Resorting to Murder

I've finally read my first book from the British Library Crime Classics! Considering that I own seven books in the collection already, it was definitely time to get reading. Luckily, I'm in a classic mystery mood all of a sudden and a short story mood to boot so I decided to start with Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards. The juxtapositions of holiday towns and trips with murders and disappearances was unique and the book kicks off with a Sherlock Holmes mystery so, really, how could it go wrong?! Edwards did a great job digging up some rare finds to pair with the better known authors. Out of 14 stories, I really enjoyed 11 of them and plan to search out some other works from a few of the lesser-knowns. And now that I've broken the BLCC seal, I'm sure I'll devour the books I have and spend way too much money on even more.

Mysteriously,
K

The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

Last weekend I was prompted by another blogger to finally pick up one of the many unread Haruki Murakami books I have here at home. The Elephant Vanishes is a collection of short stories and it had its strengths and weaknesses. I liked about half of the stories and was really weirded out when the first one seemed incredibly familiar. (How many cats named Noboru Watanabe can there be?) It turns out that it became the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle!

The main weakness of the collection was that too many of the stories were written about the same essential guy -- early thirties, smokes constantly, drinks almost as much, and likes to bed college students/twenty-somethings. The plots varied but this guy kept showing up and, well, I didn't find him very interesting. However, sometimes he still ended up in a story I enjoyed so who knows. The bottom line is that the mind of Murakami is sometimes predictable, sometimes special, but almost always worth a visit.

Shortly,
K

#MarchMagics / #DWJMarch Week 4 Roundup

The end of March already?! It came far too quickly for me. I managed two more books in the past week, making it six Pratchetts and six DWJs for me. I am (almost) satisfied with that result. ::wink::

My final Pratchett of the month was Interesting Times, the 5th Wizards book and my 20th Discworld novel! Yay! This is how the book begins ...

When I posted that picture, I had multiple conversations on both Instagram and Twitter about how we are all evidently cursed at the moment and how we are certainly hoping for dull days to return sooner than later. In this book, the interesting times are happening to our old friend Rincewind. He gets sent to the Counterweight Continent and has all sorts of unpleasant adventures (as he usually does), even running into some of his former acquaintances, Cohen the Barbarian and Twoflower.

I was kind of up and down while reading this one. There were some moments of squicky feelings since the book is set in a loosely-veiled Asia. Sometimes the parodies seemed to cross the line ever so slightly into unfavorable stereotypes and were not cool. But, other times, there were breakings of said stereotypes and quite a few funny moments and then I would get wholly back on board. I think, after this, I'll just head back to good old Ankh-Morpork for a while.

And finally, I finished off my Diana Wynne Jones reading with my third time through The Homeward Bounders. I swear that this novel is different every time I read it. This time I really thought a lot more about the various worlds (I think because I read the Magids books and the Chrestomanci short stories and even Everard's Ride during the month) and also about the nature of Them, the baddies of this book. I also decided that this could possibly be Z's entry book into DWJ so I'm going to try and get him to give it a chance this summer!

I had so much fun this year with the short stories and all. I even had a couple of unexpected moments of DWJ/Pratchett synchronicity -- first I saw in A Blink of the Screen that one of the short stories that Terry wrote was for a collection that Diana curated, and then, in Deep Secret, Diana had one of the characters at the fantasy convention wearing an "Oook!" shirt -- in reference to Pratchett's Librarian, of course! What a joy to think of these authors admiring each other.

Well, that's it for me. Please share your final thoughts and links over the next couple of days. Thank you to each of you who spread the word about the event as it approached and thank you again to those who read and shared something new or something beloved (or a healthy mix of both) over this lovely March Magics / DWJ March event. I hope to see you back here again next year!

On a personal note, today is the start of Z's spring break and then I'm having a houseguest (mom), starting my first pieced quilt (with mom), heading out on an anniversary weekend trip (15 yrs married/25 together ... eek!), and having a birthday (old) so I'm going to take a couple of weeks, possibly a month off from blogging. So, don't forget me while I'm gone and I will be back around the end of April/beginning of May!

With melancholy love,
K

#MarchMagics / #DWJMarch Week 3 Roundup

We're nearly three-quarters of the way through March Magics / DWJ March, I have read nothing else but stories and novels by these two authors, and I could honestly keep going through the month of April.

