What are you reading these days?

I've been reading quite a bit this week, and everything has been pretty good.

I read through all three of The Locked Tomb books -- Gideon The Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, and Nona the Ninth. These are space fantasy novels, kind of puzzle-box style books that hinge on the unfolding of some central mystery. Gideon is a relatively straightforward murder mystery, does what it says in the blurb: "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space! Decadent nobles vie to serve the deathless Emperor! Skeletons!" It's a debut novel, and a very good one; author Tamsyn Muir writes in a very strong and, for me, instantly charming voice (that of the titular Gideon, an indentured swordswoman forced to pretend to be her biggest hater's bodyguard and companion). The prose, particularly when Muir is describing great masses of bones or necromantic gore, can be astonishingly beautiful, and the murder mystery is tight and engaging -- with the caveat that we're stuck in Gideon's perspective, and Gideon is kind of a himbo, so our understanding is severely limited for most of the novel. There are some rough edges; the pacing feels a bit wonky, and the fight scenes are too long, and I really am not a fan of all the memes in this book, but it's a very strong opener to the series.

Harrow The Ninth, the sequel, marks a sharp and surprising turn towards surrealism that the series never goes back on. In it, our new protagonist, Harrowhark (Gideon's enemy-turned-lover from the last book) has undergone some serous brain damage, and the story follows her trying to figure it all out while failing to ascend to semi-godhood. This is a fantastic novel, certainly the best in the series so far, maybe one of the best fantasy books I've read, period, but it left me feeling exhausted, with a splitting headache. The novel is, weirdly, written in second person, except that half of it is flashbacks to the first book from Harrow's perspective, except the flashbacks are obviously factually wrong. And the book is full of time-jumps, dream sequences, worldbuilding from dubiously reliable narrators, framing devices that stick around for only a couple chapters, and answers to questions lingering from the last book that only create more questions. So even though, by the end, we the readers get a lot of satisfying answers, the journey to get there feels a bit like being gaslit and a bit like having brain surgery. And then the epilogue courteously does its best to throw everything into confusion again. Harrow manages all this with astonishing deftness; it's like watching someone juggle axes with their eyes closed. Upon fishing it I felt with certainty that I will never write anything even close to as good as this -- Muir has supplemented her strong characters and prose with a compelling world and complete structural mastery. Shame that it's all a bit miserable.

Lastly, Nona the Ninth, which continues Muir's trend of telling her story from the least informed perspective possible. Gideon was kinda dumb, Harrow had brain damage, and now Nona is a woman who essentially cannot retain information -- nineteen years old, friends with a gang of middle schoolers who, correctly, think she is dumb. The last two books were high stakes stories full of necromancers and cosmic horrors and God; the third considerably lowers the stakes, telling a deeply personal story about a girl who has lost her identity, found a family, and is having the worst birthday of all time. In some sense this is much less exciting, much smaller; however, I found Nona was maybe my favorite book of the trilogy. It adds an incredible amount of texture and humanity to Muir's world, and its mystery is the most subtle and satisfying so far; if Harrow delights in confusing the reader with a thousand big questions, Nona's opening acts ask maybe a dozen little ones, so subtly that I often wasn't even aware that they were intended to be questions until they were answered in, again, a tremendously satisfying finale.

As of now, The Locked Tomb isn't complete. There's supposed to be one more book, which is supposed to come out next year (has been supposed to come out next year for the last three years, apparently). But for what it is so far, I think it's an extraordinary series. Witty, baffling, and unapologetically queer, with a tremendously compelling world and cast of characters, if this thing hold up on reread when the last book comes out, it might well be my new favorite fantasy series.

I tend to be a real stickler for narrative efficiency in the books I read, which is why I was surprised to love China Mieville's Embassytown as much as I did. This is a book full of details and plot threads that do nothing and go nowhere, except insofar as they add texture to the world, which as a result is marvelously deep and unique. The Locked Tomb has a lot of blood and gore and bones but I was surprised to find that Mieville's story, an exploration of two societies with fundamentally incompatible ways of communicating, was to me significantly darker. By creating a world with so much 'unnecessary' detail and depth, the collapse of that world, those symbiotic societies, becomes incredibly painful, heart-wrenching, and bleak. And Mieville's commentary on language, and our relationship to it; how we shape it and how it shapes us, was deeply compelling (and went well beyond the usual sci-fi "what if Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but true?"). When the book managed, against the odds, to have a happy ending, I found myself crying with relief. This is one that I can recommend without caveats; try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, and just experience the thing for yourself. I found it so, so rewarding.

