A booklog
So Last Exit is not in any way related to the Craft novels. It is instead a real-world fantasy that reminds me of Jo Walton and N.K. Jemisin. The Jo Walton comparison is straightforward: She wrote a story, "Relentlessly Mundane," about a group of kids who went through a portal to save a fantasy world, losing one of their number along the way, and who now are regular ol' mundane adults talking…
All right, so you remember the Craft Sequence, right? Max Gladstone's world about urban planning and student loans, all set in the shadow of a war between the gods and incredibly powerful near-immortal skeleton wizard lawyers? If you haven't read it, then a) go on and read it, but b) you should absolutely stay away from Dead Country and Wicked Problems , which are the first two novels of the Craft…
So this is a trilogy of sorts from Kay, set in the not-Mediterranean of his Sarantium world, and I think it's for the best that he returned to it. At its best, this series recaptures virtues that I don't think have been on exhibit in Kay's work since Sailing to Sarantium . The first, Children of Earth and Sky , is the strongest. It's set in not-Venice after the fall of Sarantium, and it does that…
All right, I'm way behind, and not going to catch up in one shot. But still, let's do a bit more of a roundup here. First up, a couple of recent books from T. Kingfisher, who you will remember from fairytale-style stories like Nettle and Bone and horror like The Twisted Ones . Thornhedge is in that fairytale mode; it's her retelling of Sleeping Beauty. This is a fairytale that has inspired a…
So I use this booklog for two purposes: Recording my books, and learning new programming technologies. For a while now, this has been built with once cutting-edge technologies from the late teens (Angular! Bootstrap! Mongo!), and I've been lowkey intending to rewrite it with something a bit more modern, but kept putting it off because there weren't any new technologies that interested me enough.…
It's pretty obvious that I've let this backlog get out of hand; I've still got more books to go, but let's thin this out with quick hits on some books about which I don't have a whole lot to say. C.L. Polk's Even Though I Knew the End is a novella, which means it's a slight work, but it's also a good one. It's a supernatural quasi-noir, set in 1920s Chicago (but with magic) with a sapphic romance.…
Connie Willis' The Road to Roswell reads like a Connie Willis novel from the '90s -- which is bad in this case, as it's allegedly set in the present day. It's the kind of book where one (allegedly young) character will call another from the airport to get verbal directions to a wedding venue , which is something no actual human would do at this point in history. (This was the point where I looked…
I'm obviously writing this up late, but I did read the Hugo nominees in 2024, so let's talk about them, starting at the bottom of my ballot and working up to the top to my favorite (which was also the award winner). My least favorite by a mile -- and the only one that I'd put under No Award -- is John Scalzi's Starter Villain . I'm not the world's biggest Scalzi fan, but in previous years, I've…
All right, so let's talk about Brandon Sanderson. When we left off, I had been annoyed at the Cosmere concept that was now tying all his books together, but then really liked Tress of the Emerald Sea , despite its Cosmere tie-ins. I still had three books coming to me as part of the Kickstarter pledge that got me Tress . First up, a non-Cosmere book, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving…
Back when I was a kid haunting the aisles of Waldenbooks, there were just absolute piles of licensed IP books -- Star Trek, which I bought and read because I loved Star Trek; but also other ones that I didn't know anything about, like the Forgotten Realms and DragonLance and Battletech. I eventually read the Forgotten Realms and DragonLance ones, essentially out of a misguided belief that popular…
So a thing I've enjoyed doing the last few years is reading all the Hugo novel nominees; I often feel like I'm not as connected to the wider field of SF/fantasy as I used to be, and reading the award nominees at least helps me understand where the genre (or at least one part of it) is at. So this year, I'd already read T. Kingfisher's Nettle and Bone ; I'm going to wait to read Tamsyn Muir's Nona…
All right, obviously I've fallen way behind on my booklogging, but here's my chance to begin catching up. Because I read the first three novellas of Nghi Vo's Singing Hill Cycle back in January and never got around to writing them up, but now I've just finished the fourth one, so... hey, this is a current entry now. So the framing device of the series is that a monk and a bird are wandering around…
Given how much I just finished griping about the Cosmere, you might have expected that I'd also be annoyed with Brandon Sanderson's Tress of the Emerald Sea . I mean, it's a fantasy novel with an almost-fairy-tale tone (I thought The Princess Bride was too facile a comparison until Sanderson in the afterword called it out as an explicit inspiration) that could totally be a standalone fantasy…