First up: Terry Pratchett's A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction, where all but one story was new to me. I didn't dislike a single one of the 33 pieces in this book. The worst I can say is that some of them just weren't subject matters that I cared that much about -- like football rosters and British politics. I wouldn't mind skipping a couple of those on reread. But, of the rest, I enjoyed the diversity of topics, the humor, the tie-ins to classic literature, and yes, Granny Weatherwax. My favorite was "FTB", where a computer gets a visit from a down-at-the-mouth Father Christmas. It was the sweetest story and, if I can remember, I'll revisit it in December!

Then I had a truly enjoyable reread of Mixed Magics, four shorts set in the Chrestomanci world. His appearances in them range from not at all to fairly major character but the stories all have that sense of omnipresence that DWJ wrote so well into all of the Chrestomanci tales. I barely remembered any of the plots from the last time I read this book so it was almost like reading them all again for the first time.
Also, I want to buy the version with this cover -- not because I especially dislike the cover on mine but because my copy is crunchy. It crackles with each turned page because it was bound badly. I'm hoping a newer version will be better!

Pyramids is actually the first book I finished this week. It's part of a little two-book Discworld side-arc and I really liked it! It explored ancient religions, family dynamics, and advanced mathematics (as calculated by camels) and was a fun "now-for-something-completely-different" kind of book. It would definitely work as a standalone.

Finally, a reread of Deep Secret kept me up far too late last night and I have been suffering from sore eyeballs all day long! I don't know why I read the Magid books out of order this time but it just felt right and it totally worked. I liked seeing Nick's beginning after already knowing how he would turn out. Maree was less annoying this time than the last (not sure why) but the romance seemed even more improbable. I do wish there had ended up being more than two books in this series! ::small sob::

Well, I'm out of short stories from both authors (except for that elusive DWJ, "The True State of Affairs", and the Pratchett Christmas collection) so I guess I will just be reading novels for the next week. I have a couple more Discworld books out from the library and I'm planning to reread Homeward Bounders. After that, who knows?!

What did you read this week? What are you going to try and get to before the end of the month? Leave thoughts or links below!

Shifting back to long tales,

K

#MarchMagics / #DWJMarch Week 2 Roundup

It's the end of the second week of our Diana Wynne Jones / Terry Pratchett celebration and, for me, it was another great week of short story reads.

I spent the first part of the week reading The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories, the second volume of short stories for children that Pratchett wrote in his younger years -- from 1966-1973. This was another joyful collection, full of humor and friendship and, in this one, the wild west of England -- Wales. And, while every story in Dragons at Crumbling Castle was equally fun, this book actually had a couple of stories that stood out and that I would call favorites.

"The Truly Terrible Toothache" is hilarious, in that a librarian accidentally brings an Elizabethan magician to the present day and he starts changing the town and the people into what he remembers. The librarian fights his hardest to not let his language change so that he won't forget he's a modern man. It has the funniest dialogue and a cute twist.

"The Blackbury Park Statues" was so incredibly sweet. The statues in a park are alive and, when an older woman who has been coming to the park her whole life to feed the ducks stops coming, they miss her and go on a quest to find out what's wrong.

To be honest, I think this collection is actually stronger than the first. That isn't what I was expecting at all. What a pleasant surprise! I now have to find out if the holiday collection will be published in the US or if I need to make a little Foyle's order.

Then I reread Unexpected Magic and was transported again into some favorite DWJ worlds. The thing with this collection is that some of the stories are more for adults while others are okay for older middle grade/YA so it's a little harder to get into a reading groove. But, if you stick with it, you will be rewarded with some amazing stories (and one stellar "novella" which is really long enough to be a novel).

"The Girl Jones" is a (likely embellished) autobiographical tale about the day 9 year old Diana gets put in charge of a dozen or so little siblings of other kids in her village. I think about it all the time actually because it's just such a perfect portrait of someone who thinks differently enough that she was destined to become a storymaker.

"Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" seems to be set in the sequential worlds of Chrestomanci or the parallel ones of the Magids and it is far and away my favorite DWJ short. I would have loved to have seen how Siglin spent the next few years and to be able to explore more of the worlds.

This book does have some strange science fiction stories (which I don't think are DWJ's strength) and some creepy tales that are basically horror that aren't quite to my tastes. But there are enough gems (including the 230-page Everard's Ride) to make this a volume well worth visiting and revisiting. Now that I've read it all of the way through twice, I think I'll just start reading individual stories when I'm in the mood!

