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Dec. 23rd, 2006 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI hadn't planned to disappear for a month, but in that time I have at least managed to produce my Yuletide story, which got way too long on me - I'm not sure what the final word count was, but at least 15 000. Simple calculations involving word ratio to time of writing make it clear to me that a novel is really not the absolutely massive writing project I keep making it into, and I should stop stuffing around and move on past the first chapter of my current one.
Anyway. Apart from about 20 picture books (shopping for various small friends, mainly, although I happily read picture books at other times) I've read/re-read a few others. Rosemary Sutcliffe's Arthurian legend one I want to save until I can go on about it, but here're a few others...
. Re-read. Gorgeous prose, and I'd forgotten how rhythmic the speech in it is (this is from memory, so probably dodgy) - "but not from love, or from affection. And not from hope, or recollection", spoken by one of the characters, and the drawings are brilliant. I was disappointed in Ella Minnow Pea when I read it, and an early encounter with this book is the probable reason.
Recommended by someone who knows the author, but it's a someone who cheerfully reads Dan Brown. Set in Australia, about three sisters (triplets, two identical) who go through the usual cycle of marriage, affairs, children etc. I liked the failed attempt to swap places to evade a drink-driving conviction, but apart from that all very predictable and tidy in its apparent life-like messiness.
I love her books, but there's been a "but" after that sentence since, I think, the early 90s, and books like A Sudden Wild Magic (may have gotten title slightly wrong) and Black Maria, both of which had major problems for me (over-explaining things and weird gender dynamics, mainly). This is better than many of her recent ones, if still not as good as her best (Eight Days of Luke, Power of Three, Archer's Goon, Witch Week and of course Fire and Hemlock, to name a few). It's a Chrestomanci book, about Cat - set after Magicians of Caprona, as far as I can work out, and it's about the interactions between the people at the castle and two of three magic-using families in the local villages. Annoyingly, Janet (who I like a lot in Charmed Life) fades into the background in this book, emerging only to become obsessed with a) horses and b) one of the castle staff, both futilely.
A bunch of others, but I've already had this crash on me once. Titles for later comment - Audrey, a New Girl (Joanna Lloyd), Darkland (Liz Williams), Starring Tracey Beaker (Jacqueline Wilson), the Rosemary Sutcliffe book, and The More the Merrier (Anne Fine), which is a suitably Christmassy note to end on.
Anyway. Apart from about 20 picture books (shopping for various small friends, mainly, although I happily read picture books at other times) I've read/re-read a few others. Rosemary Sutcliffe's Arthurian legend one I want to save until I can go on about it, but here're a few others...
. Re-read. Gorgeous prose, and I'd forgotten how rhythmic the speech in it is (this is from memory, so probably dodgy) - "but not from love, or from affection. And not from hope, or recollection", spoken by one of the characters, and the drawings are brilliant. I was disappointed in Ella Minnow Pea when I read it, and an early encounter with this book is the probable reason.
Recommended by someone who knows the author, but it's a someone who cheerfully reads Dan Brown. Set in Australia, about three sisters (triplets, two identical) who go through the usual cycle of marriage, affairs, children etc. I liked the failed attempt to swap places to evade a drink-driving conviction, but apart from that all very predictable and tidy in its apparent life-like messiness.
I love her books, but there's been a "but" after that sentence since, I think, the early 90s, and books like A Sudden Wild Magic (may have gotten title slightly wrong) and Black Maria, both of which had major problems for me (over-explaining things and weird gender dynamics, mainly). This is better than many of her recent ones, if still not as good as her best (Eight Days of Luke, Power of Three, Archer's Goon, Witch Week and of course Fire and Hemlock, to name a few). It's a Chrestomanci book, about Cat - set after Magicians of Caprona, as far as I can work out, and it's about the interactions between the people at the castle and two of three magic-using families in the local villages. Annoyingly, Janet (who I like a lot in Charmed Life) fades into the background in this book, emerging only to become obsessed with a) horses and b) one of the castle staff, both futilely.
A bunch of others, but I've already had this crash on me once. Titles for later comment - Audrey, a New Girl (Joanna Lloyd), Darkland (Liz Williams), Starring Tracey Beaker (Jacqueline Wilson), the Rosemary Sutcliffe book, and The More the Merrier (Anne Fine), which is a suitably Christmassy note to end on.
