So there I was, enjoying the sunshine, that it is still summer, and I went to Carl's page and saw this post by him, and read the stunner of a story he links us to, Mrs Henderson's Cemetery Dance by Carrie Cuinn. It has a delightful humorous touch, a gothic feel, a melancholic dead skeleton story, for lack of a better description. Not ghosts. Skeletons. It is very good. And it put me right into the frame of mind for Carl's upcoming Readers Imbibing Peril VIII challenge coming up in the fall.
So, even though I have a shelf already full of books ready for RIP, and it's still sunny and very warm outside, I ended up going to one of my favourite sites for finding what's new and good in the world of horror and science fiction and fantasy: Locus Magazine, online. Carl, by the way, also has a post up about Locusmag, because he has the July edition featuring NEIL GAIMAN on the cover, and darn it, I let my subscription lapse in April. Boo me! I have just resubscribed, and am hoping I'm in time for the July edition. Anyway, it looks a really good interview by Neil in it, so if you're a Neil Gaiman fan, go and take a look.
In the meantime, when I wandered to Locus Magazine to see what was happening, I discovered that they have a listing of all the current nominees and winners of the various awards given out for science fiction, fantasy, and horror, the world over. This is an excellent way to find out what's good in any of these areas of literature.
I have promptly added (and drooled over) the following books I didn't know existed:
All nominated under 2013 British Fantasy Award Nominees, Anthologies:
- Magic, An Anthology of the Esoteric and the Arcane, ed Jonathan Oliver.
- The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, ed Marie O'Regan
- Terror Tales of the Cotswalds - ed Alison Littlewood
Nominated for Best Horror (the August Deleth Award), under the same British Fantasy Awards:
- The Kind Folk -Ramsey Campbell
- The Last Days - Adam Nevill
Neither of which I knew was out, and I will be seeking at the library.
Here is the entire list of 2013 British Award nominees. I am happy to see Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan nominated, as is Railsea by China Mieville. I am delighted to see Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce, nominated in both categories, as I have it on my pile to read asap.....
The 2012 Bram Stoker Awards were also announced in New Orleans in June, winning list is here. There are some very good books on this list too. Caitlin Kiernan (Drowning Girl, which I have to read), Maggie Stiefvater, Bentley Little (I just found one of his books to try), and The Diviners by Libba Bray, which I am so hoping to read for RIP!! when a list includes these names, there are going to be some really good horror/dark fantasy/ghost stories to read somewhere on it. Even more awesome, a list of poetry books!!! And when Joyce Carol Oates wins in a tie for best collection, well, there is something for everyone for RIP.
Have fun planning! Enjoy the summer daylight while it lasts, and soon autumn will be here, with cooling days and darker nights....., and thank Carl for this, today!
Showing posts with label Graham Joyce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Graham Joyce. Show all posts
Saturday, 27 July 2013
Thursday, 1 December 2011
'Tis the season for the sense of wonder - Virtual Advent Tour 2011
Welcome to Dec 1, and the countdown is on!
I love the season of Christmas and the New Year. The snow, the tree, the lights, the music, they fill my heart with beauty. What I also love is the sense of comfort that the traditions around Christmas bring. It's funny, for I am 48 years old this year, and I find I am creating more new traditions for this time of year than I did twenty years ago. Back then, I wanted to keep everything the same as my original family did. Right up to opening stockings only on Christmas morning, and all presents after breakfast. As I've grown up and away from my first family of childhood, though I am creating traditions that are for now. I like the mix of the old and the new, I am discovering.
Here is a tradition that I started last year: I found this right before Christmas, a tiny wood tree with ornaments to hang in it. This year, the kids put the ornaments on. It's so adorable.
A few years ago, a friend at work gave me these three lighted houses. As you can see, the village is growing:
One year, the people kept turning up on top of the houses. I asked my daughter - she was 3 or 4 at the time - if she was moving them. She said yes, and I asked why they were on the roofs. "Because there is a flood coming, Mommy!" she said seriously. We love this little village, and add to it every year. This has become a new family tradition now.
