Tag: books

Top Ten Tuesday

Posted October 20, 2015 by Nicky in General / 12 Comments

This week’s prompt from The Broke and the Bookish is “10 Wishes I’d Ask The Book Genie To Grant Me”.

Well.

  1. Auto-approval on Netgalley for everything. Especially Tor.
  2. Budget and unlimited space at local community library. Please?
  3. Free publicity for the above. We need more readers.
  4. A TARDIS for personal book storage. This one’s obvious if you know me at all… and hey, I could use it to travel to my partner’s and take all my stuff!
  5. Digital and print copies in the same purchase. Wouldn’t bundles like this make life so much easier?
  6. Time spent reading pauses “real life”. Then I could get soooo much more done.
  7. More library cards. And more libraries, come to that.
  8. A conversation with Mori from Among Others, when she’s 26. Seems like it might, you know, be relevant to me.
  9. Ability to slap some characters and say no don’t do that. FitzChivalry Farseer, I’m looking at you.
  10. The ability to read some books for the first time… again. ’nuff said, right? Some books, you just wish you could come to them fresh again.

I could probably keep going for a while on this topic…

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Review – Shadow and Bone

Posted October 19, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Shadow and Bone by Leigh BardugoShadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo

I was vaguely not-interested in Shadow and Bone after reading a couple of negative reviews, which I think particularly mentioned the Russian influences and then overall not-Russian-at-all, fairly typical fantasy world setting. This is true, and if it’s something that will bother you, then yes, steer clear. However… I picked this up from the library at five o’ clock, walked to the station, got the train home, walked up the hill home, mostly without reading… and by six o’ clock, had got two thirds of the way through the book anyway. It was a fast read, and it was compelling.

Now granted, yeah, there’s some typical YA stuff going on — there’s a love triangle, for one. It came across quite well for me, though. I think it helped that Mal and Alina have such a clear bond, which has been confused in realistic ways as they grew up. And the Darkling has an obvious allure, and you can see why people trust him, want to be near him. I like the development of Alina’s powers, and her interactions with people around her. For a book with a guy called the Darkling and a main character who is a “Sun Summoner”, there’s a fair amount of ambiguity going on — there are several characters who don’t clearly align on a good/bad matrix.

Overall… I don’t quite know why I enjoyed this so much. Probably it matched my mood, in part, and it wasn’t a challenging read, while I wasn’t in a great mood. I’ll be interested to see how I react to the second and third books.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Ask a Policeman

Posted October 18, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Ask A Policeman by the Detective ClubAsk A Policeman, John Rhode, Helen Simpson, Gladys Mitchell, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Milward Kennedy

I think the books and stories the Detection Club did together must have been a lot of fun to do and to share around with other writers, but they come off less well for someone outside that context, and particularly given that many of the authors and detectives are no longer well-known. Sayers/Lord Peter were the only ones I knew from this bunch, so the parody and playing in other people’s sandboxes doesn’t really interest me.

Going through the same murder in however many different ways just… didn’t interest me enough. The parody of Sayers was quite fun, since I know what Wimsey is like, but other than that, I found this fairly boring. Alas.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Binti

Posted October 17, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Cover of Binti by Nnedi OkoraforBinti, Nnedi Okorafor

I keep meaning to read Okorafor’s work, but Who Fears Death was a bad fit when I picked it up, and my copy of Lagoon has gone AWOL. Which left this as my introduction — maybe not a bad thing, because it’s fairly bitesize, without being truncated. I wasn’t sure what to think of it until I was talking with Robert from my book club, though, where he noted that at the start of the book, things begin to happen due to Binti’s merit. She gets herself into university, and she’s brave enough to leave her family and set out into the unknown. After that, though, it’s luck: she couldn’t know that the things she took with her would be useful, had no idea how to make them useful, and basically just happened to survive and do well because of her background.

It feels almost like message fiction: sometimes, someone from an unprivileged background can make good because they bring new tools which other people wouldn’t consider. That’s not a bad message, and the story and world-building is reasonably entertaining… but. The conflict essentially ends by 20% in — after that, Binti no longer has to rely on her own resources. She just happens to have the right things with her.

