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Books books books
Apr. 17th, 2011 01:08 amI took a week off from college reading, on account of it being a holiday and also cause the bank holidays mean I've got 4 weeks off Monday lessons anyway. So now I have read my entire 'to be read' pile.
In a week.
Books be an expensive habit if you don't just borrow them.
I still have a SF Novellas compilation but I intended to ration that out.
Everything else is http://www.librarything.com/catalog/beccaelizabeth rated on my librarything.
I like the Kate Griffin urban magic books. One of the cover quotes says something about urban magic for the digital age, but that isn't it at all. There's next to nothing about computers in any of them. It's all electricity and smoke and flame and empty plastic bags and yellow pages on top of bus shelters and the Night Bus. It's names and places you know from London, and not just in the tourist way of name magic, but a full sense experience, and a sense of the rhythms of place. It's the magic of words, but not the old words hardly anyone uses, the new ones everyone uses all the time. The magic in them is just in the listening, the noticing, the awareness that they are magic. Life is magic.
They've got a lot of that 'case opens when someone asks for help, investigator staggers around getting hit a lot, case solved when he has a minute to notice what he already knows'. But they've also got dragons. Because London has dragons. They've got a fully convincing London of myths you'd never heard of but believe soon as you hear them. Is brilliant.
And the most important way it isn't Neverwhere is these stories aren't about a sort of magic that drops you away from regular life, not about an invisible world that doesn't really interact, but about a seamlessly integrated world where magical injuries get treated on the NHS and there's civil servants to protect the city from the darkness and it's just as magical as everything else, the same flavour, the thing where you just need to notice things on the right angle.
The only down side in it is the main character is a bloke. He's surrounded by a lot of kick arse women but the death rate for everyone is high so they don't exactly add up to a consistent supporting cast. So I keep looking for perfection.
I also finished reading N K Jemisin's The Broken Kingdoms. I liked it fine while I was reading it but as soon as I stopped it stopped being in my head. I like the double layered lives in urban fantasy more than the whole seperate worlds sort, I think.
I don't seem to buy much actual science fiction. Well, in audios it's all science fiction, but in paper books, not so much. I seem to find it harder to find.
In a week.
Books be an expensive habit if you don't just borrow them.
I still have a SF Novellas compilation but I intended to ration that out.
Everything else is http://www.librarything.com/catalog/beccaelizabeth rated on my librarything.
I like the Kate Griffin urban magic books. One of the cover quotes says something about urban magic for the digital age, but that isn't it at all. There's next to nothing about computers in any of them. It's all electricity and smoke and flame and empty plastic bags and yellow pages on top of bus shelters and the Night Bus. It's names and places you know from London, and not just in the tourist way of name magic, but a full sense experience, and a sense of the rhythms of place. It's the magic of words, but not the old words hardly anyone uses, the new ones everyone uses all the time. The magic in them is just in the listening, the noticing, the awareness that they are magic. Life is magic.
They've got a lot of that 'case opens when someone asks for help, investigator staggers around getting hit a lot, case solved when he has a minute to notice what he already knows'. But they've also got dragons. Because London has dragons. They've got a fully convincing London of myths you'd never heard of but believe soon as you hear them. Is brilliant.
And the most important way it isn't Neverwhere is these stories aren't about a sort of magic that drops you away from regular life, not about an invisible world that doesn't really interact, but about a seamlessly integrated world where magical injuries get treated on the NHS and there's civil servants to protect the city from the darkness and it's just as magical as everything else, the same flavour, the thing where you just need to notice things on the right angle.
The only down side in it is the main character is a bloke. He's surrounded by a lot of kick arse women but the death rate for everyone is high so they don't exactly add up to a consistent supporting cast. So I keep looking for perfection.
I also finished reading N K Jemisin's The Broken Kingdoms. I liked it fine while I was reading it but as soon as I stopped it stopped being in my head. I like the double layered lives in urban fantasy more than the whole seperate worlds sort, I think.
I don't seem to buy much actual science fiction. Well, in audios it's all science fiction, but in paper books, not so much. I seem to find it harder to find.