mostly harmless books

Because it has Zelazny in its invitation, I joined HiveMind. A social network for SFF fans. To be honest, I’ll probably forget about it in a short while, since I never got the hang of all this social stuff… but who knows. I already found a fellow Zelazny fans, so it looks promising.

Friend me here! I want to be the most popular girl in class… er, on the internet.

(Yes, yes, books and reviews, I know. But I’ve been away to two festivals the last 2 weekends, and I’ve had to make up for the work I missed, and I have a new baby character in WoW that’s so fun to play and…)

Via Joe, great news: Karen Traviss’ City of Pearl is available online.
(The offer is for US residents only, and you have to sign up to get the book, which I didn’t bother to do… so I wonder if it’s downloadable from other countries too.)

I didn’t write about City of Pearl, because I read it a year before starting this blog, but some rambling about the series and Ally (book 5) here and here. In short: bloody good SF.

From Larry’s blog. Because I should be working and I don’t feel like it.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own so we can try and track down these people who’ve read six and force books upon them.

Notes: I didn’t LOVE any of the books on the list, so I underlined those I liked. I haven’t read many of the classics and probably never will.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling (nope, haven’t even read the first one.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles– Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (more…)

All right, it’s probably only funny to me, but… Another list of “sci-fi books you must read”. 32 this time. Nothing spectacular in the list itself - some I like, some I don’t, many I haven’t read.

But the comments are brilliant. There’s about 2 or 3 who congratulate the author on the list, then another couple dozen to tell him that book X or author Y is the best since sliced bread and it’s a crime not to include it/him. Oh yes. A guy who admits he hasn’t read all the “classics” puts out a list and a bunch of people with nothing better to do try to prove him wrong… Isn’t it obvious that everyone thinks his or her favorite should have been on the list omg you don’t know anything about this genre!

*yawn*

The one thing this list did was remind me of the Einstein Intersection for some reason. It’s not even mentioned there, and I got the book in my head before the one Delany name drop. But I don’t have the original, and given the track record of that particular collection of books I’d rather not re-read the translation, since it probably sucks.

So I am off to bed (fucking 2 AM…) and starting Shadow of the Wind. It’d better be as good as people said…

Backlog: 3 or so books. No time. Not getting much work done either. Too much raiding (but it’s so fun!).

Most of my favorite books have stories behind them. And even though I’ve only started reading Charles de Lint relatively recently, it conforms to the rule.

One of the best series I’ve read is Robert Holdstock’s Mythago cycle, and one day I joined a Yahoo! group dedicated to the writer. While the group is sadly not very active, it did bring one good thing into my life: an author name, recommended as very close in style and themes to Holdstock. That author was Charles de Lint and, even though I don’t think the style is similar, both of them have the same dreaminess around (most of) their books.

I remembered the connection today because I was trying to figure out what the title of the collection I am going to talk about, The Ivory and the Horn, meant. Then I was a bit confused, because Holdstock also has a book called Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, and for a second I didn’t know which was which. So, in short, I went out to figure out what was so special about ivory and horn… and the answer came quick. Of course, it’s the same thing that connects the two authors: dreams. The gate of ivory is the one false dreams come through, while the gate of horn is the one true visions come from.

My first contact with de Lint’s Newford was the collection Dreams Underfoot, and The Ivory and the Horn is a sequel of sorts. While you don’t need to know the background for any of the stories, it’s probably better if you read the two collections in order - and if you actually remember the first (which I didn’t). Many characters reappear and their past is sometimes reminisced.
(more…)