Category Archives: Books

Books by others; whatever I’m reading.

Food for brain and belly

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I am slowing down on To Each Their Darkness, because it’s less about writing so far, and more about a whole lot of films I haven’t seen. I plan to keep inching through it–so far, it’s had two absolutely harrowing anecdotes that do genuinely touch on the subject of darkness–but I’ll move at a slower pace.
I will also slip away, behind its back, to start up with a book I’ve been waiting for forever, even before I knew it was finally getting written. It’s called Remote, it’s by Donn Cortez, and speaking of darkness, it’s the sequel to a truly horrific novel called The Closer, which in addition to being one of the spookiest thrillers I’ve ever had the privilege to read, is set in East Vancouver, and features big parts of my backyard terrain, including Bon’s Cafe and the annual Parade of Lost Souls.
The Closer has one of the best final lines of any novel I’ve ever read. I won’t excerpt it… it only makes sense in context. But I assure you, it’s killer.
I don’t know anyone else who’s read it… it’s so dark, it falls outside what most of my friends prefer. It’s like Dexter dialed up. Anyone know it?
So I am keen to see where the story goes next.
And while I’m talking books, Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts is out! I reviewed it extensively here, and recommend it wholeheartedly.

In food news, I’ve finally made the pumpkin peanut soup recipe posted by Badger, from Vegan on the Cheap. It was nummy delicious.

The Age of Miracles is gonna get you!

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Before I get onto my reading, I want to mention that you can read an excerpt from Blue Magic at Tor.com, here:

The gate had been stalking Will Forest ever since he arrested his wife. It grew into bare patches of wall in his various hotel rooms and his quarters at Wendover Air Force Base; it had taken over a discreet corner of the kitchen of the Oregon home he so rarely returned to. It turned up in his peripheral vision in restaurants, TV stations, and shops. An archway of brambles, seven feet high, it pushed through drywall and hardwood with apparent ease. Its slats were a blue-tinged wood; its handle was a carved ram’s horn.

While you’re doing that, what am I reading?

I like to mix up fiction and no-fiction, so I’ve gone to a book Snuffy gave me awhile ago… To Each Their Darkness, by Gary A. Braunbeck. I had started this and then hit one of those technofails that happen with e-readers, and got derailed.

So, a book on writing. And then hopefully the new Donn Cortez, Remote, which is in the same peculiar e-hell, and which made me think of it in the first place.

To Each Their Darkness

Previously read in 2012
BOOKS
1. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
2. Among Others, by Jo Walton
3. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester
4. Kat, Incorrigible by Stephanie Burgis
5. Stone Spring, by Stephen Baxter

Bragging up a couple students

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A couple of my students have had notable successes lately:

Lisa Voisin has sold her debut paranormal romance, The Watcher, to Inkspell Publishing. Her release date is September 7th, 2012. I had the opportunity to read an earlier draft of this book as part of the one-on-one mentoring I do in association with Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, and it is delicious, with an off-beat love story and a heroine whose backstory gives a whole new meaning to ‘woman with a past.’

Natashia Deon, the heart and soul of the Dirty Laundry Lit reading series, has learned that the PEN Center USA is going to fund the program for a second year. Here’s the latest video from Dirty Laundry.

AmReading: Stephen Baxter’s STONE SPRING

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I will be interviewing Guest of Honor Stephen Baxter at Norwescon this April 6th and to that end I’ve started Stone Spring, first in his most recent series, The Northland Trilogy. It’s an alternate history about dike-building stone age Britons. The main character is a teenaged girl, Ana; of course, among a people whose life expectancy is in the thirties, this means she is in no way a kid.

I love AH and haven’t read as much of it in the past couple years as I did when I was reviewing for Locus, so it has been a lot of fun. And I’m looking forward to the interview. If you’re gonna be at NWC, it’s at 2:00 p.m. on the Friday.

My previous read was also a novel, Stephanie Burgis’s Kat, Incorrigible, which is a thoroughgoing romp. Kat’s twelve with two marriageable sisters and a family disgraced by their dead mother’s very public use of magic. Her eldest sister is thereby feeling very much obliged to buy into an arranged marriage with the obscenely rich Sir Neville, and naturally it falls to Kat, who has no gift for being ladylike, proper, or even especially inconspicuous, to find a way to save her.

The book is available now and there will be a sequel, Renegade Magic, out in the spring. I’d say they’re appropriate for kids ten years or older, and I found it thoroughly fun.

Finally, I will be mostly unavailable for today, as February 29th is when I and 28 other writers from four cities are participating in the International 24 Hour Book Project. It’ll be #24hourbook if you want to follow the Tweeting fun.

AmReading: Stephanie Burgis’s Kat, Incorrigible

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I have been simultaneously finishing up the last book I was reading–Atlantic, by Simon Winchester, and now I am reading the clever and charming Kat, Incorrigible (Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson), by Stephanie Burgis. Adorable Niecelet will be getting a copy of this as soon as she gets into chapter books, which should be any minute now, as she is of course a supergenius.

Kat is a twelve year old girl with many misfortunes: a dead and disgraced mother, a snippy stepmother and two older sisters who expect her to engage in proper Nineteenth Century Girl Behavior™, to be entirely sanguine about seeing Sister Number One married off to a heinous creep, and above all not to practice magic. When we meet her she’s chopping off her hair and going in search of work to support the family, the better to put off her sister’s impending engagement. It all goes delightfully downhill from there.

Previously read in 2012
BOOKS
1. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
2. Among Others, by Jo Walton
3. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester