I've been reading the Fat Cyclist blog for a long time now - it's one of the really appealing and well-written big endurance sport blogs (and "Fatty" a.k.a. Elden was instigator of the 100 miles of nowhere insanity). It is a funny and wide-ranging blog that began in part because Elden's wife Susan was battling advanced metastatic cancer; as well as chronicling endurance sport as coping strategy, the blog's raison d'etre includes fund-raising for cancer-related causes.
Susan died some years ago just before completing a novel that Elden has now published. I was keen to read it anyway out of a sense of loyalty (buying an author's book is good, but reading it is perhaps as much or more appreciated?), and I'm also happy to report that it's a really lovely young-adult urban fantasy novel of a sort I particularly enjoy. It reminded me a little of Robin McKinley's Sunshine, a book I have read at least half-a-dozen times, but it's also fresh and original in terms of voice, storytelling and worldbuilding; if you like that kind of book as much as I do, then consider purchasing a copy of Susan Nelson's The Forgotten Gift for yourself.
Showing posts with label urban fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban fantasy. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
Catch-up
Tomorrow I am going to a big birthday blowout to celebrate G.'s 90th! His loft is the perfect place for a party, and it's going to feature a lavishly catered buffet, a live jazz band and possibly close to a hundred guests (shooting for eighty, but these things tend to escalate!). And tonight I am having a party at the opposite end of the scale, a Like a Fiery Elephant party for my fall-semester graduate students (we missed a seminar meeting due to Hurricane Sandy, and this was the book that got the axe - I promised I'd have them over at a later date to make up the missed conversation, and the day has now come). I scurried around this morning making preparations, and still need to tidy up, stow surplus triathlon equipment and get drinks in the fridge, but unlike tomorrow's party, this is a celebration of devastating simplicity: pizzas to be delivered at 7:45, wine, beer and a couple bags of half-price day-after-Valentine's candy to supplement the baked goods one student has offered to bring!
Light reading around the edges: an unusual novel by Stina Leicht, Of Blood and Honey. I loved it: particularly recommended to those with an interest in how urban fantasy elements can be hybridized with unexpected other genres. A brutal and amazing book!
Light reading around the edges: an unusual novel by Stina Leicht, Of Blood and Honey. I loved it: particularly recommended to those with an interest in how urban fantasy elements can be hybridized with unexpected other genres. A brutal and amazing book!
Monday, November 14, 2011
"Tickling, Vociferating, Diving"
Post title from The Dunciad, selected early this morning - only I got too busy to actually write a post! It is a good sequence of words, though....
Light reading from the end of last week: Richard Kadrey's latest Sandman Slim novel, Aloha From Hell (great voice, but feels a bit undermotivated in terms of plot and purpose); and Amy Waldman's The Submission. I could criticize many things about this one, but that would be to ignore the fact that I started reading it as the plane taxied to takeoff (it was my non-Kindle book, and I expected to put it aside once the pilot gave the OK on electronic devices - the trick with these things is to choose something not so gripping that one can't have it for the landing also, i.e. that can be read in 15-minute stints over a couple of flights!) and couldn't put it down. I finished reading pretty much exactly as the plane touched down at JFK (it's about a 3.5hr flight). Highly immersive, despite some shallowness in the portraiture and occasional awkwardness in the writing.
Light reading from the end of last week: Richard Kadrey's latest Sandman Slim novel, Aloha From Hell (great voice, but feels a bit undermotivated in terms of plot and purpose); and Amy Waldman's The Submission. I could criticize many things about this one, but that would be to ignore the fact that I started reading it as the plane taxied to takeoff (it was my non-Kindle book, and I expected to put it aside once the pilot gave the OK on electronic devices - the trick with these things is to choose something not so gripping that one can't have it for the landing also, i.e. that can be read in 15-minute stints over a couple of flights!) and couldn't put it down. I finished reading pretty much exactly as the plane touched down at JFK (it's about a 3.5hr flight). Highly immersive, despite some shallowness in the portraiture and occasional awkwardness in the writing.
Monday, September 05, 2011
Light reading catch-up
Plane fare: Eric Nylund's Mortal Coils (good of its kind, and a kind I have traditionally liked quite a bit, but I am swearing off eschatological fantasy for a while, the vein has been too deeply mined!); first volume of Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy, about which more anon when I have finished it all (the prose is excellent, setting too, but sometimes hard to tell one character from another, that's my only complaint).
Found an amazing stash of stuff waiting for me at home. Seized upon Elisabeth Townsend's Lobster: A Global History, which has a most beautiful cover and also an alluring name but which did not quite live up to my expectations (it is good for what it is, but it is a serious little book about the history of lobster-eating, not a strange and postmodern Sebaldian exercise as I had fantasized - that said, the bits on lobster nomenclature I found highly worthwhile [scrubs, shorts, etc.!], and also the pictures of the 'hotels for lobsters' where the live creatures are stored before they are brought to market). Then devoured 'Jane Emerson''s City of Diamond, perhaps not quite as immediately delightful as the same author's Ivory trilogy but only because the material is rather darker - still the same great gifts of storytelling and characterization. It is silly to say anyone is a natural anything if one does not know their history and background, for all I know this craft was carefully honed over many years, but I do not know that I can think off the top of my head of any novelist I've encountered with greater natural storytelling gifts than Doris Egan: it makes sense to me, alas, that she has found it better worth her while to work in television!
