…e than adequately equipped to handle Southerners, might possibly manage to understand Northerners, but that the Centre is a law onto itself. Given that I can barely make myself understood by Southerners, I can’t help but think that the Huể/Hội An section of the trip is going to be so much fun… (Sài Gòn will be better, both because, hey, Southerners, and also because Grandma/the uncles will be around) Three more lessons to go before we leave. Ouch….

…, amusingly, I’m reading right now) Er, wow? (and yes, the irony of being listed under “Fiction translated into French” has not escaped me). -Couple Obsidian and Blood spottings: Cynthia Ward mentions both Servant and Harbinger in her end-of-year recap for Acqueduct Press, Harbinger gets noted by Duncan Lawie in his end-of-year review for Strange Horizons; Jacob at Drying Ink (who did this amazing interview with me a while back) ponders why you sh…

…ly the source literature of SF, was the province of the bourgeoisie; while the older texts were the province of nobility) In other news, busy weekend ahead: friends coming over on Saturday, and we’re probably headed into the 13e Sunday to see the New Year’s procession….

…orks on that list!. I’ve offered up a signed copy of Master of the House of Darts as a donation prize, and there is plenty more cool stuff on that list (and more to come!). So, if you feel like helping a worthy cause……

…Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! Tôi chúc các bạn mạnh khỏe và nhiều niềm vui. (normally, it should say something like “Happy New Year. I wish you all good health and many joys”, but since I basically cobbled the sentence together with a dictionary, I’m sceptical about the actual meaning…) Hope it’s a great Year of the Dragon for everyone!…

…to Lauren Beukes for doing a similar triptych, to Lionel Davoust for being longlisted for Best French Novel, and to ezine Angle Mort for making the list! (shortlist is due out at the end of March, winners announced in May)…

…s of Wolf at the Door, hopes to raise her children in peace, and enjoy the company of her pack and her friends in peace. But sinister things are afoot in Singapore’s supernatural world, with the resurgence of a darkness Jan Xu thought banished long ago. At the centre of it all are the Drakes–the Western dragons and fire-breathes, aggressive and eager to make their mark on the city–and Gabriel, a half-drake half-Chinese dragon who seems to be hidin…

…f worth reading and mulling on. -Edroxy (Roxanne) has a series on French Female Writers Through the Centuries: her latest review is of Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women, here. Whole series is worth reading, but this has some interesthing thoughts about NDiaye herself, and her sense of identity, or “truncated mixity” as she calls it, and handling what people expect her to write vs what she actually writes. -Nancy Fulda on Readers, Feedback and Good…

…s); and it explains why we came back from Vietnam sated, but determined to undergo a diet of salads. [1] 2. Orientation: Grandma very sensibly wrote the address of the house on a bit of paper (well, OK. First she told me to repeat it out loud, then she grimaced and said she was going to give me a bit of paper… Remember what I said about my pronunciation sucking?), and that was what we gave taxis as we zoomed around Saigon. It puzzled them no end t…

…ch meant the taxi didn’t recognise it), that you don’t know how to say museum or history from memory and you’re pointing to a name and an address, neither of them properly written down, and the driver looks blank… %%%% is all I’m going to say. Also: next time, I will write down the name of the place in proper Vietnamese. Le Guide du Routard, meanwhile, was a monument of colonialist fail. And I don’t use the word lightly. It repeatedly insisted on…