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Progress so far:
- Currently reading: After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson
- Books finished: 0
- Pages read: 50
- Running total of pages read: 120
- Amount of time spent reading: 35 minutes
- Running total of time spent reading: 1 hour 20 minutes
- Mini-challenges completed: 0
- Other participants I’ve visited: 6
Still enjoying the first of the Dandy Gilver detective novels. Snacking far too much though, must slow down or else….
First of all, the stats:
- Currently reading: After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson
- Books finished: 0
- Pages read: 70
- Running total of pages read: 70
- Amount of time spent reading: 45 minutes
- Running total of time spent reading: 45 minutes
- Mini-challenges completed: 0
- Other participants I’ve visited: 1
Hour 1 meme:
Three facts about me: I’m Scottish but live in London, I support St Mirren, I have two younger brothers
I have a pile of around 11 books for the challenge
I don’t have any real goals except to raise some money for charity and have an excuse to ignore my chores and sit reading for as long as I can
This is my first read-a-thon
So far so good; I’m really enjoying the first of my books, a new author to me and I can see myself reading the rest of the series. I’ll probably do less reading in hour 2 as, in addition to writing this post, I helped the Book God unpack the shopping I sent him out to do and he insisted on having a conversation (!). But he did bring me treats….
OK, so the read-a-thon starts in under 10 minutes. I have a pile of books next to my reading chair, the sun is shining, the windows are open and I need to go and find myself some snacks to start me off.
I’m not going to list my books cos they’re only a guide at the moment and I reserve the right to change my mind.
Plan is to do the full 24 hours with only one scheduled break to watch tonight’s episode of Dr Who (c’mon, did you really think I could wait until tomorrow?). If I complete the full 24 hours I donate £100 to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust; if I do 12 hours they get £50. The Book God is sponsoring me at £1 an hour, other friends have pledged support and a colleague has already given me a tenner so they will get something decent even if I wimp out at an early stage.
I plan to blog hourly with progress, but we’ll see how that goes.
Good luck to everyone taking part.
So in a fit of madness I’ve decided to sign up for the next 24 Hour Readathon, which is on Saturday 10 April. I’ve already booked the day before as leave so that I can get chores done (and stock up on some sleep perhaps) and persuaded the Book God to sponsor me (though haven’t finally plumped on a charity yet).
I’ll also be trawling my friends for support, so let’s see how that works out!
But I’ve not even begun to think about what I will read on the day – lots of short things methinks…..
Spring is definitely here; the sun is shining, I have a couple of very well-deserved (in my opinion anyway) days off work and Carl has just announced Once Upon a Time IV, one of my very favourite reading challenges.
As per usual I’m going to commit to Quest the First, which involves reading five books from the categories of fantasy, folklore, fairy tale and mythology. I’ll almost certainly select from the following (not terribly long) list:
- The Dragon Waiting by John M Ford
- Tithe by Holly Black
- Snow White and the Seven Samurai by Tom Holt
- The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick
- The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu
- Making Money by Terry Pratchett
- White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
- The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip
- Songs of Earth and Power by Greg Bear
- Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
And who knows, I might even get to them all!
It is a month for favourites – Charles Stross is rapidly becoming one of the authors I leap upon (metaphorically speaking of course) as soon as something new comes out (we have lots of his stuff in the house but I am trying not to gorge myself as he is far too good to be wasted in that way) and Lee Gibbons is becoming one of my favourite sci-fi cover artists.
So Saturn’s Children is yet more space opera with a strong female lead and an extremely interesting premise, so there was no way that I was going to dislike this novel, which is a really good thriller as well as a sci-fi tale.
Freya Nakamachi-47 is a cloned synthetic person, designed to be a concubine for humans, but activated long after the human race has totally died out. The robots, for want of a better word, have built their own society which unfortunately has taken on many of the worst aspects of how humans behaved – rigidly hierarchical with everything from aristocrats to slaves, overly legalistic and potentially very harsh.
Freya gets into trouble on Venus and needs to get off-planet very quickly; to do so she takes on a job as a courier, taking contraband from Mercury to Mars. Of course, this all goes a bit pear-shaped as you might expect, and Freya’s troubles multiply as she tries to find out what’s going on, and in particular who wants to kill her.
I really enjoyed this – it’s very funny in places, the thriller bits are thrilling, Freya is a likeable character in difficult circumstances and the story had a nice pay-off as far as I was concerned. Some of the funniest parts relate to the horrors of interplanetary travel – basically not a lot of fun, takes ages, is expensive and passengers often don’t survive. The variety of robot entities, some more humanoid than others, really add to the offbeat alienness of a non-human society. And there are a number of really cool spaceships.
This is another read for the 42 Challenge, and the Sc-fi experience 2010.
So Gary Gibson was my big find of last year (well, I didn’t exactly find him, I was pointed in his direction by the Book God) and Stealing Light one of my favourite reads. So anticipation was high for Nova War and it didn’t disappoint.