That’s a bit of a simplification, but it does weaken the story for me. It starts off strongly, and the world is interesting — Binti’s people, the way things are set up, the aliens — but then… I began to feel as if it would turn out okay because Binti was special somehow. Having a special protagonist who is insulated from harm makes suspense and intrigue difficult.

Rating: 3/5

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Stacking the Shelves

Posted October 17, 2015 by Nicky in General / 16 Comments

This has been an unexpectedly busy week again, since friends have been super nice to me (particularly Lynn and Robert), and Mum ended up with some Amazon vouchers from surveys! Which is really nice, because it is a stressful time. This week my grandmother’s going to have her operation for cancer, so I would really, really appreciate good thoughts sent her way.

Anyway, back to the books!

Won

Cover of Dragon Scales by Sasha L Miller

I liked The Errant Prince a lot, so yay for this! Looking forward to reading it. Thank you, Sasha L. Miller!

Dead tree books

Cover of Magic Slays by Ilona Andrews Cover of Dark Metropolis by Jaclyn Dolamore

I was instructed to get something light and escapist and easy, and Magic Slays will be exactly that for me. And research, since paranormal romance is a genre I ghostwrite in… Dark Metropolis apparently has a bunch of LGBTQ characters, including an ace character.

Ebooks

Cover of Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace Cover of Hollow World by Michael Sulivan Cover of Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

Cover of An Ancient Peace by Tanya Huff Cover of Salsa Nocturna by Daniel José Older Cover of Posted to Death by Dean James

Cover of This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin Cover of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

A rather random mix, really! A few of these I’ve been meaning to read for a while.

Library

Cover of The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer Cover of Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo Cover of Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo

Cover of The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Cover of My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart Cover of The Hollow City by Ransom Riggs

Cover of Control Point by Myke Cole Cover of Midnight Never Come, by Marie Brennan India Black and the Shadows of Anarchy

Another mixed bag, really! My Brother Michael and The Grand Sophy are rereads grabbed for the readathon this weekend (post coming soon).

What’s everyone else been getting?

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Review – Embassytown

Posted October 16, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Cover of Embassytown by China MiévilleEmbassytown, China Miéville
Originally reviewed 26th October, 2012

Miéville’s work is never easy for me — I always have to work for it — so I get a little contemptuous of people who just read fifty pages and give up, even though I do that plenty with other books. I always have to give Miéville plenty of leeway: he gets to a place where he blows my mind in the end, but it might take half the book before I’m starting to see it.

So it was with Embassytown, and not helped by the fact that I’m in a bit of a depressed phase at the moment and everything is Too Much Effort. But I got there eventually, and when I did, I didn’t want to put the book down for a second. I stayed up to finish it, last night, and felt breathlessly excited at the twists and turns.

I can understand the criticisms that there aren’t really any well-defined/sympathetic/unique characters (maybe if there’d been more of Spanish Dancer?), but in Miéville’s work there’s always plenty that makes up for it, for me. His cities are pretty much characters, both a collection of separate organisms and an organism in themselves, and his world-building is second to very, very few. I loved the concept of Language, and the way it became language. I just. Flail.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Wicked + The Divine: Fandemonium

Posted October 15, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of The Wicked + The Divine vol 2The Wicked + The Divine: Fandemonium, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson

I wish I had the first volume here, so I could have flipped through it again and got myself quickly back on board for this one. Not that it took too much to get sucked back into it, but in terms of the mystery, I couldn’t remember who I suspected of doing what and why! The characters stuck in my head, too, at least their roles, but their names didn’t. Partly my fault, because I’m not a visual person at all and I can’t ever connect names to faces, let alone in the second volume of a comic I’ve read once before. It doesn’t help that McKelvie’s style is much the same as it was for Young Avengers — I think, “Hey, that character looks familiar… no, I’m thinking of America Chavez.” Sigh.

The art is, as in the first volume, absolutely gorgeous. I don’t think I could imagine The Wicked + The Divine in any other style — it’s perfect this way. In many ways, this volume complicates the plot more, introducing more characters, more background, more twists. There’s still a lot more to discover, and despite the relative thickness of the book, I wanted more, right away, right now.

Please?

