Reading roundup

[hamsterwoman]

Wrapping up 2006:

37. Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners -- I was curious but apprehensive about Kelly Link after she won all those awards. Because I often find that award-winning fantasy ends up being too pretensious (and self-impressed and post-morder and whatever) for my taste. So, I finally picked up the book, not necessarily expecting to like it

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

Yeah, I see what you mean with modern short stories -- I'm not a huge fan of short stories where nothing happens, or ones where you can't tell what's happening because they're all about being arty rather than intelligible. I did discover at least one author that I absolutely love through short stories -- Terry Pratchett, whose "Troll Bridge" I read in an anthology of some sort, and was completely blown away but what I didn't then realize was the signature mix of humour, spot-on satire, and actual poignancy/profundity. So, I'm grateful to short stories at least for that. (Another favorite genre short story is Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry," but I didn't actually encounter that one until I was already a Gaiman fan, so it's not the same.)

I was actually just browsing my "reading" tag the other day, and so now have a pretty good recollection of the books that I got really, really excited about over the past several years, so, in addition to GRRM:

- Neil Gaiman's American Gods
- Emma Bull's War for the Oaks (which I'm probably the last person in the world to read...)
- Neil Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens
- Lois McMasters Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga books (which, also, I came pretty late too)

Not exactly... discoveries, so I'm not sure how useful these are as recs.

On the mystery front, the other series, in addition to Cornwell's, that I've been following is Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware novels. It's not great literature either, but they're engaging, snappily written, and Alex (child psychologist turned sometime police consultant and occasionally amateur sleuth) annoys me a hell of a lot less than Kay Scarpetta -- which is to say, he doesn't annoy me at all, which is refreshing -- and Kellerman has an extremely deft hand with secondary character sketches, managing to paint intriguing and memorable characters in a couple of lines.