Fiction read (July - December 2019)

This is the second half (July through December) of my 2019 reading list -- the first half may be found here. As usual, I'm not including my non-fiction reading & research, mostly because I've gotten so good at "gutting" those texts that page counts are pretty irrelevant. At least with the fiction. I paid pretty good attention to every page.

 So, without further ado:
Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword, 200 pg.
Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions, 150 pg
Poul & Karen Anderson, The Unicorn Trade, 250 pg.

Glen Cook, The Swordbearer, 250 pg.
Paul Edwin Zimmer & Jon DeCles, Blood of the Colyn Muir, 250 pg.
Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Misenchanted Sword, 250 pg
Michael Moorcock, Elric of Melnibone and Other Stories, 200 pg.

Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons, 350 pg.
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, 400 pg.
Trudi Canavan, The Black Magician, 400 pg.
Karen Miller, The Innocent Mage, 600 pg.
T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone, 200 pg.
Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish, 300 pg.

Jeff VanderMeer, City of Saints and Madmen, 250 pg.
Jeff VanderMeer, Borne, 300 pg.

Samuel R. Delaney, Tales of Nevèrÿon, 350 pg.
Samuel R. Delaney, Neveryóna, 450 pg

Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu, 300 pg.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 300 pg.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, 200 pg

Peter S. Beagle, The Innkeeper's Song, 350 pg.
Peter S. Beagle, Tamsin, 300 pg.
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn, 250 pg.
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey, 150 pg
Peter S. Beagle, The Overneath, 200 pg.
Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air, 300 pg.

SAGAS
Völsunga saga, ed. by Wright, 100 pg.
The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, edited by C. Tolkien, 100 pg.

Final stats: 7,700 pages of reading over 183 days, or just over 41 pages per day. That's quite a bit less from the first half of the year; then again, I've been pretty research heavy these last two months, so it's not unexpected. 

All told, I've read 49 novels and short story collections for the year. Good for a PhD in literature, or no? Honestly, I have no idea, but I do work constantly, so no guilt!

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 25, 2020 at 8:48 PM

    Not good! Excellent! Makes me regret that I never did a reading list... oh, well. - Suzanne

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin...
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall...
Read more

NEW POETS OF RUM-RAM-RUF: Zach Weinersmith & Boulet

Image
In the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult. Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a w...
Read more