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Tag: reading

Black Histories and Afrofuturisms

It’s Black History Month in Canada and the US, friends. I would encourage you to listen to and amplify Black voices this month (and every month). Here are some I’ve been listening to and reading, and some I’m looking forward to… Listening Reading Kai Ashante Wilson, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. This fantasy novella is a bloody sword-and-sorcery adventure elevated by the way the author plays with language. The main character, Demane, code-switches between Black American slang and other dialects when he’s speaking, while the narration is more poetic and literary. It’s set in a secondary world based on Africa – and I do mean Africa as a whole, because there’s a lot of travelling and we get a sense of places beyond the edges of the story, too. And the characters are all beautifully drawn, from Demane’s queer love interest (no HEA, though) to the caravan security grunts they’re travelling with. One of the best books I read last year. Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby. A near-future novella full of violence, suffering, and anger about what it can look like to be Black in America, and yet it’s also about love, protection, and hope. It’s fierce in so many senses of the word. Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine. This is a wild contemporary-fantasy ride through complex family relationships, demigods, Toronto, hoodoo, lake monsters, cats, music, kudzu, and more…as you can tell by the wonderful cover. Brown Girl in the Ring has many of the same elements and is equally cool. N.K.…

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Comfort Everything, Take 3

A little bit of everything that’s been giving me comfort lately, because why not. Reading I’ve blogged about comfort reading before (one, two), but here are a few I didn’t mention… Becky Chambers: To be honest, I bounced off her space opera series, but I gave her a second chance with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built and her writing worked much better for me in a shorter format. Hopeful, inclusive futures that don’t have giant stakes, just quiet travels and conversations and tea. Will definitely be picking up the sequel (A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). Angel Martinez: Another author of hopeful, inclusive futures, with a good dose of humour and adventure. My favourite of the three I’ve read so far is Safety Protocols for Human Holidays, a sweet and funny queer romance novella. Elizabeth Peters: I don’t know why I didn’t devour her entire Amelia Peabody series long ago, because it’s right up my alley, but I finally read the first one this year. British lady adventurer! Ancient Egypt! Archaeology! Banter! Unreliable narrator! (Not that she’s lying, but she misses things, especially things to do with emotions. Not unlike Murderbot — another comfort read.) I grew up on a steady diet of E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and the like, along with an Egypt obsession, so it would have been a natural progression. Oh well, I’m hooked now… And I still go back to England for comfort reads like To Say Nothing of the Dog by…

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When and Why I Read Romance

I think I’ve blogged before about friends who grabbed and shook when I said, somewhat ignorantly, that I didn’t read romance. I’m happy to report that I have good friends. I was corrected, firmly and often, until I saw the error of my ways. Now I don’t regularly read romance, because it’s not what I regularly want. But when it is what I want? Absolutely. Delighted to take recommendations. Gimme those good books. What I didn’t get back then, and I what I do get now, is that sometimes we just need to know that it’s all going to be okay. For me, at least, if I can’t get that in the real world (don’t look around if you haven’t lately. Trust me.) then I need it in my distractions. So, romance. Or stuff I’ve read before, but I’ve been doing a lot of rereading. So. Romance. Last week (or the week before, honestly it’s hard to keep track) I read my way through the Brothers Sinister by Courtney Milan. Also in that read-a-thon somewhere were the Langham Line books by Amanda Pahorst. Romance is not, though, my favorite genre. There’s tons of good fantasy and SF I haven’t read! So I’ve been wanting to venture out of the safe haven of romance. I still want my happy endings! I just wanted…more of what I like. I was thinking of picking up the Murderbot series. Or finishing, at long last, Temeraire. Or the Wheel of Time! –okay, not the Wheel…

