October Reading!

[sweet_sparrow]

What've you been up to, bookwise, in October? Read anything you think everyone should read? Something everyone should avoid? Are, or were, you reading anything special for Halloween? Too busy to read?

I'll be diving into Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip after hitting post here. I'm hoping to finish it before the end of the day as my final Tam Lin related book for this month. You could call it my special Halloween read if you liked.

My List of Books as it stands now - I'm not convinced I'll have the time on Monday - is as follows:

- Blood Roses by Francesca Lia Block (Didn't finish. FLB's prose and I do not get along.)
- Labyrinth by A.C.H. Smith
- Out of the Silent Planet (Space 1) by C.S. Lewis
- The Silver Chair (Chronicles of Narnia 6) by C.S. Lewis
- The House on Durrow Street (Mrs. Quent 2) by Galen Beckett
- The Witch Queen's Secret (Trystan & Isolde 1.5) by Anna Elliott
- Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
- An Earthly Knight by Janet McNaughton
- The Perilous Gard Elizabeth Marie Pope
- Dawn of Avalon (Trystan & Isolde 0) by Anna Elliott

That makes a total of ten books. Possibly eleven if I can get the one I started yesterday finished on time. ^-~ I'm a little surprised, actually, that I don't seem to have managed any non-fantasy books this month. I thik my favourite, despite having a boatload of issues with it, is The House on Durrow Street and Labyrinth is my least favourite. Stick with the movie.

I am, however, all caught up on my coursework reading now. Yay!

Comments

[travelingmonkey]

Nothing special for October.

I've read:
The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin - Alex de Jonge
The Third Victim - Lisa Gardner
The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - Jane Austen & Seth Grahame Smith
The Law of Second Chances - James Sheehan
The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabot
4.50 from Paddington - Agatha Christie
The Empty Chair - Jeffery Deaver
Star Trek Memories - William Shatner
and I'm in the middle of Marathon Man by William Goldman, which I intend to finish today.

I would recommend all of them. Kavalier & Clay was really great, definitely deserving of its Pulitzer; Rasputin was quite an interesting historical read; P & P & Zombies was really awesome, I loved it!

[queen_ypolita]

My October reading:

The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith - the blurb made it sound more like a mystery/suspense novel than it was, so it took a while to adjust my expectations, but it was OK.

Daughters of the House by Michèle Roberts - Two women in the house where one grew up and the other spent her holidays (and now occupies with her husband and children) with various objects in the house evoking childhood memories of their times together and of the secrets the adults were keeping.

Some Other War by Linda Newbery - First World War YA following twins Jack and Alice who turn eighteen in 1918; he joins the army, and she becomes a Red Cross nurse, I liked it.

Luftslottet som sprängdes by Stieg Larsson - The third book in the Millennium trilogy seemed to kick straight into action faster than the other two and was a page-turner from the first page until the last. I'm sad there won't be more; it feels we've only now really got to know Mikael and Lisbeth and are ready for adventures that take them beyond their pasts.

Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald - a long novel about a family living in Cape Breton with one section towards the end being the New York diary of one of the daughters--that turned out to be the section I liked most, and was probably closest to what I had thought the book was going to be like. And surprise incest wasn't a fun surprise by any means. There also seemed to be potential for something about being bilingual (or frowned upon for being bilingual) but wasn't really explored at all. Overall, a disappointment.

Hey, Dollface by Deborah Hautzig - YA intense teenage girl friendship.

Temeraire by Naomi Novik - I wanted to re-read this before getting started with The Throne of Jade, which I'm currently in the middle of, and it was just as good as I remembered it being.

[cafeshree]

Search the Dark by Charles Todd - a mystery post WWI in England

Changeless by Gail Carriger - total fun

Juliet by Anne Fortier - part historical story of Romeo and Juliet and part modern solving of Romeo and Juliet curse

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong - beautiful coming-of-age story, my favorite of the month

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel - Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII etc.

Dark Fire by C.J. Sansom - mystery set in Henry VIII time period, quite good

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann - eh, parts ok but not loving it

[brigid]

I've finished "Let the Right One In" (much less harrowing than "The Handling the Undead"), "One Bloody Thing After Another," and "Cryoburn," all of which deal with death. So I guess there was a theme after all this month! All were super good.

