One of my very favourite things about reading a book is discussing it with friends afterwards… or better yet, during. I loved literature classes at university and I often wonder why I haven’t joined a book club. I love the way other people bring other perspectives to the text, allowing me to see it in a different way.

Back in late November, Lynn O’Connacht mentioned in her reading round-up that she’d set down Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce, finding it wasn’t a book she was able to connect with.

“It’s the kind of book I’d do best reading in a group-setting, the kind of book that I’d gladly read cover-to-cover for university classes and yet would never consider picking up for myself. As I’m not reading this for a group discussion or a course, I’d rather spend my time reading something else. I’d be happy to pick it up again at a later date if anyone wanted to read along with me, though.”

Since Some Kind of Fairy Tale had been on my wish list for a little while, I immediately went “Ooo… pick me, pick me!” And here we are.

Lynn has been a good friend of mine for many years, but for those who don’t know her, I will let her introduce herself:

Hi, everyone! I’m Lynn, an indie author, a reader, a gamer, and an occasional watcher of dvds. I mostly read and write speculative fiction and then blog about both. I have an MA in English literature, specialising in British fantasy as well as Creative Writing. I love discussing stories, so I was delighted when Elizabeth expressed interest in a discussion of Some Kind of Fairy Tale. I’ve had great fun with it and I hope you’ll enjoy reading our discussion too.

This is less of a review than a conversation. It is somewhat spoilery and will probably work best if you’ve read the book. If you haven’t, or you need refreshing, here’s the Amazon description.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a very English story. A story of woods and clearings, a story of folk tales and family histories. It is as if Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris had written a Fairy Tale together.

It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery.

He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she’s back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim.

But her stories don’t quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young woman who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter’s parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara’s one-time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it’s as if she’s off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family…

This conversation also got rather long, so this is only part one. You can find part two over at Lynn’s blog.

So with one final warning (SPOILERS BELOW),  let me kick things off.

---

 

( Some Kind of Fairy TaleCollapse )

For part two, please join us at Lynn’s blog where we’ll discuss disenchantment, themes of responsibility and the relationship depicted between science and magic.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Back in October last year, I mentioned that Borgo Press had reprinted Baggage, an anthology of Australian speculative fiction that I had been honoured to work on as sub-editor. This is an anthology I am truly excited about and was thrilled to be part of. So today I’m sharing an interview with the editor (and my friend and mentor) Gillian Polack.

For those who are unfamiliar with the book, would you mind sharing a little bit about how Baggage came about?

Eneit Press had just published Life through Cellophane (now known as Ms Cellophane, and published by Momentum) and Sharyn Lilley and I were exchanging what I thought was just a fun set of emails. What would be your dream anthology? Who would you ask to be in it? That sort of thing. Except she was dead serious, as I found out when she gave me the pay rate to offer my dream writers.

It goes back further than that, though. Sharyn knew that one of my abiding interests is how people interpret the world around them, how they carry their culture and use it to shape and understand their lives. She also knows I am somewhat addicted to speculative fiction. It was a given that, given a dream anthology, I would ask writers to tell their speculative fiction tales through the lens of cultural baggage.

This theme of how people interpret the world and their lives through their culture is one that also occurs in your most recent novel Langue[dot]doc 1305. In the time between the release of these two books, how much has changed in the way you view this theme?

The way people view their world and live their lives is something I put into all my novels. These views, in fact, shape my novels. As I grow older, I learn more about people whose lives are different to my own and I find ways of understanding them (hopefully) enough so that I can write these people into my novels. It’s funny, so many of my readers tell me that this character is me or that character is me (I just had one tell me that Artemisia is me). What they are is me exploring the lives of others, so there is some overlap with things I know and this overlap leads to experiences I’ve never encountered and means I get to write about people I’ve never dreamed of being. As my wish to understand people shapes my novels, the understanding I try to achieve helps shape my life.

You were recently the GUFF delegate at Loncon and the Guest of Honour at Liburnicon. What was the most interesting piece of baggage—cultural or otherwise–you encountered on your trip?

 I think the most interesting piece of baggage was my own. While I have no trouble doing the big things (presenting a Hugo, giving a Guest of Honour talk at Liburnicon) it doesn’t make me terribly happy. I love finding people who share interests and passions far more than I enjoy looking important.

