Browsing Tag

sherlock holmes

Books, Other People's Books

Opening 2019 book roundup, with bonus extra 2018

It will probably surprise none of you that I didn’t get too far into 2019 without getting more new books. 😀

Ebooks

This is technically a book I bought at Orycon, but I didn’t actually go download it off the publisher site until this month. So I’m counting this as a 2019 acquisition: Soul Born, by Kevin James Breaux. This is a fantasy novel put out by Azure Spider Publications, who had a table at Orycon right near the one I was sharing with fellow NIWA members Madison Keller and Jeffrey Cook. I liked the look of the cover, and had a pleasant chat with the lady at the table. So I bought a download code for the book!

A Princess in Theory

A Princess in Theory

Meanwhile, acquired from Kobo, because both of them were on sale for $1.99 at the time:

A Princess in Theory, by Alyssa Cole. I don’t normally buy contemporary romance. But Alyssa Cole has been on the Smart Bitches podcast a couple of times, and she’s delightful. Plus, a) I liked the previous thing of hers I read, An Extraordinary Union, and b) the cover on this title is beautiful. I really like how it’s dynamic and romantic without having to rely upon either person being scantily clad.

Plus, the color scheme stands out to my eye as well. Cole even talked about that on the podcast, and about how the heroine’s dress and the hero’s tie were both patterns she came up with herself, inspired by traditional African ones.

And since she’s an author of color I am happy to explore more of her work!

And #2: no lie, I will totally be reading this thing and mentally casting Chadwick Boseman as the hero. 😉

A Study in Honor, by Claire O’Dell. This one is SF, and came across my radar last year as a new Sherlock Holmes pastiche. The thing here is, the Sherlock and Watson analogues here are both black, queer women. Which strikes me as rather awesome. I’ll be intrigued to see how the author handles keeping core recognizable “Sherlock” and “Watson” characteristics while diverging so hugely from the original characters, as well as so blatantly different a setting. I.e., a futuristic SF dystopia.

Print Books

This actually was a book I acquired in 2018, but which I never mentioned: Cracking the Coding Interview. I ordered this from Amazon last month because I need it for job hunting purposes. And I’ve started slowly working my way through it. It came highly recommended to me by one of my former Big Fish teammates, and so far, a few exercises in, I’m already finding it valuable.

And, since my household always does a gift exchange when Paul returns from Virginia, this also counts as a 2018 acquisition: the hardback edition of The Fall of Gondolin! Which I’ve already read in ebook form, but which I also wanted in hardback.

This bumps my 2018 total up to 59. And so far for 2019, we’re at 3!

Other People's Books

Sudden ebook binge roundup post

The Seafarer's Kiss

The Seafarer’s Kiss

I went on a bit of an ebook buying binge on Kobo, because every so often I just gotta, y’know?

Here’s what I got:

  • The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker. Fantasy. Grabbed this because it was on sale, and because I’d heard quite a few good things about it when it came out. It seems like an unusual premise and I am here for that!
  • It’s a regular C.E. Murphy marathon, because as y’all know, I do love me some Kitbooks. She’s just released an honest-to-god romance novel, Bewitching Benedict, which I nabbed because “historical romance” does fall into the narrow category of “romance I like to read”. But I also went back and got her Roses in Amber, which is her take on Beauty and the Beast, and Take a Chance, her superhero graphic novel.
  • Stars of Fortune, by Nora Roberts. Paranormal romance, book 1 of her Guardians trilogy. I don’t quite like Nora’s paranormals (or, “ParaNoras”, as the Smart Bitches site likes to call them) as much as I like her standalone romantic suspense or the J.D. Robbs. But I do occasionally like ’em for potato-chip type reading, and hey, I haven’t read this one yet. Plus, I saw it mentioned on this recent post on the Bitchery, and thought okay yeah sure, that might be some silly fun.
  • Acadie, by Dave Hutchinson. SF. Nabbed this newly released novella from Tor.com entirely because of the title, and because I am curious as to how big a parallel it’ll have to Acadian history in real life.
  • The Seafarer’s Kiss, by Julia Ember. YA fantasy romance. Nabbed this on the strength of this review on the Bitchery, because if you say the words “f/f retelling of The Little Mermaid wherein the little mermaid falls in love with a Viking shield maiden” to me, the words I’ll be saying in reply are “GET THIS INTO MY LIBRARY STAT”.
  • Final Girls, by Mira Grant. Horror. Because “new horror novella by Mira Grant”, you say? Why yes I WILL have some.
  • And last but not least, A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas. Mystery. Nabbed this because while I’d already heard about it and had half an eye on it on the strength of buzz about “genderbent Sherlock Holmes”, I finally caught up on a Smart Podcast Trashy Books episode in which the author is interviewed. And I would totally not have guessed by a pen name like “Sherry Thomas” that the author is ethnically Chinese–and when she described how her writing style sometimes incorporates anglicized versions of idioms from Chinese, the language nerd in me just had to see what her style is like. Plus, genderbent Sherlock Holmes. SIGN ME UP.

