Pwaites' Reading in 2015

Hello everyone and welcome to the 2015 thread!

Right now I am reading Two Serpents Rise and When They Severed Earth From Sky listening to an audio book of The Martian.

I'm liking Two Serpents Rise so far, but I don't think it's as good as Three Parts Dead or Full Fathom Five.

Happy new year! Don't mind me, I'll just settle in over here and hide behind the table from the book bullets...

I'm looking forward to giving Three Parts Dead another go - it had me intrigued but my concentration span just wasn't there when I tried it. I've also now got a copy of The Martian, so looking forward to tackling that!

Now there's a coincidence. I just got a copy of When They Severed Earth From Sky in the mail today. How are you finding it?

3> I've liked what I've read (I wrote a bit on it in last years reading journal), but I've been distracted by Two Serpents Rise.

Review of Two Serpents Rise - here.

After I finished Two Serpents Rise, I picked up Poison Study, which I'd heard good things about. It didn't live up to them. It wasn't bad exactly - it was fun enough for me to keep reading and finish fairly quickly, but it wasn't particularly good. While I liked the basic idea of the world, it never felt fleshed out. It never came alive. A good description would be that it's the fantasy version of a YA dystopia.

Right now I'm reading City of Stairs. The setting and world building is absolutely wonderful, and I'm very interested in seeing where it will go.

>5 pwaites: I thought City of Stairs one of the best (or perhaps the best) fantasy reads I had last year.

City of stairs is on Mount Tbr. I expect it will leapfrog its way to the top very soon, due to all the praise it has had here.

>7 Sakerfalcon: likewise (well, it's on my Wishlist rather than Tooby proper, but with a Thingaversary around the corner I can see that changing ;)

5: While I did enjoy Poison Study, I was disappointed by the sequels. One of the things that tries my patience in fiction is "forgiving the unforgiveable" -- for instance, in the series' last book, Fire Study, the author attempts, in the very final chapters, to redeem a character who has involved himself with a group whose practices include the ritual murder of teenage girls. No, no, no, no, no. There's also too much violence against young girls in general to suit my liking. I don't remember that being quite as much of an issue in the first book.

City of Stairs is also high on my radar screen.

I may get around to reading Two Serpents Rise someday, but I'm more inclined to read Full Fathom Five first.

9> No, "violence against young girls" was also a thing in the first book - the evil villains were attempting to find young people with magic (more likely to be girls, for whatever reason) by kidnapping them and gaining control of their abilities through torture, which would break their minds. The victims are mainly sixteen year old girls by the way. One of the men doing this was a psychopath/possible serial killer who eventually raped the main character. And this is in a book normally classified as YA as well.

I read Full Fathom Five before Two Serpents Rise. Full Fathom Five's the better book and is just so wonderful in so many ways.

6, 7, 8, 9> I loved City of Stairs. I sat down, planning to read for about twenty minutes before I went to sleep. Three hours later, I'd finished the book.

It's very different than any sort of "standard fantasy book." In that, it sort of reminds me of Three Parts Dead. It deals with oppression and colonialism, a city obsessed with it's past, and a world where the gods are dead. It also has a great heroine in Shara Komayd.

I always have more trouble writing reviews for the really good books, so this one may take me a while.

>10 pwaites: I'm glad to hear that Full fathom five is better than Two serpents rise, because although it had good points, I didn't enjoy it as much as I did Three parts dead.

>2 imyril: I liked Three parts dead a lot, but you do need your concentration for it! So trying it again sounds like a good idea.

Review of Poison Study - here.
Review of City of Stairs - here.

Today I finished Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked it all right but felt that I wasn't the target age group. I probably would have liked it a lot more if I'd read it back in middle school. I think the age level compares to the first Harry Potter book.

I may say more on it later, and I certainly will in my review. For now, I'll likely be reading Firefight next as I just got a copy. At some point I also need to begin reading As I Lay Dying for school.

>12 pwaites: I'd planned to read Poison Study eventually, but oof. FYI, I believe it was originally published for adults as part of Harlequin's Luna line- given the content you mention and the romance with the much older guy, I'm rather surprised it got repackaged as YA. City of Stairs looks good though!

13> I didn't know it was YA when I got it, but the writing style or level felt very YA (if that makes any sense). Then I checked on how it was categorized and saw it being shelved largely under YA. From what I can tell, it looks like it was originally aimed at adults then got repackaged in 2009 by Mira books.

City of Stairs was excellent.

On general reading update, I finished Firefight in less than twenty-four hours. The pacing is excellent and it's very imaginative. I'm not a huge fan of the narrator, but I don't hate him either. I can't get into the plot without getting spoilery for the first book (even Firefight's cover blurb is really spoilery for the first book), but I liked how things played out.

12, 14: I need to move City of Stairs up the TBR pile, fast.

Review of Akata Witch - here.
Review of Firefight - here.

I've got about three hours left on The Martian, but I've realized I don't really care to listen to the end. The problem with survivor stories, is that I assume the protagonist will survive, which leaves the drive as being how the protagonist survives. Only, I don't care much about the how in this instance. It's a lot of science that I'm not really interested in, and I don't like the characters enough to stay involved.

For my print read, I'm currently rereading In the Time of the Butterflies to prepare for the essay section of the AP English Lit exam this spring. The prompts say you can use "any other work of literary merit," but apparently it's safest to use books that they've referenced before elsewhere in the exams.

In the Time of the Butterflies is about the Mirabal sisters in the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. It's inspired by the true story of the three Mirabel sisters who were murdered in 1960 for being part of the underground movement to overthrow the government. The book mixes perspectives and styles to voice each of the four sister's story. The novel starts with Dede, the surviving sister, being interviewed in present day and then dives back into the pasts of each sister. I really liked it when I read it two years ago.

>16 pwaites: Your comments on The martian sum up my feelings for the book pretty much exactly. I did finish it, but skimmed a lot of it especially as it became clear that everything that could potentially go wrong was going to go wrong; I just got fed up of one disaster after another. I did mostly like the characters, however, more than you did by the sound of it. (But I hated everyone in Steelheart!)

Review of Infidel - here.

My reading's slowed the past couple weeks. I dropped In the Time of the Butterflies after about a week because I realized I wasn't picking it up.

I'm currently trying Gardens of the Moon instead, but I think military fantasy may not be my thing. I'm seventy pages in and could feel my focus drifting during a war council scene.

I've read about the first hundred pages of As I Lay Dying, which is mainly short chapters jumping between many different POV characters. It's difficult to understand and keep track of what's going on - I didn't realize a character was pregnant until I checked Sparknotes after reading the first assigned section.

I had Poison Study as a free ebook when I bought my ereader. I enjoyed it enough to wishlist the sequels but never found them at anything approaching a reasonable price. Subsequent reviews have dampened my enthusiasm for reading them now.

City I'll have to investigate I missed earlier mentions of it.!

For all the praise I never got into GoM either.

>18 pwaites: I couldn't get on with Gardens of the Moon at all. I ploughed the whole way through, and I find I can't remember much about any of it - I got less interested the further I read. Everyone else I know seems to love the Malazan books, but I felt like I was missing something.

>18 pwaites: Not wanting to influence you for evil, but As I Lay Dying is probably the book which made me decide to quit trying to read Faulkner. I don't care to be depressed when I read, not even artistically.

21> I doubt I'll be reading any Faulkner of my free will. I've still got university ahead of me, so I may yet encounter him again.

My in class small discussion group got very excited when they made some correct predictions about what will happen next (this is especially impressive when you consider that they didn't all read the book*). Honestly, it felt like we were coming up with the most elaborate things to fill the forty minutes of required discussion, but our teacher came by and said we'd guessed correctly. There will be a flood and a fire. He wouldn't tell us in which order, but our guess is flood then fire.

*One of our discussion group members was a refugee from a table where he was the only person to have read the book. Assigned reading does not seem to be often read.

>18 pwaites: & >20 imyril: Add me as one that loves the Malazan books. Erikson isn't for everyone though. Gardens of the Moon is also considered the weakest in the series. It's too bad they aren't your thing. The second book has one of the best stories in it I've read in a while. It is heartbreaking though.

20, 23> I've gotten a bit farther in and it's hooked me more. The set up's very complex, and I keep one finger hooked around the glossary at the end of the book.

>24 pwaites: You'll need both the glossary and Dramatis Personae as you continue :)

25> Luckily, it opens with a massive character list.

I haven't picked it up in a couple days. I was getting into it, and then section two switched to completely different characters and setting.

>26 pwaites: Yep. He brings it all together for the end though.

It's been a really long time since I updated this. I'm sorry about that. I just haven't been doing much reading over the past month. I put down Gardens of the Moon when it did another setting switch, and I realized that I didn't care enough to keep going. I tried picking up Angelmaker after that, which I did end up finishing although it took awhile.

I've made a a post on all of the books I haven't finished lately (Gardens of the Moon included). I also finally got around to writing a review of Angelmaker.

The best thing about Angelmaker was undoubtedly Edie, a 90 year old lesbian (or maybe bisexual?) retired super spy. Edie was a complete bad ass and totally awesome. The first half of the book switched between her sections and Joe's, the fairly boring male protagonist's. Unfortunately, Edie was shot and killed by her arch nemesis a hundred pages before the end. How was this any sort of resolution for her!? This was just paving the way for Joe, the straight white British guy, to be the lone hero. Urgh. When Edie died, so did my interest in the book. However, I made myself push through since there was only a hundred pages.

Anglemaker had other issues which I talked about in the review.

I've also finished Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but I currently have no clue what to say about it in a review. I've also got a week to write a parody or re-visioning of it, which I haven't started. Right now I think I'll write Project Runway: the As I Lay Dying Episode, in which the Bundrens compete to create a burial dress for Addie.

Hopefully the next book I pick up will break me out of my reading funk.

>28 pwaites: I'm sorry to hear Angelmaker fell flat for you as Harkaway is a firm favourite of mine, although I have clearly heavily edited my head canon, as I have no recall of Edie dying; or rather, in my head canon this is an elaborate ruse and she's actually alive and kicking. Because yes, she's absolutely the best thing in it. I think I find it hard to resist the gleeful exuberance of Harkaway's work, and I am therefore perhaps more forgiving of elements that I might be dismayed by in other works.

I hope your next book perks back up!

>28 pwaites: Sad that Angelmaker didn't work for you. Did you know that there's a short story focusing on Edie? It's called Edie Investigates. Haven't read it myself yet so can't comment on it personally but thought you might be interested.

29, 30> Part of me's worried that whatever funk I've been in meant that I judged it more harshly than I otherwise would.

Although I'm happy to report that I tried picking up Zoo City today and read something like 200 pages! I got sucked in very quickly and am finding the idea of the symbiotic animals interesting.

28: Thanks for the heads-up on Angelmaker. Even without the diminution of Edie's role, the treatment of Polly, as you describe it, would have been sufficient to persuade me to avoid this one. The passive sexpot is a characterization trope that tends to signal "Written With a Male Audience In Mind" to me.

33> What's so annoying about Polly is that she's clearly supposed to be a "Strong Female Character." But she's not. There's one scene where she (and two other female characters) are supposed to be getting information out of somebody. Except Joe is lurking the background (supervising them?) and swoops in to be the one to actually get the guy to cooperate. I'd just been thinking, "Maybe this scene will have Polly accomplish something," but nope.

Oh, I've finished Zoo City even if I haven't gotten around to a review of it yet. I enjoyed it but would give it 3 and a half stars. The concept was interesting, and the book was very engaging. However, the ending felt weak to me. I feel like the protagonist needs to have achieved something or reached some point in their character arc at the end of the book, and I didn't feel like this happened in Zoo City. True, the mystery is solved, but there's not much conclusion beyond that. This sort of ending could potentially work for a series, but I don't feel like it works in the context of a stand alone book.

I also read Swan: Poems and Prose Poems, a collection of poems by Mary Oliver. The collection deals with nature, the holiness of nature, and the joy of everyday life. "Joyful" is a good way to describe the whole collection, and I really enjoyed reading the poems.

>34 pwaites: I agree with you about Zoo City fizzling out at the end. I felt as though the author had a great idea (albeit one with some logistical holes in) and strong worldbuilding but fell down when it came to the plot. I didn't think the mystery was handled very well at all in the end.

>34 pwaites: that pretty much summed up my reaction to the end of Zoo City too. I much preferred The Shining Girls, although I do think the climax got away from her a bit there too - but it wasn't as over the top, and there was at least closure even if I didn't entirely approve of the romance.

>35 Sakerfalcon: Despite your remarks, you reminded me that I have the ebook and haven't read it yet. I started it on my morning commute. I remember starting once before, but then it didn't agree with me, so I stopped again. It was a better this time around, but I'm not very far in yet.

37> I hope you like it! I did like it overall despite my gripes about the ending.

I've finished Clariel, the new Old Kingdom book by Garth Nix. It's a prequel which shows the back story of the character Chlorr of the Mask, a villain from Lirael that I completely forgot existed. So I didn't figure out that Clariel was down a path of darkness until pretty far into the book. Basically, think of Darth Vader.

I knew going in that Clariel was asexual (she's also aromantic), but it's less exciting once you know she goes down the path of becoming a villain.

I did like Clariel and emphasized with her, more so in the second half. The first two hundred pages where a lot of "I'm going to get back to the forest - the only place I belong!" and "My parents don't understand me!" and "I'll make them sorry!" She was acting more like twelve than eighteen. Then her parents were both murdered (and there I was, thinking how unusual it was for a YA fantasy protagonist to have two living parents), and Clariel went from "I just want to get away from them!" to "I wish they were here." She was still obsessed about that forest though.

Speaking of her parents, I thought they were pretty interesting. They were terrible parents, but differently than usual. Her mother was a renown goldsmith who didn't care about much besides her craft, including her own daughter. Until her bad ass final scene that is. Anyway, I appreciated the protagonists mother being a craftswoman, and it was nice to see that other professions were roughly gender equal - there's female merchants, craftswoman and guards woman and no one thinks anything of it.

I thought the set up of Belisaere was pretty interesting - the King's refused to leave his palace or do any actual ruling in years, so it's the all powerful guilds that run the city. Various machinations for power ensue. The world building was very good here.

I was wishing that Clariel's character arc would involve making friends, since at the beginning of the book she holds herself aloof and says she doesn't see the point in talking to people. Given her "Future Villain" status, this doesn't really happen.

She was canonically aromantic and asexual, but there was this one line that really bugged me in the last chapter where she "almost... let out some feeling that she had long suppressed." What?!?

Oh, other grievance. Her cousin Bal swoops in to save her (from herself?) at the end, and she didn't really accomplish anything, besides killing the people who killed her parents, which presumably would have happened anyway.

>37 zjakkelien: I hope you do enjoy the read, and share your thoughts with us when you finish!

38: So Clariel is a "villain-protagonist" story? Thanks for the heads-up. I will be avoiding it now. I hate those kinds of things, and I must be all but alone in my dislike, as they seem to be getting more and more common. It's been almost a year since I posted about it in my own blog, but I still don't dig villainesses and don't find their stories empowering at all. So I guess asexuality, a-romanticism, and the need/desire to live alone DO turn out to be negative qualities that no truly admirable girl or woman would possess. Should have known.

Considering Sabriel and its sequels, I'd thought Garth Nix was one of the "good guys" when it came to creating girls I could root for and enjoy reading about. Yet based on what I've read about A Confusion of Princes, he apparently dropped the ball there, and now it looks like he did the same thing here as well. What a disappointment.

40> I didn't mean to imply that Clariel was evil - I quite liked her, and she was depicted sympathetically. While she might be a villain in six hundred years time, her fate is treated more as a tragedy.

I can see why she made the choices she did - she was given very little knowledge on the Charter or Free Magic, so releasing and controlling Free Magic spirits didn't seem irreversible or her, and it looked like the only way she was able to save her beloved aunt, since the Abhorsen refused to do anything for the next three months.

What annoys me is that when she made a move to rectify her mistake and destroy the Free Magic spirits, it "wasn't enough." All she really did was delay them for long enough for Bal and the Clayr's army to come sweeping in and fix everything.

I don't think Clariel wished to be completely alone. She said that she didn't feel alone in the forest because she was surrounded by living things, and by her own qualifications she had two friends at the beginning of the book, even if they really felt more like mentor figures (her above mentioned aunt and the head of the forest rangers). I think she just prefers more limited contact with people and companionable silence to talk.

I would certainly not classify Nix as someone bad at wrighting female protagonists. Even if you consider Clariel and A Confusion of Princes failures in that regard, that still leaves more books with good female characters than not.

Right now I'm reading The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemison, sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Happily, the purple-prose romantic scenes are absent from this one. That's really why I hesitated so long on picking it up, but I really shouldn't have.

41. That does make some sense. However, I still wonder how ready audiences would have been to accept Anakin Skywalker as a hero if they didn't know that Darth Vader does a major Heel-Face Turn at the end of "Return of the Jedi." If we know that a character later turns evil and STAYS evil, I expect I would find it difficult to get attached to her. But that's just me.

I still haven't read Lirael yet, so I'm a good ways off from being ready to read Clariel anyway.
Does Abhorsen have a worthy heroine in it, even though its protagonist is male?

>39 Sakerfalcon: It's not quite when I finish yet, but that's because I'm having second thoughts... I'm about halfway through Zoo city now, and it feels like it isn't going anywhere. Zinzi seems to be drifting from one place to another, talking to people about the missing girl, but there is no method to it and there seem to be little intermezzo's that are irrelevant. The stealing of the phone and the escaping through the sewers? Does that contribute to the storyline somehow? The stuff about her boyfriend? I don't know, I haven't finished yet so maybe it is related, but right now it feels chaotic and pointless. I like the world, the whole animal idea is great, if a bit crazy. I like the bits where we find out more about it. I would probably feel a lot better about this all if Zinzi would at least use her Sloth power during her search, but it doesn't come up at all. Then there are the 'look-at-me-I'm-such-a-modern-author- bits, with background info packaged like film reviews. It's annoying to read and seems awfully contrived.
And to top it off, I can't really like Zinzi. She does take care of herself, I like that much about her. But she's not sympathetic in any way. She's scamming and sarcastic, and she seems to do everything out of self-interest. The best thing about her is the sloth. Sure, she hasn't had an easy life, and I could handle her if the story were going somewhere. And perhaps I could handle the story not going anywhere if she were sympathetic. But both is getting on my nerves...

Review of Zoo City - here.
Review of Clariel - here.
Review of As I Lay Dying - here.

42> I remember very little about the last two books in the trilogy (it's been a while since I've read them, but I know Abhorsen is a direct continuation of Lirael, so she's in it. I'd assumed she was the protagonist of Abhorsen?

43> The problem with Zinzi is that she doesn't have much of a character arc and that she doesn't grow or change much through the story.

In terms of plot, the phone and sewers do prove related. The boyfriend isn't that important. The ending is not an improvement, so I'd suggest bailing now if you're having second thoughts.

I haven't updated here due to a combination of travel (college-related), sickness, and lack of internet connection. However, these circumstances have meant that I've got a lot of reading done.

First off, I've finished The Broken Kingdoms. It was okay, but I think I liked it less overall than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (even if there weren't as many purple prose romance scenes).

Oree, the protagonist, is a blind painter, which I'm not so sure about. I can understand how she "sees" magic, as I'm guessing that magic is something actually perceived by senses other than sight. However, she also conveniently sees her own paintings? I guess the explanation for this is that her paintings are magic (presumably?), but at a certain point a blind character being able to see things like this becomes questionable. It also feels like she's using the trope of "the blind can see things other people can't."

I also wonder how important Oree actually was. I mean, does she accomplish anything significant before the end? Where she saves the day by "believing in Itempas, which lets him save her."

The next book up was California Bones. I knew of the magic system where you gained powers by eating bones (mainly fossilized remains of dead magical creatures), but I somehow missed out on the whole cannibal aspect. This was even in the back cover blurb where it says Daniel's father is "devoured for the heightened magic layered deep within his bones." Yet, I somehow missed what that meant. Anyway, warning for anyone intending to read this - there's cannibalism.

Also in regards to the back cover blurb, referring to Cassie as "Daniel's ex" was really misleading. I mean, she was his ex-girlfriend, but I don't see why they said this instead of "safe-cracker" when all the other team members got some reference to their skills. I also felt like it implied the usual sort of cliches associated ex-girlfriends. He'd reluctantly have to get her on the team, they'd have an adversarial relationship, ect. None of this happened. At the beginning of the book, she's introduced as his partner. They've been working together for years. Yes, they dated when they were teenagers, but why is that put on the back of the book?

I finished California Bones while still stuck on a plane, so I picked up Ancillary Justice next, which I finished later the same night.

So one thing I wondered about Ancillary Justice (and I've seen other people posting on this too) was why she chose to use female pronouns instead of gender neutral pronouns. I found this interview in which Leckie discusses her choice:

By using “she” for everyone, I get (for many, but of course not all readers) the effect, once those associations are triggered, of undermining or questioning them, in a very basic way, a sort of... experiential way. It’s one thing to tell someone about the masculine default, and have them understand the idea. It’s another thing to actually demonstrate how it works on your reader. But it only works (for the readers it worked for, because of course it didn’t work for everyone) because we parse those pronouns so thoughtlessly.

I had guessed that she was commenting on "default masculine," but this is never really addressed in the story. It's still rather strange to represent your "doesn't think in gender" character with gendered pronouns.

I really liked the plot and concept of the book and found it a lot of fun.

Right now, I'm reading A Natural History of Dragons. I'll get around to writing reviews for the other three soon.

My review of As I Lay Dying is similar in feeling to yours. It was not a keeper.

45> I'll be passing my copy on to my younger sister for when she's forced to read it. Ultimately, we'll probably get rid of it.

>44 pwaites: Bailing is a real possibility at this point. I've already let some other books slip in...

And I really liked A natural history of dragons! Hope you do too.

Review of The Broken Kingdoms - here.
Review of California Bones - here.

I've finished A Natural History of Dragons. It wasn't bad, but I didn't like it as much as I hoped. Honestly, I think my problem was that there wasn't enough dragons.

I predicted that Jacob would die. I'm only surprised that it happened at the end of the book instead of at the beginning. In the copy and paste English Victorian society Brennan created, it was difficult to have her protagonist move around independently, especially with a husband. It also didn't fit the stereotypical fictional romance plots you normally see, so I figured that Jacob would likely die, leaving Isabella a widow and with greater societal freedoms as well as free to engage in a more stereotypical romance plot.

I have no idea why Brennan made this a second world fantasy when she's completely replicating the social structures of Victorian England. It would have made far more sense to make this an alternate history story, like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or His Majesty's Dragon. Especially since A Natural History of Dragons was sort of playing into "The Good Old Age of British Imperialism" with Isabella going off to study dragons in foreign lands among superstitious peasants. Damira, one of the locals and the only other significant female character, did get a far amount of lines, and I thought she was quite sensible, but Isabella did repeatedly characterize her as a "ham-fisted peasant woman."

Mm, I wanted desperately to like A Natural History of Dragons, but I didn't get very far before putting it down. I found Isabella annoying, and I also wondered why it was written as a second world fantasy.

Review of Ancillary Justice - here.

After the news of Terry Pratchett's death, I've decided to reread the entire Discworld series in order of publication. This is something that I haven't actually done before - I've read all the Discworld books more than once but always in a more hazardous manner.

I'm about half way through The Color of Magic, which is probably my least favorite of the books. I definitely wouldn't recommend starting here. It is more of a parody of the fantasy genre than anything else and feels like it lurches from one situation to the next without much of an overriding plot.

I wrote up a post on what Pratchett's books have meant to me, but I don't know how coherent it is.

Review of The Color of Magic - here.
Review of A Natural History of Dragons - here.
Review of The Light Fantastic - here.

49> I ended up being of much the same opinion. I was originally giving it three stars but thinking about it, ended up docking it down to two and a half.

I'm currently on spring break, which gives me plenty of time for rereading the Discworld books. It also gives me time to review them, which was becoming increasingly difficult to do at school. I used to write up reviews during my TA period, which tends to become a study hall due to an overabundance of TAs and lack of copying jobs. For the past month or so though the school's WiFi has been battling it out with Wordpress, and access is spotty.

Right now I'm mid way through Equal Rites, the third Discworld book and the first with Granny Weatherwax. I haven't reread it much, remembering that I preferred the other witch books. So compared to some of the other books, this one is relatively new upon a reread. The basic plot is that a dying wizard passes along his powers to the eighth son of an eighth son, who is currently being born. Only, the son turns out to be a daughter, making Eskarina the first female wizard.