How is this baggage? I found myself at the back of the stage, waiting to present that Hugo and thinking “This should have been someone else.”  Australian culture is misogynistic: we are trained, and we train ourselves to ensure that men are seen and that women are worthy supporters. Once I realised that being a worthy supporter was entirely appropriate for an awards presentation (for the winner of the award is the centre of it) I was fine. It wasn’t the right thing at Liburnicon at all – I’m still thinking about that.

What was one highlight of working on Baggage?

Working on Baggage was full of many, many wonderful things but there’s one thing I haven’t talked about much and it’s at the heart of the book. I had worked on cross-cultural awareness and understanding for years before I edited Baggage. I’ve taught it to diplomats and to senior public officials and to community groups. By teaching these subjects, I learn about them from my students. This is what happened with Baggage, only it was a different kind of learning. Writers can reach deep into themselves when they write their best work. In some cases – Tessa Kum’s and KJ Bishop’s are the ones that always come to mind first – as they pushed their stories and shaped their ideas, I went on a tremendous voyage of discovery in their wake. I didn’t learn about culture and cultural baggage in the way I tended to when teaching; I learned about how it becomes a part of someone’s soul and where it can take a person.

Gillian’s most recent novel is Langue[dot]doc 1305 (Satalyte). Her next novel will be the cursed one, The Art of Effective Dreaming, and will also be published by Satalyte this month. Polack is a writer, editor, historian and critic.  Baggage was short-listed for a Ditmar and has recently been reprinted by Borgo. Gillian’s second novel Ms Cellophane (also a Ditmar finalist) was recently published by Momentum. She has sixteen short stories published. One of her stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award and three more have been listed as recommended reading in the international lists of world’s best fantasy and science fiction short stories. 

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Published: 2002 by Trivium Publishing
Format reviewed: Paperback, 289 pages
Genres: Literary fiction, fantasy
Source: Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild
Reading Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge 2015
Disclaimer: The author is a friend. I have done my best to give an unbiased review.

Rose is an Australian medievalist on sabbatical in France. She discovers a strange manuscript that tells the tale of Ailinn and Guenloie, two women living in Arthurian Britain. As Ailinn and Guenloie seek to discover and overcome the evil threatening their world, Rose is preoccupied with her research and the strange behaviour of her boyfriend.

This is a Russian doll kind of story, beginning with the discovery of Rose's letters home, then moving back and forward between Rose's first-person account of her sabbatical and her third-person translation of Ailinn & Guenloie's quest. Despite this, the two main stories don't share obvious parallels so much as undercurrents the reader needs to dive for. I am not well versed in the tales of Arthur or the world of historians, so there were times I felt I was missing some of these undercurrents and some of the jokes. But I caught enough to appreciate it was a tale about the way small deeds and small lives can overcome great evil--often more effectively than flashy and powerful lives. It's a very feminist novel, commenting on how those small lives are often overwritten by those with power. Arthur and his knights aren't shown in a very favourable light.

Illuminations is definitely at the literary end of fantasy. Magic is portrayed in the matter-of-fact way of legends. It is slow-paced and it took me a while to get into the story. It was the characters that eventually drew me in. They are complex, with definite moods and their own motivations, and I could see bits of people I knew in them. However, it takes a while to get to know them. The book switches often between perspectives in the beginning and it wasn't until the switches slowed down and Ailinn & Guenloie had finished their time in Arthur's court that I began to settle into the story.

I don't feel this is the strongest of Gillian's novels, though I still very much enjoyed it. If you like gentle character studies mixed with Celtic legend, Illuminations is well worth looking into.

Published: 2013 by Walker Books Australia
Format reviewed: Paperback, 445 pgs
Series: The Tribe #2
Genres: Speculative Fiction, Young Adult
Source: Public library

With the Tribe now safe from Neville Rose, Ashala Wolf should be able to relax. Instead, she finds her Sleepwalking power out of control, making her a threat to everyone around her. To protect her Tribe she takes refuge with the local wolf pack. While she’s there, her best friend, Ember Crow, goes missing. Ashala must return and find Ember before Ember’s past catches up with them all.

I read the first book in the series for the Diversiverse Reading challenge and was very pleased with the way it handled diversity. I was even more pleased to see The Disappearance of Ember Crow build on that, expanding to include not just race but also sexuality and chronic illness (and another, more spoilery element). As in The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, these portrayals are not the focus of the story (spoilery element excepted), but are included very naturally in passing.

