I have loads of personal history with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Seashell Archives series, which she wrote in the early eighties, and which I discovered, uh, probably in the early 80s, although possibly in the mid-80s :), and quite adored. They were light funny epic fantasy with cursed or bewitched heroines, and I’d never read anything quite like them. I met Annie in Ireland in the early 90s, and she was very supportive of me being a writer. I sent her a copy of URBAN SHAMAN when it was published. We…
Tag: books my friends wrote
Recent Reads: Citadel of the Sky
Make room, GRRM: Chrysoula Tzavelas knows how to bring on the pain. I’ve just finished CITADEL OF THE SKY, which Chrysoula is in the midst of Kickstarting, and, like, whoa. This is not GRRM-style fantasy, let me make that clear. You don’t spend every turn of the page in fear that your protagonists are all going to be dead on the next one. It’s a cast of several, but not thousands. It’s also under 300 pages, which is like a quarter or a third of the length of a GRRM…
Recent Reads: The Invisible Library
THE INVISIBLE LIBRARY is the debut novel from another TooMUSH alumni, Genevieve Cogman, so I was predisposed to like it. OTOH, it’s a Library Story, and Library Stories are never…quite…what I want them to be. I don’t even know what I want them to be, save that I haven’t encountered it yet, so I was also moderately trepidatious. As it turns out, THE INVISIBLE LIBRARY is pretty splendid. In a nutshell, the Librarians are in search of unique books, ones that only appear in one alternate universe, and are helping…
Recent Reads: Hurricane Fever
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,…
To Be Read 2015
I am declaring 2015 to be Read Books By People I Know. Realistically I will, of course, read books by people I don’t know, so to make this work I think I’ll have to make every other book one by Somebody I Know. It may take 2 years to clear my TBR shelves of books by people I know, at that rate (and that’s assuming I don’t buy any more…), but it’d be a start. :) (oh, there’s 35 of them at the moment, not counting whichever ones I’ve missed.…