8 posts tagged “reading”
My wiki-fu has unearthed books about young Captain Jack Sparrow. Only the fact that they're young adult, which generally is too simplistic and infodumpy in style for my taste, is putting me off ordering them. Oh, and not forgetting that my book shelf is already full of novels I need to read and I have several things already lined up for my next amazon.co.uk order. *is so not a book-buying addict*
Finished the second chapter of my "beth" story, posted here under friends-lock. At the moment I'm aiming to get it to 30,000 words, and I have enough vague ideas floating round my head about the story that I think I'll manage it. What I'll do with it then... not entirely sure. Oh well! I've having fun writing it; that's the important thing right now.
|
|
"beth" 4,102 / 30,000 (13.7%) |
Quite an odd thing happened this year. From being someone who actually read very little fantasy or scifi, and preferred weird non-specfic stuff like Donna Tartt's books (which are a lot of awesome, and are the best non-specfic books I've read this year), I went to someone devouring fantasy and scifi - and some of it weird, new, non-mainstream stuff. It happened with my summer holiday, where I finally decided I would read China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, Frank Herbert's Dune, as well as a random book called The Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. They were all fantastic. And I haven't looked back.
Some of the books I've read haven't been fantastic. They've been mindblowingly awesome in more ways than I can count. They are:
4th Place: The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach
On a low-tech world, the main industry is the manufacture of carpets of human hair. Each takes so long to make that it is a lifetime's job for the group of men, who weave the carpet from their wives' hair and provide money from the sale for each's one son to survive while weaving his own carpet. But the ships that take the carpets offworld have stopped arriving. In a weave of plot threads with no main character, the reason for the carpet-making tradition and the fall of the vast interstellar empire are superbly told. One of the more imaginative scifi books I've read.
3rd Place: The Etched City, by K.J. Bishop
In the city of Ashamoil, gunslinger Gwynn - currently in the employ of the Horn Fan slave-trading cartel - finds himself drawn to a woman called Beth who made an etching of him. While the cartel's fortunes are shattered by a man's desire for vengeance, Gwynn realises that Beth is not quite what she seems. And wow, that summary does not do the book justice; it forgets Raule, a doctor who collects deformed dead babies; it doesn't quite express the dark, chimeric nature of the book. This is real "dark fantasy".
2nd Place: The Scar, by China Miéville
Linguist Bellis Coldwine is fleeing New Crobuzon aboard a ship headed for an island colony, when the ship is attacked by pirates. Along with all the other passengers, she is taken to Armada: a vast floating city of ships of all sizes slung together, grown over with houses and offices and gardens and more. There, with a fellow passenger, she realises that the city's leaders, the Lovers, have a dangerous plan in mind for the city, and she becomes determined to stop it. This book is vast, filled to overflowing with Miéville's imagination, and everything about it works - setting, characters, plot, narrative. An absolutely stunning book.
And the best book I've read in 2006...
1st Place: The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M Valente
A girl has been cast out into the palace's gardens for a strange marking: the skin around her eyes is stained black, with stories written in tiny handwriting. She tells these stories to a daring boy, and the fairy-tale stories weave in and out of each other with beautifully imaginative lyricism. An absolutely amazing book, brimming with ideas and beauty.
Read the prelude, and then the beginning of the stories.
Also, read her short stories:
The Maiden-Tree
Bones like Black Sugar
Urchins, While Swimming
And, quick life update:
- My gran died on Friday. Looks like it was in her sleep. I'm okay (she was 90, and very frail, so this isn't exactly unexpected) but then I'm not quite okay, you know? I'm not depressed or anything, and I cried once and probably won't again until the funeral, so don't worry about me. Still, I miss my gran a little, and I think it will hit more when I go up to Scotland for the funeral (whenever the hell that is - because she died unattended, the doctor won't simply sign off on her death certificate, so there has to be an autopsy. She was 90, WTF? Heart gave out, or a stroke, or some other kind of system failure. Stupid people.)
