sandstone78's Reading Hideout, 2014 Continued - A Place in the Shade

New topic!

I'm very interested in recommendations, especially current books from overlooked authors, out of print books to add to my used bookstore search list, or self-published works worth reading. I'm also interested in reading and discussing critical or informative articles about the genre at large or specific works, so I'll try to post those every so often too!

Check out my group reads:

March 2014: Group Reads of the Raksura: Martha Wells, The Cloud Roads (Thread)
April 2014: Group Reads of the Raksura: Martha Wells, The Serpent Sea (Thread)
May 2014: Group Reads of the Raksura: Martha Wells, The Siren Depths (Thread)
June 2014: Standalone Group Read: Melissa Scott, Burning Bright (Thread)
July 2014: Dreamblood Group Read: N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon (Thread)
August 2014: Dreamblood Group Read: N.K. Jemisin, The Shadowed Sun (Thread)
September 2014: Standalone Group Read: Intisar Khanani, Thorn (Thread)
October 2014: Group Reads of the Raksura: Martha Wells, Stories of the Raksura Volume One
November 2014: Lighthouse Group Read: Carol Berg, Flesh and Spirit
December 2014: Lighthouse Group Read: Carol Berg, Breath and Bone

Check out the list of potential future group read books and vote- or suggest a book in this thread! My criteria are: no more than about 500 people owning the book on LT, and the book should be available at least in ebook in both the US and UK, hopefully with reasonably-priced used copies available if the print book is out of print. I'm open to reading standalones, duologies, or trilogies, but if your suggestion is a series, make sure that all books meet the criteria above (eg no series where book one is owned by 1000+ users but book three is owned by less than 500 because it just came out.)

Currently Reading

Clockwork Heart, Dru Pagliassotti (impulse buy)
Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne Valente (impulse buy)

Reading off and on

The Shepherd Moon, H.M. Hoover (impulse checkout)
A Necklace of Fallen Stars, Beth Hilgartner (intend to read)
Taming the Forest King, Claudia J. Edwards (intend to read)

Currently Listening To

The Devil's Heart, Carmen Carter (intend to read)
Quantum Rose, Catherine Asaro (narrated by Anna Fields) (mount tbr)

Recently Put Aside

Thinking About Reading Next

Next (probably)

Very soon

Real soon now

Anthologies and Collections

Nonfiction

Thinking About Listening To Next

Anxiously Awaiting

This is the list of works I have read to date this year.

January
1 My Enemy, My Ally, Diane Duane ★★★★½ (mount tbr)
2 After the Golden Age, Carrie Vaughn ★★★ (mount tbr)
3 Heiresses of Russ 2011, eds. Steve Berman and JoSelle Vanderhooft ★★★½ (mount tbr)
4 Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison ★★★★ (always meant to read)

February
5 The Honey Month, Amal El-Mohtar ★★★½ (impulse buy)
6 Tiger! Tiger! (aka The Stars My Destination), Alfred Bester ★ (always meant to read, group read)
7 Burning Bright, Melissa Scott ★★★★★ (reread, favorite)
8 In the Forests of the Night, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes ★★★★ (reread)

March
9 Sunbolt, Intisar Khanani ★★★ (impulse buy)
10 The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells ★★★★ (mount tbr, group read)
11 Whipping Girl, Julia Serano ★★★★★ (always meant to read)

April
12 Champion of the Rose, Andrea K. Höst ★★½ (mount tbr)
13 Relics, Michael Jan Friedman, read by James Doohan and LeVar Burton (abridged audiobook) ★★★ (impulse buy)
14 The Initiate, Louise Cooper ★★★★★ (reread, favorite)
15 Invisible: Personal Essays on Representation in SF/F, ed. Jim C. Hines ★★★★ (impulse buy)
16 Arrows of the Queen, Mercedes Lackey ★★★ (reread)

May
17 Arrow's Flight, Mercedes Lackey ★★★★ (mount tbr)
18 Ardent Forest, Nancy Jane Moore ★★★ (mount tbr, early reviewers)
19 The Serpent Sea, Martha Wells ★★★★ (mount tbr, group read)
20 Arrow's Fall, Mercedes Lackey ★★★½ (mount tbr)
21 The Siren Depths, Martha Wells ★★★★★ (group read)

June
22 A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle ★★★★★ (reread)
23 Indistinguishable From Magic, Catherynne M. Valente ★★★★ (impulse buy)
24 Still She Wished For Company, Margaret Irwin ★★★★ (mount tbr)

July
25 Miss Leavitt's Stars, George Johnson ★★★★ (impulse buy)
26 Clay's Ark, Octavia Butler ★★★★ (mount tbr)
27 The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin ★★★½ (group read)
28 Unexpected Stories, Octavia Butler ★★★★ (impulse buy)
29 Ravel, Heidi C. Vlach ★★★★ (mount tbr)
30 Shadow Magic, Patricia C. Wrede read by Nicole Greevy ★★★★★ (reread)
31 A Matter of Oaths, Helen S. Wright ★★★★½ (reread)

August
32 Crystal Dragon, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller ★★★★ (mount tbr)
33 Night Owls, Lauren M. Roy ★★★½ (impulse buy)
34 Shade's Children, Garth Nix ★★★★ (reread)
35 .hack//AI buster, Tatsuya Hamazaki, illustrated by Rei Izumi ★★★ (impulse buy)
36 .hack//AI buster 2, Tatsuya Hamazaki, illustrated by Rei Izumi ★★★½ (impulse buy)

September
37 The Shadowed Sun, N.K. Jemisin ★★★ (intend to read)
38 Battle Magic, Tamora Pierce ★ (mount tbr)

October
39 Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie ★★★★★ (mount tbr)
40 Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, Nahoko Uehashi ★★★★ (mount tbr)

November
41 Stories of the Raksura Volume One, Martha Wells ★★★★ (intend to read)
42 The Witches of Eileanan, Kate Forsyth ★★★ (reread)

December
43 Q-in-Law, Peter David, narrated by John DeLancie and Majel Barrett ★★★ (intend to read)
44 Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie ★★★★★ (intend to read)
45 Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente ★★★ (intend to read)
46 Killing is Harmless, Brendan Keogh ★★★★ (impulse buy)
47 Swan's Braid. Tanya Huff ★★★★ (mount tbr)
48 Resenting the Hero, Moira J. Moore ★★★½ (impulse buy)
49 The Awakened Kingdom, N.K. Jemisin ★★★ (impulse buy)
50 The Boxes, William Sleator ★★★★ (reread)

Year to Date in Summary

It's hot outside here, so it's a good time to find a place in the shade- or inside- and read! I've moved threads, as you can see, and I've organized all of my group read information in the top post- if you want to find old threads or see what's upcoming or on the list for potential group reads, all of that is up top now!

A new thread seems as good a time as any to catch up on reviews:

25 Miss Leavitt's Stars, George Johnson ★★★★ (impulse buy)

I picked this back up while browsing my recently read books on my e-reader- part of my quest to read more non-fiction. The title is accurate- this is not a book about Henrietta Leavitt, calculator and astronomer so much as it is about her discovery of how Cepheid variable stars can be used as a "standard candle" for measuring the distance of stars, nebulae, and other phenomena, and the work and environment that lead to it and how her discovery was received and built upon.

Biographical information about Leavitt herself is apparently scarce, and I might have wished that in the light of that the book focused a little bit more on the environment of female scientists and the computers like Leavitt, but it was readable and interesting as far as what it did cover, and made me think about the lengthy chains of assumptions that must be made in the field of astronomy to expand our understanding of the universe- how there are often multiple reasonable ways to interpret data, and how much things can change as more data comes in.

26 Clay's Ark, Octavia Butler ★★★★ (mount tbr)

Brutally compelling- I couldn't put this one down, and read it in less than a day. Books in the "grimdark" movement have had a lot of success based on the concept that any of the characters can die at any time, but Butler takes the opposite concept, that any of her characters, at any time, might survive, often as something both more and less than human.

I think that this is a little weaker than the two previous Butler books I've read, though, Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind also in the Patternist series but focusing on people with telepathic powers instead of people infected and controlled by an alien disease. Part of it is because I feel I've seen the characters before- Eli seems too close to Isaac in Wild Seed in character and temperament, Keira and Rane too close to Mary in Mind of My Mind (including one of them enthusiastically wanting sex with a much older and more powerful man- Doro in Mind of My Mind, Eli, patriarch of the infected, here), though Mary's characteristics are divided between them.

I did some research after finishing this one, because I often find Butler mentioned as a lesbian writer and I've never seen anything that seemed drawn from that experience reflected in her work- my search was inconclusive, although I found a discussion over at Wikipedia that quotes Butler from an interview in print saying that people often assumed she was gay, but she was not, though she was "intrigued" by gay sexuality and explored it in her work. I can't find anything to the positive in that direction, other than possibly Butler exploring some of those themes in her work (possibly the Xenogenesis trilogy, which I've not yet read).

This makes more sense to me, because from the work of hers I've read so far Butler seems more concerned than any other writer I've read with heterosexuality, what draws men and women together, and how the heterosexual mating instinct drives humans to form family units. In this book, men and women are drawn together by irresistible biological imperatives exaggerated by the alien disease, men being able to smell women "in the fertile part of their cycle" and unable to resist them and women seemingly always attracted to men, even to the point of women having sex and falling in love with a man who brought disease to their household, killing their husbands, and a father attempting to have sex with his daughter, and the daughter reciprocating his lust as compelled by the alien parasite until another character separates them. The horror is that no one is safe from this violation and perversion of heterosexuality, that instinct can be chemically changed and manipulated, everyone possessing these deep-seated mating urges on some level...

Perhaps, though, not everyone. In possibly the most cringeworthy scene of the book for me, because I have less faith that the cringeworthiness is intended than I do in other places, the infected looking for a husband for one of the women to infect come upon a gas station taken over by a gang of "car people" looking for fuel in the gas-depleted future- and a man who the gang has taken prisoner, who the woman, Lorene, decides she wants.

He was soft and plump and young. One of the car people had probably taken a liking to him. They might not have killed him at all if he had cooperated. His voice, his face, his posture said he had not. He was not a homosexual, then- fortunately for Lorene. And if no one dug too deeply into what had been done to him during his captivity, Lorene might be able to convince him to come with her willingly.

Wait, wait, wait. You can tell he's not gay because he resisted being raped? Because men attracted to men are up for sex any time, and excited about any sex they can get, of course. Ugh. I'm cringing all over again typing this out. Is there any other way to read that scene?

27 The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin ★★★½ (group read)

I've posted most of my thoughts on this one in the group read thread, but for a brief overview...

I read Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and sequels) last year, and had mixed feelings about it- it had an interesting setting, but the romances between the male gods and the mortal women fell into very standard paranormal romance dynamics that disappointed me. When I heard that The Killing Moon wasn't a romance, I immediately became more interested in it- but in the end, I think this one worked even less well for me than the Inheritance books. There's an interesting magic system and an even more interesting social structure here in a world that Jemisin said was inspired in part by ancient Egypt, but the narrative largely ignores those in favor of apocalyptic drama and a disappointingly flat megalomaniac villain. I wasn't ever really convinced by the characters either, and I was uncomfortable with the way that the narrative bent tragic events to be all about them, with minor characters focusing on making the main characters feel less guilty instead of grieving for their loved ones who were killed because of the main characters' action or presence.

I have higher hopes for the second book in the duology, The Shadowed Sun, which will also be the August group read!

28 Unexpected Stories, Octavia Butler ★★★★ (impulse buy)

A compilation of two short stories published for the first time this year. The first is backstory about some of the characters in Butler's novel Survivor, set among an alien civilization where fur color is directly linked to intelligence and capability, with bluer fur meaning more of both and therefore higher status, as well as larger physical size- the story follows two of the very rare completely blue Hao, an older woman who has been unable to produce a Hao heir and a young man who wanders into her territory, prompting the people she leads to capture him as is tradition to succeed her, with the intent to cripple him to prevent him from escape. In what's by far the most optimistic Butler ending I've read, she manages to find a bloodless solution to the problem.

The other is a shorter piece about a telepath in Earth's future (unrelated to the Patternist books) with a talent for identifying and bringing out psychic potential in children. She left the mainstream organization of telepaths, but now they want her back.

29 Ravel, Heidi C. Vlach ★★★★ (mount tbr)

A short, pleasant story in Vlach's humanless Aligare fantasy setting, populated by the insectlike Aemet, the dragonlike Korvi, and the weasellike Ferrin about a young, married Aemet woman who wonders if she could have had more than her settled life when she meets a wandering Korvi storyteller.

