Hello. Yes. You. Over there. My faithful readers. Hi. I'm back.
What? Where have I been? Oh yes. It wasn't a planned absence. It was a cumulation of everything this year, and especially, what my sister and her family have been going through. I suddenly couldn't say anything. Not until now.
My sister's son, my nephew Mathew, has Ewing's Sarcoma. It's a rare form of bone cancer. It hits young people and children only. My nephew is 20. One day last winter he started complaining that he had a pain in his leg. It took 5 months and many, many trips to the ER and the doctor's before finally, the tumor was found, in June. Then two months to get the diagnosis of what kind of cancer it was. It is in his spine. It is aggressive. The treatment finally began in September. And the very best news was received last week: the tumor has shrunk by one third.
This is my Christmas present, and my sister's, and brother-in-law's, and niece's. And most especially my nephew's. This is the best news, and the only thing we all really wanted for Christmas. So thank you to the doctors, nurses, specialists, family and friends who are in New Brunswick where my sister lives, everyone helping in big ways and the small. The cancer treatment lasts a year, so there is a long road ahead. There is much needed light now on this road.
My sister is detailing Mathew's treatment on her blog over at patriciaspage.wordpress.com. Her hope is that as they go through the treatment with Mathew, the things he goes through, the mistakes and the successes, can/will help someone else who has this rare type of cancer. If you know someone who has it, or has had it, please get in touch with her, and let her know what you are going through. Sharing helps lighten the burden, especially in this long tough fight.
The news is so good, so wonderful, that my sister sent me a text earlier this week and asked me to get back on my blog and start posting about books so she could know what to read next.
Her wish is my command. So this is for you, sis. Love you very much.
Susan's books of the year, Part one.
I have been a bad blogger. I have tried to blog about books I read and enjoyed, especially those I loved. And yet, many of my favourites from this year somehow I missed!! I think I was saving them for the special I-just-loved-this-book-post, so please consider if I write a review about a book now here in this post and the next one (planned for tomorrow), as the post I would have done back then.
Books I Loved:
Of Blood and Honey - Stina Leicht. I didn't post about this one, and this is a book that deserves it's on post. It is a fantasy about fairies, but not those fairies. Faeries. The dark and dangerous kind. In this book, book one, Liam is growing up in 1970's war torn Derry, Northern Ireland. He is caught in the Troubles, only his danger is coming from a small man in a red cap with pointed teeth. Every time Liam sees him, trouble comes and he is in danger. Liam grew up a Catholic family, and his mother eventually reveals that his father is one of the Fallen, a man from ancient Irish myth, one of the main central figures of Irish myth. The war Liam is caught up in doesn't just involve the Protestants or the Catholics, but the Irish faeries, too. Very different, and very good. I really enjoyed this one, though a warning that it is dark, very dark, but then the Troubles were a terrible time, too. I like the extra dimension of the myths wandering in the pages, and trying to figure out which is which.
A Dying Fall - Elly Griffiths. The most recent book in the Ruth Galloway series, set in Norfolk, England. She is an archeologist, and in this one she is called to Blackpool to help identify some bones that may or may not be old, or even ancient, and of great importance: are they the bones of King Arthur? As preposterous as that sounds, it has to be investigated, so off she goes. Blackpool is also the family home of Nelson, the police chief she has a daughter with. He is married to someone else, and in this book, some of the characters start to put the pieces together. I really enjoyed the meetings Ruth has with Nelson's mother and sister, and how Cathbad ends up there too. This is a brilliant mystery series, with the crimes always believable, and for sad reasons, as they are in real life. Ruth is fun, and engaging, and hilarious as she recounts why she feels like she can't manage being a single mother and working at the same time. Often thoughts I have, and I am married, but balancing work and children is difficult. Highly recommended as a thoroughly entertaining mystery series. I love how she writes about the sea, too, and the wind and the sky, in the marsh where Ruth lives.
The Vampire Tapestry - Suzy Charnas McKee - I reviewed the book, here. It is one of the best vampire novels. I have had most of the year to let it sink in, and I really like how we get the different perspectives in this book through the three linked stories. He is evil, ruthless, but it is all to survive. Can we blame him? He simply is.
