Scales and Tales

I'm currently reading not one but two steampunk novels: Natasha Pulley's The Lost Future of Pepperharrow and Priest's Stars of Chaos (Sha Po Lang).

Steampunk is a genre that I want to like more than I do; in fact, the only steampunk novel I've read that I truly enjoyed enough to buy a copy is Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Here's hoping these two can be added to that very short list!

I keep meaning to post about rereading the Foreigner series, and instead I keep rereading. I'm moving so fast through things that I hardly remember what happened in each book! Oops. Here's some notes on what I remember of my reactions to the first two.

( Thoughts on Foreigner )


( Thoughts on Invader )

WorldCon completed! Hugo Awards watched! Home again with cats!

The awards were enjoyable for the most part ("five million years," hahaha!) but at times made me feel very far behind: I don't think I've read a single one of the winning works/authors, except technically a couple. (A book I bounced off of hard enough not to have bought anything else by the person since, or similar; not the works on the ballot.) Part of this was certainly my fault! I'm going to guess that I told myself, Ah, yes, next week when I have a bit more time I'll download my Hugos packet! when I registered and then promptly forgot it existed till I was sitting in the auditorium going, 'Wait, wasn't I supposed to have all these?' Oops. Although come to think of it, there might have been a format issue behind my downloading delay.

I also had a few moments of annoyance when it seemed like the same 3-5 people were finalists for a dozen different things, and they were all authors who are pretty well-known already; I enjoy seeing new names on the ballot even if it turns out I have read none of them. :D

Other con-related reading notes:
* finished my reread of Foreigner
* got about halfway through The Lost Tales and Other Writings
* bought 2 more Foreigner novels (speaking of being behind!)
* impulse-bought a book about a magical PI
* picked up flyers for two different upcoming cons, one featuring Ursula Vernon as a guest and the other Steven Brust

All in all, a grand time and far too short! Now, back to the laundry...

I have been rereading Brust's Paarfi Romances; currently I'm about halfway through The Paths of the Dead and am having a great time noticing how Paarfi sets up the big romantic shock twist to come.

( Read more... )

My prompt from gloss was: Preferred book genre, optionally with faves


This is an easy one, as my reading (outside of fanfiction) is probably 95% SF/F by volume. :D

I switch back and forth between the "SF" and the "F" sides of the genre - I'm generally in the mood for one or the other specifically, so I go through phases where most of my reading is science fiction, followed by phases where it's mostly fantasy.

Here are three recs from each, which I tried to keep to single works and short series!

Fantasy:
Eyes of the Basilisk by Patricia McKillip, for incredibly beautiful and lyrical prose
Dragon Bones & Dragon Blood by Patricia Briggs, for a really fun main character and love interest
Flesh and Spirit & Breath and Bone by Carl Berg, for interesting magic

Sci-Fi:
Chanur series (5 novels) by C.J. Cherryh, for great alien cultures and tense plotting
Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntire, for postapocalyptic medicine
Eifelheim by Michael Flynn, for aliens in medieval Germany and speculative physics

I'm still on an elf kick, and I bring recs! Lord of the Rings flavour, this time.

There are... a lot more... where these came from, so I'm going to try to do them in small batches, with a pairing or other element in common.

( Five Recs, all Gimli&Legolas or Gimli/Legolas, below the cut. )

Well, I fell down the rabbit hole into another old fandom, so between yesterday and today I have read more than 100K of Forgotten Realms fanfiction.

Oops?

Have some recs. ( Below the cut! )


Most of these are Jarlaxle/Artemis Entreri - which feels weird, because I didn't have the slightest interest in Entreri back in the day! But Drizzt is so unrelentingly het in the series that it's hard to find fics about him that I enjoy, Zak's dead, I've forgotten most of the cast of War of the Spider Queen, and it turns out (I discovered gradually through my reading) that there's basically a whole series about Jarlaxle and Entreri now? And they tried very hard to make everything as un-gay as they could, but since I have not read the books I'm just going to substitute logic instead. Nothing will ever convince me that male drow aren't all bisexual; Menzoberranzan is absolutely a Situational Sexuality setup if ever there was one.

Working my way slowly down the to-be-read pile! (Ha ha ha. At the rate I'm going it'll take me 97 years; I need to put some effort in.)

( I finished _To the Haunted Mountains_ last month. Discussion with some spoilers below the cut. )

One down, a million to go. :D

I finished A Brother's Price, by Wen Spencer, last week.

( More below the cut. )

This is the third thing I've read by Spencer, and I have come to some conclusions.

( Under the cut. )

In an effort to keep myself on track with various things, including posting, here's a round-up of where my current fannish efforts are focused.

Rewatching Nirvana in Fire
I've just started this, so if anyone wants to join in - either rewatching, or as a first-time viewing - I'd love to have company. :D At the moment I'm just four episodes in. If other people are interested in watching along, we can come up with a specific schedule and I'll make regular posts designated for discussion! If it ends up being just me, I'll probably be quieter about it; I feel like I've flooded everyone with NiF reactions lately, and you've all been very patient about it and deserve a break in return. :D

Reading Yami no Matsuei
I started this a while ago but got sidetracked, so I plan to start over at the beginning. I'll try to post after each volume completed, to avoid being sidetracked again. No specific schedule in mind, but I should manage at absolute minimum a volume a week.

Watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Believe it or not, I've never watched FMA:B before! I didn't want to watch it before finishing the manga, and when I'd finished the manga it wasn't readily available, so it's taken me all this time to get round to it. :D The first anime will probably always be my true love, but for completion's sake I do want to get through Brotherhood as well. There may not be much to post about, though, given that this is the third incarnation of FMA for me.

Reading new SF/F from my To-Be-Read Pile
Most of my reading thus far this year has been rereading, but this pile needs to shrink, and this year is as good as any. :D No idea what will call to me first when I start going through it, but as long as I pick something, it's progress! (Reminder to self: take a picture of the pile and post it!)

Rec Some Fics
The lack of fic recs in this journal is just sad. Gotta get back in that rec habit, even if it means stumbling through different ideas on how to approach it till I hit on one that works. (By fandom, by trope, by length?) DW friends, if you have suggestions for recs you'd like to see, now is the time to toss them out here! I had fun posting about Identity Porn, and I've made at least one other post about a beloved trope before, so maybe that's a good approach. Or maybe it should be under a separate heading like "Write Some Meta" that would include stuff like characterisation notes and thoughts on archive warnings.