mostly harmless books

(Beside not writing on this blog, that is.)
Working, traveling (beach!), reading. Reading books I need to write about but really, I know I won’t, so I’ll just make a bunch of posts with very short opinions. Someday. For now I have a couple of posts scheduled with some Nemira books for a contest which ends August 31st.

I’m reading The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 2006 and loving it (more or less expected; first part review is up already); I’m reading A Fire Upon the Deep and liking it (amazing; who’d have thought I’d like space opera?!); I’m sort of reading Jeff Carlson’s Plague Year (but haven’t touched it in 2 weeks or so, for some reason) and sort of reading Rama II (which, like people have told me, is not like Rendez-vous with Rama, therefore kind of sucks so I’m temporarily abandoning it).

I’ve also been fiddling with a blog a bit - due to a WoW overdose… I decided I can’t just play for one whole weekend so I needed to do something else - and only broke it once. I added a couple more things in the sidebar and this morning I managed to convince the boyfriend to help me with the more complicated stuff. From once in a while it pays to have a programmer boyfriend :P I still have big plans, i.e. interconnecting this with my Romanian blog so I only have to update my Now Reading plugin (bottom left) and Reading list once, not separately for each blog.

The fern is going to go away too. Eventually. When I find/take the perfect picture and convince one of my friends to help me with the Photoshop part.

Who: Me. Jen. Ioana is my real name, but I’ve been ‘Jen’ online for years, and ‘Ioana’ is too difficult to pronounce for English-speakers. I’m from Bucharest, Romania. Small country somewhere in Eastern Europe; it’s not just about Dracula and street children, you know?

I worked for a while in a publishing house as a copy-editor and I loved it to bits. I quit for various reasons and in the long run it seems that leaving was a good idea, but I still hope that one day I’ll be more involved in the book world.

My favorite writer is Roger Zelazny. Other favorites include Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Robert Holdstock, Jeff VanderMeer, Neil Gaiman… The list changes frequently, but these are the writers that have been on it for a while now. Recent favorites: Scott Lynch, Karen Traviss, Charles de Lint.

What: I was going to call it a review blog, but it’s not going to be that. My reviewing skills are not that good, and I’m not really keen on becoming a professional reviewer, so it’s going to be an opinions blog. My drugs of choice are fantasy novels, with some SF and horror mixed in, plus the occasional mainstream book thrown in for good measure.

Why: Because I love talking about the books I read. Because I can reach many more conversation partners in English. Because maybe I’ll get free books (why not admit it?)