Writtenwyrdd

More books I enjoyed in 2009

Me & My Shadow, a Silver Dragons novel by Katie MacAlister (paranormal romance)

Skin Deep, a Laura Blackstone novel by Mark Del Franco, an urban fantasy set in the same world as his excellent Unfalled Dead and Unquiet Dreams

White Witch, Black Curse, a new installment to the extremely wonderful Rachel Morgan books - dark urban fantasy series by Kim Harrison

On The Edge, a new urban fantasy/paranormal romance by Ilona Andrews.  This feel like a standalone, which is very refreshing in the overwhelmingly long series markets we seem to be having with urban fantasies.

Great books I read in 2009

Jaye Wells asks on her blog today what books did you read this past year that you would recommend for others, such as for holiday purchases?

Well, here's my list, in no particular order.  But I liked all these books a lot.  Most are urban fantasy.

Soulless, by Gail Carriger
Magic Strikes, the third Kate Daniels book by Ilona Andrews
Skinwalker, the first Jane Yellowrock book by Faith Hunter
Salt and Silver, by Anna Katherine
Vampire Sunrise, a Delilah Street novel by Carol Nelson Douglas
Midnight's Daughter, by Dorina Basarab
Child of Fire, Harry Connolly
The Cold Kiss of Death, and The Sweet Scent of Blood, by Suzanne McLeod
Street Magic, by Caitlin Kittredge
Salt & Silver, by Anna Katherine

Are you well enough read?

A few days ago, Charles Gramlich shared a meme: a list of books that the BBC believes everyone should read but which perhaps the average person has only read six. 

You can play along in the comments or repost. 

1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag a few people you think would enjoy sharing similar information about their book interests.


I'm not going to tag anyone, but play along if you want to.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible X (bits...in college)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X (truly an awful book)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X (several times)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (I think so?)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X (One of the funniest books ever written)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X (most of them)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (not sure)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger  (attempted it and quit)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (not sure, maybe in college)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X (being forced to read this was a crime and punishment!)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X (many, many rereads)
34 Emma - Jane Austen  X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen  X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X (in the tbr pile)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X (bleh.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (been meaning to ever since the movie came out)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X (this is the reason I hate Survivor and similar shows.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel  X (I quit in the middle, this was unreadable to me)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X (A wonderful book!)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I think so, but I'm not sure)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X (another great book)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X (I think I read this one, anyhow.)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (the first book I ever checked out of the library...at five)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (tried and quit)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (not sure, I think I read it in college, though)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (in the tbr pile)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X (Some of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I quit early on.  This is almost as bad as attempting War & Peace.)

I've read 47 of these 100 books with a couple more in the to-be-read pile and a couple more that I started and quit reading because I loathed them.  In fact, some of the half-read books are the reason for my distaste for classic literature. 

Forensic references, anyone?

I'm compiling a list of books to consider as references for forensics information.  I'd love to have more like The Book of Poisons, books that are written for the writers out there, but apparently my wish is not going to be granted....unless Ms. Josephine Damian is considering such a project? 

So, here are a handful of books that I was thinking of purchasing with the thought in mind that I want to have some forensics references around for a few projects I have on the back burner.  (And I still haven't found the answer to my question about does a vampire-drained body go into rigor the same way as a non-drained one; I presume yes but would like to know for certain.)

The list:
Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Body Farm, by Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson
Stiff:  The Curious Life of the Human Cadaver, by Mary Roach (and with the most uncompromisingly unfunny attempt at a funny cover I've ever seen, shown below)
Criminalistics: An Introduction to Forensic Science (college text), by Richard Saferstein
And of course or headliner, Forensics for Dummies.  That's got to be the definitive text, right?  Am I right?...*sound of chirping crickets*...

Any suggestions for just a basic encyclopedia for answering writerly questions?  Because with all those paranormals out there with crime scene subplots, we NEED something like that. 

Or perhaps I could start asking, WWABD?  (What Would Anita Blake Do?)  Those early books are remarkably well researched, from my admittedly limited forensics knowledge.  But I do know a teensy bit about police procedure, and that looked well portrayed. 

Interesting book list

China Mieville the author is a Socialist.  It makes his topics interesting.  I just found a list of books he recommends, "Science Fiction and Fantasy Works a Socialist Must Read".  Some sound interesting.  Mr. Mieville is an award winning author whom I had not heard of until recently.  He has a different take on things than the average writer in the genre, reminding me of my first experience of William Gibson years ago.  I guess groundbreaking is a good word.

