Sunday Status Update: January 5, 2019

Kat: Ugh, I’m still getting caught up after the holidays and getting ready for the spring 2020 semester, which starts tomorrow. Therefore, I read nothing this week. Well, no fiction, that is. I actually read a lot of academic journal articles about the effects of caffeine on the brain (all good!) and the effects of mothers’ drug abuse on their offspring (all bad!). Also several articles about neuroethics. I expect to be caught up and to have some time for fiction this week.

Bill: This week I finished Ken Liu’s newest collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, which didn’t match his earlier one but still had some wonderful pieces.  I also read a collection of poetry Secret History by David Barber and the quite interesting Maladies and Medicine: Exploring Health & Healing, 1540-1740 by Jennifer Evans and Sara Read. In video my son and I finished season two of Lost in Space, which we both quite enjoyed as writers seemed to have a stronger handle on characters this season. In my continued mission to introduce him to my favorite sci-fi/fantasy, we also watched 12 Monkeys, which I’m pleased to say he quite liked.  Currently I’m reading a collection of essays on Batman and ethics.

Kelly: Reader, I married him. After mumblety-mumble years, I finally made it official with the guy who got me more into comic books and understood why I needed a Lovecraftian kids’ book even though I don’t have kids. We each bring a dowry of many, many books, only some of which are redundant. So anyway, I haven’t gotten a lot of reading done, unless reading invoices counts, though I did recently start Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. The musical has obviously infected me, because anytime Chernow quotes Hamilton directly, I hear Lin-Manuel Miranda’s voice in my head.

Marion: I’m ¾ of the way through Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. The prose is beautiful, and, like one the characters, I have fallen in love with Kitchen, which is, well, a magical kitchen. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s I read Kat Howard’s An Unkindness of Magicians, and there should be a review posted soon. I also read John B. Kachuba’s Shapeshifters; a History. While I liked the survey-nature of the book,and Kachuba introduced me to some mythic creatures who were new to me, I found some of his conclusions to be unsupported, and some of the things he included as shapeshifting to be a bit of a stretch.

Tadiana: Last week my family drove from Utah to Denver to see the big Monet exhibit at the Denver Art Museum (highly recommended). My husband prefers to drive in iffy conditions so I got lots of reading time on the two days we traveled. I spent most of that time with Sherwood Smith’s latest Sartorias-deles fantasy novel, Time of Daughters I, set in Marlovan country about a century after the INDA quartet. It’s far more accessible and enjoyable (at least for me) than A Sword Named Truth, and I recommend it highly, especially to those who’ve read the INDA books. Now to get my hands on Part II… I also finished Martha Wells’ Network Effect, her upcoming MURDERBOT DIARIES novel, which was also great and will be a delight for Murderbot fans. And despite my pile of ARCs begging to be read, I threw responsibility to the winds and reread Ilona Andrews’ Iron and Magic, just for fun, and to confirm that the Andrews team can write far better books than their recent Sweep of the Blade, which felt flat in comparison to their better books.

Terry:  I closed out the year by reading four volumes of SAGA, a comic by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples my colleagues around here have raved about — and now I know why. I read a couple and  more novellas as well: The Twilight Pariah by Jeffrey Ford, which seemed to not so much end as just stop (so much so that I assumed my copy was defective and bought it again) and Time Was by Ian McDonald, which was a nice twisty time travel story. Now I’m reading A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson. I’m resolved to finish all the books lying around here with bookmarks in them, so I’m also back to Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End by Kevin Alexander. And today I’m going to the library!