Having decided that I'll review the winners of the Tiptree, BSFA and Clarke Awards of a give year together, the turn of the century provided me with a massive reading project. I think I started Wild Life on 17 October, and finished Perdido Street Station on 23 December. Together they are 2249 pages in length.

Ash: A Secret History and Perdido ( Read more... )

It is going to be tricky to answer questions like this otherwise than going on about The Lord of the Rings, which really is my favourite book ever but maybe is not such an interesting answer. One other book that I rate very highly is George Eliot's Middlemarch, which puts a very human face on a historical period of rapid social, political and ( Read more... )

A few years ago, shortly before I began bookblogging, I read and totally loved Mary Gentle's Ash. More recently, I was rather disappointed with her 1610. I'm afraid that White Crow was more towards the 1610 end of the scale. It brings together three short stories about her protagonists Valentine and Casaubon, and three novels, Rats and Gargoyles, ( Read more... )

Several things arrived by post today.

Three books sent by their author(s):

• Da nije bilo Oluje i drugi eseji / Who saved Bosnia and other essays by Vitomir Miles Raguž
• Media Guide to the New Scottish Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies, compiled and edited by David Denver, Colin Rallings & Michael Thrasher
• The Media Guide to the New ( Read more... )

From stellanova and subsequently daegaer:

Look at your LJ "interests" list. If you have fewer than 50 interests, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five interests, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five interests, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em. List them on your LJ, and tell everyone ( Read more... )

Well, some of my entries from Friday seem to have been lost in the grand Chef 8 crash. One was a complaint about losing my lj's style which had attracted comments from annafdd and vnp, so presumably it will reappear in due course. The other was a books update, so I'll replicate it here and delete the original if it ever rematerialises. All three books were ( Read more... )

9) Worlds That Weren't, by Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, and Walter Jon Williams ( Read more... )

3) 1610: A Sundial in a Grave by Mary Gentle.

Let's be quite clear. Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History is one of the best genre books I have read. When I discovered, shortly before Christmas, that she had a new novel out, I went out and bought 1610: A Sundial in a Grave at huge expense in hardback from the massively over-priced Waterstone's in ( Read more... )