30 Shadow Magic, Patricia C. Wrede read by Nicole Greevy ★★★★★ (reread)

A visit back to one of my favorite fantasy series when I was younger, Wrede's Lyra- my fond memories held up, by and large, giving me an enjoyable lighter fantasy story with tropes suitably to my taste including a likeable female protagonist, a good amount of magic including wizards, magic-learning scenes (I love magic-learning stories, but I don't like "protagonist goes to school, makes friends and enemies among classmates and teachers" stories- after Harry Potter, it's hard to find the one without the other), and magical artifacts, interesting non-human characters, and a focus on friendship and family as much as romance. (The main character even has a brother and living parents!) The five-star rating is, of course, skewed with this fondness- objectively, it's probably closer to three stars. The narrator was pretty good as well, though occasionally her pronunciation of things was inconsistent- does Wyrd rhyme with weird or word? Is it Lee-ra or Lie-ra?

I'll be moving onto Daughter of Witches soon, after I finish up my other audio reads, Dragonflight and Pride of Chanur.

Hello new thread!

Current reading... I'm not sure what I want to read right now, so there's a lot of reading a little bit of things and seeing what sticks.

Survivor, Octavia Butler (mount tbr)

This is, like the prequel story in the same setting in Unexpected Stories, very different in tone from the other Butler I've read- her only work set on a non-Earth planet, with different groups of aliens that she later felt were too Star Trek like and not realistic.

I can see what she means, to some degree, honestly- this feels more standard science fiction than any of Butler's other work, closer to the novels of Cherryh or other authors who focus on humans in contact with aliens. The sharp-edged, uncompromising observations I have come to expect from Butler don't quite seem in focus yet.

The aliens themselves, the Kohn, remind me of nothing so much as Wells' Raksura at this point- a caste-structured society with rank biologically determined, with the most important being physically larger and everyone divided into warriors and non-warriors, including craftspeople and those who look after children, who are highly respected (but the warriors hold all of the political power). The prequel is even about a group of Kohn diminished by a run of bad luck moving out of the ancient, ruined city they have inhabited, with a female leader who must capture a man to produce a successor or risk her people dying out.

There are many differences, enough for me to think this is probably coincidence rather than influence- the Kohn don't have the only-some-are-fertile thing that the Raksura have, no wings or shapeshifting (though the non-verbal communication with fur color adds detail in much the same way the Raksuran spine flaring and twitching does), and there are humans, at least in Survivor.

I did notice one continuity thing Patternist-series-wise- Survivor mentions that the clayark virus was spread by a number of men and women returning from the expedition to Alpha Centauri, but in Clay's Ark there is only one person surviving from that expedition.

The Kindly Ones, Melissa Scott (mount tbr)

A closed, rule-bound culture on two cold moons orbiting a gas giant. (I picked this one up after reading that The Killing Moon took place on a gas giant.)

This one is beginning somewhat slow, but there's a lot of detail being laid out. I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to keep on or set it aside and come back later, possibly when it gets colder- the ninety-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures sort of ruin the descriptions of cold and chill.

The Outcast, Louise Cooper (reread)

This one is somewhat slower-going than I remembered, unfortunately. I remember liking this one possibly the best of the trilogy, but nothing is, so far, happening.

Crystal Dragon, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (mount tbr)

I finally got back to this one, after my frustrations last year with Crystal Soldier.

This one is interesting and incredibly readable, as the Liaden books tend to be- though this one is a bit slower and more serious than the breezy action, manners, and witty dialogue of books in the Agent of Change sequence.

I am continually frustrated that Lee and Miller create such interesting, competent, talented female characters- and then pair them with men who can do anything they can do better. This volume seems to have a recurring theme of women as brains and men as brawn- except the men have brains too, and more experience in whatever areas are relevant to the plot, so it's never quite equal. Sigh.

I've currently put it down to take a break because Cantra is infiltrating an elite group of scholars under deep cover, presenting an elaborate mathematical proof- and she is accepted into the group, as much for what the proof is about as for her competence with it.

Cut scene, and it turns out Jela is the one who did the proof start to finish- not, we are told, because Cantra couldn't have done, she's very good with math, he just had more experience with it.

Better than earlier in the book, where we have an unnamed sorceress working for the world-destroying Sheriekas, and we learn their entire evil sorcerous program is built around women binding energy-based life-forms into male bodies and binding them into subjugation by raping them, because physical pleasure makes them feel closer. Urgh.

Okay, this is evil... so she's going to discover that energy-based lifeforms are people too- I'm cool with that as a character arc.

Nope, her partner is a special energy-based lifeform who is much better at everything than the normal ones because he was wild and not bred to subjugation like those other, tamed energy-based lifeforms- and he's powerful enough to mostly resist her on his own or at least attempt to destroy himself, forcing her to deal with him as an equal... because she's formed a strange attachment to him and doesn't want him to hurt himself.

Having it be an attachment- that is going to be true love, I'm sure, based on how the dramliz/lifemate bond works in later stories- sort of undermines her character growth for me- how much less effort does it take to treat someone equally as or more powerful than you as human than it does someone who you are told to control in a position of weakness? Sigh.

So, I'm taking a short break from this one- but will probably get back to it, I'm curious where it goes almost despite myself.

A Matter of Oaths, Helen S. Wright (reread)

Character-driven space opera revolving around the crew of a particular ship, with greater diversity in the cast than one might expect for a later-80s book- the main characters are the Rallya, female captain of the ship who is aware but refuses to accept that her age is catching up with her, her Webmaster Joshim who is in charge of the "web" that is used to operate the spaceship, and a mysterious memory-wiped young man, Rafell, who fills their first officer position. (Joshim and Rafell fall in love in the romantic subplot of the book, which isn't a big deal at all.)

I remember the initial parts of this well, which is all the farther in I am, and I remember that last-page twist, which I'm curious to see if it's foreshadowed earlier in the story in hindsight, but most of the plot escapes me.

I first read about this one from one of Jo Walton's posts, and it's also available for free download in ebook at the author's website.

The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (reread)

I picked this up when I came across it while moving stuff around in my room, curious to see if it has the same flaws that @LolaWalser was pointing out in Biting the Sun regarding gender and sexuality. The only thing I remember about it is that when I first read it ages ago, my mom, who is also a big fantasy reader (though our tastes don't overlap much- she prefers lighter and humorous fantasy), read it after I did and asked me "Aren't you a little young to be reading things like this?"

I find the chatty narrator incredibly readable. Lee's work seems divided into this kind of bright-colored, in-your-face out there future or fantasy (this book, Biting the Sun, Day By Night, Black Unicorn and sequels) and darker, horror-tinged, weird books (The Flat Earth, her horror eg The Books of Paradys, most of her recent work eg Fatal Women). This side is the side of her work that engages me more.

So far, regarding gender and sexuality, we have a bisexual (or possibly gay according to the narrative- "Mirror-Biased," in this future Earth's terminology) male friend of the main character, Clovis, who can be witty but somewhat cruel, and goes through male lovers quickly when he has them (we first meet him trying to end a relationship by holding a fake seance that gives his undesired lover a message that Clovis is a bad and dangerous influence- it doesn't seem to be working, though), but often has longer, asexual romantic relationships with women. Shades of the "gay best friend" trope, but no real negative judgment against him for his sexuality or anything like that yet, and it's made pretty clear that him not forming romantic attachments to his loves is a peculiarity of him and not typical of "Mirror-Biased" people in general.

Also, Jane is assumed to be "Mirror-Biased" by a stranger when she's out with a friend- the stranger assumes that the friend, who is beautiful, is a robot because he thought that a robot was supposed to be on display in the area. Jane is a bit flustered, but more that he thinks her friend is a robot and wants to buy her than that he thinks she's gay.

Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn (mount tbr)

Still an interesting look at the different types and narrative mechanisms of fantasy literature, but somewhat slow going because of the number of concepts it's presenting and its academic tone.

>5 pwaites: Hi there!

I've come to the conclusion that the type of science fiction I like usually falls into one of three categories: interesting people on a spaceship, interesting people on an interesting planet, or interesting people with interesting abilities. Sometimes these things overlap.

What I want from fantasy isn't too different, actually: interesting people in an interesting world or interesting people with interesting abilities, though I'm not usually terribly interested in people on a fantasy ship, ie seafaring fantasy- I live in the middle of a large continent, and Wow! The Ocean is just not a thing I can relate to in my bones the way fantasy that especially romanticizes it expects me to.

(Most science fiction pilots often fall under the category of "people with interesting abilities," anyways. Possibly a closer fantasy analogue to what I like about "interesting people on a ship" is "interesting people on an interesting quest"- I've just read a bit of Rhetorics of Fantasy where Mendlesohn talks about how isolated groups of people on quests tend to be from the rest of the fantasy world.)

Anyways, I've finished A Matter of Oaths and have moved back on to Crystal Dragon because I want more in that vein, and I'm sticking with The Silver Metal Lover too. I fear The Kindly Ones and The Outcast are a bit of a lost cause for my interest at this point, and as events in my life get more stressful (chronic unemployment in the family not being resolved as it looked like it might have for one brief moment), I'm doubting my ability to engage well with Rhetorics of Fantasy or Survivor as much as I'd like so I may put those off as well.

I'll be picking up The Shadowed Sun this week when the group read starts- the thread is up for that as of this morning!

In audio, I'm continuing with Dragonflight (I saw the announcement today that Warner Bros. has optioned the Pern series for film- cynically, I agree with one of the comments that says that they will adapt The White Dragon out of all the options available because it has a male protagonist) and Pride of Chanur.

I tried starting McKinley's Beauty in audio where I left off last year in text, but the narrator's voice is too different from the voice I'd imagined for Beauty in my head. I'll save the audio version for a re-read.

31 A Matter of Oaths, Helen S. Wright ★★★★½ (reread)

I still greatly enjoyed this fascinatingly twisty space opera on a re-read, but things didn't quite hang together as much as I wanted to. There's one plot point in particular that seems glaringly unresolved to me, but I guess one of the plot twists sort of made it irrelevant and a red herring- I remember thinking before that this read as the first installment of a series that never happened, but upon reread I don't think so, the ending is too conclusive.

The strengths of this one are its characters and their relationships. Wright lets her characters figure things out when they have the evidence, plan ahead of enemies, make understandable mistakes, talk to each other when they have problems with each other, and underestimate each other. This book is another example of what I've come to think of as "iceberg worldbuilding," where the things we see hint at a much larger world just below the surface or offscreen- I think that, like Burning Bright, it might make a fun one for discussion in a future group read, it has the same enjoyable way of sometimes just letting things stand without quite spelling them out.

It's a little disappointing that Rallya is the only major female character, on the side of good at least, but this doesn't ever feel like a world without women- there are numerous women among the named minor characters, and just around in general. As I mentioned previously, sexuality seems to be a non-issue, but like many settings like that, same-sex relationships between women seem to be absent- mostly because Rallya seems to be heterosexual from the evidence we're given and she's the only female point of view character we get, so far as I can remember.

I do hope that Wright writes more books someday, and I would love to see this book get more attention. I think anyone who enjoys "interesting characters on a ship" type stories like Lee and Miller's Liaden books would probably enjoy this too- mentioning again that it's available from the author's website.

>7 sandstone78: I've picked up A Matter of Oaths from the author's website because it sounds very intriguing. I seem to have a huge pile on Kindle (and, ahem, all over the floor, thanks to my Mum dropping off three boxes of books from her basement), but there's always room for one more! (so I'll be picking up The Shadowed Sun in a week or so too, unless I can find it in the library)

A matter of oaths sounds excellent; thank you for drawing it to our attention, @sandstone78.
I've only ever got kindle books from amazon before ; if I want to dowload it from the author's website, which format should I opt for? (Despite loving SF, I am rather a Luddite in real life!)

I went with MOBI - I've never had a problem connecting my Kindle to my laptop and dragging a MOBI file onto the Kindle (and then it just appearing and me being able to read it), although I've not actually tested this one yet :)

Thank you, I'll give that a try!

>6 sandstone78: I've got Tanith Lee's The silver Metal Lover on the re-read pile and with it for a first time read Metallic Love its sequel. Like you I find that Tanith Lee's work seem to fall into two types - some of them I love, some I don't. I recently picked up a few that I hadn't tried before - Cast a Bright Shadow, Birthgrave, The Storm Lord and Shon the Taken then I picked up at the same time, but have already read East of Midnight. I never can be sure whether I'm going to love them or not but I do keep on trying them nonetheless.

32 Crystal Dragon, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller ★★★★ (mount tbr)

Overall, a solid conclusion to the Liaden Great Migration duology- I think overall this pair is the best-written of the Liaden books I've read, though I'm not sure it's my favorite- I think that's still Scout's Progress. I liked both Cantra and Jela a lot, and most of the minor characters as well, and the romance between Cantra and Jela works for me- like the others of Lee and Miller's I've read, it's based on not only attraction but also genuine respect, affection, and liking between them.