But it’s going to be difficult to review here because it is a straight sequel (part of the Shoal sequence, the third volume comes out later this year) and so any in-depth discussion would give away details of the outcome of the first book, and I wouldn’t want to do that because it was huge fun to read and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone likely to give it a go.
So what do you need to know? Well, it’s a space opera (hurrah! I’m a sucker for those) with a couple of strong central characters, a convincing range of truly alien alien races (the Emissaries being particular favourites for their sheer nastiness), fantastic spaceships, revelations, war, realpolitik and (yay!) exploding suns.
I absolutely loved it from the Lee Gibbons cover to the set-up for book three. I strongly identified with at least one of the main characters (is it too much to say that Dakota Merrick survives from book one ? Probably not given that she is the heroine after all), actually felt a tiny wee bit of sympathy for one of the villains (we find out what was done to him in the past to make him who he is now and it is truly terrible – sympathy doesn’t last that long, though) and just enjoyed the whole big-wide-world-of-spacefaring thing that was going on.
What can I say? I just can’t resist hard SF.
So I was trying to think how best to describe Bryan Talbot’s Grandville; hummed and hawed about steampunk, alternative history, anthropomorphic animals, played about with a few sentences but couldn’t get it quite right.
And then I thought “wonder what it say on the back of the book?” And that sort of solved my problem for me, cos what the blurb says is:
Inspired by the work of the nineteenth-century French illustrator Gerard, who worked under the nom-de-plume JJ Grandville, and the seminal science fiction illustrator Robida – not to mention Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rupert the Bear and Quentin Tarantino – Grandville is a steampunk masterpiece in which Detective Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard stalks a gang of ruthless killers through the streets of belle époque Paris.
And you know it would be very difficult to improve on that as a description; the only thing I can add is how wonderful the artwork is, how convincing the animals as characters are, what an interesting perspective it takes on terrorism, and that it’really is quite enjoyably violent in places. There’s a reference to a “hairless breed of chimpanzee that evolved in the town of Angouleme,” menial workers known as “doughfaces” , obviously humans, which adds a little bit of depth to the world Talbt has invented.
I absolutely loved this, devoured it in a sitting as you do, and can recommend it to anyone interested in Bryan Talbot’s work.
This is my first read for the Graphic Novel Challenge 2010.
So I had such great plans for reviewing this fascinating book. There are pencilled notes and pages turned down because of quotes or references that I didn’t want to have to go looking for later. And I’ve been pondering what I want to say since I finished the book at the end of last year.
And that’s turned out to be my problem – there is just so much that could be said about this book that I don’t actually know where to start.
Divorced, Beheaded, Survived is Karen Lindsey’s feminist reinterpretation of Henry VIII’s wives, but it also takes into account the lives of his mother, sisters, daughters and some of the other significant women at court to paint a picture of what it was like to be a woman in the Tudor era.
And as you might expect it wasn’t easy, even for those in the privileged position that many of these women held.
In her introduction, Lindsey talks about what drew her to the subject, and the realisation that the modern topic of sexual harassment in the workplace could be relevant here. After all, if you consider being lady-in-waiting to the Queen as a job, then the unwelcome attentions of the King were very much in the harassment mould. And certainly over time the focus of largely male historians has been on poor old Henry having all these wanton young women thrust at him, and under those circumstances what’s a man to do?
The fact that most of these women were positioned at court by their ambitious families hoping that their girl would catch Henry’s eye and attract a good marriage as a former mistress of the King has been, if not overlooked, then certainly not given the prominence by earlier historians that it perhaps should have. But one of the great benefits of women’s studies is that their voices are heard, however faintly.
Those of you who visit here regularly will know that the sixteenth century is the period of history that holds my attention the most, and that is largely because of the women who were prominent in the period – Mary, Queen of Scots, Catherine de Medici, Mary Tudor and my great heroine Elizabeth I. So I found this book totally captivating and thought-provoking. It has given me a new insight inot the life of Catherine of Aragon, and made me want to find out more about Anne of Cleves, who really was the survivor of the bunch.
And lord, if I didn’t know before what a monster Henry was, I certainly do now!
I can’t recommend this too highly if you are at all interested in this period, or court politics, or women’s lives in general. There is much to think about.
And this is my first read for the Women Unbound Challenge.
So I signed up for this last year, read one book that wasn’t even on my reading list, and then it all fell to pieces. However, I’m determined to have another punt at a subject I’m really interested in (and nearly studied after I left university). And it’s the same reading list as last time…
- Duncan Grant: A Biography by Frances Spalding
- The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet by Jan Marsh
- Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography by Matthew Sturgis
- William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis by Angela Thirlwell
- The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society by Caroline Dakers
Which puts me in the Fascinated category, so let’s see how that works out.
Bride of the Book God 