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Comfort Everything, Take 2

Dear readers, this quarter of the year is always the hardest for me, and I know I’m not alone, especially with all the things going on this year. (Recently it seems like we’re saying that every year, though…) So this week I’m revisiting a topic I’ve covered before in these, um, pages: where to turn for comfort. Here are the comfort reads and comfort viewing that have been helping me get through lately. Books I’ve blogged about comfort reads before, so here are some I didn’t cover last time… Epic fantasy Although I read (and write) all over the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, I read Tolkien at a formative time, so fantasy will always be my first love. For about a decade now, I’ve been taking time around the holidays in December and into January to read epic fantasy. (No grimdark either, thank you.) This year, I read the first two books in Elizabeth Bear’s Silk Road–inspired Eternal Sky trilogy, Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars. Featuring a nomad prince in exile, a princess-turned-wizard, a very interesting horse, and lots of epic landscapes and cities and cultures. (CW: there’s a plague in the second book.) Book three will be next year’s read, and there’s also a sequel trilogy. (My previous epic-fantasy holiday read was N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which is breathtakingly good but 100% not a comfort read.) Historical fantasy Still in the fantasy vein: historical fantasy, roughly defined as a past era in the “real world” with…

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Whittling Away at the TBR List

Like many authors and some other people, I hoard books. I hardly go into a bookstore, used book store, or library book sale and come out empty handed. But then do we read those books? Oho, of course not. There’s always something shinier, or your holds have come in at the library, or you were passing a shelf at the library and saw a cover you had to have, etc. (I try to mitigate this somewhat by delegating shiny books to either my Amazon wishlist or my library account’s For Later list. In the pandemic age, where the library is closed, I have found myself buying eBooks of the things that would normally have gone on the library list, so this is not helpful.) (Especially since the library’s digital library is available, so who even knows.) In December we had to buy a new six-foot bookcase to accommodate the books just laying about, so when 2020 started, I made a pledge. And that pledge was to read one book that I’d bought at a library book sale a month. Since I typically read 3-5 books a month (though more like 6-8 in the pandemic age), this still allows me leeway to read whatever else I felt like. Now, I’ve made pledges like this before. A few years ago, I thought I’d read one new book off every bookcase shelf until I made it all the way through all my many bookcases (and then start over, I assume). I think I…

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A Surplus of Books

It’s moving week around here. My mother, my mother-in-law, my grandmother, the neighbors across the street, someone the next street over… It’s madness. But it’s somewhat removed madness, because I am not moving, and my mother does not want help, and no one else expects any help from my direction. The biggest thing has been my grandmother moving. My grandparents bought the house forty years ago (brand new) and have lived there since (well, my grandfather died some time ago, so Grandma has), so that’s a long time to accumulate stuff. My grandmother is in her late ’90s and has decided to move into assisted living (she’s perfectly lucid, so it was entirely her decision), so she’s also shoving off almost everything. Forty years of everything. My grandmother has five children (including my mother) and apparently there is a feel that everything must be fair about the shoving off of everything, so there’s a long list of things that Grandma is not taking with her, and everyone has to go through it and see what they like, and put in a claim on their preferences. People with children have to do it for both them and their children, so having children actually puts them at a disadvantage because every one of the five siblings gets an equal share. It has turned into a madhouse. I mean, it’s truly remarkable. I won’t go into that, but Good Lord. Last week I went up to visit (my mother also currently lives in the same…

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End of Project Jitters

City of Hope and Ruin is out! Hooray! It’s out and it’s lovely and people have been so great about telling us how excited they are or how much they liked the book and we are very thankful for all you lovely people. And now I am free! BWHAHAHA. I mean, of course, there’s still lots to do on CoHaR. Marketing things, reviewers, guest posts and blog tours, the Goodreads giveaway which starts tomorrow, etc. We’ll be at it for months. But the frenetic pace of the past year, and specifically the last five months, is done with. FREEDOM. Of course, now that I find myself with freedom, I once again find myself confronted with a slew of options. What to work on now? Do I work on anything? Do I catch up on all the reading I didn’t do while ear-deep in revisions? At the beginning of the year, I made myself a spreadsheet, and on said spreadsheet I made a list of all the writing projects I wanted to accomplish this year, as well as what I felt was a reasonable amount of time to expect them to be done, and which months would include what projects, etc. Let me tell you how that’s gone thus far. I had a bunch of “smaller” projects slated for January-March. Marketing tweaks, short projects, etc. Not one of them has gotten done. I had that I’d finish the mostly finished draft of a different story March-May. In my infinite free time…

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