Weekend reading roundup (13 Feb 2017)

[nanila]

How did your weekend reading go? If you planned on anything specifically, did you read it?

Comments

[nou]

Since last report, I have read:

• Mr Campion and Others by Margery Allingham. This was a recommendation from sunflowerinrain after I asked for suggestions to get into the Albert Campion books. It’s a collection of short stories, which wasn’t exactly what I was after as reading matter, but it worked very well as an introduction. I have a couple of the novels on my to-read pile now.
• Galactic Empires edited by Neil Clarke. More short stories, but this time SF. This was... OK? The Ann Leckie and Greg Egan stories were both very much to my taste, and so of course I’d read them before. It was good to have a prompt to re-read them, though (for, I think, the third or fourth time in the case of Egan). The stories by John Barnes and Paul Berger were both new to me, and I enjoyed them though would be unlikely to re-read. The Neal Asher one was very Neal Asher, the Yoon Ha Lee one was very Yoon Ha Lee, and the Kristine Kathryn Rusch one was very Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The Robert Silverberg story was an excuse to make beautiful descriptions of alien landscapes (i.e. very Robert Silverberg). The one by Robert Charles Wilson started off so creepy (as in male-gaze creepy, not haunted-house creepy) that I didn’t read it. Steve Rasnik Tem’s was interesting enough for me to want to seek out more by the same author, though this particular story wasn’t one I’d read again. I liked the one by Naomi Novik, and Ruth Nestvold’s was interesting though I’d have liked to have had more acknowledgement that gender doesn’t have to be binary.
• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, recommended by nanila. I liked it a lot and have already bought the next few in the series.
• Volume 9 of The Comfortable Courtesan by Madame C- C-. I love this series and can’t wait for Volume 10.
• The Red Abbey Chronicles: Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff. I’m really surprised I liked this, because it’s Young Adult (YA) and I normally find YA annoyingly over-simplified. (I hadn’t actually realised it was YA when I bought it.) This was not over-simplified! It was a bit too short for my taste, though. I’ll probably give the next one in the series a go once it’s out in English.

[nanila]

That sounds like a great selection. And I'm so glad you enjoyed Rivers of London! :)

[nou]

Thanks again for the recommendation! I got distracted from the series by a massive novel set partly in Glasgow and partly in hell, but will be picking it up again soon :)