Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs was like water after a reading drought! I was half afraid that the series would have lost its charm, but I needn’t have worried. Happy to report that this was an awesome read.
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. This week, we get to spotlight books we plan to read in Spring 2021. Here are my picks — but not choosing by publication date!
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Poetry by Alfred Kreymborg
It’s time for Poetry Friday! And here’s Kreymborg proposing a test for what makes a true “poem”:
Ladislaw the critic
is five feet six inches high,
Which means
that his eyes
are five feet two inches
from the ground,
which means,
if you read him your poem,
and his eyes lift to five feet
and a trifle more than two inches,
what you have done
is Poetry—
Should his eyes remain
at five feet two inches,
you have perpetrated prose,
And do his eyes stoop
—which Heaven forbid!—
the least trifle below
five feet two inches,
you
are an unspeakable adjective.
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Ten Books I Said Nay To
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we have a Spring Cleaning freebie. So here are ten books I recently said Nay! to.
1 / The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh Because it turned out to be Vampire + Melodrama + YA genre, and I’m afraid I’ve outgrown that.
2 / Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse Because it’s an amazing series but only the first book is out yet and I’d rather wait and then binge-read.
3 / Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker Because I was really looking forward to this till I came across a very different perspective.
4 / Soulswift by Megan Bannen Because I got to know it has a tragic end, and I can’t stomach one of those right now.
5 / Snake Eyes by Hillary Monahan Because although it was extremely well written, it was also a very grotesque (for me) tale about reptile humanoids.
6 / The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan Because although it’s rare to find a YA book dealing with disability with such sensitivity, this book seemed relentlessly bleak.
7 / Death in the Stocks by Georgette Heyer Because this turned out to be exceptionally boring with characters that were all very “cold fish”.
8 / Lucy Anne Trotter Series by Anya Wylde Because this didn’t turn out to be as funny as I had hoped, and rather contrived.
9 / Corrag by Susan Fletcher Because it reminded me too much of Outlander, and I’m not sure I want to read something along similar lines at the moment.
10 / Planetfall series by Emma Newman Because I really liked the premise but other readers have warned it’s not a read for pandemic times.
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we spotlight our ten favorite funny books. In no order of priority, here they are!
Tamsyn Muir is better known for her Gideon the Ninth, winner of the 2020 for Best First Novel. Princess Floralinda & the Forty-Flight Tower is a novella in a very different universe, and is just absolutely wonderful.
A witch has locked up Princess Floralinda on the 40th floor of a tower. Floralinda now just has to sit there patiently till a prince comes along to rescue her. Except to do that, he has to battle out a monster on each of the 39 intervening floors, starting with the diamond-scaled dragon on Flight One. Floralinda agrees to wait.
And waits. And waits …
It’s been a while since I read any contemporary YA, think the last one may have been Thirteen Reasons Why and Some Boys Do. So, I took up Karen M. McManu’s One of Us is Lying with some trepidation. It came highly recommended in last week’s Top 10 Tuesday posts. And it was actually quite good.
Simon’s been running a gossip app in high school, and has made a lot of enemies because most of that gossip is perfectly true. Ouch! Then Simon and 4 other classmates get called to detention over somebody else’s prank, and Simon ends up dead. Who killed Simon, and what secrets had Simon discovered that he needed silencing?
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The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.
The Plot:
Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.
“SHOPMAN: “You may have your choice — penny plain or twopence coloured.”
SOLEMN SMALL BOY: “Penny plain, please. It’s better value for the money.”
Penny Plain by O. Douglas was a cozy, charming find (thanks to Elisabeth’s recommendation from last year). It’s set in the small town of Priorsford in Scotland, in the 1920s just after WWI.
Young Jean Jardine, barely twenty four, has been taking care of her three younger brothers since a long time. The Jardines have lived on meager means since their parents passed away, but they are an optimistic, good-hearted lot. There’s young rascal Mhor and his dog Peter, Jock who detests sentimentality because he’s at that teenage of life, David who got a scholarship to Oxford and just wants to improve things for his sister. They make do with what they have, possessing a secret of happiness that certainly the rich don’t. Oh, and they read lot, and quote Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott and lots of wonderful poetry.