still here, still reading
May. 4th, 2022 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishBah. I still have a nagging cough and probably will for another couple of weeks, because that is how respiratory illnesses do. I was supposed to go to a work conference this week but was foiled by Regulations (I needed an authenticated covid test from ten days before travel, and the home test I took wasn't authenticated).
On the bright side that meant that I could spend this week working on getting the apartment in order. I got replacement bookcases on Saturday, and at this point they're all pretty much full. I still have a dozen or two boxes, mostly of Misc, but ... it's coming together.
Meanwhile, Wednesday. One thing I have been able to do is read.
What are you reading now?
The chapbook that came with Elizabeth Bear's Bone And Jewel Creatures. I am embarking on a readthrough of her ... you know, I don't know that they have a name, but there's the two Messaline novellas, the Eternal Sky trilogy, and the soon-to-be-complete Lotus Kingdoms trilogy.
I like these. I'd forgotten that I enjoy Bear's writing, after the disappointment of Ancestral Night. I'm looking forward to becoming engrossed. And it feels good to dig into some of my physical books after they've been boxed up for a month.
What did you just finish reading?
Bone And Jewel Creatures, of course. Also Guards! Guards!, of which more tomorrow or Friday.
And Aspects, which I wrote a lengthy bit on elseweb that I shall preserve here:
When John M. Ford died in 2006 he left behind an extremely messy estate and most of the first novel of an ambitious fantasy trilogy. For reasons too arcane to get into here, the novel has finally been published, in its unfinished form. What you get for your time is an introduction to this rich complex fantasy world that is clearly drawing from 1850s England and is equally clearly its own thing, with a society in the midst of a great deal of change and a cast of characters that are hurt and damaged and trying o so hard to be careful and gentle with each other... and the beginnings of the ways the characters crash against that society and how they'll shape it. And then it just stops, with a couple of fragments from what would have been chapter 8, the last chapter of the first volume of the trilogy.
Chapters one and five are preceded by sonnets, and the published book includes four additional sonnets (plus a variant on the last one) for the rest of the proposed trilogy. So there are hints, just hints, of where Ford was likely going with the emotional/thematic journey.
It's incomplete. But my god, the characters and the worldbuilding are so, so worth it.
(And there's a lovely introduction by Neil Gaiman, which he put off writing for eleven years. It consists mostly of Neil trying to come to terms with the fact that his friend Mike is still dead, fifteen years later, and there really won't be any more brilliant insightful emails, or World Fantasy Award-winning Christmas cards... or chapters of Aspects.)
What do you think you'll read next?
Book of Iron, the second Messaline novella, and then on into Eternal Sky. Ebook, I have no idea, if anything.
On the bright side that meant that I could spend this week working on getting the apartment in order. I got replacement bookcases on Saturday, and at this point they're all pretty much full. I still have a dozen or two boxes, mostly of Misc, but ... it's coming together.
Meanwhile, Wednesday. One thing I have been able to do is read.
What are you reading now?
The chapbook that came with Elizabeth Bear's Bone And Jewel Creatures. I am embarking on a readthrough of her ... you know, I don't know that they have a name, but there's the two Messaline novellas, the Eternal Sky trilogy, and the soon-to-be-complete Lotus Kingdoms trilogy.
I like these. I'd forgotten that I enjoy Bear's writing, after the disappointment of Ancestral Night. I'm looking forward to becoming engrossed. And it feels good to dig into some of my physical books after they've been boxed up for a month.
What did you just finish reading?
Bone And Jewel Creatures, of course. Also Guards! Guards!, of which more tomorrow or Friday.
And Aspects, which I wrote a lengthy bit on elseweb that I shall preserve here:
When John M. Ford died in 2006 he left behind an extremely messy estate and most of the first novel of an ambitious fantasy trilogy. For reasons too arcane to get into here, the novel has finally been published, in its unfinished form. What you get for your time is an introduction to this rich complex fantasy world that is clearly drawing from 1850s England and is equally clearly its own thing, with a society in the midst of a great deal of change and a cast of characters that are hurt and damaged and trying o so hard to be careful and gentle with each other... and the beginnings of the ways the characters crash against that society and how they'll shape it. And then it just stops, with a couple of fragments from what would have been chapter 8, the last chapter of the first volume of the trilogy.
Chapters one and five are preceded by sonnets, and the published book includes four additional sonnets (plus a variant on the last one) for the rest of the proposed trilogy. So there are hints, just hints, of where Ford was likely going with the emotional/thematic journey.
It's incomplete. But my god, the characters and the worldbuilding are so, so worth it.
(And there's a lovely introduction by Neil Gaiman, which he put off writing for eleven years. It consists mostly of Neil trying to come to terms with the fact that his friend Mike is still dead, fifteen years later, and there really won't be any more brilliant insightful emails, or World Fantasy Award-winning Christmas cards... or chapters of Aspects.)
What do you think you'll read next?
Book of Iron, the second Messaline novella, and then on into Eternal Sky. Ebook, I have no idea, if anything.