Sunday Status Update: May 5, 2019

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone!

Bill: This week I read The Seventh Decimate and The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson, with book one sorely disappointing and book two a bit better; the informative if a bit flat The American Museum of Natural History and How it Got That Way by Colin Davey; and an entertaining history/memoir of the family road trip by Richard Ratay entitled appropriately enough Don’t Make Me Pull Over.  In audio The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years by Robert M. Hazen has picked up stylistically, with a great chapter on the formation of the moon and the Hadean Age of Earth. In video we’re all still lingering over the joy of Avengers: Endgame (trip two this week), and my son and I finally started Magicians Season Four, and he and I also watched the first two HUNGER GAMES films. I’ve also burned through the first two seasons of Shetland and may have to buy the rest

Jana: This week I conquered my backlogged to-be-reviewed pile, and as a reward for temporarily defeating the Procrastination Monster, went to an actual movie theatre to watch an actual movie: Captain Marvel. It was so much fun, and the appearances by Stan Lee and Kelly Sue DeConnick were a great nod to fans. I finished Charles Soule‘s The Oracle Year and Seanan McGuire‘s Middlegame (reviews forthcoming) and Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor‘s The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes Vol. 2, so I get to review both Vols. 1 and 2 before jumping into The Crying of Lot 37: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes Vol. 3 and Who’s a Good Boy?: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes Vol. 4. I watched Netflix’s LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS anthology, which is pretty good but has some representation issues that I hope will be addressed in future seasons. And since Janelle Monae’s “emotion picture” Dirty Computer was nominated for a Hugo Award, I’ll be re-watching that and reviewing it for Fantasy Literature this coming week. (When I saw the nomination announcement, it felt like glitterbombs exploded in my head.) It’s been a good week!

Kat: Busy week. All I managed to finish was Mira Grant‘s novella called Kingdom of Needle and Bone. I did not fully appreciate it. Terry and I will review it together sometime this week. Another hobby I have, that you may not be aware of, is attending local rock concerts. I love metal, heavy rock, and indie rock and I live in a big city with lots of shows. This weekend I’m at Welcome to Rockville which features about 50 bands including some big names like Skillet, Tom Morello, The Cult, In This Moment, The Struts, Papa Roach, Bring Me The Horizon, Flogging Molly, Chevelle, Evanescence, Korn, Shinedown, Judas Priest, Rob Zombie, Incubus and Tool. The weekend is exhausting!

Marion: I didn’t spend too much time reading this week. Much of my time was spent with copy-edits. While I am in awe of copy-editors and their amazing eye for detail, accepting/rejecting edits is trial by tedium. On the bright side, though, this means my Falstaff Books novella “Aluminum Leaves” is that much closer to being a real thing out in the world, not just a collection of words on my hard drive and in the cloud.

The reading front was not completely barren. I started a general-fiction book by Andrea Lawlor called Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. I picked this up primarily because it is not genre and it has a shape-shifter main character. I thought that would be really interesting, and it probably is, to lots of people. Sadly, I am not one of them. It’s so not my thing. I’m going to try to finish it though. All was not dark in  reading-land, though; I started the first MurderBot novella, “All Systems Red,” by Martha Wells. I’m loving it.

Terry: I finished up a few small things this week — The Doll’s Alphabet, a small book of short stories by Camilla Grudova that I disliked quite a bit; The Black God’s Drums by P. Djeli Clark, which I liked a fair bit, not surprising since it’s one of the Nebula nominated novellas this year; and The Dispatcher by John Scalzi, which was very entertaining. I also read The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, one of the novels nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, which will be awarded next weekend. I’ve returned to The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which I’ve been reading on and off for a good year now. The closer to the end I get, the better it is! I’ve also started The Outsider by Stephen King and Tower of Dawn by Sarah J. Maas, thus breaking my promise to myself to finish up the other six novels I’ve started before starting anything new. Naturally, these two new ones are grabbing me much more than anything else I’ve had pending for some time!

Tim: This week, I finished reading Bernard Cornwell‘s Excalibur, which was a solid and impactful conclusion to his WARLORD TRILOGY. Following that, I began James Clavell’s Shogun, which I’ve been reading ever since (it’s entertaining, but also a huuuuuge brick of a book). Next on the docket is Mark Lawrence‘s Holy Sister.