News & Links
Dec
04
2010

For the second week in a row, there are no new books for the Sunday post so I’m hoping to get a review up instead.  In the meantime, here are some various bits of news or other interesting links I’ve seen lately.


Every year from December to early January, The Book Smugglers hold their annual Smugglivus celebration. This includes guest posts from bloggers and authors in addition to their own end of the year discussions on favorite books.  It started this week and there have been some excellent posts so far including but not limited to the following: Jessica of Read React Review wrote about the similarities between Hanukkah and popular fiction, Harry of Temple Library Reviews discussed some of his favorite books read this year, and a guest post by author Catherynne M. Valente.

Tor.com has an excerpt from The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente, which is a great book with beautiful imagery and a fascinating world mythology.  (It’s one of the books I’m working on reviewing now.)

Seanan McGuire has sold the first two books in another urban fantasy series, InCryptid, about a family of cryptozoologists simultaneously working to protect the cryptids and humanity from each other.  The titles of these books are Discount Armageddon and Midnight Blue-Light Special.

Chachic’s Book Nook is giving away signed copies of The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner.  The contest is open internationally, and the winner is just asked to post a review of the books somewhere in return.  These are some very good young adult books – I love how Turner leaves out all the details of what is happening until the very end and the second and third books in particular are superb.

io9.com asks if Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen the girl power equivalent of Star Wars.  I love The Snow Queen – it was my favorite book read in 2009 and one of my favorites ever.

November Reading
Dec
01
2010

November has officially come to a close with only 3 books completed during the month.  I was going to hold off on this post since I was hoping to have a review up tonight, but I keep arguing with myself about it and it’s not going to be done tonight.  Oh well!

Books read in November are:

44. Resenting the Hero by Moira J. Moore (review)
45. The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente (review forthcoming)
46. The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner (review forthcoming – if I can ever make up my mind about what I want to say about it)

Favorite book of the month: Eek, that’s a tough one.  I liked all of these quite a bit (this has actually been a great reading year for me other than not reading quite as many books as the past couple years – I’ve really liked the vast majority of what I’ve read).  It’s definitely either The Habitation of the Blessed or The King of Attolia, but I’m not sure which I liked better.  They’re very different books and I liked them both for very different reasons.  So for now it’s a tie.

I’m hoping to read 4 books in December to make it to 50 books, but I’m not sure if that will happen.  December is always my worst reading month because of being busy due to the holidays and I still need to read the rather lengthy Duma Key, which I promised a friend I’d read by the end of the year (we each picked 3 books for each other to read and this is the last one of them I haven’t read).  Next year I’m doing away with reading goals since I’ve been horrible at meeting my own – my case of book ADD is too severe, I’m afraid, especially if I have a crazy year like this one (moving twice in one year was really not in my plans – and I hope it never is ever again).

What did you read in November?

Update
Nov
28
2010

I hope everyone who celebrated it had a great Thanksgiving and the rest of you had a great week!  With the holiday I was hoping to get all kinds of blogging done but I have to admit I was lazy and did some reading but not a lot of reviewing.  I did finish The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente and The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner so I’m hoping there will be reviews of those two books up soon.  Now I’m starting Midsummer Night by Freda Warrington, and I need to read Duma Key by Stephen King before the end of the year.  Those are both fairly long, especially the latter, so I have a feeling I’ll be adding a lot of shorter books to the mix in December.

News & Links
Nov
22
2010

It’s probably going to be a bit quiet here until the holiday is over, but in the meantime here’s some links of interest.

Seeing a release date for The Tempering of Men caused me to see if I could find a date for Sarah Monette’s next book.  Her next novel is titled The Goblin Emperor and will be written under the name Katherine Addison.  According to a recent post on her blog, it is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2012.  I cannot wait!

