Not really my cup of tea

Thirty Day Book Meme: Day 4. Least favorite book by favorite author

I don't think I really have a single favourite author (if we're going by a metric of 'like every single one of their books' it would have to be Sophia McDougall, if it's 'books by them have made me feel the most intensely, for the longest period of time' it would have to be Catherine Jinks), but let's go with Philip Pullman here.

I've read pretty much every book of his (apart from his first two novels for adults, which are out of print and by all accounts pretty dreadful), and although I like them all and generally think they're at worst competently written and achieve what they've set out to do, his contemporary YA fiction is really not to my taste. I'm thinking, for example, of The White Mercedes — a tragic, somewhat melodramatic exploration of class and privilege, set against the backdrop of a teenage boy's coming-of-age story in Oxford. (Interestingly, I first read this story as a teenager in Australia, and missed a lot of the nuances until I'd moved to Cambridge and suddenly a lot of the British, and specifically Oxbridge stuff in the book became clear to me.) As I say, it's competently written enough, and it has the typical Pullman tugging on the heartstrings emotional manipulation (I mean this as a compliment, but seriously, if you read the final chapters of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, or The Shadow in the North, you'll know what I mean by 'emotional manipulation'), but I really feel his strong point is fantasy, fairytales, and historical fiction, and The White Mercedes and his other YA contemporaries are his weakest work.

( The other days )

A slightly awkward fannish request

I've already mentioned this on Twitter, but I thought it worth posting about here too. I will be going to this author event in London with Samantha Shannon, Zen Cho, Tasha Suri and Zoe Marriott, and would really love to have some company.

I often go to signings, 'in conversation', or similar events, but I almost always end up going on my own, because most of my friends who like the same authors live on the opposite side of the country (or the world), and while I don't mind being on my own, it is a little lonely.

So this post is basically me asking awkwardly if anyone who is either already going to the event, or who thinks it sounds fun and wants to book a ticket would like to meet up in the Waterstones and hang out during the panel.

If this is you, send me a message and we can sort out the details. I would really love to meet up (and if you're like me and get really stressed out about whether people you've interacted with online consider you enough of a friend to want to meet 'in real life,' if we mutually subscribe to each other's journals here and have interacted, you definitely fall into the category of 'people I'd be happy to meet up with at an author event'), and I think the panel is going to be really great. So...get in touch!