August09_4
Oh dear, this is not a post to be proud of. Nothing but fantasy and sci fi on the pile of recently reads and I did vow to diversify my reading body, didn't I? Nothing to do but list 'em and move on.
Most recently: Sherri S Tepper's 'The Margarets'. Now this book isn't anything to sniff at. Great, writing, complex structure and concepts, impossible to summarise.
Larry Niven's 'Destiny's Road'. Seamless writing by a master of the craft, in blurb-talk. Planet-based sci-fi; a well-paced adventure quest, nicely grounded in the everyday.
'Dragonflight' by Anne McCaffrey. This is still a tender subject. I had to re-read this one for the first time in a decade because I had blithely recommended it to my 10 year-old neighbour. She had just finished 'Twilight' so clearly has open-minded parents and a capacity for teen fiction, but soon after I passed it across the kitchen table I realised I had been thinking of 'Dragonsong', a lighter, starter novel, and I started to worry. 'Dragonflight' is solidly settled in the adult world, the story is politics and time travel and a difficult love match (between dragon-riders, but still)... really not appropriate. So do I raise the issue with the parents? Talk to the junior reader? Let sleeping dragons lie?
'Wonders of a Godless World' by Andrew McGahan, a bit of a teaser book given out free at Dymocks to jag some readers. I can see why they did this - the book is unclassifiable. Might be horror, might be fantasty, might be magical realism. In the blurb words: "It's like nothing you've ever read before..." which is a stretch. I wonder how many extra books they have to sell to get their money back?
Most recently: Sherri S Tepper's 'The Margarets'. Now this book isn't anything to sniff at. Great, writing, complex structure and concepts, impossible to summarise.
Larry Niven's 'Destiny's Road'. Seamless writing by a master of the craft, in blurb-talk. Planet-based sci-fi; a well-paced adventure quest, nicely grounded in the everyday.
'Dragonflight' by Anne McCaffrey. This is still a tender subject. I had to re-read this one for the first time in a decade because I had blithely recommended it to my 10 year-old neighbour. She had just finished 'Twilight' so clearly has open-minded parents and a capacity for teen fiction, but soon after I passed it across the kitchen table I realised I had been thinking of 'Dragonsong', a lighter, starter novel, and I started to worry. 'Dragonflight' is solidly settled in the adult world, the story is politics and time travel and a difficult love match (between dragon-riders, but still)... really not appropriate. So do I raise the issue with the parents? Talk to the junior reader? Let sleeping dragons lie?
'Wonders of a Godless World' by Andrew McGahan, a bit of a teaser book given out free at Dymocks to jag some readers. I can see why they did this - the book is unclassifiable. Might be horror, might be fantasty, might be magical realism. In the blurb words: "It's like nothing you've ever read before..." which is a stretch. I wonder how many extra books they have to sell to get their money back?
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