We didn't have much in the way of plans for last weekend, so I pinged my siblings, who told me last minute they were going to the Hester Street Fair, which was a food festival guess where. It was like Smorgasburg, this past summer's obsession I failed to write about during the interregnum, except with more Asian food. When I got there, my siblings ( Read more... )

Shannon Messenger's Let the Sky Fall is a shockingly good-for-the-genre story about air elementals. I'm so used to urban paranormal sucking, I was surprised when it didn't. I ended up liking it more than, ah, Buzz Bernard's Supercell, which read like an Eric Flint mystery, so if you think you'd like to try a new urban paranormal series, this might ( Read more... )

If you like Karrin Murphy, you should read Side Jobs: in some bizarre way, this Harry Dresden anthology ends up being about her, starting with the first time she encountered the wizard to, well, "Aftermath", or what she did an hour after the end of Changes. Even if you've been completely obsessive about tracking down every anthology to which Jim ( Read more... )

I'd say in literature, but zomg it annoys the heck out of me that TvTropes calls all tropes in books "literature." Pratchett, GRRM, Sanderson, et al. may be enjoyable, but they are a different category than Tolstoy, Austen, and Shakespeare. Not that I've recently read Tropes referencing any of the above authors, nosirreeno.Since we're not getting ( Read more... )

The more I think about Cryoburn, the new Miles Vorkosigan novel, the more I appreciate it. The novel does what great science fiction ought, consider the implications of technologies just out of reach. In this case, it's cryogenics. The neo-Japanese planet of Kibou-daini is dealing with all the socio-economic and ethical issues brought up by access ( Read more... )

Poll

I can't remember who inspired Q4, but I do remember my retort, which was that scads of people would line up to attest to my skillz in bed. Don't prove me wrong!!

Six days. It took me six days to give in and buy the eARC of Monster Hunter Vendetta. Your takeaway from this should be that the series is very entertaining, not that I'm a crackmonkey.

Monster Hunter International is a Marty Stu about a mild-mannered accountant whose life is changed when his evil boss is bitten by a werewolf and he has to kill ( Read more... )

On the train back from Ct, my sister asked, "What are you reading?" I told her, "A vampire novel," bc I decided it's better she thinks I'm reading Twilight than she asks about Anita Blake.

Bullet is the second worst Anita Blake novel to date. The plot exists mainly to allow her to work in three group sex scenes. I like group sex as much as the ( Read more... )

Poll mostly thanks to James Nicoll

Poll This poll is likely get me more unfriendings than any beforeThis poll is brought to you by a flocked but hilarious post about a furry takeover of a goth bar, and the lightsaber drill team brought in to keep the peace. Not kidding, I read it on the Internet so it must be true ( Read more... )