A host of other treasures await, but school starts tomorrow and I will definitely start to be busy again - I don't actually teach until next Monday, due to an oddity of schedule, but I need to write the letters of recommendation I was already saying I had to write last week, and finalize my syllabi and check on course book orders, and have some meetings with grad students, etc. etc. I'm doing a big race on Sunday (course was significantly affected by Irene, and has been altered and to some extent curtailed, but as I am very undertrained I am not complaining). It is good, I like it best when I face a long and varied to-do list!
Found an amazing stash of stuff waiting for me at home. Seized upon Elisabeth Townsend's Lobster: A Global History, which has a most beautiful cover and also an alluring name but which did not quite live up to my expectations (it is good for what it is, but it is a serious little book about the history of lobster-eating, not a strange and postmodern Sebaldian exercise as I had fantasized - that said, the bits on lobster nomenclature I found highly worthwhile [scrubs, shorts, etc.!], and also the pictures of the 'hotels for lobsters' where the live creatures are stored before they are brought to market). Then devoured 'Jane Emerson''s City of Diamond, perhaps not quite as immediately delightful as the same author's Ivory trilogy but only because the material is rather darker - still the same great gifts of storytelling and characterization. It is silly to say anyone is a natural anything if one does not know their history and background, for all I know this craft was carefully honed over many years, but I do not know that I can think off the top of my head of any novelist I've encountered with greater natural storytelling gifts than Doris Egan: it makes sense to me, alas, that she has found it better worth her while to work in television!
A host of other treasures await, but school starts tomorrow and I will definitely start to be busy again - I don't actually teach until next Monday, due to an oddity of schedule, but I need to write the letters of recommendation I was already saying I had to write last week, and finalize my syllabi and check on course book orders, and have some meetings with grad students, etc. etc. I'm doing a big race on Sunday (course was significantly affected by Irene, and has been altered and to some extent curtailed, but as I am very undertrained I am not complaining). It is good, I like it best when I face a long and varied to-do list!
Friday, May 20, 2011
Light reading catch-up
Very, very grumpy about the traditional end-of-semester cold which is ruining my training week and preventing me from doing the race I was looking forward to tomorrow. Nothing to be done about it but wait for it to go away and try not to go too crazy in the meantime. Am pursuing insomnia treatment options as it seems clear that almost everything bad in my life can be attributed to insufficient sleep!
Last week I raced through four novels that were so much my perfect kind of light reading that I now can't seem to find anything else quite right: Seanan McGuire's October Daye novels. I think I had heard of them and previously avoided on grounds of cutesy name, but once I'd read and loved her pseudonymous Feed it seemed an obvious next thing to get and read. They are great - better than even the very best early before-it-all-devolved-into-erotica Anita Blake books, and certainly far better than anything Laurell K. Hamilton ended up doing with her "faerie" series - highly recommended to the reader of urban fantasy.
Then I tried one more novel by Sophie Hannah, The Truth-Teller's Lie, but that's it for me, no more Sophie Hannah novels, they are too full of absolutely preposterous things!
Mined the Theakstons Old Peculiar crime fiction award longlist for some new fodder. I have read a number of them already, and some others are annoyingly not available in the US yet, but I thought Belinda Bauer's Blacklands was superb and S. J. Bolton's Blood Harvest really very good too, though not perhaps as unusual as Bauer's.
Since the only thing I really feel well enough to do is lie in bed with a novel, I will now go and see what else I can find for my Kindle. Recommendations will be taken in the comments!
Last week I raced through four novels that were so much my perfect kind of light reading that I now can't seem to find anything else quite right: Seanan McGuire's October Daye novels. I think I had heard of them and previously avoided on grounds of cutesy name, but once I'd read and loved her pseudonymous Feed it seemed an obvious next thing to get and read. They are great - better than even the very best early before-it-all-devolved-into-erotica Anita Blake books, and certainly far better than anything Laurell K. Hamilton ended up doing with her "faerie" series - highly recommended to the reader of urban fantasy.
Then I tried one more novel by Sophie Hannah, The Truth-Teller's Lie, but that's it for me, no more Sophie Hannah novels, they are too full of absolutely preposterous things!
Mined the Theakstons Old Peculiar crime fiction award longlist for some new fodder. I have read a number of them already, and some others are annoyingly not available in the US yet, but I thought Belinda Bauer's Blacklands was superb and S. J. Bolton's Blood Harvest really very good too, though not perhaps as unusual as Bauer's.
Since the only thing I really feel well enough to do is lie in bed with a novel, I will now go and see what else I can find for my Kindle. Recommendations will be taken in the comments!
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