The Shadow Queen is the latest of Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series. Sometime in the past year I wrote about her last book, whose title I’ve completely forgotten.

This one was gripping as ever, though I deliberately started it during the morning on vacation so I wouldn’t have to stay up all night to finish it. And I managed to sleep all night (twice) before finishing it this morning. *proud of self*

This time we were focusing on new characters, descendants of those in The Invisible Ring, but we still spent quite a bit of time with the main characters from the original trilogy. It was an interesting balance, and it made sense, but it felt like Bishop was having to work at finding the main conflict. There was an interpersonal struggle which seemed guaranteed to work out, a small mystery to resolve, and a subplot that could’ve easily been taken out with no loss to the storyline. There was a story, and I wanted to see how it would turn out, but no major bad guy. Not a problem, but interesting to notice.

I wouldn’t bother recommending it to anyone who hasn’t read the trilogy, but if you have you’ll probably enjoy it.

(This is the one I read just before the end of the year.

I’ve totaled up all of the books that I’ve posted about here this year, and assuming I don’t finish any more books in the next four days (no guarantees! Yep, I did after all.), this is my summary for the year:

Novellas: 4 (possibly more, because some of the short stories I read were quite long, but I haven’t counted those.)

Started and abandoned: 1 (Elantris.  There are lots of other books I started and haven’t finished, but I do expect to finish them some day.  I’ll post about them then.)

Comics: 2 (or 3, depending on how you count — and I’m only counting full-length books, not the flimsies.)

Books: 45 46

So, that’s nearly a book a week, not counting all of the other books I haven’t yet finished.  Whew.

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My New Year’s Resolution: Not to acquire any books or stories of any kind for all of 2010.

I’m giving myself a moratorium on getting books.  I bought or have been given/lent so many books this year (and last year, and the year before that…), and I’m afraid I’ll never get through them all, if I keep getting new books at the rate I do.  So, 2010 is my year to catch up.  My goal is to keep posting these “recently read” posts as often as I remember, and to get through a large number of the books I already have.  This includes a number of books that aren’t as easy as my usual sci fi/fantasy fare, like The Three Musketeer, and a ton of books that I’ve started and never finished.  I may decide to restart some of those

Here’s a long list, without much commentary, of the other books I’ve read this year, but never managed to write up a post about.

1. I re-read Gabriel’s Ghost (which I first read a couple of years ago, and had since forgotten the whole plot of) and then read its sequel, Shades of Dark. Bought the third one, Hope’s Folly, which I will read when I get a round tuit.  They are all by Linnea Sinclair, who writes entertaining Sci-Fi Romance novels.

2. George R. R. Martin wrote a comic book set in the same world as A Song of Ice and Fire, but a long time ago, called Hedge Knight, parts 1 and 2.  No recollection of who the artist was or anything, but it was a fun story.

3. The comic of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which was really well done.

4. I read The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines (jimchines).  I’d read his Goblin books and enjoyed them so much that I was really looking forward to this book.  But honestly, this one didn’t captivate me as much as the Goblin books.  I liked that the main characters are kick-ass princesses rescuing the kidnapped prince, but … they weren’t as expectation-bending as I would’ve liked.  He has since released the second one, The Mermaid’s Madness, and the third book, Red Hood’s Revenge, should be coming out early next year.  I will still buy them and read them, because I like him as an author and I hope he will take the series into new and surprising directions, but not yet.

5. Victory Conditions – the last Ky Vatta novel by Elizabeth Moon.  Since it had been over a year, maybe even two, since I read the 5th Ky Vatta novel, and I didn’t bother re-reading any of the previous ones, it took me a while to figure out what state the relationships were in.  I remembered most of the plot, but who knew what about whom, and who was interested in whom… that took a bit longer.  Still, it was fun, and I love the fact that Moon writes military sci-fi with a fabulous female main character, who isn’t just a guy with tits.

6. The Rowan by Anne McCaffery.  This was the first “grown up” sci fi book I ever read, when I was 10.  I’ve read it several times, but hadn’t read it in about a decade.  Since I’ve been working so hard on Craft in the past several years, I read it this time with my Writer Goggles on. I noticed that she doesn’t often tell us the story through the Rowan’s PoV, but rather from the characters around her. And that she often uses a 3rd Omniscient narrator, who talks about the overarching history or sequence of events leading to what she’s describing. And she switches PoV characters (3rd omniscient -> some character -> 3rd omniscient -> some other character), without switching scenes. This style doesn’t usually work for me, and yet it all flows smoothly, and I’m never left wondering “who’s thinking this?” or “wait, that was Afra‘s thought??” or anything. How does she do that? Clearly, I have more to learn.