- Working tonight. Closing, out at 10pm-ish. What a rocking New
Year's Eve I shall be having. Ohhh riiight, sexy time! Though, I will
be home before midnight, and will try to finish off Catherynne M
Valente's book The Labyrinth - so the moment of 2007's beginning will actually be quite good, despite the McDonald's smell clinging to my hair.
- Sent off TANSU to Sybil's Garage a few days ago.
- Finished a first draft of A TRIPTYCH, for the Iris Print "fairy tale and fantasy" boy's love anthology. It's currently 6,500 words, which is about twice as long as I expected. I think I like it, quite a lot actually, but I need to re-read, see what it looks like in dawn-light, and some tweaking will probably be in order before I send it to Rhi for beta-ing.
- Still excited about THE BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION being accepted. Can I call myself a writer yet? I don't know. But I'm not a not-writer either. And yeah, I know, anyone who writes is a writer, but am I a writer? I think there is a difference, be it just the flimsy barrier of published/not-published. But I changed my LJ profile from "a hopeful writer" to "a writer" and it feels a little odd, still.
One of my favourite authors, Catherynne M Valente, has a new short story out: Urchins, While Swimming (fantasy). It's a wonderful story and definitely worth taking a few minutes to read.
And if you like it, buy her book! I highly recommend it.
This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished, put an asterisk beside the ones you loved and put a '#' next to the ones you intend to read some time.
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert **
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson ##
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller Jr
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey **
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card **
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien ##
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson ##
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
I think this says something about what I read. In my life I have not read the greatest amount of scifi/fantasy; until this summer, I was reading a lot of other stuff. This means I haven't had time to read a lot of these 'classics'. Frankly, though, I don't intend to read more than a handful of them. My tastes tend towards the modern. I like the styles being played around with at the moment; and, hell, I like the partial abandonment of the Moral Element to speculative fiction, with writers missing out the Over-riding Moral Statement about humanity and skipping to the great plot, world-building and characterisation.
I think most writers today can create more interesting worlds than 30 or so years ago, simply because the more technological developments we make, the more writers' eyes are opened to the next possible steps. Also, some ideas of older science fiction (Are androids human? or, OMG Dystopia!) bore me, because I've already seen and contemplated them, and now I want something new; revisiting these ideas several times in old fiction really doesn't appeal to me. And as for fantasy, more writers in the past half decade or so have been more overtly abandoning the Tolkein-framework in favour of something uniquely their own, something that I am abosolutely loving.
There are some older books that I love. Anne McCaffrey's older books are better than her newer ones (and I haven't even touched the ones co-written with or written solely by her son); recently I read and loved Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time (1972-6) and Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen (1980). But on the whole, I like stuff that's coming out right now, or has come out in the past decade or so.
I think I have been bitten by the Short Story bug. A year and a half ago, I had never written anything shorter than the opening chapters of novels. Just over a year ago I wrote my first short story - MCFUTURE - a work-inspired piece that, I'll be the first to admit, is far from original but was brilliant fun to write, though now I consider the quality of the writing rather sub-standard. Not long after that I wrote my second short story - FLIGHT - based on a reaction I'd love to have been able to give to my boyfriend's snooze alarm.
I was very proud of myself. Two short stories! I uploaded them to fictionpress and left it at that.
Then, earlier this year, I wrote STATUES for the Writers of the Future Contest and, while that story was 16k and definitely has more to be told, I think it started something. Because I have since written A SHADE OF YELLOW, TANSU, THE BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION and EMPIRES AND GLASS, as well as three short-short pieces (less than 1000 words, one of them less than 100 words) and a few more shorts-in-progress.
The latest addition to the menagerie of short fiction is A FAY OF STEAM, a steampunk fairytale that I'm writing to send to Cabinet des Fées. It's set in the city of Retyelnen, in which A SHADE OF YELLOW takes place, and is set before that story.
In all honesty, I quite like this bug. Not only will it hopefully net me some publication credits, but I've found that writing short stories is brilliantly fun. I can play around with different ideas that aren't developed enough to become novels, or that I don't have time to develop into novels, and with different narrative styles (like present tense and first person) that I wouldn't use in a novel. So bite on, dear bug!
