Great read:

I finished When She Woke yesterday, the 2nd novel by Hillary Jordan, and I LOVED it. It falls under the fantasy genre though, to my mind, it's a perfect blend of literary and fantasy - the kind of novel I aspire to write. The night before last afforded me the rarest of occasions: the opportunity to read uninterrupted. No chores to be done, no meals to be made, no one to talk to. I had the house to myself and so I plucked When She Woke from its spot among the stacks of books on my nightstand and picked up where I'd left off. I had barely gotten into it the night before, just 50 pages or so, enough to be thoroughly intrigued. So I read. And read. The hours slipped by unnoticed as I tumbled into the world of Hannah, a woman who lived in a society where crimes were punished via the injection of a virus that turned your skin yellow or orange or green or red. She was a Red. When my husband came home at 1 AM, I was still up, reading. When he insisted that the bedside lamp be extinguished so he could sleep, I retreated to the kitchen and made some toast with jam, and continued reading. I read at the kitchen counter, my eyes burning, until 3 AM. The next morning, yesterday, I woke and tried to go about my morning, but my mind was on the story. So I succumbed. After my shower, I slipped back into bed, my hair wrapped in a towel, and read. Less than an hour later I was finished.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.... it was excellent on every level. I highly recommend it.

Great read:

I've just finished Kristin Cashore's Graceling and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was very Game-of-Thrones-esque, which is probably why it appealed to me. Don't let the YA label fool you or dissuade you from picking up this book - I didn't find it simplistic or too vanilla at all. In fact, on this lazy day in April, with raindrops splattering against the windows, and a fuzzy throw snugged around my legs to ward off the stubborn hold of winter, it was the perfect way to spend the afternoon.

I haven't updated my reading list, here, but I've been busy reading nonetheless. Unfortunately, most of my forays into the genre world were more ho-hum than not:

* Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell
* The Drop by Michael Connelly
* The Litigators by John Grisham
* The First Prophet by Kay Hooper

Of these, the only one I really enjoyed was The Drop.

On the literary front, I read a fantastic story published in One Story: E. B. Lyndon's "Goodbye, Bear."

Good read:

I've just finished Malcolm R. Campbell's The Sun Singer and I really enjoyed it. It's the story of Robert Adams, a high school-aged boy, and his gift of precognitive dreams. Although he foresees the tragic death of his best friend's sister, he's unable to prevent it and so he shoves his ability aside, refusing to engage it. When his grandfather dies unexpectedly, Robert resurrects his gifts in order to complete a task left undone by his beloved grandfather. The story has parallel universes, portals, synchronicity, and magic -- all deliciously woven together.

The book's back cover contains this label: Contemporary Mythic Adventure. I quite agree.

Although I really enjoyed the story, I feel like I have to say a few words about the beginning chapter. I found it awkward, choppy, amateurish, filled with grammatical errors, and full of one-dimensional characters (of which only two get filled out by story's end). There's also this weird script/layout that occurs on page one and shows up periodically throughout the book, where the prose divides into two columns and the text on the left continues in the standard typeface while the text in the right column is italicized. The intent, I believe, is to showcase, simultaneously, two opposing thoughts/reactions of/by one character to a given situation. The result, in my opinion, is so confusing and odd that it does more harm than good. The whole of this chapter was so off-putting that had the story not gotten pretty quickly to the good stuff, i.e., parallel universe, I would've abandoned the read. And speaking of the "good stuff," I found that although the lack of proof reading was still evident (thought instead of though, then instead of than, etc.), there wasn't any of the awkwardness in phrasing or abrupt switching from one speaker to the next that characterized much of the opening chapter. It was very smooth and very engaging, which makes me think Mr. Campbell was really in his element while composing this part of the story. The downside is that it highlights just how disintegrated the opening chapter is with the rest of the book; it makes it feel like an afterthought.

Great read:

I've just finished Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind and I really, really enjoyed it.

First, though, I feel like I ought to get some credit toward my Goodreads 2013 reading challenge for reading a 722 page novel (yes! 722 pages!), that instead of 1 book, it should count as at least 2, maybe even 3. I'm kidding. Sort of.

The 722 pages go by quickly. This is fantasy, and the fact that I enjoy fantasy is only a recent revelation to me (see my discovery, here). The world Mr. Rothfuss creates is amazing -- rich and believable and all encompassing. The likeability of the protagonist Kvothe (pronounced "Quothe") is astounding as well: we root for him and believe in him. And the scene where he ends up on his own is one of the best I've had to pleasure to read. It was haunting; utterly surprising and shocking, it and its immediate aftermath has stayed with me.

I have only 2 small quibbles with this story. The first is when it switches from the present time and assumes a "let me tell you what happened" tone. This is how the entire story is told, actually, where Kvothe recounts his life's events to Chronicler, who is busy copying the oral into written form. And, really, Rothfuss does such a marvelous job in drawing us into young Kvothe's world that we very quickly switch gears and are absorbed into the unfolding scene and story. My reaction stems from the intrigue that surrounds the older Kvothe and his situation at the book's beginning, that I didn't want to leave it to start over as it were. My slight irritation was short-lived, though.

My other quibble has to do with the ending. It feels like it just sort of ends. On the one hand, the story was already 722 pages long, so, really, it was time! On the other hand, I wanted a bit more of something... resolution, closure. Instead, it feels very open-ended, very much like a pause, and I'm guessing that the 2nd in the series, The Wise Man's Fear will pick up seamlessly where this one leaves off. But this just stopping, if you will, left me slightly unsatisfied and is only a very small notch against a fantastically fabulous read.

Great read:

I finished Anne Leigh Parrish's collection All The Roads That Lead From Home at the end of December, right before the new year started. And what a way to end the year. I loved these stories. Quiet, honest, powerful. They all have a low key sort of quality to them that is deceptive... the characters and their stories wind their way around your heart and through your mind, staying with you long after you've put the book down. Immensely satisfying.

Counting Proper

My short story Counting Proper is live at Blue Lake Review. It appeared originally in the May 2009 issue of Bryant Literary Review.

Happy New Year!

Disappointing Read

The title of this post should be flat out didn't like it because that's more honest. But since this is my first ever post about a book I didn't like, or, let's be real -- I didn't even finish -- I'm taking a gentler approach. The book? Jo Walton's Among Others. The premise is intriguing (from the inside book cover):

"Raised by a half mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. When her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead."

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? A little magic, fairy spirits, a spell gone bad, hints at sci-fi. Who WOULDN'T by intrigued? The reality is that I had to invoke my daughter's 50-page rule and even then I made it only to page 75 before giving up. The magic? The fairies? We get only the briefest of glimpses of either of these by the 75-page point. Seventy-five pages! And the hints at sci-fi? That comes only via the myriad references to SF book authors, titles, and characters, and I found the constant bombardment irritating. Maybe the intent was to add context? Not sure, but I found my eyes glazing over at every mention. The real disappointment for me was that nothing happens (at least not in the initial 75 pages), rather it's a LOT of plowing through uninteresting family history with brief references to things that happened off the page. Even these references are approached sort of sideways -- more of a by-the-way the twin sister is dead rather than a scene that shows us what happened. Maybe some of these things are played out or come together further in, but I just couldn't make myself keep reading. For me, reading is supposed to be pleasurable, not frustrating.