Po(sey) Sessions

I never did review Elantris after I was done listening to it on audio. Now that Mr. X is reading it, my interest is renewed. It has been fun hearing him speculate about various outcomes of the book. I started listening to Elantris shortly after I met Mr. X and throughout the experience I continued to recommend the book to him. Brandon Sanderson has created a unique world both inside and outside of the city of Elantris. When I heard Sanderson talking about the book at the LTUE symposium he said that Elantris is essentially a city of zombies. Once of city of power and strength, the inhabitants are now weak, endlessly hungry, and subjected to endless suffering.   Though to call them zombies would not be apparent from the outset, having this as a lenses through which to view the book provides a unique perspective. Because while many in Elantris act like zombies, we are able to hear a story from the inside. Zombie books are always written from the point of view of the human and I ha...

It has been over a year since my interest in science fiction by female authors was peaked. And honestly, I haven’t don as much with it as I would have liked to. Throughout my online exploration certain names tended to come up a lot. Atwood , Willis , Tepper , Tiptree , Norton , and Cherryh .  I know there are tons of other great writers, but these are the ones that came up the most and stuck in my brain. Yet, I failed in following through with this by mostly only reading books by Margaret Atwood, who was already one of my favorite authors.  I read D. A. which was  a really interesting novella by Connie Willis. But these names did stick in my mind, and when I found a book by them in a thrift store I tended to buy it. Also, Andre Norton’s name shows up on the young adult dystopian list a few times.   I feel that female authors bring a unique quality to the science fiction world. They often have more attention to the details of WRITING than often see in science fi...

The struggle with understanding and categorizing dystopia stems from the multiple attempts to define it. There are dictionary definitions and literary definitions, yet it seems that will all the definitions we are left with very little as a single common denominator.   First of all we can say we know that dystopia, in the end, is a bad place. It may not appear to be so at all times, but through control or destruction the world is bad and can now be defined as a dystopia. The definition vary on when and how this bad world is discovered. Some focus on constant destruction and war, other definitions focus on governmental control. Some definition focus on the element of dystopia having to be imagined, while others call Nazi Germany a real life dystopia.   Dystopian literature is gaining momentum, especially in the young adult market, yet no one seems to have a grasp on what words to you use to define, understand, and categorize dystopia.   In some ways it seems l...

Today/yesterday kicked off Tor.com’s Zombie Week , and I have to admit that I am more excited than I expected. Ever since going to the LTUE panel on Zombies I have had a particular interest in exploring the world of these creatures. Combine this with the glorious writing of Carrie Ryan in The Forest of Hands and Teeth and I am verging on being a hardcore zombie fan. On my recent book buying splurge (if you missed it I ordered almost 100 books in a span of a few weeks) I also become the proud owner of a handful of zombie books. With great zombie books coming out by authors like Max Brooks, it seems that the interest in zombies is being pushed out of the fringes into the main stream. The only Max Brooks book I have started so far is World War Z and I have to admit it is pretty amazing. New acquisitions to my zombie library are: Zombie Blondes by Brian James first and foremost has an amazing cover. The book caught my eye previous to me finding it on the Better World Books...

I was first exposed to Sheri S. Tepper when I was searching for female science fiction authors. There was a bit of debate online about the quality of her writing. But after talking to some of the people I trust most, I have come to believe that while some of her work can be hit or miss, overall she is an asset to the science fiction genre.   The first thing I noticed when I began the audio of Grass was how striking the language was. I have criticized science fiction writers for not being diligent enough in their writing process to really craft words together. Many times science fiction authors rely on the ideas of their work to drive the piece rather than the quality of their story telling. Tepper’s telling of Grass is definitely an exception to this. Grass was nominated for a Hugo for best novel in 1990 and was included in Millennium/Gollancz’s Masterwork collection. The novel opens with a vignette of the surface of a planet called Grass. It was sweeping an elegant. I was b...

It will come as no shock that I seem to have inability to be a consistent contributer to the Sunday Salon, or to my own blog in general even.  My reading life has been going moderately well. Even after finishing two books this week, I am still struggling to really get good chunks of reading time in. Life, focus, twitter , there are so many reasons why I don’t curl up in bed with my book night after night. But one of the biggest issues will probably be that I don’t have a nice reading lamp in my room. I am not sure when that became so vitally important, but it did. Another issue is that I have stopped using the library so I don’t have the built in system of the due date to drive me to read.  In order to combat this I am trying to set up a bit of a reading schedule for myself that I hope to stick by. I am only going to go about ten books out, but I am hoping this will keep me a bit more on track than I have been. Do you make a list of books you are going to read and stick ...