I confess that I would not have made it past page ten or so of THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS had it not been written by a friend of mine. It’s not that it wasn’t well written: it was. It’s that it’s a zombie novel, and I’m not much of a horror fan. (Re: at all.) But I’ve known MR Carey for years now and he’s a wonderful human being, so I was inclined to try working my way past the subject material and going for broke. I’m glad…
We’re now entering week two of No Internet (it has to do with regulations here, and I’m in the process of trying to circumvent those to the greatest degree possible, but as far as I can tell we’ll either get net access by the end of the week or not until like mid-August. Mrgahgngngl. (eta, since i’m still without net three days after starting to write this: this week is not looking good. maybe next week, but i’m not counting on that either. this sucks.) Anyway, I’d meant to post…
I’ve read the four available books in Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter’s Long Earth series in the past couple weeks, going so far as to break my “no e-books over €9.99” rule, which appears to have held right up until the point that I wanted something that cost more than that. :) I’ve found them pretty satisfying, obviously, or I wouldn’t have read four of them in…mostly a week. They’re about the discovery, or rather, the consequences of the discovery, of parallel earths (referred to collectively as The Long Earth)…
I think I only managed to read one book in May, which is somewhat embarrassing. OTOH, it was Judith Tarr’s FORGOTTEN SUNS, which is strong, appealing space opera. It’s space opera with YA sensibilities: only one of the main characters is actually a young adult, but all three of the main characters are on journeys of self-discovery. The character I felt was the lead (a hard call, as all 3 stories are insanely well balanced, but hers is the catalyst for all that follows), Aisha, is the 13 year old…
I’ve owned Kim Stanley Robinson’s SHAMAN since it came out, but hadn’t read it because I was still writing the Walker Papers, and regardless of how different his shaman and mine were likely to be (which was very, given that his book is set 40,000 years ago), I didn’t want to be reading about somebody else’s shaman while writing mine. :) SHAMAN is one of those books that’s either going to work for you or it isn’t, I think, although a lot of KSR’s work can be summarized that way.…