Rating: 5/5

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Review – Thornyhold

Posted October 14, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Thornyhold by Mary StewartThornyhold, Mary Stewart

Compared to Stewart’s other romance/mystery stories, this is rather gentle. It’s more about family being there for you, about everyday magic, about finding yourself at last and fitting yourself into the world. The protagonist, Gilly, really hasn’t had a chance to grow up, or at least to grow out of her parents’ expectations, and here she finds space to do exactly that, thanks to the cottage left for her by her godmother.

It honestly sounds at some point like there’s something more sinister going on — and to be honest, the antagonist’s plan is kind of creepy and weird, and there’s animal abuse that really mustn’t be discounted as harmless that I think kind of gets waved away by the ending. And the fact that the antagonist’s plan doesn’t end up working on the intended target, but does work on an unsuspecting and previously uninterested person… hm. That’s kind of not a happy ending, not a reason to relax. If you’re going to have a world where something like a love potion works, and the protagonist is concerned about it up to the point where she meets the man she wants… Hm.

But really, that’s bringing serious issues from fantasy stories into a primarily-romance story, where it’s meant to be unproblematic. So I let it go. (Pause for musical interlude.)

Not my favourite of Mary Stewart’s books (although honestly, I don’t know what I would pick — maybe The Ivy Tree, or Nine Coaches Waiting?) but fun enough when you take it as a gentle romance story with a little tang of mystery and magic.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Witches of Lychford

Posted October 13, 2015 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Cover of Witches of Lychford by Paul CornellThe Witches of Lychford, Paul Cornell

This novella has an interesting triad of characters at the centre. They’re very different, and yet they have things in common, and things to teach one another. One’s an atheist who fears she’s losing her mind; one a pastor fearing she’s losing her faith; and one a woman who would probably refuse to agree that she was afraid of anything. The personalities make quite an interesting mix!

The story itself is fairly simple, with a traditional sort of feel. A new supermarket is coming to Lychford, and the residents are split almost 50-50 on whether they want it or not. Campaigns are in full swing, both for and against. So far, so ordinary. But Judith knows there’s more to it — that the supermarket as planned will change the shape of the town, and maybe even alter the fabric of the world: Lychford is built the way it is for a particular reason.

Those are just surface details: each character has much more going on, which impacts the plot of the novella in different ways. The three main characters (who all happen to be female) are well-realised and compelling, even when one of them is cantankerous.

I didn’t love it like, say, Robert did, but I did enjoy it. It’s paced well and is just the right length — neither cut off short or stretched out too long. It was the first book I read from Tor.com’s novella line, and it was a good introduction.

Rating: 4/5

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Top Ten Tuesday

Posted October 13, 2015 by Nicky in General / 17 Comments

This week’s theme for Top Ten Tuesday is picking authors you would like to see write together. I’ve taken a somewhat random approach, just throwing favourite authors together in some cases. Also, I’ve kept dead authors in the equation, because you never know. If anyone could find a way to talk to a dead author, it’d probably be another living author.

  1. N.K. Jemisin and Kameron Hurley. I can only imagine what evils they would create… it’d be amazing.
  2. Gail Simone and Kelly Sue DeConnick. A sudden thought: imagine Batgirl vs Captain Marvel. Or Captain Marvel vs Red Sonja.
  3. Jo Walton and Steven Brust. I like their work, Jo admires Brust’s books, and I know Brust at least has collaborated before…
  4. Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie. Mind you, it’d end with all the characters dead.
  5. Cherie Priest and Kelley Sue DeConnick. Maybe they could adapt Bloodshot and Hellbent into a comic, using Kelly Sue’s knowledge of how to script?
  6. Jo Walton and Dorothy L. Sayers. Farthing is a pastiche of Golden Age crime fiction. I’d love to see what Wimsey would do in Walton’s alternate Britain… or what Carmichael would do, face to face with Wimsey. I feel like he’d probably get along better with Parker.
  7. J.R.R. Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay. The Fionavar books were influenced by Tolkien, undoubtedly, and Kay worked with Tolkien’s son on preparing The Silmarillion. The two together would surely do some fascinating things with mythology.
  8. Ursula Le Guin and Jo Walton. Because what better way to short out my fannish circuits?
  9. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Because Good Omens was genius.
  10. Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman. Might be a bit of a mismatch, but they both deal in fairytales…

This was actually a really hard one to come up with. I’ll be interesting to see what other people have thought up!

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