I am reading The Serpent Sea, the second of Martha Wells' tales of the Raksura (the first is The Cloud Roads). It's set in a fabulously fantastic world, with floating islands and a multiplicity of sapient races, all of which have widely varying biologies and social structures. And it's about identity and family: both the ones you're born with and the ones you make. It has adventures and mysteries, sex and fighting, beauty and horror.
SGA Fans please note: if you have a fondness for the competent loner who doesn't know he needs a family, and isn't quite sure what to do with it when he gets one; or, by contrast, the researcher and theorist who is forced to become a soldier through no choice of his own; or the woman leading her people through strength, force of personality, and a bit of guile--well, I suspect you might like these novels a great deal.
I'm just saying.
You can find links to the books on her site--and as of last week, there was a promo sale ongoing, with Cloud Roads free and Baen's ebook of The Serpent Sea going for $6.
Found on Tumblr, posted by a YA author:
if you use coupon code F3Y9V4J at BN.com, you’ll get 50% off your entire purchase of teen books! and teen books are awesome, no? :D
(p.s. orders of $25 or more qualify for free shipping, and this coupon is valid until 1/12/12.
Kindle deal of the day:
3 books by Dava Sobel @ excellent prices -
Longitude
for 99 cents,
A More Perfect Heaven for $1.99 and
Galileo's Daughter
for 99 cents.
Link.
So I am 20 pages into
To the Lighthouse
and, man, I don't know if I can make it through this whole book. I'm so fucking lost. I know this book is in English, but words are going right in my head and out the other without comprehension occurring in the middle. I have read Faulkner! WHY CAN'T I DO THIS.
...or the woman leading her people through strength, force of personality, and a bit of guile
I love Martha Wells. And characters with "a bit of guile" are one of her specialties. Or a lot of guile.
WHY CAN'T I DO THIS.
Because the minutiae of life are not very interesting?
t Not a Virginia Woolf fan
I guess this is why Pix suggested getting the annotated edition?
Is there a Classics comic book version?
Or wait, nevermind, that was for Lolita.
By the way, this is for my 2012 Readers' Choice challenge.
The final list is:
Crime and Punishment
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Lolita
(Vladimir Nabokov)
Midnight’s Children
(Salman Rushdie)
The Master and Margarita
(Mikhail Bulgakov)
Middlemarch
(George Eliot)
Never Let Me Go
(Kazuo Ishiguro)
Oryx and Crake
(Margaret Atwood)
A Prayer for Owen Meany
(John Irving)
The Sense of an Ending
(Julian Barnes)
The Thirteenth Tale
(Diane Setterfield)
To The Lighthouse
(Virginia Woolf)
War and Peace
(Leo Tolstoy)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
Oh yay! I saw this on your list but wasn't on a device I could type easily enough on to make a compelling argument for you to read it. I love that book!
