M.R. Graham's Blog, page 9

8 Best Reads of 2015

Somehow, it has felt like a very long year, and that has been borne out by my reading log. I exceeded my reading goals by quite a bit this year and unearthed some real gems.

Edmund Persuader

What’s it about?

A younger son’s quest to find his place in the world, his doomed loves, and his struggle with faith and conscience.

Why should you read it?

I have to admit, at 1550 pages, it’s a weighty read – quite literally. But the prose is gorgeous, the concepts lofty, the characters rich, the settings flavorful. I would call it moral fiction, and this is a rare case where I mean that as a compliment, as it is genuinely moral, not preachy.

Dreaming Spies

What’s it about?

Oxford, Japan, old books, ninjas, emperors, Sherlock Holmes, and his partner, Mary Russell.

Why should you read it?

In this recommendation, this book stands in for an entire series, which begins with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. I recommend this series right and left, which is a bit dangerous, as it seems to be extremely polarizing. Those who dislike it hate it, apparently because it’s ridiculous to think that a woman might be as clever as Sherlock Holmes. (Competence is the trait of a Mary Sue, you know.)

If you do enjoy pastiche, though, this one is an excellent insight into the thought process behind the deduction. The series swoops through such fabulously-described settings as Japan, India, Palestine, and Morocco, as well as the more familiar environs of London and Sussex. It’s also worth noting that Russell was my first exposure to the concept of the intelligent female protagonist and will forever hold a very special place in my heart.

How to be a Victorian

What’s it about?

Well… how to be a Victorian. It’s a walk through daily life with description of the habits, processes, and objects that would have been familiar to a resident of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Why should you read it?

Incredibly informative, it’s a great comprehensive resource for the historian and writer and provides any number of tantalizing hints to inspire further research.

Collected Folk Tales

What’s it about?

Exactly as the title indicates, it is a collection of folk-tales from around the world.

Why should you read it?

Unlike some collections, this one is very well balanced, representing European, African, Asian, and North and South American cultures. Those that required translation are translated beautifully, in evocative, fluid prose.

And, come on, you know you can’t go wrong with a book that begins “There was a hill that ate people.”

The Case of the Missing Marquess

What’s it about?

Enola, the much, much younger sister of Sherlock Holmes, is left alone when her mother disappears without warning. Threatened with boarding school by her insensitive brothers, she has no choice but to run away.

Why should you read it?

This recommendation also stands in for the entire series. There are six books at present, and the promise of more in the future.

This is marketed as a middle-grade book, though I would call it teen. It’s a series of charming adventures, featuring disguise, code-breaking, ciphers, danger, and a ferociously independent young woman.

Death Cloud

What’s it about?

Fourteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes is removed from boarding school and placed unexpectedly with his aunt and uncle in Farnham, where he befriends a young orphan. But a mysterious dark cloud is killing people, and the plague seems to be spreading!

Why should you read it?

This one also stands in for an entire series. The Young Sherlock series so far boasts eight volumes and a short story, each one tracking a boy’s growth into the man of Watson’s chronicles. These are more adventures than mysteries. There is some clue-finding, but the bulk of each story is a lot of danger, running, fighting, and hiding from bizarre and sinister villains. They’re not too terribly thought-provoking, but they are extremely entertaining.

A Monster’s Coming of Age Story

What’s it about?

Young Babette Varanus is tiny, rich, and bookish, which has always alienated her from the upper echelons of French society. Of course, she also comes from a family of monsters. Let’s proceed now through love, treachery, war, and… vampires.

Why should you read it?

Because it’s an epic. The series is ongoing and promises to span centuries. (Another series. Are you noticing a trend?)

It wasn’t until most of the way through the second book that I realized that I was reading an incredibly unique take on the old vampires vs. werewolves trope. Think that’s trite and overused? So did I, until I started on the Ouroboros Cycle. It’s not often that a book promising different vampires actually delivers.

Also, some of you may have noticed that I have a thing for academic vampires. Hoo, yes.

A Dose of Brimstone

What’s it about?

Demons, an immortal hunter, van Helsings, and a terrifying supernatural drug spreading through the underworld of New York City.

Why should you read it?

One more series! This one begins with A Prescription for Delirium, in which demons have overrun a small town in Texas and Gabriella di Luca and the van Helsing brothers combat the raging madness.

The writing is fresh, the plot gritty, and I absolutely love the characters. The interactions between them are captivating, humorous, and sometimes wrenching. I am very much looking forward to the next volume in the series.