I felt the ending of this one was a bit confusing and muddled, but that might have been me instead, since I read it in bits and pieces. It took me a long time to really believe that Jela was dead, for example, it felt like there was some "But is he really dead? When was the last time you saw him?" build up that never really went anywhere. It was a little confusing after the whole not quite expired yet deal, but I guess that was just to show off the Tree's ability to produce drugs for various uses.

The gender dynamics of the dramliza still bug me, but they were mostly off-screen after the lengthy prologue, just showing up here and there- Rool Tiazan bothered me though, his plot arc of basically falling in love with his captor/rapist remained icky- I needed to see more of them and more of her development to believe that there could be anything functional there at all, more than "well, he's a wild energy being instead of a tame one so their relationship is more equitable because he's stronger and could kill himself and she has an irrational attachment to him and doesn't want him to get hurt" that we got at the end of the prologue, and I didn't really get it. I was later bothered by the way he almost literally subsumed her as well, as happened with another couple later on down the timeline- theoretically, they are sharing his body, but even in scenes from his perspective she's hardly felt, much less do we get what she thinks of the matter.

Also possibly a spoiler, but a minor one, I did roll my eyes at the entire universe and all of the lines of probability quaking when Clan Korval was formed. That's a whole new level of "Korval is objectively awesomer than everyone else," which the book had done fairly well in avoiding up to that point.

I suppose I'll move on to Balance of Trade in the not too distant future. I'm curious to see if that one's a reread or not, because I honestly can't remember if I read it before- I'm thinking I did, though, because I remember reading a lot more about trading and melant'i than came up in the Agent of Change sequence.

> 9-11 I hope you like it! MOBI is standard for Kindle- you might be able to e-mail direct to your Kindle too with an e-mail address associated with the device, but there might be a fee involved.

>12 Peace2: I have the same plan to read Metallic Love after this one too. I'd not heard of Cast a Bright Shadow or Shon the Taken, so I'd be interested to know how you like them- a lot of Lee's work has never been published in the US, and much of it is hard to find as well. I did see East of Midnight at the library recently... is that one any good? The "evil matriarchy" concept seemed potentially dubious to em.

33 Night Owls, Lauren M. Roy ★★★½ (impulse buy)

My latest read is Night Owls, an urban fantasy. Urban fantasy really isn't particularly my genre, but I'm shallow- put two women who aren't trying to kill each other on the cover of a SFF book and I'll probably pick it up and take a look at it.

Night Owls bookstore is the one spot on campus open late enough to help out even the most practiced slacker. The employees’ penchant for fighting the evil creatures of the night is just a perk…

Valerie McTeague’s business model is simple: provide the students of Edgewood College with a late-night study haven and stay as far away as possible from the underworld conflicts of her vampire brethren. She’s experienced that life, and the price she paid was far too high for her to ever want to return.

Elly Garrett hasn’t known any life except that of fighting the supernatural beings known as Creeps or Jackals. But she always had her mentor and foster father by her side—until he gave his life protecting a book that the Creeps desperately want to get their hands on.

When the book gets stashed at Night Owls for safekeeping, those Val holds nearest and dearest are put in mortal peril. Now Val and Elly will have to team up, along with a mismatched crew of humans, vampires, and lesbian succubi, to stop the Jackals from getting their claws on the book and unleashing unnamed horrors…

The synopsis sounded interesting- indeed two female protagonists who both sound interesting, and no sign of an alpha male love interest (phew)- I hesitated at the lesbian succubi, though, afraid they would be a not-funny joke or worse, but after the review from Fangs for the Fantasy gave this one a pretty good score I decided to pick it up after all.

I'm glad I did- while the writing was fairly average (a bit of head hopping going on) and the story wasn't the most original that I've read, it did a good job of giving me the things I like in urban fantasy without the things I don't like and overall it was an enjoyable story with an interesting and likable ensemble cast and I'll definitely pick up the next one- Val and Elly mentioned above, Val's Renfield assistant Chaz (who manages the bookstore and runs errands for Val during the daytime, when she is dead to the world, but who is not much of a fighter and knows it), Elly's somewhat estranged foster brother Cavale (who is also an acquaintance of Val), and Justin, a normal human college student who works in the bookstore. The succubi, Sunny and Nia, ended up being more minor characters, mostly helping off-screen, and I didn't feel they were quite used for comic relief so much as the Fangs review did, but I wish I would have seen more of them and that they would have been more differentiated from each other- most of the time they were just referred to as "the succubi" rather than individually, or sometimes Sunny and Nia, still as a unit. We also see a little bit of the vampire politics mentioned in the blurb, and just when I was getting uncomfortable with the bad guys being basically a horde that can be killed with little or no guilt we got to see things a little bit more from the perspective of humans who work with them- but they still ended up being pretty much evil.

Having an ensemble cast works very well- much urban fantasy I've looked at seems to get caught up in "the badass' burden," where there is one character who is super powered or super competent and always has to save everyone at great cost to themselves. The characters here actually talk and care about each other instead of being all "no, I can't let anyone get close, I've lost too much already, everyone I love gets hurt and/or dies (conveniently both reducing the number of characters the author has to worry about and giving the character a great source of angst/motivation)."

Another thing I really liked, which seems disappointingly rare in urban fantasy, is that things from Val's past are mentioned in passing, or brought up as a painful event that she doesn't speak about... and then explained. Actually explained, in the same book in the series they were brought up in, instead of dragged out through a bajillion volumes.

(This is the reason I gave up on the Dresden Files after a couple of books way back when I tried them- besides the "Harry's chauvinism is so cute" grating on me, and why I didn't have any interest in pursuing Ilona Andrews beyond Magic Bites- besides the urgh alpha male romance in that series and the shapeshifter who is trying to create the perfect male form that will be irresistible to women so they were all have sex with him (...with, um, no understanding that there are women who just do not want to sleep with men at all- no, I don't care that he's supposed to be a sleazy character, I didn't feel as if the authors considered that women who didn't want to sleep with men were even a possibility from what I saw in the narrative- okay, I'm done ranting) and the graphic violence up to and including, um, the villain being an actual rape monster- Harry had some incident in his past that was mentioned, mentioned, mentioned and not explained, Kate has some sort of non-human powers and a mysterious incident in her past and possibly mysterious parentage or something I can't remember that were mentioned, mentioned, mentioned and not explained. Authors, I don't find this mysterious, it doesn't hook me to make me learn more- it makes me put your series down and just go look up spoilers on the internet if I'm bothered to find out more.)

I'm looking forward to spending more time with these characters when book two in the series comes out- I think sometime in February.

14>

Sounds interesting. And besides, it's in a bookstore.

>14 sandstone78: Sounds great, I shall look out for this one. And as suitable1 says, who can resist a book set in a bookstore?!

One more note about Night Owls- there are a lot of interesting female characters on the side of good, but I found the constant use of "bitch" for the evil ones a bit grating. (There are three Jackal baddies, a woman, a big tough guy, and a skinny, nervous kid- they acquire nicknames from our heroes: Asshole for the tough guy, Twitch for the kid, and, of course, Bitch for the woman, for example.) I'm chalking that up to genre conventions, though, and I do think it was balanced mostly out for me by the fact that we actually see competent female characters interacting with each other in a positive way on the side of good instead of a lone woman who thinks all other women are bitches or useless etc.

Current reading...

Shade's Children, Garth Nix - This is a re-read, though it's been many, many years since I read it. I saw recently when I was in my local Barnes and Noble that it has a new cover, all the better to fit in with the current round of dystopian YA- but I don't really think it does. This is more of a straightforward adventure story with weird monsters (Nix does weird monsters very well, see also the various undead in the Old Kingdom series and the shadow and ice creatures in The Seventh Tower) than it is anything trying to examine a particular facet of human nature. It also reads a bit younger than current YA- part of it is something I noticed when re-reading Sabriel last year, that he tends toward the omniscient and a little bit of head hopping, whereas most YA these days seems to be either first-person or a tighter third-person perspective, and part is probably that I read it when I was in elementary school. There is a bit of swearing and rather a lot of talk about sex, however, so I think that would put it up into YA for most people. (I remember, though I haven't gotten to it yet, an "interlude" that talks about a character watching a sex ed video over and over.)

But anyways, none of that is particularly why I'm interested in the book- that, instead, is all about Shade, the unapologetically self-absorbed, morally ambiguous hologram who takes the children in to wage his personal war against the Overlords. I am still fascinated by Shade.

I'm looking forward to Clariel's release this fall, but I am seriously raising my eyebrows at the "Perfect for fans of A Game of Thrones" in its blurb. I am really having a hard time finding any commonality between the two series beyond "has a wall in it that's pretty important."

I'm just about to start The Shadowed Sun too, must make up lost time on that! Not made much progress on my other currently reading books, but I do plan to get back to them- for now, I'm also going to start .hack//AI Buster, a translation of a Japanese light novel about a massively multiplayer online RPG called The World- this evidently takes place before .hack//SIGN the anime, which I have watched. It looks like this one may even have a plot different than "someone got trapped in the virtual world and is in a coma in the real world" for once.

I am really having a hard time finding any commonality between the two series beyond "has a wall in it that's pretty important."

To be fair, for marketing blurbs these days, that's a massive commonality. My favourite stoopid blurb of recent years remains a book marketed on the strength that it was from the publishers of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Given Quercus don't just publish Scandi crime titles featuring unorthodox female leads fighting the system, goodness knows what it was actually about - I never did go look it up to find out.

Two books finished, starting The Shadowed Sun for the group read.

34 Shade's Children, Garth Nix ★★★★ (reread)

This is a childhood favorite, so my review is of course skewed for nostalgia purposes. Probably a half star or so, maybe a whole star out of the four comes from that.

I strongly believe that the more one thinks about this book, the less sense it's going to make, so I'm not going to even start with the potential plot holes. (Well, just a little bit- okay, so the change happened 15 years ago, and all children over 15 disappeared instantaneously, now children are killed when the reach age 15- aren't they out of children...? no, they have 50,000 we're told later? how are they feeding them all...?)

I noticed this time that one of the main characters, Gold-Eye, escaped from the Dorms with two boys who were pretty clearly a gay couple, but the fact that gay people are recognized as existing in this world doesn't seem to have any impact on anything else- there's a sex lottery, but it seems like there's only one, and everyone is required to pass a contraception test before entering it, so it doesn't really seem to allow for the possibility of same-sex relationships there...

Shade, the AI copy of an adult research professor who uploaded himself to a computer before the change, is still the most interesting character here. I was still struck by this part (spoiler):

We see in the interludes between the chapters the Shade AI gradually disintegrating and fragmenting into multiple pieces- possibly because he's uploaded himself into Overlord technology- and becoming more erratic- but then, at the next interlude- after he seems to have been destroyed- we get this:

"So I was only fooling myself with the multiple-personality bit. You can't peel off the unpleasant parts and call them something else."

That seemed like quite a twist to me when I was younger, and very profound. Not quite so much now, but I still like the way it's handled.

Still an enjoyable read for the monsters and some of the ideas, even if it doesn't really hang together all that well.

35 .hack//AI buster, Tatsuya Hamazaki, illustrated by Rei Izumi ★★★ (impulse buy)

A translated Japanese "light novel" (targeting roughly the same demographic as young adult novels), specifically a prequel to the various other .hack series. A fun virtual reality/gaming adventure, but fairly short- I read the whole thing, 220ish pages of rather large text, in one sitting. I really could have done without the whole setup where the newbie female character coerces the male main character into letting her tag along because he said her avatar was cute and she's going to report him for sexual harassment if he doesn't bow to her will, though.

I'm a little mollified that we find out at the end of the story that the irritating newbie bit is an act and the character is a second character played by a woman who's been around since the beta version of the game, it makes it feel a bit less like "that's just how women are, incompetent and using threats of harassment to manipulate men"- but not much, because obviously she thinks that's a reasonable act to put on...

The "surprise, these two characters are actually the same person" twist didn't work particularly well for me, though- it didn't seem like the story would be significantly changed by having that up front, and I couldn't buy the one character wouldn't bring up events that happened as the other character given the situation.

>18 imyril: That is a bit of a stretch, isn't it? Wow.

I found something interesting the other day while looking at Melissa Scott's blog trying to figure out what's up with the new edition of Trouble and Her Friends (it was listed with a release date of 8/9/14, but was immediately "out of stock" so that must be wrong- hoping there will be a corresponding ebook edition, but nothing on Scott's blog or the publisher Lethe about it so it must have just been an Amazon mistake) and I happened on this- evidently Scott likes and re-reads Polar City Blues on a regular basis, so maybe the similarity of sensibility you felt between that and Burning Bright wasn't such a coincidence after all.

