Books read, late December

[mrissa]

I was traveling, and I have had a cold, and also it is for some reason A Very Novella Christmas. So…lo these many things read.

Michal Ajvaz, The Other City. This is a short Czech surrealist novel. It’s very, very much about Prague-very detailed about Prague along with its stained-glass surrealist imagery-but the strange thing is that it was written

Comments

[juliansinger]

"Unfortunately it seems to have become unavailable again."

What, already? Whine. (I actually have a hard-copy. Just, I wanted to have it in ebook, too.)

"...one of the things that was particularly appealing to me is that Randall reached for connection and understanding of others’ viewpoints."

Can't imagine how that'd be appealing to you, nope. I'll poke at this sometime.

In general, your reviews are quite thoroughly you, are engaging, and make me want to read the books. This is useful. Thank you.

[davidgoldfarb]

You can have an ebook of The Interior Life. Check out my comment below for the link.

[juliansinger]

Ahhh-ha. Thankee.

[mrissa]

Thank you!

[davidgoldfarb]

If you liked "Witches of Lychford", I can recommend to you the sequel, "The Lost Child of Lychford", too.

The Interior Life is available for free download at the author's website: Dorothy Heydt. This version uses fonts that I find a bit hard to cope with; then again I had no trouble distinguishing among the fonts in the original paperback, while a lot of other people did. (Dorothy herself, for example.) At any rate, I think this version is miles better than having it be unavailable. The people on Usenet even - with some difficulty! - managed to get her to put out a tip jar of sorts.

[thanate]

Ooh, thank you so much for the link!! (I have a paperback of The Interior Life, but have been lamenting the lack of complete Cynthia stories for a long time & had not discovered they were available yet. Yay!!)

[davidgoldfarb]

I fear you will be disappointed by those story links: they do not go to complete stories, only very short blurb-like excerpts.

But have hope. I'm told that a free downloadable omnibus of the Cynthia stories is being worked on. It's likely to be some months before you can get it, but it will happen eventually. (It will be in the same place.)

[thanate]

Ooh, excellent.

I figured at least I have a list of what S&S volumes I still have to hunt down, but a real omnibus is better. I can certainly be patient another few months. :)

[whswhs]

I owned Randall's Journey and Dangerous Games years ago, and recently picked them up for my Kindle app so that I could reread them. I thought the hybrid of family saga and space exploration/colonization was really interesting when I last read it.

[mrissa]

I have those on my Kindle, so I'll look forward to that aspect.

[tool_of_satan]

I also thought those were interesting. Her A City in the North is also worth checking out; it's a bit more similar to Islands in feel, I thought. (They both reminded me of Silverberg's work from the late 60s-early 70s.) Her fantasy The Sword of Winter starts well but I thought had significant issues.

[arkessian]

Living 5 minutes down the road from the place the Witches of Lychford was supposedly partially based on (and to which the book is dedicated, and where the author's wife is actually the Vicar), I found it odd to read -- my back-brain was trying to map it to the real countryside around here, and it just didn't (and shouldn't) fit...

[mrissa]

What an unfortunate mismatch!

[supergee]

Marta Randall was also a really great MC at the Hugoes several times.