{"id":3378,"date":"2011-01-30T06:30:44","date_gmt":"2011-01-29T17:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=3378"},"modified":"2014-04-18T15:40:22","modified_gmt":"2014-04-18T03:40:22","slug":"what-im-reading-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/01\/30\/what-im-reading-13\/","title":{"rendered":"What I’m Reading: “A Foreign Country” & “Samiha’s Song”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’ve just finished reading A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction<\/em>, ed. Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan, Random Static 2010, which is a collection of short fiction by NZ\/NZ-resident\u00a0writers\u00a0around the theme\u00a0of the LP Hartley quote: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”<\/em> Only in this case, it’s the future, so this truly is speculative<\/em> fiction.<\/p>\n

As those of you who read my Thursday 27 post<\/a> may already have guessed,\u00a0I really enjoyed the anthology and see it as\u00a0 a very good indicator of the strength and diversity of contemporary NZ speculative fiction writing. I didn’t love every story, but I liked a\u00a0great many\u00a0of them\u00a0rather a lot and really wanted to keep reading—which to be honest, is unusual for me with collected short fiction. (The last time was in 2008 when\u00a0I read Charlotte Grimshaw’s Opportunity<\/em>, which\u00a0I found very difficult to put down.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And I’m about halfway through Mary Victoria’s Samiha’s Song<\/em>, the second in her Chronicles of the Tree<\/strong> series, which began with Tymon’s Flight. <\/em>And so far, I’m loving it and really looking forward to finishing and then getting organised for our interview—right here—on 15 February.<\/p>\n

So how about you? What are you reading?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just finished reading A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction, ed. Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan, Random Static 2010, which is a collection of short fiction by NZ\/NZ-resident\u00a0writers\u00a0around the theme\u00a0of the LP Hartley quote: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Only in this case, it’s the future, so this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-im-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3378"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3386,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3378\/revisions\/3386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}