Magic for Fantasy Writers, Part VIII: A Reading List

Nobody in their right mind except an Eclectic witch would own all of these books.  I own most of them, or did before I got rid of some in order to facilitate my move from San Francisco to Maine a decade ago.  These are all fairly recent vintage, and express the neopagan movement fairly well.  I'll annotate them to give you some idea of how they may be useful to your writerly research.

There are lots of other books out there, but these will give you a good basic info on witchcraft.

Basic witchcraft.

• Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner, by Scott Cunningham.  A wonderful basic primer.  Read this for a general understanding of Wiccan basics for individual witches.  No real history lessons here.  Anything by Scott Cunningham may be useful to you, but really just this one volume stands out IMO.
• To Stir a Magick Cauldron, by Silver Ravenwolf.  Lots of data on witchcraft.  Useful for basic knowledge, but a lot of background info as well.  Probably a good bet for you if you want to understand general witchcraft today.  Her chapter on the pagan community is particularly useful.
• Spiral Dance, by Starhawk.  This gives you an entire magical tradition, as well as a lot of background information.  Worth a read for a basic grounding in ethics and ritual practices.  Starhawk was trained by Victor and Cora Anderson in the Feri tradition, and started the Reclaiming Collective with some other like-minded pagans. 
• Spells & How They Work, Janet Farrar.  Good information on the thought process of spellwork written by one of the founding mothers of modern Wicca.

Background on the Craft.

• Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, by Raymond Buckland.    Gardnerian tradition basics.
• Witches' Bible, by Janet Farrar.  A classic.  Basics of Alexandrian ceremonial magic.  Gives what I call an old timey feel to the information verses the newer, more streamlined American-written books. 
• Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler.  A fantastic collection of interviews that document the neopagan movement in the U.S.  Worth a read in order to give you an understanding of pagan society and politics, as well as how the current styles of paganism developed in the US.
• Encyclopedia of Wicca & Witchcraft, by Raven Grimassi.  A compendium of the various traditions.  More info here than I could possibly relay in this blog. 

Other information.

• The Book of Stones & Metals, and Magical Oils by Moonlight, by Maya Heath.  Besides being a personal friend of mine, Maya brings an anal-retentitive researcher's skills to these topics (and I say that with love.)  I haven't found a more comprehensive list of magical uses for these items.  Scott Cunningham also produced several books that are similar, and which are very good.  These by Maya Heath, however, are much larger, which also dovetails with my preference for encyclopedic reference material. 

The Mythology & The History.

• The Mabinogion.  Celtic mythology.  Very relevant to Feri/Faerie trad, among others.
• A History of Pagan Europe, by Prudence Jones.  I have this one, but haven't read it yet.  Highly recommended by friends as good background info.
• Bullfinch's Mythology, by Thomas Bullfinch.  For a take on the Greek gods and goddesses.
• The Witches' God, and The Witches' Goddess, by Janet & Stewart Farrar.  Pagan perceptions of diety, discussion of the varying gods and goddesses from that perspective. Long incantations to various gods (not that useful for most witches).  Most informative is the discussion of the various archetypes.
• Popul Vuh.  Mayan.  Sacred book of the Mayans.  Not sure which edition (translation) is best.  Useful to figure out their spiritual outlook or to help you develop your own.  Frankly, though, I find it a bit impenetrable because I am not at all steeped in the Central American mythology, despite being born and raised in California.  The stuff just wasn't around when I was a kid.  (You might find An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, by Mary Miller and Karl Taube, of more use to you.)
• The Egyptian Book of the Dead.  Egyptian after death mythology.  Only useful if you want to know their philosophies, or if you are trying to figure out one of your own.

Books on Energy Work/ New Age books/Other stuff.

• Wheels of Life, by Anodea Judith.  Chakra work.  (Chakras are energy centers in the body.)
• Creative Visualization, by Shakti Gawain.  Useful primer for the power of positive thinking, all useful stuff for the honing of focused mind (will).  It's a stripped-down (Westernized) version of her tantric practices. 
• The Pagan Book of Living & Dying, by Starhawk & Macha Nightmare. Rituals and meditations for those dying and those surviving.  Preparing for death the pagan way.
• Black Elk Speaks, by John Niedhart & Black Elk.  A first person narrative of the life of a Lakota Sioux, including his experience at Wounded Knee.
• Sacred Pipe, by Black Elk.  A lot of first-person information regarding the sacred pipe and the spirituality of Black Elk's people.  He gives specific rituals as part of his narrative, not like recepies but as part of his daily routine.

Books I haven't read but which I think will be useful.

• Heka: Magic in Ancient Egypt, The Practices of Ancient Egyptian Ritual &  Magic, by David Rankine.  Exploration of Egyptian magical practices for daily living.
• The Isles of the Many Gods, by David Rankine and Sorita D'Este.  Pagan gods in Celtic lands. 
• Wicca Demystified:  A Guide for Practitioners, Family & Friends, by Bryan Lankford.