The book also introduces a diversity of landscape that was missing in the first book. This time around, Ashala and Ember do a bit of travelling, allowing the reader to see a bit more of what their world looks like. The landscapes all have a strong Australian influence, making them very recognisable to me. This delighted me because I have an interest in Australian natural history and don’t often encounter fictional landscapes that feel familiar, let alone multiple landscapes in the same book.

There is a lot going on in The Disappearance of Ember Crow. It is told in first person from two points of view. The majority of the story is from Ashala’s point of view, but there are key passages from Ember’s perspective. While this mostly worked well, I felt that Ember’s story suffered a little. I would have liked to see more of her relationship with Jules and with her youngest brother. That said, The Disappearance of Ember Crow is already sizeable enough, so I understand that there may not have been the space.

The pacing wasn’t quite as tight as in The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. While still being a page-turner for me, it didn’t have quite the same edge-of-my-seat tension because the threat wasn’t as present and therefore lacked the same kind of power. The ending also had a lot of action packed into it and I felt there were a few significant moments that weren’t given the space they needed.

The younger characters remained a strength of the story. Their flaws were evident once more and I appreciated seeing them not always make the right decision. In contrast, the adult characters remained fairly two-dimensional, very black and white. It would be nice to see them given a little more depth.

Overall, I found The Disappearance of Ember Crow to be a very ambitious book. It doesn’t always pull off what it sets out to do but it remains a fantastic read. I will impatiently await the release of the next book in the series, The Foretelling of Georgie Spider.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

 

Two weeks ago, I came across a post from Renay at Lady Business about her struggles with the field of short SF fiction.

The short fiction field is huge and it’s flooded with so much work that no one reader could begin to keep up (did anyone ever keep up? Was it possible, long ago before the Internet, SF fan historians?) I know there are people out there that care about short fiction, its future, and want to ensure that new people come in and care about it just as much as they do. Unfortunately, right now it feels impenetrable. I hear a lot of commentary saying that the really daring work isn’t done in novels, but instead is happening in short fiction. I hear that investing in short fiction will give you a leg up on what’s going to be happening in novel length work later on. If that’s true, at this rate it’s simply easier and less stressful for me to sit down and wait for the big ideas to hit the novels, remixed and transformed from the short fiction writers or by short fiction writers turned novelists.

I want to care about short fiction, but I have no clue how or where to start because there’s just so much stuff and there’s little to no filtering unless I slog through it myself or wait until December – March for Hugo season.

Obviously, Renay is coming at this from a reader’s perspective. However, this is also a problem from a writer’s perspective, as the exchange below indicates.

 

@AusWomenWriters Yes! I’m reading No Need To Reply by @JodiCleghorn

— Elizabeth Fitzgerald (@elizabeth_fitz) November 15, 2014

 

Hello @ElizabethLhuede! I write mainly short stories so it’s difficult to hit readers’ radars. @elizabeth_fitz @AusWomenWriters — JodiCleghorn (@JodiCleghorn) November 16, 2014

 

In her post, Renay calls for more (and more robust) reviewing of short fiction and this strikes me as something short fiction writers also need to help them hit readers’ radars. Along with Renay, I can see a definite imbalance: I know many short story writers but very few reviewers of short fiction.

These conversations also have me reconceptualising myself as a reader. I almost didn’t read Renay’s post, saying to myself “I don’t really read short fiction.” Once I started thinking about it, I realised how ridiculously untrue this was. What am I doing reading No Need To Reply if I’m not a reader of short fiction? Or anything by FableCroft Publishing? I’ve even edited an anthology of short fiction and been involved with several more besides. So this view of myself as someone who doesn’t read short fiction is not at all accurate. While novels remain my preferred format, there are plenty of short stories mixed in amongst my reading.

Which means I’m well placed to help out when it comes to reviewing short fiction, especially because I’m already doing it. In practice, not a whole lot is going to change. I don’t necessarily intend to start reading more short fiction–not allowing myself to read at whim is a quick way to reader’s block. However, I do hope to be a bit more conscious of the amount of short fiction I’m reading.

One change I do intend to make is how I tag my posts. As I already mentioned, my reading–and thus my reviewing–tends to be a jumble of formats. What use is reading and reviewing more short fiction if no one can find those reviews? In fact, I suspect that short story reviewing is more common than Renay thinks but that these reviews likewise get lost amongst the jumble on other book blogs. So, to help with that here I’ve started a tag for short stories.

I’d be interested in hearing more on this topic. If you’re a reader, where do you find reviews of short fiction? If you review, what do you do to make reviews of short fiction noticeable amongst the longer fiction? Are there other solutions I could help contribute towards?

