Tag Archives: preorders

Wishlist Wednesday

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Welcome to Wishlist Wednesday!

The concept is to post about one book from our wish lists that we can’t wait to read. Want to play? Here’s how:

  • Follow Pen to Paper as host of the meme.
  • Do a post about one book from your wishlist and why you want to read it.
  • Add your blog to the linky at the bottom of the post at Pen to Paper.
  • Put a link back to Pen to Paper somewhere in your post.
  • Visit the other blogs and enjoy!

My Wishlist Wednesday book is:

 Curtsies & Conspiracies (Finishing School, #2)

Curtsies & Conspiracies (Finishing School: Book the Second) by Gail Carriger

I was so happy to see Gail Carriger’s post this week announcing that book 2 in her Finishing School series is now available for pre-order! Sadly, we still have a while to wait until the book is released in November, but it’s never too early to break out the teapots in anticipation!

From Goodreads:

Sophronia’s first year at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality has certainly been rousing! For one thing, finishing school is training her to be a spy (won’t Mumsy be surprised?). Furthermore, Sophronia got mixed up in an intrigue over a stolen device and had a cheese pie thrown at her in a most horrid display of poor manners.

Now, as she sneaks around the dirigible school, eavesdropping on the teachers’ quarters and making clandestine climbs to the ship’s boiler room, she learns that there may be more to a school trip to London than is apparent at first. A conspiracy is afoot–one with dire implications for both supernaturals and humans. Sophronia must rely on her training to discover who is behind the dangerous plot-and survive the London Season with a full dance card.

In this sequel to bestselling author Gail Carriger’s YA debut Etiquette & Espionage, class is back in session with more petticoats and poison, tea trays and treason. Gail’s distinctive voice, signature humor, and lush steampunk setting are sure to be the height of fashion this season.

Why do I want to read this?

I became an instant fan of Gail Carriger and her unique fictional worlds from the very first page of Soulless, book one in the unforgettable Parasol Protectorate series. In her new young adult series, Gail takes her steampunk/supernatural Victorian world and inserts one precocious teen with an undeniable talent for trouble and intrigue. I enjoyed Etiquette & Espionage, book one in the Finishing School series (my review is here), although I felt that I’d like to see main character Sophronia move from more childish antics into young womanhood. I’m hoping that as the books in the series progress, we’ll see Sophronia’s development, both as a young lady of manners as well as a first-rate intelligencer, much as we saw Harry Potter grow and mature in each book and each year at Hogwarts.

I was also tickled to learn that book three, while still in the works and not due until sometime in 2014, will have the magnificent title Waistcoats & Weaponry. Fabulous.

Quick note to Wishlist Wednesday bloggers: Come on back to Bookshelf Fantasies for Flashback Friday! Join me in celebrating the older gems hidden away on our bookshelves. See the introductory post for more details, and come back this Friday to add your flashback favorites!

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Authors On My Auto-Buy List

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fireworks2Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is:

Top Ten Authors on My Auto-Buy List

According to the Top Ten Tuesday hosts, this list is “no questions asked..you love this author so much that no matter what they wrote next, you’d buy regardless of genre or subject matter.”

A tough call, and I’m afraid I don’t actually have ten. So here are my certain four and my follow up group of six with an asterisk:

Authors whose works I will always buy, no matter what:

1) Mary Doria Russell: Author of The Sparrow — which appears on every list of favorite books that I ever write — as well as four other novels. Her topics have ranged from Jesuits in space to Italian Jews during World War II to the Wild West, but no matter the topic, her writing is beautiful and her novels always fascinate me in ways that I just never expect.

2) Diana Gabaldon: Granted, everything she writes is related to the world of Outlander, which I love madly. Whatever comes next, and after that, and after that, I’ll read.

3) Christopher Moore: Just cracks me up, whatever the topic. How can you go wrong with an author who tackles King Lear, Jesus, giant lizards, and talking fruit bats? No questions asked, I will absolutely read whatever he writes next… and the beauty of his writing is that it’ll always be something different and completely off the wall.

