What are you reading now?
Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier (hardcovers seem to go slowly)
Divine Endurance, Flowerdust Edition, by Gwyneth Jones (the current Kindle book), science fiction, in part about a person who seems to have been constructed rather than born in the usual way, set on a colony planet with lots of ecological problems. The culture has south Asian overtones, but I don't know enough of the culture to know whether they go beyond names.
What did you read recently?
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012, an anthology edited by Elizabeth Bear. What it says on the tin; the stories are all good but the overall tone is dark. This might be an example of one way not to produce an ebook, however: in lieu of a table of contents for the collection, each individual story has a note about not using DRM, then a ToC listing the title and maybe the about-the-author at the end, and then a bit about the author. I was kvetching to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mrissa about this, because sometimes I like to jump around in an anthology, looking for stories by authors I particularly like and/or am in the mood for. It also makes it harder to find things again, whether to reread in a few months or right now to tell you which I liked. For example, I think the one about the doctor and the syndicate hitwoman is the one by Brit Mandelo, but it would be more work to check than in either a paper book or a better-organized ebook.
Magic's Child, by Justine Larbalestier. This finishes the YA trilogy that started with Magic or Madness, and does so reasonably well. Larbalestier tweaks the world-building relative to the previous two books, in ways that fit with the narrator and most of the other characters having been ignorant of a lot of what's going on at the beginning of the story (in the narrator's case, because her mother was deliberately hiding things from her), and trying to put it together from experience and what they're told by adults, most if not all of whom are hiding things if not outright lying sometimes. (The story switches between first- and third-person, and I don't think the third-person narration is lying to the reader.)
What are you going to read next?
Possibly Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge, which I got from the library at the same time as Magic's Child. Or that may go back unread, just because it's in hardcover and I already have a current hardcover.
Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier (hardcovers seem to go slowly)
Divine Endurance, Flowerdust Edition, by Gwyneth Jones (the current Kindle book), science fiction, in part about a person who seems to have been constructed rather than born in the usual way, set on a colony planet with lots of ecological problems. The culture has south Asian overtones, but I don't know enough of the culture to know whether they go beyond names.
What did you read recently?
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012, an anthology edited by Elizabeth Bear. What it says on the tin; the stories are all good but the overall tone is dark. This might be an example of one way not to produce an ebook, however: in lieu of a table of contents for the collection, each individual story has a note about not using DRM, then a ToC listing the title and maybe the about-the-author at the end, and then a bit about the author. I was kvetching to
mrissa about this, because sometimes I like to jump around in an anthology, looking for stories by authors I particularly like and/or am in the mood for. It also makes it harder to find things again, whether to reread in a few months or right now to tell you which I liked. For example, I think the one about the doctor and the syndicate hitwoman is the one by Brit Mandelo, but it would be more work to check than in either a paper book or a better-organized ebook. Magic's Child, by Justine Larbalestier. This finishes the YA trilogy that started with Magic or Madness, and does so reasonably well. Larbalestier tweaks the world-building relative to the previous two books, in ways that fit with the narrator and most of the other characters having been ignorant of a lot of what's going on at the beginning of the story (in the narrator's case, because her mother was deliberately hiding things from her), and trying to put it together from experience and what they're told by adults, most if not all of whom are hiding things if not outright lying sometimes. (The story switches between first- and third-person, and I don't think the third-person narration is lying to the reader.)
What are you going to read next?
Possibly Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge, which I got from the library at the same time as Magic's Child. Or that may go back unread, just because it's in hardcover and I already have a current hardcover.
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