Category: General

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 August, but 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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Top Ten Tuesday

Posted March 24, 2015 by in General / 16 Comments

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is top ten books from your childhood you’d like to revisit. Now, I’m a bit odd in that I jumped from very basic books right up to adult books in a pretty short space of time. So there are some adult books mixed in here which I nonetheless read as a pre-teen.

  1. Magician, Raymond E. Feist. Man, it took me forever to get through this doorstop, but I loved it. And promptly reread it when the extended edition, with more material and tiny font, came out.
  2. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien. Okay, I frequently revisit this one, but there’s nothing quite like the thrill of encountering Smaug by the light coming through a crack in your curtains after your parents have threatened to take away the book if you don’t go to sleep now.
  3. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Maybe it’d just be a disappointment, but there’s still a sort of breathless romanticism about the idea of the shut away garden. And it’s set in Yorkshire, which I know well, and occasionally miss.
  4. The Positronic Man, Isaac Asimov. My most epic library fine ever was accrued on this one. The library wouldn’t let me take it out, because it was an adult book, so Mum took it out for me. And then had a lot of trouble getting it back from me. I didn’t have my own copy until I was dating my current partner and she tracked down a copy — all I’d been able to find was the book of short stories which contained the original.
  5. The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff. Another book I read to bits. I think I went through three editions, and even the fancier edition I won as a prize from school quickly got a battering. I loved the Britain underneath the Roman occupation that Sutcliff brought to life — accurate or not, I was happy to believe in it all. And there’s some really, really powerful stuff here.
  6. Animorphs, K.A. Applegate. I never did stick it out and get to the end of these. I loved the concept, though, the way you could let yourself believe that it could be real (or is that begin to fear that it is real?). Maybe I should just look on Wikipedia for how it all panned out…
  7. Clockwork, Philip Pullman. This one creeped me the heck out. I never actually owned a copy, which is weird, but I loved reading it. Sometimes I’d whisper the words, because somehow it worked really well as a whispered story.
  8. Across the Nightingale Floor, Lian Hearn. I remember being enraptured by these books. I should read them again and see if they stand up to my remembered fondness. I suspect they were quite appropriative culturally, though…
  9. Just about anything by David Eddings. I really have a craving to reread his stuff. Just one trilogy/series will do; there’s so many similarities between them that after that it’d drive me nuts. But I did adore Sparhawk.
  10. The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula Le Guin. Or all the Earthsea books, really. God, they were an enchantment for me!

That’s ten already? Yeesh! But I have so many more I could mention…

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Stacking the Shelves

Posted March 21, 2015 by in General / 6 Comments

Hey everyone! If you were curious about how my year’s goals are going, you can swing by my resolutions update here. If you just want to see what I’ve acquired this week, well, read on. It’s not actually a big haul; instead of splitting them up into sections, I’ll just list them together this week, I think!

Cover of We Are Our Brains by Dick Swaab Cover of Knight's Shadow by Sebastien de Castell Silk #2

Super thanks to the publisher for Knight’s Shadow — I requested it based on being halfway through Traitor’s Blade, and I’m looking forward to it.

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No Book Buying Challenge: My Secret Sauce

Posted March 18, 2015 by in General / 6 Comments

Yes, my puns are terrible, I know. This month’s prompt from the #ShelfLove challenge is about free books: where do you get them from?

I have a feeling that I had a brilliant idea for this list and then forgot it. Ah well: I can always add it later. And now to the general update!

  • 8/51+ already owned books read
  • Spent: £21 out of ~£30 budget (budget is 10% of my income) for January
  • Spent: £20 out of ~£25 budget for February
  • Spent: £12 out of ~£25 budget for March

As for my other resolutions:

  • No books impulse-bought (two marginal; they weren’t on my list, but I was aware of and interested in them before, and I used a voucher)
  • Read every day
  • Bed before midnight… mostly
  • Up before ten every day (now basically up before eight every day and not entirely happy about it)
  • 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 and March.
  • Done 27 hours volunteering total
  • Reading/reviewing books from NG/etc… making some slow progress

I now have a couple of challenges and stuff set up on HabitRPG to keep me accountable, too. If I don’t get to 80% feedback on Netgalley by December 31st 2015, I pay an eight gem forfeit to a random person who joined the challenge. (You can find it in the Short-Term Accountability Guild if you’re a HabitRPG fan like me!)

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Top Ten Tuesday

Posted March 17, 2015 by in General / 6 Comments

The Top Ten Tuesday prompt for this week is all about your spring TBR. Since I don’t really plan ahead much (I get too obsessed) and I’m writing this post two weeks before it goes live (I like to be organised), this is a somewhat random selection, and I might have got round to them by the time this goes live…

  1. Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses. I should get round to this soon, since the publishers were kind enough to grant me access on Netgalley, and I actually have yet to read anything by Maas. Everyone’s so enthusiastic… I’ll get there soon!
  2. Karen Maitland, The Raven’s Head. Also an ARC, though I’ve read just about everything Maitland’s written so far. I’m hoping this one breaks the mould a bit, though.
  3. Emma Healey, Elizabeth is Missing. The idea of this really intrigues me. It should be waiting for me at the library as I write, so I should be reading it soon. I might find it a bit upsetting, though; apparently the portrayal of dementia and mental illness is very good.
  4. Joe Abercrombie, Half a King. It’s about time, that’s all I can say.
  5. Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan. The next in my project of rereading all Kay’s books in publication order. (The idea is to watch his writing improve/change with experience, though oddly enough his earliest novels are probably my favourites.)
  6. Sam Kean, The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons. I’ve been recommended this, neurology is fascinating, I might want to become a neurologist, and the library has it. What more could I wish for?
  7. Melissa Grey, The Girl at Midnight. Just got approved for this on Netgalley after a long wait, and it was in a previous Top Ten Tuesday as a book I was particularly looking forward to. Ergo, I have no excuse.
  8. Carrie Vaughn, After the Golden Age. This is a reread I’ve been meaning to get round to for a long time. I think there’s another book now, too!
  9. Gail Carriger, Changeless. I don’t want to end up waiting ages and ages to read this and forgetting everything about the first. Too bad I’m so easily di
  10. Susanna Kearsley, Named of the Dragon. Arthurian connection, you say? Set in Wales, you say? I’m there.

And probably all of these are going to appear again on my summer TBR, knowing me…

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