Flight into Fantasy

So this past weekend I started reading Pride and Prejudice. I decided to read this book for two reasons:

• You apparently can’t be considered a real fantasy reader unless you’ve read Lord of the Rings. You can’t be considered a romance reader until you’ve read Pride and Prejudice. And, well, Mr. Tolkien and I have since agreed that we don’t suit, and he’s agreed to let me read other books, so I thought Miss Austen might suit me better.

• I’ve been dying to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ever since I heard of its existance, and I wanted to say I’d read the original before I started the one with lots more ultraviolent zombie madness.

I really liked the original P & P, and I think Elizabeth Bennet deserves her place among the most compelling literary characters of all time. I was also really surprised how *funny* Ms. Austen actually is. I loved the antics of the Bennets, and Lady Catherine De Bourgh was awesome in a man-you-just-love-to-hate-this-lady kind of way.

I’ve also got my eye on a few other books I want to dip into sooner rather than later.

• The Etched City by K. J. Bishop: I blame Primavera for this one, since she raved about it over IM. I started reading it today, and I’m really intrigued by the setting, which seems to be partly post-apocalyptic, partly more standard fantasy. I like the idea of fantasy with guns, furthermore, and for some reason, I really like the fatalism of Raule, the female doctor we meet early on. *

• Doppelganger by Marie Brennan: I happened to be, um, not as engrossed in my studies as I should have been and opened the ebook to take a glance at it. I was intrigued by the first few paragraphs, and am excited to learn more about Mirage and to hope she kicks as much ass as the opening lines promise.
• tomorrow by Samantha Kane: Samantha Kane’s on my very small auto-buy list. She is the only author to consistently sell me on menage romances, but I have to admit, the blurb makes this story look so. incredibly. cheesy. All it takes, really, are two words: space pirates. Avast, maties, I’ll not be a lyin’ landlubber, because the very idea of space pirates makes me want to walk the plank. Or, y’know, shove someone out of an airlock. but it’s Samantha Kane, so I have already bought the book, and plan to devour it.

In less cheerful news, I made it official and gave up on the blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. I was kind of sad about that, too, because had I finished the book when I first started reading it, I might have continued loving it. But I took a break from it, came back and realized that the only characters I didn’t actively dislike were the token female and her brother. the girl definitely deserved a better book, or at least a potential love interest that wasn’t such an asshat.

So what about you guys? What are you reading this week?

*I don’t know why the cynicism intrigues me in the Bishop book whereas it’s an active turnoff with Abercrombie. Maybe it’s that Raule seems to have enough of the optimist buried inside her that I don’t feel suicidally depressed reading her thoughts on the world, whereas Abercrombie’s characters are either resigned or, well, annoyingly self-absorbed.