leseparatist

Update

2017-07-05T17:12:32Z

Hi, been a long time.

What have I been up to this year? A lot of reading, a lot of working, not too much travelling (but some, though mostly locally).

I also finally edited the draft of one of our novels (sic!). So now it's semi-ready to send to like, friends, people, maybe potentially publishers (eek).

If you're interested in reading and letting me know what you think, feel free to ask! I'd love feedback. The blurb is below:

It's an f/f contemporary romantic comedy. It's funny (I think), with some touching moments, families, friends and it was written with the goal of being a comfort read. (It was certainly a comfort write*, if that's a thing.)

It's also a sequel to another book (novella) of ours, but that novella is waiting for another round of editing, is m/f romance, and doesn't need to be read for this one to make sense (there's very, very little overlap).

Okay, I'm off to happy dance.

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No life, just books

2017-05-01T10:35:27Z

I should probably try to post more generally, but I've been promising myself to do a book post for a while now. "I'll do it at the end of the first quarter" - never happened. "I'll do it when I finish Vorkosigans" - see above. Well, it's May Day, let's give the labours of the mind and imagination the steering wheel and celebrate the first four months in books.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with my reading so far this year. It's been very satisfying and I'm at a much better place, numbers-wise, than I was this time last year. I'm also pretty happy with the quality of the books so far: no utter fails, and only a few middle-of-the-road books.

All of the books, all of the books below.

( Read more... )Currently reading: Tessa Dare's Any Duchess Will Do, Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great, and I've started Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary, but I'm only at the beginning so far.

I'm also lazily and slowly reading assorted Hugo & Nebula-nominees and winners starting from 1986 (using my birth year for a convenient cut-off point) and I might post about how that's going at some later point. There's no particular goal to it, like "get to 50%!", just using it as a source of ideas for books to read; still, it's fun crossing books off.

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dusts off blog

2017-04-06T20:20:43Z

1. A long time ago, I used to have a livejournal, but maybe it's time to migrate. This might be temporary, but having a record seems attractive.

2. March was exhausting at work, partly due to pressure, largely due to health issues (sinus infection: -1000/10, would not recommend).

3. I did get a lot of reading done: mostly Vorkosigan saga, and my impressions are on my goodreads, but the general thing is: what an enjoyable, engrossing world, where the more you read, the more you care, and with characters that develop and grow increasingly complex. I'm currently on Memory (volume 10, though it depends how you count), taking some short breaks for brief fiction and to read one Tessa Dare romance (first Spindle Cove; I'm told books 2, 4 and 5 are where it's at, so I'm excited for that).

I think I'd like to read something about an AI character / with a major AI character afterwards, but I don't know what.

I'm also fancasting older Matthew Rhys as Aral Vorkosigan. (Wife's idea.)

4. That, by the way, is because March was also time for re-watching The Americans. We're at the beginning of season 4 now, and while this is hardly as game-changing as the rewatch of Justified we induldged in in January (which meant finally learning what Dixie Mafia was), there is more time to pay attention to certain details. Mostly: that Americans apparently think 1980s USSR had soft white toilet paper in prisons and private homes. (Most everything associated with Poland seems to be pretty inaccurate, by the way. The Polish is either mispronounced or Russian, and historical facts are stretched really thin.)

5. Otherwise, I spent a lot of time watching late 1990s/early 2000s TV series Any Day Now for my dissertation. It's so frustrating: the show had such potential, and some of the flashbacks are truly inspired, but the contemporary legal plotlines are painfully dated, boring and badly written. And now that we're on season 4, they recast child actors and the new ones are... not so great. I admire Wife for watching a lot of it with me. Though she does seem to remember she left something in the other room a lot when it's on.

6. We went to the cinema twice this month: to see Hidden Figures, on whose subject I don't have much to add, and Spoor. We enjoyed both. I highly recommend seeing Spoor at the cinema: even if one doesn't appreciate the admittedly imperfect plot / characterisation (which took some liberties with amazing source material of Olga Tokarczuk's novel), the cinematography, and nature photography in particular, are hypnotic.

(What should one know about Poland before watching Agnieszka Holland's latest? We have the largest and oldest forests in the EU, and some of the worst environmental protections, and the hunting lobby is practically our NRA.)

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leseparatist

Update

No life, just books

*dusts off blog*

dusts off blog