The Beautiful Mystery - Louise Penny. Outstanding. I have a confession to make. For a long time in my life, I have been fascinated by monasteries and retreats that ordinary people can make there. The idea of two or three blissful weeks by myself, alone, in silence, has always called to me. So, this summer, I took three weeks by myself when my family went to England to visit my husband's family. I really needed the silence. And since then, I have made a point to be more still, to find a time in the day when I sit, and be quiet. It is amazing how powerful this is. And I realized I don't have to go to a monastery to find it. I can find it in my own home. So when I saw that the second to latest in the Armand Gamache series was set in a monastery, I was eager to read this mystery. And it doesn't disappoint. It was everything I wanted, in a mystery set in a monastery. The monks in this book are of a group that were being hunted by the pope back in the 17th century for being heretics. They fled to the wilderness of the province of Quebec, and remained hidden there for centuries. Until one enterprising monk taped their music, and in the craze for Gregorian chants that really swept the world in the 1980's and 90's, these monks sent their tape out and it became a huge hit. Suddenly, they were discovered. And ordinary people came by the hundreds to seek them out. What does sudden fame and wealth do to a monastery that has no wealth and needed to remain hidden? Why was the music sent out? There is quite a bit about music in this book. Penny makes it an integral part of the monastery - all the monks who are there, are chosen for their voices. This book is about harmony, and how each part fits into the whole, in the community and in the music. It's wonderful writing. When one monk is discovered dead in his garden, Armand Gamache as the head of the Surete de Quebec is called to investigate, along with his trusted second in command, Guy Beauvoir. And in the secluded setting of the northern Quebec woods, the monastery on a lake, a beautiful setting, in the deep silence of the woods, secrets are revealed that change not just the future of the monastery, but also the lives of Gamache and Beauvoir, forever.
The Bone People - Keri Hulme. Reviewed here. I still feel the same way about this novel. Amazing, brutal, beautiful, breathtakingly sad and poetic and haunting.
Some Kind of Fairy Tale - Graham Joyce. What happens when you have a sister who disappeared one day, and 20 years later she comes back? Where was she? And then she says that she went away, taken by a fairy. Would you believe her? In this story, this is what happened to Tara Martin, and her brother Peter is the one who has had to hold the family together in the 20 years since. When she walks back into their lives, 20 years has gone by. Everything has changed. For her, it has only been a year or so. Not 20. There is something unworldly about her, something that being in fairyland has done to her. It's an odd story, about the effects her disappearance has had on her, and what her coming back does to them. She is not the same, and nothing can be the same as it was. The frightening thing is that the fairies want the girls to go with them - in this story, as in the fairy story Tam Lin, it is girls the fairies want, to share their country with. Tara hasn't come alone, the fairies didn't want to let her go. The most unsettling part? The fairies want young girls to go with them. We meet another character who has been taken by the fairies, and the book ends with the threat of the fairies already laying their charms on another character. Be careful of strangers, be careful in the woods, don't go in the woods alone......and you can't go home again. Haunting and gentle, sweet, and melancholic. This is what fairies are, and what they do. It's not for children though, this is an adult fairy story. Effectively creepy and dangerous, which is what faeries really are, even if enchanting too.
Wide Open - Deborah Coates. Reviewed here. I really like the tone of this debut mystery, and the main character herself. I don't particularly like the ending, though the setting - South Dakota - and the characters are interesting, and the plot - that she can see ghosts - has a fresh air about it. I haven't picked the second one up yet, but will be in the new year.
The Burning - Jane Casey - also in the same review above. I really want to read more in this series. Bad me for not picking more of this series up this year. Writing this post is making me realize how much I haven't followed up in mystery series yet!!!!
.
Despite my silence on here, I have been reading as much as I can this year. The last two weeks I haven't been able to read anything. Nothing seemed right. I tried three books, mostly science fiction so I could read for Carl's challenge, but nothing held my attention. The night before last, I might have found the right one: Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb. I'll know more later today and tomorrow. We are expecting freezing rain for much of the day tomorrow, after receiving close to 20cm of snow through the day yesterday. Once I get my turkey for Christmas dinner, I plan to stay in and read. The second best Christmas present for me.