Still reading The Shadowed Sun here and there, but I have a feeling I'm going to need a longer reading session to really get into it. The Kindly Ones, The Outcast, and The Silver Metal Lover have sort of lost my interest, though I will go back to them- I plan to maybe pick one or more up for the Read-a-Thing over Labor Day weekend at the end of the month.

I've picked up Tamora Pierce's Battle Magic in the meantime for my pieces here and there read, intending to continue her Circle of Magic series- the first eight books which I read last year were re-reads, and last fall Battle Magic was published, filling in a chronological gap between the end of Street Magic and the beginning of The Will of the Empress. This one is... not working for me, so far, about three chapters in. It's readable, but...

We are in the Very Exotic Not-Chinese empire, where the clothes are super uncomfortable, if servant do even the slightest thing wrong they! will! be! beheaded!, everyone is super bored with All Of The Ancient Rituals For Everything and All Of The Bowing and The Way These People Hide Their True Feelings Behind Masks, the Emperor maintains giant evil armies and kills everyone who displeases him and keeps people as slaves, including Eunuchs That Wear More Makeup Than Our Female Characters (I'm really not sure how I'm supposed to take that comparison- I would hope for better than overt femininity = shady evil from Pierce, but I'm really not seeing it) and a barbarian warrior guy named Parahan who he actually keeps in chains and displays to his guests as a curiosity. In short, it's a straight up Evil Fantasy China at this point. (I read a little more on my lunch break earlier, after beginning this post- we find out that the Yanjingyi academic magicians are also objectively wrong about certain parts of magic, eg stone symbolism.)

I think this series is at its best- or at least I like it best- when it's about uses of magic other than violence. So few fantasy settings seem to focus on how magic can be used for art and craft and everything other than killing- with the possible exception of music, there seem to be a lot of musical magic stories. Does anyone have any recommendations for fantasy heavy on magic where violent uses of magic aren't the focus of the plot (or the climax of the plot), preferably ones other than the more common music-magic?

>20 sandstone78: How about A fistful of sky? It's been discussed before, and I'm not sure whether you read it already. If you haven't yet, do! It's not aimed at violence at all, the story is very atypical of fantasy.

The night circus also fits your bill, I think. There's competition, but not really violence. Again an atypical fantasy book, by the way... I guess non-violence in general is atypical.

Ah! I thought of another set. Shades of milk and honey and sequels. These are Austenesque fantasy novels, where magic is used mostly for art. Of course, in the end there are some other aspects as well, intrigue and espionage, but even then, the magic is used for illusions and misdirection, not for fighting. I really enjoyed these books.

And you must have read The emperor's soul? Wonderful book, the only problem with it is that it is too short. Cool heroine, and cool magic.

I'm leafing through my books on GR, and I keep getting that 'Oh! That one!' reaction. Found another one, one of my absolute favourites: Child of a rainless year by Jane Lindskold. I think it's really wonderful, a middle-aged heroine, liminal magic that has nothing to do with violence. Its setting is contemporary, there is the lovely house with a will of its own, the silent women, the diary of the main character's adoptive mother and her quest to find out her daughter's background. If you haven't read it yet, I warmly recommend it!

I heard good things about A Brother's Price somewhere a while ago, so it's sort of been on my radar- to my surprise one of my local libraries acquired it in ebook, so I read the sample... I knew that it was about a boy in a world where women vastly outnumber men, but...

There were few advantages of being a boy in a society dominated by women. One, Jerin Whistler thought, was that you could throttle your older sister, and everyone would shrug, say “she was one of thirty-two girls — a middle sister — and a trouble maker too, and he — he’s a boy,” and that would be the end of it.

That doesn't actually seem so different from a male-dominated society?

There were few advantages of being a boy in a society dominated by women men. One, Jerin Whistler thought, was that you could throttle your older sister, and everyone would shrug, say “she was one of thirty-two girls — a middle sister — and a trouble maker too, and he — he’s a boy,” and that would be the end of it.

This is why discrimi-flips that focus on the people who are privileged in our world just don't tend to work for me- it keeps the spotlight on the same people who are already privileged and tends to villainize those who are marginalized in our world even further. Maybe it gets deeper as the book goes on, but I'm not going to find out this time...

>21 zjakkelien: Alas, A Fistful of Sky is still in my TBR, but I really do need to get to it- I've been wanting to read some Hoffman lately. (I really do like her books, except for the way they tend to just stop rather than ending.) Have you read Fall of Light? Reviews on that one seem to be pretty mixed.

I had heard of Shades of Milk and Honey but forgotten about it- thanks! I was a little put off by the ebook price which is still high since these never seem to have come out in mass-market, but it seems one of my local libraries owns copies so I may have to check them out.

Child of a Rainless Year is in my TBR too. I think that might make a good one for standalone group read, maybe, I'm thinking about the group read schedule for the rest of the year.

I've actually not read any Sanderson yet, though Elantris has been in my TBR pile for ages, and The Emperor's Soul has been on my radar before, but... ah. This is a TLDR answer, I'm afraid.

I've avoided talking about why I've not read Sanderson because so many people here seem to have a great enthusiasm for his work, and I've heard that he was enjoyable company and an active participant in this group in the past which I don't doubt, but... to be honest, I have a hard time separating my ambivalence about his stated views on same-sex marriage from his work. He is certainly no hateful, vitriolic bigot like Card, and his position seems about as open and reasonable as I could hope for from someone who honestly believes the tenets of his religion as he seems to do, but...

Even after his update to that post I see nothing to indicate that the original post there doesn't still reflect his honest and true beliefs eg regarding "non-practicing" gay people being "noble" (I'll be forthcoming and say it makes me outright cringe to read that, because even not being from a particularly religious background myself I still struggle with the idea that not being "normal" makes me a burden on the people close to me, especially those who I'm not yet "out" to). I don't personally understand how he can ignore the very real widespread suffering of same-sex couples who are denied equality in favor of theoretical, ill-defined suffering that might happen somehow if same-sex marriage was legalized. I also feel, possibly unfairly, it's very easy for him to offer a solution of "let's just have civil unions for everyone" when there is pretty much no chance of that actually happening in the United States- it comes across uncomfortably to me as him ending up getting praise for being "liberal, for a Mormon" without actually saying or doing anything that is likely to be able to change people's minds in a way that helps people like me.

I just can't help disappointment- irrational, because for goodness' sake it's not like this is the reason people like his work- that one of the biggest names in my genre, possibly the biggest name in contemporary secondary-world fantasy after Martin, openly has these views and is still so successful, that he has such a presence and that this issue hardly seems to come up in all of the enthusiasm. Should it? I'm not sure I'm able to answer that- the obvious slippery slope argument is there without me having to bring it up. But it dampens my enthusiasm, more so I think than if he was a lesser-known author who didn't have such a presence and a platform.

I don't know. I'm not ruling out ever reading Sanderson or anything like that, or authors I disagree with in general for that matter (within reasonable limits), but... when I pick one of his books up, I'm reminded of this, and I just find myself turning and picking up something else.

22: As much as I'm enjoying the Stormlight Archive books right now, I completely understand why you would hold Sanderson at arm's length. I'm a bit different, in that I go out of my way to find out as LITTLE as possible about an author's views on certain socio-political topics, precisely because if I knew, I might find it difficult to immerse myself fully in the stories they tell.

What gets me, though, is "Oh, you HAVE to read this!" Syndrome. I might tell some friends of mine, "This is really cool and I think you'll like it," but I hope to God I stop short of "You HAVE to read this!" One friend of mine gives me a hard time because I avoid most Classic (published pre-1980s) Sci-Fi. I avoid it because the portrayal of women in those books is not one I can get on board with, and my irritation with this one thing will absolutely get in the way of my enjoyment of the whole. But I can't fully appreciate the genre, she claims, if I haven't read Asimov/Heinlein/Niven/Dick/Anthony... you get the idea. If I want my opinion on current science fiction to count for anything, I HAVE to read these authors.

Excuse me, no, I don't. I'm not in school anymore. I don't HAVE to read anything. And if I would rather read Joan D. Vinge or Vonda McIntyre than Asimov/Heinlein/Niven/Dick/Anthony, that is entirely my prerogative. No matter how important an author may be in a particular genre, we don't HAVE to read him. I wouldn't say my enjoyment of most epic fantasy is contingent upon my having read Robert Jordan, thank God.

The Shadowed Sun is picking up. I'm enjoying the ensemble cast, even coming around to characters I wasn't sure about like Wanahomen. The Killing Moon was up and down for me, though. I'll see if this volume is the same, but I'm enjoying it at the moment.

Battle Magic is about the same. The characters seem flat in this one, and sometimes things seem forced to the extent they feel out of character. I don't have a good sense of the characters the way I typically do with Pierce's work. There seem to be a few very minor not-particularly-evil Yanjingyi characters here and there, but it seems to me that this is the first real time that the Living Circle religion has actually been treated as a religious faith tradition in the books- there have been the gods, of course, which people worship and respect, but here Rosethorn talks about being called upon to "defend her faith" and protect the center of her faith, the first temple in Gyongxe.

It's very jarring, when the method of worship seemed to previously be very personal and based in different traditions per each community Temple, and now there seems to be a whole edifice and hierarchy of temples. I don't really recall anything about that in the previous eight books I've read, but then we never have gotten much about the religious life in the Winding Circle Temple where the protagonists are just students learning magic and not actual religious initiates...

36 .hack//AI Buster 2, Tatsuya Hamazaki, illustrated by Rei Izumi ★★★½ (impulse buy)

Not a sequel to the first .hack//AI Buster volume, but a collection of related short stories. Again, nothing particularly groundbreaking, but an enjoyable read spread across a couple of sittings, and I'll pick up the rest of the .hack light novels as I come across them.

I think one of the most refreshing things about these two has been that the focus is on all different types of players, fairly evenly divided especially in this volume between newbies and experienced long-term players, and that the stereotypes of who plays games that dominate US books about gaming are refreshingly absent. All but one of the stories in this volume (which is a sequel to the previous book, following the same main character) follow female characters: a professional translator who's been playing since the beta version, a young system administrator (who was a character in the previous book, but mistranslated as male) who follows the letter of the system regulations when dealing with AI- and her subordinates, a preteen girl whose friends keep drifting away from the game so she convinces her brother to play instead, and another girl about the same age who lives in America and logs into the Japanese server of The World to explore her Japanese heritage from her mother's side and practice her language skills.

The only romance in the book is a single date that could lead to more between the main character from the last book, who was the head of the system administrators, and the translator, who's roughly his age but maybe a couple of years older- both of them in their late twenties, I believe.

None of them- or of the other game novels I'm aware of- are really about the experience of playing games, at least not the way the .hack series is so earnestly. The Real World is the world that matters, and the game world only matters to the extent "The Game is Reeeeal" or "The Game Has Stakes In The Real World!" or elements of the game can symbolically reflect back on The Real World.

I suppose that Bartle's classification also applies to books about gaming. .hack, or really all Something Is Wrong With The Game novels are Explorer novels, about discovering the glitches and emergent features- the game sure is interesting. Look, Virtual Reality Allows Me To Examine Human Relationships And The Construction of Identity In Novel Ways novels (Burning Bright? possibly the virtual reality romances of Ann Lawrence) are Socializer novels. Boy Is Good At Game, Gets Hot Girl And Rewarding Life Still Including Games novels (Scott Pilgrim) are Achiever novels- success in the game leads to happiness outside the game. I suspect Killer novels would be similar, but play up power over others through success in the game rather than acceptance and success in a rewarding geeky community (take that normal people).

Maybe these categories would apply more broadly than just novels about games. They seem broad enough that you could generalize them to almost anything.

>23 kceccato: Part of it is that I've gotten so tired of running into weird sexist tropes that I tend to look at an author's website and do a search about them before reading their work these days- but, equally as often, I tend to look at authors' websites to find out what else they've written, any author's notes they have about a book I liked (or am considering reading), or when their next book is coming out- if it's not scheduled or under contract, at least what they're working on. (You would be surprised how extraordinarily hard it can be to find that last bit for some authors!)

Sometimes I find interesting, thoughtful essays. Sometimes I find weird rants and go "Nope!" (but there are often warning signs that the author's work is not for me before that that have driven me to look up the author in the first place.) Sometimes I find people like M.C.A. Hogarth whose political views are very different than mine (she seems to be very politically conservative) who are open to dialogue and explain their positions so that I can understand them, even if I strongly disagree.

Sometimes I've already read or heard good things about an author, and are looking for where to start or where to go next and I happen upon things that leave me with mixed feelings because their views make me vaguely uncomfortable, but I'm still interested in their work because it covers topics or has tropes that are particularly up my alley. The Sanderson link I posted above is one of those cases, but there have been others to varying degrees.

Is the Anthony you mention Piers Anthony? I'm pretty sure you don't want to read Piers Anthony.

