitably also reflected on J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis’s close friend and colleague, certainly shared many of Lewis’s views and was also a devout Christian. But it all comes out very differently in his fiction. Take his handling of evil: his villains are orcs and Black Riders (goblins and zombies: mythic figures) and Sauron, the Dark Lord, who is never seen and has no suggestion of humanity about him. These are not evil men but embodiments of the evil in men, universal symbols of the hateful. The men who do wrong are not complete figures but complements: Saruman is Gandalf’s dark-self, Boromir Aragorn’s; Wormtongue is, almost literally, the weakness of King Theoden. There remains the wonderfully repulsive and degraded Gollum. But nobody who reads the trilogy hates, or is asked to hate, Gollum. Gollum is Frodo’s shadow; and it is the shadow, not the hero, who achieves the quest. Though Tolkien seems to project evil into “the others”, they are not truly others but ourselves; he is utterly clear about this. His ethic, like that of dream, is compensatory. The final “answer” remains unknown. But because responsibility has been accepted, charity survives. And with it, triumphantly, the Golden Rule. The fact is, if you like the book, you love Gollum.
In Lewis, responsibility appears only in the form of the Christian hero fighting and defeating the enemy: a triumph, not of love, but of hatred. The enemy is not oneself but the Wholly Other, demoniac.

I’m not sure I agree with all of that — the Southrons are most definitely Othered, and I’m not sure they’re meant to be universal symbols of the hateful. Or rather, if they are, and perhaps they are, we need to examine why Tolkien made that decision. But I do think that this is an informative way of looking at the two authors, which reflects a lot on Le Guin herself as well.

Rating: 5/5

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Top Ten Tuesday

Posted April 7, 2015 by in General / 21 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is top ten characters you want to check in on after the story is done. This is an awesome one — there are so many characters I wonder about!

  1. Anyone from The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison). Don’t make me choose (obviously I’d choose Maia and his wife if I had to). I know she’s not going to write a sequel (as such), so I feel free to wonder about aaaaall of the characters. And I love them all, and even those who aren’t nice… I want to know how things end up.
  2. Faramir from The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien). Total literary crush, ’nuff said. Plus, he’s with Eowyn, so you get a twofer there.
  3. Treebeard from The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s Middle-earth becomes our Europe, after all. What happens to the Ents? Where are they hiding?
  4. Caspian from Prince Caspian/Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C.S. Lewis). All of the books could’ve been about Caspian and Lucy having adventures and I’d have been happy.
  5. The Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman). He’s so awesome, and we know so little about him. Need to knooooowwww.
  6. Vetch from A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin). He was so faithful to Ged, and yet we don’t really know what happened to him.
  7. Esca from The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff). We get a little bit of an idea what’s going to happen, but I want to know eveeerything.
  8. Mori from Among Others (Jo Walton). I know a certain amount of this is autobiographical, and I know Jo a little. But I want to know about Mori, where she goes, what she does. It could be anything.
  9. Peter Carmichael from the Small Change trilogy (Jo Walton). We don’t end the trilogy with him in a good place. At all. I want to see him heal. Or not. I want to see what happens to him and to society.
  10. Con from Sunshine (Robin McKinley). I love the vampire lore in this book, love the awkward alliance/bond that forms between Con and Sunshine. Give me moooore.

I wonder how weird my choices are compared to everyone else’s… Drop by and let me know!

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Female Authors Only Month

Posted April 6, 2015 by in General / 6 Comments

For a long time, one of my goals has been to spend a month reading only female authors. It’s prompted by projects like Lilit Marcus‘ year of reading only books by women. I have too many commitments to review books and read for book clubs, etc, etc, to go for a whole year, but a month seems to be a reasonable goal and one (looking at Mount TBR) I can accomplish easily — perhaps even without missing male authors very much at all. Scrolling through my blog, I review a lot of books by women: Joe Abercrombie and Guy Gavriel Kay, even Tolkien, can all stand being sidelined for a month around here.

There’s nothing actually wrong with reading works by male writers, even if they are the archetypical white old men. Many of their books are deserving, many of them say things that people need to hear, or say things in a unique way. But the market is saturated with male writers, while female writers are still often relegated to genre, sidelined, bypassed for awards, etc.

There are issues of intersectionality, too: it’s important to read books by transgender people, people with disabilities, people of colour, working class people, queer people. There are all kinds of voices that need to be heard, need more space available to be heard in, and many of those voices are male. I think a month of reading only books by people of colour, or only books by people who identify as disabled, would be just as valuable. Even reading books by men which never made bestseller lists, or something like that. It’s just not my intent right now.