Tomorrow: Part Two of my books of the year.
Showing posts with label Wide Open. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wide Open. Show all posts
Saturday, 21 December 2013
Saturday, 2 March 2013
Reading while I recovered
I am almost all healed, and am heading back to work on Monday. I'll see
how I do riding the buses - I take six buses every day, so I'm
curious/anxious/worried about how my stitches will feel by Thursday or
Friday. I am sad my two weeks off are over, but very happy with how successful it was:
I had a superb two weeks of reading after I got out of the hospital. I read 6 books in total! A quick summary of each follows:
Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Number 3 in the DS Ben Cooper/DI Diane Fry series, set in the Peak dales in the UK. Very atmospheric, the murder is entwined with a crashed plane that went down WW2 in the Peaks, and a granddaughter's search for what happened to her grandfather after the crash. I really like this series. A feel for the location, the townspeople, and especially the weather and the landscape, looms over all the action in this series. 4.5/5
Wide Open - Deborah Coates - I saw this title first over at Lesa's Book Critiques in the round up of her favourites from last year. I had to get this book as soon as I saw her review, and fortunately the library had in their system so I could request it before the Double dare started! This is a debut mystery, and is it ever good. Sergeant Hallie Michaels is on duty in the Middle East - Afghanistan, and is granted 10 days personal leave to come home for her sister's funeral. Dell's ghost is waiting for her at the airport. Is her death suicide and everyone thinks, or murder? Hallie investigates, along the way discovering that she is drawing the ghosts of other dead people to her as well. Very well done, set in the American state of South Dakota, in the wide open spaces of horse and farming country, as well as Hallie learning what wide open means for her. I loved this mystery. She is practical, no-nonsense, and has to deal with the ghosts and it's done so well, that the story is believable, despite the slight hitch of the magic that might be involved - not for Hallie, she has one. There is no witch here, non of the usual lightness or sweetness about it. People die, and the novel is gritty and bittersweet. Highly recommended. 4.7/5
The Annotated Persuasion - ed Robert Morrison - linked to my last post, which is the review. 5/5
The Vampire Tapestry - Suzy McKee Charnas - read for Women of Genre Challenge, link here. and Carl's Science Fiction Experience. This is my second book read for this challenge. I have heard about this novel for years and years, and during my recovery, felt like reading a horror novel. Luckily I've had this for about a year, and I happily read it last week. It is as good as anything you will read about vampires. One note: the book is set up as a series of short stories, 5 in total, linked together by the vampire in question, Dr Edward Weyland. This novel was published in 1980, before the vampire craze was started by Anne Rice (or about the same time as). I'm a huge fan of Lestat etc by Rice. It's lush and vivid and creepy and a bit scary, just like the swamps of Louisiana are. The Vampire Tapestry is different. It's set in New England, New York City, and Arizona. How Dr Weyland is discovered to be a vampire, how he exists as a vampire, and what the people do to him who discover his secret, makes for a gripping, tense read. How does he survive? What is it like to look human, but not be one, and to have to live off of them? You will never look at vampires again after reading this novel. He's like an anti-hero hero. I want him to live, even though I am horrified because he is a vampire. The Unicorn Tapestry, which is the middle story, won the Nebula award for novellas. It will leave an impression on you, as the novel does, long after finishing it. It's smart, clever, and in comparison with Lestat - Lestat is still grand, and passionate, but Weyland is believable, and that makes him much more frightening a figure to my mind. You will never forget that we are prey, after reading this book. Excellent vampire reading. 4.8/5
Gift From the Sea - Anne Morrow Lindbergh I love this novel. I have read it at least twice before in my life, and lost every copy I had. I recently picked up the hardcover (recently being sometime in the past two years or so), and in the midst of all my fiction reading, I suddenly wanted to read this. It spoke to me as someone who is about to turn 50, and as someone who is examining her life and deciding what I want to do for the next 40 odd years (everything willing.....) left. How do I want to live? What do I want to do? The funny thing I found reading Gift From the Sea, is how much I have learned about love, and marriage, and life, in the intervening 15 years or so since I last read this. I understood what Anne was talking about, when she talks about the shell for first love/early marriage, the double-sunrise shell, where everything is about the two people in love, staring at one another. Soon enough it changes, to the oyster shell, which is all the changes that the couple go through as they live and work and build a life together, as they have children and make a life that is them, looking outward from the same space. Then, is the empty nest shell, the argonauta, where if successful, the woman - the couple - can leave behind all the work they have done, and start over again for themselves. They can't go back to the double-sunrise, that is for first love. The argonauta is left to each to shape for themselves, as they give themselves space to discover new things. Isn't that a lovely series of shells to describe life with?
