Author Archives: Goddess in the Stacks

Canadian Book Challenge and other Miscellany

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No book review today, unfortunately, the last few days have been more chaotic than I was expecting. But next week I’ll be reviewing The Crown’s Fate, the sequel to The Crown’s Game, a duology about Russian enchanters serving the Tsar. Spoiler: The Crown’s Game was absolutely amazing, and so far, Fate is turning out to be a worthy successor!

I have signed up for The 11th annual Canadian Book Challenge! I’m really excited to expand my reading outside of my normal comfort zone (urban fantasy, high fantasy, etc) and try to read more multiculturally. I’ve been researching books by First Nations authors, but the hard part seems to be finding books my library actually has! It’s supposed to be 13 Canadian books (set in Canada/about Canada/written by Canadians) in the next year. (Canada Day to Canada Day.) So if all goes well, one of my book reviews each month should be about a Canadian book!

20170708_141810In other news, my husband and I helped a friend vend at Anthrocon in Pittsburgh last weekend, and that was an extraordinary amount of fun! I got a little bit of reading time in the hotel room while she was at parties, but I spent the largest amount of my weekend selling leather masks to people. She had a record weekend, so it was pretty awesome. All of the hotels and restaurants near the conference center go all out for the Con – our hotel keys have original art of a derpy-looking unicorn! I got a couple of chances to walk around the vendor room, and there were a couple of small publishing houses there, but (and this makes perfect sense, it’s Anthrocon, after all) they catered exclusively to Anthro writing. I thought about picking up a book anyway, but I just didn’t see anything that called to me. I don’t mind fantasy whose world involves anthro animals – I loved Redwall, after all – but all of the blurbs felt much more like “this book is about anthropomorphic animals doing stuff because they’re anthropomorphic” than “they just happen to be humanoid animals doing things.” It’s a small distinction, I suppose. And for the main audience at the Con, not an important one. (I’m obviously not the target audience.)

I have a lot of interesting books heading my way in my local library system, including a biography of Jon Stewart (of The Daily Show fame), a memoir by an abortion doctor, and a retelling of Captain Hook’s origin story. Exciting things to come!

 

#90sinJuly – July 6 – Where the Wild Things Are

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I was not expecting these two books to be as good as they are. I mean, really, Bambi aside, who cares about a story told from the viewpoint of a deer? But these are amazingly written. The animals have their own rituals, and limited magic, and beliefs. They’re absolutely fantastic, and fantastical, books. Fire Bringer (free on Kindle Unlimited right now!) is about deer, while The Sight gives the same treatment to wolves. I may have to re-read these, as apparently Fell, a sequel to The Sight, is out.

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The 90s In July index post is here.

#JubilantJuly – July 6 – A Whole New World

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This was a random book I picked up in a used book store – the angel on the cover, and the description, about fallen angels and spaceships, intrigued me. And if it wasn’t good, it was only 99 cents wasted, right? I loved it. I am fascinated by this world. It’s a derelict colony ship, adrift so long that the AI has fractured and gone a little insane, but some part of it realized the ship is in grave danger of being destroyed by a nearby sun, and it must bring its inhabitants together enough to fix the damage done to the ship and get it moving again. The inhabitants, however, don’t really even understand they’re on a spaceship. It’s really quite well done.

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The Jubilant July index post can be found here.

#90sInJuly – July 5 – Aliens Exist

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thrawn

I don’t actually have too many books about aliens, but this was one I checked out from the library a while back. If you can find the 20th anniversary edition, it’s worth it for the author’s notes scattered throughout. This trilogy got me excited about Star Wars again. (I read it just before The Force Awakens came out.) Thrawn is an amazing villain. He’s intelligent, and capable, and cunning. If you only read one set of Star Wars books, make it this trilogy.

 

 

 

The 90s In July index post is here.

#JubilantJuly – July 5 – Workaholics

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Wasn’t real sure what to do for this post, but then I remembered how many books Brandon Sanderson has put out. He’s either a workaholic or a sorcerer! These are all the Brandon Sanderson that I own, but I’ve read a lot more. The Alloy of Law, hundreds of years after the Mistborn trilogy pictured here, the one about the rotting golden city whose name I can’t remember right now, (Edit: Elantris) and finishing off the Wheel of Time series…the man writes A LOT.

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The Jubilant July index post can be found here.

#90sinJuly – July 4 – No Rain

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“And I don’t understand why I sleep all day
And I start to complain that there’s no rain
And all I can do is read a book to stay awake
And it rips my life away but it’s a great escape
Escape, escape, escape”

Oooo I identify with this. I’m hypothyroid, and despite being medicated, I still have bad fatigue days sometimes. Sometimes that means I can’t pull myself out of bed to go do things I’d planned to do. I tend to write and schedule a bunch of blog posts on my good days, so even if I have a bad fatigue day, something still posts on the blog here. So this is my book today – it’s taught me a lot about my condition and what I can do to mitigate it.20170626_134908