Essentially, Pratchett's challenging and playing with the magic and gender dichotomy, where if women have magic at all, it is entirely separate from (and often viewed as inferior to) men's magic. This is what annoyed me about the first Earthsea book so much. Esk is a young girl determined to be who she is, no matter what people tell her she should be. I just finished reading a scene where she has a conversation with a wizard who basically tells her that wizardy is the superior form of magic (being a witch is alright for a woman) and that a woman can't become a wizard because "their brains tend to overheat."

Esk's thoughts after this incident:

"Why was it that when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft? She'd be both, or none at all. And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it."

I loved seeing Esk in the latest Tiffany Aching book - she was a completely awesome time traveler and seemed to have a bunch of adventures going on! She also briefly mentioned a son, who I want to know about. I wish we could have seen more of her.

Apparently there's another Tiffany book that Pratchett already finished and that is due to be published this year. I'm worried about how much I want out of this book, because I could read a whole library of Discworld books, and The Last One will be a sad read indeed.

>51 pwaites: Esk also makes an appearance in The Unseen Academicals, for what it's worth.

I do re-read quite a bit, but the idea of re-reading all 40 discworlds, plus his other writings was too daunting. I'd want several changes of genres in that time. Maybe I could do the mini-series though.

I feel Equal Rites is a much under-rated book, I agree that CoM and LF aren't his best, but ER is at least as good as Mort and Guards that are usually indicated as introductions to his work.

52> She does? I must have completely missed that when I first read it.

53> I think Granny Weatherwax's character is stronger in the latter books, but I'd agree about ER being as good as Mort (I like Guards better than either of those two though).

I was thinking of taking breaks between every three or four books. Reading straight through all forty would be a bit much.

>54 pwaites: A cameo near the end. It only lasts 2 or 3 pages.

51: When I read Equal Rites I had the very strong impression that Pratchett was still in the process of building his world, but that alone makes it an exciting read, a good one to consider alongside his later works when the world and its rules were more firmly established. Eskarina is a good heroine to latch onto, and Granny Weatherwax is clearly destined for series greatness.

I can think of only two Pratchett works I've read that I simply didn't like: Moving Pictures and Pyramids. In both cases, I didn't like the female leads. (I couldn't even finish Pyramids because that girl exasperated me so.) But any wise, sharp man who could give us Guards! Guards!, Feet of Clay, The Fifth Elephant, Wyrd Sisters, Reaper Man, Hogfather, Going Postal, The Wee Free Men, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and Night Watch is allowed an off day or two.

Still have not read The Truth or Interesting Times or Carpe Jugulum or Good Omens yet. That only means I still have plenty to look forward to.

Review of Equal Rites - here.
Review of Mort - here.

56> I think many of the first ten books are the overall weakest in the series, including Pyramids and Moving Pictures. I do think that those two are better than The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic.

The four you named include some good ones. I don't remember much about Interesting Times, but Rincewind's arc has always been my least favorite of the "sub-series."

I've already finished Mort and written a review of it, not that I have much to say. In terms of plotting, it's probably better than the first three, but many of the latter books outshine it.

Realizing that I only had about forty pages of Mort left, I grabbed Wyrd Sisters as I rushed out the door. Now, eighty pages in, I realize that Wyrd Sister's is in fact the sixth Discworld book and not the fifth. I skipped Sorcery.

So as it turns out, I will not be reading the books completely in order. I will, however, wait to post my review of Wyrd Sisters until after I finish Sorcery. I think I may need a non-Discworld book as a break before then though.

Wyrd Sisters is much as I remember it. While it was never among my favorite books, I have reread it a number of times since it works as a much better "first witches book" than Equal Rites. Granny Weatherwax's character is a lot better in it, plus there's also Nanny Ogg and Margrat. I do always feel slightly guilty for not having read or seen Macbeth, which I know it's a take on.

>57 pwaites: My favorite Witches book so far is Lords and Ladies. I think I still have one more I haven't read yet though.

I took a break from reading Wyrd Sisters to read the sequel to Seraphina, Shadow Scale.

Oh, my goodness I loved this book!

YA genre books tend to fall into the same old ruts in the road, but with this duology Hartman's driven far off the road, particularly with regards to the romantic subplot. For one thing, it's a clear subplot. In a lot of YA fantasy, heck fantasy in general, the romantic subplot seems to grow monstrous tendrils and take over the entire book. In a much more spoilery sense regarding the ending, it went where I've never seen another YA book go.

Seraphina likes Kiggs, but he's engaged to his cousin Princess Glisselda and has to marry her for the benefit of the kingdom. In most books, Glisselda would be horrible and turn out to be a villain. Instead, Selda is a wonderful person who becomes great friends with Seraphina. At some point, I thought that this reminded me of the love triangle on "The Legend of Korra," but without the two girls ending up together...

Then Glisselda kissed Seraphina and confessed her love. Seraphina's reaction is pretty muted, but she does think “I understood something about myself as well, even if I didn’t have the will to examine it just then.” This realization isn't returned to (there's a bunch of crazy plot related stuff going on), but at the end Kiggs marries Glisselda who's queen at this point. This is something all three of them agree on, and while it is very vague it seems like it may be a polyamorous relationship?

And as strange as it may sound, I didn't mind. We three knew what we were to each other; we would plan and negotiate and build our own way forward, and it was nobody's business but ours.

I found an interview with Rachel Hartman where she talks about the ending under spoiler cuts -interview with Rachel Hartman.

I've got to run now, but I'd love to write more about my thoughts on Shadow Scale later.

59: Shadow Scale is out now? Or only in "limited release"? I need to lay my hands on this book with all due haste.

Are all (living) female dragons still evil?

60> Yes, Shadow Scale is out.

The living female dragons were never all evil - you're forgetting about Eskar. This book also introduces Brisi, a juvenile female dragon, as well as some more female half dragons.

61: I always felt like Eskar wasn't quite trustworthy, but I'm looking forward to seeing more of her in the sequel.

I remember reflecting, at the end of Seraphina, just how much potential the sequel had. Really, REALLY can't wait to read it. Fortunately, I will have birthday money soon....

Review of Shadow Scale - here.
Review of Wyrd Sisters - here.
Review of Sourcery - here.
Review of Pyramids - here.

After finishing Wyrd Sisters, I continued on to Sourcery and Pyramids in my Discworld reread. These two are among my least favorite of the Discworld books. This time I around, I noticed that they were particularly horrible for female characters. Sourcery has only one speaking female character, and Pyramids has... well, Ptraci, who doesn't really do anything besides look sexy. Besides the witch books, the early Discworld novels don't seem to do a great job on this front.

Speaking of that, I stumbled upon this blog post on the topic. The author also pointed out that in Witches Abroad all the significant female characters are women, which I logically knew but didn't quite realize the extent of. There's eight other posts in this series, and one on Monstrous Regiment that you have to pay to get.

Right now I'm happily reading Guards! Guards!, the first book following my favorite ever character, Sam Vimes. I'm also supposed to start reading Salvage the Bones for English class, so I may have something to say on that soon.

Review of Guards! Guards! - here.
Review of As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust - here.

Time for reading updates:

- I've finished Guards! Guards! and written up a review (linked above). It is undoubtedly the best of the first ten Discworld books, and I remain confident that it's a good one to start the series with.

- I've finished Salvage the Bones but haven't written a review yet. I'm trying to figure out whether I should wait until my English class finishes discussing it in case talking it over gives me valuable insights. On the other hand, we're not supposed to have it finished for another three weeks, and I might have forgotten things by then.

Anyway, Salvage the Bones is about a poor black girl in rural Mississippi who figures out she's pregnant. The story takes place over twelve days, with the threat of an oncoming hurricane looming over everything. There are obvious parallels to As I Lay Dying, and the narrator, Esch, talks about having read the book in school. She also is reading Greek mythology and keeps comparing herself and the boy she loves to Medea and Jason, which made me unsure as if she'd finished the myth? Surely she should know that Medea and Jason don't end well? But, of course, it's clear to everyone but Esch that Manny's a complete dirt bag.

I get the impression that Salvage the Bones is dealing with the idea of motherhood. Esch herself is pregnant, her mother died when she was eight, and her brother's dog is giving birth. Motherhood is all over this book, even if I'm not completely sure what Salvage the Bones is saying about motherhood.

- Feeling like I should take a break before diving into the next Discworld novel, I picked up As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, the seventh Flavia De Luce mystery. I've become gradually less interested in straight up mystery novels, but I eagerly picked up this installment because of how much I love Flavia. She's a precocious twelve year old chemist who loves poisons. She's delightful and hilarious. I also love her relationship with her sisters, who were constantly referred to even if they weren't in this installment. They spend most of their time antagonizing each other, but it's clear that they love each other underneath it (Flavia reluctantly admits that she misses them).

- I've just finished Eric, the ninth and probably one of the worst Discworld books. Honestly, it's just so reminiscent of The Color of Magic. Rincewind bounces from one adventure to the next with the barest thread connecting them. Plus Eric, the hormonal thirteen year old demonologist, is so annoying. On the bright side, this is possibly the shortest Discworld book.

Next up in the Discworld reread is Moving Pictures. While not one of the great Discworld books, it is still better than Eric. It also stabilizes the faculty of the Unseen University, letting them develop into actual characters.

Review of Eric - here.
Review of Moving Pictures - here.
Review of Reaper Man - here.

After Moving Pictures, I am now past the first ten books! Reaper Man, number eleven, was as excellent as I remembered.

Right now I'm reading Witches Abroad, in which the coven from Wyrd Sisters goes on a trip to Genua to stop the (cinder)Ella from marrying the prince. The fairy tale references and jokes are a lot of fun, but practically the first two hundred pages consist of the three traveling though various scenarios, which was a killer for the pacing. But they're finally in Genua, so things should be picking up.

I may be picking up A Dance with Dragons soon. I know that the next season of the TV show's coming out soon, which my mom will probably watch. I don't want to see any spoilers by accident, so it's probably better to read the book now.

Review of A Dance with Dragons - here
Review of Witches Abroad - here

Witches Abroad did pick up when they reached Genua, but in terms of plot and pacing, it still wouldn't be the best Discworld book out there. It is probably the one most centered around female characters though (maybe Monstrous Regiment could compete?). I'd heard speculation that it failed the reverse Bechdel test - two named male characters talking about something other than a woman. In actuality, Witches Abroad passes due to one scene between the Baron and Death, who uses male pronouns.

This weekend, I read all of A Dance with Dragons. For a 1000 page+ book, I have surprisingly little to say. I think it's because things feel so drawn out. Plot threads are barely advancing. I'm also starting to notice how many cliffhangers there are, and while it's effective, it's also annoying.

On the ending: I figured that Jon Snow would die as soon as he fell into the traditional role of "hero." In George R.R. Martin's books, heroes get their heads cut off. Sure enough, a few pages latter, Jon Snow gets stabbed. But is he really dead? Or is this just a cliff hanger to get us to read the next book?

If he is dead, what sort of repercussions will this have? That's one thing that I've liked about Martin killing off major characters so far - every death has resulted in a ripple effect throughout the books, leading to many different events. If Jon Snow's dead just to provide a shocking cliffhanger... I'll be very annoyed.

Right now I'm reading Small Gods. It's hard to describe my thoughts on it, because I feel like I'm only scratching the surface of everything that's there. I'm not even sure how to describe this book in general, but here's my shot at it...

Brutha is a simple novice hoeing melons when his god Om speaks to him in the form of a tortoise, a form he's been stuck in for three years. You see, on the Discworld, gods are created when people believe in them, and no one really believes in Om. They believe in the artifice - the buildings, the ritual, and the Quisition - but nobody believes in Om himself, except for Brutha.

So far in my reread, Small Gods is the darkest Discworld book (just wait until I get to Night Watch). One of the great things about Pratchett is that he manages to satirize without being hateful - he may write satire, but all of his books have a real heart to them.

Small gods is one of only two Pratchett books I've read and as far as I remember, I loved it. But I thought it was a laugh-fest! :) What strikes you as dark in it?

67> Oh, Small Gods is funny alright! But like some of the latter Pratchett books I think it has dark undertones. The Quisition, with the torturing and killing people and all, would be one. But there's also a scene later on, where Vorbis (main villain) has taken over Ephebe by getting soldiers through the desert, resulting in many deaths, and getting Brutha to guide the way through the labyrinth.

"A figure appeared behind the man, from out of a side passage. Brutha had the briefest glimpse of Vorbis, his face strangely peaceful, as he gripped the head of his staff, twisted and pulled. Sharp metal glittered for a moment in the candlelight.
Then the light went out.
Vorbis's voice said, 'Take the lead again.'
Trembling, Brutha obeyed. He felt the soft flesh of an outflung arm under his sandal for a moment.
The pit, he thought. Look into Vorbis's eyes, and there's the pit. And I'm in it with him."

There's a sense of restrained horror throughout this entire section. Then there's later, when Brutha's on a boat with the philosophers and the sergeant, when the sea goddess demands the boat and the lives of everyone on it (except Brutha and Om) for saving them earlier. Om reluctantly agrees, and all the other characters die.

(EDIT - turns out Brutha only thought they died. She took the larger boat instead)

That's where I am right now.

Oh, I see. I must admit I think of Discworld as a sort of a cartoon world! Heads can fly and guts spill but none of that violence strikes me as more real than Tom and Jerry.

>59 pwaites: I really must reread Seraphina and then continue with Shadow scale. I was just hesitating because I figured it would be at least a trilogy, which means I would have 2 books to re-read in a while. You called it a duology, is that just because there are two books out so far, or do you happen to know that Hartman will stick to two books?

70> It is not a trilogy. She's said that she'll write other books in the same world, but not following different characters. Seraphina and Shadow Scale make up a complete duology which wraps up the plot.

I was expecting a trilogy too and was rather surprised when I realized Shadow Scale was the end!

Review of Small Gods - here.

I've just finished Lords and Ladies, the fifteenth Discworld book. It follows the witches and has much more character development than the previous witches novels. I'm still mulling over what to say in my review of it.

I'd been planning to read Dawn by Octavia Butler next, but I've realized that this week promises to be hectic. I've got a research paper due, and I'll be staying at one of the colleges I got into for two nights. Previous experience with these sort of events suggests that they'll keep all the students occupied with various activities, and I'll likely be sleep deprived as well. From what I know about Dawn, it's thematically weighty, so I'll be reading Men at Arms for the week instead.

>71 pwaites: Thank you, that is good to know!

I love Octavia Butler, and I think Dawn is very good. I always think her writing style is easy to read, but the things she writes about often aren't. Dawn was like that for me; it made me feel the frustration that the main character undergoes, so I can see your point about it not being the best book to read on little sleep...

Review of Lords and Ladies - here.
Review of Salvage the Bones - here.
Review of Men at Arms - here.

Okay, so nearly a week before the May 1st deadline, I've finally decided on which college I will be attending. I'm happy to report that I will be joining the class of 2019 at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia!

I'm nearly completely done with high school. Prom's this Saturday, and graduation is in about a month. It's exciting but very strange.

When I was reading Men at Arms last week, I got waylaid by a web comic called The Order of the Stick. I've ordered the two print only prequel books and will talk about them once they finally arrive. Two day shipping seems to have stretched into four days now...

I did eventually finish Men at Arms. For me, the best thing about it is that Angua is introduced! She's undoubtedly my favorite werewolf character. I think I've seen only two other female werewolves - a book I hated called Blood and Chocolate and Bitten, and their protagonists seem a lot more... romance focused? than Angua. Not to imply that Angua doesn't have a relationship - she does, with Carrot, and it is a large part of her narrative. But it's definitely less obsessive than in those other two books.

After Men at Arms, I picked up Dawn. I'd agree with zjakkelien in post 72 - the writing was easy to read and the pages flipped by, but I really felt what Lilith was going through. So much of the book was about being powerless and in the control of others.

Overall, Dawn was an interesting read, but I probably wouldn't have picked it up if I'd known about all the weird alien sex stuff. Presumably this isn't a problem in Butler's other books, so I'll probably try one of them. Does anyone know what Parable of the Sower like? My creative writing teacher has a class set, so I could easily borrow it before I graduate.

Parable of the Sower was a very quick read. I read most of it while waiting in the school library for my sister to get through mandatory junior year presentations and finished it that night. This left me needing a book for today, so I snagged The Thief from the top of the TBR pile.

Going into it, I knew that The Thief was YA fantasy and that there were hardly any female characters (true) but that more show up in the sequels (will have to find out). After reading it, I belatedly remembered that the narrator had shown up on lists of unreliable narrators. This was because he left out information during the book. While there were hints in place, I think I'd have been less annoyed if I'd remembered that he was unreliable at the beginning. Still, it set up a nice twist.

I've got little idea about what I'll pick up next. Most of the TBR pile seems to be epic fantasy (The Curse of the Mistwraith, The Bone Doll's Twin, and King's Dragon) or space opera (Consider Phlebas and Revelation Space), neither of which I feel I have the energy for right now.

Congratulations on your choice! Yes, it's very strange, but in a good way. If I had the chance to go back and give about-to-enter-college-aged me one piece of advice, it would be that I rarely regret the things I did, but often regret the things I didn't do. So do things. :)

I've only read Butler's Kindred, but I intend to read more.

>73 pwaites: I'm not familiar with the details of American education, but I suppose you have to pick a Major and Minor? May I ask what you have chosen? And did I see correctly that it is a college for women only?

Nice to hear you read Dawn. Sorry you didn't like the 'weird alien sex stuff', I actually didn't remember that it was that prominent. Of course, it is crucial to the story in a way. I really liked the sequels as well, but I cannot say how much alien sex was in those. I think not that much (it is more about the views of the various children that result from it), but I cannot guarantee it....

Congratulations on your college decision! It's such an exciting time of life; part of me wishes I could go back and do it again.

Parable of the sower is on my Mount Tbr, one of the many books I tell myself I'm going to get to "soon". If I read it before you I'll be sure to let you know what I think.

73: Congratulations on Agnes Scott, pwaites! I really hope you like Atlanta.

Men at Arms is a favorite of mine too, Vimes and his Night's Watch nearly always being full of Win for me. (Snuff was a bit of a disappointment, but even it had its moments.) I love Angua and Carrot, one of those rare and satisfying examples of an Interspecies Romance where the boy, not the girl, is the human (though he identifies himself as a dwarf, which makes for some wonderful funny moments. "What's size got to do with being a dwarf?" "Er-- a lot?").

74: Kindred is on my To-Read list. I wasn't able to finish Fledgling, or even get very far into it, because of the sex stuff (yes, I know the protagonist isn't actually a child, but still, she looks like one), but even there I found much to admire in Butler's writing and would like to read more.

Thanks for all the good wishes!

74> I'm intending to do things, particularly study abroad although I have no idea what country yet.

75> Yes, it's a woman's college. I have to have a major, but I could also double major or get a major or a minor. Right now I'm thinking of double majoring, but I don't know what in. Part of the reason that I chose Agnes Scott was that I thought it'd be good for figuring out what I want to do with my life. I have thought about getting a major or maybe a minor in visual art, but I don't know if I want to do that as a career.

76> Regardless of which one of us gets to it first, I'd be interested in seeing what you think of it!

77> I also like how Carrot's the naive, optimistic one and how Angua's the cynical one. It's almost a complete inversion of the normal gendered relationship tropes.

I'll remember to avoid Fledgling then. That sounds like it'd freak me out.

Congratulations on Agnes Scott!

If they show up in a timely fashion, I imagine the 2 Order of the Stick prequels would be perfect next reads - they're frothy, silly and quick. I've been a huge fan for years, although I lost track a few years back; I've been meaning to check in (I have the prequels and the first 3 or 4 books). While there's a lot of humour derived from old-school D&D gaming (esp in the first book), it also stands alone for the most part. And the villains are a riotous joy.

>78 pwaites: I started Parable of the sower last night and didn't want to stop reading. It is set in a VERY bleak future though - not graphically described but violence, rape, arson etc are commonplace.

80> Hmm. Maybe I can cram it into the week between AP exams and final exams? It doesn't sound like something to read during testing.

79> They came! Oh, and you should check back on the website since the fifth book is now finished and up. I've actually been meaning to post about Order of the Stick here, since I'm up to date on what's posted and I feel like I should be writing a review of it. I don't normally read comics or graphic novels, so they've never made it onto here or my blog. Might as well change that now.

Order of the Stick is a (currently) 980 page web comic that starts out as a "joke a day" format before taking a dive towards epic fantasy while still being hilariously funny. It's about an adventuring party that's trying to save the world from an evil lich lord. The party consists of a brainy fighter (the leader), a greedy thief, a simpleminded bard, an androgynous elf wizard, a "token evil" halfling (D&D hobbit) ranger, and a forgettable dwarf.

Like imyril was right about the humor in the first book being derived from D&D, and while that remains a part of the comic (especially in how the "rules" and logic of the world), the D&D jokes recede into the background after the first book. The problem I'm having with recommending this series is that the first book is the weakest. It doesn't have nearly the plotting or character development of later volumes and just generally isn't as good. Luckily, the first book is more plot independent than the later ones, so you could probably skip it and start closer to the introduction of the main plot in the second book.

There's some problematic elements in the series, especially the early pages. Haley, the thief, is the only girl on the team, and she's unfortunately prone to hurling gendered insults at the female villains. The author's apologized for this, and the comics have gotten notably better in regard to gender (read, women in the supporting cast and no more gendered insults). These problems are alluded to in one of the more recent pages:

Bandana: "But hey, I for-reals appreciate you tryin' to do the big sister bonding thing anyway."
Haley: "Well, historically speaking, it was either that, or we try to murder each other while hurling offensively gender charged insults."
Bandana: "Geeze, that sounds terrible."
Haley: "Like dungeon delving with a bare midriff, all I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time."

Then there's Vaarsuvius, who's ambiguously gendered nature seems to be more of a running gag than anything else. I think this has gotten better in the last two books, especially as V now has a character arc. They (like all the other characters now) are much more three dimensional than the original descriptions of them. Some fans of the comic seem to have an annoying tendency on fixating on "what gender V really is."

On the other hand, I think it's notable that the protagonist and leader is black, which is pretty rare for any fantasy. Humans, elves, and dwarfs all show up with a variety of human skin tones, and the comic never does the hand waving "historical accuracy" argument in regards to race. Which is good, as a fantasy world that contains cappuccino machines can darn well contain racially diverse characters.

The fifth book, Blood Runs in the Family plays with and comments on narrative conventions in very interesting ways. A new sub-villain, an extremely genre savy warlord who's Tarquin, Elan the bard's father, is introduced. Despite knowing all the genre conventions, he refuses to see that he's not the principal antagonist. The author's said in the introduction that it's no coincidence that it's the older white man who refuses to believe that the story's not all about him. Instead, Tarquin insists on trying to make his son Elan (the blond comic relief character) into the hero. But Elan is happy with who he is and refuses to give in to the narrative convention.

I'd say that the fourth book, Don't Split the Party, and the fifth book are undoubtedly the best.

In regards to the two prequel books, On the Origin of PCs tells some of the back story on the six members of The Order of the Stick. I found it skippable - there were some good bits, but it doesn't really add anything or deliver much of an emotional reward. On the other hand, Start of Darkness, which details the villains back stories, had much more of an impact.

Anyway, I liked the series enough to buy a t-shirt:

>81 pwaites: aha! I pay as much in postage as I pay Rich for the books, but I must address the gap in my shelf :)

The accompanying fridge magnets from earlier releases put a smile on my face every day.

I agree on OOTS:OOPs being skippable (altho I think Haley's back story plays well if you read it having read the first couple of books), but OOTS:SOD is a delight. And I'd love to know how long Mr Burlew spent coming up with titles that were both a gag in their own right and delivered appropriate comedy acronyms...

82> It took me a frightfully long time to get the gag for On the Origin of PCs. I don't think I even realized it until I said it aloud.

>73 pwaites: Belated congratulations! :)

Wow, I haven't thought about Order of the Stick in ages, I should go and catch up when I have time... I think I trailed off sometime in the middle of the Azure City arc with the paladins and all that.

>84 sandstone78: oh hey, there are some treats ahead for you. I felt the Azure City arc was pretty much the point where I started finding it hard to keep track through the online updates, but it worked brilliantly as a collected edition for a straight read-through.

I may have just ordered the 5th one to play catch up :)

84, 85> I'd agree with imyril. Azure City's actually where I start really liking the comic because all the character development and plot pacing really ramps up, but it's best read straight through. I can't imagine trying to read some of the battle scenes on a week by week installment.

Review of Yendi - here

I ended up grabbing Yendi as the next book. I'd tracked down a copy pretty soon after I read Jhereg a year ago but hadn't gotten around to reading it. I thought it was okay. I found the world a lot easier to slip into this time. I think my problem with the two books I've read so far is that there's not much character development. I don't feel like I know much of who the characters are besides their names.

