Tag: books

Stacking the Shelves

Posted April 25, 2015 by in General / 32 Comments

I’ve behaved myself shockingly well this week — no new books, no comics, and just a couple of library trips. Which is really odd, considering the readathon starts later today and normally I like stocking up… Hoping to pick up Crown of Midnight (Sarah J. Maas) from the library today, but it’s not open yet.

Cover of The Witch's Daughter by Paula Brackston Cover of Thunder on the Right by Mary Stewart Cover of Thornyhold by Mary Stewart

Cover of The Secret Museum by Molly Oldfield Cover of The Assassin's Blade by Sarah J. Maas Cover of A Dance in Blood Velvet by Freda Warrington

The Mary Stewart books are rereads, which I might revisit during the readathon… although I think Touch Not the Cat is the Stewart book I’ve read least recently, and I’m pretty sure I have a copy around here somewhere. The Secret Museum is one I’ve nearly finished; a fascinating exploration of all kinds of things too precious or difficult to display in traditional museums.

Oh, and I do have a review copy to be joyful over. Frances Hardinge’s latest!

Cover of The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

Pretty excited about that one, even though I really need to stop requesting ARCs if I ever want to reach my goal of 80% ratio on Netgalley by the end of the year…

How’s everyone else been this week? Acquired anything shiny and interesting?

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Readathon!

Posted April 24, 2015 by in General / 10 Comments

Yep, it’s that time again and for some reason I hadn’t got round to properly signing up, offering to run a mini-challenge, or even arranging a stack. Terrible, ain’t it? I’m in the middle of a month where I’m reading female authors only, so I’m assembling a quick list to give me something to grab no matter what — though goodness knows, I’ll grab anything from my backlog if that’s what I happen to be in the mood for.

I don’t know if I’m going to make it the full 24 hours this time; my anxiety tends to spike when I’m tired, I’ve been having a lot of headaches, and I’m just not that great at staying up all night anymore. But we’ll see how it goes.

Reading apparatus: iPad Mini for books on Blloon/Scribd; Kobo Mini for ebooks; dead tree books aplenty. As usual, I’m gonna divide my stack up into a couple of categories and try to read at least one thing from each category.

Backlog:
–A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E. Schwab
–Touch, Claire North
–Batgirl, Gail Simone
–Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
–The Buried Life, Carrie Patel

Rereads:
–Shades of Milk & Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal
–Magic Study, Maria V. Snyder
–Graceling, Kristin Cashore
–Touch Not the Cat, Mary Stewart
–Gifts, Ursula Le Guin

Library:
–Guardian of the Dead, Karen Healey
–Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson
–Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear
–Curtsies and Conspiracies, Gail Carriger
–The Winter Sea, Susanna Kearsley

ARCs:
–The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge
–The Burning Land, Victoria Strauss
–The Just City, Jo Walton
–Dark Triumph, Robin LaFevers
–A Court of Thorns & Roses, Sarah J. Maas

Some of these I need to refresh my memory on because oh, how I owe a review.

For this evening, I’m going to play enough Assassin’s Creed III to sate my current obsession with replaying the games, load my ereader, and try to finish Voyage of the Basilisk (Marie Brennan), so I have a fresh slate for tomorrow. I’ll put up a progress post tomorrow afternoon before we start, in lieu of my usual review post. Any regulars on the blog taking part?

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Review – A Natural History of Dragons

Posted April 24, 2015 by in Reviews / 11 Comments

Cover of A Natural History of Dragons by Marie BrennanA Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan
Review from April 12th, 2013

It took me a while to get round to finishing reading this, even once I was a decent way into it and knew I wanted to finish it. It’s a slow sort of book, one I suspect you will either get on with or not based on the narrator and setting. The idea is of a Victorian-era analogue in which dragons exist, and in which one young woman has the opportunity of a lifetime to go and study dragons scientifically after having obsessed over them all her life. The conceit is that it’s narrated by her in the form of memoirs, in a very Victorian sort of style.

It’s fascinating in its attempts to place a female character realistically in a society that is a Victorian analogue and have her still free enough to have this sort of story happen to her without it sounding far fetched — it mostly works, I think. Unfortunately it’s also pretty slow, and relatively uneventful when compared to so many other dragon books. I did get into it (or rather, back into it) eventually, but I can see it won’t be to everyone’s taste. I did, after all, also love Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

The illustrations are, by the way, perfect. I spent quite a while examining each one in detail. And the world built up around this story is both frustrating in its close and quite naked similarities to ours and tantalising in details that aren’t comparable, or at least instantly placeable.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Reasons to Stay Alive

Posted April 23, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Cover of Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt HaigReasons to Stay Alive, Matt Haig

And it felt like a winter machine
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

And when I chose to live
There was no joy
It’s just a line I crossed
It wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found
–Dar Williams, ‘After All’

Reasons to Stay Alive is a sort of memoir, a sort of letter-to-self, a bit of a self-help book. It talks frankly about depression and anxiety, trying to put into words the sensations it can cause, the extent to which each is beyond simply feeling sad or worried. Most of the chapters are short; some seemed more useful than others. Some of it might help with understanding a loved one who has depression or anxiety, or any mental health issue, because Haig is a writer and knows how to communicate, and has been there feeling this. Some of it might be helpful in dealing with these kinds of feelings for yourself.

