Tag: book

reading · science fiction · Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday: Leviathan Wakes

Sonia Lal22 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teaser:

“It’s the beacon we followed. Jesus. The ship’s beacon never even turned on. Someone made a fake one out of that transmitter and hooked it up to a battery,” Holden said quietly, still fighting his panic.

– Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

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.

General · reading

S is for Series

Sonia Lal15 Comments

Series abound in fantasy and science fiction. There are so many that finding stand alone books can be something of a challenge.

I guess two or three types of series.

  1. episodic series, where each book is an episode and can be read on its own without needing to read anything that came before. I am not sure there are too many pure examples of this type of series. You know, like the James Bond movies.
  2. a long long story broken up into several novels. (Because you can’t publish 50 million words worth of one story all at once!) Like Tolkien or Wheel of Time or Way of Kings. 
  3. I am not sure this counts as a separate type of series, but maybe? Anyway, the kind where the book has a stand alone-ish type plot of its own, so you have a conclusion at the end. But there is also a longer series plot and the episode plot sort of falls neatly into it. Harry Potter is like this. And so are a lot of TV shows. Maybe this is really just a subtype of 1 or 2. I don’t know.

There are also series that start out as episodic and turn into the series-as-a-long-novel. Actually, I think that’s when I fall behind on my reading.

That’s what happened with the Dresden files. That’s why I am so behind in this series, because I feel like, I didn’t get to read the previous book and now I can’t read this new book that just came out because I won’t know what’s going on.

The shift is really quite annoying.

What do you think?

fantasy · General · reading

Favorite Childhood Reread

Sonia Lal17 Comments

I reread a favorite childhood book last book: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley.

And it came to me: the book was written in a 3ed person omniscient POV.

I knew, of course, that it was written in 3rd person POV. But I haven’t read it in years and I’d somehow thought it was written it 3rd person limited.

I don’t know why. Maybe I am just so used to 3rd person limited. And back when I first read it, I didn’t know the difference between 3rd person limited and 3ed person omniscient.

The difference is so striking now, such a change from the usual stuff. It wasn’t confusing at all! But it is still as good as it was when I first read it.

I quite enjoyed it.

General · reading · Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday: American Elsewhere

Sonia Lal37 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers:

Her mother was wearing a teal bathrobe and her hair was wet, and Mona remembers how embarrassed she was when he wind rose and the bottom of her mother’s bathrobe lifted up and Mona saw coarse pubic hair and realized her mother was nude under that robe, just naked as a jaybird. Her mother called for her to come, and Mona obeyed her mother knelt and whispered into Mona’s ear that she loved her, she loved her more than anything, but she couldn’t stay here, and she was so sorry.

– American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett

Book Review · General · reading

Book Review: The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo

Sonia Lal4 Comments

Blurb from GoodReads:

“One evening, my father asked me if I would like to become a ghost bride…”

Though ruled by British overlords, the Chinese of colonial Malaya still cling to ancient customs. And in the sleepy port town of Malacca, ghosts and superstitions abound.

Li Lan, the daughter of a genteel but bankrupt family, has few prospects. But fate intervenes when she receives an unusual proposal from the wealthy and powerful Lim family. They want her to become a ghost bride for the family’s only son, who recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, a traditional ghost marriage is used to placate a restless spirit. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at a terrible price.

After an ominous visit to the opulent Lim mansion, Li Lan finds herself haunted not only by her ghostly would-be suitor, but also by her desire for the Lim’s handsome new heir, Tian Bai. Night after night, she is drawn into the shadowy parallel world of the Chinese afterlife, with its ghost cities, paper funeral offerings, vengeful spirits and monstrous bureaucracy—including the mysterious Er Lang, a charming but unpredictable guardian spirit. Li Lan must uncover the Lim family’s darkest secrets—and the truth about her own family—before she is trapped in this ghostly world forever.

 

I really enjoyed The Ghost Bride. The concept is new to me, a living woman married to the ghost of dead man.

The villains: stalker ghost and his deceased family.