Also on Sarah Monette’s blog, she announced that she has the rights to Melusine and The Virtu back and is looking to get them both back into print. This is fantastic news and I really hope this happens so that new readers can find these two books.  She did say if she can’t find another publisher, she will self publish them so they are available to those who want to read them, though.

Seanan McGuire got to show off the cover for Deadline today.  This will be the second book in her Newsflesh series written under the name Mira Grant.  It’s scheduled for May 2011.

Catherynne M. Valente also posted the cover for her upcoming novel, Deathless.  It’s coming out in March 2011.

I received my newsletter about new books available for pre-order through The Signed Page recently and they have some great books coming up – River Marked by Patricia Briggs, Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, and Pale Demon by Kim Harrison to name a few.  They also have signed copies of Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold in stock.

The Leaning Pile of Books
Nov
21
2010

Today I bought two books due to the fact that I had $10 in Borders bucks that were going to disappear if I didn’t use them over the next couple of days.  We can’t have that happening!  I was hoping to get the next Lee and Taro book by Moira J. Moore, but the bookstore didn’t have it so I ended up with these two instead:

The Decoy PrincessThe Decoy Princess by Dawn Cook

Dawn Cook is also Kim Harrison, the author of the popular urban fantasy series The Hollows.  Even though I have a lot of catching up to do on The Hollows series (I’ve read the first and liked it enough to buy the next few but I haven’t picked them up yet due to having a severe case of Book ADD), I keep wanting to pick up The Decoy Princess when I see it in the bookstore.  This time I gave in to temptation since they didn’t have my first choice book and this also sounds like fun – a girl raised as a princess discovers she is actually a decoy for the real princess.  There is one sequel, Princess at Sea.  An excerpt from The Decoy Princess is available on Dawn Cook’s website.

Princess Contessa’s dreams of living happily ever after marrying a prince are shattered when her “parents” reveal that she’s actually a street urchin they raised as their daughter to thwart assassins from their real target.

Mind GamesMind Games by Carolyn Crane

I love The Thrillionth Page, the blog of Carolyn Crane, which I’ve known about since before I even knew she was writing a book.  She’s hilarious – how can you not love her post entitled “Why aren’t men like Jamie Fraser?” in response to a question she found in her search stats?  So even though I’m getting a bit urban-fantasied out, I’m excited about reading Mind Games, the first book in the Disillusionists trilogy.  Plus there are vigilantes and some of the reviews mention moral ambiguity, which I love, so that just makes it even more intriguing.  Chapter One is available online.  The second book, Double Cross, is also available now, and the third book does not yet have an official release date but will probably be out during the second half of next year.

Mind Games heroine Justine Jones isn’t your typical kick-ass type – she’s a hopeless hypochondriac whose life is run by fear.

She’s lured into a restaurant, Mongolian Delites, by tortured mastermind Sterling Packard, who promises he can teach her to channel her fears. In exchange, she must join his team of disillusionists – vigilantes hired by crime victims to zing their anxieties into criminals, resulting in collapse and transformation.

Justine isn’t interested in Packard’s troupe until she gets a taste of the peace he can promise. Soon she enters the thrilling world of neurotic crime fighters who battle Midcity’s depraved and paranormal criminals.

Eventually, though, she starts wondering why Packard hasn’t set foot outside the Mongolian Delites restaurant for eight years. And about the true nature of the disillusionists.

The Tempering of Men by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
Nov
18
2010

Recently I came across a link to the Tor Spring/Summer catalog on asoiaf.westeros.org and was very excited to see the sequel to A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette was included.  The Tempering of Men will be released in hardcover in August 2011 and I cannot wait since I really liked the first book – and Bear and Monette are two of my favorite authors.

Since my husband is a huge fan of Vernor Vinge, I also took note that A Fire Upon the Deep is being re-released in trade paperback in preparation for the sequel.  According to the catalog, it is called The Children of the Sky and is coming out in October 2011.

2011 is looking like a great year for books!  What books are you looking forward to in 2011?