Marion: Currently I’m reading Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest, the noir horror novel Silver Nitrate. She set it in the 1990s, with a woman sound editor MC, and is already mining the dark and creepy world of classic horror films, from the 1930s forward.
Bill: Not a lot of reading this week as I was busy finishing off a 9000-mile road trip. But I did finish The Bone Orchardby Sara A. Mueller, a work that despite some small issues was truly fascinating. I also read Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light , a strong collection of poetry by Joy Harjo, and The Earth: The Story of Life on our Planet Through 47 Incredible Organisms, by Elsa Panciroli, a clear and concisely informative run through the development of life in all its myriad forms
Sandy: Moi? I am currently reading another book from one of my favorite authors, Richard Matheson, this one his 1978 bestseller about life in the afterlife, entitled What Dreams May Come. It is a genuinely moving book that has really sucked me right in, and I look forward to sharing some thoughts on it with you all very shortly….
Tim: I went on a small trip this week, and listened to a few audiobooks along the way. First was Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (Sanderson’s books are always good for long car rides, partially because he has a way of restating the important points, so you don’t miss too much if you have to focus on the road for a bit). Sanderson is consistently entertaining, though I admit my favorite of the series (and indeed of the author’s ouevre) is still Words of Radiance. Next up was Robin McKinley‘s Spindle’s End, which had some lovely imagery but went a little slow for my taste (I admit I’ve never given much thought to what Sleeping Beauty might’ve gotten up to during her 15 years of waiting for the plot to resume, and I’m still not convinced it was necessary to find out). I ended up switching over to Prince Maesa by Guy Haley, which (perhaps due to being a warhammer tie-in) felt like a surprisingly nostalgic throwback to the heyday of Heroic Fantasy short fiction. The titular prince is rather too archetypal to be fashionable in current fantasy and clearly owes a lot to big names from previous eras (Elric in particular), but I’m a sucker for the classic fantasy style and am having a good time so far.
@Sandy, wasn’t the 1980s Robin Williams film based on this Matheson book?
COMMENT The film was from 1998, and was indeed based (very loosely) on Matheson’s book. I touch on that in my review. Now, if I can only find the time to type it up….
I’m just a few chapters into Rhiannon Grist’s short novel, The Queen of the High Fields. The High Fields of the title is a magical island in the Bristol Channel, that many tourists search for but few find. The narrator went their with a school classmate over a decade before the book’s start, and her friend stayed there as Queen and began using magic to change the land, eventually being joined by magically favored others who become her followers. But the narrator returned to the mainland and the modern world, and is only going back with two young men to see how different things are now. We’ll see how this turns out.
Also on the stack of library books is Daniel Abraham’s Blade of Dream, based on Bill’s recommendation. More new books will be coming out over the next week, so the stack will undoubtedly be getting bigger. And there are already three nonfiction books on there, so much reading is in store.
I think I could have done without the third novel in the Black Company omnibus, The Books of the South, since it takes place back in the north and doesn’t feature the Black Company. The culmination of the first two novels in a cliffhanger of sorts made that feel all the more unfortunate.