Oh, my gosh!!! What a week of reading! What a book! This is our 4th group discussion and our last really long passage of reading. Only one more week after this and one short (but dare I say ‘exciting’) section to read. Lynn graciously agreed to handle question duties for this week and no doubt her questions, combined with all that happened in this section of the book, will generate loads of discussion topics.

For those of you who have not read the book and were perhaps skimming through our posts please let me dissuade you from doing so this week. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate your comments, it is that now that I’ve read this first book I desperately want you to read it and the spoilers that are going to come out in this week’s Q&A will truly ruin the experience for you. And reading Sanderson is an experience.

And as for you fellow participants, what are you waiting for? Let’s get the ball rolling!

Continue reading Mistborn Group Read Part 4 →

It is Wednesday, Hump Day, and that means it is once again time for us to get our Sanderson on! It is appropriate for Part 3 that the discussion is on Hump Day as this is the middle of our five-part discussion. This week it was Grace‘s turn to devise the questions concerning this section of the read.

For those of you who haven’t read the Mistborn trilogy, let me just say that the book has been a real page turner to this point. Engaging characters, intriguing setting, and mystery that begets mystery. It is a richly built fantasy world with a deep, involving plot. It is good.

I cannot wait to talk more about it. And because of my growing impatience, let the discussion begin!

Continue reading Mistborn Group Read, Part 3 →

(Mistborn Trilogy ebook cover art by Sam Weber)

If you happened to look in on any number of participating sites last week, you will know that the conversation over the first 100 pages of Mistborn: Final Empire just exploded! Wow! Sanderson does have a way of generating questions and speculation. It was a promising start to both the book and the group reading experience and the book has just gotten better in this second section.

TBM was gracious enough to take the hosting reigns this week, coming up with the questions to lead off our discussion. Let’s get to it!

Continue reading Mistborn Group Read, Part 2 →

(Cover image by John Jude Palencar)

Guy meets girl. Girl disses guy. Guy limps off with wounded pride with thoughts of vengeance. No, this isn’t your typical tale of jilted love, this is the story of normal goings on happening in a place that is anything but normal: Charles de Lint’s fictional city of Newford. And while the guy in this case is at first glance your typical egotistical, self-centered jerk, the girl is not so typical. Not at all. In fact she believes her origins are from a website called the Wordwood. And when she meets up with another young woman who is herself the cast-off shadow of a Newford author, the two soon discover that there is a very thin line between what is and is not “real”, and that a petty act of prideful revenge can have consequences far greater than anyone could have anticipated.

This is the second and final post in the discussion that Kailana and I will be having in regards to our buddy read of Charles de Lint’s book, Spirits in the Wires. There will be mild spoilers in the post here and I suspect on Kailana’s site as well, so please be forewarned. If you choose not to read on, please allow me to take a moment to encourage you to spend some time in Newford. This was yet another novel in which I closed the final page with an intense feeling of satisfaction. Charles de Lint knows how to tell a story with characters who are at once tangibly real and impossibly fantastical. He demonstrates with Spirits in the Wires that he can take what seems to be an implausible premise–spirits living in the internet–and weave a sophisticated story around it that hits all the right emotional notes while exploring concepts such as our belief systems as well as what it means to be alive.

This week I had the task of coming up with the discussion questions. I do hope you’ll join us and share any thoughts you feel like sharing.

Continue reading Spirits in the Wires ~Charles de Lint →

Long before joining with a larger band of readers to participate in a “group read”, Kailana and I were doing “buddy reads”. I believe we started these during one of the Once Upon a Time challenges with a Charles de Lint book and have been trying to read a de Lint book together for this event each year. We decided to continue that tradition this Spring with Charles de Lint’s 2003 novel, Spirits in the Wires. We will be posting our discussion of the book in two parts, with Kailana asking the questions for each of us to answer for the first half of the book and me taking on the second half.

Spirits in the Wires is set in Newford, the North American city of de Lint’s imagination where magic rubs shoulders with the mundane. It is a city where artists and musicians, the homeless and folks with an open mind discover that the veil between our world and the fantastic can very thin indeed. In a number of short stories and novels Charles de Lint showcases the lives of the various inhabitants of Newford and in so doing spotlights how very extraordinary the ordinary things of life can be.

Now on with the discussion.

Continue reading Spirits in the Wires ~Charles de Lint (Part 1) →