There wasn’t a weekly roundup last Friday because I was away in the countryside, so I’m condensing the past two weeks into today’s roundup. Enjoy 🙂
1. Definitely want to start off by congratulating Caitlin from Realms Of My Mind on reaching her third blogaversary! Caitlin was one of the first bloggers I starting reading regularly when I was dipping my own toes into the book community myself. The fact I’m still consistently reading her posts two years later is testament to how good her blog is. To celebrate she rounded up her ten favourite reviews of the past three years.
2. Review of the week goes to Dina from SFF Book Reviews with her review of The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. What with everyone going wild for The Wheel of Time trailer I enjoyed reading this review as someone who’s never read any of the books. This review made me chuckle as Dina took some joking jabs at the knock-off Lord of the Rings tropes, and I think she always does a good job of talking about stuff in a balanced way and is able to enjoy stuff for what it is even if there are a few pacing and character issues. Long story short, it’s cemented in my mind that I do want to read these books at some point in my life, but when that will end up being, who knows?
3. There’s been a lot of buzz around Cassandra Khaw’s soon-to-be-released cyberpunky space heist novel The All-Consuming World and she’s doing a virtual tour to promote the book. The book does sound awesome – a team of former criminals get back together to solve the mystery of their final disastrous mission and rescue a much-changed former comrade while battling sentient AIs that want them dead – but two of the tour stops are also conversations with two of my favourite writers: P. Djeli Clarke and Fonda Lee! You can sign up for the Clarke conversation here and the Lee event here and I personally recommend you do both!
4. SciFiMonth 2021 has officially been announced! The unceasingly hard-working and ever-diligent imyril and Lisa are back again, organising one of the best book events of the year, full of book reviews and discussions, as well as a readalong and a giveaway! I had a great time last year with my cyberpunk theme and def recommend you get involved this year, it’s so much fun. Have a wander on over to imyril’s blog for more info and to sign up.
5. This tweet from Alex Khlopenko definitely turned a few heads, mine included, when he floated the idea of starting a new press solely to publish left wing speculative fiction. You may recognise Alex as the editor of Three Crows Magazine, an SFF short story mag that I’ll actually be reviewing a couple of editions of soon. Alex turned my head again with another thought-provoking tweet that I’ll embed below. I’ve asked Alex if he’d be interested in writing a fuller post expanding on these thoughts cos I think it’s a fascinating position and would love to see it expanded on.
6. You might have seen my review of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca a few weeks back. It’s a really fucked up horror novella about loneliness, acceptance and chat rooms in the early days of the internet that I highly recommend you pick up. The original cover art is really cool, but a reader posted some incredible fan art of an alternative cover that I thought was stunning and really captured the spirit and aesthetic of the book. Just look at that… If you’ve read the book then you’ll understand the significance of the antique apple peeler and, if not, well…you’ll just have to pick up the book.
7. Self -Published Fantasy Month is underway. I don’t actually read a lot of self-pubbed fantasy myself, but the small amount of stuff I’ve read on recommendation I’ve enjoyed a lot (see in particular my review of The First of Shadows by Deck Matthews) and I still have a ton of stuff that made it onto my TBR from last year’s event, as well as Calvin Park’s Under A Pile of Books podcast. Check out the website and follow them on Twitter to stay in the loop.
8. And finally, I really enjoyed this interview with Paul Tremblay at Before We Go Blog. Tremblay is another of those big authors I’ve never read anything by. There’s this interesting bit in the interview where he talks about his mathematics background and in a way seeing storytelling as a sort of binary programming, with each character choice being another branching path. Personally that makes no sense to me, but it’s fascinating to see how different writers view storytelling.
And that’s this week’s Community Roundup bookwyrms. What were your community highlights this week? If you enjoyed this post why not subscribe to Parsecs & Parchment for more news, reviews and bookish chat?
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Aww, thank you for the shout out Jonny!!
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