Something a little different this week: after finishing Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, I'm pivoting hard to The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean. I didn't love Tales of the City, and I think a large part of that had to do with Maupin's narration: for me, his North Carolina accent didn't translate well to a character driven story set in 1970s San Francisco. Hoping the next book will taste better (pun intended). 😂
No idea how this amazing trilogy have eluded me for 2 decades!
"The best epic fantasy book I have read in a while. Tons of names, tribes, nations, cities, countries, factions, individuals clash in a massive once-in-a-millennium undertaking. What more does a bookworm need? Simply top-shelf stuff, imho. "
The #JaneAusten Literacy Foundation is asking the public to vote on the short story compeition! There are three finalists. Voting ends at midnight GMT (7 pm EST) in EIGHT DAYS (June 21)!
Hi there, @bookstodon , what are you reading these days? I'm half-way through Normal Rules don't Apply, Kate Atkinson, and it's really good! (a collection of interconnected short stories) Deliciously ominous, with unexplained deaths and weird job interview / date questions. "If you were a (sandwich / vegetable / disease), which would you be?" #amreading#bookstodon#shortfiction#stories
I've finished the third and fourth entries of the saga.
In "The Farthest Shore" the magic is running out of the world; Ged and the prince of Enlad part in an adventure to find out what the problem is. It's a book full of adventure, visiting many Islands in the archipelago.
In contrast, "Tehanu" has a slower pace. It's a fantasy novel in which dragons and magic are not in the foreground. It answers the question How does the dispossessed, children, women, handicapped, live in a world with magic? And doing so makes you think about the power relations in the so called real world.
If you’re a fan of podcasts, there are over dozen of them dedicated to #JaneAusten and the Brontes! If I’m missing any, let me know so I can update the list!
I'm trying to read This Is How You Lose The Time War, but I'm struggling to understand what is going on, and I'm not sure if it gets better. It feels like a dense read. I heard so much about it, but perhaps I'm too impatient?
Hey, wanna win a hardcover copy of A MISFORTUNE OF LAKE MONSTERS? Brandie June, author of Goldspun & Curse Undone, interviewed me & there's a giveaway! Go enter here: https://gleam.io/t2rHM/nicole-m-wolverton
Hey, it involves something I describe as smelling like unwashed bare feet that have been running through a forest for about two weeks in the middle of summer...and which I would willingly eat.
Was up very VERY late reading Gods of the Wyrdwood by RJ Barker. MC is a combination of Legolas and Gabriel Oak but with loads of magical power that he tries hard not to use. 🌳 #fantasy#AmReading @mastodonbooks@bookstodon
Dang, y'all, I know I'm late to the party, but in case anyone else is even later than me, @vajra 's Saint of Bright Doors is ASTONISHINGLY GOOD.
Or, at least, the first half is. I presume the second half is too, but I haven't finished it yet. It has definitely shot to the top of my Hugo best novel ranking. (One more to read!)
As I noted right here in this feed, this past Saturday was Towel Day. That inspired me to check out The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy from the library to re-read it for the first time since 2000. It still holds up! What a delightful classic.
Also worth noting: Douglas Adams basically described an e-reader device almost 30 years before Kindle came on the market.
A sumptuous, mature sequel. Griffith creates well-drawn characters who feel real but sometimes hold startlingly alien values, appropriate to the era. There are some gorgeous passages about the natural world, spirituality, and grief.
This one had a tad too much war and battle strategy for my taste, but it's interesting to see Griffith try to reverse engineer an explanation for a pretty unexplainable historical event.
I loved many things about this book: the prose, both major settings, some of the characters, the themes. But it was somehow less than the sum of its parts for me.
My two biggest complaints are my personal pet peeves in modern lit fic: a series of serendipitously interlocking stories where all the characters are magically related to each other, and the refusal to use quotation marks to indicate dialogue.