She begins with the Moon shell, talking about the woman in particular, because life is about the self first, before love and marriage can come. In this section, she describes why she needs to get away from her five children and her husband, for a week break at a cottage all by herself: she is suffering from Zerrissenheit - a German word meaning "torn-to-pieces-hood". I suddenly knew exactly what this word means, sitting in my kitchen reading this book, because this is how I felt and have been feeling for some time in my life. It's not that I don't love my live, I do! I love my family, I am so happy to be back with my husband, I love my home and my garden and my cats and my books and my friends. What I don't like is my job. There, I'm saying it out loud. I don't like the work that I do, I'm bored, and I've been trying for some time to change my job without success. I don't fit the work that my job has changed into over the last 6 years, and it has taken a deep toll on my health. I've never been sick or hospitalized like I have been these past 7 years, and I don't like it. So I am searching for a way to change my job, or looking into the possibility of taking early retirement, and if that is possible. The two weeks here in my house recovering from the surgery, I took the opportunity to be as still as possible. I feel much less torn to pieces hood now - of course, we'll see how long that survives, once I return to work on Monday! It is very hard to do work at the maximum output all the time, with no quiet time or respite allowed on the job.
Gift From the Sea allowed me to look at my time at home and pretend I was away from it all, that I was at a cottage somewhere, alone during the day. I had silence each day - no music, no tv, no radio - I needed to rest, and to heal. This book is a lovely reminder of how easy it is to get pulled from the center, and how it is our work to return to the center, so we can hold our lives together and not be pulled apart. It is also important that we learn how to find that quiet center in our day, each day, even for 1 or 15 minutes. This is a wonderful book, and highly recommended. 5/5
Leviathan Wakes - James S. A Corey - Read for Carl's Sci-Fi Experience. I discovered this book through Locus Magazine, which had the annual best books of 2012 waiting for me the day I had my surgery, Feb 14. How awesome to come home to this issue! Last weekend I was finally ready to look through it, and I circled so many books to get, as well as happy to see I already own some (not read yet, waiting for Once Upon a Time to start): Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers, Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce, and then others are on the list like Brides of Roll Rock Island by Margo Lanagan, Wide Open by Deborah Coates (because of the ghosts and the hint of magic), Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch (Book 3,must read the second one before this, on my shelf), Boneland by Alan Garner (we can't get it here in Canada!), And Blue Skies From Pain by Stina Leicht (Book 2, I have book one to read on my shelf!), etc, just to give you a hint of how awesome this year's recommended list is. The list is comprehensive, covering young adult, and short stories and novellas also. Here is the link to their site and the list, which you can get online as well.
Leviathan Wakes is the first in a series; the second book, Caliban's War, is the one published last year, that made it onto the recommended reading list. Leviathan's Wake was on the 2011 reading list, somehow I missed reading that it had a creepy Lovecraftian like monster thing too. Sold! I rushed out to Chapters (luckily close to the one event I went to while out, my sister's birthday party) and grabbed a copy, and started reading it the next day. It was so much fun. It's a huge book, at 561 pages, chock full of adventures in space. Man has gone to Mars, and colonized it, and the planets in and around the asteroid belt between the inner and outer planets. Ceres is colonized at the outer edge, as are several asteroids with science stations on them. The story covers two main characters: Detective Miller, hired to look into a missing girl whose parents want her to return to the fold; Jim Holden who is XO of a ice miner going to the asteroid belt for ice and bringing back the ice for water supplies to different planets. He is called to investigate an sos signal. while on a return journey, and what he discovers puts him at the heart of a deadly race that has the survival of the known galaxy at stake. How their paths intersect and how they try to prevent an all-out war, is fun. The creeping Lovecraftian monster? Awesome and creepy and it will give you visionary nightmares after. Satisfying fun space romp, with good characters, tight plotting, and and ending that is a proper ending to these characters, but not to the galaxy. Great fun! 4.7/5
The Burning - Jane Casey The first in the DC Maeve Kerrigan series. My husband had brought this back from England two years ago, and it took me this long to read it. Bad me! this was a very good mystery. I did guess who dunnit before the character did, but this was not a flaw for me in this book - the challenge was seeing if I guessed right, and my reasoning was sound, which it was. That made it very satisfying to read! The mystery itself is well done: 4 women's bodies have been found murdered and burned in different parks, over a series of weeks, in London. The police are at a standstill. No clues. Then a fifth woman's body is found, also murdered and burned, in a park. Maeve is not sure it is the same murderer, as there are some minute differences,and she is pulled from the big investigation to prove or disprove if it is the serial killer's work.