Right now I've resumed the Discworld reread with Soul Music. When I had eye surgery sometime in middle school, my dad got in the habit of reading books aloud to me. This was the first Discworld book we read aloud together. He plays in a band on the weekend, and he got far more of the jokes and references than I did. I didn't even realize that there were so many there...

>86 pwaites: Hmm, interesting. Yeah, the battle scenes and intrigue really bogged down, and I think I found it somewhat hard to follow week by week. If I recall there were some periods with long hiatuses and inconsistent updates too? (Though that seemed to be true of every webcomic I ever read...)

Re: Yendi, the next book, Teckla, is actually all about Vlad's marriage falling apart because he and Cawti don't have that much in common. Things progress and eventually he ends up basically exiled from Adrilankha a few books later- the series kind of stalled out I feel like.

I think the world is the most interesting part of the series for sure, though. If you like The Three Musketeers (or humorously overblown writing), The Phoenix Guards and sequels are Dumas pastiches set in Adrilankha much earlier than Vlad. (The second, Five Hundred Years After, about the disaster that caused the big sea of amorphia and the Interregnum is the best I think.) Because Draegarans live so long, many of the characters Vlad knows make appearances in this series too.

87> I liked The Count of Monte Cristo, so I may give The Phoenix Guards a try.

In regards to Teckla, that's surprisingly realistic. So often in books the "insta love" relationships last forever.

Review of Soul Music - here.
Review of Interesting Times - here.

I've finished Soul Music and Interesting Times and written up my reviews of both. Soul Music was a solid Discworld book, and Susan is always great.

Interesting Times... this is probably the last time I will ever read it. The humor relies on a lot of stereotypes that just felt sort of racist. This review gets more specific than I do about where it went wrong.

Right now I'm reading The Queen of Attolia, sequel to The Thief. While The Thief was written in a first person narration, The Queen of Attolia's third person and switches between different characters. The change in style was necessary, because the two stories are vastly different. The Thief was a limited, more personal story. The Queen of Attolia's about a war between three kingdoms and has to be able to show all the different moving plot pieces.

Two of the countries, Attolia and Eddis, are ruled by queens, who are referred to by the name of their respective countries. It would be easy to fall into the Good Queen vs. the Bad Queen trap, especially has the country of Eddis is the one belonging to the protagonists. However, the situation's more complex than that, as even Eddis is willing to admit.

'Eugenides turned to stare at her over his shoulder. "You are defending her," he pointed out.
The queen of Eddis hissed in displeasure. "I don't want to. She's vicious, she's barbaric, and I think by this time edging toward insane, but I'm forcing myself to be honest. She has not indulged in atrocities for personal pleasure," she said firmly. "Or for personal revenge. She has used them as deterrents to defend her throne."'

Before she seized power for herself, the queen of Attolia was a pawn in other people's schemes for the ruler ship of Attolia. She was overlooked and under estimated, and she rose to power against the odds, when she was supposed to placidly marry whomever she was told. She's had to be smart and brutal to gain and hold power. Yet, people still underestimate her.

'"And she has the most appealing of feminine virtues, especially in a queen. She's easily led," said Nahuseresh, smiling.
"She's held the throne for some time," the secretary said cautiously.
"She's secured her throne with brilliant tactics early on that were no doubt those of an adviser, probably the Baron Oronus, or Erondites's father."'

Compared to Attolia, Eddis has an easy time of it. She was instantly accepted as queen and her court adores her. She has people around her that she can trust. She can afford to be nice where Attolia can't.

I'm very interested in seeing where this goes.

Totally loved these books. They get even better.

Review of Queen of Attolia - here.
Review of Maskerade - here.

On Queen of Attolia, I'm very happy with how Attolia became even more sympathetic and had a happy ending. I'm not really sure what to think about her marrying Eugenides however.

After finishing Queen of Attolia, I picked up Maskerade by Terry Pratchett. I'd actually forgotten the identity of the murderous Ghost, so I had the pleasure of discovering the answer to the mystery all over again.

Yesterday I finished Stranger at the Wedding, the second book I've read by Barbara Hambly. I liked it, but it didn't catch me the way other books have. The world was very well described, and I liked that it was undergoing an industrial revolution. The romance wasn't horrible, but it was very predictable. Kyra seems to have a habit of tripping and falling into her love interest's arms, which was a major clue that he was the love interest.

I've alternated back into the Discworld reread with Feet of Clay. I may put it aside to borrow Parable of the Sower from my creative writing teacher, but at this point I'm worried school may finish before I finish the book.

Review of Stranger at the Wedding - here.
Review of Killer of Enemies - here.

I'm finished with exams! And pretty much everything else at this point. We've got five days of school left, but none of the teachers really seem to know what to do with the seniors, so they're just showing movies or letting us read.

It's been a while since I've updated, so here's the run down:

I've finished Feet of Clay. I like it, but it feels like a retread of Men at Arms or even Guards! Guards!. Some person or fraction in the city decides to overthrow Vetinari and install a king. City watch comes to the rescue. I'm glad Pratchett moved the next watch book out of Ankh-Morepork, because he needs something to break this formula.

On the positive side, Feet of Clay introduces Cheri, whom I love. Plus, she gets scenes with Angua, and their friendship is a fairly important subplot!

While reading Feet of Clay, I took a break to pick up Killer of Enemies, a fairly straight forward action based YA about an Apache girl who kills monsters. The writing was a bit choppy in places, and it felt like there wasn't a lot of character development for anyone but the lead. Still, it was entertaining and I enjoyed the experience of reading a YA book that was not romance heavy.

Searching my "To Read" shelf for the next book, I chose Consider Phlebas. I don't quite know what to say about this one. I like the idea of this epic war going on between two massive civilizations but the story focused on people sort of drifting through it. The writing was good, and there were some interesting ideas there, but... overall it was just meh.

For one, it just felt padded. In the very beginning the plot is set up: a sentient AI, the Mind, is trapped on the dead planet. Both sides of the war want it, and one gives the task of retrieving it to the mercenary Horza. The focus of the book is retrieving the Mind. Then why does it take 300 pages to even reach the planet??? Some of those chapters were not necessary, particularly Six, which was just a disgusting side track into cannibalism.

There's also the problem that characters kept dropping like flies (the lesbian couple first, for whatever reason) but that I didn't feel anything when these people died. I kept forgetting that some of them existed or who they were. I didn't even care when Horza himself died. And I figured out that the fairly forgettable alien woman Horza was sleeping with was going to die as soon as she told him she was pregnant. I'd thought she might die before then, but that little announcement clinched the deal.

Consider Phlebas wasn't completely horrible; the prose was at least good. It just needs more characterization and to be edited down. I may decide to give The Player of Games a shot. It seems to get higher ratings, and maybe the books improve. Any opinions?

On a much more satisfying note, I started In the Night Garden today. Oh my goodness, this book is wonderful. I'd had the impression going in that it'd be something like a collection of short stories with a framing device. That's sort of accurate, but it doesn't take into account the layers upon layers of it - at one point I was reading a story with a story inside the story to the fifth level. The stories are all part of each other and intertwined, so that there's still an onward thrust to the book. Also, the writing is simply lyrical and gorgeous.

>92 pwaites: I'm biased - I love Consider Phlebas, but it is a sprawling road movie of a scifi yarn (with a fair helping of 'wheeeee lookee at what I've dreamt up!' as many of the Culture novels do) rather than a tightly-paced adventure. I can rationalise that - it takes Horza a long time to seize command, and the other mercenaries have no interest in his mission - but if you wanted them to get to the point quicker then... well, then none of the Culture novels may be for you, as they do often meander and take in a number of themes, dead ends and variations in a minor key before heading to the spectacle :)

I find them incredibly thoughtful novels, with the plot an excuse for the exploration of the themes through arguably unnecessary detail (a bit like those poor nouns that Mr Banks overwhelms with qualifying adjectives at times), and I have enjoyed rereading all of them for the analysis you can subject them to. I'm not convinced they work very well as pure adventures, as a result.

I found The Player of Games slower than Phlebas, which gets going with a bang even if it takes a long time to get to the point, but it definitely gets to the main action (Gurgeh on Azad) faster than Horza gets to the Planet of the Dead! The characters still aren't particularly likeable (very very few Banksian characters are for my money) - and there's a lot more explicit social commentary interwoven with some really interesting ideas. I'd say it's worth a go simply because Consider Phlebas does seem to evoke strong responses, whereas there's more agreement on The Player of Games.

But my gut feeling is a qualified 'I don't think the books improve because I think the first 3 are all amazing' - if different - and I'm not sure the next 2 address the things you didn't like about the first.

@sakerfalcon and @pgmcc may feel otherwise...

>92 pwaites: I had to follow the link to In the Night Garden because the first image in my head was of the UK TV program for children narrated by Derek Jacobi of the same name (in case you're not familiar there's a youtube link here - I make no excuses for the apparent flatulence of the Pontipines at about minute 5). The book sounds much better :D

>92 pwaites: - I bought the first three because there was such love for Banks, not just here in all my friends to. I felt very similar to you about CP. I did read the next two, but IMO they don't get any better. It's a wonderful universe that Banks has created, there are some truly impressive and imaginative scenarios there. It's just a shame that he's chosen not to exploit any of them. It was either PoG or UoW that I think I hated more than CP can't remember which, I did finish them. It has random flashbacks through time all the way through for no reason whatsoever. Never explained, just because he could write it like that as far as I can tell. I gave them away in the end because I'm certainly not interested in re-reading them.

>95 reading_fox: the flashbacks are in Use of Weapons. I thought they worked quite well, although it's difficult to say more without spoilers! :)

93> It's not even that I didn't find the characters likable or interesting (although most weren't) but that I never got a sense of who they were. Most never felt developed, and besides four or so, I kept forgetting who all the different names were.

I didn't go into Consider Phlebas expecting to read it for analysis but as a time filler for the various class periods where we weren't doing anything. Maybe I would have reacted differently if I'd read it in different circumstances, but I do tend to read books more for entertainment than anything else. This is likely an instance of "the wrong book for me."

94> I had no idea about the TV program! Thanks for the link. :)

95> I picked up Consider Phlebas for the same reason - I'd heard lots of good things about the Culture novels. I agree with you about the world building being one of the best parts.

>97 pwaites: I think that's a totally fair criticism - and an aspect that varies book to book. I didn't mean to imply they're all about the deep thinking btw - just that they also stand up to it. They're meant to work as entertainment, but mileage varies :) I save them for when I'm looking for something a bit meatier - I'd rather pick up something lighter hearted a lot of the time.

Review of Feet of Clay - here.
Review of Consider Phlebas - here.
Review of In the Night Garden - here.

The official graduation ceremony is tomorrow, but today was my last day of high school.

My area had some flooding issues earlier this week. My house is thankfully fine, but I did see the neighbors paddling past in a kayak! School was canceled and the power was out, so I spent most of the day finishing The Curse of the Mistwraith.

It occurred to me afterwards that The Curse of the Mistwraith probably isn't the best book to be read in this fashion. For the most part, it's rather slow moving and very intricately phrased. There were things I liked about it - the world wreathed in mist, the nobility becoming bandits in the hills after a revolution...

The focus of the book is two half brothers, each of whom have half the power needed to defeat the mistwraith that curses the land. Unfortunately the brothers are separated by a generations long blood feud, and the conflict between them is to be the focus on the series.

I liked both the brothers and found them sympathetic at the beginning anyway. I'm not to happy about how the conflict between them amps up. Basically, the whole conflict is caused by one being possessed and then the sorcery given trait of "justice" in his bloodline corrupted. Actually, this brings me to...

Meddling sorcerers. Basically this entire book is about a fellowship of seven immortal sorcerers who've shaped the world as they've seen fit and have now royally messed up. They sort of disappear from the end of the novel, but in the beginning they're seen as sympathetic? I wonder how the sequels treat them.

Another thing to note (as this is a preference for me and some other people around here) is that there aren't a lot of female characters. The most important is undoubtedly a young enchantress who gets a few POV sections, but she's mostly separate from the main plot. She also seems to be the exception, as the other enchantresses are depicted in a more negative light.

While our power was out from the flood, we went to Barnes and Nobles and I got a copy of Uprooted by Naomi Novik (also of The Goblin Emperor and The Darkest Part of the Forest, but I haven't read these yet).

There's a lot I like about Uprooted, but it plays into a romance trope I loath. You have a seventeen year old heroine, and a love interest who's (insert magical creature here) and 150 years old. Despite how the narrative emphasizes that he "looks" young, this is still super creepy. Also he's like... sort of her mentor and she's his apprentice??? I mostly tried to pretend that this romance didn't exist.

Besides the whole icky romance thing, there were a lot of things I liked about the book. The forest is dark and wonderfully creepy. The writing is beautiful, and the world was based on Polish folktales. The heroine, Agnieszka, was great and had magical powers of her own. I really liked her friendship with another girl, Kasia. I will admit that I was hoping her friendship would become more than friendship as it would offer an alternative to the textual creepy romance. I mean... you've got a seventeen year old protagonist. Which sounds like the better love interest? Another seventeen year old girl or a hundred and fifty year old dude? Oh, well.

Right now I'm at the very beginning of Burning Bright by Melissa Scott.

Congratulations on your graduation!

I'm on the fence about picking up Uprooted for that reason. I find myself willing to give the long-lived mystical creature age balance a pass, but my rules tend to be the same as if it were a human May/December romance- I want the younger partner to have some sense of themselves, preferably be at least early 20s if not older, and I find it honestly kinda squicky if they knew each other when the elder was an adult and the younger hadn't even hit puberty. (Parental figure to lover or teacher to lover plots just don't work for me- there are usually huge unexamined issues with power dynamics that make me incapable of seeing the relationship as between equals, and large age differences also often go hand in hand with the "nubile young helpmeet as a reward for suffering through long, dark lonely years of manpain" trope waaay too often.)

I hope you like Burning Bright! :)

Congratulations!

Re Mistwraith: Read the sequels! There's a group discussion of it linked from the GD page, happened a couple of years ago. Janny still pops by from time to time. I find the entire series to be totally engaging and read them in vast chunks. Elaria becomes very important! You are quite right though, the brothers are the lens through which we see how well the sorcerers have done. It does become apparent that they aren't egotistical enough to be shaping the world as they see fit, they do have an underlying motive.

99: Uprooted has been on my To-Read list, since I was interested to see Novik give us an honest actual for-real female protagonist for the first time. But now it looks as though the book is very much the kind of thing I swore I would avoid after I found Stolen Songbird tough to take.

It's a shame to see Novik, such an acclaimed writer, travel such a worn-out path for her first YA novel and her first female protagonist. It's just as I said in my review for Stolen Songbird: Does the world really need yet another YA novel about a human girl who falls in love with a supernatural guy? Isn't the ground already beyond saturated with books like that? I give Rachel Hartman full marks for doing something different. I just wish one or two other talented writers would also be willing to diverge from the general path.

100> I think there were a lot of unexamined power issues there. From the back cover:

"Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood."

So, yes. She's literally taken by him and locked in a tower.

102> Agnieszka has magical powers, so she'd also fall under the "supernatural" heading, which I've seen a lot of other reviewers praise. But... she's still seventeen and he's still a hundred and fifty. No getting around the difference in life experience (plus the whole locking her in a tower thing).

101> I may pick up the Mistwraith sequels, but it'd be a while. I have a lot of other books on the TBR pile! I would like to see more about how the series views the sorcerers though.

Review of Curse of the Mistwraith - here.
Review of Uprooted - here.
Review of Burning Bright - here.
Review of Quicksilver - here.

I found Burning Bright entertaining, but I struggled to find enough to talk about in my review. I don't think it had any serious issues, but it doesn't have the "extra something" that makes a book go from okay to amazing for me. Maybe that the characters didn't seem to have strong feelings about anything? Lioe and Rosche especially - I never got any sense of them having an emotional relationship.

After Burning Bright, I read Quicksilver by R.J. Anderson. Pacing and clearity might have been a little wonky, especially towards the end, but I really enjoyed it. I do wish that I'd reread the first book before starting it. Quicksilver may have a different protagonist, but it's very much dealing with the fallout and ramifications from Ultraviolet.

Also, the protagonist of Quicksilver, Tori/Niki, was asexual, and R. J. Anderson handled it very well. There was no ambiguity around Tori's asexuality and no last minute retraction. Also, while Tori was clearly asexual, she didn't seem to be aromantic. There was still sort of a romantic relationship, but obviously very different from the usual YA fare.

I'm heading back into the great Discworld reread! My goal is to have the entire series reread by the time The Shepherd's Crown comes out in September. I resumed the reread with Hogfather, which was as enjoyable as always. There's a lot to think about beneath the lampooning of Christmas traditions, particularly in that passage in the end on humanity's belief in fantasies being what makes us human.

>104 pwaites: I agree that Roscha's character is somewhat weak in Burning Bright- so is Cella, Chrestil's girlfriend. (There was some great discussion about their characterization in the group read thread last year if you're interested in checking it out!)

I have to ask, though- if you noticed it, what do you think about Ambidexter showing up in that last Game section, after Ransome is already dead? alternate reality, out of chronological sequence, or someone else playing Ambidexter?

I was really disappointed by Quicksilver. I liked the heroine, and the author got some things spot on (eg the Makerspace sections felt true to the handful of times I've been in our local one, and the dynamics between the characters felt nice and realistic), but like Ultraviolet the ending kinda left me cold.

I did feel sort of like the ending was a last-minute retraction, actually- Tori/Niki read as aromantic to me after her speech on friendship being as significant as romance in the middle of the book, then at the end she kissed Milo and seems to start a romantic relationship? I really wanted that unpacked a little more, it felt like "welp, this is the end of the book, it's YA, the characters pair off" rather than a natural development to me.

It wasn't as bad as Ultraviolet where the whole book was spent building up empathy for everyone in the institution, and humanizing them, only for everyone to pull Alison through by motivating her with "You're not a real crazy person!" though...

I also wasn't a big fan of the way the central conflict was handled- the ending was unexpected, I'll give it that, but I really wanted to see the confrontation the narrative seemed to be promising, for more on the alien culture. After how easily they escaped from the spaceship last time it was very hard for me to feel like the villain was the kind of threat one cuts one's own arm off in order to avoid- I wanted Tori/Niki to confront the villain so we could spend more time in the alien culture and learn more about them.

I'm so torn on Uprooted. It keeps getting compared to so many writers I like, and the sample was really interesting, but I am so sick of heterosexual romance with a learned, experienced, jaded older man and an intuitive, powerful but untrained younger woman (or girl, often) coming into her own (and oof, a sex scene too?). This trope seems to be the dynamic of every romance I pick up though I swear... can't we at least flip the genders once in a while, or for goodness sake have equal competence or naivete?

(I understand part of the real reason for this is that romance is a great excuse to get your naive character in the company of an experienced one who will infodump to them, but come on...)

105> On the Burning Bright ending, I really have no idea what to think! Someone else playing Ambidexter seems the most logical guess, but it doesn't really fit right.

On the Quicksilver ending, I thought it fit with the way she'd been talking about Milo - wanting to hold his hand, wanting to lean into his arms, the "if I could be real, I'd be real for you" line, ect, but holding herself back in someways because she didn't want to confuse him as to her sexuality. It's also sort of a hopeful ending if you're someone who wants romantic love but not a sexual relationship since Tori gets both and finds someone who's completely accepting of her. Besides, she describes herself as asexual, but the word "aromantic" is never used.

I looked at some reviews and discussions of it on Aven and some blogs in the ace community. I haven't seen anything negative about it so far. This review specifically discusses it a lot more, as well as what the reviewer thinks Tori's romantic orientation is.

I would have liked to know more about the aliens too! We got so little details, but the "genetically engineered professions" concept sounded very interesting.

The good thing about Uprooted is that while the romance is there, it's not the focus of the novel. There's only a few very romance focused scenes and I just sort of skipped over those.

Very good point about the infodumps!

Congratulations indeed! I clearly remember the feeling, how liberating!!

I agree with 101>reading_fox about the Curse of the Mistwraith. I've read the whole series straight, and enjoyed it very much; since it has a slow burn approach, with a multi-layered plot and a large cast of characters, i think I was able to appreciate it best that way. I also liked very much the careful design of the whole series, I've read too many good series dragging or characters overstaying their welcome. Not the case here!

I was thinking about what you said on the women of the series. At first I didn't know what to expect, I knew there were two male leads so I didn't expect the series to focus on female characters, but I discovered there were some truly active ones in the book, obviously Elaira who gets to share the action, but I also appreciated Arithon and Lysaer's mother who definitively ends an abusive relationship on her own, that was an interesting twist and led to lots of consequences, then of course Lirenda and Morriel, ah, so different, yet, Lirenda quickly became a favorite of mine, and I couldn't help but admire Morriel and her tacticts, even if I wanted to see her burn. Another which I appreciated more in retrospect is Maenalle, the active steward of Tysan, she is the one who actually rules there and it is her ruling that overturns a succession, for one of the old bloodlines.
I can't add much more without spoiling, but I have always felt this series, though centered on the two princes -and their conflict, has several female characters of various ages and agencies. I really appreciated that.

The sorcerers are huge spoiler ground. They, and Dakar, are amongst the more complex characters of the series. In Ships of Merior there is more about them, but I can tell you my opinion about them changed during the series and they flesh out a lot as individual characters, not just as a group of sorcerers with a common goal. I'm still not sure about them, but the ambivalence is part of the fun and the characters growth.

I've read and liked your review, I'm looking forward to more of your impressions! -ah, and watch out for that boy, you'll be surprised at the far-reaching consequences of that battle. Wurts doesn't go for shock value, nor for window dressing when it comes to grim themes, at least not as far as I've read.

Glad to know romance is not predominat in Uprooted. I've never read a book by Naomi Novik and I thought a standalone was a good way to start, but I prefer romance as a subtheme in my fantasy novels.

>106 pwaites: Burning Bright- I always read it as a somewhat wistful might-have-been myself- it's so very much a resolution of Ransome's whole character arc, that he's good at working out puzzles and imaginary human nature but not so much with real people and real stakes- but I'm also very fond of @imyril's theory that it's Chauvelin, because who else would know him that well?

The Game scenes are actually incredibly dense with characterization, but I think it's something I only really noticed on a reread when I had the characters' takes on each role in mind- I'm thinking of Roscha as Avellar, eg, one of the only scenes focused on her for herself instead of her as Lioe's love interest.

Quicksilver- My main problem is that Tori and Milo never had any romantic chemistry at all to me. I think because of that I read most of her lines in an opposite way for you- eg I read "If I could be real, I would be real for you" as "I really like you as a friend, and want to reciprocate, but the feelings aren't there."

(At the risk of TMI, possibly because those words could have come out of my own mouth in a failed friend to romance relationship in my own past- albeit a much unhealthier one; when I came out to him as asexual/aromantic, as I identified at the time, after we had broken up, he told me that there was no such thing because sex was a biological and emotional need for all humans and I just hadn't found the right man yet. Given that I'm not actually a heteroromantic asexual person, but homoromantic and probably somewhere on the gray-A spectrum, my words necessarily carry less weight in the matter than someone who shares Tori's identity, but a romance that brings my experiences then mind is not going to work for me personally.)

I'm especially uncomfortable with reading the speech about friendship and "I wasn't as comfortable with my last boyfriend as I am with you" as a sign of Tori's romantic interest in Milo because to me that's giving romance tropes precedence over what she's actually saying, that she feels comfortable with him as a friend.

I probably could have believed in their friendship turning romantic by the end though, if the end didn't just not hit the right notes for me. I wanted clearer acknowledgment at the end Tori's kiss at Milo was something she wanted to do, not her trying to be "real" for him, and I wanted them to talk about it and negotiate because I felt that had been done so well before instead of just stopping.

108> On Burning Bright and the game scenes, I think I was pretty focused on the non-game "real" world and found the games an annoying distraction, which led to me not spending as much time on them as I should have to get the characterization.

On Quicksilver, I guess I feel like there relationship was talked about? They talk about her being asexual right before the kiss, and I thought their relationship ended on the note that it was complex and might not work but that they would try and negotiate it.

I guess there's also the question of defining what romance and a romantic relationship is, which I've never really known the answer to. I know that books always have the standard "fluttery heart, blushing, feeling a spark when they brush up against you, ect", but what I've felt has been more in line with Tori wanting to hold Milo's hand. Is this romantic feelings, or is this another term? Would Tori maybe be feeling sensual attraction instead of romantic attraction? Is she demiromantic? I have no idea, but I find the ambiguity surrounding it believable.

(I think get the feeling that we're both applying our life experiences to the text and getting different results)

I also knew going in that Milo and Tori would end up in a relationship, so my reading was probably impacted by that.

