Came across a bookshop doing "two for the price of one" on the SF Masterworks series, so I picked up some classic science fiction. I'm really looking forward to reading these.


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2012 was more of a thinking and talking year than a reading year. I read less than I usually do and didn’t get around to writing about many of the books that I did read, though I’m still intending to write about some of them this year.  My general preference leaned towards large works of fiction, which I think indicates a desire to lose myself in ( Read more... )

Links to the books I've written about. As you can see, I have a lot of posts to catch up on.

Emma Donoghue, Life Mask
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
Celia Friedman, Black Sun Rising
Clive Barker, Imajica
Ursula K Le Guin, The Telling
Michele Roberts, Daughters of ( Read more... )

On the downside, the content of issue 21 is dominated by white, male authors (25 men to 8 women) and you can see that in 2008, women writers and writers of colour were not getting the same level of attention as white, male writers. As far as I could tell (without looking everyone up) there are only two writers of colour included in this anthology! ( Read more... )

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”, (p. 9)

Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin comprises six interlinked stories based around the author’s experiences of living in Berlin during the early 1930s.  The book would be worth reading simply as a piece of social history documenting the lives of ordinary ( Read more... )

Crossposted to Flaming Culture 
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Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)
Beginning the story in 1682, Morrison sets out to address the early colonial settlement of North America  through the stories of four women over just 165 pages.  Opinions vary as to her success, but this poetic book says something profound about the foundation of the USA in slavery, the suppression of women and a toxic ( Read more... )

New books read in the order that I read them.  In addition to the SF and fantasy binge, I  think I read more non-fiction and popular science books than usual this year.

Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Ursula Le Guin, Gifts
Tanith Lee, Sabella, or the Bloodstone
Alice Munro, Too Much Happinness
Amanda Foreman, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
John Gribbin, ( Read more... )

I was hoping to make a start on my enormous backlog of posts and get some actual writing done this week, but an evil head cold has left me with just enough energy for a link round-up and nothing else.  The rest will have to wait until the New Year.

Let’s start with something serious.  From Lambada Literary, one for the queer theory fans, a review of ( Read more... )