I actually don't see that much of what you're talking about, though- about the only author I see "you have to read this!" and everyone nods in agreement these days is Terry Pratchett. (I'm sorry, I feel like a terrible person for not liking Pratchett when everyone else loves him, even my mom loves him, but the Discworld I've tried just doesn't work for me! Maybe it will someday. This is not a call for Pratchett recommendations.)

To ease things with your classic SF friend, perhaps you would be interested in some of the early work by women? Justine Larbaleistier has a pretty good compilation I've been meaning to track down, Daughters of Earth. I'm sure they wouldn't count, though.

>24 sandstone78: Pratchett - my word! You mean I'm not alone over here? It's such a quiet, dark corner I didn't see you there. I try hard not to feel like a terrible person about this quirk, but it generally seems to be considered a major flaw so I don't tend to bring it up :) As you say - maybe one day. But so far, not today. I can't even particularly put my finger on why - but he's never, ever appealed and I can never bring myself to put in the effort (especially when everyone tells me it's no effort, so I'm obviously doing it wrong).

>22 sandstone78:

I totally get and share your attitude to writers like Sanderson, and I'm sorry so many people are willing to overlook anything negative that doesn't affect them directly. Not just when it comes to opinions about homosexuality or women, but race even today, which shocks me the most, because people seem faster to understand what's wrong with racism, than misogyny and homophobia. So I'd expect more people to be troubled by it, or to be MORE troubled by it than they seem to be (judging by how well some stuff still sells and how favourably it's reviewed).

And yet... okay, we are all jaded about such things in 1960s sf (in the book I just finished, Martian time-slip, there are human colonies on Mars in the 21st century--and a "nigger" underclass of servants and roaming savages)--but what's the justification for the "White Saviour" Daenerys in the current hit of hits, Game of Thrones? I gave up on the second season (and the rest) when I saw those scenes with masses of PoC hailing her as their liberator. It's one thing to deal with that in pulp fiction from a century ago. But today?

>23 kceccato:

One sort of needs to put on a "historian" or "archaeologist" hat to go through much of old sci-fi. I can't believe reading it for pure entertainment is possible for anyone who's not a twelve year old white boy. Then again, I seem to be the only woman whom the world of Jane Austen severely depresses, so what do I know.

26> I think the majority of his readers probably don't know about Sandersons opinions since they don't come across in the books. Sandstone78's the first person I've met who researches the author before reading the books. Like kceccato, I usually try to find out as little as possible.

Game of Thrones has all sorts of problems. Race is certainly one, but there's others as well. What really bothers me about that issue is that it feels like he went out of his way to make the major non-white culture as barbaric and rapey as possible. I've seen defenders claim, "oh, it's ironic because Westros isn't any better!" Except for massive amounts of public rape we see in the Daenerys sections. Presumably this culture is based upon the ancient Mongols? Did he actually do any research about them? Because it seems like all he's doing is making them the barbaric "Other."

I know there's problems with it, but I keep reading it, largely because I've started to care about some of the characters. I just end up with long reviews (and reading journal posts) about everything wrong with the series.

27: pwaites, you've done a very good job of putting into words my own problematic relationship with A Song of Ice and Fire. There's so much in it that I hate, but darn it, I read (and watch) anyway.

26: The world of Jane Austen is an interesting (I won't even say "nice") place to visit, but I darn sure wouldn't want to live there.

>27 pwaites:

Good point. I too generally avoid going out of my way to learn too much about authors (although, as my fiction list is mostly dead people, it's not often that I run into a real dilemma about whether or not to give them money). But I expect avoiding information about the author's views is of limited help, ultimately, that the author's attitudes will make themselves felt in some way sooner or later...

>28 kceccato:

The trick is to nail a handsome rich man of a generous and stalwart character who appreciates brains and wit in women!

>22 sandstone78: No, I didn't read A fall of light yet. I'm a bit worried about it, because it's not about the same main character. But I will probably give it a try in time...

I usually try to avoid knowing too much about an author's personal views. And if I do know, and their views are not palatable, I try to ignore it. In general, I don't care so much about authors, I just want to read good books. But I can see how this can bother someone...

>24 sandstone78: >25 imyril: I'm the same about Pratchett. I've recently read one of his books (after trying 3 times), but it just isn't my thing. I can see how people might appreciate it, but for me the humor is laid on to thickly...

Still making progress on Battle Magic and The Shadowed Sun, slowly. Battle Magic remains pretty meh (the characters just don't sound like themselves, and they've always been the strength of this series), and The Shadowed Sun is wavering at this point- I am getting dubious vibes from this "never know true womanhood" nonsense and the makeover "I don't recognize myself made up like a feminine woman!" scenes. I am going to be cross if we are going down the "You can be in a male occupation and still be feminine!" road, even more so if we are also going down the "sex is natural and everyone wants it, celibacy is unnatural and sex should be a part of every healthy person's life or they will be unfulfilled forever!! and not know what they are missing" road, though I think there are some signs we will not be going there. (I hope.)

It feels like I've been reading The Shadowed Sun for ages, and I don't mean that in a bad way- I'm only a little over a third of the way in, but there's just so much more to sink into, and it feels so much more cohesive than the plot-driven-to-the-exclusion-of-worldbuilding The Killing Moon.

Re-reading Shade's Children and the .hack//AI buster books has put me on a bit of an artificial intelligence kick. I'm onto Catherynne Valente's novella Silently and Very Fast and I have finally started Ancillary Justice, which has been in my TBR pile since it came out and has won all of the awards since then.

It's interesting, and not quite what I was expecting- I'm liking Breq a lot. I'm not sure about the pronouns, though- Leckie is theoretically using "she" for everyone, but so far it's been "she" but we're told that the people Breq is talking about are male, so it's reading more like "she is used for men (and there are no women)" so far, and the pronouns are mostly fading into the background now that I have that "translation" in place. There is a lot to think about regarding conquering empires and colonialism here, though.

Silently and Very Fast is interesting- it mixes myth and fairy tales with the experiences of an AI who has been tied to a family for generations. There's some interesting explorations of virtual reality as well, and fluidity of human identity in virtual reality. The sometimes flowery (though not unpleasantly so) prose is nice, but some of the abstractions present in her virtual reality dreamscape make me twitchy- we have at one point abstracted code seeds "which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms"- and I am thrown out of the story, because all I can think is "what a horrible interface that would be to try to actually get something done" and "ack, why are you mixing function with presentation??"

> 26-30 I want to say more on this topic, but it's been a stressful week so I've not been able to get any coherent thoughts together on it. I'll come back to it later! I will say I'm a little surprised that so many of you go out of your way not to find out things about authors and I'm curious about the reasons why.

Is it just a lack of interest in the person behind the work, or that you don't want your enjoyment of an author's work ruined by a disagreeable personality or political views that you don't like? Or is it a "death of the author" sort of thing where you don't believe that the author's intent or experience going into the work have any bearing on the work itself?

>25 imyril: >30 zjakkelien: I'm not alone?? I'm relieved. I think this is the first time I've encountered other people who read in the genre that weren't into Pratchett- the only negative reviews I've ever seen have been along the lines of "it's not that great, but it's still Pratchett so a mediocre Pratchett is still better than a good book by everyone else" for particular books generally agreed to be his lesser works. I've been starting to wonder what was wrong with me.

31> Depends. I think a large part of it is lack of interest. I can only remember two times I specifically hunted down information about authors lives. Once was Dianna Wynne Jones, another was Douglas Adams for a seventh grade biography paper, the other was... Pratchett (aside - I love his books, but I can understand someone not liking them, especially if they aren't into the style of humor). I've more frequently gone to look for recommend books and writing advice from authors I've liked.

There's only a few who I regularly see information from. I signed up for the Discworld Monthly years ago and still get updates from that, and the other main one is Maggie Stiefvater's tumblr, since she's an artist too.

All the authors I've looked up have been after I've read them. This has occasionally backfired. See Piers Anthony and creepy pedophilia undertones.

But for the most part, looking into information on the book instead of the author works fine for me. For the most part, if there's something really disturbing about the author, it comes up prominently in reviews (which lead me away from the book) or the book (which leads me to either chuck it or write a bad review of it). I think Orson Scott Card's the only exception here. I liked some of his books in middle school, but I'm sure as heck not reading or buying any of them nowadays. He's far past the limits of what I can ignore.

>31 sandstone78: I was rather irritated by the implication that a woman is not a woman unless she has sex and children, but a celibate man is still a man. Argh. Back to the slightly dubious gender politics of Gujaareh, which - as you pointed out - seems to rely heavily on pedestals and conforming to expectations, rather than actual respect.

On authors - I'm erratic. I often read a book without finding out anything about the author, but once I do find things out about authors it influences my desire to buy (or reread) their work. I'm just not organised enough to read up in advance and inform my initial purchases :) I suppose I've yet to be tested by discovering one of my absolute favourites has an unpleasant set of beliefs; so far it's been authors I've enjoyed but not adored.

@zjakkelien, @pwaites - Pratchett's humour has definitely been part of the lack of appeal for me. And while the books always sound fun when someone else describes them, whenever I read a blurb it just falls flat and fails to lure me in. I think I've made my peace with it; I'm definitely past the point where I'm going to keep trying - I'm happy for everyone else to enjoy his books for me :)

I smile at Pratchett's humor, but don't laugh out loud...but what I admire about his books and enjoy them most for is how he can use the humor and the crazy plots as tools to examine and illuminate serious philosophical questions.

I also usually don't need to know details about authors, but I do like to know, say, if they're American or British. That can help my understanding of the cultural basis out of which a story is written (and informs me about the writing itself.) If that makes any sense at all...

>31 sandstone78: I've never really cared about authors, really. It's only since I'm participating in online fora that I find out things about them accidentally sometimes. I'm just not interested in the author, I'm only interested in the book. And I'd be annoyed if I'd be put off a good book because of the author's views. If something creepy would come through in the books too strongly, that would put me off in itself, but at least then it would be the book putting me off, not the author. So far, I have managed to avoid boycotting anyone because of their views. Well, perhaps Marion Zimmer Bradly, but admittedly, I wasn't really interested in her books even before I found out about her.

>34 Marissa_Doyle:

Nice remark about Pratchett. I wouldn't call myself a fan--I read two, I think, and that after picking up and putting down various titles repeatedly--but that's also how I see it.

It's a pity I didn't get to him in my early teens, I would have gotten so much more out of him (more amusement too!)

Just checking in- I went to start up the September group read for Stories of the Raksura Volume One, but it is only available in audio and e-book- the paper version has been delayed until September 30th. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to push the group read back to October so more people have time to pick up the book.If we push, I'm thinking Intisar Khanani's fairy tale retelling Thorn will be the replacement book for September.

Tentative group read schedule, including Thorn and pushing back the Raksura:

September: Thorn, Intisar Khanani (Retelling of the fairy tale "The Goose Girl")

October: Stories of the Raksura Volume One, Martha Wells (Secondary world no-humans fantasy, continuing the group reads of the Raksura books- see group reads linked up top in this thread)

November: Flesh and Spirit, Carol Berg (A book that seems suitable for a late autumn read- secondary world fantasy about a sorcerer hiding from his family- Berg is very good on character development, but tends to put her characters through the ringer, a la Robin Hobb- someone who likes one may well like the other)

December: Breath and Bone, Carol Berg (Second half of the above story)

January-possibly February: Something science fiction, to be decided- possible choices include A Matter of Oaths, one of Sarah Zettel's standalones, Fallway, Song of Scarabaeus (duology) and others from the list

After that: possibly Michelle West's Hunter's Oath/Hunter's Death duology, possibly Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead and (currently) two sequels, Stories of the Raksura Volume Two due out in April, Carol Berg's Dust and Light and sequel, a duology that forms a sequel to Flesh and Spirit/Breath and Bone, in the summer with the release of the second book- with some more science fiction and standalones interspersed, and of course works possibly dropping out of the list if I read or re-read them too soon before when I've planned

How does that sound to everyone?

Sounds good, sandstone78! Some good titles in your list...

Yeah, many I'm looking forward to reading or re-reading! I've fixed the touchstone for Thorn in the above post, by the way- it is a fairy tale retelling, not a Dracula novel!

That sounds good!

I'll certainly read along with some or all of these suggestions. I see that Thorn is available in the UK on kindle for not too much money so I'll snaffle that up soon. And I have Dust and light on the Tbr pile so it would be good to reread the earlier duology before starting the new book.

Ah, good, it seems we're all agreed then. I'll get the thread for Thorn set up this evening if I get a chance. I'm really looking forward to the new Raksura book and Berg duology, and I've been wanting to read Thorn since I read this review of it a while back.

Who here is participating in A More Diverse Universe by the way, out of curiosity? I'm in again this year, probably with Benjanun Sriduangkaew's Scale-Bright but I could change my mind.