There's also the issue that since Quicksilver is one of very few books to actually have an asexual character, let alone the protagonist, there's a whole lot of pressure on it to represent a diverse range of experiences. Would it have been better if Quicksilver had at least one other asexual character to show that Tori's experience is not every asexual person's experience? Probably yes. Would it be even better if more books in general presented asexual characters and more diverse emotional relationships? Yes!!!

I've been hunting for science fiction or fantasy books without sex or romance (or at least very little) since middle school when I reached the "YA" age bracket and everything suddenly became swamped with this overwhelming focus on finding a boyfriend or girlfriend. Speculative fiction aimed at adults isn't much better, particularly if the protagonist is female. Roughly a year ago I created a list for this, and the majority of the books on it seem to feature twelve year olds or female characters who get a love interest in a sequel.

Given my usual feelings on the issue, it's actually rather surprising that I was okay with the ending.

Review of Hogfather - here.
Review of Jingo - here.
Review of The Last Continent - here.

The Discworld reread is going well. Hogfather was probably best out of the above three - that scene at the end about the importance of fantasy gets me every time.

I've also finished Carpe Jugulum but haven't gotten around to writing a review of it yet. If it weren't published before Twilight, I'd be wondering if it was parodying it. Vlad's attracted to Agnes because he can't read her mind. Wasn't there something about that with Bella and Edward? Anyway, in this case the sexy male vampire is one of the villains, and Agnes has both competency and a personality.

In the last few days, my family took a road trip to Austin, Texas which involved a visit to a bookstore called Book People. It was utterly fantastic, and I came home with a pile of books:

River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay (I loved The Lions of Al-Rassan but haven't gotten around to any of his others)
The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley (Loved God's War, been hearing good things about this one)
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear (heard of it, plus beautiful cover art)
The Thousand Names by Django Wexler (had a post note "recommended" from the store's staff, plus I think I remember kceccato liking it)
Dime Store Magic by Kelley Armstrong (didn't like Bitten so much, but willing to give the series another shot)
The Riddle of The Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox (shelved as "recommended")
She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor (shelved as "recommended")

I've already read She-Wolves and really liked it. It's mostly made up of the biographies of four women rulers prior to the Tudors: Empress Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, and Margaret of Anjou. Castor uses each of these biographies to look at how women where able to gain and use power in pre-Elizabethan England. None of them were able to rule in their own name. Matilda was involved in a civil war over her right to the throne, but she ended up choosing to press her son's claim at the expense of her own.

The book was framed around the year 1553 when King Edward VI died and all potential heirs was female. It introduces the idea that England would for the first time have a queen, but then gave the event context by going back to the biographies of the four previous female rulers. The end of the book contains a brief section on the three queens after 1553 (Jane Grey, Mary, and Elizabeth) and examining how they presented themselves as queen and utilized power.

I'd heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine before but never knew much about her. I'm so glad I finally read something about her! What an amazing character. Her's was probably my favorite chapter of the four, but they were all interesting in their own right.

>110 pwaites: I really enjoyed She-Wolves when I read it last year - they were queens I knew of by name, but knew very little about. I think one thing it impressed on me more than anything else is the extent to which history is made up opinion and propaganda rather than hard fact. We're at the mercy of the record-keepers, and they all have an angle.

111> I agree! There's also the issue that some of these women had little actually recorded about them. There's records of all the events that take place around Matilda, but very little about the woman herself. I also found it interesting how the queens used their own propaganda and how much medieval society looked to biblical precedent.

I've just finished The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, and I liked it very much. The worst flaw was probably the names! I'm used to fantasy names, but there were just so many of these. Not only that, but there were made up words for titles and positions too. Like instead of using "mage" or "wizard," Addison uses "maza." I kept forgetting who all these people were, and the extensive index at the back was not very helpful. A family tree would have been useful.

The greatest strength of the book was its protagonist, Maia. He's just so utterly sympathetic. He's determined to be a good emperor, and he has such vast empathy for everyone around him. He's also had almost no preparation or training, and he tends towards naive and awkward. He's also isolated and desires friendship more than anything else.

The Goblin Emperor is very much focused around court intrigue, and I've heard it compared to Game of Thrones. I would disagree however. It is in no way grimdark, and Maia is not an anti-hero or grey character (that is, besides the fact that his skin is literally grey).

>109 pwaites: Sorry for the belated response! It does sound like we're coming from different places for Quicksilver- part of the interesting part of discussing books, I think. I didn't know that Milo and Tori ended up together going in, so that's another difference! I'm frustrated that I can't recall more specifics, but it's been several years since I read it and my copy was a library one so I don't have it to hand.

I just found a list of books with asexual characters that had several new-to-me titles- hopefully this is an indication that representation is becoming more widespread. Unfortunately, there isn't any info on the list about the quality and type of representation (eg protag vs minor character).

>112 pwaites: I've heard so much about The Goblin Emperor, I really must read it...

113> I've seen some of them on Goodreads, and I think I've heard about others. Quicksilver and Clariel are the only two on the list I've read, and both had asexual protagonists. I started but didn't finish Deed of Paksenarrion, which has an asexual protagonist. I've heard the protagonist of Banner of the Damned is asexual, and I've got it on my TBR stack, although I didn't particularly like the writing style of Inda so it may be a while until I get to it. I know the protagonists of Guardian of the Dead and Days of Blood & Starlight are not asexual, and I don't know how prominent the asexual characters are.

Review of She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth - here.
Review of Carpe Jugulum - here.
Review of The Goblin Emperor - here.
Review of Range of Ghosts - here.

The latest book I've read is Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. I'd heard it mentioned before, and the cover was just too gorgeous to resist!



The best thing about Range of Ghosts was the worldbuilding, by far. It was amazing. The world Bear creates is inspired by Central Asia and the Silk Road, and she brings it to life wonderfully. There's all sorts of fantastic details, like how the different empires have different skies.

I also loved that there were a number of capable female characters with large roles in the book. Hrahima is undoubtedly the most unusual of these, and she's now my favorite tiger warrior woman.

I've now resumed the Discworld reread with The Fifth Elephant. I've always thought of The Fifth Elephant to be among the top three of the Watch books, and I'd probably list it in top ten for the series overall.

>113 sandstone78: >114 pwaites: having just read the sequel to Days of Blood and Starlight (quite a while since I read that), I'm struggling to think who the asexual character would be. Definitely not the protagonist or her key allies - unless I'm forgetting someone that doesn't recur in the final book. Not promising though.

>114 pwaites: I have Banner of the Damned and Guardian of the Dead both in my TBR. Guardian's character is the main character's best friend, who seems to play a sizable role in the plot judging from the first chapter or so.

>115 imyril: It could always be a "Dumbledore" situation, where the author said a character is asexual but we never see so in the story :/

>116 sandstone78: I've googled, and I don't want to divert @pwaites thread too much so I'll just say I think this one is open to debate/preferred head canon. It's a stretch for me given context.

114: Very glad to hear you enjoyed Range of Ghosts! Hrahima is a favorite of mine as well. If Bear wanted to write a spin-off novel or novella with this character as protagonist, I'd be quick to buy it. This series as a whole is one of my favorite experiences of recent years, in terms of characterization and detailed, lyrical world-building. Though I do admit the plot tends to get lost at times...

117> Thanks for the information on Days of Blood and Starlight!

Review of The Fifth Elephant - here.
Review of Thief of Time - here.
Review of The Truth - here.

I've also finished The Last Hero, which means the next book in the Discworld reread is The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Unfortunately, this is the one Discworld book that I don't have a copy of. I loaned it out to a younger cousin a few years back, but I think this was interpreted as giving away books I'd outgrown. I lost my copy of Dealing with Dragons that way as well.

I'll be taking a break in the reread while I acquire a copy of The Amazing Maurice. The Mirror Empire or On a Red Station Drifting are the likely contenders for "next book."

Review of Revolutionary Mothers - here.
Review of The Last Hero - here.

I've been reading Revolutionary Mothers off and on for the past few weeks. It's a nonfiction about women's role in the Revolutionary War. It's more of a general overview and doesn't ever focus much on one woman or topic.

I've also just finished The Mirror Empire. Very inventive and very grimdark.

In The Mirror Empire, there are all multiple words, all layered together like beads on a string, and all similar to one another. This is a fairly common idea in science fiction, but this is the first time I've seen it used in fantasy.

Some people can draw powers from three satellites that orbit the world. Their powers wax and wan with the rising and setting of these satellites. However, there is a fourth satellite - Oma - which rises roughly every 2,000 years. Those who draw on Oma can use the powers of all the satellites and open gates between the different worlds. However, Oma also heralds great destruction. The world next door to the main one is ending, and a woman of that world is sending her armies to conquer it. But you can only travel from one world to another if your mirror counterpart is dead. Thus, the people of the "next door" world are eradicating the people of the "main" world.

The world building is intensive. The very landscape of this world is entirely alien, marked by vicious plant life. Culture and social systems are likewise very different. While there are numerous different cultures, all the ones we see are non-hetero-normative and a couple are matriarchal. The Dhai, who are the closest the book has to the protagonists, have a system based around kinship ties, and multiple husbands and wives are the norm.

There are so many characters. It could be difficult to keep track of them at times, but I managed surprisingly well. The glossary at the end of the book helped a lot. I never really became connected to one. Maybe it's because there's so many, or maybe it's because everyone's either a horrible person or doing horrible things. Zezili is the absolute worst of these. She's completely abusive of her husband (who she only seems to care about because she controls him and he's "hers"). She also has no problem with massacre and genocide. Even when she's doing the right thing, it's for the utterly wrong reasons. Looking through reviews, I found one that complained she is in no way different than a male general. Possibly that's the point of Zezili - to prove female characters can be just as horrible as the male and aren't naturally caring or loving or something. She lives under a power structure that benefits her, and she is dedicated to upholding it.

I found an article of hers that seems to touch on this:

It’s funny because whenever you challenge somebody to look around at the people in their lives who don’t fit dominant expectations of what men and women should be doing, they come up with hundreds of examples. But ask them to construct fictional worlds that contain that same kind of fluidity between gender roles, and it all goes to hell. We write in shorthand. We make assumptions that men shun babies and hit things in the face and women protect things and avoid conflict. In fact, the people in our lives are so much more compelling an dynamic than this. Do a little digging, and you’ll find that history is full of people who don’t conform to this narrative either...

Women are not “naturally” nice. Men are not “naturally” assholes. And the sooner we stop pretending that’s somehow hardwired in our DNA, the more interesting stories we’re going to be equipped to tell.

Not everyone's completely horrible. Ahkio, Roh, and Lilith all at least start untarnished. But they also have problems with lack of agency, although Lilith does eventually get better on this front.

I don't know if I'd want to read the sequel. There's a lot of interesting ideas going on, but I'm not attached to any of the characters and this book is a lot darker than what I'd prefer.

120: Of a multitude of characters, only three are non-evil, and of those three, only one is female? I think I'll give this one a pass.

I'm still interested in reading God's War, though.

121> There's a number of minor characters who aren't too bad. Generally this is a hard book to describe characters as either evil or good - sort of like Game of Thrones in that respect.

There's a Dhai general who's pretty sympathetic, but she doesn't get any POV sections until the second half.

Review of The Mirror Empire - here.

In the last few days of this month, I've managed to do a lot of reading.

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black was a darkly enchanting YA novel. It takes place in Fairfield, a town surrounded by a magical forest inhabited by the fae. Children grow up being told to carry graveyard dirt in their pockets to ward off the fairies, and every year, tourists are found dead. On the edge of the forest, there's a glass coffin containing an elfin prince. He's been asleep for as long as the town can remember, but one day, they discover the coffin smashed and the prince gone.

I love Hazel, the protagonist. She and her brother live on the outskirts of town, and ever since she was a young girl, Hazel has wanted to be a knight who protects the town from the fae. Hazel's a complicated person with many memories and secrets she keeps locked away. More than anything, I think the book is about her.

On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard is a short science fiction novella. In the far future, a galactic empire is crumbling and Linh is a refugee, fleeing to Prosper Station, run by Mistress Quyen. The two women are very different, and it was interesting to read their opinions of each other. Both accuse each other of arrogance, but I think Linh probably most deserves that criticism. She had a high ranking before the war came to her planet, and she seems to expect Quyen (whom she scorns for her lesser education) to immediately give her a position of power.

Prosper Station has other problems besides the war. The whole station is run and watched over by the Honored Ancestress, an AI. However, she's been having gaps in function, which puts the entire station at risk. The Honored Ancestress also brings up the issue of privacy versus security as Linh chafes under her gaze and Quyen takes comfort from it.

Dime Store Magic by Kelley Armstrong is a fairly entertaining urban fantasy read. I wasn't completely happy with Bitten, the first novel in her Women of the Otherworld series, so I thought that I might skip to one following a different heroine and see if I liked it better. While Dime Store Magic avoided the icky relationship dynamics and alpha male trope of Bitten, the relationship didn't have a whole lot of build up. I'm not sure we ever saw Paige consider Lucas in a romantic light in the three hundred and twenty pages preceding the sudden sex scene.

However, the most important relationship of Dime Store Magic was probably the one between Paige and her thirteen year old ward Savannah, who's deceased mother practiced black magic. Savannah's father is part of a nefarious sorcerer's cable, and the plot follows a supernatural custody case.

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin was the third time I gave the Earthsea series a shot. I still don't like it. It's very well written, but it just doesn't connect for whatever reason.

I'm about twenty pages into Darkwalker, an urban fantasy detective story. It's too early to say much, but it keeps hinting that the protagonist has a Dark Past.

Review of The Darkest Part of the Forest - here.
Review of On a Red Station, Drifting - here.
Review of Dime Store Magic - here.
Review of The Tombs of Atuanhere.

I've finished Darkwalker, which was fairly disappointing. I never really liked any of the characters and kept losing focus during the climax. There was only one female character of any importance, and she turned out to be evil.

It's also got a few eyebrow raising things going on with race. The Adeli are basically the "magical gypsies" trope out in full force. They're the only people who can preform magic (which is not widely believed in) and they are the only nonwhite characters. Most of the non-Adeli view them as criminals and thieves. To it's credit, the narration continually asserts that this is a stereotype. However, it would have helped to have a major Adeli character who wasn't a criminal. An Adeli woman looked like she was fulfilling this role, but then, nope, she was the villain all along. Oh well.

Much more satisfying was my continuation with the Discworld reread in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. I hadn't read this in years, and I don't think I'd previously appreciated it so much. What really makes the book great is the rats, the "educated rodents." They've suddenly gained sentience and are now trying to figure out what this means and how to navigate in a world shaped by thought. They start asking questions like "What's the part of me that dreams at night?", "What happens after you die?", "Where did we come from?", and so on.

Right now I'm forty pages into Night Watch. I'm a bit scared of reviewing this one. It's possibly my favorite book ever, and I'm not sure how I'll be able to sum it up in a review.

Review of Nimona - here.
Review of Darkwalker - - here.
Review of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents - here.
Review of Night Watch - here.

Night Watch was amazing, as always.

Sometime while I was reading it, I took a break to read Noelle Stevenson's Nimona, a graphic novel about a shapeshifting girl called Nimona. The book starts with Lord Ballister Blackheart, the infamous villain, being informed by Nimona that she's his new sidekick. Together, the two of them take on Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics and Blackheart's nemesis Goldenloin.



It's a great story, and I was excited to hear about it being made into an animated movie. However, I'm too cynical not to be worried that the movie will slim down Nimona or erase Blackheart and Goldenloin's relationship.

I've also finished The Wee Free Men. It's enjoyable as always, but I think I prefer the later Tiffany books.

Right now I'm on the thirty-first Discworld novel, Monstrous Regiment. I read this one only last year, so it's still pretty fresh in mind. However, it always holds a fond place in my heart as it was the first Discworld novel I ever read. Plus, Polly Perks and the rest of the regiment are wonderful.

Review of The Wee Free Men - here.
Review of Afterparty - here.
Review of Monstrous Regiment - here.

I love Monstrous Regiment. It's hard to be too specific about what I love about it in the review, since there's a major spoiler I didn't want to reveal. Polly Perks disguises herself as "Oliver" and joins the army. She soon finds that everyone else in her squad is also a woman disguised as a man. This is a book that takes gender bending to a whole new level.

After Monstrous Regiment, I've been taking a break from Discworld. I finished Afterparty next. Afterparty's a techno thriller set in the near future where drugs can be printed by pretty much anyone. The protagonist, Lydia Rose, was a scientist who helped create a drug intended to cure schizophrenia. However, the drug really produces feelings of a divine presence, the visions of which are permanent if you overdose. Lydia and the other creators all overdosed at an after party ten years ago, and the mystery of what exactly happened back then is threaded through the current story of Lydia trying to track down who's producing the drug on the street. I really enjoyed it. The twists and turns are non stop and the pace is speedy. I'm not sure I've seen it on any LGBT lists, but the protagonist is lesbian.

The last book I finished was Ancillary Sword. I felt like it was a solid, enjoyable sequel to Ancillary Justice. I don't have too much to say about it, but I'll try and scrape together enough thoughts for a review.

Currently I'm around fifty pages into Green Rider. The book hasn't really caught me. I haven't gotten into the writing, and I feel like it states the obvious sometimes. I don't know how much further I'll read. Does anyone know if it gets more interesting?

>125 pwaites: I can't really help with Green rider, as I gave up only a little further on than you are now in the book, for the same reasons. But at least you know you are not alone!

126> That's nice to know! I think I may just move on to A Hat Full of Sky.

>125 pwaites: I read Green Rider a couple of years ago, and found it pretty average- which suited what I was looking for at the time well enough, sometimes I just want a nice, thick brick of fantasy squarely in the tropes of the genre.

If I recall, there were some hints of a more interesting world beyond the events of the story, but it strayed into tropes I dislike the romance is not between our heroine, who we're often reminded is a schoolgirl, and her peer the other rider that seems to be set up as a love interest, but between her and the king, a much older man who comments that Karigan is just a schoolgirl multiple times.

I wasn't sorry to have read the first volume, but I didn't continue to the next volume because of that, and because of reviews on the later volumes that the story keeps sprawling without an end in sight and takes a turn toward the dark and edgy, which meh.

128> Yeah, I hate that trope too.

At this point I have quit Green Rider for A Hat Full of Sky. Tiffany's now eleven and gone off to the mountains to learn how to be a witch. She's had run ins with other preteen girls (my pity goes out to her) and a hiver, a sort of floating mind that takes people over.

>129 pwaites: After you've read it, be sure to find the reading thread from our Mighty Morphy group read. :)

130> A thread for A Hat Full of Sky? I couldn't find one - do you have an index somewhere?

Review of Ancillary Sword - here.
Review of A Hat Full of Sky - here.
Review of Last First Snow - here.
Review of Going Postal - here.

I really should have updated sooner. I've read a lot of books in the interim.

A Hat Full of Sky was delightful. Tiffany never fails to delight, and I'm anxiously awaiting her fifth and final book this fall.

Last First Snow was phenomenal. It's the fourth book in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence but a prequel, so it may be a good place to start the series. It takes three secondary characters from earlier books - Temoc, Elayne Kevarian, and the King in Red and puts them at the center of the story. The POV sections are mostly split between Temoc and Elayne, although a few are through different characters' perspectives (but never the King in Red, who remains fascinatingly ambiguous).

The shadow of the God Wars of forty years ago hangs over the book. All three fought in the wars, and the current conflict becomes reminiscent of them. The King in Red and a merchant consortium have plans for the Skittersill district. They want the old wards revised and the district to be modernized, but the residents fear this will mean higher rents that will push them out and destroy the community. Temoc, a priest of the old gods, becomes a spokesperson and leader for the unhappy Skittersill residents. Elayne, as the lawyer representing the King in Red, drags them both to the bargaining table to try and hash out an agreement and find a peaceful solution. However, there are elements in the city who do not wish for peace, and it becomes harder and harder to prevent blood from being shed...

Last First Snow was utterly fantastic in pretty much every way. The writing is wonderful, the world building original and complex, the ideas presented intriguing, the questions raised complicated, the characterization deep and complex... This will undoubtedly be one of the best books I read this year.

Going Postal was as excellent as always, and I'm glad I reread it. On rereading, I realized how much it's about hope. The idea of hope being humanity's "greatest treasure" is presented somewhat ironically as it is what allows Moist to work so many of his cons. However, it's also presented as a powerful and important force.

A visit to a local indie bookstore added The Shadow Revolution, The Silkworm, When, and Ink and Bone to pile. I've already read the last two and am currently working on The Silkworm.

When by Victoria Laurie... I would not recommend. It's a psychological thriller and some what of a mystery based around the idea of Maddie, a sixteen year old girl who can tell the day that people are going to die. Her alcoholic mother makes a bit of money on the side by having Maddie give "readings" for people and telling them when their relatives will pass away. When Maddie predicts the death of a young boy who turns up murdered, she becomes the central suspect in a police investigation.

When was written clearly if simply, but it doesn't really do much. Part of the problem may be Maddie herself - she just doesn't do much. This is fairly realistic for a teenager in her situation, but it's not very interesting. I'll probably forget this book in less than a month.

Ink and Bone was a pretty good YA alternative history novel about a version of the world where a single organization (the Library, headquartered in Alexandria) controls all access to books and knowledge. The main character's family smuggles books, and they arrange for him to get an opportunity to train for a position in the Library. He travels all the way to Alexandria where he is one of about thirty students competing for six spots. As in all YA novels, the protagonist begins to discover that the organization is sinister. Still, it's entertaining and is a book about books. What more could you want?

I'm more than half way through The Silkworm, which is very engrossing. I think I'll leave off saying anything more, as this post has gotten too long as it is.

The link is on the home page for this group, under Morphy's Mighty Monthly reads or something like that I think.

P.S. Nope, I'm an idiot! I'm always getting that title confused with A Fistful of Sky! Sorry!

132> Well, A Fistful of Sky's on my TBR list, so I'll check out the group read once I get to the book!

Review of When - here.
Review of Ink and Bone - here.

I've finished The Silkworm. It was a slow burn mystery, very engrossing. Rowling certainly has skills as a writer. There was something about the ending that left a bad taste in my mouth however - spoilers for the whodunnit. The culprit was the childless career woman, which would have been fine, but it felt like why she did it was because she was a childless career woman who was absolutely horrible and no one loved. I don't think "single, childless career woman" should be the motive for a murder. Here's a quote of what the detective, Strike, says to her:

"Off you went... to maximize suspects and incriminate another woman who was getting what you never got - sex. Companionship. At least one friend."

I don't know if I would have noticed it at all, but I saw someone point out that Elayne, the fifty-six year old childless career woman of Last First Snow was unusual in that she was never vilified. That's made me wonder about if The Silkworm is falling into problematic territory. Is this what people mean when they complain about Rowlings female characters?

Anyway, I also read Legend by Marie Lu. Of all the YA dystopias I've read, I'd put it in middling ground, about at the levels of say Partials or Blood Red Road. It's definitely better than The Selection, although that's not difficult, and the premise at least makes more sense than Divergent.

It doesn't contain anything really new. There's no big ideas, and I don't have the feel that it's working with any specific topic in mind. It's more mindless entertainment than anything else. The biggest flaw is probably the uber special protagonists who can be the country's most wanted criminal and a military officer when they're only fifteen years of age. The story would have made way more sense if they were only a few years older. And as usual with this sort of YA book, it feels determined to kill off all the parents and in this case older siblings too. You can't have anyone who might try and limit the protagonists actions out of love or concern. I'm always impressed when YA books take a different route, since it's so rare that they do.

Right now I'm rereading Thud!, the thirty-fourth book in my Discworld reread. As always, I adore it. After it, I'm thinking of picking up The Thousand Names.

>131 pwaites: I've also just read Ink and bone and enjoyed it a lot. It was more creative than a lot of those more-or-less dystopian YA books out there, and the setting was a lot of fun. Good female characters too, and, like you, I was glad the romance never took over the story.

134> I'm actually going to Rachel Caine's signing and author talk for it on Saturday. I'll let you know if she has anything interesting to say on it.

>135 pwaites: Very cool!

Review of Legend - here.
Review of The Silkworm - here.
Review of Thud - here.
Review of The Thousand Names - here.
Review of Wintersmith - here.
Review of The Fixer - here.

I'm currently all caught up on reviews. Let's see how long that lasts...

I was a bit worried going into The Thousand Names, since my other attempts with military fantasy (The Deed of Paksenarrion and Gardens of the Moon) didn't turn out so well. Happily, I had no trouble getting into The Thousand Names, and the six hundred or so pages flew by. Wexler's created a great female co-lead in Winter, and I glad that she wasn't the only important female character.