So, what did you read this week? Leave thoughts or links below!

Keeping the party going,

K

#MarchMagics / #DWJMarch Week 1 Roundup

Oh, this first week of MarchMagics / DWJMarch was heaven. I read four books, two collections of shorts, two novels.

First up was Dragons at Crumbling Castle, a collection from 2014 of stories that Terry Pratchett wrote between 1965 and 1973. From the introduction,

"... read the stories that I wrote as a teenager, mostly as they were first printed, although the grown-up me has tinkered just a little with a few fine details--the odd tweak here, a pinch there, and a little note at the bottom where needed, and all because the younger me wasn't as clever back then as he turned out to be."

These are stories for children but so lighthearted and funny that I loved them all. I loved the punny-ness of the title story. I loved revisiting the Carpet People. I loved the tortoise and the caveman inventor and the hapless Santa. Most of all, I loved the break from everything serious and bleak. This was a joy to read.

And, as much as Pratchett knows about creating lovable characters, DWJ is a master at the most loathsome, horrid creatures ever -- six different ones made their appearances in the three stories of Stopping for a Spell. The stories are each named after these awful characters (the "Chair" Person, Angus Flint, and the Four Grannies) and their awfulness is certainly the basis of each tale. The fact that she could provoke such intense, visceral reactions from adults reading short stories for children is proof that Diana was a bonafide genius.

Besides this horrible cover that I had to explain to Z had hardly anything to do with the story, Eric was another fun Rincewind/Discworld adventure. It won't work as a starting book for anyone just getting into this universe but, once you get to it, literature fans will have a wonderful time with some of the references. I was sad that it was only 197 pages long. Luckily, it left me a lot of time in the week for this doorstop ...

This was my second read of The Merlin Conspiracy (558 pages) and I loved it oh so much more this time through! There are two narratives, those of Nick and Roddy, weaving together through most of the book and then they join at the end and I wavered between each one as a favorite and ended up deciding that I had to love them both equally. The basic story is one of parallel worlds, with Nick in one and Roddy in another and how their lives eventually intersect. The stakes are high and there are some seemingly bad characters who turn out to be good and horrid ones who turn out to be even worse than you originally think. There is a lot of magic of all different sorts and the creatures are especially fun -- even the goat. I would definitely call this an all-ages book too. It has layers. Many, many layers.

So, what did you read this first week? Leave thoughts or links below!

(I know some people have trouble commenting on Blogger sites so it's okay to just leave a comment on anyone else's post too and I will find you.)

Loathing and loving,

K

A Stack of Eight

As the holidays approach and I get closer to having houseguests, I keep looking at all of the things that need to be tidied up and my stack of unreviewed books taunts me from the coffee table. Five of these are review copies too (as I've been trying to pare down yet another stack in another room) so I NEED to tell you about them. I don't know if I'll get to full reviews but I want to at least give these all a mention so here goes --

Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore
I actually finished this story (of a man nearing the end of his reincarnation limit) at the beginning of November but could never figure out just what to say about it. There were things I liked about it and a couple of things that I didn't but it had me thinking for weeks about reincarnation and death and many other things. My spreadsheet note says "all over the place but mostly in a good way".

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
This was more of a character development book than a plot book and I enjoyed meandering through it. There was also a feeling of sadness about the whole story. The main character was incredibly damaged and that followed her everywhere.

Supernova by C.A. Higgins
This is the second in a trilogy and it was ridiculously dark and, quite honestly, painful to read but it inspired a lot of thought about rebels and revolutions and the cost of bringing down an empire. I definitely want to finish the trilogy but I'll need a bit of a break before I dive back into the darkness.

Whistling in the Dark by Shirley Hughes
I adored this story of children in Liverpool during the Blitz. Hughes was a young woman during WWII and her experiences definitely come through and give this story depth and authenticity.

Yesternight by Cat Winters
This one was weird. It was atmospheric and bizarre and I'm not sure I liked the ending.

Good Evening, Mrs. Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes
These WWII homefront pieces that were originally published in The New Yorker were almost all from points of view that I had never read/heard before. Some of them were rather depressing, others inspiring. Again, it was educational and entertaining to read a different point of view that usual.