This books sounds gruesome, however not a lot of time is spent with the bodies. Most of it is with the investigations, with following Maeve as she pursues the one case, especially after it is revealed a different killer is at work. Now they have two killers to find..... It is well written, and I enjoyed it very much. It isn't a perfect debut, the killer does something uncharacteristic at the end, yet it doesn't detract from the book. 4.5/5, and recommended.
Whew! Apparently I did have a lot to say!
And this brings me to the 2013 Science Fiction Experience Wrap-up
I read 7 books in total for the science fiction experience. I enjoyed all of them so very much. Thank you Carl for hosting it! I am really enjoying increasing the books I am reading each year in this area. Here is the list:
One Second After - William Forschten
Cat's Eye - Andre Norton
Mars - Ben Bova
Timescape - Gregory Benford
Wide Open - Deborah Coates (this also counts as a mystery read, for me!
The Vampire Tapestry - Suzy McKee Charnas
Leviathan Wakes - James SA Corey
Even more amazing, is that I have reviewed them all except for Mars, which is coming shortly.
My only problem now is that reading 6 books in two weeks, has left me not able to settle down to anything for a couple of days now. I'm even happier to report that other than Leviathan Wakes, I am still in the Double Dog Dare Challenge. I'm feeling very proud of myself that I have kept to reading books I owned on my shelf since Jan 1. One month to go!
I had a superb two weeks of reading after I got out of the hospital. I read 6 books in total! A quick summary of each follows:
Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Number 3 in the DS Ben Cooper/DI Diane Fry series, set in the Peak dales in the UK. Very atmospheric, the murder is entwined with a crashed plane that went down WW2 in the Peaks, and a granddaughter's search for what happened to her grandfather after the crash. I really like this series. A feel for the location, the townspeople, and especially the weather and the landscape, looms over all the action in this series. 4.5/5
Wide Open - Deborah Coates - I saw this title first over at Lesa's Book Critiques in the round up of her favourites from last year. I had to get this book as soon as I saw her review, and fortunately the library had in their system so I could request it before the Double dare started! This is a debut mystery, and is it ever good. Sergeant Hallie Michaels is on duty in the Middle East - Afghanistan, and is granted 10 days personal leave to come home for her sister's funeral. Dell's ghost is waiting for her at the airport. Is her death suicide and everyone thinks, or murder? Hallie investigates, along the way discovering that she is drawing the ghosts of other dead people to her as well. Very well done, set in the American state of South Dakota, in the wide open spaces of horse and farming country, as well as Hallie learning what wide open means for her. I loved this mystery. She is practical, no-nonsense, and has to deal with the ghosts and it's done so well, that the story is believable, despite the slight hitch of the magic that might be involved - not for Hallie, she has one. There is no witch here, non of the usual lightness or sweetness about it. People die, and the novel is gritty and bittersweet. Highly recommended. 4.7/5
The Annotated Persuasion - ed Robert Morrison - linked to my last post, which is the review. 5/5
The Vampire Tapestry - Suzy McKee Charnas - read for Women of Genre Challenge, link here. and Carl's Science Fiction Experience. This is my second book read for this challenge. I have heard about this novel for years and years, and during my recovery, felt like reading a horror novel. Luckily I've had this for about a year, and I happily read it last week. It is as good as anything you will read about vampires. One note: the book is set up as a series of short stories, 5 in total, linked together by the vampire in question, Dr Edward Weyland. This novel was published in 1980, before the vampire craze was started by Anne Rice (or about the same time as). I'm a huge fan of Lestat etc by Rice. It's