The Little Dog Laughed

Now I'm reading Insurgent, the sequel to Divergent by Veronica Roth. She takes no prisoners, this one. There's no recap at the beginning; Insurgent starts where Divergent leaves off, and tough luck if you can't remember immediately who's who.

It's a bit of a bewildering read so far, with the characters trying to find a refuge and flailing around with no fixed goals. Feels a bit repetitive at times. Lots of hidden agendas, too.

After being harrowed by the SOE book, I decided on something a little lighter: The Ragged World by Judith Moffett, which is a fixup novel. Currently, one of the characters is entering a highly radioactive zone in order to end his life because he cannot deal with the death of his best friend. Lighter, indeed.

Saturday was a gala book day. We went into a local town that has a Waterstones and the sff secondhand bookstall I found earlier in the month and I bought lots of books. From Waterstones, from the sff stall, from another more generalised stall, and from the charity shops. Finds included a book from the Mistressworks wishlist for less than £1. Yay!

In Waterstones, I patrolled the Science Fiction shelves looking for books by women and not finding many. Finally I picked up Insurgent, the sequel to Divergent, by Veronica Roth. Then I wandered over to the history section looking for Michael Foot's history of SOE, which was mentioned a few times in the book about Vera Atkins and SOE I've been reading recently. In particular, Miss Atkins herself was quoted as describing it as being 'as accurate as the Bible'. But I thought to myself, it won't be there anyway. What are the chances? But there it was, in a shiny Bodley Head edition, just republished this year.

It was £18.99. Ouch. But I was able to fill my stampy card and get £10 off. Phew. Funny how that works, though--you buy twenty pounds worth of books to get the last two stamps on the card, then pay off £10 with the card, so you haven't ACTUALLY paid for the twenty-pounds worth that justified you having the two stamps in the first place.

Ouch again. Moving on from existential financial analysis, these are the books:

SOE: 1940-1946 by M.R.D. (Michael) Foot;
Insurgent by Veronica Roth;
Ice! by Tristan Jones;
Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty;
Mutiny!! Aboard H.M. Armed Transport 'Bounty' in 1789 by R.M. Bowker and Lt. William Bligh;
Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers by Jane Robinson;
The Journal of Nicholas the American by Leigh Kennedy (from Mistressworks wishlist);
The Aliens Among Us by James White;
Telepathist by John Brunner (probably already have a copy but 224 miles away);
Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
and
Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen.

I also bought a non-fiction book from a charity shop but on arriving home I realised a) I already had it and b) it wasn't any good. So that's going straight in the croc box for recycling to another charity shop.

Also when I got home I discovered a proof had arrived from Random House: The Murder Bag by Tony Parsons. What a great thing to come home to--a free book!

Benefits, Carmen Dog and Catseye arrived today. The first is published by Virago, the second by The Women's Press and the third by Puffin.

Shame they didn't arrive yesterday, as I've already embarked on a reread of Mansfield Park. Couldn't find Persuasion. It needed my dad to persuade it out of hiding. Ahem.

Am tired and hot and hot and tired so this will be a perfunctory list from today's trawl of Waterstones and charity shops and the newly-discovered (by me) stall that sells secondhand SFF. Oh yeah!

I only managed to buy one book I already have. Ahem. It will not be listed.

Waterstones:

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (yes, the book everyone's talking about; so sue me);
Race for the South Pole by Roland Huntford (a comparison of the diaries of Scott and Amundsen)
and
The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin.

At some point, you have to stop picking up books in Waterstones. That point is usually when you see the look on your husband's face.

Secondhand SFF stall:

(It was here that the mistake was made)

World's End by Joan D. Vinge;
The Byworlder by Poul Anderson;
Hellflower by George O. Smith;
The Palace of Eternity by Bob Shaw;
The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt;
The Ragged World by Judith Moffett
and
Farthing by Jo Walton (not actually SFF).

Oh how I have missed picking up cheap secondhand paperbacks en masse and taking them home to try out new-to-me authors. Or finding another book by an author I love. Sigh.

The look on the guy's face when I handed him my treasures was delight. I'm guessing not many people wander in and buy a third of the stock.

