books books and more books

[jazzfish]

What are you reading?

The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin. It turned up in my mailbox a few weeks ago and I'm just now getting to it. Enjoyable thus far but I have zero recollection of having read it before.

I was reminded of its existence by an email from Subterranean saying that they would in fact be offering Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy short-fiction collection, which was part of my motivation for picking up their nice editions of the trilogy. I'm glad I did. These are my favourite SubPress editions so far, next to De umbrarum regni novem portis.

Ebook, just starting on Sourcery, of which I have only slightly more than zero recollection. And I'm also moving a bit on Sandman: World's End, which I'm enjoying but not as much as Fables & Reflections.

What did you just finish reading?

Katherine Addison's Witness for the Dead, a cosy murder mystery set in the world of The Goblin Emperor. It's not Goblin Emperor, and the fierce kindness of that book is less front-and-center, but it's still present. Recommended, and I'd be happy to read more fantasy-world cosy-mysteries too.

And I bailed on Tessa Gratton's King-Lear-as-fantasy-doorstopper The Queens of Innis Lear. Like its source material, it is a bit slow going and also chock-full of interesting characters who are to a person horrible people, with the arguable exception of the Cordelia-analogue and her new husband the king of NotFrance, and I do not want to immerse myself in that. I want to be clear that this is a failing in me and not the book: it's a really good example of the kind of thing it is! It is just very much Not For Me Right Now.

What do you think you'll read next?

I feel like I'm busy enough at the moment. But I've got the new edition of The Scholars of Night, of which I will at least read Charlie Stross's introduction and then we'll see if I can manage to put it down, and also the finale of Stross's Merchant Princes series, and plenty of hard-copy books waiting on my shelves too.

... and a friend just reminded me that it's nearly October, and it's been far too long, and I should do a one-a-day reread of Zelazny's A Night In The Lonesome October. So maybe that.

Comments

[greenstorm]

I would like to borrow that cozy mystery.

[jazzfish]

Doable. <3

[shadowkat]

I've realized after awhile that my least favorite Shakespearean Trope is King Lear. I have seen one presentation of it that I adored - Anthony Hopkins's take in London in 1987. That I adored. But all others tend to annoy me for some reason.

Hmm...I may hunt down Katherine Addison's Witness for the Dead. I rather liked The Goblin Emperor.

Also, curious about N.K. Jemison, who I keep flirting with on audio books. I have some of her e-books. Inhertiance Triology, and another, I can't remember the name of.

[jazzfish]

For someone as Shakespeare-oriented as I am/was, I've really only encountered Lear twice: once in a production a few years ago that a friend took me to, and as the centrepiece of the third season of Slings & Arrows (a comedy series set behind the scenes at a Shakespeare festival). It is ... /grim/. I don't think I would go out of my way to engage with it.

I really, really like Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy. I've also read her Dreamblood duology (published after Inheritance but written first), and the first book was quite good. Then the second one I bounced off of hard the first time I tried it. I finished it when I tried again but it was a slog most of the way through, and I don't really know why. I haven't read her multi-award-winning Broken Earth series because I'm told that it is exceedingly harsh towards its characters and I am not really up for that these days.

[shadowkat]

I did a ton of Shakespeare in undergrad - and high school, combination of being a theater geek and an English Lit major. Also parents who were theater geeks.

Lear - is popular with a lot of literary fiction writers for some reason. A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley did Lear. And I think Alice Hoffman did. So did some filmmakers - I think Rashamamon is based on Lear. There's something about that trope that turns on lit fic writers and filmmakers.

Hamlet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelth Knight, The Tempest, Henry V, Richard the III, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are also overdone.

Less so - Titus Andronicus, the one with Rosalind that I'm drawing a blank on, Two Gentlmen of Verona, The one with Shylock and Portia (for good reason - that I confuse with Christopher Marlow's Jew of Malta for some reason), and Anthony & Cleopatra.

Austen's the same - Emma and Pride & Prejudice are kind of overdone, we don't see much of the others.

And also Dickens - Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Great Expectations are overdone, along with A Christmas Carol.

And Brontes? Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. I didn't know they wrote anything else until someone brought it up recently.