Tag: A to Z challenge

reading

D is for Death Scenes

Sonia Lal4 Comments

adult_human_skull_-_asian_male_thumbnail__60388.1530765307.500.659Death scenes should be meaningful, yes? I think so. If not meaningful, they should at least be memorable. They stick with you. Maybe you return to it, over and over again in some fashion.

These are some of the most memorable death scenes I recall.

  1. Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web. I read this book over and over again in childhood. The death of Charlotte – the first time I heard it, it was very shocking. Less shocking, obviously, the second and third and fourth time I reread it. But I think her death is one of the reasons why I reread this book so often.
  2. Sergeant Bothari from the Miles Vorkosigan books. He was both a rapist, and if I remember the books right, a victim of rape. He was a torturer and also mentally disabled. He also protected Miles throughout his childhood. Yet I feel his death was just. Perhaps his life is a tragedy, always heading that since birth.
  3. Henry from The Time Traveler’s Wife. I had a lot of problems with this book, but for some reason Henry’s death sticks out in my mind. Henry loses his feet and then is shot to death while time traveling by his wife’s brother. His death seems more memorable to me then the whole book.  Which is a bit odd, I suppose.
  4. Rue from the Hunger Games. Really, there were a lot of deaths in this series, but who can forget this scene? And how important it was to the rest of the series?
  5. Dorothea from Black Jewels. Anne Bishop does revenge really, really well. Dorothea is enemy number one in this series and her death was perfect.
reading

C is for Characters

Sonia Lal4 Comments

Characters! Sometimes you read a book more for the characters than the plot. Lots of times, in fact. If the characters suck, oftentimes I stop reading.

If some characters come out in a new book, I would read it and I don’t really need to know anything else. Do you have favorite characters like that?

Five of my favorite characters:

  1. Eve Dallas from the In Death series by JD Robb
  2. Daemon from Black Jewels series by Anne Bishop
  3. Miles Vorkosigan from Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold
  4. Mercy Thompson from Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs
  5. Meg Corbyn from The Others by Anne Bishop

 

reading

B is for Books

Sonia Lal5 Comments
06_17_2013_book-smell-e1371501750113
photo: David Flores

B is for Books

So . . . books. Libraries are closed, bookstores are closed. But! Books can still be ordered online and downloaded from your favorite platform. Ebooks from libraries are a thing.

Including the Internet Archive. It seems the Internet Archive has more recent books. I have known of the Internet Archive existence for quite some time, but I thought it had only old books, books that are so old they are in the public domain.

It seems that is not correct. They announced a national emergency library (http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/) where they are allowing more recent books to be borrowed. The same item can be borrowed by multiple people at the same time.

I had the impression – somehow! – that the National Archive held only old books. I supposed that is because I have only ever gone looking for old books on it. Alice in Wonderland, The adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book on the birds of India someone wrote when they traveled to India during the British Raj, old dusty books like that.

I wasn’t even aware they had any other kind of books even available. I suppose I wasn’t paying attention, but I am shocked. Shocked they had recent books available at all, let alone that they decided to make some kind of national emergency library.

 

General

A to Z Challenge Reflection Post

Sonia Lal6 Comments

Another A to Z challenge done! It went okay. I did every single letter, on time. Well, sometimes I pushed that, but I usually made it.

I only brainstormed the first few letters, so 3/4 of the challenge was done on the fly. I did that last year, too, but with slightly more planning; I prewrote most of my posts the day or two days before. I brainstormed a lot of them on Sunday.

So last year I actually had more time to actually visit A to Z Challenge blogs. This year, I mostly visited the same ones I visited last year. At least the WordPress ones I had subscribed to. I know I visited a lot on Blogger regularly, but I don’t remember which ones now. Plus a few more I discovered this year, also mostly on WordPress. (These few were very interesting and that is why I subscribed to them.)

But it was a good challenge. I think it would have been easier if I had brain-stormed ideas for posts in advance. I will do that next year. And I will try to write more of them in advance, too, preferably on Sundays.

reading

Z is for Zombies

Sonia Lal18 Comments

The zombie is the second creepiest icon of horror. Just witness:

It’s the whole shambling walk and rotting body parts thing. And fingers and toes crawling on their own. And that skeletal grin.

I can’t watch without being seriously creeped out. I just can’t.

At least if you chop off vampire’s hand, the hand won’t crawl forward and try to strangle you. It will stay chopped off!

It’s why I don’t watch Walking Dead and other zombie TV shows/movies. And I pretty much avoid all zombie novels, including the  Newsflesh Trilogy. I have heard so much about it, but no.

It feels like zombies are becoming more and more popular, which is disturbing.

Do you avoid zombie shows?

reading

Y is for Yucky Scenes

Sonia Lal1 Comment

merriam-webster defines yucky as:

adjective \ˈyə-kē\

: causing discomfort, disgust, or a strong feeling of dislike : unpleasant and disgusting

: having an unpleasant feeling in your stomach : somewhat sick

What scenes in a book did you read and go: This is disgusting.

