Daily Reads: 27 January 2015

It’s been a slow reading week, and I’m still busy with The Just City by Jo Walton and Sister Sister by Rachel Zadok. The one downside to moving back to Cape Town and studying/job hunting/enjoying being back in Cape Town is that it’s not easy getting used to having a ton of things to do other than read and blog. But it feels good to be busy, as long as I have a to-do list to stop my brain wandering 🙂 And I rounded up a couple of great articles for today’s post:

Francine Prose warns us that they’re watching you read – Kobo recently released an analysis of trends in ebook reading, based on data gleaned from reading devices. You can read more about it at the Guardian, but the gist of it is that many readers don’t actually finish acclaimed bestsellers like Goldfinch or Twelve Years a Slave (although they’re still bestsellers). Prose considers the implications of this and what it might mean for the future of publishing. In the process, she throws out a couple of ideas that would look good in an sf novel (“Will it ever happen that someone can be convicted of a crime because of a passage that he is found to have read, many times, on his e-book?”).

Take a moment to consider the crucial role editors play in bringing you the books you love by reading “Stet by Me: Thoughts on Editing Fiction” (discovered via Aerogramme Writer’s Studio on Facebook). This amusing, honest article describes the delicate but mostly thankless job of getting books from authors to readers.

Not that it would downplay the rather more harrowing work of the author. Kameron Hurley’s recent blog post about working on her upcoming novel Empire Ascendant, depicts the editing process from her POV.

Now, after all that heavy reading, a list! Hurley shares a couple of upcoming sff titles she insists you should be pre-ordering. And I trust her judgement 🙂

Happy reading!

Daily Reads helps me organise my online reading and share my favourite posts with you. If you know of any good SF/F and other literary articles, link to it in the comments 🙂

Photography for this post is courtesy of Ruth Smith. You can view or buy her work here, or contact her at photobunny24@gmail.com.

Cover Art Teasers: new books by Miéville & Pratchett

Today I found two exciting cover art reveals for upcoming releases. The first was for Railsea, China Miéville’s weird (obviously) take on Moby Dick. The second was Dodger by Terry Pratchett – a book I hadn’t heard about until now. They’re both children’s/YA novels, and although I don’t read much in that category, I’ll read pretty much anything that these two write, so I can’t wait to get a hold of their latest works.

For now, I’ll just have to gaze at the covers and try to be patient. Here is the Macmillan cover for Railsea:

Synopsis from Goodreads:

On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life than traveling the endless rails of the railsea–even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train, at first it’s a welcome distraction. But what Sham finds in the derelict—a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible—leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

From China Miéville comes a novel for readers of all ages, a gripping and brilliantly imagined take on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick that confirms his status as “the most original and talented voice to appear in several years.” (Science Fiction Chronicle)

Personally, I prefer the Random House cover, which has been out for a while:

Nevertheless I’d like copies of both if I can get them. Railsea is due for publication on 15 May 2012 by Random House, and on 24 May 2012 by Macmillan.

 

Here’s the cover for Dodger:

Synopsis from Goodreads:

A storm. Rain-lashed city streets. A flash of lightning. A scruffy lad sees a girl leap desperately from a horse-drawn carriage, in a vain attempt to escape her captors. Can the lad stand by and let her be caught again? Of course not, because he’s …Dodger.

Short and… a bit vague, but who cares? It’s Pratchett 🙂 I like the somewhat arrogant tagline. This is not a Discworld novel, but is set in Victorian London. Dodger is due for publication on 25 September 2012 by HarperCollins.