30 Days of Books Meme - Day 2

Day 02 - A book or series you wish more people were reading and talking about.

Richelle Mead's Dark Swan series. An overwhelming amount of attention is being focused on her Vampire Academy series (it was just optioned for a movie.) And it's easy to forget she writes other stuff. She's not just a "teen" author. Dark Swan is only on its second book right now, but it's a very smart and exciting urban fantasy series - and this is from someone who is very picky about his urban fantasy. It's got your typical female monster hunter protagonist with her typical romantic entanglements with the men she hunts, but it's good. Reminds me of what Anita Blake was like in the early days before it became a gangbang porn... and Richelle can write a really good sex scene, let there be no doubt!

( The prompts... )

30 Days of Books Meme - Day 3

Day 03 - The best book you've read in the last 12 months.

I'd have to say my favorite thus far has been Trader by Charles De Lint. I've read "better" books in terms of literary value in that time, whatever that even means. But Trader is the one that's stuck with me the most. It's about a successful, yet lonely middle aged guitar builder whose body and identity get switched with that of a petty swindler who begins to hijack his life. I think the setting has a lot to do with it. He uses the fictional city of Newford in a lot of his novels and its neighborhoods seem either improbably wonderful or improbably evil for a contemporary North American city. Until you realize that it's actually a fantasy world that merely looks like a contemporary city. The action of Trader, at least the part that takes place in Newford, feels very epic even if it's only taking place in a radius of a few square miles. There are a ton of viewpoint characters for what is a very direct story about two different men, but the various subplots are just as absorbing as the main plot. My favorite character was Zeffy, the struggling folk singer thrown into the whole mess and struggling to figure it out. I think she's meant as the surrogate character for the reader, but she's just so memorable. The single mother coming to terms with her own lesbianism while searching for her runaway teenage daughter was also very compelling. It's a book with a lot going on and it's all beautiful.

( The prompts... )

Systematic update

As far as I can tell www.indyplanet.com is back up again and running normally. So if you want to purchase a copy of Systematic you should be safe to do so now. If you run into any problems with the site please let me know. Sorry for all the delays and inconvenience.