also books
Oct. 5th, 2016 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWhat are you reading?
A draft of a YA novel by Theresa Bazelli, because I'd meant to have some feedback in for the start of the month.
What did you just finish reading?
Howard Waldrop's longer-fiction collection Other Worlds, Better Lives. I stumbled on a matching set of this and Things Will Never Be The Same (shorter-fiction) last month when we unburdened ourselves of the current set of go-away books. The stories are mostly quite good but they took me longer to get through than I'd expected. Waldrop tends to write twentieth-century American alternate history (in the introduction to one of the collections, he writes, "People would send alternate history stories to Omni, and Ellen Datlow kept rejecting them with 'If I'd wanted a Howard Waldrop story, I'd've asked Howard to write me one'"), and his stories ask a certain familiarity with the history in question to fully appreciate. As such, I enjoyed the heck out of "A Dozen Tough Jobs" (the labours of Hercules set in 1930s Mississippi), and the others left me varying degrees of cold. None were bad; I just didn't have sufficient background. (He does provide author's notes for each, so when I'd missed the larger significance entirely I could still follow along.)
What do you think you'll read next?
I'm traveling next week, so an ebook. I've got a desire to reread The March North and A Succession of Bad Days, and then dive into Safely You Deliver because I haven't gotten to it yet. Too, I feel like I got a *lot* more out of The March North the second time through. Looking forward to the same from ASoBD. Maybe this time I'll have something more coherent to say about them than OMG READ THESE THEY ARE DENSE AND AMAZING.
A draft of a YA novel by Theresa Bazelli, because I'd meant to have some feedback in for the start of the month.
What did you just finish reading?
Howard Waldrop's longer-fiction collection Other Worlds, Better Lives. I stumbled on a matching set of this and Things Will Never Be The Same (shorter-fiction) last month when we unburdened ourselves of the current set of go-away books. The stories are mostly quite good but they took me longer to get through than I'd expected. Waldrop tends to write twentieth-century American alternate history (in the introduction to one of the collections, he writes, "People would send alternate history stories to Omni, and Ellen Datlow kept rejecting them with 'If I'd wanted a Howard Waldrop story, I'd've asked Howard to write me one'"), and his stories ask a certain familiarity with the history in question to fully appreciate. As such, I enjoyed the heck out of "A Dozen Tough Jobs" (the labours of Hercules set in 1930s Mississippi), and the others left me varying degrees of cold. None were bad; I just didn't have sufficient background. (He does provide author's notes for each, so when I'd missed the larger significance entirely I could still follow along.)
What do you think you'll read next?
I'm traveling next week, so an ebook. I've got a desire to reread The March North and A Succession of Bad Days, and then dive into Safely You Deliver because I haven't gotten to it yet. Too, I feel like I got a *lot* more out of The March North the second time through. Looking forward to the same from ASoBD. Maybe this time I'll have something more coherent to say about them than OMG READ THESE THEY ARE DENSE AND AMAZING.