Am Reading

A Year of Books

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I realize I have not written much over the break, and in part, it is due to the fact that I have come down with some random unnamable illness and part because I just needed to vegetate for a while. Now I find myself barreling towards the end of the calendar year and am in that “reviewing” type mode. One of the biggest changes that 2023 brought on is the fact that I read more books this year than I have ever read in a single year… or honestly over the course of several years. While I love books and love everything that there is about a bookstore… specifically the smell of moldering print… I was pretty reliably a “two to five books per year” type person. When something really caught my fancy I would grind through all of the books available in a specific series, but for the most part I picked at books rather than devoured them. My wife was the opposite… and all the time I spent playing the latest MMORPG or ARPG she was curled up on the sofa shotgunning books directly into her brain one after another.

What changed you might ask? Well, this transformation was in large part due to a little thing called the Libby App. It isn’t like my wife and I have not had library cards before… we both spent a large chunk of our adolescence in libraries as they were generally safe places for nerds kind. It was around this time last year that we got our first of many new library cards, and around this time I connected it to the Libby App for the first time. Over the years I have transitioned from reading physical books to reading almost entirely digital books for sheer convenience, and about a decade ago I tried this whole nonsense and found the entire process of getting ebooks from the library to be immensely fiddly. It left a sour taste in my mouth, but apparently, Libby formerly known as Overdrive has come along and smoothed out the rough bits allowing you to link your library card and have it automagically integrate with your eBook reader of choice.

One of the most important lessons that we learned was that different Library systems have different licenses for ebooks and audiobooks. So by going to some nearby communities, we were able to pick up library cards from three different systems… in our state, there is only one other major system and we hope to road trip to get a library card with it soon as well. Between these three systems, it has given us a broad reach of titles and the ability to mitigate some of the hold queues in favor of the shortest. Of the fifty-one books that I have consumed this year, I would say probably 10 were reading the books… and the majority were books that I consumed in audiobook form. My happy place is grinding away in an MMORPG or ARPG while listening to a book and I can legitimately do this for hours at a time.

When it comes to buying audiobooks… I’ve landed on a site called AudioBooksNow. Audible mostly feels like a monopoly and it is way the hell too expensive for most things. Sure Audible has a whole subscription service that supposedly gives you access to lots of content for one “low low price” but I have yet to find a single thing on it that I wanted to read when I wanted to read it. To be fair… we’ve had the same problem with Kindle Unlimited as a concept. I have no clue how this site charges so much less, but I am not going to ask too many questions because based on my research ahead of time they do in fact seem legitimate and well-reviewed. I think at this point I have bought four books and the majority of those were brand new releases that had 40 or so week hold backlogs in the library system. The majority of everything I have consumed comes from three of the four major library systems in my state.

I’ve been using Bookwyrm.social to track my progress this year. Honestly, I am really happy that I had the foresight to set up an account and start using it at the beginning of last year. Since every service seems to have a “year in review” functionality, I should not be shocked that Bookwyrm recently patched one in. If you are so inclined you can check out my year in review here. Largely at the beginning of last year, I set a target of 20 books, and last of last night I finished my 51st for the year blowing that goal out of the water significantly. I think I will probably set forty books as my goal for 2024 because while I am not from the tribe of “line must always go up”, I do think that maybe twenty was a bit low. I started my first book of the year on December 26th and it took me until January 8th to finish it. These days it takes me around two days per book pending I don’t get terribly derailed.

I would say probably my favorite books of the year are the “Viv” series from Travis Baldree first Legends and Lattes technically released last year, and then Bookshops and Bonedust which came out in November of this year. One of the things that I am learning about myself as I venture forth into books that are recommended to me by friends… is that I seem to really care about the characters more than the setting or the story. I love all of the characters in these books and would fight to protect them all. Mostly they arrived at the right time for me when I had just finished what I would term a “heavy read” and were lite and fun entertainment. I’ve tried to hold specific books in reserve like Scalzi’s Starter Villain for example as something that I knew I would enjoy as something I could effortlessly dive into after finishing more serious fare.