I've been struggling to read books lately, in part because I have this rule that I have to read one nonfiction book for every fiction book I read, and as a transgender woman, nonfiction often feels pretty bleak, and in a way that doesn't get wrapped up by the time you hit the acknowledgements page. But, shock of all shocks, it turns out that I was able to read four extremely engaging and compelling novels in a single week with one easy trick: reading books that i actually wanted to read! Hoping to keep this up for at least a couple more weeks.

With Stormlight 5 coming out next month, I started the Stormlight Archive. I've had these books for a couple of years now, but I wanted to read all 5 in one go.

I'm almost finished with Words of Radiance, and I'm loving it so far! It's epic, but with a manageable amount of characters to keep track of.

I also have the 'in between' books laying around (Edgedancer, Dawnshard, Sunlit Man), so I doubt I'll be ready when the book gets here.

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves.
Man who cannot die is 80,000 years old, now works for the US army and just wants a mortal life.

In addition to Kindred for the Tildes book club, I read New From Here by Kelly Yang. My daughter read it and asked me to read it.

It is about a Chinese / American family living in Hong Kong at the start of the COVID outbreak. The story is told from the point of view of the family's younger son, who has ADHD. The family comes to America because they think it will be safer. The central theme of the story is how the crisis of the COVID pandemic and their displacement brings them together.

I had pretty mixed feelings about the book. The mother in particular is a pretty terrible role model. I found the resolution of conflicts to be a little simplistic, even for a middle grade novel. I think there was room for more nuance in the story. Apparently it is based on the author's actual experiences, so maybe that makes it different? I don't know.

To be fair, thinking about those days at the beginning of the pandemic was not a pleasant trip down memory lane, so that may be coloring my response as well.

Now I'm only A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. It's good so far, but it's going to be one of the dark ones.

"Artemis" by Any Weir ( author of the Martian ).

The story is interesting bed time reading. I wouldn't call it a work of art. Instead I call it "Mark Watney goes to the moon". The protagonist is written completely the same as in The Martian. Zero character differentiation. Worst example I've seen of a male author writing a woman character since Heinlein.

Lessons in chemistry (a novel focused on a woman scientist in the 1950s).

Kindred by Octavia Butler for tildes book club.

Til we have faces by c s Lewis. Thanks @chocobean.

Every day when walking to work I pass by my local second-hand book store, and I have a terrible habit of just buying cool books knowing damn well I'll never read them. But, yknow, I got the Iliad for £2, so at least I have it now, there are worse vices to have for sure. I'm not brave enough to venture into the realm of obscure authors I've never heard of so 90% of what I've read is popular/genre-defining.

I've really been enjoying H.P. Lovecraft's stories, they're my favourite kind of horror. Similar is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves: Honestly I didn't finish it because Christ it's long and my attention span is garbage, but it's incredibly compelling. Outside of that genre I've been intermittently going through the Tao Te Ching in my quest to fill what Dennis Reynolds called "his God-hole": It's interesting for sure, though I'm not sure how I feel about its emphasis on essentially promoting societal ignorance in the name of a simple life, it feels a bit authoritarian. Still a cool read though, worth checking out if you know nothing about Taoism.

Honestly though I'm a complete Tolkien stan, I've never been able to find anything that has ensnared my as much as his writing does. People give him flak sometimes for how he'll spend 2 paragraphs describing a tree but god damnit I'd read an entire book of that. Currently I'm reading Unfinished Tales, am about halfway through Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin and I'm in love with how descriptive it is, the way it describes the sparse landscapes and the feeling of solitude as Tuor travels west toward the the Great Sea. Then the whole interaction with Ulmo is just incredibly powerful. Absolutely worth a read if you've never ventured past Rings and The Hobbit.

I finished "Acceptance", really cool to get some closure to the original Southern Reach series. It's left vague as expected when dealing with unknowable cosmic eco-horrors but I have my own thoughts on it. I'm getting Absolution for Christmas so it'll be great to jump back in to the series.