Other secondhand book stall:

Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths by Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas
and
The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson.

Charity shops:

Nobody's Child by Kate Adie
and
Extra Titanic: The Story of the Disaster in the Newspapers of the Day, from the collections of Eric Caren and Steve Goldman.

Really wanted to send that last one to Monissa, but it's Big and Heavy. So I guess it stays here until she comes visit.

I coulda bin a contender...had I actually submitted anything. Deep in novel edits. Honest. That's why.

Just one more month to go before we publish our Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue. To whet your appetite for destruction, here’s the table of contents.

We went to Waterstones (again!) and then the cinema. Haven't been to the cinema in years--I think the last film we saw was the piss-poor Edge of Darkness. Not to be confused with the fantastic tv series Edge of Darkness. No.

In Waterstones I secured:

Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler;
Arslan by M.J. Engh
and
Longbourne by Jo Baker (a present from husband who saw one of his students reading it).

After seeing and much enjoying Divergent at the cinema yesterday, we picked up Veronica Roth's novel in Asda today. Actually, we each independently picked up a copy, so one had to be put back.

In Waterstones I used all my loyalty points to help pay for the books, and got two more stamps on my stampy card. Time to start saving again.

Lately I've been reading Pat Murphy's The Falling Woman, which was one of the books I bagged on a recent visit to Waterstones. It's told from two different first-person POVs. The first is archaeologist Elizabeth Butler, who's currently working on a dig at a Mayan site, and has the ability to see into the past at twilight. The second POV is Elizabeth's estranged daughter, Diane, who's come in the hope of establishing a relationship with the mother who gave her up to her father's care years before.

So far, this is a very interesting book that focus on the relationship between mother and daughter and their different relationships with the past. Diane wants to understand their own past but Elizabeth is interested in the Mayans she sees living their lives around her, and even more so in the Falling Woman of the title, Zuhuy-kak, a Mayan woman who was sacrificed in a cenote but survived to bring the messages of the gods back to her people. Never before has one of Elizabeth's ghosts interacted with her.

At the same time, it appears possible that Diane has inherited her mother's ability to catch glimpses of the distant past.

There were some points at the beginning of this book--always a tricky time--where I was disappointed. For example, when Elizabeth first meets Zuhuy-kak, there seems to be too much luck in Elizabeth's ability to answer the tests Zuhuy-kak sets her. One lucky guess I could tolerate, but two in succession felt forced. Yet that's such a small complaint. Beginnings are hard; it's often there that the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief is tested.

Am looking forward to finding out what happens next.

I was looking for something in the bedroom when I uncovered a little pile of books that had been buried under some upcycling. Two were by Diana Wynne Jones: The Spellcoats and The Crown of Dalemark. I devoured the first book, thoroughly drawn into the first person narrative and intrigued by the Undying and the weaving of spells and stories into cloth. The second book went more slowly, as I found the third person narrative less engaging, but it was almost as fun as the first one.

One observation I made to myself as I went along is that it takes either a heck of a lot of effort, or a great deal of skill, or perhaps both, to write stories that read so effortlessly.

Apparently these are books #3 and #4 in a series. Ooops. But maybe the first two books will show up in a charity shop someday soon :D. And who needs what I was originally looking for when there are BOOKS?

Not much of a haul lately. One book from the Co-op and three from the local town we visited today. It doesn't have as many charity shops as the other local town we frequent, so there were fewer opportunities. And, overall, far fewer books. I guess they don't read as much there.

The town was pretty dead anyway. Husband commented on the difference between the number of vehicles on the road (large) and the number of people in the streets (small). Plus, although it was mid-afternoon on a Saturday, many shops were shut. Not symptomatic of a thriving metropolis.

I won't list one of the books here, as it may be going out again as a present, but these are the others, with the Co-op book first:

The Gladys Society: A Personal American Journey by Sandi Toksvig;
Keeping It Real by Justina Robson
and
Explorers: A History in Photographs by Richard Sale (large letters) and Madeleine Lewis (small letters). Reduced to a wimpy £3.99.

How great it would have been if photography had been invented much earlier.