First SFF?

My friend Kari Sperring (who is one of those writers whose prose just makes me want to weep with envy) has been putting up terrific questions and commentary over on Twitter. Today’s question (which can be followed at the tag #1stSFFReads) is “What was the 1st sff book you read? The 1st by a woman? By a writer of colour?” As it happens, the first SFF novel I read was *by* a woman: THE CITY UNDER GROUND, by Suzanne Martel. It was published when I was two; I read it…

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Recent Reads: The School for Manners

My reading lately has not been going so well. I’m bouncing off a lot of well-reviewed books hard, and I’m retreating to fun and easy reads. I’ve said before that I enjoy reading MC Beaton’s books because they take me about 70 minutes and therefore allow me to feel like I’m reading a lot, even if in wordcount I’m not really. I’d been reading Agatha Raisin and Hamish McBeth, but I picked up one of her Regencies lately and it was great fun, so I’ve recently blown through the whole…

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Recent Reads: Lust for Life

LUST FOR LIFE is the fourth & final book in Jeri Smith-Ready’s WVMP Vampire Radio series. I have a conflicted relationship with these books; something happened in the 3rd book that I really did not want to happen, but I read the interstitial novella and book 4 because I wanted to see if Jeri (who is a friend of mine) did the only thing with the end of the series that I felt would justify the thing I really didn’t like. The answer is that she sort of did, which…

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Recent Reads: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Jesus. I read LIES the year it came out, or close enough to count. In the intervening years I’d pretty well forgotten everything about it except that it was tremendously cleverly written and that somebody died, which is to say, there was a specific death I remembered. I did not, however, remember the rest of the appalling brutality that went along with that specific death. It was nearly like reading the book entirely fresh: it was still tremendously cleverly written, but sweet mother of mercy, I was taking unexpected emotional…

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