#356 - Books!

[reileen]

Not the list of books I read over 2009 (that'll come once I update my running list on my computer and figure out something meaningful to say), but the books I just ordered from Borders using a $50 gift card.



I'm so excited! I don't know where to start first. D: Maybe with Soulless, since I have a friend who just ordered it from her library to read based on being interested from the Amazon description.

Half-assed New Year's Resolution: Re-read older favorites with a more critical, analytical eye, so I can learn how to do this shit myself. Especially with plotting and pacing. *sigh*

Comments

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

How are the Lilith Saintcrow books? I've picked them up before and they look kind of intriguing, but I'm also a bit tired of first-person heroine paranormal/urban fantasy, which seems to often not be as awesome as one might hope.

[reileen.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I generally like Dante Valentine's character (at any rate I don't hate her, though I get the impression that some readers didn't like how much bitchier she got in later books), but mostly I'm interested in the wyrd hybrid urban fantasy/sci-fi (...urban science fantasy?) world that Saintcrow built for these books, and I also enjoy reading about how Danny does her work as a necromancer. I don't particularly care for Dante's romantic life, since I've gotten sick of UF books that have a strong romantic theme in them (at least right from the get-go; once I'm settled in the world and you've established some characters I'll be more willing to accept it), but I don't hate it either.

If you haven't already, you may want to check out the Marla Mason series (starting with Blood Engines) by T.A. Pratt. It's 3rd-person mostly from Marla's POV, but it also jumps around to other characters every now and again. I find these books refreshing in the UF scene for a number of reasons:

1) Lack of romance! Marla does get a romantic subplot in the second book, but...well, I don't want to spoil it for you, so let's just say that even though you know it's important to the story and to Marla's character, it doesn't take over the external plot.

2) No vampires or werewolves, as far as I can remember! (Though there are zombies in the third book.) You get to see a lot of different kinds of sorcerors.

3) Marla is unapologetically an urban/city witch - she really doesn't like being out in nature and feels better walking broken concrete streets. Being a person who's interested in witchcraft and all that sorts of things but doesn't feel a particular connection to nature (although I certainly enjoy it and wish the city had more protected spaces like that), this was really nice to see. She also doesn't whine a lot - she's not very contemplative or reflective. This can kind of render her character a bit shallow in the text, but I still find her entertaining and interesting to read about anyway.

Uhhhh TL;DR it's been a while since I read the first two Danny Valentine books, so I'm not sure what I can say about the stories themselves. If anything, I would read for the world, but YMMV on that.

(Also, hi! I found your one entry about Avatar when ithiliana linked it on LJ (or something like that), and I perused your other DW entries and thought you talked about potentially interesting things, so I friended you. Although now that I think about it I don't actually check my DW all that much, lol. Do you crosspost to LJ?)

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I've gotten sick of UF books that have a strong romantic theme in them (at least right from the get-go; once I'm settled in the world and you've established some characters I'll be more willing to accept it)

Yeah, me too.

Marla Mason = you had me at "third person"! Ooo.

(I do crosspost almost everything to LJ--not always book reviews, but I've been really bad about crossposting those to DW from LivingSocial, so eh. And there's some personal life stuff that's DW-only, but not terribly interesting. I think the main advantage of following me on DW would be ability to easily not read my boring locked entries about my thesis woes and whatnot. Also, there is no such thing as tl;dr in my world, especially when it comes to media.)