I’m back with Part 2 of my 2012 Year in Reading review. In my last post, I discussed some of the YA I loved most in 2012, and naturally I forgot to mention one of the best YA fantasies of the year: Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Such a great story! Though not […]
Tag Archives: fantasy
2012, A Year in Reading: Part 1
For a few years now, I’ve been living a semi-nomadic life, making my home in Wisconsin, in Scotland, in Colorado–wherever life and work has taken me. But 2012 was a year of stability. I didn’t travel much. I didn’t divide my time between two homes. I stayed in Colorado long enough to raise a puppy, […]
Anomaly Con
Despite keeping busy with our little puppy, we managed to attend AnomalyCon in Denver, where I got a chance to a.) pose with a giant TARDIS and b.) meet Nebula nominee Genevieve Valentine, whose dark steampunk circus fantasy Mechanique is exquisitely crafted, brilliantly non-linear, and unbearably happy/sad.
Among Others
I’ve been reading Jo Walton’s evocative novel Among Others. A fantasy story set in Wales during the late seventies, it positively resonates with compassion for teens, geeks, outcasts–our younger selves. The book’s compassionate tone is established by the epigraph–a quote from critic Farah Mendlesohn, who offers this advice to her younger self: “It’s going to […]
The Magicians
Lev Grossman is the kind of fantasist who refuses to give readers what they want, which probably explains why his brilliant new fantasy novel The Magicians is so polarizing. Some readers hate Grossman’s sobering take on the whole Harry Potter genre: they expect a charming Hogwarts-like school with earnestly heroic young wizards fighting high-stakes battles […]
Sharp Teeth
I teach Beowulf and Paradise Lost almost every year, something I wouldn’t do if I didn’t have a thing for epic poetry. From time to time, I’ve wondered why nobody writes epic poems anymore. You know—sprawling, thrilling narrative poems that ordinary people actually want to read. Somebody had to bring the epic back, and with […]
Worldcon
The World Science Fiction Convention was held this year in Denver, and I was lucky enough to be there inside the Colorado Convention Center, rather than on the outside, looking in. Highlights of the conference included the Masquerade contest, the GOH speech by Lois McMaster Bujold (who had some great things to say about genre-jumping), […]
Fantasy matters a lot
…so says Neil Gaiman, who was the keynote speaker at the Fantasy Matters Conference this weekend in Minneapolis. He read the opening chapter of his new (as-yet-unfinished) novel The Graveyard Book, which was really quite charming, spooky, and lovely. I gave a scholarly presentation on Peter Jackson and Hayao Miyazaki, and I was very glad […]