Currently reading "This is How You Lose the Time War" and I think it's cool do far. The developing back and forth between Red and Blue, the different universes and time periods they move through and how they leave their correspondence in crazier and crazier places. However, the internet/nerd pop culture references sprinkled throughout can be a killer. One of them saying "your X is in another castle" or Red referring to Blue a their "Blue-da-ba-dee". I hate it in most media but especially so in sci-fi or fantasy, it always comes across as so anachronistic.

I've always struggled to read books but I thought I'd try to read at least one book this year. I've watched a lot of movies over the last few years that have been adapted from books so I decided to pick one and go with it. So, I've been reading Bullet Train by Kōtarō Isaka which became the 2022 movie of the same name. While I know many people may not have liked the movie, I really loved it and have been wanting to read the source material for a while.

I'm only ~12 chapters in which is about the first 40 minutes of the movie and there's just so much that's in the book that's not in the movie. I'll be honest, some of this info doesn't feel super critical to the story so it makes sense why it was removed in the movie. However, there's also some extra backstory in the book that answers some of the questions I had about the story in the movie so it balances out. If you enjoyed the movie, I think you'll enjoy the book too.

Finished Manufacturing Consent, by Herman and Chomsky. I felt like the intro was roughly 80% good info, 10% good analysis, and 10% unsubstantiated claims. I didn't feel so good about it, but I guess that's why you read books like this. If you just agree with everything in this kind of book, was it really something you needed to read? Anyway, by the end I felt like it was about the same ratios of info, analysis, and unsubstantiated claims throughout. It didn't really conflict with my opinions to begin with; as someone who was born in the 80's, I grew up with the impression that most people thought that the Vietnam war was a huge waste of lives and an example of the government doing evil things in various ways, including propaganda. It seems that this book is likely part of the reason why I grew up thinking that.

I also finally finished The Dispossessed, which I got stuck on halfway through in June and wasn't able to finish in time for the book club. I felt like the ideas on how the societies are structured were interesting, but the overall plot was a bit underwhelming.

Currently reading Remember by Lisa Genova. It promises to make you feel better about forgetting small things by explaining how memory works. I'm quite poor at remembering various small and large things, and this is something I have anxiety about from time to time, so the idea is appealing.

Also currently listening to The Omnivore's Dilemma on audiobook. I'm not that big a fan so far. The whole part about this one small farm seemed like a one-sided advertisement. He hand waves away the potential costs of producing more of our food this way, but we saw how people felt about even a small increase in food prices during the COVID pandemic. The way he compares yields between methods is very specific and doesn't seem to use what I would consider the appropriate measures to assess viability. Well, I still have about half to go, so I'll have to see where the author goes with this.

This'll be a strange one, I think. So my original copy of White Fang from when I was in elementary school in 2005 has been tattered and beaten. I've always been the type to re-consume things I really enjoy - shows, movies, books - and yeah, this book about dogs fighting dogs and cruelty and redemption, for some reason, has stayed with me since I was a kid. I decided it was time to retire my tattered copy (as in, place it somewhere safe instead of letting it disintegrate with every reread...) and buy another. Which means I have to read it again.

I'm a little sad to admit that I do not treat my books well, particularly if I enjoy them...

I just finished "Mind Game" by C.A. Hartman. It is the third sequel in the "Mindjacker" series.

The story is set in the western American city of "El Diablo", now a desert city
due to climate change and years of drought. Quinn Hartley is a young woman desperately trying
to escape poverty by working for the Mindjackers. The Mindjackers are an underground
organized crime group with an ethics code that for a fee will steal copies of memories from
the rich and the powerful. The reader is kept engaged by Quinn Hartley’s struggle with
poverty, living in El Diablo, the acts of mindjacking she does, and her dangerous romance with a police officer.
Eventually she discovers a rival underground group that operates without the ethics code of
the mindjackers and she becomes their target as she discovers a city wide conspiracy.

The second book in the Mindjacker series ends on a steep cliffhanger. In this
third book the reader gets a resolution to that cliff hanger and other aspects
of the story. The ending is kept open-ended enough to allow for future additions to the story.

