NextRead

There isn’t much point in reviewing this final book in the series – at this point you either love it or you hate it and you’ve either bought it or you haven’t. But just in case you are yet to enter the hallowed halls of Hogwarts then I’ll offer a few of my own thoughts on this once in a life time literary phenomenon.

As I’ve pointed out recently the Harry Potter series is never going to see Ms. Rowling honoured for Nobel Prize for Literature but that was never its intention. HP is a children’s story that happens to appeal to an adult audience – though this attraction to an older audience has been played on with the Adult Editions and perhaps some of the adult related content as suggested by Catherine Bennett in the guardian. And as a children’s story HP has a lot to stimulate the imagination from the use of magic, to the magical creatures, to the whole conflict between good and evil.

If there is a negative to HP in general and DH in particular is that it might be a bit too immersive with a large casts of characters, locations, spells, and artefacts. Though strangely scenes are often rushed and key moments dealt with over a few lines that should have been lingered over longer.

Now this does show either a lack of good editing or lack of skill in the finer details by Rowling and this is the most disappointing thing – that in order to keep the story under wraps it missed having that vital feedback that could have polished it a bit more.

Overall, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows brings the series to a satisfying if bloody conclusion. It is an amazing achievement to keep so many threads not only tight but tied off cleanly in the end over 7 books and goodness know how many words.

This is a series that will be read again and again and is going to take some beating in the future.

Tags: Fantasy

Susan Hill’s blog :: THE HOLY SPIRIT BLOWEST WHERE IT LISTETH..
Be assured that no book mentioned and praised and recommended by me on this blog or elsewhere has ever been done so as a result of any form of bribe or ‘buzz.’

The internet is a wonderful thing full of wonderful people who love sharing stuff with other people with their only motivation to be part of the conversation. And that’s my hope for this blog - that it is a conversation with you dear reader.

There are some great conversationalists on the list of links on the right hand side of the screen, which I hope you’ll find time to check out. The strange thing is that not one of them encompasses all the books that I find interesting - which is great because by reading them I’m always finding more and more writers and books to check out  - but I do get the feeling that they are all genuine in their thoughts and opinions.

The nice thing about having this blog is that I get sent the occasional book that I might be interested in either one I’ve requested or one they think I might like. I must admit that it is very flattering to have books  arrive through the door from publishers not that I get that many but it’s still nice.

I have a small pile looking at me at the moment:

Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley
Sharp Teeth  by Toby Barlow
The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

Winterbirth is fantasy début that is getting a lot of buzz (see Rising Stars).
Sharp Teeth is a novel-in-verse with decision clinching quote by Niall Griffiths and another debut.  They also both come under my mini focus of debut’s in this blog this year.
The Dreaming Void is by an author I’ve been meaning to read for ages.

Does this make me a proper reviewer? There is a great debate about the value of blog reviewers. I for one think that we all add to the conversation and we amateurs (as in we don’t get paid) can compliment and perhaps supplement (where they don’t cover our tastes) the professionals (as in they get paid for it).

I’ve have gone back to my previous reviews and added REVIEW COPY just so you know that’s what it is if it is one. The only difference it makes in practice is that I try to read them faster. They don’t get any other special treatment.

So to quote Susan Hill again: ‘Be assured that no book mentioned and praised and recommended by me on this blog or elsewhere has ever been done so as a result of any form of bribe or ‘buzz.”

And on that note back to the books.

I’ve had a wonderful few days in the amazing city of Athens, which as it happens was having a heat wave. It was, if I’m honest, a little too hot.

It’s a very hard place to describe - a strange mixture of the very very old and the very very new.

I had to take Harry with me. Not that that needed to have worried if I didn’t as you could get your hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as easily as a bottle of water.

I’m suffering a bit from culture shock at the moment so I’m off back to bed.

More later.

Well I queued and conquered now I’m reading… you guessed it…. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - ahead of my other reading may I add. Then I’ve got a couple of things to sort this week - so I shall see you all next weekend.

Hurray for Harry!

The brilliant people at Blackfish Publishing have managed to release another fabulous

Death Ray #3 is in the shops!
The third issue of Death Ray is on the newsstands.

And of course we have the latest issue of the long running Interzone:

T3A Space » Archive » Interzone 211 Has Mailed Out
It’s the Michael Moorcock special issue – guest editorial, interview by Andrew Hedgecock, extracts from works in progress and a short story – and we hope you enjoy it.

I’m picking mine up next time I’m in Borders.

Tags: Fantasy, Magazines, Scf-Fi

It’s slipstream fiction:

Slipstream (literature) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Slipstream is a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries and doesn’t sit comfortably within the confines of either science fiction/fantasy or mainstream literary fiction.

And here is the post that gained my interest (and for the life of me I can’t remember where I found it from, though it was focusing on this years Readercon. Not that I knew about that either).

theinferior4+1 - Slipstream literature
A Working Canon of Slipstream Writings
Readercon 18, July 2007

The following list was created by the Panelists on the “Slipstream / Fabulation / Magic Realism Canon” Panel before we knew that Fabulation and Magic Realism were being added to the list; neither is considered by any of us to be identical generically to one another or to Slipstream, though overlaps do occur.

<snip>

The Core Canon of Slipstream

1. Collected Fictions (coll 1998), Jorge Luis Borges
2. Invisible Cities (1972, trans 1974), Italo Calvino
3. Little, Big (1981), John Crowley
4. Magic for Beginners (coll 2005), Kelly Link
5. Dhalgren (1974), Samuel R. Delany
6. Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Fiction (coll, 1995), Angela Carter
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, trans 1970), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. The Ægypt Cycle (1987-2007), John Crowley
9. Feeling Very Strange (anth 2006), John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (eds.)
10. The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (coll 2001)
11. Stranger Things Happen (coll 2001), Kelly Link
12. The Lottery and Other Stories (coll 1949), Shirley Jackson
13. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon
14. Conjunctions 39 (anth 2002), Peter Straub (ed.)
15. The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
16. The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka
17. Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf
18. The Castle (1926), Franz Kafka
19. The complete works of Franz Kafka
20. V; (1963), Thomas Pynchon
21. Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter
22. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (anth 2007), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.)
23. The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories [UK title Busy About the Tree of Life] (coll 1988), Pamela Zoline
24. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988, trans 1989), Umberto Eco
25. Sarah Canary (1991), Karen Joy Fowler
26. City of Saints and Madmen (coll 2002), Jeff VanderMeer
27. Interfictions (anth 2007), Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.)

I’ve suddenly gained a whole new reading list and the only I have, thanks to ReaditSwapit.co.uk, is Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.

Tags: reading lists

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books: Stephen King has a shining talent
n short, King’s ability to reflect contemporary US society - and (thanks to his huge fan base) to affect it - is as powerful as any other writer around today. And if that isn’t impressive literature… Well, you tell me.

Actually this post is a pretty good defence of the phenomenon that is Stephen King. I really don’t get why there is so much snobbery around certain types of writing, which is mostly aimed at anything genre related.

I’ve enjoyed most of the Stephen King stuff I’ve read. Some of it didn’t float my boat like Geralds Game, which I must have read when I was 14 so I probably missed some significant meaning. And Dolores Claiborne probably rates as my favourite books ever - at least on the grounds that I have never tired of re-reading it.

I guess it’s the difference between liking French films and watching the new Die Hard. Now don’t get me wrong I love smoked salmon but I’d rather have fish and chips.

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books: Harry Potter’s big con is the prose
A nine-year-old might feel quite pleased with the writing in the Harry Potter books. It’s pretty embarrassing coming from an adult.

There are now over 300 480 540  600comments on this blog post about the literary merits or lack of them in J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series.

You know what I love Harry Potter and it’s written well enough to get the story across and that’s all that matters in then end.

I’m currently making a concerted effort to catch up on my reading, which means I’m trying to get one or two books read a week. I’ll probably burn out soon but until I do I’m quite enjoying it.

I’ve stuck up a list of books on the right so you can see at a glance what I’m reading, what I’ve read, what I’m going to read and what I just couldn’t finish.

I’m also offering a few words of review too and why not. Reviewing is quite challenging. It’s hard not to spoil the plot and without revealing some of story you can’t always explore the book in full. But I quite like sharing my thoughts on what I’ve read and I hope you enjoy reading them. And practice makes perfect.

A good review should take into account what the writer was trying to achieve and how well they achieve it and luckily the ones that I’ve read recently are good examples of their genres hence all the gushing. I genuinely have enjoyed what I’ve read.

The only one that I didn’t was The Wanderer’s Tale, and that was because the style of the writing didn’t allow me in and as I didn’t finish it I haven’t said much about it.

Look for more reviews of the good, the bad and the ugly soon (as long as I’ve managed to finish them – life is too short to force yourself to finish a bad book when there are so many good ones out there.)

Title: Case Histories
Author: Kate Atkinson
Publisher: Black Swan 2005
Price: 7.99

Case Histories is one of those novels that you want to start again as soon as you’ve finished it so you can go back and find out all the bits you’ve missed. Kate Atkinson has interlaced all the lives of the characters so tightly that you don’t see all the connections until she turns over the tapestry and shows you the knots.

From the first three opening chapters, which present the details of three open cases that land at Mr Brodie’s door, Atkinson’s relaxed, warm and straight talking style drags you into the lives of the characters and keeps you needing to know what happened so that you can say ‘case closed’ at the end.

For an ex-army, ex-police and current private detective Jackson Brodie is quite a lovable character, maybe a little soft, but definitely in the British Bumbling Detective mould.

The story flips from one character’s view point to the next all being held together with a connection to Jackson though that is rarely the only connection. As it flips, it sometimes rewinds events so you can see that part of the story from the other side. Atkinson is an excellent storyteller and keeps all the elements moving along even when she seems to be going back to tell the reader something they think they already know.

For all its emotion there is lots of humour that comes from Atkinson’s narration and Brodie’s whit. Though there is one thread that border on the ridiculous and I’d like to have seen it treated more seriously. But that might be because Atkinson is such a good writer that I’d love to read her going darker.

Both moving and tightly packed this is a wonderful novel to read when all the gritty crime novels get too much. I’m itching to get on with the next one to see what web Jackson ends up entangled in next.