Changes by Jim Butcher
Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente
Soon to read:
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like
Wise Man's Fear
Patient Zero
Saturday, December 11, 2010
dear Amazon.com.
I love you so much. I placed an order for five books on Thursday and got it before 24 hrs was up on Friday. They're all personal-books, but two of them are necessary for before one of the books I'm reviewing in the new year, so you're pretty much awesome. Especially at this time of year.
Love, me
Love, me
in-reading notes: palimpsest
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3973532-palimpsest
So far, it's beautiful and confusing and complex and both real and utterly unreal, like a dream and the real world crashing into each other because they're in love.
12-11-10:
This book is distractingly gorgeous. I want to blow through it and absorb it whole, but in certain sections, every page has such beautiful language that I keep having to stop to write it down so I won't forget it, and the lines strung together sound like poetry. It's fantastically absorbing, incredibly involving, and at the same time, impossible to read quickly, so it's probably going to go on hold again until after the next few books that I'm required to read.
None of this is at all a bad thing, I just don't have the schedule for leisurely reading any more-- I've become a book-eating monster who gobbles them up in a few big bites over the course of a few days, and this one just refuses to be taken that way.
(from my Goodreads pages)
So far, it's beautiful and confusing and complex and both real and utterly unreal, like a dream and the real world crashing into each other because they're in love.
12-11-10:
This book is distractingly gorgeous. I want to blow through it and absorb it whole, but in certain sections, every page has such beautiful language that I keep having to stop to write it down so I won't forget it, and the lines strung together sound like poetry. It's fantastically absorbing, incredibly involving, and at the same time, impossible to read quickly, so it's probably going to go on hold again until after the next few books that I'm required to read.
None of this is at all a bad thing, I just don't have the schedule for leisurely reading any more-- I've become a book-eating monster who gobbles them up in a few big bites over the course of a few days, and this one just refuses to be taken that way.
(from my Goodreads pages)
review: clockwork angel by cassandra clare
Clockwork Angel by Cassandra ClareMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
So far, every bit as beautiful and absorbing as her other books! I just wish I had the time to sink right in and not come up until it's done!
12-22-10:
SPOILER WARNING!
In the end, it was very much a first novel (in a series if not her's), and there was a sense that Cassie was trying to find her voice in a Voctorian world, which led to making parts of the book sort of stilted and strange. I think the love story suffered a little from not getting inside Wil's head nearly enough (it was much more organic with Jem). The plot couldn't quite decide if it was about Tessa's brother or about Mortmain, and how they fit together. Sometimes it seems like the story wants to go somewhere that the established history can't manage to allow, and has to be forced back-- and that always leads to awkwardness.
But you know what? For all that, I loved it. As soon as I had time, I devoured it, and it made me want to live in the ugly, deadly, dirty London of Victorian times, made me froth at the mouth a little bit at the thought of having to wait for the next one.
I expected it to be a little tighter because the Mortal Instruments series was so fantastic right off the bat, but there is nothing here that can't be explained away. The next book will likely be stronger for all the problems in this one being worked through, and now that the world is established, it's ready to go-- hopefully completely off the rails. And I love the idea that Valentine isn't the first one to start manipulating things he shouldn't have had control over. Maybe there were more before him, too, a whole line of wack-jobs he could draw on for his own purposes, and maybe all of them have stories like this to be told.
The book is beautiful, often charming, has all that wit and cleverness that we all have come to love from Cassie Clare, and really, I think, the problems all stem from figuring out how to put that wit and charm and *nowness* into something as alien as the Victorian era.
View all my reviews
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
the Recent Works of SF and F reading in the genre books list
Storm Front, Jim Butcher
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow (free in ibooks)
The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
Blindsight, Peter Watts
I've read Storm Front, but that was, like, eleven books ago and it'll be nice to read it again. I wanted to read Boneshaker anyway, and I've read another of Fforde's books and liked it. So overall, I think this is a good list!
Let's see what Kindle has for me... Kindle has all of them! All at roughly 10$, so a total of roughly 70$, which is 30$ cheaper than this term's RitG. I'll see what I can do about getting them through other / cheaper means, too, but this is pretty manageable as far as school books go, and I already have the All Read book for the res.
Sweet.
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow (free in ibooks)
The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
Blindsight, Peter Watts
I've read Storm Front, but that was, like, eleven books ago and it'll be nice to read it again. I wanted to read Boneshaker anyway, and I've read another of Fforde's books and liked it. So overall, I think this is a good list!
Let's see what Kindle has for me... Kindle has all of them! All at roughly 10$, so a total of roughly 70$, which is 30$ cheaper than this term's RitG. I'll see what I can do about getting them through other / cheaper means, too, but this is pretty manageable as far as school books go, and I already have the All Read book for the res.
Sweet.
reading meme
My total: 41
Of them, 24 were for school and 23 were for myself, which I think is a pretty good balance.
Also, though, I think Hamlet is included in the Complete Works and Lion, Witch, Wardrobe is included in the Chronicles, so I've actually read, according to the list, either 39 or something like two or three hundred. And I didn't count Lord of the Rings since I didn't finish it, or His Dark Materials, or the ones I have and haven't read yet, or the ones I claimed to have read for school and actually cliffs-noted. Because an English Major mostly teaches you how to BS.