I then moved on to Wintersmith, the thirty-fifth Discworld novel. I loved it on reread as much as I was expecting to, but I think it'll never again effect me as greatly as I did when I read it at around thirteen or fourteen. It just clicked really well at that point in my life.

At the book signing (more on this in a moment), there was Rachel Caine and Jennifer Lynn Barnes, who I hadn't thought I'd read anything by. I figured out during the author talk that I'd read one of her earlier books, The Squad, which was about cheerleader secret agents. Her new book, which she described as a cross between Veronica Mars and Scandal, sounded interesting, so I gave it a go.

The Fixer is about Tess, a sixteen-year-old girl who's sister is the "fixer" for the Washington D.C. elite. Her sister uproots Tess's life to move her to D.C. and a prestigious high school, where the other students assume that she's also a fixer. This leads to Tess reluctantly investigating a political conspiracy. The book was fun, and I appreciated that it's one of the few YA books I've come across with no romance. Tess is focused on family and friends instead.

There were a number of plot twists, some of which I guessed and some I didn't. I was guessing from the first few pages that Tess's much older sister was actually her mother, and I proved to be correct. It's fairly obvious when she's being raised by her grandfather and her mysterious older sister is seventeen-years older. I've seen this sort of thing before.

I really enjoyed the book signing and author chat. A large number of the questions asked dealt with "what's it's like to write YA?" or "what's the maximum reader's age for your books?" The authors looked sort of perplexed by that last one.

On Ink and Bone, Rachel Caine talked some about how she was inspired by history. Apparently the original Library of Alexandria would seize traveler's books to add to the collection. Caine says that she imagined that if that continued, the library would eventually own all the books, leading to the situation seen in Ink and Bone. The automatons were also inspired by ancient Greek devices, which due to pressure plates in the floor could turn their heads to look at you.

One of the more interesting topics was on the use of cliff hangers. Rachel Caine admitted to using cliffhangers, while Jennifer Lynn Barnes said she sometimes does but prefers to end on a "game changer," where the status quo has been utterly changed and everything will be different. She said that since fiction is all about imagination, an ending should leave room for the reader to imagine the future. Plus, it always leaves her something to write a sequel about.

I could see this in The Fixer, although I thought it had a bit of a cliffhanger too. At the very end, Tess has figured out who her father was and made a bargain with her paternal grandfather. In return for helping her, she has to become his heir and fulfill his legacy. I'm guessing this is what Barnes means by "game changer." However, there was also a conspirator that wasn't revealed, which I thought was sort of a cliff hanger.

The authors also talked about how each successive book in a series should enlarge the world of the story in some way, although one pointed out that it could also focus in on one part. They both also agreed that even when you weren't writing science fiction or fantasy, world building was important. Barnes said that much of her work for The Fixer involved thinking about the rules of Tess's world, what sort of students would go to her high school, and researching information such as what an invitation to a White House dinner would look like.

All in all, it was a lot of fun. I'll be heading back there in a couple of weeks for when Ilona Andrews arrives to promote their next Kate Daniels book. This may be the... fourth? time I've gone and seen them, and they're signings are always interesting.

137: So glad you liked The Thousand Names! I had my own problems with Sheepfarmer's Daughter, finding it painfully arid, with almost no interiority and no humor at all. That's a shame, because Paks ought to be a heroine after my own heart, and based solely on a list of traits, she is -- but as with Honor Harrington, I can admire her but can't embrace her story; the style just flat out doesn't suit me. With The Thousand Names I learned that military fantasy doesn't have to be like that.

I suppose I should approach Gardens of the Moon with trepidation...

>138 kceccato: I'd approach Gardens of the Moon with some trepidation and a good blanket for when you nod off ;)

...but I understand I'm in the minority (although thankfully a happy, tasteful minority along with @pwaites!) that simply didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

>138 kceccato: another non-fan of GotM. Too many characters for me, without a well enough explained world, plot or even captivating prose.

I'll look out for Thousand Names. Sounds fun.

Tiffany Is just so superb. And I'm far from being the audience able to directly identify with her.

138, 139, 140> What got me was that just as I was starting to get invested in the characters, it switched to a completely different setting with different characters! Urgh! I kept hearing that it paid off in the end, but I didn't feel like going through six hundred plus pages for an eventual pay off. If I'm reading something that long, I need to enjoy the journey.

>138 kceccato: >139 imyril: >140 reading_fox: >141 pwaites:
Yeah, it's sprawling, and you're thrown in at the very deep end.
Almost *everything* pays off eventually, be it in the shape of a somewhat clear picture emerging, Checkov's guns going off on various scales, or at least enough matter piling up to chew on for some interesting speculation.
But that may be several books and dozens of other story strands later.

I love those books but I can see how they might not appeal to everyone.

142:
I can deal with a sprawling cast of characters. What put me off Sheepfarmer's Daughter was the painfully arid writing style (I swear, reading it was like trying to eat sawdust) and the lack of humor and scarcity of introspection. As long as we get to spend quality time in characters' heads and get the occasional and appropriate flash of humor, I'm good to go.

I wanted so badly to like Paks. She's awesome and a hard worker, and the army in which she fights is delightfully gender-egalitarian, but for a few bad apples. If only I'd been able to enjoy the storytelling of which she's a part.

>143 kceccato: I actually preferred Sheepfarmer's Daughter to Gardens of the Moon. It was dry as Jacob's crackers, but I could conceptually appreciate Paks, whereas I couldn't find anyone to hang onto in the Malazan.

That said, I think I've become less patient. I had the Paks omnibus, and I think I plodded on to book 2, where I found it more rewarding. The story arc about her training as a paladin and confronting a loss of courage was unlike anything I'd read to that point.

144: There are actual emotions in the second book? Gosh! (I do have the three books on Kindle, and even after my disappointment with the first, I wasn't prepared to banish them to the cloud. I will read the sequels eventually; I'm just not in a huge hurry.)

143, 144, 145> I'd agree with kceccato's assessment of Sheepfarmer's Daughter. It felt like we only ever saw the motions of Paks but didn't get a sense of her thoughts, emotions, or motivations. That, plus all the slogging through mud was what turned me off.

Review of The Serpent Sea - here.

A couple of days ago I finished The Serpent Sea, the sequel to Martha Wells' The Cloud Roads. She's created a stunningly original and vividly beautiful world with this series. The world building's phenomenal, although I do feel like characterization can be thin at points. From what I can remember of the first book, The Serpent Sea may be an improvement on this front.

Today I finished Making Money, the thirty-sixth Discworld books. It's funny, splendidly written, and highly enjoyable but it doesn't reach the levels of the best Pratchett books.

I've started on In the Cities of Coin and Spice, which is the sequel to In the Night Garden. I'd recommend reading Night Garden before picking up Cities, since there's so many references to past stories woven into it. These books are really excellent, beautiful tapestries of interwoven stories. It's so easy to be entranced and pulled into them.

So what in your opinion are the best Pratchett books? I've only read a handful myself so feedback would be welcome.

And how dense is the Valente series? I've been tempted by reviews of In the Night Garden but was afraid that it might not be a light read.

147> My absolute Discworld novel is Night Watch, but I think you need to have read some of the previous Watch books going into it. I tend to think the late twenties, early thirties are the peak of the series. The Fifth Elephant, Monstrous Regiment, Thud!, Going Postal, Small Gods, the Tiffany Aching books, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and The Truth are the ones I'd say are among the best. Reaper Man is also very good, but it's divided between two different related plots, one following Death and one following Windle Poons. The bits that focus on Death are fantastic, but the Windle sections just aren't as strong.

I'm not sure I'd call The Orphan Tales a light read. It does take a certain amount of work to keep track of where you are in all the different stories. They're framed multiple times, so you'll be in a story inside a story inside a story inside a story... and so on, up to six or seven layers sometimes. Here's an example:

First layer: The orphan in the garden, telling a story to the boy.
Second layer: A traveler on the ferry in the underworld, explaining his past.
Third layer: A girl he met long ago, telling a story about when she was a child and encountered a hedgehog.
Fourth layer: The hedgehog talking about how one day he came up from his burrow and met a solider.
Fifth layer: The solider telling her story.

And it's all interrelated too. For instance, the war the solider fought in was in the first book, seen from the other side. Characters and settings reoccur and intertwine. It's absolutely wonderful, but it's certainly complex and does require more focus than some other books.

That's exactly the clarification I was seeking! Thank you!

>147 jillmwo: there's an old thread in the Pratchett group where people discuss their favourites, which vary widely from person to person despite everyone there liking the series as a whole. I'd mostly agree with >148 pwaites: that the twenties and thirties are the best, although personally I don't like Night Watch much, and find it one of the weakest. Your mileage may Vary. Certainly some them do require having read the preceding books in the mini-series.

149> Glad I could help!

150> Yeah, everyone has wildly different opinions when it comes to which are the best. I love Monstrous Regiment, but I know it's one a lot of other people hate.

Review of Making Money - here.
Review of In the Cities of Coin and Spice - here.
Review of Rapture - here.

Wow, In the Cities of Coin and Spice was amazing. Mega spoiler: All of the stories the girl was telling turned out to be a very long and complicated explanation of the events surrounding her birth: her mother, her father, the midwife, the man who paid for the midwife's passage, ect. Everything was even more related than I thought.

I've also finished Rapture by Kameron Hurley. I talked about it some with kceccato over on her thread. Basically, I really love Nyx, the protagonist. She's an antihero of the sort you so rarely see with female characters - morally grey, complex, messy, broken but tough and resilient. She’s strong without being a “Strong Female Character.” Also, by the events of Rapture, she's much older than most speculative fiction heroines. She's in her mid to late forties, but most bel dames don't live anywhere near that long. Rapture is the story of her getting called out of retirement to do one last job.

I also read The Neon Court, the third book in the Matthew Swift series. It was fun, and I like Kate Griffin's writing style and the character of Matthew/the electric blue angels... but I don't know if I'll read the next one.

I think I'm just getting really tired of all the character deaths. There's practically no characters that survive from one book to another who's names aren't Matthew Swift. I also wonder if it hits female characters more? Dana's in the first book was definitely fridging, and there's a number of others who might be too. The Neon Court kills off a major secondary character (probably the most important overall, next to Matthew), Oda. She was a particular favorite of mine, and I don't like how her character development was thrown away to generate a plot.

In other news, I picked up ebook copies of The Grace of Kings and The Bone Gap because I saw they were on sale for $1.99 each. If you don't know about it, there's a fantastic website called eReaderIQ that you can input you're to read list into and get updates on when the ebook price drops on amazon.

I'm trying to save the ebooks for college, since there's a limit on how many books can fit in a dorm room. I haven't got any firm plans on what will be the next read. Maybe The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf of The Innkeeper's Song? Or maybe I'll continue the Discworld reread with Unseen Academicals?

>151 pwaites: I too adore Monstrous regiment. I'd stopped reading Discworld when I couldn't finish Interesting times, and MR was the book that got me back into the series. As a result I went back and read all the books I'd missed (and I still think IT is one of the weakest).

I really do need to read the Night Garden books. They've been sitting on my shelves for a few years now.

153> I'd agree that IT is one of the weakest. I think the Rincewind arc is probably the weakest overall because so often the plot just consists of Rincewind running from one joke to the next.

Review of The Neon Court - here.
Review of The Riddle of the Labyrinth - here.
Review of The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf - here.

I'm caught up on reviews again! After The Neon Court, I ended up reading The Riddle of the Labyrinth, a nonfiction account of the deciphering of Linear B that focuses on the three people who were crucial (including a woman who's contributions were largely forgotten). It does a good job of explaining the linguistics involved, and I was able to follow along even without knowing much about the subject.

Next I picked up The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, a YA dystopian/fantasy that's different from many of the genre norms. For one thing, it's a lot more hopeful than many of the others I've read. Plus, the government's a democracy and the protagonist isn't trying to overthrow it. The writing's style's rather simplistic for my tastes and what romance there is reeks of tropes like "soul mates" but other than that it was pretty good. Oh, and I forgot to mention in my review, but the heroine has two female friends who are of plot importance, which I don't think I see very often.

I'm reading Unseen Academicals right now. There's a lot going on here. The wizards of the Unseen University realize that a bequest supplying over 80% of their food budget will disappear if they don't form a football team. For the sake of the cheese tray, they have to rise to the task. Meanwhile, a large part of the book is also focused on the basements and servants quarters of the University, and four young people who work there. Juliet and Trev are a fairly obvious Romeo and Juliet riff, separated by opposing football teams "alike in villainy." Juliet's best friend Glenda is the head of the night kitchen and a POV character of some importance. Meanwhile, Trevor's fellow candle dribbler is Mister Nutt, a very intelligent goblin (or more accurately, an orc who thinks he's a goblin) who's trying to survive in the big city.

One of the things I'd forgotten was that Glenda's character arc seems to be that she needs to spend less time taking care of other people and spend more time taking care of herself. Almost everything she does is for other people, and Glenda can't help but remember her mother who had a helping hand for everyone but "was lucky to die with all her fingers."

I love how the Discworld books build upon each other and you see so many references and other characters passing through. For instance, there was one line in Unseen Academicals where Trev says something like "Oh, Brutha." If you haven't read Small Gods, you'd probably pass right over it.

Also, Pratchett just has a wonderful way with words. Take Juliet who "didn't exactly wash the dishes, she gave them a light baptism."

Review of Magic Shifts - here.

Overall, I liked Unseen Academicals better this time around. I do think the ending was rather weak, but that could have more to do with my preferences than anything else.

Tomorrow I'll be going to a signing for Ilona Andrews's eighth Kate Daniels book, Magic Shifts. This series has got to be one of my favorite for fun, entertaining reads. They've got great world building, I love Kate, and they're great at how they incorporate mythology and creatures. I particularly love their take on vampires, mindless monsters whose brains can be piloted by necromancers.

The last book in the series wrapped up what had previously been the overarching plot - Kate's inevitable confrontation with Roland - so Magic Shifts has to set up a new plot arc. Hints of this came mostly at the end.

I made the mistake of going into a book store today and came home with four new volumes for the TBR pile. The first three are The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, Daughter of the Sword by Steve Bein, and the first volume of Sandman by Neil Gaiman. I also got the first volume of Lumberjanes, which I've already finished.

I picked up Lumberjanes because I'd really loved Noelle Stevenson's Nimona when I'd read it last month. Lumberjanes is a comic about five girls at summer camp (obviously an equivalent of Girl Scouts) who encounter strange creatures and secret messages in the woods. It's a cute story, and I like the vividness of the artwork even if the strong line work and messy style doesn't really appeal to me. I don't like it anywhere near as well as Nimona, but I would recommend it to anyone looking for a girl's adventure story.

Edit - I forgot to mention that I'm currently reading The Innkeeper's Song. I loved The Last Unicorn, and I'd always thought that I ought to read something else by Peter S. Beagle. The Innkeeper's Song is a slow, lyrical book, and I can't read it quickly. It demands to be read over several days at minimum, so I may space it out with the next Discworld novel, I Shall Wear Midnight.

>156 pwaites: I've seen Daughter of the sword in the bookshop and have come really close to picking it up. I'll be looking forward to your review when you get around to reading it.

The only book by Beagle that I've read is Tamsin, which is an excellent YA ghost story, and one of the few books I've read where a male author manages to create a totally convincing female narrator.

157> Yeah, I'll probably pick Daughter of the Sword up next time I'm in the mood for some urban fantasy.

I ended up not being a fan of The Innkeeper's Song, but I really love The Last Unicorn by him. I'd highly recommend it. I still want to try some more of his books sometime in the future, so I'll keep an eye out for Tamsin.

Review of Unseen Academicals - here.
Review of The Innkeeper's Song - here.

I've finished, The Innkeeper's Song, I Shall Wear Midnight, and The Fifth Season. Innkeeper's Song was very well written but never managed to catch me. I just don't think it's the sort of book I'm suited for, or at this moment anyway. It's very slow and reflective. It's a character based book, but for whatever reason I didn't feel much of a connection to the characters. I liked Fox the best, probably because his POV sections were written in a very distinctive way.

This is the second or third time I've read I Shall Wear Midnight, and I loved it just as much. It's got to be the darkest of all the Tiffany books. Tiffany faces off against the Cunning Man, the spirit of a long dead witch hunter who exacerbates the darkest parts of people to turn them against witches.

I also really loved N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, which is sort of a fantasy apocalyptic novel. The world of the book is wracked by frequent catastrophes which destroy civilizations and leave ruins in their wake. People have grown used to a world of disasters and prepared, storing food for hard times ahead. But when a giant rift in the earth rips apart the continent, annihilating the capital of the empire, enough ash is released into the air to block out the sun for thousands of years.

Amid the chaos, Essun finds that her husband has murdered their son and left with their daughter. As the world collapses around her, she sets off across the dying land to find them.

The Fifth Season is incredibly gripping and imaginative. Certain people, orogenes, have the power to shape the earth itself, creating and stopping earthquakes or lifting mountains through the air. The orogenes are feared and hated by the ordinary people, the stills, and most orogenes are either killed or picked up by the empire to be shaped into tools and weapons. Essun is an orogene and she sees it as more of a curse than a gift.

The story of Essun is interwoven with two other stories, one of an orogene woman belonging to the empire and one of a girl picked up to be trained. Eventually it becomes clear that these stories are Essun's past. Those two sections are narrated mostly in third person with the occasional interjection by a mysterious first person narrator. Essun's sections are written in second person. It reminds me a bit of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

The Fifth Season is undoubtedly the best novel by N.K. Jemisin that I've read yet.

Is The Fifth Season tied to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in any way? Or is it an entirely different universe? I guess my third question is whether it's a depressing read.

159> The Fifth Season is in an entirely different universe and has no relation to any of Jemisin's other work. I don't know how I'd answer on whether or not it's depressing. Plenty of bad things happen, but I think there is hope for the future despite the terrible circumstances.

>160 pwaites: I've been going back and forth about The Fifth Season, and decided after reading your review to request it from the library. I really love Jemisin's worldbuilding, but at the same time I often have issues with her work. (Specifically, I'm still not over my frustration with the ending of The Shadowed Sun, which I'm not sure I ever posted about at length...)

161> I don't think I ever heard your issues with The Shadowed Sun. I'd be interested if you want to elaborate - I've been meaning to pick up The Killing Moon sometime these days.

I wasn't happy with the romance plots of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, but romance was a negligible part of The Fifth Season so it wasn't really an issue. I also thought the plot of The Broken Kingdoms mostly consisted of the heroine stumbling from one event to another and that she didn't have enough agency. Again, I didn't have these issues with The Fifth Season.

>162 pwaites: I'll do so, but my issues were really all with the end, so I'll have to spoil a major plot twist. It's also been a little while since I read it, so the details might not be exact.

So, first off, there's a really neat magic system, about manipulating different "dream humors" in the body to effect whatever desired outcome. Our protagonist, Hanani, is the first female priest of Hananja, and she's being trained to use the dream humors, but this being a fantasy novel, something goes horribly wrong and the person she tries to heal ends up dead of a nightmare- and it eventually turns out that the nightmare is spreading through the city like a virus, and even the priesthood isn't immune.

The other female protagonist is a young woman, Tiaanet, who has been sexually abused by her father. We find out that her sister Tantufi- actually the daughter of her and her father, who her father has also horribly abused- is the source of the dream, because she is really strong and can't control her power because she's so traumatized. The father is using the girl as a weapon to clear his way to the throne, basically.

So, Hanani meets and falls in love with Wanahomen, the son of the mad Prince from the first book. Wanahomen is, of course, much, much stronger in magic than she is, which means that her training is kinda useless next to his brute force. (Of course.) Together, they solve the mystery, and confront Tantufi... and it turns out that Tantufi is so horribly broken that they just need to kill her, but she is so broken and twisted that if they just did that, she would destroy the afterlife, so they have to completely annihilate her soul.

Yeah, the author chose to set up the story so that an abuse victim was so broken by her abuse that she needed to be completely destroyed for the good of everyone. I was... really, really bothered by that.

But then, on top of that, we find out that this is the reason that women haven't been allowed to become priests, because if you allow both men and women to have dream magic, they can produce horrible dream babies, so the solution is (this is one of the points I'm slightly vague on) to keep the ban on women doing magic in perpetuity.

And, on top of that... at the end, Hanani decides she doesn't want to be a priest after all, because priesthood is essentially masculine, and she had to repress her femininity, and women need a different way of worshipping than men so she'll have to come up with a new way to worship, and maybe start her own new order. (This is also tied in with Hanani choosing not to remain celibate before, because women should experience sex, and a makeover scene in the middle where she stops dressing like a male priest and begins dressing like a woman.) This completely ignores the already existing almost-all-female order, who are also healers but who have sex-based magic, and I'm not sure why.

One thing that comes up over and over for me in Jemisin's work is a kind of men are from Mars, women are from Venus gender essentialism- but it's not exactly like that. Men are allowed to have a wide variety of roles, including a full spectrum of gender variation (eg Nahadoth, who is treated as male pretty much entirely through the Inheritance books but who we're told is gender-fluid- I think this amounted to maybe one scene in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms where Yeine thought that she'd still sleep with Nahadoth if Nahadoth was a woman and another scene where Nahadoth is holding Sieh in her arms, explicitly because she's feeling maternal) and sexuality- Nahadoth/Itempas, Nijiri in The Killing Moon's unrequited crush on his probably-asexual mentor Ehiru, Sieh and spoiler in The Kingdom of Gods, which incidentally was my favorite of the Inheritance books, probably because Jemisin allowed Sieh's male love interest to be his equal in a way I never feel like she does for her female protagonists- at least, not during the story, they end up coming into their power and equality right at the end, eg the conclusion of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms when Yeine becomes one of the Three- she is absent except for cameos from the rest of the series, except a semi-important role in one of the short pieces in Shades in Shadow.

Anyways, I feel like she allows her male characters the full range of humanity, while her female characters are restricted to a very particular type- intelligent and competent, but completely out of her depth because she's in a situation where none of her previous experience counts for anything; paired up with a more competent, insider male character who is vastly more powerful than she is right up until the end of the story- and romantically paired up, because she's always heterosexual. (I know she has at least one short story with a lesbian couple as the main characters, but I can't recall even minor lesbian or bisexual women in her novels, though she's had three male pairings crucial to her plots...) Maybe The Fifth Season is different? :/

That got a little longer than I intended, sorry!

>160 pwaites: "the terrible circumstances"
For no particular reason this put a smile on my face, remembering Dick Findlay (artist, illustrated an edition of at least one of Eugene N. Marais's works, and two definitive series of South African stamps in the 1960s and '70s. When things were going well and one greeted him in the with the usual 'How are you?', his response was often "Soldiering on bravely. People stop me in the street to say how brave I am to soldier on under such terrible conditions" -- delivered in a put-on quavery old-man voice.

>158 pwaites: I too am going to have to give The fifth season a try. I've had mixed reactions to Jemisin's work - hated The hundred thousand kingdoms, liked The killing moon and loved The shadowed sun despite sharing many of sandstone78's reservations. Your remarks on the Fifth season make me optimistic that this will be a book that I'll get on with.

163> In terms of queer dudes, straight ladies, The Fifth Season is mostly in line with the rest of Jemisin's novels. The protagonist is presumably straight and for part of her life is paired with a more powerful man. This is when she was one of the orogenes owned by the empire. She's sent on a mission with a tenth ring orogene (pretty much unheard of power) that's really a pretext for the the empire's decision that they should have a child together. At some point you figure out that he's gay, and for a while she's in a poly relationship with him and a bisexual man. Which, yes, reminded me of the origin story of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Of course, the relationship ends with people dying to create a horrific backstory for the protagonist. Anyway, I'd estimate that this portion of the book takes up maybe a third?

Oh, there's a scholar sort of character the protagonist encounters in the "present" timeframe who's a transwoman. She's decidedly a secondary character and hasn't had much impact on the plot as of yet.

Super powerful male orogene does turn up again at the end of the book in the present day section. He's on his deathbed and says he has important plot related information to share. I guess he could be miraculously cured, but I'm going to be cynical and gues he dies since his sexual orientation isn't compatible with being the love interest.

I'd previously noticed from the two inheritance books I've read that she had a number of gay or bisexual male characters but no lesbian or bisexual female characters. Even down to "random neighbor couple," they're gay men. I've noticed this with a number of authors actually. For example, Holly Black has some prominent gay characters in her YA books, but I don't remember any lesbian or bisexual girls.

More generally, I'd say that "intelligent and competent, but out of her depth" does describe the protagonist of The Fifth Season, except maybe in the Essun/present sections. It might be worth waiting on the second and third books to see where she goes with all this.

153, 165> Hmm, that does not look good for The Killing Moon. I don't know if I'll move it off my TBR list completely, but it'll probably be given lower priority when I'm looking for new books to read.

