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1JannyWurts
Kicking off a new reading year, the first book finished The Caller, Number 3 in Juliet Marillier's Shadowfell series.
4Sakerfalcon
Happy new year! Looking forward to following your reading again this year. I have Ash and silver ready to start soon (I hadn't realised it was published until your mention drew my attention to it!)
6JannyWurts
Yay, welcome here Mereday, Rozax and Narilka - and Sakerfalcon, you are going to love Ash and Sliver, Berg did her usual brilliant, reliably cracking finish.
7reconditereader
I'll be lurking!
10JannyWurts
#7, 8, 9 - Awesome! Thanks.
12imyril
Lurk lurk lurk :) (eventually, there will be so much rustling behind these pot plants you'll have to ask us all to come take a seat where you can see us)
13JannyWurts
Snorting with laughter - thanks for the spot of humor!
This thread is sluggish because of the workload. My finish of The Caller feels so long ago (the end of my stolen reading time, over holidays, before the serious accounting for end of year kicked in.)
A neat wrap to the trilogy, that stayed true to the special snowflake template, but restful in the way that Marillier's works always are.
The next read for the year took a very sharp turn in the opposite direction. Bloodsounder's Arc, vol 1 Scourge of the Betrayer by Jeff Salyards. I enjoyed this book, which is huge, not being a rabid fan of the grit and the grim. What made it outstanding was the choice of protagonists. Picture a young, naiive (somewhat), scribe - educated but wet behind the ears - being hired by what amounts to The Black Company. His plunge into adventure is severe culture shock. But it made the book an edge of the seat read for two reasons:
The witty, black humor dialogue among the company cohorts. The very strange mystery behind their smooth talking captain - who is devious, down and dirty up to something big, and close mouthed about it -with that Tyrion style Jeckyll and Hyde nature where you think, one moment, this guy has a soft heart, and the next, maybe you think he doesn't.
Enter a creepy twist, some hi jinks adventure with plenty of blow by blow action, and the slow shift in the character's perspective as he falls deeper and deeper into the captain's business, and there seems no bottom to the double dealing in sight.
The orchestration of action vs dialogue, and the relationships (often complex) between the characters, and the depth of the unknown layers of this company's past, and its current objectives - and you get a very fast, very engaging read with an astonishingly deft touch of detail, and a backdrop of ordinary people and a thoroughly fleshed out setting. There is a major female character right up there, with splendid opinions and real agency, in high form alongside the raunch language and humor. No stereotypes here.
I will certainly be pursuing the sequel - just as soon as I can plow my desk clear of the ongoing pile of manuscript being ground, shredded, reworked, and whittled down into its final form.
This thread is sluggish because of the workload. My finish of The Caller feels so long ago (the end of my stolen reading time, over holidays, before the serious accounting for end of year kicked in.)
A neat wrap to the trilogy, that stayed true to the special snowflake template, but restful in the way that Marillier's works always are.
The next read for the year took a very sharp turn in the opposite direction. Bloodsounder's Arc, vol 1 Scourge of the Betrayer by Jeff Salyards. I enjoyed this book, which is huge, not being a rabid fan of the grit and the grim. What made it outstanding was the choice of protagonists. Picture a young, naiive (somewhat), scribe - educated but wet behind the ears - being hired by what amounts to The Black Company. His plunge into adventure is severe culture shock. But it made the book an edge of the seat read for two reasons:
The witty, black humor dialogue among the company cohorts. The very strange mystery behind their smooth talking captain - who is devious, down and dirty up to something big, and close mouthed about it -with that Tyrion style Jeckyll and Hyde nature where you think, one moment, this guy has a soft heart, and the next, maybe you think he doesn't.
Enter a creepy twist, some hi jinks adventure with plenty of blow by blow action, and the slow shift in the character's perspective as he falls deeper and deeper into the captain's business, and there seems no bottom to the double dealing in sight.
The orchestration of action vs dialogue, and the relationships (often complex) between the characters, and the depth of the unknown layers of this company's past, and its current objectives - and you get a very fast, very engaging read with an astonishingly deft touch of detail, and a backdrop of ordinary people and a thoroughly fleshed out setting. There is a major female character right up there, with splendid opinions and real agency, in high form alongside the raunch language and humor. No stereotypes here.
I will certainly be pursuing the sequel - just as soon as I can plow my desk clear of the ongoing pile of manuscript being ground, shredded, reworked, and whittled down into its final form.