I think probably most books have a few scenes that are like that. They don’t make you dislike the whole book

But some stand out.

One I remember was one of the sexual scenes in A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. I don’t think the scene ever said and I don’t think the main character ever thought of it like that, but it felt like gang rape to me. (I think it was rape.) It’s just that characters were never portrayed as rapists and it caused me some cognitive dissonance.

Like: how could they even do that and be okay with themselves.

It was part of the book, it made sense in the book, but it was disturbing. But I enjoyed the book as a whole so . . . Sometimes I wonder if I should revisit and see if it is as disturbing as a I remember.

What yucky scenes stand out for you?

reading · science fiction

X is for Xris Cyborg

Sonia Lal7 Comments

While searching my WordWeb dictionary for a word starting with X. I didn’t find anything I could use. Why there are so few words starting with X?

But than I recalled a character whose name started with X: Xris Cyborg. 

Xris Cyborg is the cyborg leader of a mercenary group called Mag Force 7. There is a fantastic pilot and a poisoner who spends half his time on recreational drugs and lots more fun characters. The books are by Margaret Weis and Don Perrin.

I really loved them and reread the books every so often – a future mafia, crazy plans to break into a top secret military installation, a man who changed gender to hide from everyone who wants to kill him/her.  It’s lots and lots of fun.

So I Googled Xris Cyborg – I was hoping to find a picture or something someone had drawn. I have no artistic talent, so I could not draw him myself.

But! The Wikipedia listed every book I’d read – plus three more. Three books that had been published previously and apparently feature my favorite cyborg as a minor character.

The Mag Force 7 books I loved were a spin off series, not the original, and all this time I never knew. I don’t know how I missed them, but I am hoping they are still in print.

I think the lesson here is to look at all the books from the writers you like rather more carefully. So you know if the character you love pop up somewhere else, in some other series.

reading

W is for Weird

Sonia Lal9 Comments

I had a Twitter conversation today where it occurred to me that sometimes it is possible for a book to be too creative. A book about weird things, a book that involves things that are not familiar to the reader will not be as successful as a book that does involve the familiar.

It’s not as if I am unfamiliar with this concept. I read an article months on how successful books need to be like something else people knew about, but just different enough to stand out. I can’t find this article now. 😦

I have heard it before in the advice that you need to know what genre your book is. Because if a book doesn’t slot neatly into an existing genre, publishers won’t buy it.

It’s just . . . Accepting people won’t like a book if it’s too different from what they are used to is hard to accept.

I grew up thinking the more creative a book, the better it is. Maybe that’s not true.  Maybe it’s just weird.

That’s sort of depressing.

reading

V is for Verse in Books

Sonia Lal6 Comments

I don’t often encounter verse in the books I read. There may have been more poems in the books I read as a child; I don’t really remember.

The first one that stayed with me, the first poem I really liked in a novel, was in high school. The novel was Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey. This whole series is especially prone to poems and songs, because the main character is a singer.

But I like it. I’ve taken it out just to read the poems sometimes.

“The little queen all golden
Flew hissing at the sea.
To stop each wave
Her clutch to save
She ventured bravely.

As she attacked the sea in rage
A holderman came nigh
Along the sand
Fishnet in hand
And saw the queen midsky.

He stared at her in wonder
For often he’d been told
That such as she
Could never be
Who hovered there, bright gold.

He saw her plight and quickly
He looked up the cliff he faced
And saw a cave
Above the wave
In which her eggs he placed.

The little queen all golden
Upon his shoulder stood
Her eyes all blue
Glowed of her true
Undying gratitude.”

I think I just really, really like the imagery in this poem. (Even though I read the scene that inspired this poem and it was, well, this is a good summary.)

flash friday · General · Short Story · Writing

Undead

Sonia Lal29 Comments

This flash was inspired by the letter U!

She pondered the picture.

It showed a lady, dead from drowning. She knew that face.

She glanced over her shoulder at the rest of her class; they wandered the room, looking up at the photographs on the wall. Her teacher was across the room, with most of the kids.

She turned back to the picture. It was colored, but not pretty. She took a step a closer and peered closer at the woman’s face.

She took her wallet out of her bag and slipped out a picture hidden away behind her school id and transport card. The black-and-white photo was yellow with age and tattered at the edges. Grandmother was young in this picture; she grinned into the camera, knee-deep in the ocean, holding up her printed maxi out of the water.

She studied the picture on the wall, then her wallet picture and back again.

“Girls and boys!” The teacher clapped her hands. “Gather around now. I want to introduce to artist. She composed these photographs with herself as the model.”

A woman who looked exactly like the picture of her grandmother stood beside the teacher.