Tag: reading

Recent Reads: The Abigail Adams Mysteries

August 25, 2015

I’ve had Barbara Hamilton (Hambly)’s Abigail Adams books on my TBR shelf for quite a while, based on my love for her Benjamin January books. I didn’t like the Adams books as much as the January books, which kind of surprised me. It was partly, I recognize, the Puritanism in the books, which made me…impatient. I don’t have a lot of use for religious fundamentalists in real life, much less in my fiction, and the fact that Abigail Adams herself apparently struggled with her (literally) Puritanical faith did not help…

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Recent Reads: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

August 18, 2015

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…

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Recent Reads: Shaman

May 5, 2015

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.…

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KSR at Hodges Figgis

April 11, 2015

Last night was Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at Hodges Figgis. It went really well: the audience was full and there were a lot of great questions, almost none of which I can remember right now. :) Someone asked about ESCAPE TO KATMANDU, which I haven’t read and which apparently I must, and ANARCTICA, which is actually one of my favourite KSR novels (and turns out to be one of his favourites, too, although it evidently made no blip at all when it came out) was mentioned, and there was someone…

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Recent Reads: The Dragon, the Witch & the Railroad

March 31, 2015

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…

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