I think the book series that I am the most conflicted over is “The Craft Sequence” by Max Gladstone. I enjoyed the totality of this series… but I gotta say that there were some weak spots. You can tell that the entire sequence was planned ahead of time as the first several books introduce you to characters in almost “stand-alone” stories, that eventually weave their way back into the main story arc of the world with book four… which is technically chronologically the first book… and book five which brings everything together. Book six… feels like it should be starting a new sequence but just lands somewhat flat serving mostly as a way of giving a complete story arc to one of the main characters from book three. Three Parts Dead was phenomenal… Four Roads Cross… also phenomenal. Two Serpents Rise and Full Fathom Five were a bit middling… and then Last First Snow and Ruin of Angels I appreciate for the pieces of story that they give… but I didn’t super enjoy large chunks of both books. There is a new series centered on the best character… Tara Abernathy… and I am certain that before 2024 is up I will have given it a shot. Mostly I find myself conflicted because while I enjoyed myself, I am not entirely certain I would recommend the series heavily to others.

As we enter the next year… the book that I am probably looking forward to the most is Alecto the Ninth. This is the fourth part of quite possibly the strangest book series I have ever read The Locked Tomb. Every book has been wildly different than the previous books and I am mostly on board just to see where the hell this is going to go in the end. I am also really looking forward to The Relentless Legion by J.S. Dewes the third book in The Divide Series but there is no real tentative information on when it might drop. Another book series that I am anxiously waiting on is Apostles of Mercy the third book in the Noumena series by Lindsay Ellis which got delayed from a late 2023 release to a mid-2024 one. This similarly is a series that has had high points and low points but I am very much here for the journey. I’ve very recently become obsessed with the Alchemical Journeys series by Seanan McGuire and will be looking forward to reading Tidal Creatures when it also drops in mid-2024. I am also interested in whatever the next book in the Dresden Files series ends up being, but I gotta say after 17 books it does not feel anywhere near as fresh as it once did.

As I look forward to 2024, I am looking forward to as many adventures in books as I had this year. What books are you yourself looking forward to? Drop me a line below.

Alchemical Boy and Murder Puppet

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Good Morning Folks! Every so often I find myself lacking gaming content… and decide that it is going to be a book update day. Today is in fact one of those days. Over the last week and some change, I have consumed three books and started on a fourth, and am going to talk about them. First up we have Last First Snow by Max Gladstone, the fourth book in the Craft Sequence and chronologically the first. I have to admit… this book combined with the fact that my Library system does not have the other books available… has halted my momentum in this series. It isn’t so much that Last First Snow is a bad book, and more that it takes the least likable character from Two Serpents Rise and then writes an entire damned book about them. It is essentially a retelling of events that are hinted at during the second book in the Craft Sequence and the whole thing feels a bit superfluous.

Sure it shows us that Elayne Kevarian is maybe a far cooler person than we had realized up to this point… but also I was sort of already on that page and the Temoc is awful… which again I am already on that page. I feel like this is a “darling” that the author should have probably dragged out into the street and killed. In the grand sequence of events in this series… I am hoping this book matters more than I realize at the moment. It very much feels like Max Gladstone has a deeper attachment to Temoc than we their readers do… kinda like Metzen and Thrall. Maybe I am wrong… maybe this character is beloved by the fanbase as a whole… but I am sorta doubting that someone who is pro-blood-sacrifice and ritualized scaring of children is a champion of the people. This is going to be a speed bump to the series as a whole for me that I am going to have to get over.

I found myself in need of a palette cleanser after that book, so I ventured slightly to the side and picked up This is How You Lose the Time War which is a collaboration between Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. As suggested by my friend Thalen, this book is sort of this weird romp of taking the classic Mad Magazine Spy vs Spy characters… and then turning that into a Romeo and Juliet story arc. The story is presented in alternating excerpts about two characters… Red and Blue are on diametrically opposed sides of a time and reality-bending Cold War. The thrill of competition leads to begrudging respect which blossoms into a romance that could never be… were it not for the fact that the two of them are adept at making the impossible appear probable. It is a really short book, only 200ish pages and once you get indoctrinated into the speech patterns of the two characters time flies by. I highly suggest you pick this up and give it a spin because I found it delightful.