lush and vivid and creepy and a bit scary, just like the swamps of Louisiana are. The Vampire Tapestry is different. It's set in New England, New York City, and Arizona. How Dr Weyland is discovered to be a vampire, how he exists as a vampire, and what the people do to him who discover his secret, makes for a gripping, tense read. How does he survive? What is it like to look human, but not be one, and to have to live off of them? You will never look at vampires again after reading this novel. He's like an anti-hero hero. I want him to live, even though I am horrified because he is a vampire. The Unicorn Tapestry, which is the middle story, won the Nebula award for novellas. It will leave an impression on you, as the novel does, long after finishing it. It's smart, clever, and in comparison with Lestat - Lestat is still grand, and passionate, but Weyland is believable, and that makes him much more frightening a figure to my mind. You will never forget that we are prey, after reading this book. Excellent vampire reading. 4.8/5
Gift From the Sea - Anne Morrow Lindbergh I love this novel. I have read it at least twice before in my life, and lost every copy I had. I recently picked up the hardcover (recently being sometime in the past two years or so), and in the midst of all my fiction reading, I suddenly wanted to read this. It spoke to me as someone who is about to turn 50, and as someone who is examining her life and deciding what I want to do for the next 40 odd years (everything willing.....) left. How do I want to live? What do I want to do? The funny thing I found reading Gift From the Sea, is how much I have learned about love, and marriage, and life, in the intervening 15 years or so since I last read this. I understood what Anne was talking about, when she talks about the shell for first love/early marriage, the double-sunrise shell, where everything is about the two people in love, staring at one another. Soon enough it changes, to the oyster shell, which is all the changes that the couple go through as they live and work and build a life together, as they have children and make a life that is them, looking outward from the same space. Then, is the empty nest shell, the argonauta, where if successful, the woman - the couple - can leave behind all the work they have done, and start over again for themselves. They can't go back to the double-sunrise, that is for first love. The argonauta is left to each to shape for themselves, as they give themselves space to discover new things. Isn't that a lovely series of shells to describe life with?
She begins with the Moon shell, talking about the woman in particular, because life is about the self first, before love and marriage can come. In this section, she describes why she needs to get away from her five children and her husband, for a week break at a cottage all by herself: she is suffering from Zerrissenheit - a German word meaning "torn-to-pieces-hood". I suddenly knew exactly what this word means, sitting in my kitchen reading this book, because this is how I felt and have been feeling for some time in my life. It's not that I don't love my live, I do! I love my family, I am so happy to be back with my husband, I love my home and my garden and my cats and my books and my friends. What I don't like is my job. There, I'm saying it out loud. I don't like the work that I do, I'm bored, and I've been trying for some time to change my job without success. I don't fit the work that my job has changed into over the last 6 years, and it has taken a deep toll on my health. I've never been sick or hospitalized like I have been these past 7 years, and I don't like it. So I am searching for a way to change my job, or looking into the possibility of taking early retirement, and if that is possible. The two weeks here in my house recovering from the surgery, I took the opportunity to be as still as possible. I feel much less torn to pieces hood now - of course, we'll see how long that survives, once I return to work on Monday! It is very hard to do work at the maximum output all the time, with no quiet time or respite allowed on the job.
