Weekly reading (02/07/16), with actual thoughts
What did you recently finish reading?
Today I finally finished the Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep anthology. (Goodreads helpfully tells me I started reading it on May 28. o_o) I found it was a mixed bag--not surprising in an anthology with such a variety of writers--but I don't think that's why it took so long. Happily, I loved Seanan's "Each to Each", which I'd been really looking forward to, and many of the other stories were great.
I also read two novels, both of them quickly enough that I haven't had a real chance to see if the "read a new-to-me novel and reread Deadline simultaneously" theory will pan out.
The first was Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows, which quite a lot of people I know loved, and a couple of them assured me I could read it without having finished the original Grisha trilogy (of which I read the first book a while back; I now own the whole thing digitally, and do still mean to read it, but it keeps not bumping up on my priority list). Anyway, I really enjoyed this one. ^_^
Abstractly fannish note: as is probably obvious, I don't have many OTPs, but I also don't have that many ships in general. Especially with novels, I often greatly enjoy the relationships on the page, but they don't tend to take up residence in my head in any significant way. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the fact that I knew going in that many people come out of Six of Crows with a very intense ship...which I, uh, am not sure I've identified. O_O Not due to lack of possibilities! It's just I see more than one contender there.
The other novel I read was Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky, and since for once I actually wrote something about it on Goodreads, I'm just going to c&p that here. (Relevant note: I gave it a four-star rating.) "Possibly more like a 3.5 star rating for me personally, because IMO there's a type/degree of detachment from the emotions that nearly always keeps me from falling in love with a story. But that's not a failing in the book; what's it's doing may not be something that hooks my heart, but that doesn't mean it's not doing its thing really well. It's clever and engaging, and it has some kickass turns of phrase."
What are you currently reading?
Today I finally started my Deadline reread. I'm only five chapters in so far, and already I can feel it flowing by much more quickly than my Feed reread did, in a way that I think confirms that the Feed reread took a while because I'd read it much more recently and have read it more times. Deadline (and presumably Blackout) is in much broader strokes in my head--I could lay out its plot thoroughly, and go into a lot of detail about parts I've reread for canon review, but it's not the same.
Non-spoilery things I can say about Deadline: it is so different from Feed, which I can't imagine is a surprise to anyone who's read Feed on its own; the groundwork and circumstances have changed completely. All plot stuff aside, Deadline is as much an "us against the world" book as Feed, but the "us" has opened up significantly, and it has a much stronger found-family element running through it. It's the middle book of a trilogy, so it does a fair bit of setting up Blackout, as middle books tend to, but it also has a lot of things going on, some of which break my heart. (The other books each have a couple of distinct moments that I wait for people to get to, moments when everything changes, but Deadline beats them both in quantity, IMO.)
And also, because I love the entire main cast so much, in some ways Feed makes me a little twitchy because I adore the main characters there too (obviously), but there are so many who're just mentioned in passing, whose roles we know as they're carried out, but they're not physically present until Deadline--which is entirely fair! Georgia and Shaun run an internet news site, and it's just getting off the ground in Feed, and they're on the move a lot while most of their staff are scattered all over the place. So yeah: that's fair and reasonable and all, but getting to Deadline and suddenly having proper access to Becks and Maggie and Alaric and Dave, and more time with Mahir, is wonderful.
[ETA: Spoilers for Feed and Deadline in comments on Dreamwidth!]
What do you think you'll read next?
Novel-wise? Not sure. Depends on how the "juggling two novels" thing goes, and if I read Blackout right after Deadline or not. (I probably will.)
But I have vol. 4 of Ms. Marvel out of the library, so that'll get read soon. ^_^
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/669956.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW:
Today I finally finished the Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep anthology. (Goodreads helpfully tells me I started reading it on May 28. o_o) I found it was a mixed bag--not surprising in an anthology with such a variety of writers--but I don't think that's why it took so long. Happily, I loved Seanan's "Each to Each", which I'd been really looking forward to, and many of the other stories were great.
I also read two novels, both of them quickly enough that I haven't had a real chance to see if the "read a new-to-me novel and reread Deadline simultaneously" theory will pan out.
The first was Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows, which quite a lot of people I know loved, and a couple of them assured me I could read it without having finished the original Grisha trilogy (of which I read the first book a while back; I now own the whole thing digitally, and do still mean to read it, but it keeps not bumping up on my priority list). Anyway, I really enjoyed this one. ^_^
Abstractly fannish note: as is probably obvious, I don't have many OTPs, but I also don't have that many ships in general. Especially with novels, I often greatly enjoy the relationships on the page, but they don't tend to take up residence in my head in any significant way. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the fact that I knew going in that many people come out of Six of Crows with a very intense ship...which I, uh, am not sure I've identified. O_O Not due to lack of possibilities! It's just I see more than one contender there.
The other novel I read was Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky, and since for once I actually wrote something about it on Goodreads, I'm just going to c&p that here. (Relevant note: I gave it a four-star rating.) "Possibly more like a 3.5 star rating for me personally, because IMO there's a type/degree of detachment from the emotions that nearly always keeps me from falling in love with a story. But that's not a failing in the book; what's it's doing may not be something that hooks my heart, but that doesn't mean it's not doing its thing really well. It's clever and engaging, and it has some kickass turns of phrase."
What are you currently reading?
Today I finally started my Deadline reread. I'm only five chapters in so far, and already I can feel it flowing by much more quickly than my Feed reread did, in a way that I think confirms that the Feed reread took a while because I'd read it much more recently and have read it more times. Deadline (and presumably Blackout) is in much broader strokes in my head--I could lay out its plot thoroughly, and go into a lot of detail about parts I've reread for canon review, but it's not the same.
Non-spoilery things I can say about Deadline: it is so different from Feed, which I can't imagine is a surprise to anyone who's read Feed on its own; the groundwork and circumstances have changed completely. All plot stuff aside, Deadline is as much an "us against the world" book as Feed, but the "us" has opened up significantly, and it has a much stronger found-family element running through it. It's the middle book of a trilogy, so it does a fair bit of setting up Blackout, as middle books tend to, but it also has a lot of things going on, some of which break my heart. (The other books each have a couple of distinct moments that I wait for people to get to, moments when everything changes, but Deadline beats them both in quantity, IMO.)
And also, because I love the entire main cast so much, in some ways Feed makes me a little twitchy because I adore the main characters there too (obviously), but there are so many who're just mentioned in passing, whose roles we know as they're carried out, but they're not physically present until Deadline--which is entirely fair! Georgia and Shaun run an internet news site, and it's just getting off the ground in Feed, and they're on the move a lot while most of their staff are scattered all over the place. So yeah: that's fair and reasonable and all, but getting to Deadline and suddenly having proper access to Becks and Maggie and Alaric and Dave, and more time with Mahir, is wonderful.
[ETA: Spoilers for Feed and Deadline in comments on Dreamwidth!]
What do you think you'll read next?
Novel-wise? Not sure. Depends on how the "juggling two novels" thing goes, and if I read Blackout right after Deadline or not. (I probably will.)
But I have vol. 4 of Ms. Marvel out of the library, so that'll get read soon. ^_^
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/669956.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW: