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May 11, 2016

Comments

I've always been a bit of a Hambly fan. She's got a bit of a love for "younger woman/much older man" romances, but she's generally got a strong style, excellent vocabulary, and strong imagery.

The magic system she uses in a number of her books (or variants there of) is rather good. It strikes an excellent balance between explainable (and limitable), fantastical, and evocative.

Given when a lot of her work was published, she was a bit ahead of her time in a lot of ways.

Just to add: Wouldn't call her award winning (although some of her books are very good), but she was definitely forging her own path and writing some solid stuff.

Patricia McKillip's Kingfisher, because I've never met an incarnation of Parsifal I didn't want to kick in the pants.

Given that I'll normally mindlessly consume anything with McKillip's name on it, this warning is appreciated.

creepy baby doll heads (see the book cover image for cuckoo song) always make me think of the Brothers Quay.

Their stuff is like some kind of echt German Expressionist nightmare, set in Miss Havisham's parlor or maybe some broken-down Appalachian shack that nobody has lived in for 100 years, as acted by broken toys and bits of hardware whose original purpose you don't, and probably don't want to, know.

Safe for work, probably not safe for kids.

I'm interested in hearing how you like Linesman; I enjoyed it.

I enjoy Hamby, but her classic Dark trilogy the most. Even her return to the world a decade ago wasn't as bright for me. I really should try out her Benjamin January novels; I've been reading and enjoying more mysteries after avoiding them for so long.

I'm more like Mr Dr, in that I often stick with books rather than abandon them, though I'm better about bailing out if it's 100 pages of slow now.

I've been enjoying the Unfogged Tooze book; the introduction's a little stiff, but the chapters are zippy. (It's not at all science fiction--it's a look at WWI and the interwar period--it's meeting my occasional craving to study.)

I've started a binge reread of the complete Malazan Book of the Fallen series, this time in order. Wikipedia says that's something just over 3.3M words.

On a tangent, my ongoing project to replace the massive collection of paperbacks accumulated over most of 50 years with epubs is approaching the 300-title mark. The wife and I are getting to the point where we are at least entertaining the notion of downsizing the house, and if that's to happen a lot of the physical books will have to go.

Michael, do you know if the Malazan ebook is the way to go here? I would love to sink into a montrous tome like that.

I'm doing my reread by individual ebooks, if just for no other reason than I can stick the current one in my back pocket on the way out the door, etc. The big question about any ebook is how good a job the publisher did producing it, and I haven't looked at Tor's big omnibus version to see if they were careful.

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