Tobias Buckell’s terrific ARCTIC RISING was one of my favourite books the year I read it (2012, looks like), for its near-future SF climate change worldbuilding and its heavy focus on the Arctic, which is obviously near and dear to my heart. I liked pretty well everything about it–setting, queer POC female lead, slam-bam adventure plot–which meant that HURRICANE FEVER, set in the Caribbean, had a big hill to tackle as its sequel. It didn’t quite succeed, in that I didn’t love it as much as I did ARCTIC RISING,…
Category: Recent Reads
falling behind!
I’m falling behind on my Recent Reads and film commentary stuff. Suffice it to say we just got to s3e9 of Person of Interest and they could probably hear our scream of agony in Australia. And I’m not speaking in the royal We, I’m speaking of me and Ted both shrieking “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” at the television. A friend of mine says she’d read spoilers and that she will not go beyond s3e8. This is not necessarily a bad solution. #heartbreak I went to see Jupiter Ascending a second time, and liked…
Recent Reads: The Art of Asking
I found THE ART OF ASKING to be a rather strange read. A lot of it was familiar to me in one way or another: I’ve watched Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk, I followed her Kickstarter and its aftermath, I periodically read her blog, I used to read Neil Gaiman’s blog regularly, etc. I’m not a fan of either Palmer or Gaiman, which is to say their art doesn’t particularly speak to me, but I’ve met them both, albeit briefly, and it’s hard to be in my line of work and…
tbr shelf: that’s one way to do it
One way to get through the TBR shelf is to bounce off what I’m trying to read. I’ve had a couple of thuds in a row, one mystery novel (which my mom couldn’t finish either) and an epic fantasy that I…probably could have made it through…if I’d really wanted to try…but it felt very over-written to me and I was just kind of tired of it before I got to page ten. Throw in a couple graphic novels and my little debacle with the MC Beaton books last month, and…
Recent Reads: Mansfield Park
I’ve finally finished reading Austen’s MANSFIELD PARK, which I found remarkably hard going. This was not helped by reading the first half over the course of several months in dribs and drabs; the second half, which I read over the past several days, went more easily. But I struggled with remembering who the characters were in relation to one another, and it was made worse by some of the longest sentences I’ve ever been dragged down by. I had a hell of a time remembering what had happened at the…