I finished The Shadowed Sun last night. No rating yet because I'm still mulling things over- I'll post about them over in the group read thread. I think a lot of things were improved in this book over The Killing Moon- the characters seem more fleshed-out, the setting does too a bit, and the pacing seemed more even too- I would say that I enjoyed it as an interesting, immersive created-world fantasy, but I have some definite mixed feelings about some of Jemisin's themes, including the handling of rape, abuse, "true womanhood" and gender roles, religion, and mental illness... pretty much all of the themes she deals with in the book, really. I'm looking forward to comparing notes on this one.

I'm in for the More Diverse Universe - I've got an Octavia Butler possibly lined up, but I'm going to look out for at least one other read too.

Looking forward to your comments in Shadowed Sun - I also thought it was better and yet it still bothered me.

>13 sandstone78: So late in replying to your comment, my apologies. I wouldn't rave about East of Midnight but I did make it through it. I do remember that I didn't actually really like any of the characters. Of the two men at the centre of events, one is actually fairly contemptible and the other I didn't like, but ended up appreciating him because he tried to solve problems not at the cost of anyone else. My general feeling was strange, unusual, but I wouldn't keep it or come back and read it again.

I'm also in More Diverse Universe. I've got The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Throne of Crescent Moon, and Silver Phoenix. If I can, I'll read all three. More likely is that I'll read one of the two epics and Silver Phoenix, which is a shorter YA fantasy novel.

Thread for Thorn is up here!

>43 imyril: Oo, which Butler are you going to try? This month's group read, Thorn, would qualify for Diversiverse if you've any interest.

I've read your comments on The Shadowed Sun and I agree with most of them overall, though I don't think I was as convinced by Wanahomen's character arc though- while I did like him better at the end of the book, I'm not sure I really understood why he changed as much as he did from an in-story perspective. It was a bit like "wait, having him set up Hanani to be raped is actually really horrible, I'll have her forgive him and understand and he'll change his behavior out of guilt and also be simultaneously mystified by and attracted to her selfless virtue," which... I don't even know? Anyways, more on that in the other thread when I get a chance.

I am not happy with the resolution re: Tantufi.

>44 Peace2: That's okay! I've still not managed to get back to The Silver Metal Lover, which I did start, so you're ahead of me. Sounds like it's not worth going out of my way for East of Midnight when I have other works I'm more interested in by Lee in my TBR already, thanks. The Silver Metal Lover is better than I remember it being, though I'm not too far into it. I didn't remember a lot, though- it was a surprise to me that it is set ostensibly on a future Earth, for example.

>45 pwaites: Looks like a good list! I liked a lot of things about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but I would advise you to stay away from reviews- it's a twisty story, and I think it would have worked better for me if I'd not known some of the twists in advance. One thing I do wish I'd known up front is that the story contains a fairly typical paranormal romance subplot with the usual powerful and dangerous man/naive but resourceful woman dynamics- I had to realign my expectations a bit when it showed up.

46> I haven't heard much about the plot, but I have heard about the romance tropes, which is probably why it's sat in TBR for so long...

>46 sandstone78: I figured I'd start with Wild Seed as a chronological start to the Patternist books.

I've got about a dozen (non-fantasy) books on the shelf I've been meaning to read - I think I'll take this as a good reason to stop putting off reading them and tackle one or more of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rajaa Alsanea or Sulaiman Addonia.

However, my wishlist is cheerfully expanding with MOAR BOOKS that I now want to read from various interesting Diversiverse links :)

>48 imyril: I liked that one. But I think I liked the later ones (3 and 4) even more.

Current reading...

Battle Magic, Tamora Pierce

I'm stalled out a bit in this one, but I need to get back to it because I want to move on to the later books in the series. This one is frustrating because so much is told in summary instead of shown on-screen, the plot seems more than a bit contrived, and the character relationships just aren't there the way I expect in a novel by Pierce- Briar, Rosethorn, and Evvy all seem very flat to me in this novel, and something is off about their relationship in a way I can't put my finger on- Rosethorn seems pretty passive in a lot of places, deferring to Briar in a way that I'm not sure makes sense for their relationship.

I'm still disappointed that this series took a turn for the epic/war/violent uses of magic instead of the craft-based magic we started out with, though really that started as early as Tris' Book- even the criminal-investigation-focused Circle Opens quartet had a lot of craft in it, though.

Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne Valente

This one remains interesting, I just need to find the time- perhaps this weekend- to sit and finish the rest of it. The blending of myth and technology remains interesting, if still not always convincing from a technology point of view.

Thorn, Intisar Khanani

I'm liking it so far. It reminds me a lot of The Swan Kingdom in its tone and prose style. More thoughts will be over in the group read thread.

Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, Nahoko Uehashi

I'm going to cheat and count this one as a mount TBR read despite the copy that's been on mount TBR for years being in the original Japanese and this being the English translation. I'm not terribly far in yet, but the protagonist has potential- Balsa, a wandering, spear-wielding bodyguard who seems widely renowned. Her charge this time around is Chagum, a prince suspected to be possessed by a water demon that the founder of the kingdom of New Yogo was thought to have killed two hundred years ago. I'm not too far into this one, but I'm looking forward to it.

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie

The pronouns are still neither here nor there for me at this point, but after a somewhat slow start I've become really interested in both plotlines as the story progresses and I find out more about what's going on.

>48 imyril: Interesting list! From the books you list, I wonder if you might not also be interested in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, if you've not already read it and you're not bothered by graphic novels? Longer wishlist is one of my favorite things about Diversiverse :)

Wild Seed was my first Butler as well. I'll be curious to see what you think of it!

>49 zjakkelien: Would that be Clay's Ark and Survivor or Clay's Ark and Patternmaster? I found Clay's Ark extremely hard to put down, but I thought that Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind did most of what it did better.

>50 sandstone78: Ah, yes, I forgot about Survivor, which I also read. I think I liked that one as well, although I can't fully remember. And I think I got my numbers wrong. I actually meant Mind of my mind and Patternmaster. I didn't really like Clay's ark.

>50 sandstone78: I loved Persepolis - my interest in books about women in Islamic cultures started with Reading Lolita in Tehran (which I highly recommend; my copy was loaned out so often it eventually never came home), and my housemate had a copy of Persepolis (and the sequel), which made a perfect partner.

I do feel like I've got nothing but treats lined up to read this autumn :)

50, 52: Persepolis is brilliant. I love the book, and have also seen the movie. One scene I won't soon forget: in the college classroom, the men are seated on one side and the women on the other. When we see the men, they look like distinct individuals, each dressed in their own way. But on the women's side, all the students look identical -- individuality being erased, except in the hearts and minds of the women themselves.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is one of my favorite nonfiction books of the past decade.

I might finally finish Battle Magic tonight... All of the magical creatures in this book just seem really out of place, I don't think there were any I could recall in the Circle of Magic quartet or the Circle Opens quartet. It's explained in-story by Gyonxe being a magical land, but... I just feel that this story wasn't particularly suited to this setting, or to these characters, and some things like this and certain character behavior feel rather forced to make it fit. I'm not sure what the point of some of the subplots were either.

I'm also bothered by the seeming glee with which Briar and Rosethorn's plant magic is described when it's used for war- it's the same "magic is so cool tone" as when it's used for crafting purposes in the earlier books:

Saplings shot from the willow beads worn by the Yanjingyi mages. Rapidly the new trees grew. The mages tore off their strings of beads, but not fast enough to keep them from being enveloped by the fast-growing willlows. The new trees followed their power to heal by uniting the mages' arms with their bodies and forcing the humans' two legs to become one. They wrapped the humans in their trunks.

This seems even more horrific than the villains' beating and torture of Briar's student Evvy to me, which uses non-magical methods, but nobody seems to care at all at all because the target are soldiers of the evil Yanjingyi empire- there was what felt like a token acknowledgement later that most of the army probably doesn't have a choice in the matter, and many of them were probably pressed into service against their will, but that doesn't stop it being okay to kill them by merging their arms and legs to their bodies and growing trees that envelop and consume them, presumably while they are still conscious and aware as it's happening.

That is just not okay to me- the lack of acknowledgement or anything of how horrible this is by Briar and Rosethorn or the army they are fighting with takes the story past any sensible "war is horrible and awful" theme right to "wipe out all of the enemies" video game logic. I was unsettled by the lack of horror before back in Street Magic, when Briar killed a number of guards serving an evil noblewoman with "seed bombs" that envelop someone with instant-growing thorny vines that consume and devour them- it's as if it's okay to kill someone in as horrific a manner as possible so long as they are in the service of evil, which makes it really hard for me to see the protagonists as being on the side of good. I'm hoping that this is given some attention in the bit of the book I have left, at least.

I really want to continue the series because I'm involved with these characters after following them for so long, but I think other books by Pierce will be hard sells for me after reading this one, especially with any kind of war or crime plots. The Will of the Empress at least seems to have a political intrigue plot and Melting Stones seems to get back to the natural imbalance/disaster themes rather than war and crime, so hopefully these won't be issues so much.

>51 zjakkelien: There are so many different ways to number that series, though, I can think of at least four (publication vs chronological, including or not including Survivor)- very confusing!

Survivor is interesting, but I've stalled out a little because it's print and I can't take it around with me because it's not easily replaceable. I need to go back and finish it. The first story in Unexpected Stories is a prequel about Diut and another Hao woman who hasn't shown up in Survivor yet, before the humans got there it seems like, with decidedly the most optimistic ending I've seen from Butler. (Don't worry, though, the other story included balances is right back to her usual unflinching realism regarding the awful parts of human nature.)

>52 imyril: I read Persepolis in high school and really liked it too. I remember also liking Embroideries, which is specifically about the experiences of women if you've not read it.

>54 sandstone78: ooh, onto the wishlist that goes :)

I've not been around much lately- I've got a lot going on lately, and the stress and anxiety make it difficult for me to concentrate enough to read. I'm really disappointed that I missed participating in A More Diverse Universe, and I've not been able to finish Thorn and join in the discussion either, but I've put up this month's group read thread for Stories of the Raksura Volume One. (The paper copy of that was pushed back a little, but it seems to finally be available everywhere if you've been waiting!)

I did manage to finish the last little bit of Battle Magic, at least.

38 Battle Magic, Tamora Pierce ★ (mount tbr)

This was a real disappointment, for the reasons I mentioned above- the setting did not really jive with the universe as established in the first eight books both in the way religion works and the introduction of magical creatures, the gruesome violence committed by the main characters, the flatly evil not-Chinese empire whose residents (especially their mages!) are almost universally backwards and wrong, the way the dialogue and relationships between the characters seemed lacking, the uneven pacing, the literal deus ex machina ending- which was at least foreshadowed, heavily, I will give it that- followed by "and then they forgot about all of the strange beings and gods because everyone forgets about all of when they leave this country" to explain why none of this ever came up in any of the other books... a thorough disappointment.

I'll probably move on to The Will of the Empress and Melting Stones eventually, because they were written earlier and reviews are generally better, but I'll probably check Pierce's new work out of the library instead of (or before) buying after this one.

Hello everyone, it's been a little while again but I'm still around- I haven't been reading as much lately, partly because I'm dealing with some anxiety related to my mother having fairly useless health insurance (there are no known issues beyond some chronic conditions she has had for years now, but anxiety is rarely rational- also, seemingly every. single. book. or TV show or movie or other form of media I pick up having the main character's mother die or have died tragically does... not help the anxiety- seriously, authors, please please please find a different "tragic backstory" device besides "dead mother"), partly because it's been a stressful period at work with lots going on, along with various other things.

I have finished a couple of books, though: I managed to make it through Stories of the Raksura for the group read and will post my belated comments shortly, Ancillary Justice (in time to attend the book signing for Ancillary Sword!, which, Ann Leckie remembered me from last year's signing of Ancillary Justice and said she thought I was possibly the only person she didn't personally know at the signing last year, and she was glad I came to this year's as well- I am still not over that :D), and Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit.

I'm going to have to call the group read for November a scratch; my original plan had been Carol Berg's Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone for this month and next, but I do not think I could take something as grueling as Berg is with her characters right now. I've seen discussion threads about Kameron Hurley's God's War which is in my TBR still, but seems to also be dark and grueling; perhaps for next month, something like Barbara Hambly's Stranger at the Wedding (how much is this improved by having read the Windrose chronicles first, those who have read it?), Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel duology omnibus, or something along those lines?

39 Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie ★★★★★

I liked Ancillary Justice quite a bit- I really liked the balance of a focused, personal story with an expansive setting that's shown and implied more than infodumped about, and I liked Breq. The gender pronoun thing didn't completely work for me in parts- early on, when it's explained that Seivarden is male and yet being referred to with the neutral "she," I think my brain just got switched to "she = male character" rather than "she = person, without gender being relevant," and while that never really went away I think I got closer by the end of the novel, when we got more characters on-screen.