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Published: 2012 by JADD Publishing
Format reviewed: Paperback, 170 pages
Series: None
Genres: Non-fiction
Source: Public library

The Emotion Thesaurus is pretty much exactly what it says on the label. This non-fiction book has an entry for emotions ranging from adoration to worry. Each entry lists a definition of the emotion, as well as physical signs, mental responses, cues that might be given off by acute long-term sufferers of that emotion, cues of suppressed emotion, and other possibly related emotions. It is intended to be a reference book for writers.

This book was mentioned with some derision at one of the Conflux panels I attended so I thought I would check it out for myself. It didn’t take long; the book is fairly slender and features one emotion for every double-page spread. There is a fair bit of duplication between similar emotions–for example, the lists for annoyance and irritation feature many of the same signs.

Judging from the tone, the book is aimed at newer writers and I can see how it could be a useful starting point. However, any writer will still need to consider cultural norms, genre expectations and the particulars of their character. Gillian Polack explores how to give this kind of consideration to dialogue over on the History Girls blog. While the opening chapters of The Emotion Thesaurus are careful to point out this kind of consideration is needed in order to avoid cliché, the thesaurus format makes it easy for those looking for a short-cut. This was the very reason it received criticism at Conflux.

Unsurprisingly then, the book is best seen as a tool: equally capable of producing the beautiful and the dreadful, depending on the wielder. Use with caution.

 

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Published: 2014 by FableCroft Publishing
Format reviewed: E-book (mobi)
Series: None
Genres: Fantasy
Source: Review copy provided by the publisher
Challenges: Dewey’s Read-a-thon
Disclaimer: I know the publisher, cover artist and a couple of the contributors

In my September review of To Spin A Darker Stair, I anticipated that Phantazein would prove to be more of the same. Having now read it I can say: it is and it isn’t. Although Phantazein opens with a fairytale retelling and closes with a mythological retelling, the majority of its stories are original stories that retain a strong fairytale flavour.

The stories that make up the anthology had a nice mixture of cultures. While there were some stories that felt vaguely European, there were also some that drew on Asian, Arabic and South American influences. Not being from these cultures, I’m not in a position to judge whether these influences were handled with sensitivity. From an outsider’s perspective, they seemed respectfully done. The diversity made for a reasonably well-balanced anthology, with one exception: there were very few Australian-influenced elements. Cat Sparks’ story The Seventh Relic was the sole exception and a questionable one. Only those familiar with Buddhism in Australia are likely to identify the setting, which otherwise comes across as generically western.

There was also a nice mixture of relationships featured in the stories. Being fairytale-inspired, there were various family relationships (mother and daughter, mother and son, father and daughter, siblings etc) as well as romantic relationships and straightforward friendships. I would like to have seen a few more non-heterosexual romantic relationships. The Seventh Relic proved the exception here once again, though, as with the Australian setting, it tended to be understated.

Being the exception to both of my diversity-related criticisms, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Seventh Relic was also the only story that I felt didn’t quite fit the anthology. However, I feel this was less to do with the inclusion of those diverse elements than its tone, which came across as a little too biting in comparison to the more fairytale-esque stories.

My notable mentions were difficult to pick but include Twelfth by Faith Mudge, The Ghost of Hephaestus by Charlotte Nash and How the Jungle Got its Spirit Guardian by Vida Cruz. Twelfth was a retelling of the Grimm fairytale The Twelve Dancing Princesses. It had wonderful heart and no easy resolution. We didn’t quite get off on the right foot, as I had some trouble with the perspective at first and felt the beginning could have used some tightening up. However, it drew me in as the characters came more to life.

The Ghost of Hephaestus was an enchantingly romantic steampunk that tapped into Greek mythology and managed to hit all my buttons.

How the Jungle Got its Spirit Guardian drew on Aztec influences and had some interesting commentary on gender roles sold by some strong characters.

Overall, I found Phantazein to be very entertaining. Despite my criticisms, it had a nice mix of stories and I’d definitely recommend it to those who like fairytale-inspired fantasy.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

Published: 2012 by Allen and Unwin
Format reviewed: Paperback, 343 pages
Series: None
Genres: Fantasy. A case could also be made for YA
Source: Public library
Challenge: Dewey’s read-a-thon

Sea Hearts is a dark fantasy that taps into traditional tales of selkie wives. Misskaella is a lonely child, bullied by her sisters and shunned by the community for her ugly appearance and eerie affinity with seals. When she discovers she can turn the seals into human form, it sets off a devastating sequence of events.

