Tsana's April Status

I had a few unusual things going on this past month. The first would be that I wrote a blog post celebrating Women's History Month (which was March) over on Gillian Polack's blog about Emmy Noether. She was a mathematician whose theories are very important to quantum physics. If you're interested, you can check out the whole list of Women's History Month posts Gillian ran. You can also check out my most recent round-up of speculative fiction by Australian women over on the Australian Women Writers Challenge blog.

On this blog, I ran two interviews. One with Christian Schoon (author of Zenn Scarlett and Under Nameless Stars), which also includes an extract of Under Nameless Stars. And one with Glenda Larke (author of The Lascar's Dagger and lots of other lovely books). Go check them out, especially if you need convincing to read The Lascar's Dagger; it's one of my favourite books of the year.

What have I read?

• Supurbia Volume 4 by Grace Randolph — the last one so far. Ties of most of the plot lines, but leaves something dangling for future comics.
• Black Dog by Rachel Neumeier — YA with a really interesting take on werewolf dynamics. Also a Mexican main character group, although it's mostly set in the US.
• Peacemaker by Marianne de Pierres — A science fiction Western, set in future Perth.
• The Lascar's Dagger by Glenda Larke — A fantasy world which explores the spice trade between analogues of the East and West. A really great read.
• Adaptation by Malinda Lo — Near-future YA with government conspiracies and weird happenings.
• Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett — The most recent (albeit, not that recently released) Discworld novel. Pretty much what you'd expect (if you've been keeping up with recent Discworld), in a good way.
• The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare by M G Buehrlen — Innovative YA with a protagonist who can sort of travel to other times.
   

What am I currently reading?

I planned to pick up Dead Americans and Other Stories by Ben Peek to read a few stories to break up novels... but I ended up being distracted by the first issue of Dimension6, new spec fic magazine being produced by Aussie press Coeur de Lion Publishing and available for free. You can download a copy here. It's only got three stories, but I'm not quite down with it yet. And then I'll get onto Dead Americans.

Novel-wise, I've almost finished reading Blade of the Old Empire by Anna Kashina, the first of a new fantasy series from Angry Robot. I'm enjoying it more than I expected to, so that's always nice. Expect to see a review very soon. After that, I'm not sure what I'll read. At the moment it's a toss up between Emilie and the Sky World (sequel to Emilie and the Hollow World) and Assured Destruction (see below).

New Booksies:

• Crudrat by Gail Carriger — This is from a Kickstarter to make an audiobook of Gail Carriger's first SF book. So far I've only got the ebook because the audiobook is still in production (and I won't mention it next month by when, hopefully, I'll have the audio version) but I plan to enjoy it in audiobook form. Really excited to see what this will be like. I've loved Carriger's humorous steampunk books but I'm not really sure what to expect from this.
• The Lascar's Dagger by Glenda Larke — awesome. First in her new series. Already reviewed.
• The Grinding House by Kaaron Warren — novella, was on sale, like Kaaron Warren.
• Essence by Lisa Ann O'Kane — YA from Strange Chemistry. Review copy.
• Deadly Curiosities by Gail Z Martin — another review copy. I came across a few "if you like <author I like> you should read Gail Z Martin" in a row, so when Solaris offered me a chance to review it, it seemed like a good idea.
• Assured Destruction (The Complete Series) by Michael F Stewart — caught my eye on NetGalley. YA with tech wiz girl and identity theft shenanigans. Or something like that. Not technically SF, but the kind of book that seems close enough for me.
• Fool's Assassin by Robin Hobb — OMG I can't believe I actually got a review copy of this. I absolutely loved the original Assassin books. They were among the first serious/BFF fantasy books I read as a teen. I didn't get into the Shaman's Crossing series and didn't bother with the recent dragon series because that part of the Liveship books didn't grab me... but now Fitz is back for a third series! Yay!