It’s WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.
• What did you recently finish reading?
A couple of weeks ago I did a reading with Nalo Hopkinson and Deborah J. Ross. It went really well–full house, much good discussion. And I scored copies of Deborah’s The Seven Petaled Shield and Nalo’s Sister Mine. They’re very different–Shield is a thoughtful fantasy in the epic mode, and the first in a trilogy. Disclaimer: I’m generally not a reader of epic fantasy–I think it’s the intractable urbanist in me. But I liked Shield a lot. It’s told from two different viewpoints, that of a mother and her son, from the beginning of a cataclysmic attack on their city. Of the two, I felt more sympathetic to the mother–may be that I simply have less patience for adolescent anguish than I used to. But I was particularly impressed with the religious backgrounds of the story, which infused the characters’ behavior. Sister Mine is…sort of a tour de force, a fantasy set in modern Toronto, involving a family of beings who are, or are related to, demigods. I wish I could describe the voice–I heard Nalo read a section, and thereafter I could hear her inflections and pauses and humor as I read. It’s comic and tragic and unexpected, and one of the best things I’ve read so far this year.
• What are you reading now?
I’ve got a passel of books by my BVC colleagues on my Nook, and just started reading The Fall of Princes, the third book in Judith Tarr’s first Avaryan trilogy. As I said above, I don’t go to epic fantasy as my first instinct, but I have really enjoyed each of the Avaryan books (I’m assuming that I’ll enjoy Princes; I only started it this morning, but the signs are good so far). They’re thoughtful and beautifully made. I’m also re-reading War for the Oaks by Emma Bull; I find myself re-reading things sometimes when I’m trying to accomplish a particular technical thing in my own writing and want to see how someone else did it. Plus…oh, heck: I’m reading it because I love it and haven’t read it in too long.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
Well, there’s that passel of books on my Nook (Linda Nagata’s The Red: First Light; Mindy Klasky’s Single Witch’s Survival Guide, Judy Tarr’s Arrows of the Sun, plus a manuscript of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Valor and Vanity). There’s also Tor.com’s anthology of all the short fiction published on the site in their first five years, which I suspect I will dip into and out of. And I’m wondering if reading War for the Oaks is going to lead me into reading her wonderful Territory again.
What about you? What have you been reading lately? Put the link to your WWW Wednesday entry in comments, or just tell us!
