My Own Personal Book-of-the-Month Club
Nathan Bransford, a literary agent whose blog I read obsessively and who I wish was my agent because he's terribly funny and if he was my agent I could call him up whenever I liked and get him to say something witty--as I say, Nathan Bransford recently posted about networking. He says there's no longer an excuse for writers to be poor networkers, because we all have the internet. He says blogging and posting to other people's blogs is a type of networking.
I'd never thought of it that way. I was ashamed to realize I blog about ten times a year, mostly to complain.
So (pause for heavy, reluctant sigh) I think I'd better start blogging more often. Because Nathan Bransford says so. And he didn't actually say that I should blog about writing and books and things, but I think that goes without saying.
Thus, I will explain my book-of-the-month New Year's Resolution, because it's about reading. I don't read enough fiction, either because I'm too busy writing my own or because I don't want to take away from my Desktop Tower Defense playing time. So among my myriad resolutions this January, I decided I would read a minimum of one fiction book a month that I wouldn't have otherwise read.
In January I read City of Bones by, um, someone not named Rosemary Wells. Hang on, let me check. It's by Martha Wells. Rosemary Wells is author and illustrator of Benjamin & Tulip, a charming story about two little raccoons that contains this wonderful bit of dialogue: "'Where is the watermelon?' asked Aunt Fern. 'Back a ways,' said Benjamin."
But I digress. I liked City of Bones, which I borrowed from my brother, even though I think the occasional POV changes are completely unnecessary. The main character is thoroughly likable and the world is beautifully detailed, if oddly bereft of music (really music, I mean, not the music of good writing, which it has in plenty).
In February I read The Cockatrice Boys by Joan Aiken. Ordinarily I love her writing, but this book just didn't make it. It was too serious to be silly and too silly to be serious, if you see what I mean. And it wasn't consistently edited, frankly. I'll stick to her earlier stuff.
In March I read The Wind in the Willows, which I'd been meaning to read for around twenty years. It's fully as excellent as everyone says, and I wish I'd read it first as a kid.
Thus launched upon Books I Should Have Read Years Ago, in April I read Kidnapped by RLStevenson. How, how, how did I live my whole life thus far without reading this book? It's marvelous, it's exciting, it's beautifully written and fascinating!
I tried to keep up the nautical theme by reading Captains Courageous by Kipling in May, partly to celebrate the (then upcoming, and ultimately disappointing) Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I liked the book, but I must say it dragged a bit despite its short length. It also made me rabid to find and reread Kipling's story "The Maltese Cat," which used to be widely available in the sort of horse story collections that were everywhere when I was growing up. What happened to them?
You know, if I had billions of dollars to waste, I'd start my own little publishing company dedicated to the fine art of the horse story. I'd snag the rights to reprint all those marvelous out-of-print books I read growing up and that are now so hard to find, like Jean Slaughter Doty's books and Monica Dickens', and Sam Savitt's--gosh, those three authors (and Sam Savitt was also an artist, with muscular pencil drawings of horses fighting!) influenced me to a frightening degree. It's probably why I keep having to stop myself from making a horse the main character of my own stories. If Kipling could do it, and that woman who wrote Black Beauty, why can't I? Because no one wants to read a horse's story anymore, apparently, that's why.
Anyway, I couldn't find "The Maltese Cat" anywhere, and I decided I wasn't quite keeping to the spirit of the resolution by reading dead authors. So in June I read the second Harry Dresden book (by Jim Butcher), because my brother didn't at the time have the first one. It was a lot of fun, although I do think Butcher stops the action/conversation too often to have Harry think about what's going on for paragraphs on end. I went back and read the first one after the second, and then read the third one even though by that point I was getting really fed up with Harry Dresden and his stupid choices that were transparently made only to further the plot. I've got the fourth book here but I haven't started it yet.
In July I read a book I picked up because it sounded interesting, and hit the jackpot. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novic is one of the best books I've read in years! I devoured it utterly and went out and bought the next two books and devoured them utterly too, and then I loaned them to my brother so he can devour them utterly. We are waiting impatiently for Novic to finish the next book in the series. And that's odd, because when I look back on them, nothing much really happens in the books. There's a skirmish, and then a lot of waiting around doing nothing, and then another battle, and then a lot more nothing much. But it's brilliantly written and I do so love the characters that I just don't care what they do.
Now it's August, and I am belatedly reading my August book, The Golden Compass by Pullman. Go get your own copy and read it now before the movie comes out. This is a brilliant book (except for the first ten pages, which are astonishingly pedestrian). It's seldom that I read any book at all and think, "People will be reading this one a hundred years from now, and deservedly so," but that's the case with this one.
