books | January Reads

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January Reads

I promised you all a best-of post ages ago, didn't I? I failed miserably at compiling one of my own.

The year has... not been off to the best possible start. (It's not been off to the worst possible starts either, though.)

I've managed to read a decent amount of books in January, though not as many as I'd have liked. Books I remember reading are...

The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (where have her books been all my life?!)
Whispers of the Cotton Tree Root edited by Nalo Hopkinson
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
Flegling by Octavia Butler
Trickster edited by Matt Dembicki

I'm probably missing some, but I'm doing this from memory. I feel like I'm coming across as this whirlwind of activity, but I'm really not. Just disorganised and out of my element. (I'd like the universe to restore my laptop now, please.) I spent today curled up with Anna of the Five Towns. I'm so much further behind on my course reading than I'd wanted to be... (I've also been managing to stick to my TBR acquisition rules, though. Yay!)

Anyway! How's the new year been treating you reading-wise? Do you have any reading goals this year? Any challenges you've decided to participate in? Read any books that you can't get off your mind now that you've read them?

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I know you know what I'm doing for the year, reading-wise, but for anyone else who is interested, I have my lists here. I have two rules: at the end of the year, my 'read' list must be twice my 'acquired' list. Every time I achieve that, I get a reward. I also get a reward every time I strike through everything on the acquired list. The reward? A bottle of Kopparberg cider in whichever flavour I feel like at the time!

Hopefully, this will result in a lot of cider, but I haven't had any yet! At least, not for this. Buying books for university is partly the culprit. Right now I'm struggling through Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome), though I'm looking forward to other books for this course.

(For the curious, I'm doing Old Norse, which will involve translating Kormaks saga, Children's Lit, Welsh Fiction in English, and Creative Writing. And, oh,

sweet_sparrow? The book has an extract from a Norse saga about Tristan and Isolde! I might translate it for practice. *grin*)

I'm also making monthly reading lists. This is the state of February's, which I made a bit too long...

Menna Gallie, The Small Mine.
~~Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction.~~
Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy.
Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness.
Justine Larbalestier, Magic's Child.
Justine Larbalestier, Magic Lessons.
A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh.
A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner.
Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden.
~~Rohase Piercy, My Dearest Holmes.~~
Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons.
Dodie Smith, The Twilight Barking.
Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave.
Mary Stewart, The Hollow Hills.
Mary Stewart, The Last Enchantment.
Mary Stewart, The Wicked Day.
Rosemary Sutcliff, Frontier Wolf.
Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers.
Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset.
Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind.
Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword Song.
Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shield Ring.
Gwyn Thomas, The Dark Philosophers.
~~Jo Walton, Among Others.~~
Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia.
Megan Whalen Turner, A Conspiracy of Kings.
Connie Willis, Doomsday Book.
Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog.
Connie Willis, Blackout.
Connie Willis, All Clear.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival.

My favourite so far was Jo Walton's Among Others, and I totally recommend it. I can link my review if anyone's interested, but oh -- I loved it so much. Apparently it's backordered at the publisher's now -- or so someone told me -- so this one seems to be getting the attention it deserves, which I don't think Jo Walton's had before. (Farthing and the sequels are great too, and if you want Jane Austen-esque society with dragons, you couldn't go wrong with Tooth and Claw... /plug)

You're still doing well with your list, though! You've still read a fair amount more books than you've acquired, after all!

If you translate it for practice, I can has translation to squee over? (Alternatively, what's the saga called and is there a translation I can track down? It sounds fascinating!)

How is Parzival coming along? (And would it be an idea to assign some books to multiple months perhaps if they're proving the kind to take breaks from? Maybe that'd help your list feel a bit smaller too?)

Conversationally, list-wise I am to finish up Pratchett's Witches books (minus the newer Tiffany Aching ones) this year. But I'm taking all year for it.

Yes, just not as well as I'd hoped!

It seems to be just called Tristrams saga, and while I don't know of a translation, I don't know that there's not a translation, either. A lot of Norse texts are translated online, too...

I'm a couple of chapters in, but I haven't read any of it yet this month. I should get to it soon, but I wanted to get a bit ahead with course reading first. I'm okay with stretching books over multiple months if necessary -- the 'shortlist' is more of a guideline than a necessity -- so, we'll see!

That's university's fault, though! *snugs* I'm sure you'll be able to get that cider reward soon, though!

After googling a little, I've discovered that a translation does exist somewhere. Just a matter of tracking the thing down. (It's an older one, though, from 1973.)

