It has recently come to my attention that I really like fantasy books. Last summer, I demolished Deborah Harkness’ entire ALL SOULS TRILOGY and Nnedi Okorafor’s WHO FEARS DEATH in three months. Some people might not think that’s a lot of books, but for me, that’s a lot of books. I devoured the first two…
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Book Review: The Windup Girl by Paolo Baciagalupi
A dystopian future where genetically-modified food is ever-present. Where the rising tides of climate change have permanently altered human landscapes and agriculture. Where corporations and governments use biological warfare to enslave and oppress. Where political webs are woven and unwoven every day, with millions of lives hanging in the balance. Am I describing the Seeds…
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Book Review: THE SNOW LEOPARD by Peter Matthiessen, and THE GLASS BEAD GAME by Herman Hesse
It must have been an act of supreme universal goodness that delivered each of these books into my hands at differently similar times when I needed them for differently similar reasons. The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen I half-borrowed, half-stole from my sister almost two years ago when I was re-embarking on a journey I began almost…
Read MoreBook Review: “The Awakening of David Rose” by Daryl Rothman
In 2013, I met a friend. His name was Daryl. We met at a writing conference, and he told me he was (unsurprisingly) writing a book. Several, actually. He was editing one, a young adult fantasy novel, and was pitching that, along with an adult literary fiction novel, at the conference. He seemed cool. We traded…
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Book Review: “H Is For Hawk” by Helen Macdonald
“H is for Hawk” is currently causing an uproar in the British literary world, achieving mountains of acclaim from critics and fellow writers on both sides of the pond. I first found out about it through BrainPickings, a weekly digest of assembled blog posts that thematically explores famous thinkers and works through the use of quotes, relevant…
Read MoreBook Review: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “The First And Last Time I’ll Talk About Veganism”. In the post I vaguely promised that I would not be expounding frequently (or ever again) about veganism, at least not on this blog. This book review is a narrow dodge of that promise: I’m not…
Read MoreBook Review: “Broken Homes and Gardens” by Rebecca Kelley
After a few months of not reading much, you could say I’m going on a bit of a bender. With harvest season long over, my recovery period complete, and the third book in the Seeds trilogy finally finished, I have at last had some time to come up for a breather and do some reading.…
Read MoreBook Review: “These Broken Worlds” A Mini-Kosalogy
Last summer, a group of writers I am friends with got together to form a new kind of publishing house called Kosa Press. Their tagline is “Rethinking Publishing One Universe At A Time.” Formed by a group of people with a shared love of science fiction and fantasy books, as well as flash and short…
Read MoreBook Review: “The Vintner’s Daughter” by Kristen Harnisch
Last week I blogged about attending the 2015 Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City. I met so many fantastic agents, editors, and writers there, some of whom I hope will be contacts for years to come. One of the most astounding connections I made was with author Kristen Harnisch, who lectured at a session…
Read MoreBook Review: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
It’s been a long time since I read a science fiction novel–hell, any novel–that disturbed me in quite the way Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly did. Forget science fiction. This is literature. This is one of those books that proves that genre fiction can be as real, hard-hitting, and thought-provoking as literary fiction, any day of…
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The Z-Axis 