January Reads

[sweet_sparrow]

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?

Comments

[akk]

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.

[sweet_sparrow]

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.)

[akk]

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.

[sweet_sparrow]

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*

[akk]

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.

[sweet_sparrow]

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.

[akk]

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. :)