WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
A Natural History of Dragons by our own Marie Brennan. At first I shied away from this fictional memoir by Lady Trent, a natural historian with a passion for dragons. So many authors get too good at the Victorian journal voice. The tangled sentences, convoluted asides, and passive omniscient narrator bore me. Not this one. The action begins early on and never stops. The narrator inserts bits of hard-earned wisdom as well as apologies for her youthful exuberance that gets her into trouble time and time again. The humor and drama are well balanced and I can’t wait to finish it and move on to the next volume. 
• What did you recently finish reading?
Oh my gosh! Carousal Sun by Sharon Lee is a magnificent sequel to Carousel Tides. This is what urban fantasy should be. Lee paints a world where the existence of six dimension, each with their own magic system, and carefully guarded portals between them, seems a natural extension of the character lives. A metaphysical bond with the land, or a tree, or the sea, is an acceptable part of everyday life. Nothing artificial or out of place about this story world. The action is more gentle than a lot of the genre, minus gore and demons and marshal arts with fancy weapons. But the battles are important and loyalties come under close scrutiny. Well worth the wait between volumes and I’m excited to here there will be a third.
• What do you think you’ll read next?
I think I should close my eyes and reach into the middle of the TBR pile to see what I come up with. But I think Chaz Brenchley’s Rotten Row is close to surfacing.
What about you? What are you reading, have you been reading, wanting to read next?
Read:
Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
Rose and the Lost Princess by Holly Webb
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Reading:
The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle
To Read:
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Folktales reviewed here
Rose reviewed here
Lord reviewed here
I’ve read volume 3 of Saga which is every bit as good as the first two. Such a wonderful comic! The art is lovely, and the suspense/action is exciting, and I love how a married couple with a baby and in-laws are the main characters. Their biggest enemy is worried about his pregnant wife, too.
A friend raved about James Schmitz’ The Witches of Karres, so I picked it up. I did enjoy it—it’s great fun.
Several friends had raved about The Goldfinch, but I’d been shying away from the sheer bulk of it. I noticed on Meetup that a local book group was reading it, and signed up and read it over the weekend. Donna Tartt is a very unusual writer. I loved The Secret History even as I thought it was nuts. I finished The Little Friend but didn’t think it was all that good. I did gobble down The Goldfinch and did enjoy it while I was reading it, but once I’d finished it and looked back over it, I thought it was nuts, too. I arrived at the book group to find that only one of the 8 people had enjoyed reading it, and she didn’t think it was a great book.
Yesterday, I got my copy of Diana Gabaldon’s 8th Outlander novel, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood. I’m enjoying it immensely, but I’m completely incapable of saying whether it’s well written or not. I just sink happily into that world.
The purchase of our new house FINALLY closes this Friday, so I’ll be crazy busy (painting, moving, unpacking) and get a lot less reading done for awhile!
I liked The Witches of Karres — but better as the short work rather than expanded novel.
(The short work ended when he went to look it up, and was considering whether to look under K or W.)