.....And what is it that can distract a good bug? Only a good book, and I have found one in the wonderful The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M Valente. How good is this book? Let me tell a story:
Today I decided to finally get my arse in gear and head on over to the British Library to register, because a book I need to read is there and I'm sure I'll find it a useful resource for the rest of the year. It's about an hour's round trip from where I live, via the London Underground. When I reached the BL, I discovered that you required both proof of identity and proof of address, and I did not have the latter. I had wasted an hour. Normally I would be viciously pissed off at this, but not today. Another hour spent on the Underground meant another hour reading Catherynne M Valente's book. No other book has made me enjoy wasted time to quite that degree.
The book is about a strange girl who lives in the Palace Gardens, shunned by the court. A daring boy approaches her and she begins to tell him stories - fairytales, with stories within stories within stories, woven together and told in Valente's wonderful lyrical prose. It is an absolutely fantastic book, a feast for the imagination.
Read the opening - HERE!
Read her short story The Maiden-Tree - HERE!
Read her short story Bones Like Black Sugar - HERE!
Catherynne M Valente is a fantastic author, and I heartily recommend everyone to buy In the Night Garden.
I think I may have a minor compulsive-book-buying problem, because I keep buying new novels when I am a) running out of a shelf space, and b) don't have time to read them. I buy faster than I have time to read right now, which is very annoying because there are so many books out there I want to read.
My current reading list, in no particular order, is as follows:
The Snow Queen by Joan D Vinge CURRENTLY READING
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke CURRENTLY READING
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman CURRENTLY READING
The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M Valente
Salon Fantastique a collection of fantasy stories
Vellum by Hal Duncan
Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
Iron Council by China Miéville
The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Hopkins Manuscript by RC Sherriff
*cuddles books*
*glares angrily at Time*
Moral of the story: I shouldn't be allowed near bookshops. Especially not Forbidden Planet with its beautiful, VAST scifi/fantasy section. *purrs* But books are so purty!
After the muses made me write the two short bits of Threads yesterday, they relinquished their control of my brain as quickly as they snatched it, leaving me free to mooch around for the rest of the evening. I really need to stop wasting my free time. I'm currently reading The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque at the moment, an interesting fantasy novel by Jeffrey Ford, having just finished The Scar by China Mieville. Next in line is Neil Gaiman's Coraline, as well as The Alsiso Project (a collection of short stories), which I'm reading on and off. Book review of them all will follow...sometime. And I also read The Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock. Have my mock AMC (floor manager's exam) on Friday. :S And, joy of joys, a dentist appointment on Thursday. I got into really bad habits at uni this year, so I can guarantee I'll get another lecture about brushing twice a day and flossing and blah blah I know this already. Speaking of uni, going back up to London this Sunday, first class sometime next week. Free time will be sadly constricted by the masses of reading I will need to do. At least I won't be regularly getting up at 5am like I have been recently.
Why is it that I'm stupidly unproductive on the days I have most time to write?
Granted I did manage to polish off another edited chapter of Painted
Angels this morning, then the rest of the day was wasted on browsing
through livejournal and other soul-sucking places on the
intarwebs. A whole fricking day, pretty much.
The Painted Angels chapter meant moving a flashback away from the
second chapter, which I reckon is too early for that kind of thing, to
the sixth chapter, and adding a short POV scene for one of the bad
guys, Van Tonder. He needs more depth and screen time, so I
started to give him some. It also ties into the Fox being hunted
plot, ending with a (hopefully) ohnoes! moment where Van Tonder's
lackey says Fox will be in captivity by the end of the week.
Other than that, nothing. Well, I typed up a few hundred words
of what I wrote on holiday, but that doesn't really count.
I also started reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, one of my new favourite authors. So far, so good. Much better than Shadowmarch
by Tad Williams, which I started reading on holiday and is fairly
average. Took 200 pages to get interesting and even now, about
halfway through the hefty tome, I can put it down and not care overly
much. I will finish it sometime, but it's likely it'll take a
while with a lot of better works to read. Not to mention all the
ficpress reading I have to catch up on.