My favorite: the afterlife.

Things I expected, but didn’t get:

  • From the blurb, I thought she was a ghost bride. She got a proposal, but there was no wedding.
  • There was a trial of the villains and I would have liked to see it. I guess only the results mattered to the main character, but the omission of the trial disappointed me.

Things I Liked Least: the romance wasn’t especially convincing.

The afterlife in this book is complicated, complete with bribery and corruption, demons and dragons who serve as minor government officials. I loved it. But I really love ghosts and dragons.

The ghost stalks her from the afterlife, and had he lived, I cannot think he would be much different. If he had lived and she had married into the household (their fathers had a childhood arrangement for her marry the cousin). I think he would have been an awful in-law, the kind who would hit on her and retaliate when she refused.

He haunts her dreams and insists she marry him. He sets up a party in her dreams, complete with unappetizing spirit food, and is upset when she rejects him.

She goes to see a medium, who gives her some medicine to keep the stalker ghost away. But one day it stops working, so she takes a lot more and gets so sick her soul is ejected from her body.

That’s when the book gets interesting. She meets hungry ghosts, a dragon, and she goes to the Plains of the Dead. The Plains is the underworld, with little villages and cities of ghosts. It is wonderful. This portrayal of the spirit world was amazing. This is my favorite part of the book.

The character comes into her own here. It stands in her good with her romance with the cousin of her stalker.

So . . . Girl sees boy; girl thinks she’s in love with boy. Truthfully, this romance never worked for me. I mean, he’s a good guy. But it just happened so fast. She visits him in his dreams and he burns a horse for her (she finds it very helpful in the Plains of the Dead). So I can’t see the romance was useless. But I think it was more lust at first sight rather than love at first sight.

In fact, I think, she fell in lust with the dragon, too. Who can blame her? And no human can compete with a dragon. She left with him in the end, but I don’t buy she’s is in love with him. Plus, he rescued her. So he’s a good guy, too.

In the end, I really, really enjoyed the books. The descriptions were marvelous. The story moved forward at a fairly brisk pace. It was well-written. You should read it, especially if you like ghosts.

reading

e-Reader Dying Out?

Sonia Lal15 Comments
I feel like this is me on a sunny day.

I just read an article on Mashable and on Slate that e-Reader sales are down. They might go down until ALL companies stops selling them, just like that trendy device no one remembers from a decade ago, like the Mac Cube.

Barns and Nobel are already separating themselves from the Nook; Amazon has a new phone; Sony has long since gotten out of the American market.

Both Mashable and Slate say it’s because e-Readers are a single-purpose device, a purpose that can easily be performed on any tablet and smartphone. That’s, true, yes, you can read anything on a tablet or a smartphone.

Mind, this category of the dedicated e-Reader does not include e-Readers such as the Nook Color and Kindle Fire. Those are tablets, but they are usually marketed as e-Readers. The dedicated e-Reader is an e-ink reader.

Mashable says the smartphone is killing the single-purpose e-Reader. I disagree; if anything is killing it, it’s the tablet. The smaller tablets and most e-Readers have a similar size.

Me, I got a dedicated e-Reader, a tablet and a smartphone. I do have an e-reader app on my tablet and my smartphone and even some books, but the bulk of my reading is done on the e-Reader. It’s just a lot more comfy for hours and hours of reading. A lot more comfy.

But if you don’t read as much as I do, maybe a tablet or a smartphone would be a better idea. It means fewer devices and less expense. You can get and read books on either one easily. So a part of me thinks, yes, there will come a day when dedicated e-Readers are no longer sold.

What do you think? Do you think the single-purpose e-Reader is on it’s way out? If you wanted to be able to read ebooks today, would you get a tablet or a dedicated e-Reader? Neither and just stick with your trust smartphone?

 

General · reading

Non-Review Way To Complain About A Book

Sonia Lal5 Comments

So, yesterday, while looking for snippets of A Shiver of Light, I ran across the book’s Goodreads page. This is normal.

