It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? (07/02/12)

This Week I’m Reading:

Or rather, this is what I intend to read this week. Last week, no sooner had I posted, several library holds became available. This week is still fall-out from that. ;) (Review of Ready Player One coming up this week.)

Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman & Mark Buckingham (Illustrator)

The winter isn’t ending. Nobody knows why.

And Odd has run away from home, even though he can barely walk and has to use a crutch.

Out in the forest he encounters a bear, a fox, and an eagle – three creatures with a strange story to tell.

Now Odd is faced with a stranger journey than he had ever imagined.

A journey to save Asgard, City of the Norse Gods, from the Frost Giants who have invaded it.

It’s going to take a very special kind of boy to defeat the most dangerous of all the Frost Giants and rescue the mighty Gods. Someone cheerful and infuriating and clever.

Someone just like Odd… (Goodreads)

Impulse check-out when I was looking for Norse mythology.

Hippolyte’s Island: An Illustrated Novel by Barbara Hodgson

In search of a new adventure, Hippolyte Webb, quixotic spirit, modern-day explorer, and natural historian, sets his sights on the Auroras, a group of tiny islands in the middle of the South Atlantic. His destination wouldn’t be so unusual, except that these islands were last spotted almost two hundred years ago. Equipped with a centuries-old map, an inadequate sailboat, and an advance payment for a book about his quest, Hippolyte embarks on an unforgettable voyage, not just through unfamiliar seas but through the uncharted territory of his own mind and heart. This new novel by the author of The Sensualist and The Tattooed Map–lavishly illustrated with over forty illustrations and a fold-out map–is an enigmatic tale bridging the space that lies between what we believe and what we know. (Goodreads)

Another impulse check-out. I was drawn to the bird on the cover.

Short Story of the Week:

“Faerie Food” by Kat Otis and/or
“An Experimental Excursion in Artificially Amplifying Armoured Animalia” by by Jimmy Grist

The Usual:

A poem, some Poetic Etta, and a chapter of A Clash of Kings.