Good Morning Folks! One of the things that I have talked about before is how much of a happy place it is for me to be playing a mechanically interesting game… that is devoid of narrative, so that I can sit there and listen to an audiobook while I play. I seem to forget how much I enjoy this from time to time. I was doing really good this week until March… when I completely fell apart when it came to books. Then I picked back up a bit after the passing of my wife, because I needed anything to take my mind off what I was going through, but again paused in August for a bit. Then recently Brigands and Breadknives was released by Travis Baldree and I felt bad for not having read it yet, so I chained through a bunch of books that I had gathered up waiting for me to give them attention. I am back in the swing of things and over the course of the last week and a half or so I have gone through three books and am chipping away at a fourth, with a fifth absolutely prepped and waiting. I figured this morning I would talk a bit about each of them.
First up we have Brigands & Breadknives which is the third book in a series of books centered around the universe first created in Legend & Lattes. Though technically this book is much more of a direct sequel to Bookshops & Bonedust, which itself serves as a bit of a prequel to Legends & Lattes. It centers around the character of Fern, a bookseller from a seaside town that has recently accepted an offer from Viv the central character of the first book to move operations to the city of Thune and next door to her Coffee shop. However Fern suffers a midlife crisis and a totally different sort of adventure ensues. I love this series of books and I love its characters… and this book introduces yet more characters that I have fallen in love with like Zyll the Goblin fugitive and Asteryx the Elven bounty hunter. This book is phenomenal… right up until the end… when it sort of goes off the rails. The ending Fern receives is not the ending I expected… nor even an ending I even feel comfortable with. Ace is re-reading the book to see if they feel any different about the ending knowing where things are going… but I somehow doubt that will be the case. There are essentially multiple paths laid out in front of Fern, and she chooses the most boring option. What I want now however is a book centered on Zyll, because she absolutely deserves a prequel treatment like Bookshops & Bonedust was for Fern.
In 2023, on a complete lark, I read The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, and fell in love with it. I have no recollection of HOW this book crossed my eyeballs, but I am very glad it did. From that point forward I had been waiting for a sequel and thought I had one when A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping was released earlier this year. It is not a sequel, nor is it even set in the same broader world… but thematically it very much fits the same sort of pattern that the first book did. This is the point where I have realized that I actually quite enjoy a romance novel so long as the romance elements are not the central plot point, and the book in general has some sort of fantasy or science fiction setting. They are really nice cozy reads, and I highly enjoyed this one. I do wish that Sangu were building some sort of broader universe with all of these individual vignettes, but I am not going to hold that against them. The main reason why I can tell they are absolutely NOT connected is that the hierarchy of magical societies in the books are wildly different. It was well worth the read though, especially if you enjoyed the Harry Potter series before we realized how much of a harmful person the author is.
Another series I have deeply come to love is the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. I’ve not read anything else from them, and admittedly was originally drawn to this series by the striking cover art. Then I found out Ace was reading them and also loved them, so that sealed them deal when it came to me giving them a read as well. Essentially this whole series is in the vein of gaslight horror, similar to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The first book in the series, What Moves the Dead, is somewhat of a re-imagining of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. From there each of the book dives into almost cosmic horror elements in different settings, and What Stalks the Deep specifically centers around an inherited coal mine in West Virginia and a series of disappearances. I love the character of the Gallacian Sworn Soldier Alex Easton and their companion Angus and the various misadventures that they get involved in within the course of the books. Each of the books is pretty short and more novella than novel, so similar to the Murderbot Diaries you can rip through them in pretty short measure. I HIGHLY suggest this series if you like gaslight era horror or cosmic horror themes.
Another book that I had been holding onto, but had not started was The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi. Firstly I love Scalzi and pretty much everything I have read from him. In 2023 I ripped through the entire Old Man’s War series, so it has taken me a little bit to reactivate the pathways in my brain that remember what the final events of The End of All Things were. This book specifically is told from the perspective of Gretchen Trujillo, best friend to Zoe Boutin Perry, and a former member of the ill fated Roanoke Colony. Twenty years have passed since the events of the Roanoke colony and now Gretchin is in the diplomatic corp, and called forth to assist in another series of pivotal events centered around a colony that has up and disappeared. So far it has been a fun ride, but like I said I am having to active memberberries for where things left off in the previous books since a few years have passed since I read them. I am enjoying it quite a bit and also finding it hard to stop at a reasonable hour. Last night I had multiple cats reminding me that it was well past my bedtime and I should really come to bed.
