Reading Wednesday, a bit late
Thank you, everyone, for the birthday wishes! I am sorry I am so slow in responding individually, but I suppose you all expect that from me by now.
This has been a slow book week for everything except acquistions, but I do want to record them. I could swear I usually read more than one book per week, but 2013 seems to think otherwise.
What are you reading now?
I am in the liminal state between books. Liminal, indecisive, whatever. Last night on the way home I tried to start several different things I mentioned I might try in last Wednesday update, but I was too tired and jittery to concentrate on something new. I may have started rereading Ankaret Wells' Firebrand, but it is too soon to tell if I have settled or if I will end up abandoning this, too.
What did you just finish?
I finished Sayuri Ueda's Cage of Zeus, which ended up being just as disappointing as I thought it was going to be last week. It relegated all its interesting examinations of sex and gender and psychology to backstory in order to focus on technothriller terrorist hijinks. The terrible translation did not help.
Oh, and also I skimmed/re-read Sherry Thomas's Not Quite A Husband because
hesychasm reminded me I loved and hated it.
What books have you acquired this week?
People sent me birthday presents! So now I have Heiresses of Russ 2012 and The True Meaning of Smekday. And I got Kerry Greenwood's Medea via Netgalley.
I very much wanted also to acquire S.U. Pacat's Captive Prince, even though I converted it to epub when I discovered it last year, but B&N has yet to list it. (After a couple of days, despite my desire to buy ebooks from not-Amazon whenever feasible, I gave in and got the Kindle versions. Book 2 crashed Kindle for the PC, so I got fed up and returned them before I even tried to convert them to epub. Technically, I suppose, I acquired and unacquired Captive Prince this week. Maybe by next week I will have acquired it for good. Oh, Barnes & Noble. I don't want Amazon to be the only player in the ereader/ebook marketplace, but you are just not fighting the good fight.)
When I first got my ereader, I experimented with Netgalley and LibraryThing giveaways and Goodreads giveaways and maybe an arc or two via a friend, and the experiment ended in apathy and guilt, because even when I read things on time I didn't manage to write them up. Frequently I did not read things on time. More frequently, I did not read them at all, because they came in PDFs formatted in ways difficult to maneuver or outright impossible to decipher on my ereader. For a while, I would just log into Netgalley and look at new books coming out and then I would go look at my Dashboard with 6 approved requests and 0 resulting reviews and then I would dwell for quite some time on what a horrible, terrible, no-good person I was. Then I would go look at the book blog feeds I had recently subscribed to and feel exhausted just thinking about posting that substantively and that often, and then I would go walk around my neighborhood and think about how reading to Participate in Ongoing Conversations and Be Knowledgeable about the Field and Nominate Things for Awards and Keep Up with Contemporary Literature was starting to feel like keeping up with the Joneses instead of doing the thing I love best in the world.
Then I would go read comic books so I didn't have to think about the books I wasn't reading, and this was very relaxing except for the part where it was a constant stream of sexist microaggressions.
This is a very roundabout way of getting around to saying that I heard Netgalley had revamped and now offered epubs and that there was a historical novel up about Medea and I love Medea and, in short, the publisher was unwise enough to approve my galley request, despite all evidence indicating this was a waste of their time.
So now I will read Medea in a timely fashion and post about Medea in a timely fashion. I am saying this in public so all my friends can guilt trip me if I fail.
I guess it is also roundabout way of thumbtacking some things to talk about later, maybe, maybe not:
cups brewed at DW
This has been a slow book week for everything except acquistions, but I do want to record them. I could swear I usually read more than one book per week, but 2013 seems to think otherwise.
What are you reading now?
I am in the liminal state between books. Liminal, indecisive, whatever. Last night on the way home I tried to start several different things I mentioned I might try in last Wednesday update, but I was too tired and jittery to concentrate on something new. I may have started rereading Ankaret Wells' Firebrand, but it is too soon to tell if I have settled or if I will end up abandoning this, too.
What did you just finish?
I finished Sayuri Ueda's Cage of Zeus, which ended up being just as disappointing as I thought it was going to be last week. It relegated all its interesting examinations of sex and gender and psychology to backstory in order to focus on technothriller terrorist hijinks. The terrible translation did not help.
Oh, and also I skimmed/re-read Sherry Thomas's Not Quite A Husband because
hesychasm reminded me I loved and hated it.
What books have you acquired this week?
People sent me birthday presents! So now I have Heiresses of Russ 2012 and The True Meaning of Smekday. And I got Kerry Greenwood's Medea via Netgalley.
I very much wanted also to acquire S.U. Pacat's Captive Prince, even though I converted it to epub when I discovered it last year, but B&N has yet to list it. (After a couple of days, despite my desire to buy ebooks from not-Amazon whenever feasible, I gave in and got the Kindle versions. Book 2 crashed Kindle for the PC, so I got fed up and returned them before I even tried to convert them to epub. Technically, I suppose, I acquired and unacquired Captive Prince this week. Maybe by next week I will have acquired it for good. Oh, Barnes & Noble. I don't want Amazon to be the only player in the ereader/ebook marketplace, but you are just not fighting the good fight.)
When I first got my ereader, I experimented with Netgalley and LibraryThing giveaways and Goodreads giveaways and maybe an arc or two via a friend, and the experiment ended in apathy and guilt, because even when I read things on time I didn't manage to write them up. Frequently I did not read things on time. More frequently, I did not read them at all, because they came in PDFs formatted in ways difficult to maneuver or outright impossible to decipher on my ereader. For a while, I would just log into Netgalley and look at new books coming out and then I would go look at my Dashboard with 6 approved requests and 0 resulting reviews and then I would dwell for quite some time on what a horrible, terrible, no-good person I was. Then I would go look at the book blog feeds I had recently subscribed to and feel exhausted just thinking about posting that substantively and that often, and then I would go walk around my neighborhood and think about how reading to Participate in Ongoing Conversations and Be Knowledgeable about the Field and Nominate Things for Awards and Keep Up with Contemporary Literature was starting to feel like keeping up with the Joneses instead of doing the thing I love best in the world.
Then I would go read comic books so I didn't have to think about the books I wasn't reading, and this was very relaxing except for the part where it was a constant stream of sexist microaggressions.
This is a very roundabout way of getting around to saying that I heard Netgalley had revamped and now offered epubs and that there was a historical novel up about Medea and I love Medea and, in short, the publisher was unwise enough to approve my galley request, despite all evidence indicating this was a waste of their time.
So now I will read Medea in a timely fashion and post about Medea in a timely fashion. I am saying this in public so all my friends can guilt trip me if I fail.
I guess it is also roundabout way of thumbtacking some things to talk about later, maybe, maybe not:
- Book blogs
- The gender divide between popular book blogs and the kind of blogs that tend to be nominated for Hugo Fan Awards
- The terrible sameness of the sets of books most often selected for professional reviewing
- The terrible sameness of the sets of books most often canonized via awards and best of year lists
- The continuing disappointment of the obvious sexist and racist bias of critics whose work has meant a great deal to me in the past
- The vast divide between publishers'/authors' goals and readers' goals for literary conversation, and the queasy gender and power politics underlying a lot of this
- The conflicts between books as a commercial endeavor and books as an aesthetic and spiritual experience
cups brewed at DW