 |
| via Pinterest |
Or, will Alex
ever stop whining about her first world problems?*
I’ve decided
that they’re two types of stories—the ones that show you how you want to write,
and the ones that show you how you don’t want to write. Not that anything I’ve
read in the past couple of months has been outright terrible. Everything has
been good, decent, or okay. And that’s the problem. I’m ready for something
like The Monstrumologist or The Reapers Are the Angels. Something
that makes me want to cry because I didn’t come up with the idea first.
Through all
the good-to-okay books I’ve read since fall semester started, one thing that
most of them had in common has stuck with me. None of them are unexpected. It’s not so much a question
of plot or character development but some weird, impossible to define
ingredient—that bit of whatever-it-is that makes a story seem new and
unfamiliar, even if the plot’s actually been done ten billion times before. I
don’t expect each book I read to have that, but when it’s missing, I notice.
In the meantime,
I’ve been reading a bunch of short stories on Tor.com. Some of them are better
than others, but they’re all just the right length for reading in between
classes.
That
Game We Played During the War
by Carrie Vaughn
Modern day
fantasy of two prisoners of war who meet to finish the game they started years
before. I ended up loving the concept a lot more than the story itself (mostly
because of the length—I’d love to see this as a book). Still well-written and
emotional.
The
Night Cyclist
by Stephen Graham Jones
This one didn’t
scare me. At all. Bicyclist vampires are still a cool idea, though.
Men
Who Wish to Drown
by Elizabeth Famma
The best
atmosphere out of these three, plus it’s about mermaids and whaling (two of my favorite
things), so I can’t complain. The narrator’s voice is also wonderfully lemony:
“As long as you have known me, I have been
Grandfather Henry. But when I met my wife, Martha, I was still Resolved, a name
that since our wedding day I have only signed to legal documents. No man was
permitted to call me Resolved, because none could accuse me of any such virtue." A
man after my own heart.
What have you
guys been reading lately?
*Not likely.