All these wonderful books, and if I hadn't kept my new year's resolution I probably wouldn't have read any of them!
I'd never thought of it that way. I was ashamed to realize I blog about ten times a year, mostly to complain.
So (pause for heavy, reluctant sigh) I think I'd better start blogging more often. Because Nathan Bransford says so. And he didn't actually say that I should blog about writing and books and things, but I think that goes without saying.
Thus, I will explain my book-of-the-month New Year's Resolution, because it's about reading. I don't read enough fiction, either because I'm too busy writing my own or because I don't want to take away from my Desktop Tower Defense playing time. So among my myriad resolutions this January, I decided I would read a minimum of one fiction book a month that I wouldn't have otherwise read.
In January I read City of Bones by, um, someone not named Rosemary Wells. Hang on, let me check. It's by Martha Wells. Rosemary Wells is author and illustrator of Benjamin & Tulip, a charming story about two little raccoons that contains this wonderful bit of dialogue: "'Where is the watermelon?' asked Aunt Fern. 'Back a ways,' said Benjamin."
But I digress. I liked City of Bones, which I borrowed from my brother, even though I think the occasional POV changes are completely unnecessary. The main character is thoroughly likable and the world is beautifully detailed, if oddly bereft of music (really music, I mean, not the music of good writing, which it has in plenty).
In February I read The Cockatrice Boys by Joan Aiken. Ordinarily I love her writing, but this book just didn't make it. It was too serious to be silly and too silly to be serious, if you see what I mean. And it wasn't consistently edited, frankly. I'll stick to her earlier stuff.
In March I read The Wind in the Willows, which I'd been meaning to read for around twenty years. It's fully as excellent as everyone says, and I wish I'd read it first as a kid.
Thus launched upon Books I Should Have Read Years Ago, in April I read Kidnapped by RLStevenson. How, how, how did I live my whole life thus far without reading this book? It's marvelous, it's exciting, it's beautifully written and fascinating!
I tried to keep up the nautical theme by reading Captains Courageous by Kipling in May, partly to celebrate the (then upcoming, and ultimately disappointing) Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I liked the book, but I must say it dragged a bit despite its short length. It also made me rabid to find and reread Kipling's story "The Maltese Cat," which used to be widely available in the sort of horse story collections that were everywhere when I was growing up. What happened to them?
You know, if I had billions of dollars to waste, I'd start my own little publishing company dedicated to the fine art of the horse story. I'd snag the rights to reprint all those marvelous out-of-print books I read growing up and that are now so hard to find, like Jean Slaughter Doty's books and Monica Dickens', and Sam Savitt's--gosh, those three authors (and Sam Savitt was also an artist, with muscular pencil drawings of horses fighting!) influenced me to a frightening degree. It's probably why I keep having to stop myself from making a horse the main character of my own stories. If Kipling could do it, and that woman who wrote Black Beauty, why can't I? Because no one wants to read a horse's story anymore, apparently, that's why.
Anyway, I couldn't find "The Maltese Cat" anywhere, and I decided I wasn't quite keeping to the spirit of the resolution by reading dead authors. So in June I read the second Harry Dresden book (by Jim Butcher), because my brother didn't at the time have the first one. It was a lot of fun, although I do think Butcher stops the action/conversation too often to have Harry think about what's going on for paragraphs on end. I went back and read the first one after the second, and then read the third one even though by that point I was getting really fed up with Harry Dresden and his stupid choices that were transparently made only to further the plot. I've got the fourth book here but I haven't started it yet.
In July I read a book I picked up because it sounded interesting, and hit the jackpot. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novic is one of the best books I've read in years! I devoured it utterly and went out and bought the next two books and devoured them utterly too, and then I loaned them to my brother so he can devour them utterly. We are waiting impatiently for Novic to finish the next book in the series. And that's odd, because when I look back on them, nothing much really happens in the books. There's a skirmish, and then a lot of waiting around doing nothing, and then another battle, and then a lot more nothing much. But it's brilliantly written and I do so love the characters that I just don't care what they do.
Now it's August, and I am belatedly reading my August book, The Golden Compass by Pullman. Go get your own copy and read it now before the movie comes out. This is a brilliant book (except for the first ten pages, which are astonishingly pedestrian). It's seldom that I read any book at all and think, "People will be reading this one a hundred years from now, and deservedly so," but that's the case with this one.
All these wonderful books, and if I hadn't kept my new year's resolution I probably wouldn't have read any of them!