Ocean of Secrets, Vol. 1 by Sophie-chan
This is Sophie-chan's first manga and she says she has been working on the story for years. It is a good twist on the secret-princess story. The second volume comes out in a couple of months and I think this will be a fun one to follow.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
And this one was a bit hard to get into for some reason. By the end I enjoyed it but I think that there are other better books in the Death series. However, there were also a few things in it that I loved -- like the scenes with the wizards. They were especially funny this time.

Well, now I get to put all of these books away and make room for presents. Yay! If there's one you want to know more about, let me know in the comments and I'll write a real post in the new year.

Tidying up,
K

#RIPXII Wrap-Up

How is it the end of October already?! Luckily I got my fill of RIP reads over the past two months with 25 perilous reads, 17 of them rereads. Yay!

I loved my massive Agatha Christie binge. I had great fun with audiobooks from Carlos Ruiz Zafón and John Connolly. And I finished the event with a collection of ghost stories--Ghostly--collected by Audrey Niffenegger. With just two duds (I guess I am not really a fan of some modern ghost stories), this was a great collection.

So, I would stop the RIP reads now except that my hold on the audiobook of The Screaming Staircase just came in so I'm gonna need a few more days on this challenge ... ::wink::

What was your favorite read this season (perilous or not)?

Reminder: Witch Week is starting over at Emerald City Book Review today ...

Until we meet again ... in a dark alley, under a full moon,

K

The Company, In Short Form

Black Projects, White Knights is a collection of short stories set in Kage Baker's The Company alternate history series. The fifteen stories revisit some familiar characters like Mendoza, Joseph, and Kalugin and I enjoyed those but my favorite were the four stories featuring Alec, the mysterious child who is possibly genetically-modified, possibly a cyborg, but certainly a bright and unique boy. My favorite was The Dust Enclosed Here which happens to be available online. If you want to read a fun story about a technologically advanced kid who meets a holographic William Shakespeare and liberates him, then this is your lucky day!

I'm starting to get sad that I'm about halfway through the Company books already. Luckily it should take me some time to get through the remaining ones as they are getting very hard to track down! I have the next one (The Life of the World to Come) and a standalone (The Empress of Mars) but haven't found used copies of any others. Now I'm in the mood to scour my local used bookstores yet again ...

Enjoying the short but sweet tales,
K

A Pair of Shorts: Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link

I'm way behind on reviews so
a) since I bought these books together on the same day (I had to get my signed Gaiman!)
b) they're both short story collections
and
c) the two authors are at least friendly (I'm not sure if they're officially friends or not but I have a feeling they are),
I'm going to let them share one post!

First, I read Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. Now that I am usually pretty current with all of Neil's various undertakings, I had read a few of these stories in their primary works/collections. Still it was nice to revisit those and to also read some new poems and stories.

I choose different ways to record short stories in my Official Short Story Recording Notebook and, for this one, I did ratings of 1-5 with 5 being best. Of the 36 pieces (breaking A Calendar of Tales into each month), I rated 30 of them as a 4 or a 5. Obviously this collection really worked for me, from the awesome "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" (which made me cry when I first read it in Shadow Show and Neil was not sorry) to "The Truth Is A Cave in the Black Mountains" (which confused me a bit the first time in Stories, clicked when I read the illustrated version, and finally became a favorite this time through), to the brilliant Holmes story "The Case of Death and Honey", and the exceptionally dark "Black Dog", featuring Shadow from American Gods.

I truly think this is a collection that has something for every reader. There will also be lots of stories that will make many readers uncomfortable but it seems that that is partially what Gaiman set out to do with a title like Trigger Warning and stories with "images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane world into a place much more dark and less welcoming."

I had mixed results with the first collection of stories I read by Kelly Link (her YA-focused Pretty Monsters which I really wish now I hadn't given away!) but I was still looking forward to Get in Trouble. This collection only has nine stories but they were great. I only was unsatisfied with one of them ("I Can See Right Through You"), mostly because I didn't like the characters or care about their dramas. I did mention a fantastic character name on Twitter (Bunnatine!) and Link responded that she got the name from this fabulous lady. And, probably not coincidentally, one of the stories from this collection was also in Shadow Show ("Two Houses") and I enjoyed it even more on this second read.

My biggest (still little) complaint with Pretty Monsters was that the stories were so short that I was left wanting more of the tiny worlds she had created. I didn't feel that at all this time. It was a very satisfying read and Link will be on my list of authors to follow going forward!

