Blog Relaunch

OK, so I've decided that I'm going to try this blogging thing again as one of my New Year's resolutions. Seeing that the last post was in March made me feel pathetic, quite frankly. I mean, I regularly read two dozen blogs and my goal this year is to write more, soooo.....

I thought I'd start things off with a list of the books I was able to read over the Christmas Break. For some reason, I was able to get a lot of personal reading done in the month of December (at the expense of laundry and other things, but still...)

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
This has been on my shelf for about two years now. I finally picked it up and got sucked in immediately. She was able to create a great tension through fear and suspense w/o much actual blood and vampire spooookiness. I also loved the academic researcher milieu. It's a lot more fun to read "She spent the whole day in research before she found the key information" than to actually spend a whole day doing research. I thought her ability to weave together a story from letters, notes and accounts was also very skillfully done.

A Companion To Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear
OK. I read this because I like Sarah Monette, and b/c I'd read in some reviews on her blog of the "controversial nature" of how sex was addressed in the book. I enjoyed the book, though I wanted more, the same way I felt about Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark - There was enough there to address a whole trilogy, rather than just one book, and I felt the same way here. I thought the sex was tastefully addressed and, you know... if you're going to bond a female wolf, that's about what should happen when she goes into heat...

Weight, Jeanette Winterson
A retelling of the Atlas story as part of Canongate's The Myths series. I enjoyed Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, but I didn't like this as much. I guess it was a little too fragmented for me. It was OK, but again, it had been on my shelf for two years, so I had to read it. There were a couple of ideas that piqued my interest - Laika joining Atlas as a companion, and the characterization of Hercules as being afraid of inaction were novel.

The Bone Key, Sarah Monette
I really enjoyed her Melusine books, so I've been wanting to get this forever, but I couldn't find it. Grrr.... Finally, I got it for Christmas from my wife, who is much more practical than I am and just ordered it. I loved her protagonist, Kyle Murchison Booth, an archivist at a museum. He's the perfect protagonist for a short story because in that venue, she doesn't have to resolve his emotionally crippled state. It would be harder to maintain his social awkwardness if he had to be the protagonist for an entire novel. I also liked that he wasn't hellbent on banishing all the spookies that he finds. He's more of a "Sorry, don't let me interrupt. Good luck with that. I'll be going now..." kind of guy.

Her Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (reread)
I *love* this book. In the way these things usually go, I picked it up to read my favorite section and ended up rereading the whole thing. As I said to my wife (who has yet to read it, but I'm sure will love it) - "It's the best Regency period book I've ever read. Dragons instead of boring women scheming to get a husband..." :)

First Testing, Page, Squire, Lady Knight (Protector of the Small Quartet), Tamora Pierce
YA fiction, I literally found this by walking down the wrong aisle of Borders. I love YA and the novel that I'm working on *might* turn out to be YA rather than adult (it depends how much the story turns to sex, I suppose...) I enjoyed this series of four books and the young, female protagonist. I picked it up, in part, because I'm trying to get a handle on writing a more realistic teenage girl for a protagonist.

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
Good story. Interesting magic system. I'll probably read The Well of Ascension eventually. I wanted to see what the guy who will be writing the last Wheel of Time book had written on his own. I also enjoyed the female protagonist, thought the thief who attracts the attention of nobility is a trope that I'm pretty much over at this point. Anyone who writes a book called Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians can't be all bad, though.

I'm also slowly working my way through

The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzberg
This is an academic study of Italian agrarian cults in the 16th and 17th centuries, including a discussion of the Benandanti spirit walker belief. I've been looking for this book for awhile, and was able to get a used copy off of Amazon. I'm hoping to use this folk legend as a basis for a short story.

and The Mammoth Book of New Historical Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley.
My wife got this for me because it has a short story by Margaret Frazer featuring Dame Frevisse, her sleuthing nun. We have read a few other Dame Frevisse books and enjoyed them as well. There's something about a medieval mystery that I find irresistible.

Well, that's what I've read in December anyway. I doubt I'll be able to finish anything else in the next few days, but I'm going to try to write a review of each book I read in 2008. Well, I guess we'll see...