Daily Snapshot Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Books - Host by Faith Hunter

This is the 3rd book in the series. After finishing the series it really feels like she wrote a single long book and then with a few edits broke it into 3 individual volumes. The advantage to it is that unlike most books in a series there isn't 100 pages of "and this happened in the last book" to have to dig though. She does give some little reminders but they are thrown in as a single sentence or at most a paragraph. I did find it hard to follow at points because of differing states of reality and "dream sequences" that had to be taken as symbolic as opposed to the primary reality of the story.

Overall you are looking at ~1000 pages for the series and the writing is very vivid while not being excruciatingly verbose. Anyone who has read anything by Laurell K. Hamilton will understand that sometimes it can just be too much detail. Spending 2 pages to describe the new character can turn the reader off them instead of endearing them. It is twice as bad if the character is introduced in a suspenseful time and you have broken the reader's drive to see what is going to happen. Much as Tripod asks for in King Kong Ms. Hunter "gets to the monkey".

336 pages

Daily Snapshot Saturday, January 15, 2011

Daily Snapshot Friday, January 14, 2011

Daily Snapshot Thursday, January 13, 2011

I probably haven't taken pictures this week because I have been fighting a cold and been wearing my glasses that tend to glare in the web camera.

Books - Seraphs by Faith Hunter

I read the first book in the series over the Christmas Holiday. The basic word is ~100 years in the future after the Christian style Apocalypse happens. A very large part of the population die and the world has some major shifts in weather. There is also the side effect that there are now Angels (Seraphs) on earth along with Darkness (devils/demons) and neomages and a few other cross breeds.

The story is about Thorn who is a stone mage who was outed in the last book. Over all they are well written and in the family of Female written sci-fi/fantasy books these would not qualify as smut. While there are many relationships and character interaction plays a main role in the plot it is a very solid story that spins through the first book and fully into the second one with less of an end and more of a pause at the finish of each book.

368 pages

Books

I realized that last year I read a large number of books due to the kindle app but that I didn't really have a quantified list of them and I didn't spend any time reflecting on them. Admittedly many of them are not worth reflecting on and were just for the fun of the story there were others that could have benefited from a bit of reflection or at least forcing myself to create my own summary to see what I took away from the books. So you dear reader (of which there is probably only one or two of since I removed this blog from my google buzz) will get to see what stories I have been reading and follow me on my quest to see how many books I read this year.

You also get to see my photo a dayish posts. Those also being for my own amusement and reflection more than providing something substantial to the world at large.