14Peace2
>13 JannyWurts: Is that a book bullet I'm feeling? I think it might be.
15JannyWurts
Well give it a look. I really enjoyed it. Extremely colorful and fun.
16AHS-Wolfy
>13 JannyWurts: & >14 Peace2: Scourge of the Betrayer is making its way onto my wishlist also. I think it's the mention of The Black Company that did it.
18dovelynnwriter
#13 Ooooh, that one sounds like it could be a lot of fun! Onto the wishlist it goes! ^_^
19Narilka
>13 JannyWurts: That sounds like something I'd enjoy.
20LunaticDruid
>13 JannyWurts: Aaaand added to wishlist...
21JannyWurts
I am a hard customer to please, sometimes - this book was really fun, I think (hope!) you enjoy it too.
22JannyWurts
Latest book, non fiction Managing the Lost Person Incident - read for a course I completed. If you ever imagined lost persons to be 'simple' and searching for them to be straightforward and simple/'just a common sense' approach - this is an eye opener. There is nothing 'simple' either about the problems encountered with specific types of people who become lost or missing - and the extremely dedicated and hard working volunteer teams who assist with such cases with specialized, trained responses as they arise (often teamed with highly trained dogs). There are other books on the subject that are less dry and technical, but if you are curious about the science based approach - this book is considered one of the must-reads on the subject.
23Meredy
>22 JannyWurts: Interesting topic. Does the book include cases where a person is thought to be lost or missing but has in fact disappeared deliberately?
24JannyWurts
Yes - called a bastard search (but the book skates round this with 'bogus search', so as not to 'use a word that maligns ancestry' - the only light passage in the whole thing.
25Meredy
>24 JannyWurts: I don't want to cause a digression here, but I'm curious: does it speak to the ethical question of whether or not to look for someone who, for personal reasons (and not evasion of the law), does not want to be found?
27JannyWurts
The text was written for public safety/serious application of search and rescue - wherein the person (sportsman/woman being only one category) or child or alzhiemers or despondent - was officially reported as missing or lost, as an emergency, by family or the responsible care institution, and addressing the very real, critical period where an appropriate response can mean the difference between survival and death.
Search teams do not go out unless they are called, UNDER whatever local, official jurisdiction covers lost and missing persons.
A bogus search could be, for example, a teen girl having a fight with Mom and failing to return home, or a guy in a snit with his wife off hitting the booze, or even a hunter who walked himself out of the wilderness who was embarrassed to admit he was lost and he hit the bar for a lot of beer without calling home, or a toddler taken off by a relative - but - if the family of the subject delayed, in the case of not knowing - and official response calls in a search team to start redressing the emergency too late, it is a high risk situation, and timing is critical for the subject in trouble.
So the book details methods for responders TO a situation, they are not the ones determining the 'ethic' involved in those cases where the person was party to their own disappearance.
Search teams do not go out unless they are called, UNDER whatever local, official jurisdiction covers lost and missing persons.
A bogus search could be, for example, a teen girl having a fight with Mom and failing to return home, or a guy in a snit with his wife off hitting the booze, or even a hunter who walked himself out of the wilderness who was embarrassed to admit he was lost and he hit the bar for a lot of beer without calling home, or a toddler taken off by a relative - but - if the family of the subject delayed, in the case of not knowing - and official response calls in a search team to start redressing the emergency too late, it is a high risk situation, and timing is critical for the subject in trouble.
So the book details methods for responders TO a situation, they are not the ones determining the 'ethic' involved in those cases where the person was party to their own disappearance.
28JannyWurts
It has been a long, long absence because of deadline pressure, but now that Destiny's Conflict is at last turned in, I can begin to book worm through my HUGE TBR mountain.
While also wrestling short story deadlines #30 and 31, I read Fool's Assassin and Fool's Quest which in typical Robin Hobbs fashion pulled me in hard and would not let go. Besides the even more than usually rough handling of her poor protagonists, I have little to add except I came through heart wrung, predictably in suspense, and now stuck waiting for the final volume of this latest trilogy. Good thing I didn't read these during deadline, the novel would still not be turned in. Her books are still Hot Temptations, carefully reserved for when I have time.
