cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)
These are all the rest of the books I've read for the first time this year, leaving me with five re-reads and however many books in progress. I'm still a bit ambivalent about where to put graphic novels that aren't manga, but I'm reading so few of them at the moment that they're ending up here.

Edie Campbell, The fate of the artist. )

Ellen Wittlinger, Sandpiper. )

Hilary McKay, Indigo’s Star. )

Diana Wynne Jones, Enchanted Glass. )

Stephen King, Under the dome. )
cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (hare by durer)
I wanted to write about a book I loved, for a change, because it’s often easier to complain about things than try and convey how much you really enjoyed something. And then I found myself spoilt for choice, which is a nice position to be in – two re-reads and two new-to-me books that have really stood out. One of the re-reads (Pat Barker’s Regeneration) is for a course, and I will go on about it there, and one of the new-to-me will show up later as well as I hadn’t realised it was a sequel (Morris Gleitzman’s Then – Once, the first book, is still good, but not as good). Also, I am reading so many other things about war at the moment that I thought it would be nice to think about something else for a change. So I picked the other two, and went on (and on!) to discuss both of them in fairly thorough detail - I don't think it's possible to really spoil in Alice in Sunderland, but I'd suggest avoiding the first review if you haven't gotten around to reading Eight Days of Luke yet.

Eight Days of Luke, Diana Wynne Jones. )

Alice in Sunderland, Bryan Talbot. )

I can’t pick up this book again without getting dragged into it, and that’s true for Eight Days of Luke as well. With Eight Days of Luke there’s familiarity with narrative, and with Alice in Sunderland it’s more familiarity with place, but in both of them there’s that feeling of being able to completely trust the author; I don’t know, necessarily, where I’m going or what it all means, but I know they’ll get me there.
cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)
Except for the fact that it's too short.

Diana Wynne Jones, The Game. I've loved Diana Wynne Jones' work since I picked Eight Days of Luke off a library shelf more than twenty years ago (eek!). For the last ten years or so I haven't liked her books as much (actually, since she started doing adult books - I really didn't like A Sudden Wild Magic), but there was still The Lives of Christopher Chant in that time, and some of the stories, and even when she's not as good, she's still better than a lot of the alternatives. The Pinhoe Egg, though, was encouraging, and this is very good. )

Mostly back up to date. There's a bunch of manga (am unsure of correct collective noun!) and Justine Larbelestier's Magic's Child to go, plus my incisive comments on Dorothy Dunnett's Johnson series ("Wow.") after another 160 pages of Moroccan Traffic (retitled from one of my personal appalling title favourites, Send a Fax to the Kasbah).
cyphomandra: fractured brooding landscape (Default)
I 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...

The Thirteen Clocks and the Wonderful O, James Thurber. )

Three Wishes, by Liane Moriarty. )

The Pinhoe Egg, by Diana Wynne Jones. )

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.

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cyphomandra

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