Go grab the Goodreads pages and add them to your reading lists!

Drift – a poem

Becoming light,

in truth, I am falling,

slow and soft like motes of dust.

Downward still,

sometimes I think I am rain,

and I know the earth lies somewhere below.

The books are back!

For a while, I played with Amazon exclusivity, and I concluded that I’d rather have them absolutely everywhere. So here they are! The exclusivity period is up, and everything is back where it belongs. If you’re a Nooker or an iPadian or a Koboite, or if you’ve got a Scribd subscription, you can find my work there now – and, in fact, they have all been slightly updated, correcting for some earlier formatting issues.

The Siren and Versos will be spreading around the internet soon, as well.

The Medium

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Smashwords

Scribd

The Mora

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Smashwords

Scribd

In the Shadow of the Mountains

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Smashwords

Scribd

The Wailing

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Smashwords

Scribd

Home for Christmas – a poem

An excelling beauty,

the hedgerows, snow-cloaked

beneath a sky that never ends,

exulting in all the hues of diamond.

Frost is a thing eternal:

in the effervescent air,

even time is frozen.

And I wonder how I ever left,

and when I shall come home.

Boreal – a poem

The mists of winter creep into my bones

a slow hibernal draught of frosty sleep

refracting shades of crystal, rainbow tones

and drawing dewy dreamers deep and deep.

Like icy ferns unfurling o’er my skin,

the twilight rest of Boreas begin.

The Mage – Preview

As NaNoWriMo progresses, I’d like to share a snippet of The Mage, Book 3 of the Liminality series.

San Antonio, Texas

1985

The teenager in the Mazda’s passenger seat kept her arms tightly folded and the headphones of her Walkman clamped down immovably over her ears. Her mother should have known better, really. You can’t force a fifteen-year-old to move away from all of her friends and expect her to be happy about it.

Somehow, though, that seemed to be exactly what her mother was expecting. She chattered away at the unresponsive girl. “And we’ll be able to go hang out on the Riverwalk,” she was saying, as though the San Antonio Riverwalk was the be-all, end-all reason for moving anywhere. “And we’ll be so much closer to your Aunt Cecilia, and there’s the Alamo, and the culture is just so unique… Kim, are you listening?”

Kim was not listening. She was rolling her thumb across the Walkman’s volume knob so she wouldn’t have to listen.

They followed the big moving truck around Loop 1604 and off into the wilds of San Antonio. It was virtually frontier land, Kim thought. It was tiny for something called a “city”. It would never hold a candle to Houston.

The truck snaked through a tangle of residential streets, beneath a similar tangle of dark, old live oaks. The ground was thick with their powdery, yellow-brown pollen. It lay on sidewalks and rooftops and completely coated any car that had been sitting still too long. It coated the square, gray house that waited where they pulled up, and the unkempt lantanas by the door. It was a ridiculously ugly house, and Kim was pretty sure that opinion had nothing to do with her desire to live somewhere else. It was legitimately awful. Other than small, regular windows, its face was completely featureless. It looked like a prison. Maybe that opinion wasn’t entirely unbiased.

Two big men and a bent-over old one slid out of the cab of the truck and began to unload, with the two muscly ones lifting and carrying and the old one directing. Kim found the room that was meant to be hers and stayed out of the way by sitting on the floor of the closet with her music and a book. It wasn’t even a good book, but it was the only one that had escaped the packing boxes. It was also a library book, and the odds were that Kim was never going to have a chance to return it, now. She had never not returned a library book, before. One more small misery to add to the growing list.

When the men were gone, Kim and her mother unpacked a few boxes, just until they found a pot and two bowls with which to serve their improvised dinner of macaroni and lunch meat.

Two towels and a rolled-up sweatshirt served for blankets and pillows until the bedding could be found.

Some neighbors arrived the next day. One elderly couple brought a blueberry cobbler as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood present. They exchanged phone numbers with Kim’s mom and obtained a detailed description of the family car, including license plate number, so that they could be on guard against trespassers. A young couple brought a bowl of black-eyed peas and a green bean casserole. They repeated the ritual. Lasagna arrived later in the day, borne by a middle-aged couple that seemed to fall almost exactly between the old and the young. Kim was bright and cheerful until everyone was gone, because she didn’t want anyone to think her a morose teenager, even if she actually was one.

When the unpacking was finished, Kim’s mom went to work, and Kim stayed behind with piles and piles of books. She saw to her own homeschooling, which wasn’t exactly legal, but what the authorities didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. It was only for the end of the school year, anyway. She’d be back in high school come fall.

