Book Roundup, April 2009
May. 3rd, 2009 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaI am thoroughly behind on my bookblogging, so I'm going to do a quick roundup and then hopefully I'll get myself caught up with full-fledged entries later.
New Fiction:
* Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson. Already blogged this one, hurrah.
* Delicious, by Sherry Thomas. Victorian romance with lots of food descriptions. Fun, but the ending was a bit too pat.
* Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang. SF/F short stories, very good. They tended toward the 'idea fiction' end of the spectrum, so how much I liked each story correlated with how cool I thought the idea was, which means that my favorites were the one about linguistics and the one about alchemy-and-golems steampunk.
* Love Marriage, by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Contemporary fiction about Tamil families, marriages, and history in America and Canada. Good, but my preference for genre over literary fiction made the ending seem weak to me -- though I doubt someone with more literary tastes than me would agree.
New Nonfiction:
* All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown. Memoir abouta bookish and amusingly cynical agnostic kid growing up in an ashram in India. Grim and funny by turns.
* Food Matters, by Mark Bittman. Another food politics book. More practical and less preachy, which I liked, though kind of more-of-the-same. (Kindle version.)
Periodical Literature:
* Cooks Illustrated, both the recent issue and the "Make-Ahead Meals" special. I love the idea for making individual pot pies in disposable aluminum loaf pans to freeze and cook later; pot pie is a favorite dinner for me, but the time it takes to make means they're restricted to weekend fare, but if I could make a bunch on a Sunday and freeze them, I could use them as quick weeknight dinners.
Rereads:
* Guards, Guards, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo and The Last Elephant, by Terry Pratchett. Guards-series reread; one of my favorite subseries, thanks in large part to my huge fondness for the characters: Angua and Vimes especially, but also Vetinari, Carrot, Detritus, Littlebottom, and even the minor characters like Dorfl, Reg Shoe and Constable Visit.
* The Tightwad Gazette, Volume One, by Amy Dacyczyn. Confirms my prior opinion that it's got some very useful ideas scattered amongst some very screwball ones. (Although I suspect that which is which for who varies quite a bit.)
New Fiction:
* Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson. Already blogged this one, hurrah.
* Delicious, by Sherry Thomas. Victorian romance with lots of food descriptions. Fun, but the ending was a bit too pat.
* Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang. SF/F short stories, very good. They tended toward the 'idea fiction' end of the spectrum, so how much I liked each story correlated with how cool I thought the idea was, which means that my favorites were the one about linguistics and the one about alchemy-and-golems steampunk.
* Love Marriage, by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Contemporary fiction about Tamil families, marriages, and history in America and Canada. Good, but my preference for genre over literary fiction made the ending seem weak to me -- though I doubt someone with more literary tastes than me would agree.
New Nonfiction:
* All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown. Memoir abouta bookish and amusingly cynical agnostic kid growing up in an ashram in India. Grim and funny by turns.
* Food Matters, by Mark Bittman. Another food politics book. More practical and less preachy, which I liked, though kind of more-of-the-same. (Kindle version.)
Periodical Literature:
* Cooks Illustrated, both the recent issue and the "Make-Ahead Meals" special. I love the idea for making individual pot pies in disposable aluminum loaf pans to freeze and cook later; pot pie is a favorite dinner for me, but the time it takes to make means they're restricted to weekend fare, but if I could make a bunch on a Sunday and freeze them, I could use them as quick weeknight dinners.
Rereads:
* Guards, Guards, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo and The Last Elephant, by Terry Pratchett. Guards-series reread; one of my favorite subseries, thanks in large part to my huge fondness for the characters: Angua and Vimes especially, but also Vetinari, Carrot, Detritus, Littlebottom, and even the minor characters like Dorfl, Reg Shoe and Constable Visit.
* The Tightwad Gazette, Volume One, by Amy Dacyczyn. Confirms my prior opinion that it's got some very useful ideas scattered amongst some very screwball ones. (Although I suspect that which is which for who varies quite a bit.)