(The equation of "she" to "male person" was reinforced by the "masculine" title of Lord of the Radch and the address "sir"- I had the chance to ask Leckie about these at the book signing, and to paraphrase she said that she had considered using "Lady" and "ma'am," but felt that she didn't want the associations that those titles carried in our world- she wanted the feel of "Lord" and "sir"; I guess to some extent I can see that, but it felt a bit still like Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness keeping "king" for her Gethenians but avoiding "mother," instead using "parent.")

Interestingly, though Leckie has stated a strong Cherryh influence (especially Foreigner), the book that most came to mind was A Matter of Oaths- possibly because the warring Anaander Mianaais reminded me quite a bit of the warring Emperors Julur and Ayvar, especially Mianaai at the end and Ayvar. I was also reminded of Shade's Children, not for any particular similarity so much as the way AI was handled- specifically, whether an AI can act against its own interests- Nix comes down pretty hard against that with Shade, in one of my very favorite scenes of the book, while Leckie seems to accept it as a matter of course that it's possible- which would make sense with the relatively autonomous ancillaries, though little has been explained about the nature of Mianaai at this point; I'll be very curious to see where that goes.

40 Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, Nahoko Uehashi ★★★★

This has been on my mount TBR for six or seven years in Japanese, but finally I gave in and bought the translated edition, and am glad I didn't wait until the nebulous day my vocabulary might be remotely able to tackle it- this is a middle-grade/younger-young-adult fantasy with an interesting setting and quite a few complications and gender role reversals beyond the expected (the tough, wandering bodyguard with a troubled past and a heart of gold is our female protagonist, Balsa, for example, but there are a number of interesting characters both male and female, and even the apparent bad guys don't really turn out to be so simplistically bad.) It's not perfect, and the writing style can sometimes be quite simplistic- I'm not sure if that's because of its original audience as a children's book in Japan, Uehashi's style, or the translation, but I'm guessing it's some combination of the three.

I'm currently listening to Catherine Asaro's The Quantum Rose, another long-time TBR sitter (it is... not very good, so far, I'm afraid- Asaro tends to be quite infodumpy sometimes, and this book definitely has that issue, as well as an iffy somewhat waifish young woman escapes abusive fiance for wealthy but damaged stranger who no doubt she will heal romance- evidently it will expand into the greater Skolian space opera universe sometime after The Radiant Seas, though, which I feel at this point could only improve things), and re-reading Kate Forsyth's The Witches of Eileanan (aka Dragonclaw).

The Forsyth was going so well- the omnipresent dialect which surely would be a turn off for many people, the witches having apparently used witchcraft to travel through space and settle this planet (and they are from Earth- there are references to very old books in Latin), numerous interesting female characters (including female friendship between our protagonist apprentice witch Isabeau and a tree shapeshifter, Lilanthe, with subtext that bordered on the romantic), lots of interesting magic and magical creatures, and not sparing on the revelations that some authors would drag out for books- but then I hit about the 50% point...

I looked past the random rebel guy making a comment around that point about the evil army's soldiers being "nancy boys," despite it feeling somewhat out of place with the relatively egalitarian gender roles up to that point, but very soon after I hit the bit with the sadistic bisexual torturer who takes great delight in graphically abusing and torturing our protagonist Isabeau, trigger warning for what's behind the spoiler cut sexually arousing her against her will during the torture, putting his hand between her legs and putting it in her mouth, making her "taste her own juices". Just... I don't even.

The way the book is written it's really, really hard not to see the bisexuality being part of his evilness with the sadistic torture (he kisses a young man on the mouth and fondles him repeatedly while he's torturing Isabeau- the "young man" never gets a name and is completely forgotten about- he's clearly just a prop to show how depraved and gross the Grand-Questioner is). To make sure we get it that this guy's evil, on top of being a bisexual sadist, the Grand-Questioner is also an evil albino- he's weird-looking and blonde with "strangely pale" eyes. (We also have an evil female magic sniffer, the Grand-Seeker, who is basically a "bitch" stereotype as much as one could imagine.)

It's unfortunately just kind of been downhill from there- the focus has changed from Isabeau and Meghan to Jorge, a blind seer (or, as the typo has it repeatedly throughout the book in chapter headings, the "bund seer"), and a boy with healing talent he picks up along the way (Jorge, despite being completely blind except for magical seer vision we're told, has things described from his point of view in colors and other visual terms as much as any other character by the way), the evil queen, Isabeau's woefully ineffective escape attempt (though she did manage to kill the Grand-Questioner with an unsecured torture instrument that she knocks down with magic- given that the guy has presumably tortured about umpteen witches older and more powerful than Isabeau, none of them thought to do that with their sort-of-telekinetic power, which ability is required to be considered a full witch?, a point of view section with Meghan and another female characer Isabeau's secret twin sister who is competent but can't understand why she feels strangely tender towards the leader of the rebels who is a complete jerk to her (not a spoiler: because the author is pushing them together into a romance of course though he pretty much has no redeeming qualities at least at this point), and a point of view section with Lilanthe- except not really, it ends up being about a jongleur guy that Isabeau knew when she was a kid. (Lilanthe reacts completely as if she had a serious crush on Isabeau when the jongleur tells her Isabeau's been captured, and in fact swears revenge and everything- alas, evidently Lilanthe is summarily married off to a random guy from the rebel army and summarily written out of the story in future volumes.)

I've managed to make it nearly to 80%, but despite fond memories of enjoying this series when I was younger, I'm not sure I'll continue, or even whether I'll make it through this volume...

57> The Witches of Eileanan is sounding like a book I won't be reading. Urgh, it sounds like Dune with the gay villain, with all the subtext that being gay is part of what makes him evil.

>57 sandstone78: I didn't like The witches of Eileanan when I read it years ago, and it sounds like one I don't need to revisit! I saw that The Book Smugglers really like Moribito as well, so that looks like one I need to look out for.

And that is very cool that Ann Leckie remembered you and was so nice.

I read Barbara Hambly's Stranger at the Wedding after the Windrose Chronicles, however, I think it would stand very well, in fact just fine, on its own. If you are hesitating in case you think you ought to read the other series first, I'd say - don't worry.

I loved the book - very engaging. And it covers a very short time span, rare for novels in the genre. The memory has stuck with me for a long time, with no looking back.

I don't know what edition you have - but if it is one of the early ones from the USA, it may have Don Maitz's cover on it?

If it does (red headed heroine, purple dress, casting a spell into a sort of gothic style stone doorway?) - if that is your edition, there are some amusing ancecdotes from the studio.

>58 pwaites: >59 Sakerfalcon: To be fair, this is a small section of the book (I'm reading in ebook, so I don't have the page count, but I'd guess maybe 10-15 physical pages?), at the end of which the Grand-Questioner is summarily killed, and I do fully get the feeling that it's an unthinking use of "eeeevilness" tropes rather than any kind of agenda, but that makes it no less a tap from the suck fairy's wand!

The cast is still, though less than it was at the beginning of the book, dominated by important female magic-users and warriors, which is still rare enough to find that I remain conflicted about continuing to read instead of just throwing the book across the room- magic-heavy settings with lots of wizards have been an appealing trope for me since I read The Wheel of Time and Patricia Wrede's Shadows over Lyra when I was younger, but they seem seem somewhat rare these days, except for possibly the more military-type fantasy or gaming-inspired fantasy with very structured, rigid magic systems.

>59 Sakerfalcon: I would definitely recommend Moribito; it is part of a series, and Scholastic seems to have unfortunately declined to translate the books after the second, Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness, but don't worry- it is self-contained and comes to a satisfying end. The second book picks up with Balsa on a different quest, related to some of her background which we learned about in this story.

>60 JannyWurts: This is the cover of my edition:



I suspect it is the one in question, I would love to hear the anecdotes! Thanks for the reading advice as well- I've been eager to try this one, so I think it might be a good group read choice.

>61 sandstone78: I've not read any Hambly, so I'd happily join a group read at some point. I'd been vaguely looking at putting the Darwath books on my list for next year, but a standalone is always a nice starter for ten :)

It's official, everyone- I am the pickiest reader in SantaThing! I'm so sorry, Secret Santa(s)! :(



It makes me want to log out and go into that page to see what everyone is saying, but I am restraining myself :) (If you should happen to look this way, santa, I really am not as picky as I seem! If I required all books I read to avoid all of the things I dislike, I'd be out of reading material fast!)

I'm also wondering if it's too late to start December's group read- I've been unfortunately busy and offline for the past week, so haven't yet got it posted. What does everyone think? Go ahead, or wait until after the holiday madness is over? Stranger at the Wedding/Sorcerer's Ward is roughly 350 pages, but I can't speak to how dense it is.

On a more serious note, while scrambling to find books to add to my wishlist to save my poor secret santas' sanity, I came across this article, "A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names." The individual is Benjanun Sriduangkaew, whose fiction I praised highly before (I really did enjoy Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon), and also Requires Hate, whose articles I've found insightful and linked before.

I didn't have any idea they were the same person, though this was apparently not unknown to many people, and I wasn't aware of her stalking and harassment of many people. When reading and linking Requires Hate posts in the past, I dismissed the vitriol as venting; given the additional context, it becomes clear that it's only part of a larger, uglier picture- one I do not support in any way.

There now appears to be some doubt how sincere she has been in any activity, if she even meant any of the sentiment behind the articles she posted or if it was just a way to stir people up and direct them to gang up on people she didn't like. I can't speak to that one way or another, I have no idea. What I do know is that some of the issues she pointed out, deliberately or in passing, are, indeed, there- the exoticization of non-white characters, the troublesome romance dynamics, the unspoken requirement that every strong female character should be seen vulnerable or broken at some point in her story to make her "relatable." We need to keep talking about these things.

43 Q-in-Law, Peter David, narrated by John DeLancie and Majel Barrett ★★★

Some tie-in novels exceed their source material, making a world feel fleshed-out in a way that limited time and effects budgets and casts of characters can't. Diane Duane's My Enemy, My Ally, for example, is one of these- a wonderful adventure that uses the pre-established characters and settings to great effect.

This book is not one of those books; it's exactly what detractors of tie-in novels dislike about them. Q meets Lwaxana Troi, and exactly what you would expect to happen happened; I suspect that any further depth this might have had got cut out in the abridgement. The performances by the actors who played the characters on the TV show was enjoyable, though, and sometimes I find myself needing exactly the kind of undemanding, predictable reading that tie-in novels provide, where, like an episode of the TV series, I know none of the characters are going to be in too much danger.

>63 sandstone78: I did some mental gymnastics when I tripped over the Benjanun Sriduangkaew / Requires Hate affair a while back. I was aware of the accusations of harassment levelled at RH, and had separately found Scale-Bright and popped it on my wishlist. Now I'm conflicted over whether to pursue it. It sounds intriguing, and I hear nothing but good things about her work generally... but while RH frequently did make points worth making, I never appreciated the vitriol and the broader context is just inexcusable. So I find myself loathe to buy it.

But as you say - we do need to keep talking about the issues she raised.

Hi sandstone78, I was perusing your Fantasy by Women Who Broke Away from Europe list, and I was wondering what The silver wolf by Alice Borchardt is doing on it? I noticed that this book was also in the original list by Martha Wells, but I seem to remember everything taking place in Rome. It's been a while since I read it, so I guess I'm missing something?

I received my SantaThing selections from @leahbird a couple of days ago:

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
Palimpsest, Catherynne Valente
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, Catherynne Valente
Cinder, Marissa Meyer
The Queen of the Tearling, Erika Johansen
The Cipher, Diana Pharaoh Francis

Also The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (thrown in as a bonus because others were on sale- I didn't own my own copy so that worked out well!), and Wool, which was chosen but free so it couldn't be gifted.

A very nice selection this year, and more good suggestions in my comments that I'll have to look into too, thanks everyone :)

Yesterday the 28th happened to be my fifth Thingaversary as well, so I celebrated by picking up the requisite five books, one to grow on, and another to ensure an odd number (as good a reason as any, right?):

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin
Banner of the Damned, Sherwood Smith
House of Shadows, Rachel Neumeier
Geist, Philippa Ballantine
Kalpa Imperial, Angelica Gorodischer
Resenting the Hero, Moira J. Moore
The Awakened Kingdom, N.K. Jemisin

Of course as fate would have it, I also found some unused Kobo coupons sitting around in my inbox from their recent contest, which went to Clockwork Lies: Iron Wind and Clockwork Secrets: Heavy Fire; found that Bella Books was having a $10 off $15 or more sale on their website and came away with Andi Marquette's space opera series Friends in High Places, A Matter of Blood, and Edge of Rebellion; happened to accidentally go into Half Price Books during their 20% off sale and find Tanith Lee's complete Claidi Journals quartet which I had been looking for for quite some time; and went thrifting with a friend, which yielded a Star Trek Voyager trilogy by Christie Golden (Cloak and Dagger, Ghost Dance, and Shadow of Heaven) and two books I've been intending to reread for ages now, Diana Wynne-Jones' The Homeward Bounders and William Sleator's The Boxes.