Makes complete sense! I kind of wish my course work reading agreed with me enough to read them all in quick succession, but it'd seem I need to space them out a little with something lighter to avoid dizzy and confusion. (We're supposed to come up with about an A4 of thoughts on each books. The Bennett I finished today? I have nothing.)

*snug* If you get too stressed out about the list-reading, I shall endeavour to remind you that it's a guideline only. ^-^ (And you made this beautiful descriptory line about the Walton and I cannot remember what it is, but it makes me want to go out and buy it and put Farthing aside to read this one first. D'you think I should go ahead with that impulse?)

I'm aiming to get the reward for striking through all of them in March -- look how close I am! Once this month is over, I'll have only eight not struck through.

Hmmm. I might look for it myself. I knew that some of the Arthurian texts got to Iceland, but I should look up if there are any others...

I wouldn't want to, if I didn't have to -- I'm going to see my best friend from Wednesday to Monday, next week, and won't be able to take my work with me. Heck, I'm not even taking clothes (I keep enough at my parents to do me). So I have to at least get Swallows and Amazons and whatever I'm meant to read the week after done, and the next couple of books for Welsh Fiction, too...

*snugs* That would help. (If I were you, I would read Among Others first. It's more accessible, I think, since it's not a pastiche of another genre, which Farthing partially is. Jo Walton linked to my review on her LJ, EEK.)

You can do it! *waves pompoms* And that reward for doubling your reading over your acquisitions will be there before you know it too! ^-^

There must be... I'd corner your Old Norse tutor and ask about them if I could. ^-^

I wish you good luck with it! *huggles and sends good reading thoughts*

*shall try to remind occasionally* (Yay! I shall do that then! A good linking, though. ^-^ *snug*)

Yeah, hopefully also in March...

I'll try, but he is quite elusive!

*huggles* Thank you.

I barely read in January--I've been super-busy trying to declutter and prepare for a temporary move.

Reread Tamora Pierce's Lady Knight and Wild Magic. Also read Sarah Monette's The Bone Key (which I found...frustrating, like most of Monette's writing) and The Nanny Diaries, which I picked up via Bookcrossing (didn't really find it funny or particularly interesting).

Oooh! Good luck with the move! I hope that the next books you'll read will be more to your tastes like the rereads you've done!

this year seems to be the same as last year. no goals or challenges, just read what i've got and maybe acquire a few new books. my physical reading pile is low, but the virtual on at booksfree is pretty long.

Hopefully the year'll bring you a lot of good reads!

Work (most notably my 3rd scientific paper) is gobbling up my time, but I still managed

M.R. Mathias' The Sword and the Dragon, which is a nice long read with a captivating plot told in _very_ easy language (in fact, it's a book I would recommend to those of my friends who're less fluent in English, if there'd been tougher editing on the text). (review in my blog)

Lindsay Buraker's Encrypted (reviewed in this comm yesterday; the paranormal romance tag is wrong, but I couldn't remove it myself), which I absolutely loved & recommend to everybody who likes science fiction with emphasis on "science believably used in plot", steampunk, military fiction, and romance.

and I continued with my loud-reading exercise:
Lynn Flewelling Hidden Warrior, the 2nd book of the Tamir Triad. Heart-gripping high fantasy with very somber tones for a change.

You're getting a fair amount of good reads from Smashwords, no? I remember you mentioning a few more books available there.

Did you finish the Flewelling book this month? How're you finding the exercise itself? (I'm sure I've asked before, but I'm afraid my memory is a sieve.)

Yes, Smashwords is my main indie ebook source, in the beginning mostly because its often listed as source in the

fantasy_book_critic_feed, and then I liked the idea behind their service: no drm and you often get 30 to 50% of a book for free to see if you want to buy it. A lot better than what the common stores like Amazon or Sony's set up. For out-of-print, DRMed stuff (like McCaffrey's Pern novels), I use Diesel ebooks, and mainstream else is Fictionwise. But Smashwords delivered most of the unexpected positive surprises, because there's the chance to find something more original than the run-of-the-mill LoTR-rerun with sparkly vampires. Fantasy going mainstream certainly didn't make finding worthwhile books in the genre any easier. ;)

I'm at about 50% of Hidden Warrior. It's a good exercise, esp. for longer speeches (and Hidden Warrior always drags me at least one chapter further than I planned, because I want to know how the story continues). Flewelling's prose also includes enough descriptive text to make reading aloud feasible. If the text-to-speech ratio is too low, it doesn't work as well for some reason.

