Recent reads and new goodies

Posted by: Redhead on: March 2, 2017

• In: for the love of reading
• 12 Comments

I’ve been getting plenty of reading done lately, now I just need to actually write the reviews!

 

I find I write best in the morning.  My husband thinks I’m crazy, but I love the time of day between 4am and 8am.   I get to hear the city wake up around me – the early city buses, delivery trucks, first shifters scraping ice and snow off their cars in the neighborhood, the apartment building creaking as the air temperature changes.  My apartment is up on a hill, so this time of year when the trees haven’t budded out yet I can see pretty far. I can watch the sun rise over the city and change the colors of the clouds. I can  watch the businesses across the street get ready to open for the day. I can watch the college kids run across the street to catch the city bus for their 8am classes at the campus.  I can watch the traffic on the hill go from a trickle to what passes for rush hour around here. It’s a nice time of morning.  Any those of you lucky enough to have received e-mails from me time stamped at 5am know I do some crazy stuff before the sun comes up.

 

But anyways, we were talking about books I need to review!

Kelley Armstrong’s Lost Souls is a forthcoming novella that takes place in her Cainsville series. I’ve not ready any of the books in that series, but this was a quite fun little mystery story.  I wish more authors would write short stories and/or novellas within their series, they are often very nice entry points. review is coming soon!

 

Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor.  When I bought this novella about a month ago, I told myself i was going to read the first novella, Binti, again, so I could read them back to back. Did that happen? Of course it didn’t.  I zipped through Binti: Home without digging out my copy of the precursor. So before I review this book, I’m going to reread the two novellas back to back, because that will mean I get to spend more time with Binti and her family.

 

I’m nearly done with Arkwright, by Allen Steele,  which means very soon I’ll have another book I need to write a review of. While I really like the overarching plot of this book, as a whole it’s not really working for me.  There is a lot to enjoy in this book, but a lot that frustrated me too. This is the March book for my local book club, so it’ll be interesting to see what everyone else things.

 

Because no week is complete without a stop at my local bookstore,  these beauties came home with me:

Spock Must Die!, the famous Blish novel, and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card.  I’ve read Ender’s Game at least 5 times, but I was never interested in reading further in the series.  A conversation I had with someone last year got me interested in reading further, in learning about how Ender handles knowing that he is responsible for the destruction of an entire species.   And Star Trek novels are always fun brain candy!

 

the wonderful folks at Subterranean Press also sent me some ARCs:

The Unorthodox Dr. Draper and Other Stories by William Browning Spencer – contains short stories written over the last 10 ten years. Looks like there is some satisfyingly dark stuff in here!

 

Mightier than the Sword by K.J. Parker – I run hot and cold with Parker. But of these three, this is the one I am most intrigued by.

 

The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch – I stalled out a few books into Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, but I did enjoy the two or three novels that I read.

 

So, here’s to reading, and here’s to getting up when it’s still dark to fill my favorite hours of the day with review writing.

Tags: books