4) Gail Carriger: I fell in love with Gail Carriger’s steampunk, supernatural-saturated vision of Victorian England, and loved her Parasol Protectorate series. I’ve read the first book in her new Finishing School series, and will gladly dive in when she launches her Prudence series as well.

The asterisk list: Basically, I will pretty much read whatever these wonderful authors write next… but I might have a condition or two:

5) George R. R. Martin: I feel like this is a pretty sure bet, given that the next two big novels he writes should be volumes six and seven in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. However, if he decides to go in a completely different direction, I’m not sure that I’ll necessarily follow… although given how much I admire his writing, it’s most likely that I’d give it a try.

6) Stephen King: I usually love whatever I read by Stephen King… but I’m not always ready to dive into horror. So I can’t say I’ll always buy whatever Stephen King writes, but it’s a sure thing that I’ll at least consider it.

7) J. K. Rowling: This one’s tough. I have, so far, read everything JKR has written. Huge Harry Potter fan, but I didn’t actually care for The Casual Vacancy very much. I’ll be interested to see what she writes next, and I’ll definitely read whatever it is… but this “auto-buy” placement may not last long if her novels continue in the vein of The Casual Vacancy.

8) Jim Butcher: So far, I have read all of Jim Butcher’s novels. I love the Dresden Files series, and really loved Codex Alera as well. So yes, Jim Butcher is on auto-buy for me right now… but I hope he branches out and creates new worlds soon, too.

9) Susanna Kearsley: I haven’t read all of her books yet, so this one feels like a bit of a cheat. Still, having read three of Susanna Kearsley’s lovely books in the past year, and with her upcoming release, The Firebird, on pre-order, I think it’s safe to say that she’ll be on my auto-buy list for the foreseeable future.

10) I’ve saved number 10 for a trio of young adult writers. I haven’t read everything already written by these three, but what I’ve read I’ve loved. I may or may not go back and read all of these authors’ previously published works, but I can guarantee you that whatever John Green, Libba Bray, and David Levithan write next, I will absolutely read.

As always, as soon as I hit “publish”, I’m sure I’ll remember a handful of others I should have included. But for now, that’s my auto-buy list. What authors are on yours?

Fairies on the brain

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November can’t come soon enough.

For a brief period in my youth, which at the time felt like an eternity, I took piano lessons. These lessons were not successful; the lack of success most likely attributable to my lack of talent or my avoidance of practice time, take your pick.

Each week, I’d show up for my lesson at my teacher’s house and sit on the piano bench, waiting for her to stop chatting with my mother. Those five minutes or so of waiting were always my favorite part of the lesson, because… the wall next to the piano was filled with floor to ceiling bookshelves. Right at eye level was the fairy shelf — my piano teacher had what seemed to me a HUGE collection of the color-coded fairy books. The Blue Fairy Book, the Red Fairy Book… as an adult, I’ve learned that there are twelve volumes in all (including lilac! who knew?), collected and published by Scottish scholar and anthropologist Andrew Lang.

These books fascinated me. The covers were lovely, and I enjoyed just looking at them, perhaps touching the spines with a finger or two. I wasn’t ever actually allowed to take them home with me, but my mother, a full-fledged booklover herself, would take me to the library and help me find whichever pink or blue or rose book of fairies that had caught my eye.

I loved how involved, mysterious, and dark the stories could be. I was fascinated by the contrast to the “prettified” versions of fairy tales that were so much more familiar, thanks to Disney and about a thousand or so picture book versions of pretty princesses, handsome princes, and magical kingdoms. I got a secret thrill from discovering just how gross some of the fairy tales truly could be — I seem to recall people baked into pies and thrown into fires, body parts hacked off, iron spikes (boy, does that sound like a horror movie description or what?).

Perfect for horror fans

To be fair, I must admit that I did love the enchantments and romance of the fairy tales as well, and never stopped rooting for a good Happily Ever After.

While I eventually grew out of my obsession with fairy tales, they’ve always retained a special little corner of my heart. I still enjoy picking up a nicely illustrated collection or reading a new translation.

