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Announcements and Errata

Announcement: Around the World (Cycle One) and the New Retro Nostalgia Begins!

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For the past month, I’ve been thinking about my various blogging ventures and how to improve them.  For Totally Pretentious, that has involved reconsidering how I engage with film in written form.  After all, I can’t keep up with Hollywood’s production levels no matter how hard I try; that requires a full time commitment. So I decided to concentrate my film discussions on two specific projects:  the Retro Nostalgia feature (derived from my personal blog) and a new feature called Around the World.  There will still be the occasional review of a film that doesn’t fit in either of these categories, but my primary focus outside of the podcast will be on these two projects.  These changes will also be noted on my Patreon page, which you can support if these columns (or anything I do) interest(s) you. So what are “Retro Nostalgia” and “Around the World”?

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The April 2015 Read List: What You Read and Loved

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Last week, I asked for listeners/readers to share their favorite reads from April 2015.  The following is a reading list comprised of those favorite reads.  Do with this mystical knowledge what you will! Novels: Fool’s Assassin by Robin Hobb Edge of Dark by Brenda Cooper The Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente I, Robot by Isaac Asimov The Stars Seem So Far Away by Margrét Helgadottir Beasts of Tabat by Cat Rambo Last First Snow by Max Gladstone Short Stories: “The Shape of My Name” by Nino Cipri There you have it.  It’s a small list, but we just started this fancy feature. I’ll put up a call for your favorite reads from May later this month!  Now get reading!

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Book Review: The Clockwork Dagger by Beth Cato

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Octavia Leander is a healer, and a talented and blessed one at that. A graduate of Miss Percival’s school for the training of Medicians, those who can not only use herbs and other remedies to heal the sick, but draw upon the power of the Lady to do wondrous feats of healing, even wounds and conditions that threaten the victim with death. Octavia’s desire to use her talents, and an offer to help a village on the far end of the nation of Caskentia from her, leads her to board an airship for the long journey. On that ship, Leander faces intrigue, adventure, romance and danger, the latter especially in the person of the eponymous agent of the Queen, The Clockwork Dagger. The Clockwork Dagger is the debut novel from Beth Cato.

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The April 2015 Reading List: What were your favorite reads for April?

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It’s time to create some reading lists!  Once a month, we will post something just like this:  a post asking about your favorite reads during a given month.  At the end of the month, we’ll put together a reading list containing all of your selections.  You can name any kind of book or short story you like, even if it’s not science fiction or fantasy. So with that in mind, here we go: What were your favorite reads for April 2015? Leave a comment 🙂

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Book Review: Wildalone by Krassi Zourkova

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Talented pianist and bright student Thea Slavin leaves the familiar confines of family and her Bulgarian homeland for the opportunity of study at prestigious Princeton University in the United States. Compounding the normal cultural shocks of studying abroad in an unfamiliar land, Thea discovers that she has chosen to accept an opportunity from the same school her older sister attended years past, an era mired in family secrets. Thea learns that this sister mysteriously died while at Princeton, leaving a hole in her parent’s lives about which they refuse to speak. Braving the discomfort that the unfamiliarity of the Princeton campus brings with its upper class American culture and distant memories of the embarrassing unsolved crime involving the elder Slavin daughter, Thea turns full focus to her piano/music studies and the strange draw a course in Greek mythology and its professor holds for her. As she tries to settle into her new life and avoid associations with the past history of her sister with the campus, Thea is pushed rapidly into preparing for major recitals and the prospects of college romances.

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Book Review: Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library

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A seemingly endless Library, with books from across multiple worlds. A library with connections and portals to endless worlds. It can take hours, even days, to get to locations within the library. It is a Library of the first order, in the same tradition as Pratchett’s multidimensional and universe-spanning idea of  L-Space in his Discworld novels. The Librarians are devoted to the love of books, their acquisition and preservation. They travel to alternate worlds in search of rare books, of key books, of special books to add to their collection. This process does not always go well, especially with the rarer finds. Irene is a junior librarian of the Library. When she is assigned a new assistant (who is clearly more than he appears) and a seemingly simple task to find a book in an alternate London, things start going wrong immediately.

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