Reading short shorts,
K

Sci-Fi Experience: 12 Doctors, 12 Stories

Remember how I said I was only going to work through my big time-travel anthology for The 2015 Sci-Fi Experience? Well, that was before I got this for Christmas --

Doctor Who: 12 Doctors, 12 Stories is a gorgeous set of stories from lovely authors who have created a new story for each of the twelve doctors (obviously ignoring the War Doctor). There's a nice one-volume set (shown below) but I really wanted the box set that has each story in its own book with the doctor represented on the cover (and a matching postcard for each one). This actually began as e-books of 11 Doctors, 11 Stories and then a compilation paperback, but Puffin decided to reissue it all after Peter Capaldi joined the gang and they added a story for him too.

As you can see, the author list for this project is amazing. There honestly wasn't a dud story in the bunch. I'm one of the fans who joined at the reboot but, even though I don't know some of the older Doctors very well, I still really enjoyed the stories featuring them. I'm not even sure I could pick a favorite story because they were all so wonderful. I highly recommend this collection for any Doctor Who fan or even for any reader wanting to get a taste of what the Doctor is like.

Waiting to become the next companion,

K

New Releases: Penguin Christmas

If you're still looking for a stocking stuffer or two (or five), you can't go wrong with the new Penguin Christmas Classics series, featuring

A Merry Christmas & Other Christmas Stories by Louisa May Alcott

The Nutcracker by E.T.A. Hoffmann

The Night Before Christmas by Nikolai Gogol

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Christmas At Thompson Hall & Other Christmas Stories by Anthony Trollope

They have beautiful foil-stamped covers ...

and lovely inner artwork as well, all in petite books that will fit in a purse or jacket pocket. I read the Alcott stories last week and am rereading A Christmas Carol tonight. I'll read the others during the coming week and I know that they will set the perfect mood for a lovely Christmas Day.

Seasons readings,
K

Short Story Summer: Update Two

I managed to fit in two more books of short stories this summer, bringing my total to four books and dozens of stories.

I have read Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things more than once but hadn't yet read Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. This book of stories and poetry covered a wide variety of styles and themes but the only thing that didn't vary was the quality of the writing. (No duh, right? It's Neil.) There are a few stories in this collection that I'm sure I'll revisit regularly.

I had started this collection, Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories by Diana Wynne Jones, a few times but hadn't progressed past The Plague of Peacocks. This time through, I skipped a couple of stories that I had just read in another collection, reread a couple of favorites (The Girl Jones, What the Cat Told Me and Dragon Reserve, Home Eight) and took my first trip down Everard's Ride. I adored these stories (and one novella) so much that I can't even find words to explain. My journal has little hearts next to all of the story names. I even think that Jenny's Law (DWJ is always better on reread) is going to be proven wrong for once because there's no way that I could love Everard's Ride more. I already love it the most possible. And why did Dragon Reserve, Home Eight never become a full novel or series?!

This was a really fun project and I cleared four books off of the TBR. Yay! I deem this Short Story Summer a success.

Briefly,
K

Short Story Summer: Update One

Apologies for the brief absence. We had something like fourteen 80 degree plus days in a row (that's hot for Seattle since we don't have air conditioning so whatever temperature it is outside is what temperature it is inside) and I didn't feel much like having a hot laptop anywhere near me! Now that it has cooled back down and a bit of rain is headed our way, I feel like doing a bit of catch-up blogging.

I am making progress on my short story summer, having read two anthologies so far --

Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is a collection of stories set in Victorian or near-Victorian times and exploring various forms of magic. There were a bunch of well-known authors with stories in here -- Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire, Catherynne M. Valente, Caroline Stevermer and more. Of the eighteen stories, I really enjoyed about a third of them. Two of my favorites were "Smithfield" by James P. Blaylock (ghostly photography!) and "Phosphorus" by Veronica Schanoes (historical fiction with a bit of voodoo). And the very best story, in my opinion, was "The Vital Importance of the Superficial" by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer, written as a series of letters between two young people falling in love and dealing with really fun magic. Overall, I found this collection to be hit or miss but it has inspired me to look for the novels of a few of these authors.

I've read a couple of Mike Ashley's Mammoth anthologies and really enjoyed them. He's quite talented at collecting a cohesive set of stories, some of them quite obscure. This one was The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits and I thought ten of the twenty three stories were great fun. The others dealt with boxers and mobsters, things I'm really not interested in. I was hoping for more Bright Young Things but that's okay. It was fun to immerse myself in another time and to meet all sorts of crazy characters, even the ones I found distasteful. I've jotted down a couple of authors to investigate in the future and I look forward to my next Mammoth book.