So, from 1st May to 31st May, this blog will review only books by female authors. (That’s how far in advance I’m scheduled — April is full.) Once I’ve finished reading Traitor’s Blade and The State of the Art, I’ll have no books on the go by men, and so the month of reading female authors only will commence. I might give you updates on how it’s going and what I’ve been reading, so you can see what reviews are coming up in May!

But a request to all of you, too: I want to read books by queer women, trans women, women of colour, Native American women… all kinds of women, in summary. Look through my TBR and STS posts and highlight someone you think I should read now now now, or suggest someone new. I’m especially looking for comics by women — I’m aware of Gail Simone, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Noelle Stevenson, Fiona Staples, Emma Rios… Gimme more!

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Stacking the Shelves

Posted April 4, 2015 by in General / 38 Comments

First StS of a new month! I can’t believe I’ve (mostly) been sticking to my resolutions so far… This has been a busy week, but I promise, I’m still sticking to my resolutions like glue.

Received to review

Cover of Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

Making my sister burningly jealous! Alastair Reynolds was the author who got her back into reading when I handed her Century Rain; she hasn’t looked back since, and she’s read that one at least three times. I’ve read this already, but it’s actually a while before the review goes up… I’ve gotten awfully ahead of myself with scheduling!

Bought

Cover of Od Magic by Patricia McKillip Cover of The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip Cover of Song for the Basilisk by Patricia McKillip

Cover of In the Forests of Serre by Patricia McKillip Cover of The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia McKillip Cover of The Just City by Jo Walton

25050340 Cover of Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan

I’ve been meaning to buy the SF Gateway Omnibuses of McKillip’s work for a while. Now I have them (thanks, Mum). I got The Mirror World of Melody Black because I loved The Universe vs Alex Woods, and Voyage of the Basilisk because I didn’t get round to my ARC in time. Also, I now have The Just City, which I didn’t own yet. I swear I’m gonna get a review up for it soon.

Library

Cover of Master And God by Lindsey Davis Cover of Ringworld by Larry Niven Cover of Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Cover of The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino Cover of On Such A Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee

I’ve been meaning to try Lindsey Davis for aaaages. This one is apparently a standalone, according to someone I was on duty with at the library, so that’s where I’m going to start — since we don’t have the first Falco book. Gah. Anyway, the others are mostly fairly random picks, except for Ringworld which is another upcoming read for the SF/F Book Club in Cardiff.

Comics

Spider-Gwen Operation S.I.N

Yay Spider-Gwen!

And to finish off, a couple of things I’ve added to my lists lately on Scribd and Blloon.

Cover of The Sanctuary Seeker by Bernard Knight Cover of Trance by Kelly Meding Cover of Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

So yeah, as usual, I have plenty on my plate. What’s anyone else been getting? Are you gonna make me expand my never ending to read list…?

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Top Ten Tuesday

Posted March 31, 2015 by in General / 16 Comments

This week’s prompt for Top Ten Tuesday is “books recently added to your TBR”. That’s an easy one for me, because I keep veeeery careful records… I won’t just add the ones I’ve got most recently, or it’d basically echo my last couple of Stacking the Shelves posts. So here’s a selection of what I’ve got/borrowed in the last couple of months.

  1.  Touch, Claire North. I might’ve been disappointed in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry Augustbut I have been a fan of North’s work since she first published as Catherine Webb.
  2.  A Darkling Sea, James L. Cambias. I think this was mentioned by a friend in a book group. It made it to my wishlist, anyway, and from there onto my bought list!
  3.  Impulse, Dave Bara. Picked up on, ha, impulse. Looks like fun space opera type stuff.
  4. Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. For book club!
  5. Mortal Heart, Robin LaFevers. I’ve just read Grave Mercy. I already had Dark Triumph on my list, but now I’ve gotta get my hands on Mortal Heart…
  6. Blackout, Connie Willis. I’m actually pretty ambivalent about Willis’ work, but I told myself I’d give it another go!
  7. Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson. Had never quite connected this book with the Ms Marvel writer! When I realised, well, the choice was obvious.
  8. Knight’s Shadow, Sebastien de Castell. I’m still only partway through the first book, since I got distracted. Oops. But this is waiting for me.
  9. The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro. I have to get around to this soon. I hear it’s got Gawain in it!
  10. The Mirror World of Melody Black, Gavin Extence. Having loved The Universe Versus Alex Woods, and knowing this is about mental illness in many ways, I couldn’t help but pick this one up as soon as I could.

Tahdah! What’s everyone else been getting hold of?

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