Tell a little about what books you just read, are reading, and plan to read next. Why did you pick them? Did you enjoy them? Etc.
This month I’ve read Young Men and Fire, by Norman MacLean, about the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire that claimed the lives of fourteen Smoke Jumpers. My younger brother is a firefighter, so I’m interested in stories about fighting fires, and the reviews on amazon.com were mostly good. I found the story fascinating but the prose hard to put up with. From there I jumped to Sebastian Junger’s FIRE, which also has an account of a forest fire disaster, along with accounts of reporting from a war zone and other interesting pieces.
Then it was back to fiction. I read a pretty intriguing first novel by Kit Whitfield, called Benighted, in which she creates a world where almost everyone is a lycanthrope, and tells us what it is like for the few who aren’t, along with a murder mystery.
Rachel Caine’s new Weather Warden book: Firestorm, was sadly disappointing. This is book five in the series of fast-paced action/paranormal/romance books about a secret group of paranormally talented people who control the elements of Fire, Air & Water, and Earth, with the mostly unwilling help of the enslaved djinn. I loved the first three, was a bit let down by the fourth and found the fifth one too repetitious and chaotic, with too much happening and not enough of it forwarding the plotlines laid down in the previous novels.
I took a step down to a book I expected to be bad: Josepha Sherman’s The Shattered Oath. Standard fantasy fare about an exiled Prince of the Fae in the human realm. It was cliche and amatuerish in spots, but not as terrible as I thought it might be, and it was free anyway.
Much anticipated books have just arrived in the mail, though!
To Ride a Rathorn, by P.C. Hodgell is what I’m reading now. Hodgell is a marvellous fantasy writer whose books come out way too far apart. This is book four of a series she started in 1982 with God Stalk, and you do need to have read them all, in order. But it’s great stuff. I expect to love it.
Robin Hobb’s new book, Forest Mage also arrived. I loved the Farseer works, and while I didn’t like the first book in this series as much as I loved those, I admired her ambition to do something entirely different and difficult besides.
Also, I’m looking forward to reading E.E. Knight’s Valentine’s Exile, book five of the Vampire Earth books. These books about a ragtag group of human resisters fighting back against an alien occupation kick ass and take names.
Books in route to me from paperbackswap.com are A Perfect Storm, which I have read from the library and will reread when I get it, and Faery in Shadow by C.J. Cherryh(a favorite writer most of the time).
How’s about you guys?