Happy Super Bowl Sunday! Before the day gets super-crazy with our upcoming annual Super Bowl Party, I thought I’d go ahead and post my January stats for 2015. As always, if you want to discuss any of these, just say so in the comments.
Books
1) Low Midnight by Carrie Vaughn
2) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
3) Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
4) My Real Children by Jo Walton
Short Fiction
None in January
Comics
25 individual issues read in January, but the TBR pile for comics is HUGE. There’s a lot I need to catch up on.
Annihilator #1
Annihilator #2
Annihilator #3
Annihilator #4
Coffin Hill #12
Coffin Hill #13
Coffin Hill #14
Copperhead #4
Gotham By Midnight #1
Lazarus #13
Low #3
Low #4
Low #5
Ody-C #1
Operation S.I.N. #1
Shadow Show #1
Sleepy Hollow #3
Supreme Blue Rose #4
Supreme Blue Rose #5
The Massive #30
The Walking Dead #135
Wolf Moon #1
Wytches #1
Wytches #2
Wytches #3
Movies
* = repeat viewing
Batman Begins*
Divergent
Draft Day
Into The Woods (In theaters)
The Dark Knight*
The Dark Knight Rises*
Television Shows
A note with television: these are the shows I completed in the month of January, not a list of everything on-going that I’m still watching.
American Horror Story: Freak Show
Boardwalk Empire, Season 5
Galavant, Season 1
Homeland, Season 4
Penny Dreadful, Season 1
That’s it from me! Also, feel free to share whatever 2015 stats you’ve got! How many books? How many movies? What were your favorites? Lay them on me!
Cheers!
Calico Writes 
The only book that you read this month that I have also read is My Real Children. I thought it was a cool concept and basically enjoyed it, but it was not a favorite. I am really appreciating, though, that Jo Walton is taking chances as a writer and doing new and different things all the time. I am currently 40% through The Just City and am enjoying it very much.
Speaking of Jo Walton, do you follow her on LJ? She had a really cool blog post a couple days ago about mourning people who died centuries ago. Link here: http://papersky.livejournal.com/643103.html
My stats for this month are as follows:
Books read:
1. The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. 3.5 stars. Read for my local book club. This was a monster of a book and took me most of December to read. I enjoyed it, but felt it was over-reliant on crisis and ruin, followed by a rebuilding of fortunes, only to have a crisis hit again. I swear it must have gone through that pattern 6 or 7 times over the course of the book. There is also some mighty unpleasant rape and mention of rape in the book, used to drive the plot and characterization. So, I have mixed feelings.
2. The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, by Zen Cho. 4 stars. Novella. Historical Romance, not SFF despite the author. Available for free online. This was a really delightful novella. It’s in 1st person POV, and the voice is wonderful and makes the whole book.
3. Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett. 4 stars. For Mark Reads. This is my favorite Pratchett so far.
4. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil. 4 stars. Non-fiction. Read for my UU bookclub. Book 1/6 for my non-fiction goal this year. It was a really interesting book. I am not sure I buy all of the author’s conclusions, but they are well-argued and pretty convincing. His central premise is that we will achieve strong AI in the next decade or so that will pass the Turing test, and that humans will expand their consciousness by incorporating strong AI into our biologic systems, making humans dramatically different than they are now.
5. The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu. 4 stars. I am glad I read this and I enjoyed it, but it perhaps does not live up to all the hype.
Short fiction:
1. Christmas Eve at the Purple Owl Cafe, by Cora Buhlert. 2 stars. This is a self-published author whose blog I have been following and I decided to read one of her short stories. It unfortunately just did not do it for me.
Re-reads
1. Uhura’s Song, by Janet Kagan. A Star Trek tie-in novel. 4 stars. I have not read it in over twenty years. It was a favorite book back when I first read it. It’s still good, but not quite as wonderful as it was. 😦
2. Magic Steps, by Tamora Pierce. 4 stars. For Mark Reads.
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I don’t read her blog, but I’ve been meaning to add it to my list, so thanks for that reminder!
I liked MY REAL CHILDREN quite a lot…. I was afraid it was going to be too obvious in terms of THIS world is good and THIS world is bad, but it got more complex by the end, and I appreciated that. I haven’t gotten my hands on THE JUST CITY. It doesn’t speak to me like MY REAL CHILDREN did, but I may get my hands on it next year.
The Liu is in my TBR pile. I’m trying to keep my expectations in check, so thanks for that. 🙂
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