Miscellaneous books that might be useful for magical fantasy writers.

• The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne.  Yep it's all about positive thinking making the world go your way, but it is useful for giving you the flavor of a 'magical mindset.'  So to speak.
• The Nature of Personal Reality, A Seth Book, by Jane Roberts.  Yes, it is channeled.  However, I think that this book has a lot to add to the discussion when talking about the mystical world view.  Besides, it  ties together a lot of the New Age stuff floating around, stuff that can infuse your worldbuilding with some interesting flavor.

Dark & Urban Fantasy booklist

y bThis is a repost of my Dark Fantasy reading list.  I've made a few changes since I originally posted it. As the definition is a bit amorphous, I used my best judgment for what is Dark Fantasy and what is Urban Fantasy.  Most overlap.  Some might be called Mythic Fantasy. Feel free to disagree with my assessment.  Dialog helps the definitions along! In alpha order by author.  P.S. - Urban Fantasy titles are in RED.

• Black, Holly - Tithe, Valiant, Ironside (YA but well written)
• Briggs, Patricia - The Mercy Thompson Series (Moon Called, Blood Bound, Iron Kissed)
• Constantine, Storm - Grigori series (Stalking Tender Prey, Scenting Hallowed Blood)
• Constantine, Storm - Wraethlu Chronicles (Wraethlu, Bewitchment of Love & Hate, Enchantments of Fulfillment, etc.)
• de Lindt, Charles - his Newford tales (Memory & Dream, Trader, The Ivory & The Horn, Blue Girl, The Onion Girl, and many, many more.)
• Flewelling, Lyn - Tamir Trilogy (The Bone Doll's Twin, Hidden Warrior, The Oracle's Queen)
• Ford, John M. - the last hot time
• Gaiman, Neil - Neverwhere, American Gods, Anansi Boys
• Green, Simon R. -The Nightside (Hex & The City, Agents of Light & Darkness, Something From the Nightside, Nightingale's Lament)
• Hamilton, Laurell K. - Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (the first 8 books are the best) 
• Hamilton, Laurell K. - Merry Gentry series (Caress of Twilight, Kiss of Shadows, Stroke of Midnight, Mistral's Kiss) (explicit sex, but very dark fantasy)
• Harrison, Kim - Rachel Morgan series (Dead Witch Walking, The Good, The Bad & The Undead, A Fistful of Charms)
• Hodgell, P.C. - Chronicles of the Kencraith (God Stalk, Dark of the Moon, Seekers Mask)
• Hoffman, Wynette A. - Blood is Thicker Than Water (this is a POD, but despite the desperate need for an edit, I really loved this book.)
• Kay, Guy Gavriel - Fionavar Tapestry (The Summer Tree, The Darkest Road, The Wandering Fire) (some would not lump this in DF)
• Klause, Annette Curtis - Blood And Chocolate (fantastic YA book, werewolves)
• Lee, Tanith - Red As Blood (& many of her other books)
• Lovecraft, H.P. - anything (classic)
• Lukyanenko, Sergei - Nightwatch, Daywatch, Evening Watch
• McKinley, Robin - Sunshine (vampire), Deerskin
• Moorcock, Michael- Elric of Melnibone series
• Morehouse, Lyda - Archangel Series (Archangel Protocol, Messiah Node, Apocalypse Array, Fallen Host) (some would label this science fantasy or dystopian)
• Murphy, C.E. - Urban Shaman
• Nix, Garth - Ragwitch
• Nix, Garth - Abhorsen trilogy (Abhorsen, Sabriel, Lirael)
• Parker, K.J. - trilogy: Memory, Pattern, Shadow (a very strange and allegorical work)
• Poe, Edgar Allen - anything (classic)
• Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour (1st of the Mayfair Witches books)
• Rice, Anne - Vampire Lestat (and her others, but this one in particular)
• Sagara , Michelle - The Elantra Chronicles (Cast In Shadow, Cast in Courtlight, Cast In Secret)
• Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (a classic)
• Thurman, Rob - The Caliban Saga (Nightwish, Moonshine, Madhouse) 
• Vande Velde, Vivian - Companions of the Night (YA)
• Vaughn, Carrie - The Kitty series (Kitty & The Midnight Hour, Kitty Takes A Holiday, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty & The Silver Bullet, Long-time Listener, First Time Werewolf)
• Wolfe, Gene - Earth of the New Sun series (Shadow of the Torturer, Claw of the Conciliator, Sword of the Lictor, Citadel of the Autarch, Urth of the New Sun) & most of his other books