One of the things the kids like most is their advent calendar. My mother is a quilter, and she made them each an advent calendar when they were babies.
Now, the kids rush every morning to see what is waiting for them to start that day. That's a lovely way to start any day, isn't it? With a little present waiting for you? It's usually some chocolate, as the squares are small and its' difficult to find anything small enough to fit in. My kids don't really care - it's the surprise they like.
The new tradition for this year is a surprise: the kids don't know. Holly-Anne and Graham will wake up tomorrow to find this waiting for them.
Yes, that's right, the Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar. I really bought it because of the Yoda Santa Claus figurine. I love it! I'm really excited. I know my kids won't let me build it with them, though I will be right alongside with them each day as they open each door. One day when they are older and beyond this, I
And this is what makes me think about what I also really love about this time of year: surprises. I used to lay awake before Christmas when I was a child, thinking about what I wanted, wondering what would be under the tree for me. If I get a present early now as an adult, I keep it wrapped and save it for Christmas Day with NO peeking!, to open and so really, I can savour that sense of surprise and waiting and anticipation. That's what I think this time of year really means for me: a sense of wonder. Anything can happen. It's the closest time for all of us to be that little child again, and let that little child come out and play, and no one bats an eye. So you might find me playing with Yoda Santa Claus when no one is looking.......
And because this is a blog about books and you know that it wouldn't be Christmas for me without new books, I decided a couple of years ago to give myself a box of books every year. Through the autumn, I buy books that I want to read, and into the box they go. Even though I know the titles, I'm not allowed to read them, or to look at them once they're in the box. Just knowing that the latest Phil Rickman - The Secrets of Pain - in hardcover no less! -
is among the many books waiting for me on Christmas Day, makes me excited. The joy I feel opening that box, the sense of wonder and yes, a little greed as I hold all the new books in my hands and wait for Christmas dinner to be over (I'm the one cooking it so I have to wait until it's all over with!) so I can read, deciding all day which of them will be first. There's nothing quite like knowing there is a whole boxful of new books waiting to be read, is there? Some others I've added are Michelle Paver's Dark Matter in paperback, and Yrsa Sigurdadottir's Ashes to Dust (finally! I waited most of the year to find this!), Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop, among some
I think this is a most lovely time of year, when we remember to look in the faces of the ones we love, and share in their delight, when we make memories that become suffused with love and tenderness as the years go by.
May your holiday season be bright, and filled with love, and joy, my Gentle Bloggers. Thank you for stopping by. I'll see you tomorrow as we go through Day 2 of this lovely Virtual Advent Tour. I can hardly wait to come see what you like or want to talk about, this year! Happy Holidays!
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
Some book reviews! Really! - The Limits of Enchantment, and St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - Karen Russell
I had been hearing about this book here and there, and finally picked it up over a year ago. When Stephen King said that Swamplandia!, Russell's new book, was one of the anticipated books of the year, I thought I'd better go back and read her first book. I also love the title. I love wolves, and it's an irresistible title.
St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves is a book of short stories, and they are fantasy in the way that is fabulous, in the old original sense of fabulous being strange and wild and wonderful. Almost all the stories are set in Florida, in and around the water or the forest or the swamp. The two that are not, From Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration, and Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422, are set in the prairies/desert (Children's Reminiscences) and the Arctic somewhere (Accident Brief). All the stories feature young people, usually around 8 or 10 or 12, who are on the cusp of reaching for the adult world, not quite knowing what they are missing, but they are missing it, even as they explore childhood and the darkness around them. Almost every story features loss, absent parents, mothers who abandon their children to make a living in the way that the very poor do. These aren't pretty people, neither are they terrifically bad - they are children and the freaky adults they find themselves surrounded with. If I had to describe the theme of this book, it would be what life would be like if it were a circus - that extraordinarily twilight zone feeling that we get going to the circus, where certainly I want to laugh at the clowns, but at the same time I'm aware there are people underneath and are they happy? do they want to be laughed at? (of course they do, but I always worry about what people are really feeling, and not what they are pretending to the world.)This collection of stories is like looking through a fun house mirror, where the carnival aspects of childhood get twisted in ways we know are, even though they shouldn't be. They are gothic without any of the nonsense about death - surreal stories, almost. And fascinating. I really enjoyed this collection.