Brandon Sanderson's The Lost Metal finishes up his Cowboy Mistborn trilogy, seven years after the last installment. If you're like me, that means you have absolutely no idea what was going on in this series, and you're going to need to know, so I will do you the favor of linking to the wiki with extremely detailed recaps -- but do be careful about clicking around outside the recaps, the spoiler…
So I originally read Steven Brust and Emma Bull's Freedom & Necessity back when it came out in the '90s, but inspired by Dracula Daily, Kate Nepveu organized a read-along-with-the-date group read, and so what the hell, I can re-read a book every quarter century. My memories of what happened in the novel were very thin -- all I remembered is that there was a bunch of revolutionary stuff that tied…
Nicola Griffith's Ammonite certainly wins the award for the book I took longest to read after buying. I picked it up on its initial "Del Rey Discovery" publication in 1993, and well, here we are, nearly thirty years later. So the weird thing about the delay is that (with the exception of one plot element, which I'll get to), this book really feels like it could be written now. It's about a…
N.K. Jemisin's The World We Make is maybe the most disappointing book I've read in a while -- both because Jemisin has written some absolutely incredible novels and the potential was high, and because it's genuinely a bad book. The problem with it, fundamentally, is that it's just a collection of the most banal, shallow leftist ideas possible: Cops are bad, ICE is bad, techbros are bad, Wall…
So you'll recall that on a short domestic flight in September , I'd read a Courtney Milan novel and found it to be ideal airplane reading. Then back in October , I read five Courtney Milan novels/novellas to get me through flights to and from Hawaii. Well, in December I ended up needing to fly to India, which is a considerably longer flight, so I ended up reading nine of them -- specifically,…
So as I started Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry's The Bright Ages , it seemed to be a kind of "mythbusting" book -- you know, all "hey, these aren't the so-called Dark Ages you're picturing, actually they were super-awesome times!" And so when the book started out talking about the fall of Rome by basically denying that there was any such thing at all, real "you know, things are always…
So I'm slightly behind on my booklog (this entry is backdated by about two months), and I'm afraid I'm going to have to do some catchup posts. This one will be entitled "what I read on my Hawaiian vacation." So to start with, I'd had success reading a Courtney Milan novel on a previous flight; with a much longer flight, I loaded up the rest of Courtney Milan's Brothers Sinister series . The books…
Becky Chambers' A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is, unfortunately, something of a miss for me. The thing about Chambers' books (particularly her more recent ones) is that nothing really happens in them, and there's no real big conflict to be resolved, so the books really just amount to hanging out with the main characters in whatever setting they're in. Sometimes that works well; I enjoyed The Galaxy,…
So when I read The Governess Affair , I remarked that I didn't really care about the next-gen characters in the coda; but I went ahead and read Courtney Milan's The Duchess War anyway, and it turns out that those characters are actually plenty interesting once they're more grown up. The main thing that stood out to me about this book is that it had way less disguise, pretend marriage, or other…
Robert Jackson Bennett's Locklands is the conclusion of his Founders Trilogy, which started with Foundryside . The thing about this trilogy is that each book is very different from the previous one. Like, in terms of plot and characters, there are obviously major connections between them, but the feel and style of the books are so different. The first book is about a street thief who gets mixed up…
Tasha Suri's Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash are a duology that feels like a mashup of S.A. Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy and Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan books . Like the former, it is set in a desert city with djinn and sandstorms and what-not (though Suri's world isn't a fantastic version of Earth, it's a full-on fantasy world); like the latter, it's a book about empire, and what it means to…
Lauren Groff's Matrix has nothing to do with the film franchise, but is instead a semi-fictional semi-biography of Marie de France, a poet who was a contemporary of Eleanor of Aquitaine. I say "semi" twice there because this is the kind of book that blurs the line between history and fiction. Like Hild , this is taking a real historical figure and doesn't contradict what we know of that figure...…