Review of I Shall Wear Midnight - here.
Review of The Fifth Season - here.
Review of The King of Attolia - here.
Review of Snuff - here.

Between finishing The Fifth Season and picking up the next Discworld novel, I read The King of Attolia, the third book in the Queen's Thief series. I don't have a lot to say about it. It's quieter sort of fantasy that's very low on magic and more focused on subtle characterization.

Then I read Snuff, the thirty-ninth Discworld novel. I feel like the Discworld novels hadn't been quite as good for a while, but it becomes really apparent in Snuff. I'd only read this one once before, when it first came out. I'd found it too disappointing to pick up again. However, on reread, I did like it better. It's not great, but it's far from the worst installment in the series. I think what really bugs me about it is that the voice just feels... off in places.

Right now I'm reading Raising Steam and the change in voice is really apparent. The sentences are longer, more ambling. Dialogue is in general longer. It feels like there's a lot more exclamation marks than in previous novels. While there is a lot that bothers me about it, I actually am liking Raising Steam better the second time around. There's still some good scenes and moments, even if this is certainly one of the weakest Discworld books.

I've got roughly four days before I get on a plane to leave for college. It's a strange feeling. I've been sorting through everything, trying to figure out what I'll bring. Some favorite books are coming along - Night Watch, Monstrous Regiment, Sunshine, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Magic Strikes, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and Good Omens, if my dad's finished reading it. I'm also going to bring the first two Young Wizards books, starting with So You Want To Be a Wizard? since I want to reread those after I finish with Discworld. The tenth book in the Young Wizard series doesn't come out until 2016, but I feel like revisiting them anyway. I'll also be bringing some books from the TBR pile, although I'm not sure which ones at the moment.

Class scheduling is being a massive pain since it turns out the college didn't have my AP scores. I'm signed up for the two required freshman courses, plus Latin 101 and Intro to Psychology. I'd originally opted to fill the remaining spot with a 200 level English course, History of the English Language, but since the AP scores still haven't arrived (or if they have, I haven't been notified) I've been stuck in limbo on whether I'll get the one remaining spot. I've been searching through the course catalogs for other classes that are open and have compatible times, and I've dug up an introductory economics course and an introductory history course which might work instead.

Next time I post a reading update, I'll probably be moved into my dorm room.

Review of Raising Steam - here.
Review of Daughter of the Sword - here.
Review of Falling in Love with Hominids - here.

I'm now arrived at Agnes Scott College and have moved into my dorm room. Classes start on Wednesday. I've got an intro to psychology class, a Latin 101 class, a freshman seminar, and a 200 level English class called History of the English Language that looks very exciting.

I've also done a lot of reading in the past week or so which I haven't updated here what with one thing and another.

- I've finished Raising Steam and stand by my earlier assessment. While it makes me smile in places, there's not the complexity of some of the previous Discworld novels.

- Daughter of the Sword by Steve Bein. This was a different sort of urban fantasy. There's less of the supernatural elements than you may expect - no werewolves or other beasties and no wizards. The fantastical element is the personalities and propensities of the swords, a sense of destiny, and a blind seer. There's also a large use of historical fiction with various sections delving into the past to explore the different blades. This is also one of the few books I've come across where the female lead has no romantic subplot. Mariko doesn't even have the prospective love interest that you sometimes see in the beginning of series. She's focused on her job and her relationship with her drug addicted sister, for whom she feels responsible. Going in, I felt like the sister would get killed off to provide Mariko with a reason for vengeance. While the sister did end up being kidnapped and threatened, Mariko was successful in rescuing her in the end and it looks like there relationship will take a better turn.

- The Shadow Revolution by Clay and Susan Griffith. Urgh. This was a steampunk sort of book about wizards and alchemists fighting werewolves. It could have been worse, I guess. Maybe I would have liked it more if I was in the mood for fluff? It fell flat and committed a number of annoying tropes. The first chapter opens with a female character being fridged for the male lead (apparently she was secretly building her life around him too) and in the end the female lead is kidnapped and has to be rescued. Talk about a let down. She was actually showing promise before that. Also, it spent an inordinate amount of time describing how attractive the characters were, which includes referring to peoples' eyes as "emeralds."

- Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson. This was a much better read. Falling in Love with Hominids is a collection of 18 short stories. I'm usually more of a novel person, but I'm glad I picked this one up. The stories were all very well written and imaginative. I really need to get around to reading one of Hopkinson's novels.

I actually got my copy of Falling in Love with Hominids as an advanced reader's copy on Netgalley, a site which gives book reviewers ebooks before they're published in exchange for a review. I figure this will be a good way to get reading material at college. I doubt my blog has enough views and followers for me to get anything from one of the big publishers, but as the ARC of Falling in Love with Hominids showed, I might have a shot with the smaller presses.

- Buried Deep by Kristine Kathryne Rusch. I think this is the best entry in the Retrieval Artist series since The Disappeared. It finally gets back to one of the things I really loved about the first book - the aliens. I've really enjoyed this series, but the copies can be hard to track down and the books have hardly any reviews. In short, they're a science fiction mystery series that so far has been set primarily on the Moon, which has been colonized with domed cities. This future contains a large number of alien races, all with their different customs and laws. To make trade possible, the Alliance has agreed humans who commit a crime against an alien will be subject to that alien's laws. But many of the alien cultures have wildly different notions of what constitutes a crime and an appropriate punishment, which sometimes is to be inflicted on the perceived criminals relatives as well. As a result, Disappearance services have risen. They will help someone go into hiding to avoid alien retribution. The protagonist of the series, Miles Flint, is a retrieval artist, someone who tries to look for a disappeared while retaining their safety.

Interestingly, while I would say that Miles is the protagonist, less than fifty percent of the page time is spent on him in Buried Deep (the fourth book in the series). Rusch uses many different viewpoints to show the ongoing crisis, which involves an alien species with a cultural revulsion to death panicking once a human body is found under one of their settlements. Most of the characters are one offs, used just for Buried Deep. Miles and Noelle DeRicci, a detective in the Armstrong police force are the only two reoccurring characters and both have their own POV sections.

- I'm currently reading Bone Gap by Laura Ruby. I'm enjoying it so far. While I have more to say on it, this post is getting long, so I'll save it for next time. I've also found another first year who's loaned me Mitosis, a novella by Brandon Sanderson set in between Steelheart and Firefight. I'll likely be reading this one very soon.

Review of The Shadow Revolution - here.
Review of Buried Deep - here.
Review of Bone Gap - here.

I liked Bone Gap, but I have a hard time finding things to say about it. It's a contemporary fantasy that's low enough on magic to have some people class it as magical realism. The book switches between four different POVs, although Finn's and Roza's predominate, especially at the beginning.

Roza has been kidnapped by a strange and powerful man and whisked into a magical realm. The only one who saw her abduction is Finn, and none of the other residents of the town believe him, not even his brother Sean who was in love with Roza.

What stood out to me the most was how Roza's story was twisting the tropes of the "fairest in the land" and "damsel in distress." Roza constantly has people seeking to posses her because of her beauty. People see her beautiful face but not who she is. She's the sort of character who is so often relegated to a quest object. The typical plots here are that some boy (almost certainly in love with her) has to rescue her from the quasi underworld. She would appear only at the beginning (when she's kidnapped) and at the end (when she marries the hero as a reward). Roza fights against this story line. She's constantly searching for escape and freedom and to hold on to who she is. While Finn does eventually arrive in the magical realm, it's Roza who ensures her own escape.

Since then, I've finished The Fire's Stone by Tanya Huff. I haven't read much of the sword and sorcery subgenre, but this book strikes me as one. The Fire's Stone which keeps the volcano at bay has been stolen, and a thief, swordsman, and wizard must go on a quest to retrieve it before the city is buried in lava.

Chandra, the wizard, was the only significant female character. The only other named female character Chandra interacts with is her nurse Aba, at the beginning of the book. However, background characters such as guards, messengers, or wizards where just as likely to be women as men. Also, all three of the principal characters have dead mothers and a contentious relationship with their fathers. Why is it that there are so many dead or missing mothers? It's not just The Fire Stone. In Bone Gap, Finn and Sean's mother left them and doesn't appear in the book. In The Shadow Revolution both of the main characters mothers are dead. Their fathers are dead as well, but their fathers' legacies drive the character and plot. The mothers are hardly mentioned.

A Fistful of Sky, which I've just finished, doesn't follow this trend. The vast majority of the narrator's principal relationships are with her large family. Both her parents are present. Her father's mostly quietly supportive. Her mother... "difficult" would be the kind word. "Abusive" might be more accurate. Her mother's controlling and focused on appearances, which concern her more than her children's mental health. When the protagonist was about twelve her mother decided she was too fat and set spells on her to make her lose weight. For a week, Gyp had little control over her own body. She nearly drowned because the spell forced her to swim past exhaustion, and she passed out multiple times. She wound up in the hospital and was terrified of her mother for years afterwards.

I did like A Fistful of Sky. It was meandering but enjoyable, and I'll need to get around to writing a review of it soon.

Review of The Fire's Stone - here.
Review of A Fistful of Sky - here.
Review of The Shepherd's Crown - here.

So, I've read The Shepherd's Crown, the very last Discworld book. It has a beginning, middle and end, but Terry Pratchett was still working on it when he died and it feels a bit sketchy in places.

Still, this is a wonderfully appropriate ending to the Discworld series. It was emotional, I'll admit to crying a bit when I read it. Significantly, there's a huge spoiler - Granny Weatherwax dies. She's been one of my favorite characters for years. I love her strength of character and personality. I love how she's so tremendously arrogant that she can use her certainty almost like a weapon. While, I'm sad she died it felt like a fitting ending for a book about death and loss, but also how the world moves on.

Tiffany and Nanny and the many other characters mourn her, but they get on with their lives. There's elves to fight. Besides, Granny Weatherwax wouldn't have wanted them to make a fuss.

"“The end of times?" said Nanny. "Look, Tiff, Esme tol' me to say, if you want to see Esmerelda Weatherwax, then just you look around. She is here. Us witches don't mourn for very long. We are satisfied with happy memories - they're there to be cherished.”"

And in the end, as Tiffany thinks...

"Granny Weatherwax was indeed here. And there. She was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere.”"

I feel myself tearing up just writing about this, but I feel like this was the right thing for the book. Pratchett dedicated The Shepherd's Crown to "Esme Weatherwax," and it feels like she was accompanying him into the realm of death.

There's other things going on in The Shepherd's Crown. There's a subplot about a boy who wants to become a witch, which felt like a reflection of Equal Rites and Esk. The elves encounter a changing world, banded in the iron tracks of the rail ways. Tiffany accepts new responsibilities.

I could talk about this for ages, but I've got to grab some lunch before my Latin 101 class. I'll post later about the book I just finished, River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay, and the book I'm reading right now, The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes.

I've got some friends going to DragonCon, but I didn't buy a ticket in advance, so I'll be venturing off campus for the Decatur book festival this weekend instead.

Updating continued!

I picked up River of Stars after really liking The Lions of Al-Rassan. I figured I should try some more Guy Gavriel Kay, and this one was on sale. For whatever reason, I didn't like River of Stars nearly as much. I really loved the characters and sense of destiny/fate in The Lions of Al-Rassan, but River of Stars didn't work as well in those regards.

The female protagonist of River of Stars is a poet, which Guy Gavriel Kay said he based on a historical figure. Her character was mostly fine, but I felt like she didn't have much or any impact on the plot. It feels like her main role in the story ended up being the love interest for the plot relevant main male character. She also almost the only female character. There's a handful of other named female characters, but none of them has more than one or two scenes and Shan never interacts with any (she says all other women dislike her). This book certainly fails the Bechdale test.

I'm forty percent into The Palace Job, but I've quit reading it. I find it too... sketchy? What I mean by that is that world building and character elements feel like they've been outlined but not filled in. I'm never immersed in the setting. There's also so many characters and I have to constantly struggle to remember who is who. It's a pity because I like heist stories so much, but I don't think this one will work for me.

Does anyone have recommendations for fantasy or science fiction heist/caper stories? I've already read California Bones, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Mistborn, Artemis Fowl, and American Gods. I actually made a Goodreads List for these sorts of stories here and a LibraryThing version here. I figure if this is something I'm looking for, maybe other people are too.

The new book I've started, Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells, might qualify. I didn't look up what it was about since I dug it out of the TBR pile, but it opens with a group of thieves robbing a vault in a high society house. Whatever elements were missing from The Palace Job are present here, and I'm really enjoying the little I've read so far.

>171 pwaites: Though not all of the stories involve a caper, maybe check the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser duo in the various Lankhmar stories by Fritz Leiber.

Seregil in the Nightrunner series also had a definite rogue vibe IIRC.

Less speculative, the various Arsène Lupin books.

Haven't read them yet though I intend to, but IIRC the Riyria Chronicles start off around a heist, at least a planned one.

172> Thanks for the recommendations! I've actually got the third Nightrunner book sitting in my TBR pile and would agree about the rogue vibe.

Review of River of Stars - here.
Review of Death of a Necromancer - here.
Review of The Deathsniffer's Assistant - here.

Death of a Necromancer was awesome. It had such a great atmosphere and really transported me into its world - I got chills when they were down in the tunnels and the fey monster was after them. If there was one thing I'd wish for from it, it'd be more female characters. Madeline was awesome, but the only other female characters where her grandmother who had only three scenes before she died (even if those were good scenes), and the queen of the kingdom, who appeared twice.

The book I read next, The Deathsniffer's Assistant, was an ARC fantasy murder mystery from Netgalley. While it also had a male lead, there were plenty of important female secondary characters. In short, the protagonist is a impoverished young nobleman who becomes the clerk of Olivia Faraday, deathsniffer (in universe equivalent of a homicide detective). There's a lot of interesting ideas, and the book was very immersive. While I did have some problems with the ending (reasons explained in the review), I overall did like it and will read the sequel. I ended up writing something like a thousand words in my review. I don't want to go over it all again here, so if you want to know more I'd encourage you to go there.

Right now I'm reading two books, Servant of the Underworld and So You Want to Be a Wizard?. Servant of the Underworld is a historical fantasy mystery, set in the ancient Aztec empire. The protagonist is a priest of the death god who is investigating the disappearance of a priestess, who vanished from a room filled with blood. The protagonist's brother is blamed for the event and will be executed if the real killer is not found. For whatever reason, I'm not emotionally connecting to this one. I don't feel like I really know or care about any of the characters. It probably doesn't help that there's not much beyond the mystery itself. I did really like Aliette de Bodard's On a Red Station, Drifting, so I'll stick with this one yet in case it gets better.

So You Want to Be a Wizard? is a long favorite of mine, but not one I've read since I started this reading journal. I liked doing the Discworld reread, so I decided that I'd do another series reread. The tenth Young Wizard book comes out in February, making it the ideal choice. The series has been going on since this first book was published in 1983, but the overall series was recently repackaged into a millennium edition, which the author tweaked to make everything set in the 2000s. I don't think that my copy's part of this. Looking at the date, I think somebody decided to re release it after Harry Potter became popular.

Nita Callahan is an intelligent thirteen year old girl who likes looking at the craters of the moon and learning the different constellations. One day, she is running from a group of bullies who are constantly giving her black eyes. This time, she hides in the library.

"She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another..."

While Nita's in the library, she comes across a book called "So You Want to Be a Wizard?" She finds a section entitled "The Wizard's Oath," and, feeling a bit silly, says it. The next morning, she wakes up to find herself listed in the book as a novice wizard. She soon encounters another young wizard, a boy named Kit Rodriguez. But every new wizard must go on an ordeal, and Nita and Kit soon plunge into theirs, where they will face the Lone Power itself, the Being who brought death into the universe...

The Young Wizard series is definitely a fantasy series, but it owes a lot to science fiction. Yes, there's wizards, but there's also aliens. Heck, there's alien wizards. One of the characters in So You Want to Be a Wizard? is a sentient white hole. The magic the wizards work feels a lot like a science. There's talk of equations and balancing, and every element must be specifically described in a complex wizardly language. Wizardry in the Young Wizard series is all about life and slowing entropy. Wizards are devoted to life and growth and sworn to stand against the Lone Power.

So You Want to Be a Wizard feels more middle grade than I remember the later books being. This shouldn't be surprising - the characters do get older over the course of the series, although the timeline is very fuzzy and sometimes contradictory. Or maybe it's just that the book (and the rest of the series) are more focused on magic and adventure than romance or Teen Issues? Anyway, I really love it.

Review of So You Want to Be a Wizard - here.
Review of Deep Wizardry - here.

I quit Servant of the Underworld. It was reaching the point where I was avoiding it by doing other things, mainly watching TV instead of reading. Even when I'd finished marathoning Steven Universe, I realized I'd rather watch X-Files than pick up Servant of the Underworld again, which meant it was time to find a different book.

Instead, I read the second book in the Young Wizards series, Deep Wizardry. I had vague memories of it, but mostly remembered that it was the one with whale wizards like S’reee, a young female humpback. There's been problems in the Atlantic Ocean which if go unchecked could lead to earthquakes which could topple New York City. To stop this from happening, an ancient ritual known as the Song of Twelve must be enacted. Nita volunteers for a spot in the ritual, that of the Silent Lord. Who it turns out has to sacrifice herself at the end of the ritual. The power of her willing self sacrifice is enough to stop the Lone Power. Nita doesn't realize she's volunteered for her own death until she's already agreed to take the role (S'reee and the other whales thought she knew). She then has to face the prospects of her own death and whether it's worth it if it means saving many other lives.

Something else I really love about Deep Wizardry is the approach it takes to Nita's parents. How many YA fantasy books have you read where the parents are either stupid or incompetent, and the protagonist keeps lying or magicking her way out of it so that her parents never realize what's going on? In Deep Wizardry, Nita actually tells them that she's a wizard and tries to make them understand what that means. This is possibly the only YA book I've seen that does this.

After finishing Deep Wizardry, I picked up a book from the Decatur Book Festival.... which I forgot to mention here. The festival took place over Labor Day weekend and featured booths and panels and everything you can imagine. I went to a number of different panels, three of which prompted me to get books.

The one I just read was Unaccompanied Minor, which I got after I listened to the author talk in a panel called "Humor in YA." It's about a fifteen year old daughter of a flight attendant who's run away from an attempted kidnapping and a messy custody battle by taking to the air and living in airports. Then she happens to be on a plan that gets hijacked (by her court appointed supervisor no less), and she has to save the day with the help of a wounded police officer, another unaccompanied minor, his service dog, and a 67 year old flight attendant named Flo. While the book was really funny, it was structurally a mess. Most of the action doesn't start until half way through, and the beginning is a round about, ambling explanation of the protagonist's life.

The two other panels that prompted book acquisitions were one on urban fantasy and another on newly released fantasy fiction. The first led to me getting Awakening: The Blood Rock Prophecy, since the author made it sound interesting and said it had witches. It's from an indy publisher and has almost no ratings or reviews on Goodreads (and no working touchstone here).

Right now I'm reading the other book I got, which is Updraft by Fran Wilde. I'd actually wanted to read it even before the panel since I'd heard good things about it from some authors whose books I'd liked, including Max Gladstone. So far, it's very good. The worldbuilding is incredibly inventive. The setting is a city comprised of ever growing towers of bone, where people are continually moving up levels, leaving behind the world below. They travel with hand crafted wings made of spider's silk and other organic materials. Metal is rare, mostly having been left behind.

The novel start's off with the mother of the protagonist, Kirit, leaving to fly out when there's a monster (sort of like a giant invisible flying squid) roaming around outside. Tower laws say that Kirit must remain fortified within the tower, but instead she stays outside to see her mother off. Kirit's then attacked by the monster but remarkably survives, bringing her to the attention of the Singers, mysterious figures from the central tower. I'm not very far into it yet, but I'm excited to see where this goes.

I'm about a fourth of the way into The Thousand Names. It's becoming a good read. A recommended book bullet so far.

176> I'm glad you like it! I'm excited to read the sequel and will probably get it next time I buy books online.

176, 177: The sequel is even better -- if you like a capitol-city political-turmoil kind of setting a little bit better than a battlefield, which I do. (Although I do appreciate battles the way Wexler writes them.)

I believe Django Wexler may be my favorite new-author discovery of 2015, even though I'm still calling Uprooted my favorite novel.

178> I think I also heard about some review of it that complained that there were too many female characters? That only made me want to read it more.

179: The review was for Book 3, The Price of Valor -- but the reviewer probably felt that way about Book 2 as well. The sad thing is that I seem to recall the review got three Likes.

>174 pwaites: there are several parallels between The House of Shattered Wings and Servant of the Underworld (who is killing these people in this unusual setting? how can we clear someone's name?), but I'm happy to report back that I rather enjoyed the post-apocalyptic Parisian angelic urban fantasy version.

181> I read a novella by her that I really liked, and I realize that Servant of the Underworld was her first book. So I'm not opposed to reading something else by her and will probably pick up The House of Shattered Wings at some point.

Review of Unaccompanied Minor - here.
Review of Updraft - here.
Review of Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell - here.

I liked Updraft. I also think it's one of only a handful of books I've heard of with teenage girl protagonists which doesn't have a romance subplot and stays focused on the adventure. I kept expecting one to jump out on me somewhere, particularly when it came to the male best friend. Nope. He stayed the best friend and never became a love interest.

Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell is a fifty page novella by Brandon Sanderson. It's about a woman named Silence who runs a way station in the forests of hell and makes money on the side by bounty hunting. When debts come calling, Silence must go after a notorious killer and his gang to keep everything she holds dear. Silence is a single mother and very much of the "independent frontier woman" mold, which is a change from the normal breed of fantasy badass ladies. Overall, the short's a solid read, and as always with Sanderson there's some nifty world building elements I'd like to see more of.

I've finished by not yet reviewed Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn by Danielle Ackley-McPhail and Day Al-Mohamed, a steampunk retelling of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It was alright. The beginning started off slow, with Ali traveling from England to Arabia and being attacked by various cardboard henchmen. The book doesn't really come into its own until around the fifty percent mark, when Ali finally discovers the cave with the treasure. The book isn't great for female characters. There's only two of any importance and the more significant one of the two doesn't arrive until half way through. She's the clockwork djinn referenced in the title, and she's the love interest for Ali. The power dynamics in that relationship felt a bit uncomfortable.

Right now I'm reading The Grace of Kings, a fairly new fantasy epic by Ken Liu. The worldbuilding and writing seems good, and it's immersive enough that I don't think I'll have any trouble reading all 600 pages. So far it also doesn't look great for female characters. There's only one important woman so far, and while some of the male have had hints about destiny (a family to revenge, a note from the gods foretelling great things..) she's had a prophetic dream about... her marriage. I really hope she's going to have more than a role than that.

183: Updraft looms large on my radar screen.

From everything I've read about it, where female characters are concerned, The Grace of Kings belongs to that "Be Patient and Wait" school of current fantasy that gets on my last nerve of late. Supposedly, a very impressive woman shows up near the end, but by then a person's patience may be exhausted. I'll be curious to know what you think when it's over and done.

>183 pwaites: I read Shadows for silence ... in the Dangerous women anthology and thought it was one of the best things I've read by Sanderson. Silence is a great character and her world was fascinating and eerie.

184> Actually, I just quit The Grace of Kings. I was finding it too frustrating and realized that I wasn't getting the sort of enjoyment or relaxation I was looking for. The one recurring female character (besides the goddesses, who weren't largely involved either) continued not to do anything, even when it really would have made sense for her to be involved in the plot, such as when her husband is leading a bandit army on the town her father's the mayor of. Her father had invited her husband there and then changed his mind, locking the gates. Her husband gets the city to rise up in revolt and over throw her husband. No where is she mentioned in any of this. Then it added in a fridged woman to provide a guy's motivational back story... I was only 150 pages into this 600 page book, and I didn't feel like wading through to the end. Besides, I started going through reviews and there were multiple ones that made me think it wasn't going to get suddenly better for female characters. Particularly this one.

Instead, I've switched to reading Brood of Bones, a story about a narcoleptic enchantress who's returned to her hometown only to find that all the women there are mysteriously pregnant.

185> Yes! I would love to see more of Silence.

>186 pwaites: I enjoyed Brood of Bones. Though for some reason I didn't quite tag it "strong female protagonist" as others did, despite sometime using an equivalent, she's certainly interesting, as well as the world and what happens around her.

>186 pwaites: Your one-line synopsis of Brood of bones was so intriguing that I've just had to go to amazon and add it to my kindle! (It's free, if anyone else is tempted.)

>186 pwaites: >188 Sakerfalcon: it's like being pinned to a wall by your friends in lasertag/ paintball and book bulleted en masse ;) (but fewer bruises and no ill will!)

Picking it up - it sounds fascinating.

