Aaaand it's Which Books Did You Read Last Month? time again &lt;3

I made a conscious decision to read my own things this month (as compared to March's "read nothing but course books and small extras if you have the time"). It's almost doubled the amount of books I read this month, with as bonus that I finished most of them.

Sadly, my brain is a sieve and the best I've got for you are the ones I talked about:

Spellwright by Blake Charlton
Goose Chase by Patrice Kindl
Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
Howards End by E.M. Forster
The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones
Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells

It doesn't look like much until you remember I read about twice that and just can't recall titles. (Oh! No, I can! The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald, which I didn't actually finish, but I think that's the only one.)

It wasn't a terrific reading month for me with not loving anything I read, but I did enjoy most of it in some manner. May will be All About The Course Books. I suspect I'll be dipping in and out of shorter things here and there just to retain my sanity, though.

What about you? Did you have any favourites this months? Something you couldn't finish? Did you make any reading plans and did they work out if you did? Why (not)? Any plans for May?

Also, lastly, has anyone made any bookish posts for the 3 weeks fest that they'd like to share links for?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This was definitely a better month than March for me!

C. J. Cherryh, Betrayer (Foreigner 4.3) -- Always good to spend time with Bren Cameron and friends^H^H^H associates, but one would have liked a little more resolution for the end of the trilogy, and I really hope the (other) aliens put in an appearance before too many more books go by -- it's been six, now, with only occasional reminders that they exist.

Jane Lindskold, Nine Gates -- Chinese-flavored fantasy, middle book of a trilogy. Intriguing and reasonably satisfying; if there's a giant plot hole I haven't spotted it yet.

Seanan McGuire, second of the October Daye series, with mysterious killings in a fearie-owned software company. Diverting travel reading, not very deep. (It's on the e-reader and I'm too lazy to go check the title; Artficial something, I think.)

Michelle West, City of Night, second of the House Wars series. Which I haven't quite finished yet, but I'm only a few pages from the end. I'm a little frustrated with this series; I've been waiting since (I think) 2004 to find out what happened to Jewel Markess and her den *after* her thread was unceremoniously dropped in the last volume of the Sun Sword series, and instead we get, apparently, three fat volumes of backstory about their childhood and adolescence, with this volume having a fair bit of overlap with events in Hunter's Death. Still, it's an engaging enough story, though the suspense is somewhat lacking given that we already know pretty much who was alive ten years later and who wasn't.

Barbara Hambly, Dead and Buried, a welcome return to the Benjamin January series of murder mysteries set in the free colored community of 1830s New Orleans. In this one, the body of an old friend of January's (white) friend Hannibal mysteriously turns up in the coffin of a colored man.

Also I finally made it to the end of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, which was ... odd. Pages and pages and pages of (quite powerful) description of a dead body sitting undiscovered overnight, after most of a book of meandering anecdotes leading up to that moment, and then -- wham bam happy ending in about two pages.

Aargh! I meant to crosspost the above comment to my journal and seem to have sent it to the community instead. Mods, please don't let it through? Many apologies.

Yay! Better reading months are good! (Unless you're supposed to be too busy to read much, I guess. Then it'd probably be bad.)

Linskold, Linskold... Oh! That book's from the series that starts with Thirteen Orphans, right?

Artificial Days, I think, is the title of the McGuire book. But I'm not quite sure. I haven't read them myself. I'm... half curious about them and half not. Fairies in urban fantasy and I... tend not to get along.

The Hawthorne sounds weird. Intriguing, but weird. Anything you preferred more than the others from this list? (I admit to skipping a bit over your description of the Michelle West. I've had about... half of her Sun Sword series standing on my shelf for... three years now? so wanted to err on the side of caution)

The McGuire is An Artificial Night. And yes, the Lindskold was the sequel to Thirteen Orphans. That one felt a bit like an obligation at first -- it was a personalized hardcover from last year's Tucson Festival of Books, and I was not quite in the mood for it when I started, but it grew on me as it went on, and the plot didn't fall apart at the end. On the panel before the signing, the author explained that she makes her plots up completely as she goes along, and her first reader is her husband, who reads the manuscripts on his commute. This probably explains why they often fail for me on a macro level, though they're engaging on a page-by-page basis. I just hope the third one wraps up in a way that works.

I think my favorite was the Hambly, though I didn't say much about it. I can always count on Hambly for atmosphere; she's really great at immersing the reader in the grungier side of different realities. Though this one does suffer slightly from the problem that once the love interest is married to the hero it's harder to find interesting things for her to do ...

Apparently my memory for titles is spectacularly awful. ^-^

The Linskold books sound interesting! *should put the first higher on her wishlist* I hope you'll enjoy the third!

Why does being married exclude the ability to do interesting things? *tilts head* Is it a cultural thing in the book that causes that?

I think it's something about the nature of long-running episodic series rather than about a specific culture. Love interest gets introduced to a previously single main character, spends a book or two being the love interest and an interesting character in their own right -- and then they get married, which reduces the tension in the relationship and also means they're a fixture in the series. But the series isn't primarily about them or the relationship, so the main character goes off and keeps having adventures according to the pre-established theme, and the love interest just sort of sits there in the background, making occasional helpful comments. This instance isn't nearly as egregious as what happened (or didn't happen) to Ekaterin in the latest Vorkosigan book, but it reminded me of that, and it feels like a pattern.

Still, I suppose it's better than the alternative model for detective series, where anyone the main character is romantically interested in turns out to be involved in the crime, either as victim or perpetrator.

Aaaand it's Which Books Did You Read Last Month? time again <3

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