Gift From the Sea allowed me to look at my time at home and pretend I was away from it all, that I was at a cottage somewhere, alone during the day. I had silence each day - no music, no tv, no radio - I needed to rest, and to heal. This book is a lovely reminder of how easy it is to get pulled from the center, and how it is our work to return to the center, so we can hold our lives together and not be pulled apart. It is also important that we learn how to find that quiet center in our day, each day, even for 1 or 15 minutes. This is a wonderful book, and highly recommended. 5/5
Leviathan Wakes - James S. A Corey - Read for Carl's Sci-Fi Experience. I discovered this book through Locus Magazine, which had the annual best books of 2012 waiting for me the day I had my surgery, Feb 14. How awesome to come home to this issue! Last weekend I was finally ready to look through it, and I circled so many books to get, as well as happy to see I already own some (not read yet, waiting for Once Upon a Time to start): Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers, Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce, and then others are on the list like Brides of Roll Rock Island by Margo Lanagan, Wide Open by Deborah Coates (because of the ghosts and the hint of magic), Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch (Book 3,must read the second one before this, on my shelf), Boneland by Alan Garner (we can't get it here in Canada!), And Blue Skies From Pain by Stina Leicht (Book 2, I have book one to read on my shelf!), etc, just to give you a hint of how awesome this year's recommended list is. The list is comprehensive, covering young adult, and short stories and novellas also. Here is the link to their site and the list, which you can get online as well.
Leviathan Wakes is the first in a series; the second book, Caliban's War, is the one published last year, that made it onto the recommended reading list. Leviathan's Wake was on the 2011 reading list, somehow I missed reading that it had a creepy Lovecraftian like monster thing too. Sold! I rushed out to Chapters (luckily close to the one event I went to while out, my sister's birthday party) and grabbed a copy, and started reading it the next day. It was so much fun. It's a huge book, at 561 pages, chock full of adventures in space. Man has gone to Mars, and colonized it, and the planets in and around the asteroid belt between the inner and outer planets. Ceres is colonized at the outer edge, as are several asteroids with science stations on them. The story covers two main characters: Detective Miller, hired to look into a missing girl whose parents want her to return to the fold; Jim Holden who is XO of a ice miner going to the asteroid belt for ice and bringing back the ice for water supplies to different planets. He is called to investigate an sos signal. while on a return journey, and what he discovers puts him at the heart of a deadly race that has the survival of the known galaxy at stake. How their paths intersect and how they try to prevent an all-out war, is fun. The creeping Lovecraftian monster? Awesome and creepy and it will give you visionary nightmares after. Satisfying fun space romp, with good characters, tight plotting, and and ending that is a proper ending to these characters, but not to the galaxy. Great fun! 4.7/5
The Burning - Jane Casey The first in the DC Maeve Kerrigan series. My husband had brought this back from England two years ago, and it took me this long to read it. Bad me! this was a very good mystery. I did guess who dunnit before the character did, but this was not a flaw for me in this book - the challenge was seeing if I guessed right, and my reasoning was sound, which it was. That made it very satisfying to read! The mystery itself is well done: 4 women's bodies have been found murdered and burned in different parks, over a series of weeks, in London. The police are at a standstill. No clues. Then a fifth woman's body is found, also murdered and burned, in a park. Maeve is not sure it is the same murderer, as there are some minute differences,and she is pulled from the big investigation to prove or disprove if it is the serial killer's work.
This books sounds gruesome, however not a lot of time is spent with the bodies. Most of it is with the investigations, with following Maeve as she pursues the one case, especially after it is revealed a different killer is at work. Now they have two killers to find..... It is well written, and I enjoyed it very much. It isn't a perfect debut, the killer does something uncharacteristic at the end, yet it doesn't detract from the book. 4.5/5, and recommended.
Whew! Apparently I did have a lot to say!
And this brings me to the 2013 Science Fiction Experience Wrap-up
I read 7 books in total for the science fiction experience. I enjoyed all of them so very much. Thank you Carl for hosting it! I am really enjoying increasing the books I am reading each year in this area. Here is the list:
One Second After - William Forschten
Cat's Eye - Andre Norton
Mars - Ben Bova
Timescape - Gregory Benford
Wide Open - Deborah Coates (this also counts as a mystery read, for me!
The Vampire Tapestry - Suzy McKee Charnas
Leviathan Wakes - James SA Corey
Even more amazing, is that I have reviewed them all except for Mars, which is coming shortly.
My only problem now is that reading 6 books in two weeks, has left me not able to settle down to anything for a couple of days now. I'm even happier to report that other than Leviathan Wakes, I am still in the Double Dog Dare Challenge. I'm feeling very proud of myself that I have kept to reading books I owned on my shelf since Jan 1. One month to go!
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