This is an engaging and fun series to read. Climate change is used as part
of the setting for the series, but this is not at all a depressing dystopian story. The reader’s attention
is riveted to Quinn Hartley’s conflicts and that makes the background of daily life in a climate change
altered city approachable and interesting.

The characters are colorful and well developed. It was fun to read this third sequel and have a visit
with those multidimensional characters again. One of my favorites is Hammond Jones, the intimidating downtown thug who contrary to his appearance is an intelligent family man.

A very fun and absorbing series.

I've finished a handful of books recently, including: Across the Sand by Hugh Howey (which I loved), The Henna Artist (enjoyed), and Pillars of the Earth (so long/misfortunate it felt like torture, but questionably worth it). I've recently been breaking up my streak of longer books with comics and graphic novels because I have more long books to come (waiting for The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon from the library). I started the Verse series by Sam Beck and am waiting on a handful of volumes of manga.

I also just finished Invisible Women, which I was listening to with my male partner. We both had to put a lot of effort into remembering that the main point of the book was to illustrate the data that isn't being collected or put to use, so there weren't many potential solutions offered. It was frustrating to listen to, but that's also part of the point.

I'm currently listening to Remarkably Bright Creatures (45%) with my partner and it's a good time. I'm following along and unraveling the story. He's invested in the octopus that stars in it (which is fair, Marcellus is great). Also listening to The Dagger and the Flame (50%), a new YA release that so far seems to be hitting similar notes to Heartless Hunter/The Crimson Moth. It's cute but I'm nervous about how animals have been treated in it from basically chapter one. I'm hoping my fears about the main character's animal companion don't manifest.

Lastly, I'm working on reading The Becoming by Nora Roberts. I really like the world but after reading one of her trilogies (Stars of Fortune), I'm concerned that the plot will probably feel slow/repetitive. So far, this book seems to have a similar structure to the first book (intro to what's going on, train, fight the boss). I don't care if similar elements are used in more than one series, but when the same plot repeats itself in each book of the same series, just with a bigger boss battle each time... that gets a little old. We'll see.

I listened to Ice Planet Barbarians and the general consensus in online fandom is "started reading as a joke, passed out and I'm on book 16 now". These are rather famously scifi-romance with quite a bit of smut, but they're free on Hoopla and I was curious.

Basically women from earth are kidnapped by aliens and crash landed on a (ice) planet of Na'vi er sorry no, uh Draenei ummm tiefling? No no that's not it. They're ice planet barbarians, big, blue, horns, and all have a symbiotic tapeworm thing that helps them survive on this planet that also conveniently causes the "fated mate" trope. Also their genitals are shaped like a rabbit vibrator. And their tongue is also ribbed. Look this is not subtle.

So. Yeah. Look, I'm not proud of this read but things in its favor - the characters are pretty likeable, and the alien men are more likely to dote over and protect their human women mates as they are to mate with them (but they will do both) It's very much about the fated mate trope so consent is a bit wobbly but it's sort of the point of the trope. And I'm interested in the world-building, to an extent. Idk if I'll listen to anymore of them. I always feel weird listening to smut/sex scenes rather than reading them. But if I end up getting a KU sub I could see myself zipping through the sixty some books in the series + subseries as fillers between heavier reads.

I also am listening to Dungeon Core which is a really poorly written example of the genre but I'm committed now (sometimes the author forgets who's speaking and I'm catching typos and mistakes in the text from the audiobook). I'd never read the whole sentient dungeon trope before.

I started re-reading The Expanse and currently on the 3rd book. I read the first 7 books years ago and read the 8th right when it came out but moved on while waiting for the 9th book and completely forgot about the last book.

I used to be able to read on my commute to work so I could really get through books pretty quickly without having to carve out time. Things change so I'm no longer commuting to I don't have that unused time anymore but I forgot how much I really enjoy this series and haven't had an issue making time to read them.

I'm on the 3rd book currently

Just Enough Research by Erika Hall. It's a practical handbook that, while slanted toward design research, is really about asking better questions and thinking critically. I'm hoping it will help with my technical/content writing, which involves asking good questions to extract info from smart people.

Rereading Dragonlance so that I can start in the new trilogy. Finished Chronicles, Legends and Second Generation, and am now on Summer Flame.