It was a good week! I am getting back on course instead the slumpy feeling I’ve been dealing with the past three or four weeks. I got a few things read, and it’s already looking like (as of Monday) that this next wrapup will put me in closer to on track! But on to what I’ve read last week and general thoughts! There is also a video on the Youtube channel – link to the channel is on the sidebar!
- The first thing I finished is Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone. This was really, really fun. I think this might have been exactly what I needed to boost my reading forward. This follows a young Craftswoman, this world’s version of highly magical lawyers who manipulate the same type of magic the Gods do, as she enters into a new role on a job to resurrect a dead god. A dead god, I might add that powers an entire city. The complex world and magic that Max Gladstone built was just… awesome. This was the perfect ‘right time’ novel for me I think. It tickled everything I wanted in a book after the previous bummer of a week.
- The same day I finished Waking Gods, the second Themis Files book, by Sylvain Neuvel. If you’ve been reading for a while you know I really enjoyed Waking Gods last year, and this one was just as good, with a higher death toll. I’ll have more thoughts on this coming probably tomorrow or Thursday so look for that!
- The next book was less fun for me. Everfair by Nisi Shawl was just a struggle bus of a ride. I wound up really enjoying the characters and the various feelings of aggravation and the small successes they had but it was so hard to find a consistent tangible plot. The book maybe tried to be too meta? I’m still not sure about it, but it just jumped so much. Every chapter was different, at different times. Sometimes it’d jump a month – which generally was fine. Other times it was a year or 6 months and I was left scratching my head thinking ‘WTF did I miss?’. It was a rough ride at times.
- The final novel I finished was My Lady Jane by Brodi Ashton, Cynthia Hand, and Jodi Meadows. This was a fluffy read, a fun twisted story of Lady Jane Gray who ruled England for all of 9 days. It’s got some magic inserted and at least one beheading removed. There isn’t a whole lot about this I can say besides just that it’s pure escapist fantasy. I was able to read this in almost a sitting and it was a lovely recharge read.
- I also managed to finish Clarkesworld Issue 121. This was overall a satisfying issue, the best stories for me were Rusties, The Calculations of Artificials, and probably The Very Pulse of the Machine. All of the stories I think are definitely worth a read but I enjoyed Issue 125 a smidge better. The interview with Peter S. Beagle was also very cool, I haven’t read one of his books since I was a child, so I may go pick something up from him at the library soon.
I had some short fiction reads this week as well but I’m going to save those for a short fiction roundup in the next few weeks. So overall a pretty solid week! Besides struggling with Everfair a bit I enjoyed everything I picked up!
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