(Wednesday) Reads - 21 October 2014

I've let this drop a little, in part because I felt like I was only reading sci-fi: and I'm reading so many things and taking so long to finish them, that my lists were getting monotonous.

But this week I've got two new genres (one of which I don't entirely know how to classify) in my "in the middle of": queer action-adventure/thriller/romance, and something vaguely girlsowny.

The Honor series by Radclyffe
This is not the Honor Harrington series by David Weber.  That one is military sci-fi and although I'm getting close to the point where there's going to be a marriage between three people, I'm not entirely sure that Weber can cope with queerness all that well.  (If I'm wrong, I apologise.)

This is the long (looong) running series starting with Above All, Honor starring Blair Powell, daughter of the US President, and Cameron Roberts, Secret Service agent.  In the last two weeks I've reread books two and three, and purchased and read books four and five and started book six.  I've also got book seven already, and am planning to buy the final book in the series as well as the First Responsders series, which contains a crossover in the third book.

So: my recent reads from this series are

• Honor Bound
• Love and Honor
• Honor Guards
• Honor Reclaimed
• Honor Under Siege - currently reading.

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith (Audio, read by Jenny Agutter)
For my trip down to Melbourne, I - not realising that the e-version of Dowager Empress Cixi by Jung Chang was only available as an e-Audio, not as an e-Book, I'll get into this later - borrowed the CD book of I Capture the Castle, mostly because it was read by Jenny Agutter, who I adore.

I've never previously gotten past the first chapter, and since I read A Brief History of Montmaray I've not entirely wanted to go back to it, simply because I adore Montmaray and am a little uncomfortable with just how similar it feels at the beginning to Castle.  But the name "Jenny Agutter" on the cover was enough to get that set of CDs in my hand.

I got through the first three CDs on the drive down.  I will admit that I'm not entirely sure when I'll get to listen to the rest, necessarily, but I do own the book (the film tie-in cover, and given that Henry Cavill is in the film, I'm pretty sure we'll be watching it fairly soon, as M is a massive fan of Cavill.  But I am really enjoying it, far more than I expected, even though The Starlight Barking is a dear and favourite book.  I love the way Smith writes, and I do love a lot of the characters already.

I know I have a few friends for whom this book is a favourite, and I'm looking forward to finishing it and being able to discuss.

A note: this book is not a historical, because it is set in the 1930s and published in 1949.

Read in September 2014

If you read over on the other blog, you'll know that the Project Life app has rather captured my imagination.

Also, I follow Megan of the Nerd Nest on Instagram, and I've really loved her monthly reads posts.  After a bit of chat with her, I came up with something I hope I'll now be doing monthly here (and possibly over at Chez Stutters as well): a PL Layout of the books read this month.

I think most of the books above have been mentioned in a post somewhere, except for Pearlie's Pet Rescue and Wagons West, because both of those are historicals and I plan to post about them separately soon - I hope.  

Sunday Reads - 5 October 2014

I'm still working my way through Kaleidoscope - it's finally on my Kobo, yay! - and I've also been working on Freedom Climbers, and have now finished everything but the Appendices and have marked the book as finished.

The rest of the week has been dystopias and sci-fi.

 On Thursday I finished reading Frozen, book 1 in the "Heart of Dread" series by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnson.  It worked so well, right up until the end, when it was high action, but conceptually a little disappointing.  I adored the drip-feed of world building, so very slow burn, just little bits and pieces that slowly put the world together.  But in all that world building, the drakon just wasn't there.  Sure the voice was there, but the idea seemed to me to come out of nowhere.  And so the last few chapters just didn't work the way I wanted them to.  I wanted to believe the buildup, and I just couldn't.  It was good, but I had such high expectations that had been built up through the book.

I loved Sean Williams' story in Kaleidoscope - "The Legend Trap" - and I was thrilled to find out that it was a short story from a universe that he's written in a LOT.  So I've started the first of Williams' "Twinmaker" series, Jump.  I seriously love the concept of d-mat and what Williams seems to be doing with it - at least in "The Legend Trap", and I assume it will be just as awesome in Jump.

I've also finally begun to read Gemma Malley's The Killables, although it almost broke me in the first few pages with the religious fundamentalist imagery.  This book may kill me.  I'm just warning you.

Changes to the blog

As you may have noticed, there's been a change in flavour around here. 

This has never really been much of a Library blog: the social media rules of my workplace (and the lack of interesting blog posts to write about such things) keep me from really digging into that the way I might have liked.  And I wanted to focus this blog a little more narrowly than the sort of scattergun approach it has had.

And so it is becoming a predominantly "history/ical" blog. 

Yep - an entirely made up term.  By which I mean that my focus is going to be on works of historical fiction and nonfiction history.  I doubt that I'll ever be reading the very latest releases when they're released: I've got a lengthy backlog of both Chadwicks and Gregorys, not to mention my "Reading the Morlands" or the fact that I'm working my way through most of what Jean Plaidy ever wrote.  I'm also hoping to start posting about historical TV adaptations like The Tudors or the bits of history in the Great British Sewing Bee (love those!  Also hoping to blog the rest of the show on Chez Stutters at some point soon.)

With the introduction of the Sunday Reads posts I've established a place to discuss non history/ical current reads - at the moment that seems to be predominantly sci-fi.

I will still post other things here: other topics, reviews of other types of books.  I'm not giving up on my obsession with dystopias any time soon!

But as it (now) says up the top - "Heidi Reads - mostly history/icals"