For now, I won’t even go into all the myriad fairy tale retellings that I’ve read and enjoyed over the years… another topic for another day. I will, however, give a quick shout-out to a collection that I found weird and very entertaining, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer and featuring forty new takes on classic fairy tales, written by an amazing array of authors including Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Joyce Carol Oates, and more.

Perhaps my childhood experiences with fairy tales and my ongoing fascination with them explain why I found the discovery of an upcoming volume quite so exciting. I just happened to stumble across a listing on Amazon for Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version, due out in November… and written by Philip Pullman! New Brothers Grimm! Written by the author of The Golden Compass! Brilliant!

(Excuse all the exclamation points. My, but I am being a tad exuberant about this.)

Can. Not. Wait. My preorder has been placed. I know what I’ll be reading in November. Who else is in?

I pre-ordered The Casual Vacancy. I’m just not sure I want to read it.

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Let’s be honest, shall we? If you came across this description of a soon-to-be-released book, would you want to read it?

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town’s council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

(book description lifted from the nice people at Amazon)

Sounds okay, but it wouldn’t rise to the top of my to-read pile (which I swear grows a few inches taller every time my back is turned, but that’s another story for another day). I tend toward the dark, the weird, the magical or mysterious, the slightly off-kilter in my must-reads. A story about small town politics? Well, maybe when I have nothing else to do… and when I’ve run out of Stephen King or Christopher Moore to fill in the slow moments.

BUT… and it’s a very big but (ha! I can hear my 9-year-old saying, “Mom! You just said ‘big butt’!”), this is no ordinary, run-of-the-mill tale of life in a charming English town. This is The Casual Vacancy, the debut adult novel by J.K. Rowling! Changes the picture a bit, doesn’t it?

According to Amazon’s stats as of today, The Casual Vacancy is currently #223 in their sales ranking, with still two months to go until its release date in late September. If this wasn’t a book by J. K. Rowling but rather by some unknown author, I’d imagine that the preorders on this would be non-existent. BUT (again with the big but…) this is the queen of bestsellers, the creator of Harry Potter! Who doesn’t want to read whatever she writes next?

I can only imagine the conversations between J. K. and her agent and her publisher. “Well done, you’ve finished the most successful book series in the history of the universe! What are you going to do next?” “Ummmm….”

I suppose it would have been easiest for J. K. to coast for a bit, write more tales set in the Potter ‘verse. C’mon, don’t we all want to know more about Neville? That Teddy Lupin seems like an interesting guy, right?

And too, she doesn’t actually have to do anything for the rest  of her life, and she’ll still be more or less a gazillionaire forever, thanks to Harry.

It takes a certain amount of courage to go off in a new direction, to say to her legions of fans, “Hey, I know you lot want more wizards and magic — but I’m over it. Moving on, here!” And no matter what she writes next, there’s certain to be an intense amount of scrutiny and incredibly high expectations. The schadenfreude crowd would love, I’m sure, to be able to say, “Oh, J. K. Rowling? One-trick pony. She has nothing else to say after Harry Potter.”

So, onward to The Casual Vacancy. I wonder — is this a story she was dying to tell? Did she have a sudden burst of inspiration, see whole new worlds opening up before her? Has she always wanted to explore small-town English politics?

Or, perhaps, is The Casual Vacancy just a first tentative step toward moving into a post-Harry Potter writing life? Get that first book out there, like throwing a bone to a hungry dog, let all the people salivating over her next work see that she’s capable of writing something outside the HP world. If The Casual Vacancy is released to big fanfare and the world reads it, shrugs its collective shoulders, and realizes that J. K. Rowling is a novelist who will be around for a while writing lots of different books, then maybe the pressure will be off.

Who knows, maybe it’s the next book after The Casual Vacancy that ‘s the one that she’s just dying to write, and The Casual Vacancy is just a test balloon to get us all to back off and ease up on the expectations.

As for me, I’m sure I will read it. I love Harry Potter, world without end, and I’m willing to give J. K. the benefit the doubt, even if it means reading a book about Muggles.

Although it would definitely be cool if a dementor or two showed up in Pagford.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

What about you? Are you planning to read The Casual Vacancy?