Alert readers may note that that’s three, count ’em, three different books that are on this list specifically because of the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books. They ARE a huge influence on my reading, it’s true! (Duking it out recently a lot with Tor.com, in fact.)

33 titles now for the year.

About Me, Movies, Television

And now, a holiday review!

I’m coming off a nice long vacation, thanks to my workplace having given the entire lot of us the week of Christmas off. This was as the cool kids say AWESOME, given that it meant that and I were able to have Longest Night without me having to take an extra day off for that. And that was a nice way indeed to fire off a relaxing break.

The weekend of the Solstice was pretty much given over to, aside from a special Solstice Murkjam (more on this in another post), a mighty rewatching of the entire extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are few movies I can happily watch over and over again, but these? Absolutely. Especially when Dara starts asking me questions about Middle-Earth lore and we get to Tolkiengeek. <3 Plus, this time around I started finally watching a lot of the copious extras in all three sets of discs, which I had never done despite owning these things for years now. I'm sure you all know by now, but yeah, lots of lovely stuff there and I've only barely scratched the surface of it all.

Did a lot of catchup of medical appointments during the week, and the highlight of that was getting to touch bases with both my endocs and say "by the way, I'm working on seriously trying to lose weight, just so you all know". In particular, wanted to check with the thyroid endoc to make sure I coordinate with him about how to reduce my T4 and T3 dosage as I drop pounds. I've already had to start tweaking my intake since I've dropped six pounds or so.

I dropped in on to say hi in between some of those aforementioned medical appointments, and was treated to tea and a cookie and her delightful offspring informing us, when asked where her dump truck was, “it could be ANYWHERE!” Lillian continues to impress me with her smarts. This kid is going to be scary when she gets older. Hell, she’s kind of scary now!

Christmas itself was pleasantly low-key and featured first going out with to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Picoreview: big silly fun if you can buy that this was totally a fluffy, alternate-universe version of Holmes and Watson that didn’t bear too much resemblance to the canon versions. I did like many get a kick out of the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, and felt that poor Mary was sadly underused as a character, and that the actress playing Irene wasn’t quite up to the task of her own character’s awesomeness. But really, the thing I liked the most about the movie? The music. Especially the jigs during the action scenes and the take of “Rocky Road to Dublin”. I may have to buy the soundtrack on the strength of that alone.

Christmas evening, , , and all had dinner with us at the Murk and then we all watched the new Doctor Who, “The End of Time, Part 1”. Most definitely more on this in another post. There are rumblings of another group watch of Part 2 to come.

I closed out this past weekend with going, finally, with Dara to see 2012 before it finally vanishes out of the local theaters. We wound up having to catch it at the Alderwood Mall cinema, which was really kinda crazytalk since the place was swarming with after-Christmas shoppers and getting from our parking spot to the theater was a nerve-wracking exercise in dodging oncoming traffic. But we did manage to get there on time, and once we were actually settled in, despite being too close to the screen for comfort, we had a delightful time. I’m sure many of you already know this by now too, but yeah, this movie was awesomely bad. We’re talking epic levels of MSTable disaster pr0n, which is pretty much exactly what we were there for. Mutating neutrinos, baby!

Didn’t get a damn bit of writing or reading done, but on the whole, I didn’t really mind. I’ve been catching up on fixing broken stuff on this web site instead, and that sits well with me, since the long-undone tasks there were annoying me, and I found fixing those relaxing. I assure you all though that more writing and reading will be coming with the New Year.

And oh yes: with coming home from Virginia on Sunday, we had our little house gift exchange. My nifty l00t: one box of Ninth Doctor DVDs (man, I do love Nine and Rose, I must say), one lovely tin of bath bombs from LUSH, one $50 Barnes and Noble gift card which I promptly spent on five new ebooks, and last but not least, this, which is pretty much the Best Possible Christmas Ornament to Give to Anna, Ever:

Indy Ornament

Carefully, Indy

There’s a button on it that plays the Raiders March when you press it. knows me very, very well. <3