Dinara Tengri

January is (finally) over, so how about a quick recap of all the bookish stuff I've done this past month?  Just a couple of days ago I had the pleasure of attending a book release party at the Science Fiction Bookhandeln in Malmö. Novellix is a Swedish publishing house that specializes on publishing short stories. This is their first venture into science fiction, with four of the biggest names in the genre. A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury The New Atlantis by Ursula Le Guin The Defenders by Philip K. Dick The Country of the Blind by H.G. Wells I'm always happy to see science fiction get the love it deserves, and I really dig the choices Novellix made. Coincidentally, A Sound of Thunder is one of my favourite short stories. You can either buy individual stories, or a whole box set. I bought the box set (of course).  The book store also had a quiz about all these authors, and I came in third! Now I need to go back there and collect my prize. Speaking...

Today, I want to talk about three books that I've been reading for the past few weeks. Even though I took a book blogger's oath (which I just now made up) to review everything I read, I sometimes find it difficult to review certain books. Sometimes, I simply don't understand what the author is trying to say, and sometimes I just don't have anything profoundly interesting to say about the book in question.   Nevertheless, I want to cover these three books so that my guilty reader's conscience will let me sleep at night. Twelve Years a Slave By Solomon Northup (and David Wilson, ed.) First published in 1853 Source: Aldiko Reader Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slav...