6a. I also re-read Damia and Damia’s Children, sequels to The Rowan.  Damia is a wonderful story, but McCaffery changed her narrative style.  Despite the title, it’s more Afra’s story than Damia’s.  It starts with Afra’s childhood and how he arrived at Callisto to work with the Rowan, and so it fills in the ten-year gap in The Rowan, as well as filling in some of the story around the Rowan through the rest of that story.  And then it skips ahead to after The Rowan ends to when The Rowan’s third child, Damia, is a toddler, and follow her life–but again, largely from Afra’s PoV.  There isn’t nearly the same amount of jumping around of perspectives, and more is shown rather than told.  It is narrated more like the usual third person limited that we’ve become used to in fantasy, rather than the pleasing third person omniscient from The Rowan.  Damia’s Children shifts style yet again, now following a few of Damia’s children (she has eight!) for short periods of time, never really returning to any of them.  Damia herself seems much more stable, and less interesting, than she was in her own novel.  And now the third person omniscient tone is gone completely, and all is focused on the plot rather than the characters.  I meant to continue on with Lyon’s Pride and The Tower and the Hive, the fourth and fifth books in the trilogy, but … well, I lost interest.  I think with most of McCaffery’s series, I find that the first two books are the best, and they degenerate from there.

7. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. OMG!  This one is a YA story about a kid called Bod, short for Nobody Owens, who is raised by the ghosts in a Graveyard.  It’s a bit dark, but mostly it’s fun and wacky.  Each chapter is pretty much a standalone story about Bod, but strung together in chronological order there is a larger story arc, which is satisfyingly completed by the end.  I highly recommend that everyone go find a copy and read it.

8. The memoir of a woman who went to Le Cordon Bleu, called The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School, by Kathleen Flinn.  It was recommended to me by a coworker, who shares a lot of the same interest in books as me.  I don’t usually read memoirs, but this one was entertaining, takes place in Paris, and is about cooking–which I’m not very good at, but have been working on gaining skill at.

9. A short little book called The 10% Solution, which is about how to revise any written thing.  I got it because it sounded kinda interesting and was available in kindle format, and I’d just gotten Lord Goring.  And I knew I wasn’t likely to want to pass it along to anyone.

10. In Ashes Lie by Marie Brennan (swan-tower)!  She’s such a good writer, and she’s writing high fantasy set in London.  She manages to use just enough old-fashioned English to provide the flavor of the time, without becoming unreadable.  And you can tell how much research she did to get her historical facts accurate.  She just happens to throw immortal Faeries into the story.  The first one, Midnight Never Come, is set in Elizabethan London.  This one is set in the London of King Charles I, the first European King to be beheaded.  It covers his reign through the Great Fire, with the Great Fire being the unifying theme.

11. Also, Deeds of Men, the novella that fits between Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie.  You can find it here: http://www.swantower.com/marie/stories/onyx/dom.html.  Also very good, flipping between two time periods, which creates an interesting level of mystery.  Brennan seems to enjoy playing with time in her stories, and she is good at it.

12. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.  Yes, I don’t usually count picture books.  But I got it free to read on Lord Goring (no pictures, sadly), and then I read it.  And I really enjoyed it.  I hadn’t read the story in ages and ages. It’s such a sweet story, and doesn’t end nearly as sadly as I’d remembered.  Somehow my memory stops at the point when the rabbit gets thrown away because the boy was sick, and I was so upset by the notion of a stuffed animal being thrown away.  But in the end he becomes a real rabbit, and even gets to see the boy again.

13. Worms Eat My Garbage (second edition) by Mary Appelhof.  It’s a short little book about how to keep a worm bin, so worms can eat all of your kitchen scraps and turn them into compost, which are good for the garden.  I’ve been wanting to do this for about a year now.  I keep saying that once I’m more moved-in I’ll set one up.  I even have the bins for it, but one of them still has stuff in it.  :-/  And now Ben has gone and gotten a compost bin (which hasn’t arrived yet) for all of our kitchen scraps, as though he’s trying to avoid my worms.  So rude.  So, I’ll set one up next year sometime.  Once the bin is unpacked and emptied.