186: Pretty damning review. "Ken Liu's Rules for Writing Fantasy Novels" -- OUCH! Welcome to my Author-to-Avoid list, Mr. Liu.

The only reason the "Silence" novella doesn't interest me is the same reason The Emperor's Soul doesn't interest me: it's too short. Even though I sometimes write short stories myself, as a reader I don't care for short stories or novellas. When those short stories and novellas have vivid, compelling characters, that actually makes the situation worse rather than better, because I want to spend TIME with those kinds of characters. I want to get to know them, and I want to follow them through two hundred pages or more. I want them to be friends, not just amazing brief acquaintances. It's like meeting a truly charismatic and compelling figure in a novel, only to have that character killed off within the first hundred pages.

Still, when it comes to women, Sanderson is the anti-Ken Liu -- though I've read rumors that sympathetic female characters are quite scarce in his middle-grade "Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians" series -- we get villainesses, but no heroine after the first two books.

Brood of Bones is one I will have to check out.

My review of Brood of Bones is up! - here.

I liked it overall and want to read more of Hiresha's adventures.

Right now I'm reading one of the Scotland Street books by Alexander McCall Smith, but I can't remember which one. It's the continued daily lives of the various characters. I don't think I like it as much as The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency books, but it's all right.

>191 pwaites: I must admit I put Brood of Bones down today about a quarter of the way through. It's just not chiming for me - I can't quite put my finger on why (possibly the prose/dialogue style?). I might give it another chance in due course (and not directly after finishing a classic, which is never an easy follow!)

192> The good thing about it being free online is that there shouldn't be regrets over not finishing it. That's the beautiful thing about free or cheap books. If I pay money for one, I'm more likely to make myself grind through it even if it's not great.

>193 pwaites: that is so true. And it's so rare that a grind becomes a pleasure!

Review of Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers - here.
Review of Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn - here.
Review of Zero Sum Game - here.
Review of Sorcerer to the Crown - here.
Review of Laughing Without an Accent - here.

I really should have updated before now. Anyway, after I finished the Alexander McCall Smith, I started my first book for Aarti's A More Diverse Universe reading challenge, Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang. Zero Sum Game is an action packed science fiction thriller about an anti-heroine who's got special powers due to her amazing ability with math. I liked it - the protagonist has actual character growth and the lack of a romance plot was refreshing. Still, I would have liked to see another female character among her allies, who were all men. The other major female characters were antagonists.

Next I picked up Sorcerer to the Crown, which was as wonderful as everyone's been saying. Describing it, there's obvious similarities to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - regency era England, magicians, faeries, lack of magic in England - but the tone of Cho's book is much less serious. I really loved Prunella, the female lead, who was so determined and fiery. Also there was a rather wonderful bit with dragons. A character was making his great aunt out to be a fire breathing monster. This turned out to be absolutely true.All in all, Sorcerer to the Crown was splendid fun, and I read it much quicker than I anticipated since I got so into it.

Then I remembered that I'd brought a book from home with me to read for the event, Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas. My mother had read it over the summer and would insist on reading pieces of it aloud to me, all of which were hysterical. Laughing Without an Accent is a collection of memoirs by Firoozeh Dumas, an Iranian-American woman. It's both funny and wise, and I would highly recommend it.

Right now I'm split between two books, Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor on my ereader and Angelfall by Susan Ee on audio. Lagoon is a first contact story set in Lagos, Nigeria. I don't know what to make of the aliens yet. They claim to be benevolent, but you never know with aliens. It's really good so far, and I like the depiction of Lagos.

Angelfall is what I'm listening to while I work on the current Grand Art Project. I'd been watching Full Metal Alchemist for the sketching portions, but I needed audio only when it comes to doing the Photoshop work. Angelfall is... all right. It's a YA apocalyptic sort of book where the heroine has to rescue her younger sister, this being the main reason younger sisters exist in action oriented YA. Said younger sister has been kidnapped by the angels who are destroying the world for unknown reasons. Protagonist finds a totally hot male angel who she teams up with to get to the angels headquarters. It's not the sort of thing I would have picked up but it got a couple of good reviews from some Goodreads reviewers I follow. I think I might have liked it more in print, where it'd be easier to skim the descriptions of the totally hot male angel and the descriptions of his "husky voice." Also, he has so far been shirtless for almost two hours of the audio recording.

The other books I've got for A More Diverse Universe are Octavia Butler's Wild Seed and Okorafor's novella Binti. Given the rate I'm going through books, I'll undoubtedly have to find more. I'll probably get any qualifying ebooks I can find that are fairly cheap and have good reviews.

>195 pwaites: I just finished Zero Sum Game the other day and had much the same feelings. I didn't really notice it until Cas was getting the team together to put things in action with the numbers, or maybe when the girl that was her client showed up brainwashed and talking about how great Dawna was. I definitely found this one engaging, and I actually ended up reading through it in a single day which is rare for me these days, but I found myself bothered by the body count, which is the reason I usually don't read much in the thriller genre (or watch many action movies)- I thought it kind of worked against the character development that part of the resolution was keep killing a huge number of people until Dawna showed up. I have some other nitpicks as well, but on the other hand I did pick up the next book...

I'd definitely recommend Aliette de Bodard's Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship- it's short, but I really liked it, and I think it stands well enough alone from The House of Shattered Wings since it's a prequel. I picked up Serpentine recently too after seeing good reviews and liking the sample, but I haven't read it yet- evidently it's set in the same setting as her other books too, which I didn't know.

196> I'd agree with your comment on the ending. I want to read the sequel, but I'm worried that it will basically drop all character growth in favor of keeping the body count high. I also want to know what's going on with her backstory, and I'll be annoyed if this isn't explored.

(Edit - Turns out the free novella I downloaded was In Morningstar’s Shadow, not Of Books, and Earth, and Courtship. But then a quick Amazon search revealed the second one was only 99 cents, leading me to take a book bullet and get it.)

I'd seen Serpentine, but I didn't care for the book by Cindy Pon I've read, Silver Phoenix. I didn't think the writing was that good and I thought it was over reliant on the threat of sexual assault to amp up tension. Still, I know Silver Phoenix was a debut book, so I've been thinking that Serpentine might be different.

Since I've posted I've realized that I actually have a book that works in the TBR stack back home - The Broken Crown by Michelle West. I'm flying home tomorrow night for Fall Break so I'll be able to get a hold of it. I've heard it's grimdark which isn't usually my thing, but I've also heard there's a lot of female characters, which is right down my alley.

>197 pwaites: I'm hoping that it will keep the character growth, since it has some negative reviews bemoaning Cas "suddenly being reluctant to kill people" as if that was a bad thing. I plan to read it fairly soon, though, so I'll try to post in a timely fashion when I do.

In Morningstar's Shadow is actually not a novella but a collection of three short stories- I'd read Of Books, Earth, and Courtship first because it takes place before one of the stories in In Morningstar's Shadow which features the same characters.

Now that you mention it, I remember your review and seeing others that confirmed that about Silver Phoenix. I picked it up because it's billed as a story about female friendship, and one of the two friends falls in love with another girl, though I've been unable to ascertain whether they end up together at the end of the book or not.

Your mention of The Broken Crown reminds me I really do want to go back and finish Hunter's Death... I'm so bad at actually finishing books these days, it's frustrating!

>197 pwaites: I wouldn't describe The broken crown as grimdark at all. It has some dark events, but the book overall is more concerned with political and social manoeuvring at court. I found the prologue(s) hard to get through - the first one is nasty - but you need them to set up the events of the book (although it's not clear for some time exactly how they relate to the larger plot). West's prose is quite dense but she writes well and the characters are well developed and interesting. It should keep you going for a while!

198> That makes me feel better about the sequel. I look forward to hearing what you think about it and Serpentine!

199> Thanks, that's good to know. I am anticipating that it will take me a while - I forget the exact page count, but it's one of the largest books in my TBR stack.

Review of Lagoon - here.
Review of Angelfall - here.
Review of Wild Seed here.

On the whole, I did like Lagoon. It might have suffered some from the sheer number of characters Okorafor was juggling. In particular, I felt like the thread following the LGBT student organization was dropped. Maybe they're dead? It's either that or that the author forgot about them.

I've read Of Books, Earth, and Courtship. It was a sweet story, but I think it's too short for me to review. Whenever I get around to reading The House of Shattered Wings, I could add something about it to the end of my review.

I started Wild Seed in the airport and finished it on the plane. This might not have been the best environment for reading, and I'd probably need to reread it to get a lot of the nuance. I felt like the ending was sort of vague and not fulfilling. I'm guessing this is due to it being the first in the series, but apparently the next book doesn't follow Anyanwu? I did like it overall, and I can see why it's considered a science fiction classic. It's accessible but still deals with a lot of different ideas without becoming overwhelmed.

Right now I'm about half way through The Broken Crown. It has definitely got the heft of an epic fantasy novel - the first seventy pages are about the circumstances leading to the birth of a character you won't see for another several hundred pages. I feel like it doesn't really get going until after page three hundred at least, but luckily plenty of things are happening right now. The back seemed to be billing Diora as the main character, but so far she hasn't done much. She's been married. She made connections with the sister wives in her husband's harem. She's watched her husband and sister wives be slaughtered by a conspiracy her father was part of. Now it feels like she's just sort of drifting. There was the oaths she made with her sister wives that I don't yet know what were concerning. I'm guessing that they will turn out to be important somehow. Her aunt Teresa has done far more plot wise.

>201 pwaites: Anyanwu shows up in a minor way in Mind of My Mind, which is next chronologically but was written before Wild Seed, but... maybe not in the most satisfying way.

That's disappointing and a little concerning about Lagoon, hmm. It also makes it the... fifth? sixth? book I can think of published in the past year or so that I've been really interested in reading and subsequently put off after hearing that its queer characters were killed off or nearly so. For goodness' sake. I picked it up recently as it was on sale, but after that and having just read Okorafor's Binti and feeling rather lukewarm about it, I think I'll leave it sit in the TBR for a while...

201: Regarding The Broken Crown, I couldn't be more Team Empire if I tried. I found the scenes set in the Dominion heavy going, yet I was far more engaged by the characters and situations on the Empire side of things. My impression of the series is that interest will be fairly evenly divided between the settings.

You're right about Diora. It does take her an awfully long time to become an active player.

202> I was looking at reviews for Mind of My Mind and saw that she was hardly in it and she died. This makes it sound like she's not going to have the character growth I was hoping for.

What I thought made that instance in Lagoon even worse was that it felt like the author was including the thread specifically to deal with themes of homophobia and oppression based on sexual orientation and gender performance. The idea of "change" kept being repeated, including by the LGBTQ group and the straight transvestite who's eyes they were seen through. To deliberately introduce these themes and then kill off the characters and/or forget about their entire existence? What was she thinking? It's just mind boggling.

203> I can see why you prefer the Empire, and I'd agree with you. It's less staid and women are allowed to do more. What's not to like? So far I'm particularly liking the Kalakar, the noblewoman general.

>204 pwaites: Yes, that's fairly accurate. The view you have of her is through the eyes of one of Doro's children, which is an interesting counterpoint to Wild Seed, but not a particularly sympathetic one. Mary sees Anyanwu as rather passive and pathetic, as you note in your review of this volume.

Lagoon... Sigh. Boggling, wearying... I think many authors have good intentions with this, like "I'm aware how much LGBTQ people suffer, pay attention to this!" or "Look how horrible this setting is, that life is so hard for LGBTQ people who I have the utmost sympathy for, this is a really grimdark place and !" But the net effect is, "no matter how far fantasy diverges from reality, or how alternate the history or present, how far after the apocalypse, how far in the future, homophobia is an immutable and inescapable constant of human nature," and wow is that a horrible message, and such an untrue one. Catherine Lundoff wrote a longer essay on the "tragic queer narrative" recently that's worth a read.

205> Thanks for the essay link! That was worth reading.

Review of The Broken Crown - here.

I really liked The Broken Crown. Epic fantasy can be a tricky genre for me since I think a lot of books collapse under the weight of what they're trying to do. Huge swathes of pages are spent on things that aren't really necessary, leading to bloated door stoppers. Sometimes the series may go somewhere, but I don't care enough to wade through twelve books for it. Other times series can start off strong but seem to suffer from ambling and overabundance of subplots (I sort of think Song of Ice and Fire might be heading this way). The Broken Crown has these problems to an extent - the first seventy pages are only loosely connected to the rest of the book - but it pulls together at the end. I am definitely interested in reading the sequel. Also, it's nice to see an epic fantasy with such a number of important female characters who don't all fit into the sword swinging Action Girl mode.

I've also read the third book in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, High Wizardry. While the back cover blurb tries to sell Nita and Kit as the protagonists, this one is really about Nita's younger sister Dairine. Dairine has always been ferociously intelligent and driven to learn. When she finds out about magic and wizardry, of course she takes the oath herself. With her newly awakened powers, she sets off site seeing, hoping from planet to planet before she suddenly finds herself being chased by agents of the Lone Power. She ends up halfway across the universe on a strange planet seemingly devoid of life. It's hard to say much more than that without running into spoiler territory, but I think this is my favorite of the reread so far.

I'm currently reading the fourth Young Wizards book, A Wizard Abroad, which is much more centered around Nita and deals with Irish mythology.

I've also acquired a copy of the new Mistborn book, Shadows of Self, so expect to see me reading that soon.

>206 pwaites: Excellent review of Broken crown. You sum up the strengths and weaknesses of the book very clearly. I'm looking forward to the sequels too, when I can get my hands on them. West has at least 2 other series set in the Empire/Dominion universe - the Hunter duology (of which sandstone78 led a group read earlier this year) and the House War series, which connect and overlap with The sun sword books; it's a very complex and ambitious world.

207> I'd seen references to her other series, but I hadn't realized they were in the same universe. I'll probably try to finish The Sun Sword books first though.

207, 208: A used bookstore in Commerce, GA, not far from me, had all the books in the Sun Sword series, so I grabbed them while I could. It was a huge stroke of luck. Sadly, I have not been so lucky when it comes to hunting down the House War books. I have the first volume, but I've never managed to catch sight of ANY of the subsequent volumes in any of the used bookstores I visit.

This is especially frustrating for me because as much as I enjoyed The Broken Crown, I believe I'd enjoy the House War series even more because it takes place in the Empire, the setting I prefer. I'm loath to read The Hidden City until I can get my hands on at least Volume 2 of that series.

209> It looks like The House War series is newer, which is probably why they're harder to find used.

Review of Shadows of Self - here.
Review of High Wizardry - here.

Today I finished A Wizard Abroad. Of the four books I've reread in the Young Wizards series, this is undoubtedly my least favorite. Maybe I'd feel better about it if I knew more about Irish mythology? I think there were a lot of references in that area that I wasn't getting. Plus, there was an attempt at "teen romance" that I'd forgotten about. Thankfully it seemed to fizzle out by the end won't be in at least the next few books.

Before I finished A Wizard Abroad, I decided that I couldn't wait and jumped right into Shadows of Self. It was fun and action packed, plenty of banter. There was also a huge twist at the end that I hadn't seen coming - the fridged lover turned out to be alive after all. There was also a character I vaguely remembered from the first trilogy, MeLaan, who got reintroduced. I loved her! She's one of the kandra, a non-human race of shapeshifters. She was so funny and really clicked with the rest of the characters. I hope she's in Bands of Mourning.

Right now I'm reading Six of Crows, the hardback copy of which is possibly the most lovely book I've ever seen. The pages are all edged in black, the end papers are a brilliant scarlet, and the maps are done by one of my favorite illustrators, Keith Thompson. Even if I end up hating the story, I'll probably want to hang on to the book itself. However, I don't think I'll be hating the story itself. For one thing, it's a fantasy heist and I love heists plots. I've also liked the writing and the feel of place so far.

Review of A Wizard Abroad - here.
Review of Six of Crows - here.

I did end up liking Six of Crows. It does an admirable job of making the five POV characters distinct, and after the first half the pace really picks up. For whatever reason, I thought it was a stand alone, so I was annoyed by the cliffhanger ending. I was also annoyed because the cliffhanger involves a female character being kidnapped, leaving her male love interest to have to rescue her in the next installment.

I'm listening to Jackaby on audio right now. It's a YA novel that takes place in what I think is the early 1900s. A young woman from England gets a job as the assistant of a detective named Jackaby, who has supernatural sight. It's all right so far.

My current print read is Bone Dance by Emma Bull, which has been on my TBR pile forever. It's different from most post-apocalyptic books I've read in that it doesn't seem to involve a complete break down of civilization. The main character lives in a city, and there's apparently enough central government for the city to issue it's own currency.

Review of Jackaby - here.
Review of Bone Dance - here.

Jackaby stayed all right but never wowed me. It's hard to think of a way to describe it beyond "okay." I won't be reading any more in the series.

Bone Dance was really interesting, even if the pacing was funky. I really came to like Sparrow, the narrator, and I think the novel was more focused on Sparrow's character than the physical plot.

At the same time as I was reading Bone Dance, I also started listening to an audio copy of Lock In. It was a coincidence, but both of these novels have narrator's who are never given a gender. In the case of Lock In it's simply that nothing's ever said in the text and reader's come away with a variety of different impressions. In Bone Dance, Sparrow is specifically written as not having a gender, and this is dealt with in the book.

For Lock In, there's actually two audio books available, one with a female narrator and one with a male. I'm listening to the one by Will Wheaton, mainly because I recognized his name. Lock In deals with a near future where a disease has left millions of people "locked in" - mentally functioning but completely paralyzed. Those effected now interact with the world through neural connections and robotic figures which they manipulate to move around. FBI Agent Chris Shane is one such person and is involved in a strange death which seems connected to the ongoing social politics of the disease. So far I would highly recommend it.

After finishing Bone Dance, I read Kate Elliot's new YA novel, Court of Fives. It didn't have any huge problems, but it wasn't very interesting. For something important enough to name the novel after, the Court of Fives was pretty dull. It's basically an obstacle course. I feel like it was being played up to make comparisons to Hunger Games. The very first blurb on the back compares Jes (female protagonist) to Katniss. I also don't find this to be true. Mostly, it feels like the book had a lot of potential but was never able to live up to it. I'll say more on Court of Fives when I get around to writing my review.

I'm currently 3% into a Netgalley copy of The Banished of Muirwood. I actually won the copy a while ago but had been dawdling on reading and reviewing it since I had til the end of November. I'm not far enough into it to say pretty much anything. The protagonist is a princess who has learned reading and writing even though this is forbidden for women of her country. She also seems to be working on learning magic.

>212 pwaites: Is it just me, or does there seem to be quite the resurgence of "but it's forbidden for women" novels lately? Last Song Before Night and Sorcerer to the Crown both use that trope I know, and it seems like I've seen at least one or two more just in recent releases...

I've been interested in reading Bone Dance for a while since I came across that essay you linked, actually. Must move it back up the list...

212> I think it's always been a common trope (any "girl disguises herself as a boy to join the army" story for instance), but I don't know if it's getting more common lately or if we just had a lull in it for a while.

I would recommend Bone Dance. The plotline's a bit thin, but I did like it for other reasons.

>213 sandstone78:, >214 pwaites: I too recommend Bone dance, for excellence in both worldbuilding and character development.

Review of Court of Fives - here.
Review of Lock In - here.
Review of The Banished of Muirwood - here.
Review of Shadowshaper - here.

I've done a lot of reading this last week. I finished The Banished of Muirwood and would give it an anti-recommendation. Avoid it; the book's a complete mess. Half of it is unnecessary flashbacks, and it relies heavily on historical information that is never well explained.

Since the last post I've also finished Lock In, and this is a book I would recommend. It was entertaining more than anything else, but it did manage to address some ideas of ability and disability at the same time.

Last Saturday I walked down to the Decatur public library card, since the college library doesn't have as much in the way of popular fiction. I got two YA books, Shadowshaper by Daniel Jose Older and The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde. I found Shadowshaper disappointing, possibly because I was expecting too much of it on the art front. The book is about a Puerto Rican teenager named Sierra living in Brooklyn who discovers she comes from a family of Shadowshapers - people who can interact with the spirits through artwork. I found the writing style too simplistic to mold well with a plot that necessitates description of visuals and the description of the art-making itself lacking. Someone who's not as obsessed with visual art as I am might like this one better.

The Eye of Zoltar was hilarious, which is predictable given that it's by Jasper Fforde. I'd forgotten most of what happened in the first two books of this series, which follows Jennifer Strange, a sixteen-year old orphan living in the Ununited Kingdoms and indentured to a magical service company named Kazam. The plot begins when The Mighty Shandar announces that Jennifer saving the last two dragons threw a wrench in his contracted agreement to kill off all the dragons. Either she brings him the Eye of Zoltar, a lost and legendary magic gemstone, or he kills the dragons. With no choice but to agree, Jennifer sets off on a search* which heads into the dangerous Cambrian Empire.

*It is not a quest, since all quests must be official and registered with the powerful Questing Federation:

“The Questing Federation were powerful, and would insist on a minimum staffing requirement: at least one strong-and-silent warrior, a sage-like old man, and either a giant or a dwarf–and all of them cost bundles, not just in salary but in hotel bills too. To go on a quest these days you needed serious financial backing.“

I went back to the library yesterday to return the two books and pick up some holds: The Shadow Throne by Django Wexler, A Darker Shade of Magic by Victoria Schwab, We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory, and What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang. I was especially excited to The Shadow Throne, since it is the sequel to The Thousand Names which I read and highly enjoyed this summer. I'd meant to work on an art project on Thursday but somehow I ended up only reading The Shadow Throne, which I've now finished.

I think I liked it even more than the first book. It had more of a political conspiracy focus and was obviously inspired by the French Revolution. It continues to be awesome with female characters, although the supporting characters from the first book were mostly gone in this one. As of the last book, Marcus wanted to investigate the death of his family and Winter wanted to find her ex-girlfriend Jane, which happens a lot quicker than I expected. A third major POV character, Raesinia is added. Raesinia leads two lives - one as the heir to the throne with a dark secret that could destroy her if it is ever exposed, and the other as a member of a conspiracy to end the powerful grip the Duke Orlanko, Minister of Information, holds over the country.

Right now I'm about three chapters into A Darker Shade of Magic, which features three different versions of London that the main character can slip between. It's too soon to say much more yet.

216: I learned with The Wretched of Muirwood that Jeff Wheeler's books are best avoided. It gives us a female protagonist with a deep desire to learn to read, an ability she's kept from because of her social class (and gender as well, though this isn't explicitly stated; we don't meet any literate women in the story). Yet in the end, despite all she's been through, she STILL doesn't get to learn to read; moreover, the head of the Abbey for which she went through all this explains to her, in an infuriatingly condescending way, why she must be kept illiterate. The worst of it is, Wheeler expects the reader to side with him and to think the heroine should learn to be okay with being illiterate. Oh, the rage I felt once I read the last paragraph.

Another unlikable quirk: Wheeler's refusal to use contractions in any of his dialogue. It makes that dialogue very stiff and stilted. Plus, all the characters, from all social classes, speak in the same way.

So glad you liked The Shadow Throne, though! That one is definitely in my top five reads of 2015, and it's not getting much competition from the books I'm reading at the moment. I seem to recall from a review or two I read of Book 3, The Price of Valor, that Feor comes back in that one, which I'll be happy to see.

A Darker Shade of Magic is high on my sky-reaching To-Read ladder.

217> I wasn't planning on picking up anything else by Jeff Wheeler after The Banished of Muirwood, and your description of the The Wretched of Muirwood makes it sound like I had the right idea. There was some weird gender stuff going on in The Banished too, but it was hard to tell exactly what was going on at all in that book.

I'm also looking forward to Feor's return. Unfortunately the Decatur public library doesn't have a copy of The Price of Valor, so it may be a while before I get to read it.

The writing of A Darker Shade of Magic is good so far, and I really love the world building and imagery of the different Londons. There's a few things that are a bit worrying so far about the female lead, mainly that she's very scornful of other women (hello, "I'm not like the other girls" trope). The second scene she was in is also an attempted rape scene. So far the only other named female characters have been a villainous warlord and the queen of Red London, who's only been on two pages. I'm a hundred and fifty pages into it, so things could still change.

218: The "I'm not like other girls" trope drives me mad, and what makes me even angrier is the number of female authors who perpetuate it. It can be difficult sometimes to find a book or series in which the natural state of affairs between female characters is NOT antipathy or indifference. Male-buddy stories, by contrast, are everywhere.

>216 pwaites: It's a pity to hear that Court of fives was a disappointment. Elliott's worldbuilding is usually extremely good, and her characters complex and engaging. From your review it sounds to me as though she was given a stack of current YA novels and told "write something like this". I highly recommend her previous trilogy, which starts with Cold magic. Her high fantasy series, first book King's dragon, was very good too but became too bloated in the middle books for me to make it my top recommendation for her work.