Oh! I didn't know they had a feed! Useful!

*pokes these sites* Oooooooooh... They look dangerous... And fun!

Huh. How curious that it gets harder. Maybe it's easier to read certain types of text?

*goes poke websites some more*

Yes, those are dangerous sites - for your time and your money (though they might turn out beneficial for your entertainment). ;)

Oops, I meant it gets more difficult to find the good and/or intriguing books on the fantasy shelf (virtual or not) in all that's getting published in the genre right now. At least here in Germany the book stores are literally littered with books that are rarely more than retellings of the same few themes: inherently good vampires (with a few bad habits and high sex appeal), Lord of the Rings characters revisited (and renamed to avoid being too obvious) and a few more. Trying new paper-books has become almost frustrating business at the moment. There are a few gems, finding new aspects or features or themes, but it feels as if there's a lot more sand to sieve through before finding them. Probably it's a thing of the commercialized German book market: publishers are playing it save. A story like that sold well, so the next ten books in the genre better not be too different (a.k.a innovative) from that one.

It helped that my enthusiasm got dampened by the first few books I might've been interested in appearing to be US-only sales.

Oh, no. My fault. I meant the texts being easier to read aloud. I've never actually tried it, but it sounds so curious. There must be some criteria for a book to be easy or difficult to read aloud.

Our situation is much the same, though. (Except that the Dutch market is much smaller so publishers are even more likely to play it safe. It appears to be worst in the YA section and in much the same way.) I think the situation in the English-speaking world is similar. It's just that, being so much bigger there's also a bigger market for niche and innovative stories. I think. I speculate. I wish I knew. That'd be useful.

There must be some criteria for a book to be easy or difficult to read aloud.

I guess it depends on the reading habits. For me, texts with less direct speech work better, because I tend to mimic different speakers with different voices.

The YA section... *sigh* the last really good book I found there was Catherine Webb's Waywalkers (Link goes to Amazon.de for lack of proper review source at work) and even that I preferred in its German translation (which was geared towards an older audience than the original). Regarding innovative stories... yes, they exist, but I think their number doesn't really increase with more books being published in a genre, because the publishers will to take a risk aren't the ones flooding the market with do-overs. But maybe I'm just the pessimist in this. :)

I've started working, and that's put a hole in my reading-for-pleasure, but it's a job I do need to read quite a lot of books for, so I've still been reading...

Let's see.

Manga:
- A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Comics:
- Skim by Mariko Tamaki (Comic about coming of age etc etc. Queer. Didn't really resonate with me but could totally give it to teenagers and I think they'd get on great with it. It was a good comic but probably not at the right moment for me, if you see what I mean.)
- Handboken by Karolina Bång (A comic which is also a kind of manifesto for queer & feminist relationships. Plus it has a great sense of humour!)
- Prins Charles känska by Liv Strömquist (feminist theory IN COMIC FORM omg I have probably been waiting for this book all my life.)

Non-fiction:
- Tove Jansson: Ord, bild, liv by Boel Westin (Biography. Really, really, really good biography.)

Books read for work:
- Headmaster Disaster by Sue Mongredien
- The Legend of the Worst Boy in the World by Eoin Colfer
- The Bear with Sticky Paws by Clara Vulliamy
- Morris the Mankiest Monster by Giles Andreae and Sarah McIntyre
- Unwitting Wisdom: An Anthology of Aesop's Fables by Helen Ward
- Puss in Boots, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Cinderella, Snow White (Ladybird Favourite Stories)
- The Macmillan Treasury of Nursery Rhymes and Poems

Novels read for pleasure: No. Oops?

err. *känsla. I don't think "känska" is a word actually. -_-;;

I hope it's also a job you're enjoying! ^-^ Have you been working long? Maybe you'll get more for-pleasure reading done once you settle into a routine with your job's reading?

Boel Westin is an awesome name. ("Boel" means "lot" in the sense of "a lot of" in Dutch. It adds to the awesome. Just listen to how it falls off the tongue... Preeeeetty...)

This is my January list: http://quackaquacka.dreamwidth.org/18997.html

When I added them up it turned out that I read the exact same number of books in January 2011 as I did in January 2010. It wasn't a conscious thing, so I thought it was interesting to note.

Oooh, fun fact! And that is a lot of books. I hope you've enjoyed the majority! XD

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