I've been reading some novels recently but I'm going to give a couple more anthologies a go before the end of the summer.

Briefly,
K

New Release: The Best of Connie Willis

The book that motivated my Short Story Summer project was the brilliant The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories. It's a 450+ page book with only 10 stories and a couple of speeches. But it is a collection of some of the best science-fiction out there and each story is followed by an Afterword that gives us insight into why Willis chose to write them. The common factor? She wrote each of them out of love for the subjects, love for people, love for words.

My favorite story was Fire Watch, a time travel story from my favorite alternate history series (that of Blackout and All Clear) that I had been waiting a while to read ... until I read The Winds of Marble Arch and my mind was blown. It's the type of story that you can't really describe except to say that it is a complete fantasy that is also entirely believable. This will be a collection that I return to regularly.

Above and beyond,
K

Tales of a Feather

The Emperor's Nightingale and Other Feathery Tales is a collection of avian poetry and stories, gathered and illustrated by Jane Ray. It's a gorgeously bright and (mostly) happy collection of morals and whimsy, from sources ranging from the Brothers Grimm to the Bible. While, of course, she must leave poetry as is, Ray retells the stories and fables at a clear and easy-reading elementary school level. It seems a bit strange to begin with a tragic tale (The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde) but she then moves through such a variety of emotions and time periods and experiences and locations that it demonstrates just how deeply birds are integrated into the stories and myths of all cultures, both in moments joyous and tragic. Birds can be friends, former lovers, saviors and fools. They are creatures of such variety that they lend themselves well as stand-ins for ourselves in almost every situation from the commonplace to the divine.

He was warm and comfortable, nestled among soft feathers and lulled to sleep by the hushing sound of the great creature's wings as they soared among the stars. -- The Firebird

It appears from the introduction that Ray intends to have other themed collections and I think these, starting with this one, would make beautiful library and gift books worthy of any library.

From wing to tale,
K

Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

All The Books I Haven't Reviewed Yet This Year

My friends, I have not been the best blogger this year. I started out well but my productivity dropped off when real life stepped up with a few stresses and challenges. Consequently, I've ended up with a nice stack of books that haven't been reviewed. I want to at least mention the books because many of them are fantastic. I also want to put this stack of books away and start fresh in the new year. So bear with me as I take you on a whirlwind tour of a dozen or so books!

(Apologies for the poor quality pictures. I was in a hurry to get this post going. The notebook on the left that is propping up all of the books is my short story journal.)

First up are the children's books, three of which Z and I read together at bedtime --

Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce was a super fantastic book about a twelve-year-old boy, Liam, who pretends he's an adult (he looks old for his age) and ends up lost in space with four other children. This book is his attempt to explain how he got there. Z and I both loved this book. It's very British and also very engaging.

Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell (in the UK), was hilarious and also very British since I ordered a beautiful slipcased edition (signed by both author and illustrator) from Foyle's Bookstore and had it shipped over the pond! Though the book was a little young for Z, he didn't mind one bit. Personally, I loved how Riddell made the dad look like Neil himself.

The Templeton Twins Have an Idea by Ellis Weiner, illustrated by Jeremy Holmes, was a fun enough read but it never quite grabbed Z's interest. There is a saucy narrator that just seemed to annoy him though I'm sure other kids would find that voice hilarious. I loved how the kids each used their own individual talents to their advantage.

A Great and Complicated Adventure by Toon Tellegen, illustrated by Jessica Ahlberg and translated by Martin Cleaver, is a book of very short bedtime tales that were originally published in Dutch. I read them quickly on my own one afternoon and ended up perplexed but amused. The stories are quite strange and yet I had one or two kids come immediately to mind who would probably enjoy them immensely.

Next is a non-fiction read --

I finally finished Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones, which I began during DWJ March. I savored this book all year long and learned so much, both about DWJ and about storytelling. And, of course, a highlight of my year was having the foreword signed by Neil Gaiman.

I have two books of short stories on the stack --

Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, edited by Jonathan Strahan is a wonderful collection of witch stories. I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity and quality. There was only one story I didn't enjoy. The ones I loved most were from Diana Peterfreund, Garth Nix, Patricia A. McKillip, Tim Pratt, Isobelle Carmody, Jim Butcher and Peter S. Beagle. Close on their heels were tales by Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Ellen Kushner, Jane Yolen and Margo Lanagan. As you can see from the names, this is a star-studded collection!

