I originally wrote the following as a comment on Tor.com, but realized they might not appreciate a paean to a Disney/Hyperion author!

One thing I have really enjoyed in Rick Riordan’s books is watching how each new series takes a step forward in diversity. (I think his various demigod training camps fit the boarding school trope fairly well.) The ( Read more... )

What’s better than a festival where you can taste wine from a bunch of local wineries in one place? A wine festival a little more than a mile from your own house … that happens a day after the weather has finally broken, with comfortable temperatures and no smoke. The air quality has been awful here for weeks due to fires all over the Western US ( Read more... )

I have been reading Victor Kloss’s Royal Institute of Magic series - a somewhat depressing endeavor, since I just finished book 5 and he died (tragically, of lymphoma at age 35) while writing book 6. They are fun, though there are klunky bits the size of speed bumps throughout. One question I’m left with is, why does everyone in the vignettes from ( Read more... )

After reading the latest of Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant books, The Hanging, Tree, I started over from the beginning of the series to refresh my memory of the details, and also because it got me thinking. In this series, which is written in the first person, Aaronovitch does a thing that’s rare in US and UK fiction: every time Peter Grant meets ( Read more... )

One of the books I’m recently read is Fallen Into the Pit, by Ellis Peters. She’s best known for Brother Cadfael, but this one is an Inspector Felse mystery (contemporary, published 1951). Lately I’ve been reading a lot of BritLit from WWI to just after WWII (DE Stevenson, Angela Thirkell, Elizabeth Cadell), and in the past I’ve read lots more from ( Read more... )

Perhaps not the best combination: reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth while my workout audiobook is Connie Willis’s Blackput. Death and destruction in all directions 🙁

And I keep hearing the refrain, “For, Willie McBride, it all happened again, and again and again and again and again.”

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

(See previous post for context.)
These books are absolute time travel crack, but they move along so damned fast, apparently, even the author can’t keep up. Just a few of the continuity errors, behind a cut because spoilers are unavoidable though I’ll try not to be too specific.
( Read the rest of this entry » )

I really like The Chronicles of St. Mary’s series by Jodi Taylor; the first book was a bit awkward, as first books so often are, but they’ve smoothed out. There are faults, of course - a ton of minor characters not adequately fleshed out (one reason for this post), way too much plot crammed into the first couple of books especially (another reason ( Read more... )

Good heavens. I’ve just gotten a credit on Amazon from the Apple price-fixing settlement … for a hair under $250. The time span the settlement covers falls within my expat years; I bought a *lot* of books in those years. What I’d liek to do with it is to keep it until September in hopes that a new Apple Watch will be released then - I’ve wanted one ( Read more... )

I’ve been rereading the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. Their plots are very twisty, an I’d realized I was missing a lot of the connections when I read the books as they came out, a year or so apart (Seanan is amazingly prolific and the first few came out at a faster pace, but now she’s got several series running.) Reading the series in ( Read more... )