Over the last few months I've been reading my grandmother's favourite books, Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. Part of why it's taking so long is that they're dense, and part because they're frustrating or upsetting. They're frustrating for several reasons, primarily because the main character is better at everything than everyone, which is ( Read more... )

In recent years I've been working on knocking some classics off my to-be-read list, and finally got around to Dan Simmons's Hyperion. Overall I was underwhelmed, but what really got me was the entire chapter that's basically Neuromancer/Sprawl fanfic. I'm down with the Canterbury Tales in Space thing; I thought that was a neat concept. But Simmons ( Read more... )

My housemate just found a Jezebel article about a straight girl at Smith who wants to start a sorority because she feels marginalized. So that happened. (I don't like giving Jezebel the page clicks but you can find the link if you want.) In addition to all the obvious things wrong with this, Smith doesn't allow sororities. Like, not even the ( Read more... )

I recently finished Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue and one of the things I liked was that it's quite queer-friendly. As in, it contains queer characters, who are not demonized, and several are in happy long-term relationships. This novel improves on Graceling in that a (obvious to me) same-sex pairing in that book is openly acknowledged textually in ( Read more... )

I remember as a teenager coming across Tanya Huff's Quarters books. I found them refreshing in several aspects (a non-heteronormative world, with complete equality of gender and sexual orientation! But that is a post for another time), but one I particularly liked was that the first three books start off making the reader think they're about ( Read more... )

I so nearly got this done in time for it to still be 2012.

( 2012 in review )

In the past year or so I've followed links to a number of excellent blog posts from author Sarah Rees Brennan, so I thought I'd finally get to trying her books. Picked up Unspoken, hoping to love it, and actually did. It's possibly the only Gothic novel I've read that I liked, and only because she tackles head-on many of my problems with the genre ( Read more... )

I am sitting here filled with nervous energy, and I know I'm going to open the CNN results tracker at 7:00pm, even though that early it'll be meaningless. I am not far gone enough to look at exit polls, because they are a joke. I know as soon as real results start getting tallied I'm going to get phone calls, texts, and emails from a number of ( Read more... )

Among the more immortal phrases from my high school days, although I did not originate it.* Things have been rattling around my brain, none of them really related to each other.

Tomorrow morning I'm leeeeeeaving on a jet plane . . . for WorldCon in Chicago. I'll grit my teeth as Dance of Dragons wins the Hugo, and try not to boo. (I voted for a ( Read more... )

Unbeknownst to me until last night, a question I stopped asking two or three years ago recently and unexpectedly changed to a different answer.

So, uh, I guess I'm getting married.