Tag: recent reads

cityofbones_cassandraclare

Recent Reads: CITY OF BONES

June 11, 2013

I read CITY OF BONES in a deliberately deconstructive manner. I wanted to see what worked and why. So this is perhaps an unusually, er, structural, review thingy. First off, Clare nearly lost me on page three, where the POV character did something to the effect of “my flashing green eyes scanned the room,” which, well, how damned often do you say, “My clear blue eyes lifted to the heavens,” even if you’re deliberately describing what actions you took? The color of your eyes is not likely to come into…

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Recent Reads: TOUCH OF POWER

May 20, 2013

Maria’s one of the other Luna alumni who got picked up at the same time I did. She’s done a kind of splendid shooting star rise, reaching the NYT with first book, and going on to take the YA world by storm since then. This book might work better for that audience. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it (except a language thing Maria’s chosen to do in all her books which I understand but find jarring), but I was underwhelmed, which leaves me feeling like probably I just wasn’t a…

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Recent Reads: Astonishing X-Men (Warren Ellis run)

May 3, 2013

ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, EXOGENETIC, XENOGENESIS: Sometime back Warren Ellis said he was never going to write for Marvel again. After reading this trilogy of story arcs, I really wish he’d stuck with that. I gather the X-universe storylines have taken a turn for the bleak recently, but I liked GHOST BOX less than anything else of Ellis’s I’ve ever read, and less than any X-story I’ve ever read, including what I considered to be the god-awful Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely run that culminated with Cassandra Nova. The art in GHOST…

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the essential kit

gender parity

April 29, 2013

So after reading Juliet E McKenna’s quite terrific blog post about women in SF/F, I became curious as to the percentages of books I read by each gender (only because this guy is trying to balance his own gender parity in reading). Since I’ve been keeping an annual reading list since 1998, I could offer up a very thorough look at fifteen years of my reading proclivities. I haven’t got the time right now to do a 15 year retrospective (if somebody else wants to, have at!), but it was…

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Let It Bleed - Jeri-Smith-Ready

Recent Reads: LET IT BLEED

April 18, 2013

LET IT BLEED is book 3.5 of the WVMP RADIO urban fantasy series by my friend Jeri Smith-Ready, and is what happens when the publisher decides they want four books instead of five and the author turns the salient events of book four into a novella to offer her readers for free so she can wrap up the series in a way she feels is satisfying. This is in every way awesome. And the novella is, in and of itself, fine. My problem is with a decision Jeri’s made for…

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