Similarly recommended, this time by my friend Ace/Grace… we have the book Space Opera which is also smallish in stature coming in around 300 pages. The tagline for this book compares it to what if Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy met Eurovision and quite honestly it is apt. A more brutalist interpretation is what if the Get Schwifty episode of Rick and Morty were played a bit more seriously and expanded into an entire story arc. It is the tale of washed-up glam rockers Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, and how they saved the earth from total annihilation at the hands of the great galactic civilizations. How does a civilization prove itself to be truly sentient? Through music of course. It was a fun ride that took a bit to get into, but once I was bought in… I was there happily until the conclusion. The only thing a bit distracting about the novel is it has a propensity for rapid-fire information dumping asides… but then again so did Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy so maybe that is just fit for form.

Now I am working my way through Middlegame which is in itself part of a larger series… that admittedly I am probably going to dive into as well. It also has this whole story-within-a-story thing going on… which has spun off into its own book series. I admit though… the first night that I started this book I struggled considerably because it spends a lot of time introducing you to some deeply unlikeable characters. Last night however I broke through the surface and met the adorable Roger and Dodger… two small genius potatoes that I want to protect with all my life. I am glad I suffered through a maniacal alchemy boy and his murder puppet in order to get to the good bits. It definitely feels like one of those novels where every statement is purposeful as we are carefully working our way toward some grand denouement. While I had wobbly legs for a bit… I am very much on board now and will see this through.

Finishing Middlegame will take me to 48 books this year and that seems like a reasonable number. Sure it would be nice to maybe push that to 50 for clean divisible by ten goodness… but I am finding myself craving some narrative gaming. A lot of this has been me listening to audiobooks while playing mechanically enjoyable games that don’t require the narrative centers of my brain. I think I want to spend some time before the close of the year visiting some of the wealth of games that came out in 2023. I feel like I want to start Baldur’s Gate 3 over from scratch, and maybe roll something that can talk to animals as I seem to have missed out on a major part of the game.

Post Series Sadness

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been back in my happy place each evening of curling up on the sofa with my laptop and usually a cat and listening to an audiobook while I played copious amounts of Path of Exile. There is just something about having two different parts of me engaged at the same time that brings me joy. Mechanically I am happily grinding away at whatever objective I am focusing on in the ARPG, and then mentally I am having a story told to me. It brings me back to happier days as a kid of doodling while listening to storytime. Yesterday however was a bit of a sad day because I started the morning thinking that I would go home that night and start the next book in the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi after finishing up the previous one Sunday night. Then I realized… I had no more books in that series. For whatever reason I was thinking that another “space opera” series by that author was connected.

That bummer moment however should not blunt the joy I felt consuming this series. Looking back at my Bookwyrm account, I started the first book on August 26th and wrapped up the last on September 17th. So that was most of a month of chilling out with an ARPG and a book and enjoying life. I guess really if you think about it there is a primary trilogy, a book that retells the last book in that series from a different perspective, and then two different anthologies fleshing out the world from a wide number of different but connected perspectives. Through all six books, a cohesive tale is told, even though no single book keeps the same central character throughout the entire story. This is legitimately my favorite part of the series. It is telling a story of a world more than it is telling a story of a single person, even though the same cast of characters keeps popping up regardless of the scenario.

In many ways, it reminds me of another obsession of mine from when I was a bit younger. I stumbled onto Santiago in a battered paperback form at a used bookstore in college and I mostly picked it up because I liked the cover and the “A Myth of the Far Future” tagline. To the best of my knowledge that “major motion picture” never happened. In truth, the novel was something like the 11th book in the “Birthright” series where Resnick created this entire universe out of disconnected novels. Each one focuses on a specific legend of the far frontier, so you might be hearing about a character in one book… and then pick up the next in the series and it is from their perspective. The thing is… Scalzi is just a better writer and gives his characters far more depth and personality.

I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters from Santiago or any of the other dozen or so novels I read in that series, I cared about the world. With Old Man’s War, I feel like I have a personal relationship with each character that the story focuses on. Even when someone seems outwardly evil, you find out that maybe there is a bit more behind that story. There were several times in the story where an entire alien race was considered to be the villain… but we as the reader were given a viewpoint into one particular member of that race to help explain their actions. This elevates the storytelling past hero/villain iconography to something grounded in experience and emotion. My sadness when I realized I was out of books… comes from the fact that I wanted to know more about these rich characters.

