swan_tower | Books read, June 2014 (Reply)

This was a terrible, terrible month for reading books. I’m in one of those pits where you start reading things and then quit on them, but too many of them are things I get a hundred or two hundred pages into before I decide to stop. Or else I’m reading things I’m not done with yet, like the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, which I picked up for research; it’s kind of a slog. (And also a study in religion as Stockholm syndrome. Every time she goes on about how God makes her suffer so that she may better know the depths of His love . . . yeah.)

Plus there were copy-edits. Result: the title of this post only barely deserves the plural.

Skull City, Lucius Shepard. Novella, and technically a re-read, but given that I first read it when I was twelve and remembered nothing beyond the quote we put on our TIP shirt, it might as well have been new to me. Re-read this because Shepard passed away recently, and the Locus roundtable discussion made me realize I had encountered his work once upon a time. If this is representative of Shepard’s writing, then he was a deeply weird writer, but also one with some very thoughtful things to say.

Also: I’m tempted to make a project of re-reading all the TIP stories. I still have ‘em; it might make for a fun experience, seeing what I make of them now.

Also also: holy mother of god I can’t believe Roger got away with giving this story to twelve-year-olds. Even if I didn’t know what “fellatio” meant back then, there’s plenty more that’s clear enough. O_O

Shadowboxer, Tricia Sullivan. Read for blurbing purposes.

You all know me. You know what genres I like. So when I tell you that I probably would have read and enjoyed this book if it had no fantasy content whatsoever and was just about a teenaged Dominican girl trying to make it in the world of MMA, you should extrapolate accordingly.

Voyage of the Basilisk, Marie Brennan. Copy-edits don’t count.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.