harry potter

Speculative Chic Round Up: Week 3

~ Shara ~ Leave a comment

ancillary-mercy-by-ann-leckie-500x750Greetings, and welcome to week three of shameless self-promotion! Our third week at Speculative Chic  was SUPER BUSY, with three days in a row with two posts instead of one. Why all the craziness? Well, we wanted to get our Hugo Reading project wrapped up before the rockets were handed out on Saturday night (and to that affect, CONGRATS to N.K. Jemisin for her Best Novel win!), and I have to say, it’s been a joy to see all these different bloggers reviewing in one place! But we did MORE than just book reviews, so let’s break it down:

Monday, as usual, was another round of My Favorite Things. Nancy discussed Star Trek Collectibles, Bingeable Books, Animate Cat Rosebushes and Power Armor with Sherry, Lane, Keyes, and Whitney.

Then on Tuesday, Tez managed to nab all kinds of eyeballs with The Culling: Clearing the Clutter of Unwanted Books. We promise: no books were harmed in the making of this post!

Wednesday brought our very first day of duel posts. First, Betsy sat down to review the Nebula-winning and Hugo-nominated Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Then yours truly introduced the Orphan Black Rewatch, which starts in September. Whether you’re watching for the first time or the twentieth, we’d love to have you aboard!

jim-butcher-aeronauts-windlass-cover-530x800Thursday had Nu reminiscing about the past ten years of her writing career and the events that jump-started her path to publication. Then Sharon came by and explained how Jim Butcher finally helped her see the Steampunk light in her review of The Aeronaut’s Windlass.

Finally, on Friday, we learned from Coach Sherry that too much feedback CAN be a bad thing, and then Janicu wrapped up our Hugo reading project with her review of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy. Spoiler alert: it’s a very satisfying end to an awesome trilogy.

What’s on the agenda next week? My Favorite Things returns, of course, and then we’ll discuss portrayals of teens in the apocalypse, debate the pros and cons of Suicide Squad, talk about why Squirrel Girl should be your new favorite superhero, celebrate the return of Harry Potter, and then, if we’re LUCKY, we might gather around the campfire to whisper about Stranger Things.

Won’t you join us?

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One of These Days….

~ Shara ~ 2 Comments

I fantasize that one day, someone will pay me to read for a living. I have all these reading projects I want to embark on in addition to all the other stuff I want to read, and there’s simply not enough time in the day.

But if there were enough time in the day, and ESPECIALLY if someone were paying me to read for a living so that I could embark on these projects, this is what I’d like to do.

1) Re-read the Harry Potter series. I re-watched the movies over Christmas, and it was a lot of fun re-watching with the series’ end informing the scenes. I can only imagine how much fun it will be to do the same with the books.

2) Read Charles de Lint’s Newford series using his recommended reading order. I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, and I’ve got quite a few of the titles. I just need to start!

3) Read the Norton Book of Science Fiction edited by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a BEAST, and I know I won’t like every story, but I think it’ll be well worth the effort.

4) Blame this one on the Writing Excuses podcast and Cherie Priest: I suddenly have a desire to give H.P. Lovecraft another go. I tried reading At The Mountains of Madness but the writing style did me in. However, listening to Writing Excuses episode 10.3, “Lovecraftian Horror” and learning what Lovecraft did and how he did it and how it was effective really has me wanting to track down a “Lovecraft for Beginners” reading list and make my way through it. Problematic the writer definitely is, but his lessons on horror might be quite fascinating.

5) This is an easy one, one I might actually start putting in my rotation: return to my original passion of reading women who write SF. Not just fantasy, but SF in particular. Because women writing SF need more love, and there’s tons of titles I still need to explore.

6) I’m sure there are other reading projects that have taken root in my subconscious, but they’re not rising to the surface at the moment. But even if I could do these, I’d have more than enough to keep me busy, and that doesn’t include the very necessary need to climb Mount TBR and whip it into submission!

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Today’s headline comes from “These Days” by Foo Fighters, from the album Wasted Light. You can hear the song here, and you can blame both Jaime Lee Moyer for using a lyric from this song for her blog post (which is far more interesting than this one, you should read it) and my husband for watching HBO’s first season of Sonic Highways and getting the Foo stuck in my head.

Culture Consumption: December 2014

~ Shara ~ 6 Comments

Ah, 2014 has finally ended, and with that, I say good riddance! At least the stuff I was reading and watching was thoroughly enjoyable, so let’s see where December ended up.

Books

My goal for 2014 was to read 50 books. If you don’t count the novellas/novelettes/short stories, then I fell just shy of that goal. However, if you include those (some of those novellas were pretty hefty!), then my total for the year was 95, which is more on course for what I was reading back in my book blogging days. Still short, but considering the kind of year this has been, quite respectable.

44) Symbiont by Mira Grant
45) Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
46) The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Short Fiction

45) The Ninety-Ninth Bride by Catherine F. King
46) The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind by Kate Hall
47) The Awakened Kingdom by N.K. Jemisin
48) Snakes and Ladders by Seanan McGuire
49) White As a Raven’s Wing by Seanan McGuire

Comics

It utterly amazes me at the number of comics I read every year. Seriously, I added it up, and I read a total of 283 individual issues this year. There’s definitely down from previous years, but the way the issues have piled up is overwhelming, and I still have a very large TBR comic pile. There’s some series that are ending, which is good, and some series I’m pretty close to quitting. That said, I’d like to be more judicious and selective in the my titles for 2015, and keep it to the stuff I’m really into.

Individual Issues:

Batgirl #37
Black Widow #12
Black Widow #13
Ms. Marvel #10
Sex Criminals #8
Sex Criminals #9
Sleepy Hollow #2
The Massive #29

Movies

My husband and I had an epic Harry Potter marathon in December, which was a helluva lot of fun, because it’s been a while since I’ve seen these and it was a lot of fun to go back to the start, knowing how the series ends, and see all the little clues I missed the first time around. I look forward to do the same with the books, but that’s a marathon for a much later time.

Total movies seen this year? 14 total in theaters, and 61 in the comfort of my own home.

In December, we watched the following:

A Christmas Story
Elf
Guardians of the Galaxy
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Home Alone
Palo Alto
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (in theaters)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1 (in theaters)
Total Recall (1990)

Television Shows

We didn’t finish and seasons this month, but we completed a total of 46 seasons of stuff. Damn, that’s a lot of television, but when you consider a nice portion of those to be marathons of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Friday Night Lights, it takes up a good portion, and most of the television we watch is during the fall to summer season, so it’s an episode a week for a limited number of shows. Still, those seasons do add up, don’t they?

That’s it from me! Also, feel free to share whatever 2014 stats you’ve got! How many books? How many movies? What were your favorites? Lay them on me!

Cheers!