I love Russells' flights of fancy, her awareness of nature and the children being the ones taking the time to see the stars and trees and being intimately connected with life around them, before adulthood comes to sweep them away. There are ghosts and convicts and dream camps (I wish I could go to that one!), a minotaur as a father, and gator-wrestling Ava Wrestles the Alligator, which the new book Swamplandia! is set in the same swampland attraction as the short story is. One of my favourite quotes is on my sidebar; "Haunting Olivia" is one of my favourite stories in this collection. It's told by the older brother who searches endlessly for her in the ocean, hoping to find her ghost among the ghosts of all the other creatures that died, but even when she seemingly contacts him, he still can't find her. That sense of loss, of searching for something gone, permeates all the stories in this book. Olivia was sliding down the sand on the back of a very huge crab sled and slid out into the waves, but the tide was going out and the boys didn't wait around to see her come back in. Just like in real life, tragedy and loss, big changes and small. "St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" is about werewolves who are taken by nuns to be raised to be like humans. It's very good, especially as the girls learn how to not think like pack, and how they lose their sense of connectedness when they do that. Who says being human is the highest realization? Only humans do. These stories are weird and wonderful, like the old time circuses and men calling, "Step right up! See the Bearded woman! One night only!" Like Ray Bradbury if he had grown up in Florida, there is a sense of him in her writing. I highly recommend this book. 4.5/5
The Limits of Enchantment - Graham Joyce
I love this novel. It's the story of Fern Cullen, a young woman who lives with her mother in a small village in 1966 England. Mammy Cullen is a midwife, but not of the new school of hospital approved midwives. She is old-school. She knows the herbs and small magics that midwives traditionally know since women began having babies and needed help giving birth. She might be a witch, she might not. And Fern is on the cusp of asking what she wants to do with her life. Then Mammy is roughed up by some men - really, just knocked over roughly - and she gets weaker and ends up in the hospital. Fern has to contend with a group of hippies who move into the neighborhood, the advances of Arthur, and deciding if she wants to carry on her mother's work. She has the gift, but before she does more than take a few steps for the future, the local gentry who own the land decide she must move out because they are in arrears. And The Limits of Enchantment is about how Fern discovers who are her friends, and who isn't, and how she learns to ask and to listen and to judge on her own.
The Limits of Enchantment is written from Fern's point of view. She is engaging and frank, seeing through most people around her. But she is young, and she has to learn that she can't practice her midwifery without the support of the community around her, and when they initially don't respond to her requests for help, she faces being forced to leave. How she fights back and how the community rallies around her, is particularly funny and tender.
This is a really enjoyable book. Fern is a strong character as is Mammy. All the characters are interesting and idiosyncratic - they are really vividly drawn. I liked the setting - 1966, a small village, and I especially liked the midwife and magical aspects of the story. I highly recommend this book, especially to anyone interested in folklore and herbal lore, and changing society. 5/5
I had been hearing about this book here and there, and finally picked it up over a year ago. When Stephen King said that Swamplandia!, Russell's new book, was one of the anticipated books of the year, I thought I'd better go back and read her first book. I also love the title. I love wolves, and it's an irresistible title.