[holyschist]

I kind of fell down on my "read more grownup books" and "read more diverse authors" plan this month, but oh well. I was on vacation and the library I used was small.

78. Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbalestier (ya fantasy)
Really enjoyed this--an interesting, morally difficult magic system sets up the conflict, and it's set in Australia and New York City. Bechdel-passing.

79. The Shadow Matrix, by Marion Zimmer Bradley (adult science fantasy)
Reread for nostalgia's sake. Very little actually happens. Spoilery loling here, if you can spoil for something with so little plot. Definitely not one of the better Darkover books.

80. Corambis, by Sarah Monette (adult fantasy)
The marginally less problematic conclusion to Doctrine of Labyrinths. I continue to love and be deeply icked out by these books in equal measure.

81. Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld (ya science fiction)
82. Specials, by Scott Westerfeld (ya science fiction)
84. Extras, by Scott Westerfeld (ya science fiction)
Finishing out the series! Westerfeld is very much an idea writer, and I never got very vested in his characters (I was also...unconvinced by the future-Japanese setting in Extras). But these are fun idea books, even if the characters always seem a bit wooden. Very Bechdel-passing.

83. Heist Society, by Ally Carter (ya contemporary)
A very unconvincing, bland heist story. I picked it up because it had a female protagonist and heist/con stories rarely do, but the writing was mediocre (lots of telling rather than showing, distracting lapses in omniscient voice) and the characters were flat. Not very Bechdel-passing.

85. So Tomorrow, by Scott Westerfeld (ya contemporary with SFish elements)
DEFINITELY an idea writer. I couldn't tell you a damn thing about the characters, but the idea--about consumerism and branding and trend-setting--is fairly interesting.

86. The Last Hero, by Terry Pratchett (illustrated adult fantasy)
A short Discworld novel illustrated by Paul Kidby, who has basically visually defined Discworld, about the last battle of Cohen the Barbarian. It's charming, amusing, and sometimes rather gorgeous, and the illustrations are fantastic.

87. How to Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier (ya fantasy)
I...don't think I really liked this. Too much slang (Larbalestier is married to Westerfeld--maybe he rubbed off on her?), was much more interested in the main character's rival than the main character, and the disgustingly, unfairly, arbitrarily rigid school that all the characters loved made me want to reach through the page and punch all the authority figures. In the end, the characters all loved the school, so there was never any serious questioning of whether the authority was right. Also do not like reading about self-absorbed societies that think they are better than everyone else (no, I did not like Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel books, either). The main concept was interesting, and I think telling it from the point of view of Fiorenze would have made a big improvement. Very Bechdel-passing.

88. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan (ya zombie)
I'm not normally into zombie stories, but I did like this one. Beautiful writing, great atmosphere. I thought teenage lust was described well, although by the end I was sort of irritated by its conflation with love, and not entirely convinced by how the dystopian society was set up (a society that small, that careful about inbreeding--dude, teenage boys wouldn't be picking their brides, adults would be arranging ALL the teenage marriages). I gather the sequels are more rehashes with similar characters, so I may give them a pass, since I'm more interested in what Mary does. Not very Bechdel-passing.

I also used some field guides, including:

The Birdwatcher's Guide to Hawai'i, by Rick Soehren
Slightly out of date, but very useful to find birding locations. Sadly, many of the best sites on the Big Island were closed due to fire danger.

A Photographic Guide to the Birds of Hawai'i: The Main Islands and Offshore Waters, by Jim Denny
This was the best of the Hawaiian bird guides I used--it wasn't as compact as the others, but had more information. Also, it consistently used diacritical marks on the Hawai'ian names for birds, which I liked. However, it did not have many of the features of Sibley which I have grown to rely on, such as thumbnail images showing what birds look like in flight from behind, for example. This made some identifications difficult. Also, neither this nor any of the others was very useful for ducks. My ideal Hawai'ian bird guide--a Sibley that includes extinct species--does not exist.