I adored this book. Margo Lanagan has a reputation for writing stories that are very dark, so I wasn’t sure it would be for me. Indeed, the opening scene had a suitably creepy atmosphere as a group of young boys try to collect mussels from the beach without attracting the angry attention of Misskaella the crone. However, the beautiful turns of phrase drew me in and I was soon completely absorbed.

Nevertheless, it is a dark story and one that shows cycles of abuse. Gradually, we see how the bullying of Misskaella by her family and community leads to her calling forth the selkie sea wives. Witnessing the way the men of the island then conspire to keep the selkies from returning to the sea by hiding their sealskins is not pretty. This portrayal of systemic oppression at the hands of men makes Sea Hearts quite a feminist novel, though it is never preachy about it and there is certainly plenty to imply that the men aren’t solely to blame.

At her Conflux Guest-of-Honour interview, Lanagan spoke about how she often tricks herself into writing a novel by constructing it as a series of short stories. This approach is evident in Sea Hearts, which sketches out Misskaella’s lifetime and the events on Rollrock Island from a number of different, first-person perspectives. These different perspectives allow an overview of events while still inviting the intimacy Sea Hearts requires for its quiet, domestic horror. There is no black-and-white here: each perspective offers something to sympathise with, while also revealing flaws. It was this last point that kept me reading. No one was completely unlikeable and there was always a little bit of hope, no matter how faint.

As you might have gathered, the tale unfolds at a stately pace while still managing to avoid feeling slow. There’s something very ethereal about it, despite the way Lanagan anchors it in concrete detail. There is a very deliberate sense that Rollrock Island has stepped beyond time, while the world beyond its shores moves on, and my experience of reading Sea Hearts echoed that. I can’t possibly do it justice.

 

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

While I was at Conflux, I heard a lot of talk about the importance of reviews. This wasn’t limited to the panel on reviewing, but cropped up at book launches, at other panels and in conversation. With the rise of e-publishing, competition is fierce and it is important to stand out from the crowd. Reviews are one way of doing this. I heard many writers and publishers encouraging readers to leave reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. These sites are configured so that the more reviews a book has, the more likely it is to be seen. It is better to have dozens of two star reviews than a couple of five star reviews.

However, reviewing becomes tricky when one is involved in the publishing community. I read a reasonable amount of work written or published by people I know. I do this partly to keep up with what’s going on in the industry, partly out of curiosity over what my acquaintances have been working on and partly out of genuine interest for the work itself. One of the reasons I started this blog was to share what I read with people who are just as excited about books as I am. Can I do that when I know the people whose work I’m reviewing? I got a few looks of horror at Conflux when I suggested I might attempt it.

I can understand why. On the reviewing panel at Conflux, experienced reviewer Satima Flavell suggested that a review had to be sympathetic to three people: the publisher, the author and the reader. Being too kind to a publisher or author can give a reader the wrong impression about a book. This wastes the reader’s time and money at best and ultimately breaks the trust between reviewer and reader. On the other hand, criticising a work too strongly–whether warranted or not–can hurt the feelings of someone the reviewer knows and will have to encounter again in the future. It is a difficult balance.

The panelists approached the situation in different ways. Writer David McDonald simply avoids reviewing Australian material. Shaheen of Speculating on SpecFic chooses to maintain some distance from the writing community and is able to do so because she isn’t a writer herself.  Satima Flavell and Helen Venn negotiate the tricky path of reviewing while still being part of the community. All of the panelists agreed that the key to this path is to be as honest and upfront as possible. Let readers know who you know so that they can make an informed choice about how to treat your review.

This commonsense approach seems to work well for Tsana Dolichva of Tsana’s Reads and Reviews, who had the following to say during her interview for the 2014 Australian Speculative Fiction Snapshot:

I think a lot of the controversy comes from worries about authenticity and potential antagonism. If a writer is friends with the author of the book they’re reviewing, for example, will they write an honest review if they don’t like it? Is a fledgeling writer worried about criticising a Big Name writer in their review? But I think we’re all grown ups and should be capable of writing critical reviews without being rude, or, on the flip side, dealing with negative reviews of our work without having a breakdown on Twitter. I understand some of the hesitancy around the matter, but I don’t think that should be a reason for writers not to review, if that’s what they want to do.