Next up, I turned to non fiction and just finished Heart of A Lion A Lone Cat's Walk Across America by William Stolzenburg Devastating, beautiful, factually accurate, and wrenchingly sad, in that, our human view of apex predators is so wildly out of line with what dedicated biologists are uncovering, truly, about how these animals live, function in our ecosystems, and co-exist in our increasingly crowded and developed world. If anyone has followed me on FB or twitter, they'll know of my efforts to record factual evidence of our Florida Panthers using camera traps - and the love and frustrations of catching wildlife in their natural habitat, to working with land owners and the crazy-making efforts to build bridges of understanding wide enough to just - place a camera to record rare species. So this book was up my alley, and dear to a subject I am working hard over in real life. If anyone ever read Born Free or The Incredible Journey or Gorillas in the Mist, or has a heart big enough to include the wildlife struggling to make it in an increasingly human dominated ecosystem - this is another landmark book I will never forget. I am copying my review of it here, because I don't know (quite) how to append it to the book's page. I did notice I was first to register this title - it deserves note as a great release for 2016.
Review copy:
This is a gorgeously written, factually tracked account of a male mountain lion's journey from the Black Hills to the coast of Connecticut - based in accurate science, with parallel accounts of other cats' journeys in their attempts to disperse and re-colonize their former range. It traces human attitudes towards big cats, both back in American history, and beyond, and clearly illuminates the insane degree of fear mongering that so often, still does, influence our perception and shapes our wildlife policies regarding re-wilding apex predatators.
I was impressed by the accuracy of the science, given I have followed this species' plight as a long time resident of Florida. The fact that the state of California has banned the hunting of these magnificent animals, and uses tranquillizers and not bullets, to remove them from populated areas - and the existence of the cougar living in Griffith Park in LA, this book is a clear call for the redefinition of policy concerning our only native big cat.
The story is beautifully told, clearly written, and cited with proper scholarship. An incredible journey and a call for more enlightened and compassionate policy. Highly recommended!
----
I have a big pile of books on the floor that are screaming temptation - and still, a desk load of work, but at least here's the ice cut and end of a long silence. I'm back.
While also wrestling short story deadlines #30 and 31, I read Fool's Assassin and Fool's Quest which in typical Robin Hobbs fashion pulled me in hard and would not let go. Besides the even more than usually rough handling of her poor protagonists, I have little to add except I came through heart wrung, predictably in suspense, and now stuck waiting for the final volume of this latest trilogy. Good thing I didn't read these during deadline, the novel would still not be turned in. Her books are still Hot Temptations, carefully reserved for when I have time.
Next up, I turned to non fiction and just finished Heart of A Lion A Lone Cat's Walk Across America by William Stolzenburg Devastating, beautiful, factually accurate, and wrenchingly sad, in that, our human view of apex predators is so wildly out of line with what dedicated biologists are uncovering, truly, about how these animals live, function in our ecosystems, and co-exist in our increasingly crowded and developed world. If anyone has followed me on FB or twitter, they'll know of my efforts to record factual evidence of our Florida Panthers using camera traps - and the love and frustrations of catching wildlife in their natural habitat, to working with land owners and the crazy-making efforts to build bridges of understanding wide enough to just - place a camera to record rare species. So this book was up my alley, and dear to a subject I am working hard over in real life. If anyone ever read Born Free or The Incredible Journey or Gorillas in the Mist, or has a heart big enough to include the wildlife struggling to make it in an increasingly human dominated ecosystem - this is another landmark book I will never forget. I am copying my review of it here, because I don't know (quite) how to append it to the book's page. I did notice I was first to register this title - it deserves note as a great release for 2016.
Review copy:
This is a gorgeously written, factually tracked account of a male mountain lion's journey from the Black Hills to the coast of Connecticut - based in accurate science, with parallel accounts of other cats' journeys in their attempts to disperse and re-colonize their former range. It traces human attitudes towards big cats, both back in American history, and beyond, and clearly illuminates the insane degree of fear mongering that so often, still does, influence our perception and shapes our wildlife policies regarding re-wilding apex predatators.
I was impressed by the accuracy of the science, given I have followed this species' plight as a long time resident of Florida. The fact that the state of California has banned the hunting of these magnificent animals, and uses tranquillizers and not bullets, to remove them from populated areas - and the existence of the cougar living in Griffith Park in LA, this book is a clear call for the redefinition of policy concerning our only native big cat.
The story is beautifully told, clearly written, and cited with proper scholarship. An incredible journey and a call for more enlightened and compassionate policy. Highly recommended!
----
I have a big pile of books on the floor that are screaming temptation - and still, a desk load of work, but at least here's the ice cut and end of a long silence. I'm back.