It is... very fortunate that one's Thingaversary only comes around once a year, I believe, if this is what ends up happening to mount tbr every year. Oh dear.

In any case, I am thoroughly set for reading material for the foreseeable future :)

>65 zjakkelien: Hmm, I'm afraid I have no idea, as I haven't read it myself- I just copied the list from that blogpost into a LT list and nothing more. Possibly someone was thinking of another author or another of that author's books? Feel free to comment on it or down vote it in the list if you think it doesn't fit!

What a haul! Happy Thingaversary!

>66 sandstone78: Wow, that is a lot of books! Nice! And happy thingaversary!

And thanks for the suggestions, I didn't know I could downvote, I'll have a look at that.

Great haul on Santa Thing. Especially after all the drama of being last person picked. Made no sense to me, but well, it looks like it was worth it. :)

Also, great picks for your Thingaversary. Mine is January 15th. I'm already considering what to get. :)

In response to #61, cover anecdotes.

Yes, you do have the cover painted by my husband Don Maitz. The anecdote is this: we were both on deadline with cover paintings. He was doing this one, I was finishing Curse of the Mistwraith's jacket for release of the American edition.

We were leaving for a book tour in the UK the NEXT DAY, and planned to drive the finished works to drop them off at the photographer in Tampa on our way to the airport.

A little pressure, what???

We'd been painting like the hammers and very short on sleep. It was into the wee hours, and I was staying awake on caffeine - which does not agree with me, or rather, works too well. One coffee, I can lift the world one handed and not sleep FOREVER. But it makes my hands shake. I'd finished all the fine points of Mistwraith's cover Except the hair fine lines of the strings to the musical instrument. These, done in oil - are accomplished by loading a fine brush with just the right mix of paint, then drawing the brush braced along a ruler to maintain the extremely fine line. Well, if your hand isn't steady the brush depresses too much and you get an inconsistently thick line. So.

Don was struggling to paint the mice in the picture above and he had steady hands but LOUSY rodent reference. I'd lived in an apartment carriage house and trapped mice (live for release) for YEARS when they came in every autumn.

So - we switched paintings. He did the steady hand thing to paint in the lyranthe strings, I worked on the finish of the mice from memory. (There are 8, can you find them)?

Saved in the nick - we got the paintings dropped off on about two hrs sleep, and made the plane overseas in good order. And both art directors were thrilled with the delivered cover works.

Checking back in after being away myself for a bit. I liked Lavinia a lot and hope you will too. I'm not reading as much fantasy as I used to but have noted a couple of things that you described. I read back through the discussion from the summer about how the things we know about authors affect us--it's a very interesting topic, and one on which I'm both conflicted (e.g., I've decided that Gene Wolfe's overall right-wing politics aren't a good enough reason to avoid him) and adamant (e.g., I will not buy anything from Card).

Hope all is well with your Mom and that you have a wonderful 2015!

Oh dear. I hadn't realized (or perhaps not remembered) that Lavinia was a retelling of the Aeneid. I'm currently reading Black ships also a retelling of that legend. Now tempted to switch plans and jump into Lavinia when finished.

I might add that I'm really enjoying Black Ships. Told from a former female slave's viewpoint, who after an accident making her unable to work is dedicated to the temple of the Lady of Death.

>72 majkia: Lavinia is told from the eponymous Lady's POV, with a fascinating account of growing up in pre-Roman Latium. It includes some spine-tingling moments, and I'd give it a five-star recommendation. Which suggests to me my copy is due for a re-read.

*stagger* book bullet!

I'm woefully behind on reviews and my new thread and the group read thread, I hope the new year is going well for everyone so far and beg new kitten as my excuse:



>67 imyril: >68 zjakkelien: >69 majkia: Belated thanks everyone :)

>70 JannyWurts: Thanks for sharing that :D Lucky things worked out but I bet both of you were exhausted! Who knows what will come in handy for reference too?

>71 Jim53: I hope I'll like it too, my mom's doing better, thanks for asking! Have a wonderful 2015 too :)

>72 majkia: I read Black Ships in 2013- I remember thinking it was dragged a bit and being kind of meh on it at the time, but more of it has stuck with me than I would have thought- Graham has a knack for writing vivid scenes. I got about halfway through Hand of Isis before it had to go back to the library and really should check it out again!

>73 hfglen: I'm looking forward to it!

>75 sandstone78: Aww, lovely kitty! I can understand letting other things fall by the wayside with her as a distraction!

75: What a little sweetheart! I love calico cats.

>75 sandstone78: kittens are a good excuse for many things, especially when they're gorgeous :)

Awww - what have you named her? Anyway, cats sit on whatever you want to work on - won't make your list of stuff to do more efficient any time soon! :)

75> She's adorable!

>75 sandstone78: She's too cute!

>76 Sakerfalcon: >77 kceccato: >78 imyril: >80 pwaites: >81 zjakkelien: Isn't she? :) She nearly deleted this post by walking over the keyboard and managing to refresh the page, but luckily I'd installed Textarea Cache for just such an eventuality.

>79 JannyWurts: Our current best thought for a name is "Ruby," but we're not yet sure if that suits her or not!

Final thoughts on remaining books read in 2014, and I'll try to get the Stranger at the Wedding thread up tomorrow:

44 Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie ★★★★★ (intend to read)

The thing that appealed to me most about Ancillary Justice was that it was not only space opera, but a very personal one, rooted in the life and experiences of Breq. Ancillary Sword continues that with an almost slice of life feel as we follow a short time in the life of Breq on a new assignment.

The book that this most strongly reminded me of was Martha Wells' The Serpent Sea- not because they particularly share anything in common, but because they seem to both occupy similar spots in their respective series; Ancillary Justice and The Cloud Roads both set up fascinating worlds with pressing issues, and Ancillary Sword and The Serpent Sea both take a step sideways from the continuation that might be expected, focusing more on the characters and their internal journey than the things that might reasonably be expected to go boom.

I think this worked for me better in Ancillary Sword, because I have a feeling that the kind of person Breq is is going to be central to the finale, and Leckie worked in a lot of setup in the background without this being a typical middle book where the stakes increase linearly towards the action-packed finale- this is a more introspective-leaning series, and I really like it for that.

That said, this one did border a bit on the self-righteous sometimes, with Breq bordering on the trope of outsider savior who comes in and fixes everyone's problems- but people call her on that, and she- and Tirsawat- do a great deal of involving the local people and getting them to talk to each other as well.

(Tirsawat is really interesting, by the way. I find myself having a great fondness for almost all of Leckie's characters, and am a little disappointed that this will firmly be a trilogy- but that's what re-reads are for!)

Also, yes, the gender thing- this time it was a bit easier to settle into for me, and actually I found myself very glad for it. It made me realize how much I pay attention to character genders, for the purpose of unconsciously bracing myself for the usual stereotypes to show up to either sigh or scowl at and keep reading or put the book down; without clear indication of character gender, that's really not an issue. One of my favorite parts was Fosyf and Raughd- I was surprised to discover how much I'd fallen into stereotypical thinking of "overbearing mother" and "dissolute, privileged son" only to be turned about when Leckie revealed offhandedly that Raughd is not Fosyf's biological child and heir, but Fosyf's clone and heir!

Certainly looking forward to Ancillary Mercy this fall!

45 Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente ★★★ (intend to read)

I ended up dragging on this one. It didn't really end up feeling like a story about AI at all, but rather a more typical coming of age/growing up themed story, though with some beautiful prose and myth and fairy tales tied in in some interesting ways. I was a little underwhelmed with the ending, though, but that may be my personal taste for AI-related tropes more than anything.

46 Killing is Harmless, Brendan Keogh ★★★★ (impulse buy)

Something rather different that I picked up from a recent video-game-focused StoryBundle bundle, this is an account of a playthrough- with details accumulated multiple playthroughs- of the first-person shooter game SpecOps: The Line. First-person shooters really aren't a genre of game that holds any appeal to me, but this is a game that arguably attempts to make the player take a long, hard look at the nature of this type of game and their reasons for playing them, while still being firmly settled in the genre and perpetuating the same old racist and sexist tropes. It was an interesting read, especially in the way it dealt with violence and some of the thoughts on games as an experience- the way that game developers necessarily restrict the player's choices as part of game design, for example: in the real world, non-violent ways out would be an option in some situations, but because this is a shooting game, those options may not be available to the player in the story world... and the player knows this, because when they bought the game, they did so because they wanted to shoot polygons that represent people.

The biggest disappointment for me I wish Keogh had gone further past what the game does question and more into what it doesn't- the use of women as victims and the dehumanization of the inhabitants of Dubai, where both are still props for what seems a very typical "straight white guy identity crisis/nervous breakdown" story of the type that's so popular these days.

47 Swan's Braid, Tanya Huff ★★★★ (mount tbr)

This is a collection of four short fantasy stories following the adventures of the thief Terizan that I received for SantaThing last year. I'd read the first story, "Swan's Braid," first in Swords of the Rainbow and again in Stealing Magic, but for some reason never read further about Terizan's adventures. "Swan's Braid" has some light lesbian romance, but Terizan's orientation is fairly unimportant for the rest of her stories, which focus more on her capers as part of the Thieves' Guild, including commissions to steal Imperial treasures, the idol of a minor god, and a wizard.

48 Resenting the Hero, Moira J. Moore ★★★½ (impulse buy)

I've avoided this series for ages because the covers for the first couple of books imply it is "humorous fantasy," specifically the kind based on gender stereotypes, but that's actually pretty far off the mark- this is isolated colony planet with magic science fantasy in the manner of Pern or The Gate of Ivory, though a bit lighter than either of those, and quite fun- I read it in about a day and a half, fast for me especially these days.

I was also pleasantly surprised that this is a setting where bisexual and lesbian/gay characters are quite normalized- it's implied that Lee's rakish Karish sleeps with both men and women and it's not commented on at all as unusual, and one of the minor characters, a woman Lee works with, has a female lover who's concerned when she's injured and takes care of her. This is one of the better executions I've seen of a setting like this because a variety of relationships are just portrayed as part of daily life rather than being off-screen in the past. It's also quite nice that the pair bond is explicitly not a romantic one by nature, though it seems quite clear our protagonists are heading that way.

The one thing that didn't really work for me was the handling of the villain. I'm not a fan of the "villain brings up concerns with the system, but turns out to be a completely amoral psychopath so their concerns aren't actually legitimate or worth addressing" plot at all. See also: The Incredibles, the first season of Legend of Korra. I'll be curious to see if that's addressed in the rest of the series.

49 The Awakened Kingdom, N.K. Jemisin ★★★ (impulse buy)

A coda of sorts to Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy. I liked the ending, nice twist, but overall the strengths and weaknesses were pretty much the same as Jemisin's other work- worth reading if you liked the Inheritance Trilogy I would say.

50 The Boxes, William Sleator ★★★★ (reread)

I ended the year with a bit of nostalgia- Sleator is one of the authors whose works I read every chance I could get when I was younger, and I couldn't resist when I found a copy of The Boxes at a thrift store. His books are full of weird happenings- lots of ESP and time manipulation, both here with insectoid creatures, a mysterious clock that can slow down time (of course the nefarious evil construction company wants to get their hands on it!), and a mysteriously young uncle.

Interesting stuff, though I wish it had gone into more detail about everything and unfortunately, this is one of those books that just stops rather than having an ending, though I felt enough detail was given about the characters that I had a sense of closure- Sleator is one of those authors that seems to imply a lot with well-chosen details to me. The other book set in this universe, Marco's Millions, is a prequel about said mysterious uncle as a boy, and I will be tracking it down shortly.

I've had a printout of Silently and very fast sitting around for ages, but haven't felt compelled to keep reading after the first section. I really must, as I do love Valente's writing, and it's not as if it's very long!

>82 sandstone78: >83 Sakerfalcon: I just picked up Silently and Very Fast for my Thingaversary, and now I'm wondering if that was an error :) However, as I've indulged in lots of short-form scifi by female authors, it sits well in the collection and I'll get to read For Want of A Nail as a companion piece / foil.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/186302 2015 thread! (I couldn't continue this one, wonder what the limit is? Possibly 100+?)

>84 imyril: Hmm, I would say it's worth reading! There's some really interesting ideas, and some cool imagery, but I just didn't care for the plot- it took the setting's fresh concepts and made them into something much more typical and less interesting to me. I would have been disappointed if it had been longer, but I think overall it was a good length.

>75 sandstone78: beautiful!

>85 sandstone78: I think the limit's 200.