N.K Jemisin's The Shadowed Sun

So this is the second book in the Dreamblood series, and I am enjoying it just as much as the first one. It's very Jemisin - world-building that goes above and beyond to create an intricate and varied culture, a many-layered plot and a meaty story that you have to do a bit of work to unpack.

I was reading it on the train last night, and was in a bit where one of the Sharers is in the dream world, when my ear was caught by the young men sitting opposite me. In a wonderful conjunction, one of them was telling the other about his experiences with lucid dreaming and the healing work he had done on himself through that.

Kindle Unlimited

The big question, is whether it is worth £7 a month. I mean, yes, I have been spending more than £7 a month on books, and yes there are eleventy-trillion titles available, apparently, but will it actually save me money?

I think possibly not.

I think Kindle Unlimited is fine if you are happy to take pot-luck, but less so if you have specific books you want to read. I went through my Goodreads "want to read" list, and none of the books on it were available on Kindle Unlimited. Of the authors represented in my "want to read" list, there were a few featured in short stories and anthologies. I don't know how the authors are getting paid for their work in this format, but the fee must be fairly low if they are all keeping their powder dry.

Someone in one of my Goodreads book clubs recommended a few books to me, so I shall read those - they aren't in a genre I typically read - while I'm still on the free trial and then we shall see. But honestly, I'd rather read what I want to read, even if it does mean paying for it.

The Killing Moon

At the beginning of the year I decided that I needed to read more books by non-white authors. I looked at my shelves and saw a shameful lack of representation. Reading N.K Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for Vaginal Fantasy book club was a start... only trouble being I liked those books so much I have moved on to her other books and I am in danger of Nora being my token non-white author.

I am really enjoying The Killing Moon. The world-building is intricate and original and the characters are both flawed and sympathetic. Definitely one for lovers of epic fantasy.

What I'm reading now

I've been bouncing around a bit. As I mentioned in my last post, I'm now a member of three different online book clubs (Felicia Day's Vaginal Fantasy, which is genre romances, the GFY book club which arose from the comments section on gofugyourself.com and the Cook Your Books food bloggers book club). GFY & CYB have a book every other month, while VF has a main and an alt (sometimes two) every month. Which is quite a lot of books on top of other books I want to read!

So at the moment I am reading Kate Atkinson's Life After Life for GFY (review from The Observer here, which contains spoilers) and N.K Jemisin's The Killing Moon just because I want to. Next up is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I have been wanting to read for ages. That should see me through a couple of weeks!

Writers on social media

I was at an event a couple of weeks ago - a food thing, nothing to do with books - and one of the PRs blithely said "oh of course you know about SEO, 250 word posts, links back to important sites, lots of good-quality pictures". I smiled and nodded and then scurried home to find out what it is I am supposed to know about 250 word posts.

Well, turns out shorter posts are less likely to turn up in search rankings. So I need to write longer pieces about books if I want people to read these posts. Well, maybe I do, maybe I don't! And as for pictures... I mean, they do make a post prettier, but I don't take a lot of pictures of books...

So here is Urchin catching up on some bedtime reading.

There must be a lot of lists of things you must know and do, as a blogger, as an author, as a whatever. Based on the people who follow me on twitter, quite a bit of it seems to be a painting-by-numbers thing. There was an author who I followed, and whose blog I read, who insisted that the more followers on twitter the better and that it was just a numbers game. He followed vast numbers of people, and if they didn't follow him back within a certain period, he unfollowed them. His act of following me seems to have got me on some sort of list, because every day now I am followed by a bunch of people whose profiles read "author".

Now, I have a fairly flexible attitude towards following people on twitter. As long as nothing about your profile or recent tweets suggest you are a dickhead with views that will outrage me, I will follow back. But. I am a big believer in the "social" side of social media, and if you ONLY tweet praise for yourself, or ads for your book, I will unfollow you pretty damn quick. And I probably won't be buying your book.

You know what makes me buy a book? Interest and gratitude. I'm in 3 different bookclubs, which all introduce me to books I probably wouldn't have read before but which fall into line with my interests. I also buy books out of gratitude for the entertainment that writers have provided me with on social media. Chuck Wendig: great blogger, great tweeter. Jim C Hines: great blogger, great facebooker. It's not just a numbers game - there has to be some give and take.

400+ words. Take THAT SEO!

Code Name Verity 2

I ended up staying up late to finish it last night. Thoroughly enjoyed! My feeling about what Verity was doing was mostly accurate, but I didn't at all expect the denouement.

It's books like this that make me annoyed when people criticise Young Adult fiction, or say people shouldn't read it. It's a good book! Accessible to teenagers, but not infantilised or preachy or overly romanticised. Why shouldn't adults read that sort of book?

Code Name Verity

I assume everyone had an English teacher who tried to get them to engage with a book by reading a page and then making you guess what was going to happen next?

I've found myself doing that quite a lot with Code Name Verity. I've been reading it for a Goodreads book club, and finding it engrossing, but I keep thinking it is going to go a bit Sarah Waters. Of course, as it is a young adult novel, the chances of it involving explicit lesbian sex are fairly remote.  The Scheherazade aspect, of a young woman spinning a story to save her life - or at least postpone her death - is well done.

I won't say how I think it'll be resolved, but my guess is that the name, Verity, is quite important.

ETA I just got up to a bit where Queenie gets called Scheherazade, so apparently that was a deliberate motif, not just my interpretation.