Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 27
May 15, 2015
July 2014 Reading Log
Fiction: I finally started to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke this month, but ran out of steam, so it’s still not finished. I state that here so I will be ashamed and go back to it, even though to date (May 2015), I still have not. I bought the book when it came out, in hardcover, and because the hardcover is ginormous I could only read it at home. Yes, I know that now there is an e-book. I am stubborn. I bought the hardcover and I am going to read it that way.
Prisoner b...
May 8, 2015
June 2014 Reading Log
A note here – I’ve mostly been listing nonfiction books in the month I started reading them, and combining my thoughts from throughout the time I was actually reading it. But I actually spent months reading some of these nonfiction books.
Fiction: Lessons After Dark by Isabel Cooper was much more a traditional historical romance than its predecessor, No Proper Lady, and for that reason I enjoyed it a lot less.
Nonfiction: They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by DeAnne Bla...
May 1, 2015
May 2014 Reading Log
Fiction: The Knights of Breton Court by Maurice Broaddus (three volumes in this edition) could be described (and I think was, somewhere) as King Arthur meets The Wire. It’s brilliant and original, but I tend to find Arthuriana depressing in general because of the way the sequence ends, and this book adds the hopelessness of grinding poverty and endemic crime to that. I was not in a good place to be reading this particular book when I did, but did it anyway because I was preparing for a WisCon...
April 24, 2015
April 2014 Reading Log
Hooray, now I’m only a year behind!
Fiction: Emilie and the Hollow World by Martha Wells was a lot of fun, with a spunky heroine, interesting nonhumans, and lots of steampunk. Wells is one of my all-time favorite fantasy authors; this is her first novel specifically aimed at young adults.
Country Heaven by Ava Miles is a contemporary romance about a country singer and a cook. I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the Midwestern heroine’s love of the movie Gone With the Wind and the idea that...
April 17, 2015
March 2014 Reading Log
Fiction: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (galley) – I have known the author online for many years, though we’ve only met in person a few times, briefly. I loved this. Straight up loved it. And since now it’s been out a while, you can see from various reviews and award nominations that many others loved it as well, so it’s not just me. It’s rare to find a fantasy in which the hero is not constantly cleaving people with swords. I felt an emotional connection to the protagonist almost im...
April 10, 2015
February 2014 Reading Log
Fiction: The Marketplace (Book One of The Marketplace Series) by Laura Antoniou – this was a freebie of a well-known book about dominance and submission. I’d read it back when it came out, but didn’t remember much. Anyway, Submission is not my kink, but reading about it in this book is interesting in that it feels like science fiction to me: I’m reading about a culture that is alien to me, and trying to understand the associated emotions of the characters, but I don’t have all the necessary…s...
April 3, 2015
Reading Log, September-October 2013
I haven’t posted anything substantive in this blog in a really long time! Sorry about that.
I haven’t been doing a lot of writing, but as usual when not writing much, I have been reading, and I’ve been logging that reading, after a fashion. I’ve decided to post my off-the-cuff commentaries in manageable chunks For Your Pleasure. These posts are going to have a mixture of fiction, nonfiction, and fanfiction.
September 2013
Fiction: Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik, latest in the Temeraire serie...
February 2, 2015
Book Posts!
I haven’t done a roundup of my work for Heroes and Heartbreakers and The Criminal Element lately, so here is a collection of my recent posts.
First Look: Lauren Gallagher’s Razor Wire, an intense lesbian romance set on an Okinawan military base; the story begins after one of the protagonists has been raped by a superior officer.
Family Issues and Finding Love in Janice Kay Johnson’s One Frosty Night: this was a slightly unusual book for Johnson, in that there’s an underlying possibly-murder mys...
January 9, 2015
Arisia 2015 Schedule
January 16-19, I’ll be attending Arisia in Boston.
Here’s where you can find me at the convention:
Orgasmatron: The Erotic & Not So Erotic in SF/F
Sat. 10:00 pm, Marina 2
Not every SF/F story fades to black when the sexy times start. Let’s talk about our favorite erotic SF/F stories and some that just AREN’T RIGHT.
Jo Vanderhooft [mod.], Connie Wilkins, N.K. Jemisin, Victoria Janssen, Tegan Mannino
The Arisia Mega Fan-Casting Panel
Sun. 2:30 pm, Marina 4
Believe it or not, not every great book or com...
November 21, 2014
Philcon 2014 Schedule
Here’s where you can find me at Philcon this year.
Sat 5:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Three
The Capaldi Report: A New Who
Victoria Janssen (mod), Gordon Linzner, Deborah Stanish, Rebecca Robare, Christine Norris, Gail Z. Martin
With the first season of Peter Capaldi as the new Doctor concluded and fandom awaiting the Doctor Who Christmas special, what has worked and what has not? Has this new “alien” Doctor worked out well? How has Moffat’s new season helped or hurt the arrival of the new Time Lord?...
