Valkyrie Protocol, the second book following Gordion Protocol by David Weber and Jacob Holo, is much, much better than the first one. Less direct time travel and more multiverse stuff (albeit due to time travel), but it followed its own rules, and the writing in general was way more consistent than the first book without a bunch of odd digressions that didn’t add anything to the plot.
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Rereading Thus was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell
The dialogue is hilarious, and the gender ambiguous narrator[1] is so wonderfully unreliable/reliable.
It’s the type of dialogue that modern regency romance tries to do, but never quite works for me. I’m not sure what Caudwell did[2] to make it work in a modern[3] murder mystery with a focus on a group of people involved in UK tax law, but it makes me laugh on each reread. I do ration rereads so that I don’t wear down the edges too smooth.
- I didn’t even realize this was the case until someone pointed out that Hillary is never identified beyond name
- she unfortunately only published 4 books and I think the 4th was not quite polished before her death
- 1980s contemporary, no cell phones or email
ps - do footnotes work better than parenthetical asides for my writing style? or does it look too much like I read a lot of Pratchett as an impressionable teen and grew up online in afp? (true)
Eg - “On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the public record office not much after 10, I soon secured the papers needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness or my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.”
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I like the footnotes!
I read How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories over the weekend. It’s a short book set during/after Holly Black’s Elfhame trilogy, from the POV of Cardan, the enemy/love interest in the original trilogy. I loved it, as I have loved all of Holly Black’s other faerie books. It also has gorgeous illustrations!
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Ooh, I’m way out of the loop on Book Club but this was available for immediate borrow through the library app and I just started yesterday — a win so far (I’m like 15% in).
I just finished Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater — a YA regency romance/fantasy I saw recommended somewhere I can’t remember and it was on sale for $1 for the ebook when I got it. I ultimately liked but didn’t love it as much as I hoped to based on the description. The characterization is a huge part of the plot but also felt clunky and not always enjoyable to read.
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Finished Valley of Shadows and River of Night by John Ringo and Mike Massa, an offshoot storyline in the Black Tide Rising series (technically there’s some overlap in the first book but the focus in this is very much elsewhere which is a good thing). Way better than I was expecting given the last collaboration of Ringo’s, actually had set characters and a plot and such although for something that’s obviously supposed to be continued in future books they wrapped a couple storylines up awfully quickly at the end…one of them was annoying and needed to be done with, but the other could have been a lot more interesting down the line. Although I did get the distinct impression that there was a reference to the Oh, John Ringo, No series thrown in at one point in the first book, and that never needs to happen.
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I finished Pride and Prejudice over the weekend; not sure which number reread this is (third? fourth?). I heckin love that book so.
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Sounds like a lot of fun, I want to see if my library has this one.
I think you’d like Dickens a lot if you haven’t already read much of him. Bleak House and Little Dorrit are a big time commitment but they’re both satires of the British legal system, and Our Mutual Friend is a series of soap-opera plot twists that ends happily. And of course he was a big influence on Pratchett.
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I’ve been devouring the Wayward Children series, it seems I like Seanan McGuire’s writing best at novella length. The hopeful but also disturbing vibes of the series kinda remind me of my favorite Mountain Goats songs… I think Every Heart A Doorway would be “Rain in Soho”, and “Damn These Vampires” is too obvious a choice for Down Among the Sticks and Bones so I’ll go with “The Autopsy Garland”. Haven’t yet finished the others so can’t make a song comparison.
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That serious is very Mountain Goats-y. Also, damn I need to catch up on it…
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Penric’s Progress by Lois McMaster Bujold, which is the first 3 stories in her Penric series, within the 5 Gods/Chalion world.
In these, Penric picks up a chaos demon by mistake and then solves a few mysteries with the help of his friends (and the demon). Story 1 was a bit slow, but I really enjoyed story 3, and I’m looking forward to the next set of stories being released by Baen. I’m happy that these are finally being published in a cost-effective way, because buying a hardcover Subterranean Press edition for each novella + shipping gets very expensive very quickly.
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I had to read a book for school and I thought it was interesting even for someone not studying special education. It’s called “The Reason I Jump” and it was written by a 13-year-old boy in Japan named Naoki Higashida who experiences autism. I feel like autism is out there, all around us, but not very well understood. I never had any particular interest in studying autism so I hadn’t pursued knowledge on it but I feel like I had absorbed certain ideas about autism just from being a part of society, and not all of them were correct. Rain Man, anyone? I’m still not an autism expert by any means, but this book was pretty eye-opening for me, and very different from any of the other things I’ve learned about autism in my graduate program, which are from a clinical perspective. This short, easy-to-read book is different because it allows someone who isn’t able to talk to express himself and tell us what life is like for him. It’s just one person’s perspective and we know autism can be very broad in terms of severity and intensity and how exactly it affect each individual, but I feel like this one short book has given me insight that a thousand scholarly readings could never give. Highly recommended.
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I don’t do a good job of updating here when I’m rereading my own books, but I’ve been going back through the Esther Diamond books by Laura Resnick (currently a 7-book urban fantasy series). My favorite two are probably Vamparazzi and Polterheist just for the main character’s thoughts throughout, but they’ve all got their funny moments. Although the will they/won’t they thing with the assigned love interest gets annoying given that the most interesting thing about the guy is that
very minor spoiler
several incidents indicate that he’s pyrokinetic, and yet over seven books she’s yet to take it anywhere.
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The complete monty pythons flying circus: all the words
I mean, it’s an exact transcript of the show, but damn it’s good
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Catching up with library books which I’m much better about recording than my own. Finished Across the Green Grass Fields (Seanan McGuire, Wayward Children) and it was…a book? The whole thing mostly felt like a drawn-out prologue that could have been much more succinct, and it ends just when it should have gotten interesting. I’m assuming this was setting up a backstory and Regan will feature in something else later, but it could have been a short story included as part of something else and I don’t think it would have suffered for it.
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I’ve been slowly reading my way through the Animorphs series this past year, because after work and baby, reading at about 2nd grade level is where I’m at.
These books are dark! I read a few as a teenager but I never realized how dark these are!
Spoiler + Trigger Warning
I’m reading through Book #s 30something; in one book a main character gets tortured. In another book, we see from the perspective the spirit of a dead character who finds out that her partner was killed years ago, and that her baby son was captured by the enemy and died in captivity. I’m completely gutted, from a children’s book!
Maybe I should go back to reading the Babysitter’s Club.
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Maybe romance novels? That’s about all I can handle lately. I at least know we’ll get a happy ending.
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If adult romances seem a little much, I recommend YA romance!
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Finished At the End of the World (another Black Tide Rising offshoot, by Charles Gannon this time who’s done some collaborations in the Ring of Fire universe too)…pacing wise it’s better than River of Night and told in kind of an interesting way, but damn is he taking a roundabout way to close a very tiny plot hole in the original series.
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I really enjoyed the two Helen Hoang books I just read. Contemporary romance both featuring an autistic main character and a big Vietnamese-American family. The second book seemed to gloss over a (in my eyes) big issue at the end, but had a beautiful depiction of grief.
I’m now at the end of my book loans so I’m rereading the Kowalski series by Shannon Stacy while I wait for my holds to come in. Big, goofy family in a small northern town. Doesn’t require too much attention.
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Helen Hoang is a recent favourite of mine for sure.
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