>220 Sakerfalcon: Cold Magic looms high on my wishlist. I keep resisting it while I chip away at TBR, but... I really do want to try some Kate Elliott.

220, 221> I think I actually read Cold Magic sometime in middle school or early high school? The memory is fuzzy, but I do remember the world building being excellent.

219> I've finished A Darker Shade of Magic. It did end up passing the Bechdel test (for the first 250 pages it looked like it wouldn't). The female lead, Lila, needs clothes to get into a party, and she gets them from a named female merchant. Later she exchanges some fight scene banter with the female villain. Unfortunately I feel that she was largely ineffective in the climax itself. This shouldn't be too surprising, as it was mostly magical fights and she didn't have or know how to use magic.

What I really liked about A Darker Shade of Magic was the world building, concepts, and imagery. The settings all felt vivid and magical, from the magic infused streets of Red London to the dangerous White London. Still, when I write up a review, I'll be giving this one 3 1/2 stars. Besides Lila's "Not Like Other Girls" thing and a character who is pretty much the promiscuous bisexual stereotype, I just never became emotionally involved in the characters. They could have died and I don't think I would have cared. Maybe if I saw more of how the leads related to other people? Kell has important relationships with other people (mainly his adopted brother), and it might have helped if those got more page time. Lila... well, there's the burgeoning relationship with Kell. The only other person she has some sort of connection to is a barkeeper who lets her live in a room above the bar for free and tries to help her out, which she resents. This connection isn't deeply explored and he dies part way into the book, for reasons that are Lila's fault. This also isn't deeply explored.

Right now I'm reading an ebook copy of McKinley's Rose Daughter. I'd previously read Beauty, but Rose Daughter is new to me. It's been a few years since I've read Beauty, but from what I remember I'd say Rose Daughter is the stronger retelling.

Review of The Eye of Zoltar - here.
Review of The Shadow Throne - here.
Review of A Darker Shade of Magic - here.

Rose Daughter was all right. Beauty was fell in love with and was willing to marry the Beast awfully quickly - only seven days went by! There's also a bunch of McKinley hallmarks, from the vague magic stuff at the end to the heroine being accompanied by a veritable hoard of animal life.

Once I finished Rose Daughter, I read What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang. It's sort of a YA dystopia but also an alternate history. In the world of this book, everyone is born with two souls in one body. They are expected to "settle" by four or five and have the non-dominate soul fade away. Except Eva is a non-dominate soul who refused to leave. Given that "hybrids" (those who don't settle) face institutionalization, Addie and Eva hide Eva's continued existence. Eva cannot move their body at all and is trapped inside, watching. The relationship of Addie and Eva was at the core of the book. They sometimes argue or resent the other, but neither would know how to live without the other.

I've also read We Are All Completely Fine, a novella by Daryl Gregory that's about five survivors of horrific supernatural events attending a group therapy together. There is a plot going on, but the focus of the novella is on the characters of the patient and the psychologist leading the session. I feel like there was room left for a sequel at the end.

Currently I'm reading The Wizard's Dilemma by Diane Duane. I've been putting it off since I remember it being a tear jerker.

I've got some holds in at the library, so these will likely be the next books I read: Ancillary Mercy, Anna Dressed in Blood, and A Conspiracy of Kings. I've also got a request in for Dragon Sword and Wind Child, but it hasn't arrived yet.

Other bookish news is that I'm a volunteer for the Agnes Scott College Writers' Festival. It looks like I'll mainly be working on publicity and keeping the social media updated. I've also applied for a volunteer job for the Decatur public library, but I haven't heard back from them yet.

>223 pwaites: I very much like the sound of We Are All Completely Fine.

224> I hope you like it as much as I did!

Review of Rose Daughter - here.
Review of What's Left of Me - here.
Review of Through the Woods - here.
Review of We Are All Completely Fine - here.
Review of Anna Dressed in Blood - here.

The Wizard's Dilemma, geeze... it did make me cry, which doesn't usually happen with books. I'm giving it five stars as of this reread. This is the fifth installment in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series and definitely the darkest yet. Things start falling apart and it's unclear if they can be put back together again. The book starts with Kit and Nita having the first big fight of their friendship. Then Nita's mom gets diagnosed with cancer and events start spiraling. It's a really good book but hard to read. I can get teary eyed just thinking about it.

She simply could not imagine a life without that serene, dancing presence sailing through it. Her mother was always there, behind everything, involved in everything. The idea of a life without her, of an emptiness where she had been: never again to hear her voice, joking, yelling, singing to herself, never again.

"It’s not fair,” Nita said softly. “How come I only get to really know you now, when I’m going to lose you?”
“I don’t know if you can ever lose me, honey. I’m your mother. There’s a bond neither of us can break unless we want to. And it doesn’t have to hurt."

Something I really love about the book is how Nita's mother is involved at the end. So much of the book is about Nita trying to save her and learning the wizardry she would need to do so. The climax of the book is in a world symbolic of and somehow literally (this is magic after all) Nita's mother. And it's Nita's mother who really comes in and makes the crucial choice - after all, it is her body. At the end of the novel, Nita's mother is still going to die, but at least they have more time.

"This is my body,” said Nita’s mother. “If this is going to be a battleground, I make the rules."

This one is going to be very tough to write a review for.

I've since read a collection of short stories told in a graphic novel style format, Through the Woods by Emily Carroll. I loved this collection! The art work was beautiful and went with the stories so well. There was a sense of delicious creepiness, and I loved how the stories drew on fairy tales. One of the stories, "His Face All Red", is available on the author's website.



Anna Dressed in Blood wasn't anything exceptional, but I liked it. The book's a YA paranormal/horror story, about a teenage boy who kills ghosts. Then he runs up against a ghost unlike any he's seen before - Anna Dressed in Blood.

I've read but not yet reviewed A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner, the fourth book in her Thief series. It continues the quality of the previous installments. While each has a separate story arc and often shifts to a new POV character, I wouldn't recommend starting the series here. You'd be missing too much from the previous books.

Up next is Ancillary Mercy, the final book in the trilogy that started with Ancillary Justice, which I read earlier this year and really liked.

Review of A Conspiracy of Kings - here.
Review of The Wizard's Dilemma - here.
Review of Ancillary Mercy - here.
Review of The Abyss Surrounds Us - here.

I meant to post sooner but everything's been hectic with Thanksgiving and upcoming exams. I probably won't be posting much here for the next couple of weeks, but I was able to schedule some reviews to be posted on my blog throughout next week.

I liked Ancillary Mercy about as much as I liked the other books in the trilogy, which I figured would be the case.

Shadows on the Moon was a YA fantasy retelling of Cinderella with a setting based on historical Japan. It was one of the better Cinderella retellings I've come across. The problem with retellings can be that you already know in advance how it ends, so it feels like you're just going through the motions for most of the book. Shadows on the Moon was different enough that it kept me guessing.

The Aware is a female lead epic fantasy novel that takes place in a collection of islands, all with their own culture. The protagonist is looking for a mysterious slave woman when she runs into a bunch of evil magic. It was all right. It had a tough female lead and some good world building ideas, but it didn't catch me enough to make me want to read the sequel.

The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie is an ARC that I got through Netgalley. I actually received it a while back but haven't been able to read it until I came home for Thanksgiving, since campus wifi and my Kindle hate each other. The Abyss Surrounds Us is a YA novel set in a near future where rising sea levels have drowned cities and created a large pirate population. In response, shipping corporations have paid for the construction of huge genetically engineered sea monsters to guard and protect their ships from pirates. The protagonist, Cassandra Leung, is a seventeen year old girl who's entire family works in the sea monster industry. She's sent off as her first time solo tour as a trainer when the boat she's on is overtaken by pirates and her monster slain. Turns out, the pirates who captured her have a baby sea monster and plans for domination of the high seas... There's also a romance subplot with another teenage girl on the ship.

The Abyss Surrounds Us won't be out until February, but I would recommend picking it up when it comes out. It feels like there's been a rash of badly thought out YA, but The Abyss Surrounds Us holds together well and has a gripping pace and some morally complicated situations.

The Girl with All the Gifts was one I picked up since I heard a number of people here in the Green Dragon raving about it. I can see why they were raving. It centers on a ten year old girl inside a compound where she's moved from cell to classroom to showers, all while strapped down in a wheelchair and watched by armed guards. Turns out that she's a zombie. Most zombies are mindless "hungaries" but a few child zombies retained sentience, even if they also have the overwhelming urge to eat human flesh.

Right now I'm four percent into my digital copy of Promise of Blood. It's a bit too early to say much about it yet.

Review of The Aware - here.

I was hoping for more from Promise of Blood than I got. I'd heard a lot of good things about the book, plus comparisons to Wexler's The Thousand Names, and then the ebook copy went on sale for $1.99. I can see why it's being compared to Wexler - same subgenre basically. "Flint lock" fantasy, and the plot of Promise of Blood was similar to the second in Wexler's series. But I wouldn't recommend Promise of Blood to people who like Wexler's work.

Promise of Blood did have... well, a lot of promise. The pacing and action were good, the world building was decent (even if the magic system wasn't really great enough to name the series for), and the plotting was pretty well carried out.

Promise of Blood's biggest failing is characterization. It has three main characters: Tamas, a general who led a secret conspiracy to behead the king; Taniel, Tamas's son and a solider; and Adamat, a retired police inspector who Tamas is having investigate various things. The book mainly switches through their POVs, but there are four shorter POV sections from a woman's perspective - Nila, I think her name was. She was a laundress who didn't have much impact. I didn't realize until about 80% of the way in that the three main leads have no distinguishing personality traits. They might be in different situations but their voices and characters are remarkably similar. There was a scene that I honestly couldn't recall who's POV it was from until I remembered that Tamas's bodyguard was also in there.

If you haven't guessed from the "all three of the MCs are men," this book contained very little in the way of female characters or really diversity of any kind. The most important female character was the villainess, an immortal sorceress who wanted to recall a god to the world so that she could eventually rule it. Against her... another immortal sorceress! A possible significant female character! Only she disappeared less than half way into the book for inexplicable reasons. In terms of more heroic female characters who were actually in the book beginning to end, really there's only Ko-poel, a mute teenage magic user who comes from some foreign country. She's Taniel assistant and he thinks she's fourteen (later finds out she's nineteen) for half the book, which makes the constant narrative inclination that he's going to sleep with her really uncomfortable to say the least. Honestly, Ko-poel doesn't have much of a presence, but she might be the only female character to crop up in the top ten most mentioned characters. Thanks to the x-ray feature of the ebook, I can tell that of the ten most mentioned characters, eight are straight white men. The one black guy gets shot in the head.

I also had this uncomfortable feeling about more "background" female characters being objectified. I think a large part of this is because of the number of harems and sexy ladies that are strewn all over the scenery. Of the two types of magic users, one's magic has a side effect of a super high sex drive apparently? So that's the reason that sorcerers always have multiple women fawning on their arms? Just... why?

Then there's the scene of attempted rape at the beginning of the book (first of Nila's four POV sections). Nila, who doesn't even make the top ten for most frequently mentioned characters by the way. The guy who stops the rape from happening and becomes her love interest does make the top ten list. It leaves me feeling that the whole point of the scene was to make him look good, which I find irritating.

Anyway, I didn't want to rant this much about gender stuff in my review, so I figured I'd write up my thoughts here and give myself some space to think on how to condense it to a single paragraph. I'm reading Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring now.

227: I recall reading a quote from Django Wexler somewhere on Reddit Fantasy that he went to work on The Thousand Names knowing already that he "didn't want to write an all-male book." His intention to include significant female characters was right there from the concept stage.

By contrast, when Brian McClelland's unsatisfying portrayal of female characters in Promise of Blood was brought up on Goodreads and elsewhere, as I understand it, he was surprised, and he apologized. He'd written them that way without even thinking about it, and he vowed to do better in the sequels. (He's also written some one-off novellas with a female POV.) So, his portrayal of female characters as weak, evil, and/or irrelevant was not deliberate but unconscious.

Am I alone in thinking that somehow that actually makes it worse?

228> There's so much stuff out there with hardly any female characters that it can be easy to replicate what everyone else is doing without examining it. I've always wanted more female lead heist stories, but when I was working on an idea for my own heist plot the protagonist was originally male. I did notice this fairly quickly and figured it was because almost all of the "mastermind" characters that I'd read about were male, I unconsciously made my own character follow in the mold.

Review of Shadows on the Moon - here.
Review of Promise of Blood - here.
Review of The Girl with All the Gifts - here.
Review of Acne, Asthma, and Other Signs You Might Be Half Dragon - here.
Review of The Brown Girl in the Ring - here.

I'm finished with exams and home for the holidays! Since it's been almost two weeks since my last update, there's a fair amount of books to cover:

- Acne, Asthma, and Other Signs You Might be Half Dragon. This one was a YA fantasy advanced reader's copy I got through Netgalley. It was okay. Nothing memorable. The characterization and world building were thin, and the protagonist didn't try to get any information out of her mother about the fact that she's half dragon, which she didn't because YA novels presume parents are idiots or have the characters act irrationally to prolong the plot. On the good side, the relationship between the female protagonist and her female best friend got a large focus, which is pretty unusual for fantasy books.

- Brown Girl in the Ring. I've been meaning to read a novel by Nalo Hopkinson ever since I liked her short story collection Falling in Love with Hominids so much earlier this year. I didn't like Brown Girl in the Ring quite as much as the short stories. Turns out it's her debut novel, which might explain why I found it lacking. I'll try and pick up one of her later books sometime next semester.

- The Phoenix Guards. I'd read Jhereg and one of the sequels but had never gotten involved in the series or felt they were more than all right. The Phoenix Guards is set in the same world but earlier in time with a framing device that this is an account being written up by a historian. The writing style is similar to Dumas's, or at least from what I remember of reading The Count of Monte Cristo as a freshman in high school. I thought the book was entertaining, but I found it too slow to be a good study break during exam season.

- Maplecroft. The start to Cherie Priest's newest series is a historical horror novel. I haven't read anything by Lovecraft, but I would suspect that there's an influence here. There's monsters, something strange coming from the sea, and a small town. The writing was good, and it was appropriately creepy. Unfortunately, my tastes don't run much towards horror, and I likely won't continue with the series.

- Touch by Claire North. I've read books by Claire North before, under the pen name Kate Griffin which she uses to write urban fantasy like the Matthew Swift books. I really loved Touch. The idea behind the story is that there exist "ghosts" who survive by possessing people's bodies and transferring from body to body by touch. The narrator is one such ghost, who was beaten to death in an alleyway but suddenly found themself inside the body of their attacker upon death. The name or gender of the narrator's original body is never given (and the narrator insists that they don't matter), although other characters name the entity Kepler. At the beginning of the story, the narrator has negotiated a deal with a young Polish prostitute, Josephine, - they use her body for three months, she gets ten thousand euros and a new start on life. Then Josephine is killed by a shadowy organization dedicated to taking out "ghosts." The narrator survives but decides to find out why Josephine was killed even after they jumped away and seek revenge for her death.

Something I really love about Touch is the deep moral ambiguity of the protagonist. Kepler is called a thief and a parasite, claims which they never totally deny but instead insist that they are better than others of their kind. It is true that Kepler steals others lives, sometimes for up to years at a time, but as a narrator, you see the story entirely through their view and how they try to paint themself as sympathetic. The idea of self is also important here. Kepler usually tries to slip entirely into the lives of their hosts, taking their names and genders and trying to develop a story to explain their situations. Yet over the course of the book, Kepler does seem to come closer to admitting the truth that they exist as an individual, distinct from any of the lives they've stolen. I'd like to reread this one sometime in the future, and it's definitely a book I'd recommend.

- Binti. This science fiction novella by Nnedi Okorafor was all right. I didn't seem to love it like a lot of other reviewers did, and I'll have to figure out why before I write up my review.

Almost a year ago I read and loved City of Stairs, and I was super excited when I was approved for an advanced reviewer's copy of the sequel, City of Blades, earlier this week. I'm currently about seventy percent into the book and really enjoying it so far. The book starts with General Turyin Mulaghesh being called out of retirement to go looking for a missing intelligence agent in Voortyashtan, the city that was once the domain of the goddess of war and death. The agent was investigating the discovery of an ore with certain, possibly miraculous, properties, when she apparently went made and disappeared. Events start out slow as more pieces of the puzzle are uncovered. At a bit over the half way mark, the action really ramps up. As with City of Stairs, world building and characterization are excellent. I really like Mulaghesh as a protagonist - a one handed, sixty something female general isn't the normal sort of protagonist. Mulaghesh has also got some serious darkness in her past regarding what she did as a teenager when she first lied about her age and joined the army.

>229 pwaites: I've had a mental block about picking up Claire North books (err, for no particular reason - no idea why, in fact), but Touch sounds intriguing.

230> I really liked it, and I hope you do to if you decide to read it. I've actually got a novella by her that I picked up when the ebook copy went on sale, The Gameshouse. I'll probably read it at some point during Christmas break.

Review of The Phoenix Guards - here.
Review of City of Blades - here.
Review of Maplecroft - here.
Review of Touch - here.
Review of Binti - here.
Review of Marked - here.
Review of Pawn's Gambit and Other Stratagems - here.

Yikes! I forgot to update.

- City of Blades continued to be awesome. I would definitely recommend this one.

- Marked by Sue Tingey was an ARC I got for Netgalley. It is quite probably the worst ARC I've read so far (only The Banished of Muirwood comes close to giving it competition). I think part of the problem is that it has two blurbs one that sells it as urban fantasy/psychic investigation and one which is more honest about it being paranormal romance (and wish fulfillment. So much wish fulfillment). The first chapter actually looks like it's going to be an investigation type story but then the heroine finds out she's a demon princess, gains two love interests who are consistently shirtless, and a closet full of new clothes that she looks great in (it describes each outfit and how hot she looks in detail).

- Pawn's Gambit and Other Stratagems is a collection of short fiction by science fiction author Timothy Zahn. I read a number of books by Zahn back in middle school, including a collection of short fiction that had some overlap with this collection. I would say that the stories are mostly all right but not anything especially great.

- The Serpent by Claire North is the first in a series of novellas about the Gameshouse, where countries are the playing boards and people the pawns. This installment took place in 17th century Venice and follows a woman playing a game of kings.

- Planetfall by Emma Newman is wonderful science fiction novel that came out last month. The book's set in a human colony beneath the shadow of a strange alien structure they call God's City. The settlement is built upon a foundation of lies, and only two people know the truth, one of which is our narrator, Ren, the colony's 3-D printer engineer. Ren has trouble with anxiety, and just how much trouble exactly becomes increasingly clear over the course of the novel. The colony has existed for twenty years and the lies have never been revealed... but at the beginning of the book, a stranger arrives at the gates of the colony and everything begins to change. The novel is a gradual unfolding of more and more information and insights. I think it was one of the better stand alone science fiction novels I've read, and I would highly recommend it.

Right now I'm reading yet another ARC from Netgalley, a novella called Faith and Moonlight, which doesn't appear to have a working LibraryThing touchstone yet. It's by Mark Gelineau and Joe King.

Review of The Serpent - here.
Review of Planetfall - here.
Review of The Price of Valor - here.

I've finished the novella, Faith and Moonlight. It could have been better. It's main problem is that it ends way too soon. I've already written a review of it, which is scheduled to go up on my blog tomorrow.

The Price of Valor is the third book in the Shadow Campaign series, which starts with The Thousand Names. It's fantasy that has influences from the Napoleonic wars. I'm really loving this series. If you liked the first two, you'll probably like The Price of Valor.

I also read another Netgalley ARC, Henchgirl. It's a YA urban fantasy where people who are part dragons rule the world. They have special magical gifts, and the more dragon you are, the more powerful. The heroine is 1/8th dragon but pretends not to be to attend an all human high school for an assignment from her crime lord grandfather. The book starts off well but goes to pieces when it starts spending more and more time focusing on a particularly jerkish love interest. I really hate the guy. He hires someone to follow her, hacks into her computer to read through all her emails, and goes through all the text messages on her phone. The only emotions he ever displays are anger, desire, and possessiveness.

Right now I'm reading Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, which I got for Christmas. It's a translation of a Japanese light novel (sort of like YA) about a warrior woman and bodyguard named Balsa who is hired to protect a twelve year old prince who's possibly possessed by a demon.

I'm also reading Science of the Magical on and off. It's a nonfiction by a science journalist that looks at different examples of "magic" from folklore and popular culture (including superheros) and tries to determine if there might have been a reason for the creation of the myth.

I got a number of books for Christmas that I'm excited about:
- The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson
- To Ride Hell's Chasm by Janny Wurts
- The Siren Depths by Martha Wells
- Red Country by Joe Abercrombie
- Scriber by Ben S. Dobson
- War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
- The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
- And All the Stars by Andrea Host
- Warchild by Karin Lowachee
- The Gunslinger by Stephen King

I think I added a number of these to my TBR list after seeing people here in the Green Dragon talk about them.

233: I got The Price of Valor for Christmas! I'll be dipping into that one once I've finished Leicht's Cold Iron.

I've read and really liked some of your presents. If you've read The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea, of course you'll want to read The Siren Depths; the things readers loved about the early books are still in evidence here. The Color of Distance is in my top ten favorite science fiction reads, as it includes two interesting and complex female characters, one human and one "alien" -- though in this book, what constitutes "alien" is played with. Scriber delighted me. It's one of the few, perhaps the only fantasy book I've seen in which a male protagonist is surrounded by female characters and all his important relationships are with them. The female lead, Bryndine (not his love interest! Yay!) holds a special place in my heart. Take Brienne of Tarth from Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, but give her intellect to match her brawn, and put her in charge of a troop of female soldiers, and watch awesomeness happen. I also remember really enjoying War for the Oaks, though I admit it's been several years since I've read it. I may need to remedy that this year. And All the Stars isn't the kind of book I generally favor, but it has quite a few positive qualities, including an artistic heroine and a strong central female friendship.

I haven't read The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet yet -- emphasis on "yet" -- but I've heard and read nothing but good things about it, here and on Goodreads.

Review of Faith and Moonlight - here.

234> I'm pretty sure I picked The Color of Distance, Scriber, and And All the Stars after seeing your reviews of them. The same might be true for War of the Oaks, but its name tends to come up a lot when people are talking about urban fantasy.

I've also heard very good things about The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

Floored! (thanks!) I hope you enjoy it. There is an archived discussion in the Green Dragon, when you get there.

236> It's exciting to find a stand alone high fantasy story. Most seem to run to massive series, which I don't have a history of finishing.

Review of Henchgirl - here.
Review of Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit - here.

I actually ended up finishing two other books before 2015 ended - The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and Wheel of the Infinite. I really liked both of them, but I haven't gotten around to writing up reviews yet.

To end the year off, I made a blog post with statistics on the different books I read. Here's most of it:

Genera and Format Statistics

Total: 169
Average Books Read per Month: 14
Rereads: 26.04% (44/169)
Audio Books – 1.78% (3/169)
Graphic Novels – 1.18% (2/169)
Short Story Collections – 1.78% (3/169)
Non-fiction – 1.78% (3/169)
Fantasy – 75.74% (128/169)
Science Fiction – 16.57% (28/169)
Mystery – 1.18% (2/169)
Young Adult – 28.99% (49/169)

Author Statistics

Authors: 103
“New to Me” Authors: 65
Female Authors: 68.93% (71/103)
Male Authors: 30.10% (31/103)
The difference in percentage is accounted for by Ilona Andrews.
Books by Female Authors: 53.25% (90/169)
Books by Male Authors: 45.56% (77/169)
Books by Both Male and Female Authors: 1.18% (2/169)
Authors of Color: 20.39% (21/103)
Books by People of Color: 15.38% (26/169)

Protagonist Statistics

Books with Female Protagonists: 47.34% (80/169)
Books with Male Protagonists: 31.36% (53/169)
Books with Multiple Protagonists: 17.16% (29/169)
Books with Non-Binary* Protagonists: 3.55% (6/169)
*Most of these are cases of the protagonist’s gender never being given or the protagonist being some sort of non-human creature (Ex. Ancillary Justice).
Books with Non-white Protagonists: 26.63% (45/169)
Books with LGBTQ Protagonists: 9.47% (16/169)

I'll be moving over to a new thread for 2016. Hope to see you there!

Planetfall sounds terrific, and I'm now intrigued by the Gameshouse novellas.

239> I've got the second one on my Kindle, and I'm planning on reading it sooner rather than later.

Important Note! For the "This topic was continued by" I am actually continuing the journal at this thread after it was kindly pointed out to me that I had accidentally titled the new thread "2015" instead of "2016."