Archive for the 'Reading Recommendations' Category

Reading Recommendation: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

August 23rd 2010 at 8:33 pm

I got ready to head out onto a cruise last week, and picked up Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Shades of Milk and Honey” to see if I thought I’d like to bring it along as cruise reading.  The next time I looked up I was almost 100 pages into the book.
It’s lovely.
I read it.  Toni also [...]

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Reading Recommendation: The City in the City by China Mieville

August 14th 2010 at 10:15 pm

First, this was a hard read.  I had to work for it.  Maybe that’s partly because I have been pretty stressed by family stuff, but it took me two full weeks to read this, about 12 days to get through the first half and then not much time to finish.
But I loved it.
I’ve read so [...]

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Reading Recommendation: Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

July 29th 2010 at 5:36 am

This is a rare case of “Saw the movie, bought the book,” and even rarer case of “both worked.”  For my usual readers, It’s NOT genre fiction, except to the extent the life of people in Ozark Mountains feels a planet away from Seattle.  I’m currently working on a strong female character in my novel [...]

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Movie Recommendation: Winter’s Bone

July 22nd 2010 at 5:08 am

Went out to see the movie Winter’s Bone in Queen Anne last night.  I highly recommend it for writers.  It has a strong female character, a society that is itself a character, knockout dialogue, real social dilemmas, and it never missed a beat.
We often think our stories need to be big – to be about [...]

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Reading Recommendation: WWW: Watch

July 8th 2010 at 6:23 am

I have been getting in more reading lately due to long drives (and audiobooks), the coming Hugo vote, and the fact that it’s  a bit easier to read than write at the moment.  Yes, I’m doing both, but in different proportions than usual.
Anyway, I loved Robert Sawyer’s WWW: Wake, which I recommended long before it [...]

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More Happiness with The Girl….

July 6th 2010 at 5:36 pm

I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest in audiobook on my way down here to Bend, Oregon (a seven hour drive). Its the third book in Stieg Larsson’s wonderful trilogy.   They are titled correctly — every one begins with the “The Girl Who…”  and that is exactly who the books are about.  The [...]

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Reading Recommendation: The Windup Girl

June 27th 2010 at 8:07 pm

I realize I’m late to the party for this award-winning book.  The Windup Girl is one of my favorite kind of books:  complex, plausible, a little scary, brilliantly written, and satisfying.
Paolo gets a lot of points from me on world-building.  I believed this place and time. Of particular interest, I believe that we have come [...]

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Reading Recommendation: The Specific Gravity of Grief, by Jay Lake

June 16th 2010 at 5:46 am

I’ll start out by quoting myself twice – the following blurb is on the back cover of the book:
“We tend to clothe cancer in pretty words, to hide its savage nature from our innermost frightened hearts.  In The Specific Gravity of Grief, Jay Lake used pretty words to clothe cancer in the rags of fear [...]

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Reading Recommendation: The Girl Who Played with Fire

June 8th 2010 at 5:50 am

Well, this is the second Stieg Larsson I’ve recommended.   I’ve already bought the third.  And again become sad there will be no more.  These are good, well-written thrillers.  They’re paced in a way that a reader stays interested and yet can breath out from time to time.  They are in an exotic place, and they [...]

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Reading Recommendation: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steig Larsson

May 11th 2010 at 5:30 am

I wander out of genre regularly to keep my head up and learn other tricks and tropes.  Writers rather need to do that, in my opinion, and I’m lucky enough to have a group of writers who explore multiple genres with me.  While I will actually read a text version to do my analysis, I [...]

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Publications

A recent short story of mine is “My Father’s Singularity,” which came out in ClarkesWorld Issue #45

The story is available to read online, to purchase for Kindle, or as a podcast.

Wings of Creation by Brenda Cooper

Reading the Wind cover image

“The sequel to The Silver Ship and the Sea (2007) and Reading the Wind (2008) is intense and increasingly complex. Cooper continues to limn interpersonal relationships in considerable depth, including this time those of some individual fliers. Happily, the ending suggests yet another episode to come.” - Booklist

Available now from Tor Books in hardcover, on the Kindle, and on ibooks.

Reading the Wind by Brenda Cooper

Reading the Wind cover image

Audio promo:

“Brenda Cooper’s newest novel is a feast of character and concept. She depicts the devastation of war on microcosmic and macrocosmic levels, and even more so, the driving motives of young men and women caught in deadly conflict. Cooper is a master explorer of the interaction of society and individuals. She probes the psychology of her genetically enhanced characters with both rare depth and fidelity to scientific plausibility. Moral conundrums drive the plot in this unforgettable narrative. Don’t miss this compelling work by a major new talent.”
- Mary A. Turzillo, An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl.

“Brenda Cooper tells a tale of a powerful brother and sister in a fight for their lives, offering insights along the way into the nature of courage and the hunger for community that burns in every human being. This is a lively book, full of colorful images and a memorable cast of human and animal characters, a worthy successor to The Silver Ship and the Sea.”
- Louise Marley

Available in July, 2008, from Tor Books.

The Silver Ship and the Sea by Brenda Cooper

Silver Ship and the Sea cover image

Audio promo:

“The first solo novel by Larry Niven’s Building Harlequin’s Moon (2005) coauthor portrays the thoroughly
convincing human colonial society on Fremont, a dangerous planet rife with vicious predators, frequent earthquakes,
and falling meteors….Distinctive characterizations, well-limned interrelationships, and the
vividly realized Fremont contribute to an exciting coming-of-age story with a strong message about the evils of prejudice.”
- Sally Estes, Copyright American Library Association.

Mass Market Paperback, July 2008.
Included by Booklist as a “Best Adult Book for Young Adults.”

Building Harlequin’s Moon by Brenda Cooper and Larry Niven

Building Harlequin's Moon cover image

“Fans of both hard and softer, psychological SF will welcome veteran Niven and newcome Cooper’s well-written tale of a 60,000 year layover in space, in which physical challenges of world building are matched by the social challenges of collaboration among disparate groups.” – Publisher’s Weekly

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