Currently Reading and Recently Read
I’ve been reading a lot these days.
I really enjoyed Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture series; I was turned on to it by this review of the last book at Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together. I think I inhaled all three books within a week and they aren’t short books by any stretch of the imagination.
Ann Leckie’s Translation State was fantastic, but I still need to know more about the Presger Translators.
I liked The Witch King from Martha Wells, but like a lot of her fantasy, it took me a while to immerse myself into the world she’d created. This is a me problem, not a Martha Wells problem.
I re-read This is How You Lose the Time War on the heels of the Bigolas Dickolas endorsement and it was just as great as the first time I read it.
Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory is an incredible book, especially in the way it’s structured. The protagonist, Kyr, is not exactly likable but I found her to be compelling.
I can’t remember where I read the recommendation for Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, but wow. This isn’t speculative at all, but is instead a novel with an incredibly odd and unreliable narrator.
Daniel Ford’s novel, The Warden, has a really unique take on necromancy and, just so no one else has to suffer, ends on a cliffhanger. Book two isn’t scheduled until next year.
On a more light-hearted note, Megan Bannen’s The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy was great, as was The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches from Sangu Mandanna. And there was Stephanie Burgis’s Good Neighbors, a series of novellas about a necromancer and witch.
I’ve also been re-reading lots of Celia Lake and Victoria Goddard, because sometimes I just need to.
Non-fictionally, I read Lynda Lyanda Lynn’s Rooted, which was really good in some spots, but in other spots her privilege really shone through–particularly when it came to talking about access to the outdoors for disabled people. I’m slowly reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and her writing is just so good that I have to take it slowly. Also being slowly read is Mary Beard’s SPQR which makes my brain bend in weird ways. And once I finish one or both of those books, I can read Mo Ryan’s Burn It Down and I’m so looking forward to it.
This isn’t everything, but it’s most of everything from the last six months.
Next: I yell about how great the third season Picard is. Maybe. Two more episodes to go. But my God, Amanda Plummer was in prime scenery eating mode as Vadic–Vadic definitely gives Khan a run for his money in Star Trek villainy.
P.S. I didn’t have “Hugo Committee releases an incomplete ballot and then memory holes it after nominations have been closed for months” on my Worldcon/Hugo Bingo Card. Is there not a spreadsheet that other conventions have used that they could possibly share?