A perfectly competent example of a subgenre I'm bored with

I'm not going to list all the books I brought home from World Fantasy, because I don't intend to keep all of them.

It isn't meant as an insult. Normally I fly to WFC, and that necessitates strict limitations on what I bring home. This time we drove, though, and so I grabbed copies of things I knew I would never read, because I can (and will) donate them to the library.

The thing is, "I'll never read this" isn't necessarily a judgment of quality. We did the traditional thing of reading the opening page out loud, and I described one of the books from my bag as "a perfectly competent example of a subgenre I'm bored with." Other people still enjoy it, and that's fine; more power to them. Or take the Pathfinder novels I received: I didn't even bother with the opening page, because I know I'm not interested in the first place. But somebody at the library book sale might very well snatch it up.

If I really thought a given book was bad, I wouldn't even donate it to the library. Like approximately 93% of the con attendees, I dumped one book on the swap table, and thought "good riddance." I won't name and shame the author, but it was self-published and rampagingly full of the stalest cliches, including one that I find offensive. I'm not inflicting that on the library.

So I won't list all the books I brought home, because I don't want to imply a major criticism when I don't keep them. But there were some really good-looking ones in there (including Guardian of the Dead! Which was on my wish list!), so look for those to show up in my "books read" posts later.

The DWJ Project: Castle in the Air

I remember picking this book up when it hit the shelves, and being delighted when I saw that it was a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle.

I also remember being really, really confused as to how it could possibly be a sequel. For more than half the book, the only visible connection is a couple of passing references to Ingary. (There's much more than that going on, of course, but it doesn't become obvious until fairly late.)

For that first half or so, the real connection is more a matter of style. Just as Howl's Moving Castle played around a bit with fairy-tale tropes -- eldest of three, setting out to seek one's fortune, etc -- Castle in the Air plays around with tropes from the Arabian Nights. Abdullah is a very different character from Sophie, and his conflict is likewise different; the story is more centrally about him solving his problem (and dealing with a larger one in the process), rather than Sophie solving a larger problem (and getting her own resolved in the process). But there's a similar feel to the two stories, and I'm quite fond of Castle in the Air, if not so fond as I am of the original.

On to the spoilers!

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House of Many Ways next, to finish off the Howl-related stuff.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Two: My Colleagues

Continuing the post-WFC theme: I don't exactly work with anybody, per se -- writing being a fairly solitary task and all -- but man, my fellow writers are pretty damn cool people.

Sure, not all of them; some are boring blowhards or unrepentant jerks. But the percentage of them with whom I can have cool conversations is remarkably high. It's a function of the job, really: writers in general, and sf/f writers in particular, are prone to knowing random nifty things, and "random nifty things" is one of my favorite things to talk about. As mrissa and alecaustin and zellandyne and I were commenting at lunch on Sunday, we don't do the small talk thing very well; introduce us to somebody new, and if we get our way, within five minutes we'll be riffing on archaeology or exoplanets or historical methods of smallpox vaccination.

I may go months at a time without talking to any of them in person, but I look forward to those occasions when we all get together.