The thing I’ve found is that mostly, people with depression aren’t able to hear this sort of story. I certainly couldn’t. People could tell me until they were blue in the face that it could get better, that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, the fog would lift, etc, etc. I totally get the urge to share that understanding with people who don’t have it yet, but I’m not sure it works.

But if it does, even once, then it’s worth saying, so here’s my voice too: it can get better. No matter how scared or despairing or fucked up you feel, you can come back out of it. You’re never going to be the person you were before the depression, but you can be a new person who has learnt to cope with it, who has good times again.

I’ve been scared again, even desperately so, since I began to get better from my GAD. The important thing was that hard won knowledge that my brain was lying to me and it is possible to be okay again. I believe that for me, I believe that for Matt Haig, and I believe it for you, too, even when you can’t.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The State of the Art

Posted April 22, 2015 by in Reviews / 7 Comments

Cover of The State of the Art by Iain M. BanksThe State of the Art, Iain M. Banks

The State of the Art is a collection of short stories, some of which relate to the Culture novels and some of which don’t (or at least, don’t overtly). I actually wasn’t much impressed by Iain M. Banks as a short story writer, it seems: the best of the stories was the titular story itself, which is both a Culture story and rather longer than the other stories in the collection, which gave it more space to interest me, and more space for him to set up the kind of story that’s grabbed me in his novels.

There’s nothing wrong with the stories per se, but they didn’t grab me at all (with the exception of the one already mentioned and ‘A Gift from the Culture’). Where I was interested was when it was closest to Banks’ other SF work, but otherwise the stories seemed fairly unremarkable. There are some interesting bits of humour; wry looks at staples of the genre.

I’m hoping that’s not a reaction to Banks’ work in general, as I know I did enjoy several of his Culture novels and I was looking forward to reading the rest. Perhaps he just isn’t to my taste as a short story writer.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Ombria in Shadow

Posted April 21, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Ombria in Shadow by Patricia McKillipOmbria in Shadow, Patricia A. McKillip

I love all of McKillip’s work, as least so far. She can really manage enchantment: her Ombria is a strange world, decaying and bright, mysterious and intriguing. There’s a lot going on here: the magic behind Faey and her waxling, the magic behind Domina Pearl, Ducon’s father and Mag’s origins… And there’s characters you can’t help but care about: Kyel, so alone; Lydea, who loves him; Ducon, the bastard son with no designs upon the throne, who spends his time drawing, searching, learning the city and seeing it in ways others can’t. And the details, like Lydea’s bitten fingernails, the charcoal stains Ducon leaves on the bedsheets so everyone knows where he’s been sleeping and when.

And of course, the hidden passageways, the secrets, the two worlds side by side.

It cast its spell very quickly over me; McKillip writes beautifully, of course, and that itself is kind of mesmerising.

Towards the ending — perhaps the last twenty pages — I was less sure of what was going on. It might pull itself together more on a reread, I’m not sure, but I was left not quite knowing who knew what was happening, who understood what, why certain things changed and others didn’t (or if they didn’t change, but people acted like they had to make things easier). I have that feeling with McKillip’s work a lot, though, and it hasn’t deterred me from picking up more.

Rating: 4/5

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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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Review – Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts

Posted April 20, 2015 by in Reviews / 11 Comments

Cover of Hybrids of Plants and Of Ghosts by Jorie GrahamHybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Jorie Graham

A somewhat random choice from Blloon’s catalogue. Some of this poetry is lovely — some just didn’t make an impression on me, but there are some gorgeous images, ways of tilting the world askew and looking at it anew, haunting ones…

I think unfortunately my overall reaction is of ambivalence, but things stick in my head — “The starlings keep trying / to thread the eyes / of steeples.” And looking at other reviews, it sounds like this was a first collection, and that perhaps I should’ve come across Jorie Graham before. I might look for more of her work, mostly for the language rather than the content.

Rating: 3/5

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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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Review – Salt

Posted April 19, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Salt by Adam RobertsSalt, Adam Roberts

Salt is an interesting sort of book; it does have a plot, but really the central point is not the setting (the planet Salt) or background, though we do see that, but a clash between two different ideologies. Roberts handles it pretty cleverly: as soon as you find yourself sympathising with one side, they do something awful. The voices are clever, too — more Barlei than Petja, because he reveals who he is and his self-satisfied, propagandist agenda with every word. I could never quite sympathise with his side of things, given that. I didn’t really side with either of them: it seemed like such a typical case of two different ways of life clashing, with no one really trying to understand the other — with the very act of trying to understand the other even being part of the problem, because they were just so incompatible.

The only place the voice really fails for me is when Rhoda Titus takes over narrating. It feels like the story just trickles to a stop there; there’s no resolution. Now, maybe the story warrants none; maybe there is none. But when you’re writing a book you can’t just let it dribble into silence in this awkward way.

It’s a clever/interesting set-up, and well-written for the most part — some of the passages about the landscape of Salt are gorgeous, and the voice of President Barlei is perfect too (unless, uh, you’re meant to like him and not see right through him). Just failed to satisfy when it comes to the ending.

Rating: 3/5

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