St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves is a book of short stories, and they are fantasy in the way that is fabulous, in the old original sense of fabulous being strange and wild and wonderful. Almost all the stories are set in Florida, in and around the water or the forest or the swamp. The two that are not, From Children's Reminiscences of the Westward Migration, and Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422, are set in the prairies/desert (Children's Reminiscences) and the Arctic somewhere (Accident Brief). All the stories feature young people, usually around 8 or 10 or 12, who are on the cusp of reaching for the adult world, not quite knowing what they are missing, but they are missing it, even as they explore childhood and the darkness around them. Almost every story features loss, absent parents, mothers who abandon their children to make a living in the way that the very poor do. These aren't pretty people, neither are they terrifically bad - they are children and the freaky adults they find themselves surrounded with. If I had to describe the theme of this book, it would be what life would be like if it were a circus - that extraordinarily twilight zone feeling that we get going to the circus, where certainly I want to laugh at the clowns, but at the same time I'm aware there are people underneath and are they happy? do they want to be laughed at? (of course they do, but I always worry about what people are really feeling, and not what they are pretending to the world.)This collection of stories is like looking through a fun house mirror, where the carnival aspects of childhood get twisted in ways we know are, even though they shouldn't be. They are gothic without any of the nonsense about death - surreal stories, almost. And fascinating. I really enjoyed this collection.I love Russells' flights of fancy, her awareness of nature and the children being the ones taking the time to see the stars and trees and being intimately connected with life around them, before adulthood comes to sweep them away. There are ghosts and convicts and dream camps (I wish I could go to that one!), a minotaur as a father, and gator-wrestling Ava Wrestles the Alligator, which the new book Swamplandia! is set in the same swampland attraction as the short story is. One of my favourite quotes is on my sidebar; "Haunting Olivia" is one of my favourite stories in this collection. It's told by the older brother who searches endlessly for her in the ocean, hoping to find her ghost among the ghosts of all the other creatures that died, but even when she seemingly contacts him, he still can't find her. That sense of loss, of searching for something gone, permeates all the stories in this book. Olivia was sliding down the sand on the back of a very huge crab sled and slid out into the waves, but the tide was going out and the boys didn't wait around to see her come back in. Just like in real life, tragedy and loss, big changes and small. "St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" is about werewolves who are taken by nuns to be raised to be like humans. It's very good, especially as the girls learn how to not think like pack, and how they lose their sense of connectedness when they do that. Who says being human is the highest realization? Only humans do. These stories are weird and wonderful, like the old time circuses and men calling, "Step right up! See the Bearded woman! One night only!" Like Ray Bradbury if he had grown up in Florida, there is a sense of him in her writing. I highly recommend this book. 4.5/5
The Limits of Enchantment - Graham Joyce
I love this novel. It's the story of Fern Cullen, a young woman who lives with her mother in a small village in 1966 England. Mammy Cullen is a midwife, but not of the new school of hospital approved midwives. She is old-school. She knows the herbs and small magics that midwives traditionally know since women began having babies and needed help giving birth. She might be a witch, she might not. And Fern is on the cusp of asking what she wants to do with her life. Then Mammy is roughed up by some men - really, just knocked over roughly - and she gets weaker and ends up in the hospital. Fern has to contend with a group of hippies who move into the neighborhood, the advances of Arthur, and deciding if she wants to carry on her mother's work. She has the gift, but before she does more than take a few steps for the future, the local gentry who own the land decide she must move out because they are in arrears. And The Limits of Enchantment is about how Fern discovers who are her friends, and who isn't, and how she learns to ask and to listen and to judge on her own.
The Limits of Enchantment is written from Fern's point of view. She is engaging and frank, seeing through most people around her. But she is young, and she has to learn that she can't practice her midwifery without the support of the community around her, and when they initially don't respond to her requests for help, she faces being forced to leave. How she fights back and how the community rallies around her, is particularly funny and tender.
This is a really enjoyable book. Fern is a strong character as is Mammy. All the characters are interesting and idiosyncratic - they are really vividly drawn. I liked the setting - 1966, a small village, and I especially liked the midwife and magical aspects of the story. I highly recommend this book, especially to anyone interested in folklore and herbal lore, and changing society. 5/5
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