Books Read in 2008

[rolanni]

*sigh*

I was going great guns there for a while...


Most recent on top:

War for the Oaks, Emma Bull (re-re-re-&c-read)
Hiding the Elephant:  How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, Jim Steinmeyer
Iron Kissed, Patricia Briggs
The Arrival, Shaun Tan
Blood Bound, Patricia Briggs
Season of the Witch, Natasha Mostert
Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan, Ferdinand Kuhn
Narbonic Five, Shaenon K. Garrity
Identical Strangers, Elyse Schein, Paula Bernstein
Moon Called, Patricia Briggs
Dust, Elizabeth Bear
Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West, Lesley Downer
Soon, I Will be Invincible, Austin Grossman

Comments

[peanut13171.livejournal.com]

How cool! It looks as if you've discovered Patricia Briggs. IMO her earler books are *much* better than her Mercy series, but that may be because I'm burnt out on vamps and werewolves.

I used to buy 2 copies of her books 'cause I wanted to make sure her sales numbers were high enough to keep her being published. I'd loan out the extras and make converts.

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Lisa Shearin's books (Magic Lost, Trouble Foudn, and the second book in the series, Armed and Magical, which came out some weeks back) have some of the feel of some of Patricia Briggs' earlier books. There's also Diana Pharoah Francis' novel The Cipher (which I like much better than her her Path of ... novels, I think that her voice is much stronger in The Cipher, the worldbuilding and characters and situations much more compelling, and amusing, etc.)

Briggs has an website which typing http://www.hurog.com will get one to. She comes east to ConBust at Smith in the spring. She's writing urban fantasies apparently because there was a hole in Ace's schedule for a UF and her editor asked her to write one--she apparently had been intending to rewrite/revise Masque (title something like that) which was one of her earliest books, adding the material from a never published drafted sequel to create a longer revised version, when that happened, and following the Blood Bound doing well, and her coming out with a second series derived with a starting point of some of the minor characters in Blood Bound, she's been kept very busy and fully occupied with the apparently selling very very very well UFs instead--and with the publisher being first and foremost interested in her getting more UFs written and out to market, than an expanded revised non-UF fantasy.

[peanut13171.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for the info and the recommendations. I'll be sure to check out Shearin and Francis.