After giving the matter some consideration, I’ve decided that this is also the approach I’ll be taking. Restricting my reviewing to only non-Australian authors or those I don’t know would leave me unable to share so many exciting, well-written books. If I can’t share what excites me, what is the point of reviewing at all?

However, I acknowledge that it is a contentious issue and one I’ll no doubt continue to wrestle with as I become a more experienced reviewer. Do you write/review? How do you approach the matter? I’d love you to share your thoughts here.

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.

A few years ago, I made an optimistic New Year’s resolution to finish the year with a smaller Mt TBR. If the overall total was less than it had been on 1 January–even if it was only by one book–I’d count myself successful. It’s a goal I’ve never managed to achieve, but I continue to live in hope. In pursuing this lofty ideal, I’ve learned to carefully track both Mt TBR and what I’ve read using a variety of spreadsheets (including one adapted from Fyrefly). This helps me make sure multiple copies of the same book don’t bloat Mt TBR. It also helps me gather data on what I’ve read, for instance: ratio of male and female authors; ratio of Australian and international authors; genre; and ratings. At the end of every month, I check on what I’ve read and acquired. I also check on the overall height of Mt TBR (which usually brings on a strong need for a cup of tea).

I thought I would share these reports here. This is not out of a misguided notion that creating public accountability will help me achieve my goal–I have no delusions on that front. If anything, starting this blog will make things worse. However, I love to poke through other people’s book lists; it’s always fascinating to see what they are reading or want to read. I’m sure I’m not the only one. While I’m on Goodreads, it’s not really the space for this sort of report. I also hope that sharing them here might start some additional conversations (you may have noticed that I like to talk about books).

So, without further ado, here is this month’s report.

Mt TBR status

Mt TBR @ 1 January: 191
Mt TBR @ 31 August: 217
Mt TBR @ 30 September: 215

While September’s month’s total is down on August, I’m pretty sure I can farewell any chance of getting back down to January’s total. Especially with Conflux starting today.

 

Books read

39. Heat Rises by Richard Castle: The third book in the ghostwritten Nikki Heat series tied in to the TV show Castle. Entertaining enough for fans but probably not of much interest otherwise. The tone and characterisation seem to vary a bit from book to book, indicating each book was ghostwritten by someone new. It makes for a rather uneven series and this wasn’t one of the better books.

40. The Passage of Pearl by Lynn O’Connacht: A fantasy novelette about a university student who discovers an extraordinary book. It tends more towards slice-of-life than adventure, featuring some nicely understated species dysmorphia.

41. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina: Reviewed here.

42. Lavender Blue and Other Poems by Elizabeth Conall: A comprehensive collection of Conall’s poems from 2013. As with most anthologies and collections, the quality is a bit uneven. However, it shows an impressive command of poetic form and fantastic diversity of characters.

43. The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo: Considered by some to be a sacred text, this is an examination of the history and philosophy of tea preparation in China and Japan. The book pays particular attention to the Japanese tea ceremony and its links to Taoism and Zen. A fascinating read for dedicated tea lovers.

 

Books acquired

(3/9) The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina
(25/9) Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan
(27/9) Phantazein edited by Tehani Wessely

 

Online Reading

This gets its own section because the immediacy of online reading tends to short-circuit any attempts to record it as part of Mt TBR.

Xxxholic Vol. 1 by Ohkawa Ageha: A manga with a very misleading title. A boy able to see spirits and magical forces agrees to work in an occult shop in exchange for the owner ridding him of his undesired ability. It wasn’t quite enough to hook me in.

Boundary Lines by Elizabeth Barrette: A poem in an ongoing series about Brenda, a badass Private Investigator who happens to use a wheelchair. The poem examines some of the boundary violations Brenda experiences as well as illustrating more respectful behaviour.

Skip Beat Ch. 215 by Nakamura Yoshiki: A shojo manga. When a young girl is dumped by her rockstar boyfriend, she vows never to love again. Determined to ruin his career, she enters show business to get her revenge and discovers a talent for acting. Light-hearted fun.

The Court of Five Thrones, Ch 6
and Strange Sights, Ch 12 & 13 by Pia Foxhall: These are at completely the opposite end of the spectrum from Skip Beat. Both of Foxhall’s stories are classified as m/m erotica, are explicit and come with some heavy trigger warnings–particularly the latter. They’re both set in the same vibrant fantasy world and feature wonderfully faceted characters. Definitely NSFW.

 

Mirrored from Earl Grey Editing.