Sunday, January 04, 2015

Summary Season

It's blog round-up season, where we count out how we did last year and name our favorite books.  And I've been offline for weeks (well, mostly) and have not even started, so you'll have to wait, just like everyone on my Christmas card list, and also sometimes the credit card company when I forget they exist.

So, to get myself back into the swing of things: some fun things I've been enjoying from around the internet lately.  I'll get back on the horse this week with a couple of reviews I've had in my back pocket, and I'll try to do a year in review before 2016.

You know which bloggers kill me, though?  The Book Smugglers.  They bring in all these guest authors to give you their Best Of lists for the year, and now my to-read has grown, like, offensively long, whereas before it was just troublingly long, or maybe just mind-blowingly long.  Their month of Smugglivus posts have buried me in book hunger, but I'll just link give you the one link to their own Year's Best list, because I think it's fairly representative of the feeling of "Yeah, I want to read that....and that...and that....and ALL THE BOOKS!!!" that I get from the internet nowadays.

At Tor.com (what deliciousness isn't?), Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer is doing a reread of the original Heralds of Valdemar trilogy, which (the reread) is a delightful geekout on how simultaneously hokey and satisfying those books are.  One of the entries is called "Valdemaran Public Health and Epidemiology."  Enough said, except that I think I love you, Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer, and I know you live in Eastern Massachusetts so call me, 'kay?

This one almost counts as a mini-review, because I just read Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang's In Real Life, and I have nothing to say except exactly what the Book Smugglers said, every word of it.  With underlining on the "convenient ending" and "white savior" parts of the article.  It was fun to read and the illustrations were absolutely lovely but BLARGH.  (Aarti's brief review also linked back to TBS; I think they dealt with this very comprehensively.)

Oh, there's so much more, but I have to go to work in the morning.  Welcome to 2015, everyone!

2 comments:

Lianna Williamson said...

Gah! I want read ALL THE BOOKS in that link!

Aarti said...

YES about In Real Life. Ugh. And YES in a very positive way about The Book Smugglers year end lists!