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety and, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (I've read one whole one and parts of the other two...)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (one of my favorite books, even with all the impenetrable Yorkshire)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (started this one and just couldn't do it. He comes across as so... condescending. If he doesn't care about his characters, why should I?)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (the actual and the condensed classics)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hard13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, most of them...)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (don't remember much; it wasn't life-changing for me, apparently)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (I was supposed to...)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (are there still people who haven't read this? really? I read it when I was 9, and again every year until I was, like, 16)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (loved it, in all it's confusing glory)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving (did not like)
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (and all of the rest of the series)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (Parts)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (I know I had to read this at some point in the UK school system, but I don't remember if I finished it)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (one of my favs of classic kidlit)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (love me some Bill Bryson)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (on the shelf)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt (makes me want to be a full-time academic)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (I have this on my shelf, but I haven't read it yet)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (this was the first book with more than ten pages I ever read!)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (in the Kindle)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Of them, 24 were for school and 23 were for myself, which I think is a pretty good balance.
Also, though, I think Hamlet is included in the Complete Works and Lion, Witch, Wardrobe is included in the Chronicles, so I've actually read, according to the list, either 39 or something like two or three hundred. And I didn't count Lord of the Rings since I didn't finish it, or His Dark Materials, or the ones I have and haven't read yet, or the ones I claimed to have read for school and actually cliffs-noted. Because an English Major mostly teaches you how to BS.
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety and, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (I've read one whole one and parts of the other two...)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (one of my favorite books, even with all the impenetrable Yorkshire)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (started this one and just couldn't do it. He comes across as so... condescending. If he doesn't care about his characters, why should I?)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (the actual and the condensed classics)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hard13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, most of them...)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (don't remember much; it wasn't life-changing for me, apparently)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (I was supposed to...)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (are there still people who haven't read this? really? I read it when I was 9, and again every year until I was, like, 16)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (loved it, in all it's confusing glory)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving (did not like)
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (and all of the rest of the series)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (Parts)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (I know I had to read this at some point in the UK school system, but I don't remember if I finished it)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (one of my favs of classic kidlit)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (love me some Bill Bryson)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (on the shelf)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt (makes me want to be a full-time academic)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (I have this on my shelf, but I haven't read it yet)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (this was the first book with more than ten pages I ever read!)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (in the Kindle)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Currently reading
Just finished Hard Love moments ago. A study in making an asshole relatable.
Still have to finish Clockwork Angel.
Just received ADiscovery of Wiches and I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like for review.
In about a month, I'll have the list of the year's reading.
Still have to finish Clockwork Angel.
Just received ADiscovery of Wiches and I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like for review.
In about a month, I'll have the list of the year's reading.
Monday, November 8, 2010
review: how to write science fiction and fantasy by orson scott card
I don't usually read craft books. I love language, but for some reason, books about how it works just bore the brain right out of my head. But I needed one for school and I'd read some of Card's stuff before, so I thought, this is as good as any, right?
It was. I'm so glad I wasn't disappointed. There aren't as many books specifically for sf / f writing as there are for writing in general, and I wanted to read one of them first, and this was a good choice. It's a little outdated, at least in the copy that I have, but it's clear, conversational, helpful, and it goes over a lot of the specific problems, shorfalls, common mistakes and details that a person writing genre has to think about.
Recommended.
It was. I'm so glad I wasn't disappointed. There aren't as many books specifically for sf / f writing as there are for writing in general, and I wanted to read one of them first, and this was a good choice. It's a little outdated, at least in the copy that I have, but it's clear, conversational, helpful, and it goes over a lot of the specific problems, shorfalls, common mistakes and details that a person writing genre has to think about.
Recommended.
link: Best Books of 2010
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/awards-and-prizes/article/45070-best-books-of-2010.html
I haven't read any of these, even with all the books I've read, but at least a few of them sound like they'd be interesting, and sometimes I feel the need to read something other than deep genre, you know?
I haven't read any of these, even with all the books I've read, but at least a few of them sound like they'd be interesting, and sometimes I feel the need to read something other than deep genre, you know?
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
I got this book because I'm sort of a sucker for the off-beat diet books, but this one is actually really smart. Not long, not complicated, but written by someone almost entirely outside the food / diet industry and loaded with facts about the basic things that influence how we eat: plates are bigger so servings have gotten bigger, and the real thing we need to do is relearn how to see what a real serving looks like and put it on a decent-sized plate to get out brains to think it looks like a real meal and not a skimpy mess.
Brilliant.
The only thing I found wrong with it is that there's not a single mention of seconds and slowing down your eating-- you should definitely eat smaller portions, but you also shouldn't eat three platefulls of them, and you should eat slow enough that while your brain is telling you you've had enough, your stomach has time to agree so you don't keep eating forever, despite the smaller plate size. It's the freest and most reasonable "diet" I've ever seen. And it's mostly about how culture has messed up all the comparisons, not at all about how food has gotten worse for us (even though it has) or how we all have become weak and stupid (which we probably haven't, mostly).
Highly recommended.
Brilliant.
The only thing I found wrong with it is that there's not a single mention of seconds and slowing down your eating-- you should definitely eat smaller portions, but you also shouldn't eat three platefulls of them, and you should eat slow enough that while your brain is telling you you've had enough, your stomach has time to agree so you don't keep eating forever, despite the smaller plate size. It's the freest and most reasonable "diet" I've ever seen. And it's mostly about how culture has messed up all the comparisons, not at all about how food has gotten worse for us (even though it has) or how we all have become weak and stupid (which we probably haven't, mostly).
Highly recommended.
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