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 just realized this morning how long it has been since I did one of my “Book Talk” round-up posts. Originally I had set myself a goal of reading Twenty books this year, and I have long since blown past that. I credit easy access to books through the Library system as the thing that spurred off this renaissance of catching up on books that I had intended to read but never got around to doing so. In a normal year I would read somewhere between two to five books, and this year… has been considerably more focused than that. I’ve been tracking my journey over on Bookwyrm, a federated book tracking site along the lines of Good Reads that is part of the Fediverse and plays nicely with Mastodon. This morning I am going to catch the thread up of sorts and talk about the books I have read over the last month.
The Hunger of the Gods – John Gwynne
I’ve technically written a bit about this book in the middle of another blog post, but I opted to go ahead and include it in this run-down since it never quite made its way to a Book Talk series post. Once again I had every intention of starting the next book in the Iron Druid Chronicles series when I last posted in the Book Talk thread, but then my hold on this book came open and I dove straight into the second part of this series. It is rare that the second book in the series is better than the first, but I consider that to be the case with Hunger of the Gods. I think maybe this is a side effect of so much of the first novel setting the stage for the central conflict and introducing all of the characters, and this novel just being wall-to-wall plot navigation. Once again if you played a Nord in Skyrim… and really really enjoyed it… then this might be a book series for you. The third book is supposed to be coming out in October… as is seemingly EVERY series I am waiting on a book from. I know without a doubt I will be picking up the series and continuing forward with it. Highly recommend it, but it is a bit of a dense read given how much specific language is associated with their world, which you may not be familiar with unless you have a Norse fetish.
Legends and Lattes – Travis Baldree
Then after finishing Hunger of the Gods, I finally got that “light read” that I felt I needed to recover from the density of that world. Legends and Lattes is maybe my favorite book that I have read this year so far. It is a story of an Orc Warrior that decides to hang up their sword and introduce the world to coffee… a gnomish invention that no one has really heard of up to that point. A delightful read about friendship turning into family and whether or not destiny and luck are really forces in the world or something we just imagined along the way. Again the next book in this series I believe is coming in October, and of the wealth of things that I will have to choose from that month… this series is going to take precedence over everything else. I would die to protect Thimble, and after reading this… you probably would too.
Broken Earth Trilogy – N.K. Jemisin
A few AggroChat’s ago we had a quick topic at the end of the show discussing some of the books and series we had been reading. I talked about the Bloodsworn series and Legends and Lattes and Thalen talked about the Broken Earth series that he had started. His description was enough to interest me, and that night after the show I dove into the series and did not surface until I had finished consuming all three volumes. This is the story of an apocalypse, lived out through a culture… that is used to having apocalypses happen on a fairly regular basis so much so that they have a term for them… The Fifth Season. There are certain aspects of the series that remind me of Dune, or more specifically the Bene Gesserit but if they were denied their basic humanity and treated as property. The novel deals with some really dark themes about humanity, and what happens when a society ostracises an entire group of people.
The Fifth Season is one of those books that I feel like maybe it was originally going to be a singleton, and about halfway through the first novel it was turned into a series. The totality of the series was phenomenal, but only really the first book stands on its own as a complete work. The second and third outings only really serve to fill in gaps from the first novel and move the wider global story arc forward. There is a trick that the first novel does of shifting between timelines, and it was maybe the single best use of that mechanic… but also a trick that only really works once. The second and third novels are considerably more straightforward in the way that the narrative unfolds but ultimately needs to be. This is an exceptionally dense read, but once you get five or six chapters your brain adapts to its patterns. This book deserves the time you devote to it, and will ultimately pay you back for that attention.
Redshirts – John Scalzi
After reading through three dense novels… I once again needed a bit of a break. I had been holding Redshirts by John Scalzi in my back pocket for such an occasion and dove in happily. By the title and branding… you know without a doubt this is going to be a bit of a parody of Star Trek. I was expecting something light-hearted along the lines of Galaxy Quest, Orville, or even The Lower Decks cartoon. I did not expect this to be one of the weirdest meta-narrative rides taking common Science Fiction tropes and taking them in some truly odd directions. Like I finished the novel section… and it was pretty great… but then I read the Codas and lord some stuff happened. I enjoyed the book immensely but also I am not entirely certain this is going to be for everyone.
The Power – Naomi Alderman
Some time ago one of my friends suggested this novel, and I added it to my Library hold list. It was described as a novel where Women suddenly develop superpowers, which leads to a bit of a gender-flipped Handmaid’s Tale. They also warned that the novel was rather graphic at times… and I was thankful for that the first time I encountered a rape scene. I have to be honest… I am not sure if I enjoyed this novel or not. That is not to say that I don’t believe that it was worth reading, but it also isn’t going to be something I probably actively suggest to anyone who is not already prepared for this. There is an Amazon Prime series that is actively releasing episodes currently, and I expect that it probably going to sanitize things a bit. There are a lot of messages that one can take from this novel, but I think the most important would be that Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. Twisted abuse of power is not an inherently gendered thing, just that one gender has traditionally held the locus of power in our society.
No Predictions
I wrapped up The Power last night, and usually at this point I would make some prediction about what novel I am going to start next. So far this has been wrong each time I have done so, and as a result, I am just going to skip this practice. I figure by tonight I will have chosen something, and that will be entirely dependent upon my options at the time and how fleeting they might be. Right now I am leaning towards Old Man’s War, but who knows where I will be by the end of the day. I am still wishing I had sorted out my Library Card and easy access to digital lending years ago because I have greatly enjoyed this year in reading so far.
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