So that is where I am currently with my reading. I am hoping I can stay on the wagon a bit longer because I have several books that I want to consume. Once I wrap up Shattering Peace, I am likely rolling into Fury of the Gods by John Gwynne which is the third book in another series I really have enjoyed, that I got turned onto by my friend Cuppy. What have you been reading? Is there anything that you think I would enjoy based on the assortment of books that I talked about here? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Friends! I am getting a bit late this morning because I have been off-watching the last of the Loki series. We have the day off from work, and I have a list of things I plan on doing today but have yet to start. One of these is breaking down the mountain of shipping boxes I have carelessly thrown in the garage, and I plan on doing so while listening to an audiobook to make the time pass more easily. Speaking of books… I wrapped up Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree. This book came out on the 7th and I think maybe this is the fastest I have ever consumed a book. There is just something cozy about the style of writing of these books and how easy it is to consume. Truth be told there is nothing terribly special about the setting of the books themselves because it is sort of this familiar fantasy setting that would blend cleanly with any D&D session.
What makes them special however is the love and attention paid to the characters. Legends and Lattes was probably my favorite book that I read this year because it created this tapestry of characters that now all have permanent homes in my heart. I can’t say that Bookshops and Bonedust is necessarily a better book, but it is still equally enjoyable. Where Legends starts at the end of Viv’s adventuring life… this book is set far earlier in the very beginning as she was earning her place in an Adventuring company and got knocked out of battle and forced to stay behind and heal. This is a book about becoming the Viv that we know in the first book, and some of the key moments that set her on a path to that eventual future. Above anything else though it is a book about falling in love with books… and the friends that you meet along the way that influence your tastes. I chiseled careful niches in my soul for a whole new cast of beloved characters, and I think you will as well.
I watched The Marvels, and I think this is probably going to be a bit of a divisive film. Let’s just get this out of the way… I loved it and I think it might be slingshotted into the pantheon of my favorite Marvel films. However, I think the hype being artificially manufactured related to this film is going to leave a lot of folks frustrated. The last trailer that was released makes it seem like this is the beginning of a brand new era for Marvel and that “everything changes”. On some level this is true… but on other levels, the film itself is a really good character-driven story about three generations of heroes at different steps in their journey. I feel like this is going to be a film that the folks like me who enjoyed Thor Ragnarok and Love and Thunder will greatly appreciate. I feel like the folks who trashed those films… will not and will probably be overly vocal about it.
Ms Marvel is one of my favorite characters in Marvel comics, and I loved the Disney Plus Mini-Series. This movie is more a direct sequel to that than anything else, and it does a fairly good job of wrapping up some loose ends surrounding Captain Marvel and Monica/Captain Rambeau. I feel like it also makes some effort to try and set up events for future movies to explore… with a post-credits scene that finally begins to make good on a whole slew of teasers that have been not so stealthily inserted into a lot of Marvel media of them finally making good on the Fox Studios acquisition. More than that however it lays further groundwork for the Young Avengers… a project I am entirely here for.
As stated in the first paragraph, I wrapped up the second season of Loki this morning. I really hate the Disney Plus standard now of airing shows at a fixed time, because it ultimately means I always watch something the day after it comes out. This season admittedly was a bit of a mess and I spent most of the episodes uncertain of what I thought about the journey we were taking. The art direction of Loki is phenomenal, as is honestly the acting… but the tale that was woven felt a bit unsteady at times. However I am happy to report that the series as a whole sticks the landing, and I think we will probably be closing out this chapter of the MCU and opening a brand new one thanks to this series.
I think that has been my frustration with Marvel over the last few outings… we’ve been on the cusp of something greater but never quite getting there. It is a series of media telling us that something is coming, but never quite stepping over the threshold and out into whatever this new reality is. Multiverse of Madness, Quantumania, The Marvels, and the Loki series… all have been playing around the periphery of things to come and I feel like finally we are beginning to get somewhere worth going. After a lot of floundering and a few just plain awful series like Secret Invasion, I am hoping that maybe just maybe Marvel is beginning to coalesce into something better.
All of that said… Loki as far as a standalone series goes… has enough internal continuity to be universally good for even someone who knows nothing about the Marvel Universe. I would legitimately recommend this series even if you have never darkened the door of any superhero properties. I am hoping however it leads to more interesting things that do finally begin to factor into the larger picture. I think it has to… there is no way this series and the others I mentioned before are not leading to a Multilateral war that will carry us forward into the second culmination event for the MCU.
Anyways! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. I highly recommend all three of the pieces of Media that I talked about this morning.
The post Bookshops, Marvels, and a couple of Lokis appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