14. Angelica, by Sharon Shinn.  This is the fourth book in the Archangel series, and I’ve read it before.  But I lent it to a coworker, and when she gave it back and we were talking about it I realized how much of the story I had forgotten.  So, I read it again.  It’s a nice story, but it’s another one where the action never really gets fast-paced and the conflict never gets heated.  The two main characters are both very level-headed, even-keeled people, so there’s not a lot of room for fiery interpersonal conflict.  And then the climax of the plot didn’t really involve the main characters doing much, which seems a bit odd.  But the relationships and growth of the characters were interesting, so I didn’t stop reading.

15. And somehow I never wrote about reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles, Mutants and Microbes, a compendium which includes: Falling Free, a very cool story set 200 years before Miles’ time about genetically created people called Quaddies who have four arms instead of two arms and two legs, making them ideal for functioning in zero-g environments; “Labyrinth” (also included in some other volume that I read); and Diplomatic Immunity, which is the last Miles story to date (teardrop), and has him being a diplomat resolving a political dispute with the descendants of the original Quaddies, who now have colonized their own solar system.  They were all wonderful, and I love how gracefully LMB handles complicated subjects like mutants.

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Ok, that’s all I could find evidence of.  I may have read some other books, but I can’t find them now.  I read a lot of short stories and magazines and blogs this year, but they’re too specific to list.

Mood:  accomplished

Rutabaga!

I really liked Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson*.  It’s a YA book published by Scholastic, so it’s printed in a big font, and the cover looks like it’s aimed at kids.  And it’s fun.  The premise is that the known world is actually ruled by Evil Librarians, who deliberately control all of the information that we have access to in order to keep us docile and under their thumb.  They’re trying to take over the whole world, and have so far succeeded in taking over the seven continents that we know about.  There are actually three more.  The main character is named Alcatraz, and some of the people he meets are named Bastille, Sing Sing, Quentin, and Leavenworth.  Are they all named after famous prisons?  No!  The famous prisons are all named after them!

Beyond the premise, I really enjoyed the writing style.  It’s narrated by the main character, Alcatraz, who is 13 during this book, and is filled with meta-description, about how to write a book and leaving cliff-hangers and things.  One of my favorite meta-sections, at the beginning of chapter 11:

You probably assume you know what is going to happen next: me, tied to an altar, about to get sacrificed.  Unfortunately, you’re wrong.  The story hasn’t gotten to that part yet.

This revelation may annoy you.  It may even frustrate you.  If it does, then I’ve achieved my purpose.  However, before you throw this book against the wall, you should understand something about storytelling.

Some people assume that authors write books because we have vivid imaginations and wan to share our vision.  Other people assume that authors write because we are bursting with stories, and therefore must scribble those stories down in moments of creative propondidty.

Both groups of people are completely wrong.  Authors write books for one, and only one, reason: because we like to torture people.

All in all, a very entertaining book.

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I enjoyed Gateway, the new book by Sharon Shinn.  It’s also YA, I think, but aimed at a slightly older age group.  The main character, Daiyu, is a high school-aged Chinese girl who was adopted as a baby by white Americans, who are now living in St. Louis.  I must say, St. Louis is one of those cities that I’ve never been anywhere near, so I kinda believe that it doesn’t really exist.  So, it works really well for me for the start of a fantasy novel.    One day, walking under the St. Louis arch transports her to another world.  The other world oddly mimics hers–e.g. the city is laid out very similarly to St. Louis–and in other ways is completely different.  In this other world, the dominant population are all Han, who look just like Chinese in our world.  There are white and black people, who are poor minorities with crummy jobs.  She is immediately brought into this conspiracy, in which she is the only one who can infiltrate the upper class in order to reach a very important person.  It actually does make sense (despite my confusing description), and provides a fun story.  The book isn’t as exciting or fast-paced as I’ve gotten used to fantasy adventures being.  But it was a nice story and I wanted to know how Daiyu would manage.  I kept wondering how Shinn could possibly end the story in a satisfying way, which may have been what drove me to finish.  I wasn’t disappointed by the ending.

Shinn, a white woman living in St. Louis, is looking at race in this story.  It’s not the point of the story, but neither is it just tacked on like an after-thought.  Daiyu being Chinese is a critical aspect of the plot.  But I didn’t read any moral or Statement about race within the story.

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* My mom and I picked up Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians at the booksigning for TGS.  We figured we might as well support the local independent bookstore Bay Book Co.^ who was kindly hosting the signing by buying a couple of books.  My reaction to Sanderson’s first book, Elantris, was less than meh and I never finished it.  I thought he did TGS very well, though, so it was worth giving him another try.  crazyfaerie tells me that Mistborn is worth reading, so I’ll probably get around to it.

^ Which also sells wooden pipes and tobacco.  Random, but cool. 

Mood:  cheerful