Cake

Sandra Newman, 2007

(December 2015)

  

Oh, wow. This shouldn’t have taken me so nearly as long to finish as it did. Nothing to do with the book, sadly, which deserved much more concentration than I was able to give it, but such is life.

  

Lumberjanes / Saga

Lumberjanes Volume 2: Friendship to the Max

Noelle Stevenson et al, 2015

Saga Volume 5

Fiona Staples et al, 2015

(November 2015)

Lumberjanes required me to get my eye in somewhat (expectations, etc), but now that I’m better acquainted with what I’m going to be getting I can honestly say that this is worth the hype. The second volume is even better than the first: heartful, intelligent, and just laugh-out-loud funny. I love this series.

Cake

Look! Cake! Also deadlines: massive stinking honking deadlines. Which is why it's been a bit quiet round here of late, and will remain so until the new year.

Hope you're all enjoying your holidays, wherever you are and however you celebrate them, and here's to great 2016.

Cyberpunk: Malaysia

Zen Cho (ed), 2015

(August 2015)

Reviewed over at Strange Horizons.

Bookmark Four

Year Four. Who’d a thunk it etc etc. Anyway, it’s Contrarily Early Annual Reading Round-Up Time!

Strange Weather in Tokyo

Hiromi Kawakami, 2001 [Allison Markin Powell, 2013]

(November 2015)

Look, I’m as hacked off as the next man by the tendency for every Japanese author translated into English to get compared to Haruki Murakami, as if he’s the only author from the 10^th most populous country in the world. Here, however, I think it might actually be justified.

All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy, 1993

(November 2015)

  

The obvious thing to do here would be to pastiche McCarthy's style, but other people have done it more convincingly and more amusingly, so rather than just strip out all the punctuation and occasionally write very long sentences I'll actually try to talk about the book. Or at least my reactions to it.

10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights

Ryu Mitsuse, 1973 [Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander, 2011]

(August 2015)

  

I invite you to marvel dumbfounded at the depth of my ignorance and the height of my hubris, as I attempt to mix it with people far, far smarter than me over at the Strange Horizons Book Club.

Sorcerer to the Crown

Zen Cho, 2015

(October 2015)

  

Delightful. As with her short stories, Cho has a rare and unerring ability to do charming without tripping over into twee, and witty without falling into smug.

Very Short Introductions

Postcolonialism

Robert J.C. Young, 2003

Game Theory

Ken Binmore, 2007

(October 2015)

A pairing prompted by absolutely no good reason whatsoever, but one which did at least serve to emphasise that I'm better with the big ideas than the tedious business of actually backing them up with numbers and evidence. But then we knew that already, didn't we?