Books

Hiatus breakage

It will probably surprise none of you that I’ve managed to soundly break my book hiatus the last few weeks. But that said, given recent family events slapping another pile of debt on top of us even aside from the required roof repairs, I will need to be returning to that hiatus. Let us, however, at least document what I’ve got here.

Picked up in print in recent weeks:

  • Tongues of Serpents, by userinfonaominovik. I’ve had this in ebook for a while and have done it a sore injustice by not reading it yet. That said, Temeraire is of course on my list of Stuff I Must Also Buy in Print. So since this one came out in mass market, I did!
  • The Snow Queen’s Shadow, by userinfojimhines. Book Four of his ongoing Princess series of fantasy novels.
  • Rebels and Lovers, by Linnea Sinclair. Romantic SF. Bought in paperback because I was vaguely cranky to discover that there’s not any real easy way I can get an iBook off the iPad onto the Nook (without going through Certain Channels), so I thought “screw it” and got the DRM-free paperback instead.
  • The Thirteenth House, Dark Moon Defender, and Reader and Raelynx, all by Sharon Shinn. Fantasy. Books 2-4 of her Gillengaria series, book 2 of which I’ve already read. Shinn is another author I’ve already got mostly in print, and I’m not inclined to give up her print books, so I got the paperbacks for consistency.
  • Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. Romantic suspense. Bought because B&N seduced me with a 15 percent off coupon, and because I’ve kept meaning to read du Maurier for a while now, and I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of The Scapegoat yet.
  • The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte, by Laura Joh Rowland. Mystery. Bought because seeing the recent movie adaptation of Jane Eyre put me in the mood, mostly, for a mystery featuring Jane’s author as the heroine. Yeah, I’m a sucker for those sorts of mysteries, what can I say. Also, because I’ve previously encountered this author thanks to her period mysteries set in feudal Japan, and the one of those I read was respectable. So checking here out here too.

And, picked up electronically:

  • The Hunt, by Jan Neuharth. Mystery, it looks like; this was this past Friday’s B&N freebie, so I yoinked it out of curiosity. It appears to be set around a foxhunting community, and there promises to be murder and horrible secrets coming out and such.
  • Lord of Scoundrels, by Loretta Chase. Romance. Grabbed this while it was on sale for .99, and because it’s highly spoken of by the ladies at Smart Bitches.
  • The Blue Light Project, by Timothy Taylor. Suspense, maybe. This was another B&N freebie, and focuses on a four-day hostage situation in the near future. Also, it’s set in Canada; Canada fiction FTW!
  • The Whisper of Leaves, by K.S. Nikakis. Fantasy. Saw this one in B&N, thought it looked interesting, and grabbed the ebook later.
  • Doctor Who: The Monsters Inside, by Stephen Cole. Just what it says on the tin: a Doctor Who novel. It’s a Nine/Rose one, which I’ve wanted to read for a while just because stories involving Nine are still fairly thin on the ground.
  • Doctor Who: Winner Takes All, by Jacqueline Rayner. Got this one since it’s another Nine/Rose story, and because I liked Rayner’s Ten/Rose story, The Stone Rose.

All of which brings me up to a good strong showing of 129 for the year.

July 9, 2011 by
About Me

I’m on Google+ now

If you’re there, feel free to look for me as “Angela Korra’ti” or via either of my gmail addresses. Thanks to both userinfosmarier and Tia Nevitt for inviting me, although Shawn’s invite got to me first.

Mind you, I didn’t really need a whole new social network to keep track of. And I’m pretty sure that at least for a while, this one will suffer the same problem that all the clones of LJ do, including Dreamwidth: i.e., that it won’t get really interesting unless there’s a critical mass of people that move to it. But hey, now I’m at least part of the initial wave. We’ll see what happens.

July 9, 2011 by
Music, The Murkworks

Dara at Cafe Venus/Mars Bar tomorrow night!

Hey, Seattle-based peeps! My belovedest userinfosolarbird, in her auspices of Crime and the Forces of Evil, will be doing her very first bar-type show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar tomorrow night! She will be playing along with Natalie Quist and Gimmie a Pigfoot, and I’ll be there to provide merch support.

(Yes, you heard that correctly, I will be in an actual bar on an actual Friday night. But with my belovedest performing, hey, it’s worth it!)

Music starts up at 9pm and there will be a $6 cover charge. There will also very likely be shenanigans, and definitely rage-driven acoustic elfmetal. You should all come listen, and furthermore, buy her album while you’re at it. And if you see me, say hi!

July 7, 2011 by
Book Log, Books

Book Log #8: Death Troopers, by Joe Schreiber

Death Troopers (Star Wars)

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Y’know how sometimes, even if you know the book is probably going to be mediocre at best and is even likely to outright suck, you kind of have to read it anyway? Death Troopers, a Star Wars novel by Joe Schreiber, was like that for me.

‘Cause, okay, yeah, Star Wars plus zombies.