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa was a read-together with Natalie but she also had real life get in the way and so we never got the chance to write about these strange and definitely dark tales. The word "disturbing" pops up more than once in the blurbs on the back of the book and it's a fantastic descriptor. I also used the word "creepy" in my notes. The stories begin as separate entities but then start weaving together in big and small ways. I found my biggest confusion arose from the question of gender in many of the stories. There weren't enough clues and many times I was reading the story from the wrong gender perspective until sometime near the end when it was revealed clearly. It was very disorienting and I'm not sure if that was purposeful on Ogawa's part or if it was a consequence of translation.

Then we have the adult fiction --

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is another of her time travel "series" (in quotes because they really all are perfect stand-alone books with only brief reference to the other adventures and some character sharing). This was a trip back to the Middle Ages and it was amazing but long. It's my least favorite of the time travel novels but probably only because the others are set in times that I know more about.

The Counterfeit Guest by Rose Melikan is also a series book but would work well as a stand-alone. It's a fun adventure/mystery with a strong female lead and a wee bit of romance. If you want to start at the beginning, the first book is The Blackstone Key.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens is only half of a story and though I thoroughly enjoyed it, I felt out of sorts for days after finishing it. I finally realized that it was because I was annoyed at not being able to continue with the story! I think that Dickens wrote some of his most complex characters for this novel and his pacing was perfect. It is a tragedy that he never finished writing the story.

Bellman and Black by Diane Setterfield is one I purposefully avoided reviewing. I just don't know what to say about it. It was okay but not great or memorable in the way that her first novel was.

And finally a few series books --

The Grey King and Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper were the last two books in the Dark is Rising Sequence. The Grey King was amazing and made me want to travel to Wales immediately. Silver on the Tree suffered a bit from my timing in picking it up, being the book that I read over the Christmas holiday. I was busy and it took longer than it should have and so I kept losing track of the story. Still, I think this was an amazingly deep and complex series and I truly hope that Z enjoys it in the coming years.

Seventy-Seven Clocks by Christopher Fowler is the third Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery though these are books that could be read on their own as they skip around in time. This one takes place in the middle of Arthur Bryant and John May's careers -- 1970's London. It was a crazy roller-coaster story of murders and phobias and I am definitely looking forward to picking up the next book.

Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures by Walter Moers is the second Zamonia book and I put off reading it for a long time because Rumo was not a very exciting character in the first book. That was a mistake because this book was fantastic. I don't even know how to begin to explain this book or series but if you are looking for something completely different, this is it. If you don't enjoy the absurd or fantastic, then don't read it.

If you're still reading, thank you,
K

RIP Read 1: The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories

I didn't mean to go missing for two weeks from the blog. I guess back to school tasks in the school library, getting back to the gym regularly and taking two weeks to read this book all conspired to keep me away. But here I am, with my first RIP VIII book done. Hooray!

The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories is a collection edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert. It has 35 stories, written between 1852 and 1908. As they are presented in chronological order, it was quite interesting to see the progression of the ghost story through time, though the basic elements of the stories really did stay the same.

Some of the best stories in the collection were --

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse's Story
J.Y. Akerman, The Miniature
Tom Hood, The Shadow of a Shade
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, At Chrighton Abbey
Thomas Street Millington, No Living Voice
Wilkie Collins, Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman
Anonymous, The Story of Clifford House
Amelia B. Edwards, Was It an Illusion?
Charlotte Riddell, The Open Door
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Captain of the 'Pole-Star'
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Body-Snatcher
Mary Louisa Molesworth, The Story of the Rippling Train
B.M. Croker, To Let
E. Nesbit, John Charrington's Wedding
Jerome K. Jerome, The Man of Science
Algernon Blackwood, The Kit-bag

If you read Victorian fiction, you probably recognize a lot of the names on that list (and there were other stories by Dickens and Kipling and more). It was interesting to see that ghost stories were standard fare for many authors of the time. The story that I found most haunting was the last in the book, the one by Algernon Blackwood. It made me seriously uncomfortable while I was reading it and it was just a great ghost story, with a fully explained but nonetheless frightening scenario. I've done you a favor and found an online copy of The Kit-bag. If you need just one creepy story to get you in the mood for the season, this might do the trick. Enjoy!