The other field guides I used were not memorable.

I picked up some fun books--a book on Hawai'ian grammar (awesome! ♥), a book of Hawaiian legends, and a book on the ancient Hawai'ians illustrated by Herb Kawainui Kane. Right now I'm reading Tanya Huff's third Torin Kerr book, military space opera. I don't love these books, but they're kind of fun and nicely, if obviously, subversive of expectations.

[archersangel]

people of the earth by kathleen o'neal gear and w. michael gear
stargate sg-1: the first amendment by ashley mcconnell
the virgin's lover by philippa gregory
the other boleyn girl by philippa gregory
people of the mist by o'neal gear & gear
star trek: DS9--the lives of dax edited by marco palmieri Collapse

[to_love_a_rose]

Not much in October.

Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
The Corinthian by Georgette Heyer

Two Heyer so close together, only broken up by a light comedy play that took about a day and a half to read, was a bit much. It was too much fluff, not enough substance, and by the second half of The Corinthian, I was annoyed with the plot devices and characterization, but I can't tell if it was the book itself or just Heyer overload.

I'm poking at Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger right now, still working on some essays and letters by Charles Lamb, and occasionally picking up A Memoir of Jane Austen by J.E. Austen-Leigh.

[sforzando]

October was a great month for me!

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant
The Bells by Richard Harvell

Room and The Bells I was really excited about, because I rarely pick up new novels! They were both satisfying in kind of a morbid way. The Bells kind of freaked me out so much with what I perceived as borderline child molestation that I put it down for awhile, but when I picked it back up All Was Well and it turned out a great read. The best thing about October is that I didn't pick up a book I didn't actually finish, I don't think.

I'm reading The Wrong Blood by Manuel de Lope now, which is turning out really well aside from the long, difficult-to-follow sentences and the first bit being mostly about rape (though there is a preface almost entirely dedicated to explaining why that's the case).

[sage]

the highlights:

97. The Adventure of English (Audio CD) by Melvyn Bragg - loved this. BBC has since made a miniseries of it, too.

98. The Passage by Justin Cronin - good, but overhyped. Cross Stephen King's The Stand with Salem's Lot and throw in some GRR Martin.

99. The Game (Mary Russell #7) by Laurie R. King - I do love my Holmes pastiche, although this is not one of the better books in the series.

100. The Hunger Games (Hunger Games, #1) by Suzanne Collins
101. Catching Fire (Hunger Games, #2) by Suzanne Collins
102. Mockingjay (Hunger Games, #3) by Suzanne Collins
- variously loved and hated parts of these. I'm not a fan of the Battle Royale trope, but it was really good YA dystopia...with the caveat that YA dystopia doesn't generally succeed at worldbuilding that makes a lick of sense.

103. Locked Rooms (Mary Russell #8) by Laurie R. King - yup, still love my Holmes pastiche. Really nice to see them do San Francisco, although the pacing was weird throughout.

[thecutepolice]

I did pretty good in October:

The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, by Lauren Willig
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe
The Glass Painter's Daughter, by Rachel Hore
Pray for Silence, by Linda Castillo
Grave Secret (A Harper Connelly Mystery), by Charlaine Harris
The Truth About Forever, by Sarah Dessen
The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America, by Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. S. Mark Young

Of these, I'd most recommend The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and the Truth About Forever.

I'm starting November with Bloodhound by Tamora Pierce (who I adore) and still working through The Encyclopedia of Counseling (I will pass the Licensing Exam the first time...)

[ellarien]

I spent the first half of the month not having much time to read at all (and also preparing for an intercontinental move, so most of my dead-tree books are in transit and will be for a while.) I plowed through an ebook re-read of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and still didn't care much for any of the characters and found the ending drawn-out and unsatisfying. Then I had a bit more time on my hands, and read Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue, about a half-faery San Francisco PI, and Sandra MacDonald's The Stars Blue Yonder, the third (and final?) book in a series with spacefarers and Australian mythology, this one with a complicated time-travel plot, both of which I enjoyed, and also a re-read of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a teenage favorite now with bonus anti-semitic stereotypes and surprisingly little actual action.