I've been doing some. As you might expect. (For once, I finished my NaNo novel inside the distance, and that did rather occupy my attention for November. But I'm still reading.)

Catching up, among other things, on Charles Stross's "Laundry" series, with The Rhesus Chart, The Armageddon Score and The Nightmare Stacks. There's a definite sense ( Read more... )

Yes, I'm doing NaNoWriMo, of course. Currently a bit over 13,000 words, so comfortably ahead of schedule... I don't know how happy I am with it, so far, though. I've ventured into pure SF for the first time, and the results, so far, are heavily loaded with infodumps. This might be all right for NaNoWriMo, but I suspect it will need significant ( Read more... )

Some I finished, some I missed out of the last entry.... Two I forgot to mention were Allen Drury's books about Akhenaten, A God Against the Gods and its sequel Return to Thebes. I have an old battered ex-library copy of the first, somewhere, but never got the sequel, so I'm glad they've turned up in shiny new e-book format ( Read more... )

Despite personal circumstances (described in f-list only posts, as being too boring for general consumption), I'm still getting some reading done. Not to mention gearing up for NaNoWriMo, where, in a first for me, I'm trying a pure SF novel ( Read more... )

It's probably a bit presumptuous, not to mention a bit late, for me to review Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, acknowledged classic that it is. On the other hand, I may as well tip my hat to it in acknowledgment anyway ( Read more... )

Despite the general sense of burned-outness which prevailed after getting through the Hugo and Retro Hugo lists, I'm still reading, y'know, just ordinary stuff. Might as well talk about some of it.

The past week or so has been rather dominated by Dining Out Around the Solar System, a self-published novel by Clare O'Beara, which I kept seeing in ( Read more... )

I should collect all these things together, make a table of contents, call it "The First Draft of My Collected Book Reviews" and nominate it for a Hugo, really. Or maybe not ( Read more... )

Because I'm still doing some.... I got the second Kothar the Barbarian omnibus (comprising Kothar and the Conjurer's Curse and Kothar and the Wizard Slayer) because, well, it was dirt cheap, and let no one say that I didn't give Gardner Fox's Conan knock-off a fair try ( Read more... )

Prompted by a) a mild disagreement with nancylebov about whether or not "Magic, Inc." is urban fantasy, and b) news from Midamericon II that Jack Williamson's "Darker Than You Think" was misclassified as a novelette when it is, in fact, a novella, and has been dropped from the Retro Hugos in favour of A.E. van Vogt's "Vault of the Beast ( Read more... )

I suppose I should be writing up another Hugo nominee review, but I'm not.  I've been reading other things too, and this is what they are.  Were.  Whatever.

Offbeat horror has been featuring heavily, starting with The Three by Sarah Lotz.  It starts with a bang... four bangs, in fact, as four planes crash on a single day.  In among all the carnage ( Read more... )