Jumping at every little sound,
K

DWJ March: Review of Spellbound

It turns out that the first book I finished for Diana Wynne Jones Month wasn't even written by her except for one short story at the end. It was Spellbound, a selection of fantasy tales "chosen by Diana" that I picked up at Half Price Books a couple of years ago simply because her name was on it. With eighteen short stories or excerpts of books from Rudyard Kipling, Eva Ibbotson, L. Frank Baum, E. Nesbit, Tove Janssen, Patricia C. Wrede, Joan Aiken and more, these stories were apparently chosen by Diana as the best of fantasy (in her opinion, of course). Unfortunately, there is no foreword or afterword talking about why she chose these particular stories, although one gets the gist of it after a while. As you read, you start seeing echoes of Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky and The Ogre Downstairs and Witch's Business and so many more of her stories and you realize that Diana's broad selection of fantasy tales were all written because they were subjects and ideas that she loved. Diana's story in this collection, "What the Cat Told Me" seems to bear the seeds of Earwig and the Witch and I loved it.

I didn't think there was a dud in the bunch (well, maybe that one based on Spenser's The Faerie Queene) except for the poor production quality of the book. It has a gorgeous cover and nice paper and, well, extra sentences and also some missing ones. For some reason, in more than one place in the book, one or two sentences are repeated. It's confusing the first time it happens and annoying the next few times. As for the missing paragraph or possibly page, that was really unfortunate. If this book had better editing and an informative foreword, I would recommend it unreservedly. My TBR has once again grown by leaps and bounds. I finally found out who the Moomins are, I immediately wanted to re-read The Silver Chair, I decided on Which Witch? for Z and my RIP read-aloud this year and I've lamented never reading Five Children and It.

There is one personal statement from Diana at the start of the excerpt from The Seven Towers by Patricia C. Wrede --

I know it is annoying to be given only the start of a story, but it is a long book and I did want to introduce you to my favorite sorceress. Here she is at her most typical.

If that isn't reason enough to pick up Wrede's book immediately, I don't know what is.

So, if you want an insight into Diana's taste in fantasy (though you likely already know it from her own work) and don't mind some wonky editing, see if you can find a copy of this book.

Learning more from my favorite witch,
K

Eleven Impossible to Ignore Stories

Well, once again I have Carl to thank for getting me to pull a book out of my TBR (this time for The 2013 Science Fiction Experience) that I ended up loving. This book has eleven stories, three of which were Hugo and/or Nebula award winners. But, if you ask me, these stories are all winners.

A couple of years ago, I started to keep a short story journal that simply lists the names of the stories and a 1-5 rating (5 being love). This is mainly just because I am terrible with remembering story names and it saves me time when I want to find a story I know I enjoyed before. Well, most anthologies have one or two DNFs, a couple of ones and twos and then mostly threes and fours with one or two exceptional fives. This collection, as recorded in my journal, has no stories below a three. It broke down like this

3: "In the Late Cretaceous"
3+: "Schwarzschild Radius", "Chance"
4: "The Last of the Winnebagos" (with a possible +), "Even the Queen", "Winter's Tale", "At the Rialto"
4+: "Time Out", "Jack"
5: "Ado", "Spice Pogrom"

Every one of these stories drew me in. They are all well-crafted and I enjoyed the broad range of subjects that she presented -- from quantum physics to menstruation. "Jack" was probably my favorite story to read as it was set during the Blitz and I think she just does a fantastic job every time she writes in that time period. The story didn't get a five though because I thought one tiny aspect of it was a bit cheesy. (If anyone is familiar with the story, I would love to chat about it!) "Ado" and "Spice Pogrom" were comedies and I thought they were hilarious. "Spice Pogrom" was probably really a 4/4+ story but I had so much fun reading it that I gave it full marks. Some of the reviewers on LibraryThing really didn't like her sense of humor (and yet they claimed to have loved To Say Nothing of the Dog -- go figure!) but I really enjoyed it. I think I do best with science fiction when there's an element of humor involved, like with Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde.

It sounds like some of these stories will be in her newest collection (out in early July)--"At the Rialto", "The Last of the Winnebagos" and "Even the Queen"--but not my favorites so it's still worth looking for this older collection if you're in the mood for some fantastic tales.

Imagining eleven impossible things,
K