But than I discovered people had been putting commentary on the book’s page and they put where the reviews usually go. But they weren’t reviews, they were slamming/praising the series OR they were expressing their unhappiness because the book hadn’t been published yet.

It will be published tomorrow: Jun 3, 2014.

goodreads snapshot

I took this screenshot of the Goodreads’ page for A Shiver of Light. As you can see, there are 3000 comments. If this is the first comment, (I don’t know that it is, I didn’t sort it in any way), it showed up two years ago.

And the book’s not even published yet!

This comment talks about  a love for the series and a wish she would publish this book. Well, I also love the series and I wished she would publish it, instead of writing lots and lots of books in the other series. But it never occurred to me voice this in the review section of its Goodreads page. I mean, I thought that was for reviews only. But no.

If you look further up the screen, it says there are 42 reviews and 244 ratings. I took a screenshot.ashiverlightgoodreads

It’s not counting most of the 3000 comments as reviews, probably because most of them have no rating for the book – how could they? The book’s not out until tomorrow and I doubt there are a 1000 ARCs, let alone 3000.

So this is a good thing. It is a way to express some feeling involving the book, but is not actually a review.

Because, personally, I don’t really like the idea of using a book review to complain about prices and other things that don’t involve book’s story. Sometimes there is no other way, because the reviews on Amazon or wherever is the only way we got to complain to the publisher/author. But I don’t think it is a good way.

IMO, this is a better way to complain about something – prices, not being published soon enough, etc. What do you think? Would you do it?

General · Writing

Doorway to Act II

Sonia Lal22 Comments

open doorsI was reading Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell and it talks about the three structure act. It talks about moving from Act I to Act II through a doorway.

The key question to ask yourself is this: Can my Lead walk away from the plot right now and go on as he has before? If the answer is yes, you haven’t gone through the first doorway yet.

Further, the book says this should happen at or before at the 1/5 point of the book. This is an interesting way to look at transitioning from the beginning to the middle, IMO. I hadn’t considered the transition like that before, but more like the number of pages from the beginning of the book.

And, you know, if it feels like middle. But that’s not a quantifiable feeling. How would you quantify it anyway?

I have never really paid attention to when I feel like I’m in the middle of a book as opposed to the beginning. But according to this definition, it should happen when the plot feels inevitable. Like, something has happened and nothing will ever be the same.

Do you agree? Do you this doorway separates the beginning from the middle? And does it usual happen at or before the 1/5 mark?

I suspect this is something I’ll be a lot more aware of when reading now. I was rereading Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K.

guilty-pleasures-by-lkh-book-coverHamilton and you know what? It is true. In Guilty Pleasures, this doorway happens when a close friend of the main character is harmed/threatened by the vampires. This happened pretty much when 1/5 of the book was done. So it works in one book.

But Guilty Pleasures is structured like a thriller. Question is, does it work for other thriller style books? And other non-thriller style books?

 

General · reading

B is for Boys Fiction

Sonia Lal18 Comments

I was going to choose some other topic for B because, truthfully, I am not sure what boys fiction is. But then I thought, why not speak about my confusion?The_Hero_and_the_Crown

I don’t get how boys fiction is defined. I really don’t. Is it when the main character is a boy? Or when the author is a guy?

It’s only since I’ve been blogging that I’ve heard the term. The first time was probably when someone posted a review about the TV version of Games of Thrones and called it boys fiction. I was shocked because I’ve no idea what makes it boys fiction. (I was less shocked by the rest. Some people don’t like fantasy and I think that particular review was more about the genre than the TV show.)

So, okay, it’s not chic flick-ish. But beyond that? I don’t know. It’s not as if there are no women in Game of Thrones. And it’s a type of fantasy I read off and on in grade school and more regularly afterward. So, yeah.

As a child, it never really occurred to me there were books I shouldn’t read. Maybe such thoughts occurs to boys? Maybe they see a dragon, a girl on a white horse and a female writer’s name, and decide the book isn’t for them? (The cover for the Hero and the Crown, a childhood favorite.) It seems strange to me.

So I just don’t know what makes a story boys fiction.