Fiction log - April 2012

Fiction books
Bennett Cerf, Roy McKie. Bennett Cerf's Book of Riddles
Marianne de Pierres. Code Noir
Marianne de Pierres. Crash Deluxe
Marianne de Pierres. Nylon Angel
Phyllis Ann Karr. The Idylls of the Queen
Anthony Price. Our Man in Camelot
Brandon Sanderson. The Way of Kings

In progress
Murray Leinster. The Forgotten Planet

Non-fiction books
Declan Donnellan. The Actor and the Target

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

( short, screen, and stage )

( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Verlyn Flieger. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology

Five Things Make a Post

1. I went to Swancon 2012 (Doomcon) last month. I have not yet given up on writing a proper post about that.

2. What I've Been Reading Lately: The Idylls of the Queen, by Phyllis Ann Karr, is a murder mystery set in the court of King Arthur. One of the Knights of the Round Table drops dead at a dinner hosted by Queen Guinevere, a grieving kinsman accuses Guinevere, and it's up to Sir Kay to figure out who really did it and why. In the process of uncovering the murderer's motive, he also solves an earlier murder that everybody thought had been solved already. One of the big strengths of the book is the well-drawn and faceted characters. Which is no mean feat: my enduring impression of the Morte d'Arthur is of a succession of arbitrarily strange events that often left me wondering what on earth any of the people involved thought they were doing; this book offers a fairly convincing set of answers. And Kay's traditional reputation for cowardice and boorishness is here largely due to an entirely understandable tendency to roll his eyes at the ridiculous scrapes his fellow knights always get into when they go questing. I was also particularly impressed by Karr's version of Mordred.

3. I know there's at least one person on my friendslist who'd like to see a picture of Blue Beetle and Booster Gold.

4. Likewise, there's at least one person on my friendslist who does those exchanges where you create an illustration inspired by someone else's fic, or a fic inspired by someone else's illustration, so I thought I'd point this out: in the IF Cover Stories minicomp, artists are being invited to offer images which will be used to inspire interactive fiction games.

5. I wrote the first 4 of these things two weeks ago, put it aside until I thought of a 5th, and my brain promptly checked it off as written. (Almost the same thing as "posted", right?) It should therefore be noted that the art deadline for Cover Stories, mentioned in point 4, is... um... today. Whoops. This is obviously why I usually put off writing posts until just before I post them.