Besides, a young wizard’s education is a uniquely personal affair.

Math and science and history had their places on her shelves, but memorizing facts and formulas was easy for Kim. Magic was a lot more time consuming. The conventional wisdom was that only so much of it could be taught, and the rest had to be discovered in order to stick, and so Kim huddled in her room with a bag of chips and discovered.

The conventional wisdom, in Kim’s opinion, was crap. Her mom would have absolutely turned inside out if anyone had suggested teaching a teenager to drive by sticking her behind the wheel of a car and telling her to have at it, and if there was one thing that had been drilled into her head since birth, it was that there was absolutely nothing more dangerous than magic. It was like teaching a teenager to drive by sticking her in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. Her cousins all got more guidance than she did, she was certain. But then, none of her cousins had mothers all set and lined up to take over North America’s most powerful Circle as soon as the patriarch decided he’d had enough.

Her cousins all had dads, too.

They had been in San Antonio about two weeks when the next-door neighbor got back to town. Kim was helping unload groceries from the trunk when a dark green Lincoln Continental coasted up into the next driveway. Its driver climbed out and ducked into the back seat to retrieve a battered brown suitcase. Then he straightened, shooting upward like a stalk of bamboo, tall and thin and wiry.

Kim gaped. He had to be six and a half feet tall, with his brown fedora pushing him toward seven. The afternoon light fragmented against the sharp angles of his narrow face, almost startlingly white beneath dark hair majestically winged with gray. Piercing, frost-pale eyes regarded her and her scrutiny with mild affront from behind wire-rimmed spectacles. A muscle twitched in his jaw, like a failed attempt at a smile.

He was spectacular. Spectacularly frightening. Sort of like her grandfather, Kim reflected.

“Good afternoon,” he said crisply, raising incredibly long, white fingertips to the brim of his hat. “Ma’am, Miss.”

English, Kim thought, or something like it. The ‘r’ was missing from ‘afternoon’, and ‘ma’am’ lengthened into ‘maahm’.

“Afternoon,” said Kim’s mom. Her fingers dug painfully into Kim’s upper arm and squeezed, pushing her toward the house.

Kim stumbled a step away and stopped. Her mother nudged her again, and she pushed back in irritation.

“Hi,” Kim said brightly. “I’m Kim, and this is my mom, Cindy. We just moved in while you were away.”

“Cynthia Reed,” her mom clarified. She gave Kim another discreet prod.

The man nodded, staring hard at Cynthia. “Daniel Leland,” he replied. “It’s a pleasure.” His sharp gaze traveled to Kim. “I think your mother wants you to go inside, Miss. It is usually best to do as your mother wants.”

Kim felt Cynthia stiffen beside her.

Daniel Leland’s thin lips twitched into an expression a little too sardonic to be called a smile. He locked his car and strode up the sidewalk to his front door, disappearing inside.

Cynthia seized the last remaining grocery bags, shut the trunk, herded her daughter inside, and locked the door.

“Holy beans, Mom,” Kim griped. “What the heck was that? I’m supposed to be polite, but you get to be a complete jerk to that man?”

Cynthia pressed her flat palm to the door and whispered a single word. Kim could feel the power that surged through the house’s walls, its windows, its roof, down into the foundation and the surrounding soil. It felt like caulk, something that was meant to stop up holes.

“That’s not a man,” Cynthia muttered. “Our neighbor is a vampire.”

 

Expect The Mage out some time in 2016. In the mean time, you can start the series with The Medium. It’s still only 99¢ for Kindle.

NanonanonanonanonanonanonanonanoWRIMO!

Forgive me; I cannot take the time out of my mad word rush to write a blog post of any length, so you get a photo, instead.

Behold! The Nano workspace!

That is coffee liqueur. All the writing utensils. Cough drops, just in case. And the ‘encouragement’ (by which I mean motivating stares of disapproval and accusation) of multiple saints.

Back to the book!

Bedtime story – a poem

Eyes are closed for evening

as the stories open,

dreams unfurling like night lilies.

I have breathed their perfume

and am ready to sleep.

Long night – a poem

The sun was late today,

so late, I thought she might have forgot

to set her alarm.

The stars grew concerned,

and the night breezes whispered.

But it turns out she was just sleeping in.

The rain came – a poem

It stampeded like buffalo across the plains

and I heard hooves in the sky

striking fire from flint

and shaking loose the water of the heavens

with terrible fury

and roaring of fearsome throats

until we waded and struggled

in darkness through the flood below.