I have been doing some reading, although I have been doing more writing. Still, here are a few offerings from the literary world that really rocked my boat since I last wrote about books that literally rocked my boat. Here we go!
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I’ve already talked about how delighted I was with The Shores of Spain. If you haven’t read any of J. Kathleen Cheney’s Golden City books, you should do that. She combines romance, history, and fantasy masterfully.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell: Young college fan fiction writing twin goes to Freshman year of college in Lincoln, Ne. Her twin sister decides they need to be independent, so Cather finds the year discovering herself while gaining a pretty cool boyfriend, trying to finish her fan fiction opus before the final book of the series comes out, and continuing to grapple with her dad’s bipolar condition and her sister’s embracing of college’s party atmosphere. It’s the best kind of coming of age, a true and honest portrayal of a young girl, with bits of fiction thrown in, and the realistic ups and downs of young people at that time. This will easily make my best list for the year.
Immortal Muse by Stephen Leigh. Usually writing as S.L. Farrell, Leigh changes direction as he writes about a centuries-old battle between Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel. Lots of delicious historical research, solid extrapolations, and interesting dilemmas make this book keep you thumbing through its many pages.
Wool by Hugh Howey. A book I skeptically approached because of the hype, and it’s not my kind of read. But yes, a good book is a good book is a good book. Lots of multi-faceted characterizations, interesting social problems, and a new flavor of dystopia, if you need more of that kind of thing.
A Thousand Perfect Things by Kay Kenyon. Probably one of those books that should have received more attention than it did, it deals in an interesting and frank way with the colonization of India by England in an alternate reality.
Other books that I read farther back, but you should check out: Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel Jose Older; The Comorant by Chuck Wendig; Ironskin and Copperhead by Tina Connolly; and Master Keaton by Naoki Urasawa.
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Finally, while it may not be cool to technically recommend a boot WHILE you’re reading it, right now I’m reading Time Reiss’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Black Count about Alex Dumas–father of the Musketeer guy. Awesome, awesome book. Just flat out awesome. I’m about a third of the way through. A must for us Dumas fans.