29Peace2
Heart of a lion : a lone cat's walk across America sounds really interesting having just recently read two books by David Attenborough that also focused on wildlife and his work in bringing knowledge and understanding of the world's wildlife to other people through his work in TV.
30Narilka
Looks like you have sparked an interest in the book. It's showing up in a few more libraries now :) And welcome back!
31JannyWurts
Well, that is totally fabulous news - it's a book that needs to take off, since the dearth of accuracy of information regarding these cats perpetuates policies so wretchedly out of line with what needs to be done, and what is healthy for our ecosystems. I have a pretty spectacular video link to how all species recovered, multiplied, and were enriched by just a few wolves being re-introduced to Yellowstone. I could post that if there is interest. The big cats perform the same function, and they are not called 'ghost cats' for nothing.
They prefer to eat their natural prey; they prefer to stay hidden; they prefer to avoid/not confront, people. The scientific evidence is overwhelming.
And Peace2 - definitely familiar with Attenborough's work though we have no TV anymore.
They prefer to eat their natural prey; they prefer to stay hidden; they prefer to avoid/not confront, people. The scientific evidence is overwhelming.
And Peace2 - definitely familiar with Attenborough's work though we have no TV anymore.
32Narilka
I've seen that video on Yellowstone. It's pretty amazing and definitely worth a watch for anyone with any interest at all.
33JannyWurts
Here is the link, then, on the trophic cascade - how the reintroduction of wolves enhanced every aspect of the Yellowstone ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q&feature=youtu.be&utm_source=...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q&feature=youtu.be&utm_source=...
34AHS-Wolfy
>33 JannyWurts: Thanks for the link Janny. I think the best example that I've read in fiction (I don't read a lot of non-fiction) of a changing ecosystem was Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong. About how the Chinese brought new ways of doing things and how this had a devastating effect on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia.
35zjakkelien
>33 JannyWurts: Wow, that's a really cool video! I've always loved wolves, but I didn't know about this...
36JannyWurts
Totally. I saw it and cried.
All the research science we have at our disposal, all the work of folks digging up the facts - and yet, we are still managing our apex predators and meso predators by 1850s policy and blood sport.
Why I liked Heart of Lion so much, it absolutely covered the territory between what actually works, and what people are doing. The gulf between education and ignorance.
If you liked the video, the same site has another about how whales balance the oceans and actually dd work in our favor, massively, regarding the carbon cycle. Worth looking up.
All the research science we have at our disposal, all the work of folks digging up the facts - and yet, we are still managing our apex predators and meso predators by 1850s policy and blood sport.
Why I liked Heart of Lion so much, it absolutely covered the territory between what actually works, and what people are doing. The gulf between education and ignorance.
If you liked the video, the same site has another about how whales balance the oceans and actually dd work in our favor, massively, regarding the carbon cycle. Worth looking up.
37JannyWurts
I have finally finished Kate Elliott's Crossroads trilogy.
38reading_fox
>28 JannyWurts: I somehow missed the great news that DC is finished! Looking forward to release dates!
What did you think of Traitors gate I somehow managed to avoid reviewing this although I'm sure I read it. I think I liked the direction it took, and that it wasn't all happily ever after. I'm going to have to re-read it now (sometime) and review it properly
What did you think of Traitors gate I somehow managed to avoid reviewing this although I'm sure I read it. I think I liked the direction it took, and that it wasn't all happily ever after. I'm going to have to re-read it now (sometime) and review it properly
39JannyWurts
Reading_fox - Yes, Destiny's Conflict is several months turned in, now, and in copy edit. It is probably the most intense ending I've ever done. Wish I could say I took time off at the finish - but couldn't - two short stories due stat (also in the Atheran Universe). One's turned in and through copy edit, and the second is getting polished up for submission, then I will be doing the cover art and interior art for the novel, and with any luck, re-vamping this office, which really really needs a facelift (it's a made over garage).
I finished the Crossroads trilogy so that I could get the chronology for Black Wolves, which will be my next read as soon as I can catch my breath. Then I have some really lovely books in line that I had to set aside as too tempting to manage during the work load. I'll have a little more time to hang out here, too, which I've missed.
I finished the Crossroads trilogy so that I could get the chronology for Black Wolves, which will be my next read as soon as I can catch my breath. Then I have some really lovely books in line that I had to set aside as too tempting to manage during the work load. I'll have a little more time to hang out here, too, which I've missed.