I know, I know. But I’m still enough of a Star Wars fan, and definitely enough of a zombie fan, that I could not resist seeing how an author tried to get a zombie story into the Star Wars universe. Plus, given that I saw a spoiler about two of the main Star Wars characters getting grafted into this plot (and it will probably not be much of a stretch for anyone familiar with me to guess which characters would pull me in), well okay yeah fine I’m there.

Survey says: overall, meh. I had two main beefs with this story: one, that the aforementioned grafting of primary Star Wars characters into this plot had no real suspense to it, since you knew they were going to survive. The story’s set before A New Hope, so there wasn’t any doubt at all that these characters would make it. Two, that pretty much every other character is thinly sketched in at best. They’re all archetypes zombie fans have seen in countless stories elsewhere.

Although, that said, the two main characters grafted into the story are the exact right characters you’d want to graft in. And, I do have to give Schrieber props for making the one female in the plot, the prison ship’s doctor, halfway interesting.

Also, props have to be given for a reasonably creepy Star Wars-based zombie scenario. Our protagonists are on board a prison ship that comes across a seemingly abandoned Star Destroyer, which has gone adrift thanks to its crew being devastated by the unleashing of a potent virus that, of course, the Empire had been trying to develop as a weapon. A Star Destroyer IS pretty much perfect for a zombie scenario; it’s huge, and there are thousands of crewmembers at your disposal to turn into undead. Since this is Star Wars, you get the added amusement value of non-human zombies–and I must say, zombie Wookiees? Okay yeah. That’s disturbing. So are the moments with the doomed command staff of the Destroyer being discovered barricaded inside one of the shuttles, where they’ve been slowly starving to death.

And to be fair, I did actually like the ending. The Destroyer zombies start exhibiting creepier behavior (I shan’t specify what, because spoilers), and the surviving protagonists (well, aside from the aforementioned two main characters who we knew were going to survive anyway) go out on a respectably gritty note.

I gave this two stars originally, but I’m bumping up to three ’cause yeah, there was some decent creepiness here.

July 7, 2011 by
Book Log, Books

Book Log #7: The Spurned Viscountess, by Shelley Munro

The Spurned Viscountess

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love me some Gothic romance, and Shelley Munro’s The Spurned Viscountess is certainly that, with all the right elements to yoink me right in. We have your innocent young woman with strange abilities. We have your nobleman with a mysterious secret, getting his brood on. We have your string of mysterious accidents. And we have your suitably spooky, remote mansion, chock full of potentially dangerous people. For bonus Get Anna Engaged mileage, we’ve even got a bit of an amnesia plot going on, since our hero has memory issues on top of his angst about the murder of his first love.

The atmosphere worked for me, and I found Munro’s prose solidly executed. I’m partial to healers as characters, which inclined me to like Rosalind as a heroine, though I liked her best when she expressed worry over the fate of her lost maid; she seemed a stronger character there than she did even in her interactions with hero Lucien. The mystery of what happened to Lucien and Rosalind in Europe provided a reasonable backbone for the plot, although it never really gelled for me until the very end.

Overall I liked this one well enough, definitely enough to read it through to the end, even if it never quite managed to be more than the sum of its parts. Three stars.

July 7, 2011 by
Writing Group

Hopefully, a kick in the pants

I have joined my very first official writing group, consisting of myself, Alex Piper, Jemma Prophet, userinfojennygriffee, and the redoubtable Vonda McIntyre. We are calling ourselves Imaginary Ink, and we just had our first official critique meeting last night, discussing Jemma’s and Jenny’s works in progress.

I’m feeling excited about this, since I really need a kick in the pants to get myself back on track. Lament of the Dove has GOT to be finished. And I need to get going on doing proper edits on Queen of Souls, so that I can start shopping that thing around.

So in fact, I shall be flinging QoS at the group for critique for our next meeting, and shall be working in the meantime to get Lament‘s edits done before then so that they can sanity check it for me before I fling it back to Carina. With that in mind, I shall be holing up for a good chunk of this forthcoming three-day weekend, doing battle with as many chapters as I can finish. I won’t be paying attention to Twitter or Facebook, but I will keep an eye on email. Anybody have a reason to ping me, just fling me a note!

And wish us all luck, folks. We’ve got some awesome works between us and we’re looking forward to sharing them with the world.

June 29, 2011 by
Other People's Books, Writing

Two lovely QOTDs for my fellow writers and readers

From this post by The Rejectionist:

Underneath everything, underneath the machinations of the industry and the terrible dance of agent-getting and submissions, underneath the despair and joy and wild mood swings, underneath the misery and extraordinary grace of trying to make art–underneath it all, we just want to sit together and tell stories.

Meanwhile, over on John Scalzi’s Whatever, today’s Big Idea post for Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey gives you this bit of YES:

Writing genre fiction is undignified. Reading genre fiction is undignified. If we’re going to do this, it should be joyful. We should create a little literary pocket universe where we can shuck off the irony and defensiveness and care about these imaginary people, and weep for them, feel awe when they’re awed, triumph with them when they win, and grieve with them when they fail. If there is any sense of wonder to be had, it’s there. Wonder is what we come here for.

THIS. THIS SO MUCH. That bit of that post alone has convinced me to go get that book.

June 16, 2011 by