What I'm Reading Now

As always, I'm reading SF for review. One really excellent book I read for review is a collection of short stories by Theodora Goss, Letters from an Imaginary Country. I won't review it here because I'm reviewing it there, but I recommend it highly.

Books I'm not reviewing for SF outlets:

Joan Austen-Leigh, A Visit to Highbury: Another View of Emma. 

I came across this one on the shelf at our library, saw it was an epistolary novel (my favorite!), as well as being fan-fiction for Emma. I was sold. It's a story told as a series of letters between Mrs. Goddard, who you will remember runs the girl's boarding school in Highbury, the one Harriet attends, and her sister, whom she hasn't seen in seventeen years. Aside from Harriet, there are two romances, a ship captain lost at sea, and a couple of orphans. Just the sort of novel a Jane Austen heroine would have loved, in other words.

Joan Austen-Leigh is descended from one of Jane Austen's brothers, and started out writing fan fiction for a Jane Austen society "magazine," which is to say several mimeographed pages stapled together and distributed at the society meetings. This is, of course, how many writers in the science fiction world got their start, though they were usually writing slash fiction rather than straight romances. Anyway! I liked this one a lot, and am now on the lookout for Austen-Leigh's other books, which our library does not have.

Anne Tyler, Three Days in June

I checked this out of the library some time ago, I think, but I didn't read past the first few pages. I can't remember why. It's a perfectly acceptable Anne Tyler novel -- what my kid calls "family books," which is to say books about families and their lives. Here, the only daughter of a divorced couple is getting married. We follow the events of the three days in June around the marriage -- the day before, the day of, the day after. It's very readable, as all Tyler's books are. I liked the cat. And the ending is nice, if not exactly a surprise.

It's also really short, so you can read it in a few hours. 6/10, if you've never read Tyler, don't start here.

Anne McCaffery, Various Dragonriders of Pern books.  

I loved these when I was in my teens, and my library has several of them, so when I was lately suffering with the kidney stone, I checked a bunch out via e-books and read them straight through. They are what my kid calls mid, not gonna lie, but they held my attention enough that I read I think eight of them before I'd had enough -- Dragonflight, Dragonquest, Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums, The White Dragon, and about half of Renegades of Pern. Oh, and Masterharper of Pern. Seven and a half, I guess that is.

If you have somehow managed to miss these books, they are about a planet, Pern, where every 200 years 'thread,' or a vicious kind of fungus, falls from the sky (crossing through space from another planet, except cold kills it, so don't ask me how). The early colonists used genetic engineering to make a local species, a kind of flying lizard, large enough to ride on, and also it spits flame. So when thread is falling, dragon riders fly out and burn it from the sky. This is science fantasy rather than science fiction, but the whole special boy/girl chosen by the dragons and lauded as a hero thing works well with the soap opera plots. I also liked the Harper Hall parts of the books a lot, as I recall. 

Anyway, if you need something mid about dragons to read, there are a ton of these.