Before this year I had never consumed anything by John Scalzi, I am taking a break from his work and diving into another author that I had never read anything from. I am not entirely certain why I chose Mistborn over any of the other series by Brandon Sanderson, but I did and started it last night. It took me a few chapters to switch gears from space opera to fantasy thieves but I think I am on board now. I know absolutely nothing about this series other than the name that kept popping up periodically in my timeline. So far it reminds me a little bit of Locke Lamora, but not enough to shape my opinion. There are already a few characters that I like, and a few others that I dislike but I feel like that is probably intentional. The mythology of the world seems rich, so I am probably going to enjoy it. That is very much a thing for me… I need thick worlds filled with cultures and symbology to keep me going.

Anyways… time for me to wrap this up and move on with my day. If you have never read the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi it is most definitely something that I would recommend. I am sure in another month’s time when I have consumed all of the books available in Mistborn series I will give you my opinions of that as well.

Twenty-Five Books

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Good Morning Friends! I just realized this morning how long it has been since I did one of my “Book Talk” round-up posts. Originally I had set myself a goal of reading Twenty books this year, and I have long since blown past that. I credit easy access to books through the Library system as the thing that spurred off this renaissance of catching up on books that I had intended to read but never got around to doing so. In a normal year I would read somewhere between two to five books, and this year… has been considerably more focused than that. I’ve been tracking my journey over on Bookwyrm, a federated book tracking site along the lines of Good Reads that is part of the Fediverse and plays nicely with Mastodon. This morning I am going to catch the thread up of sorts and talk about the books I have read over the last month.

The Hunger of the Gods – John Gwynne

I’ve technically written a bit about this book in the middle of another blog post, but I opted to go ahead and include it in this run-down since it never quite made its way to a Book Talk series post. Once again I had every intention of starting the next book in the Iron Druid Chronicles series when I last posted in the Book Talk thread, but then my hold on this book came open and I dove straight into the second part of this series. It is rare that the second book in the series is better than the first, but I consider that to be the case with Hunger of the Gods. I think maybe this is a side effect of so much of the first novel setting the stage for the central conflict and introducing all of the characters, and this novel just being wall-to-wall plot navigation. Once again if you played a Nord in Skyrim… and really really enjoyed it… then this might be a book series for you. The third book is supposed to be coming out in October… as is seemingly EVERY series I am waiting on a book from. I know without a doubt I will be picking up the series and continuing forward with it. Highly recommend it, but it is a bit of a dense read given how much specific language is associated with their world, which you may not be familiar with unless you have a Norse fetish.

Legends and Lattes – Travis Baldree

Then after finishing Hunger of the Gods, I finally got that “light read” that I felt I needed to recover from the density of that world. Legends and Lattes is maybe my favorite book that I have read this year so far. It is a story of an Orc Warrior that decides to hang up their sword and introduce the world to coffee… a gnomish invention that no one has really heard of up to that point. A delightful read about friendship turning into family and whether or not destiny and luck are really forces in the world or something we just imagined along the way. Again the next book in this series I believe is coming in October, and of the wealth of things that I will have to choose from that month… this series is going to take precedence over everything else. I would die to protect Thimble, and after reading this… you probably would too.

Broken Earth Trilogy – N.K. Jemisin

A few AggroChat’s ago we had a quick topic at the end of the show discussing some of the books and series we had been reading. I talked about the Bloodsworn series and Legends and Lattes and Thalen talked about the Broken Earth series that he had started. His description was enough to interest me, and that night after the show I dove into the series and did not surface until I had finished consuming all three volumes. This is the story of an apocalypse, lived out through a culture… that is used to having apocalypses happen on a fairly regular basis so much so that they have a term for them… The Fifth Season. There are certain aspects of the series that remind me of Dune, or more specifically the Bene Gesserit but if they were denied their basic humanity and treated as property. The novel deals with some really dark themes about humanity, and what happens when a society ostracises an entire group of people.

The Fifth Season is one of those books that I feel like maybe it was originally going to be a singleton, and about halfway through the first novel it was turned into a series. The totality of the series was phenomenal, but only really the first book stands on its own as a complete work. The second and third outings only really serve to fill in gaps from the first novel and move the wider global story arc forward. There is a trick that the first novel does of shifting between timelines, and it was maybe the single best use of that mechanic… but also a trick that only really works once. The second and third novels are considerably more straightforward in the way that the narrative unfolds but ultimately needs to be. This is an exceptionally dense read, but once you get five or six chapters your brain adapts to its patterns. This book deserves the time you devote to it, and will ultimately pay you back for that attention.

Redshirts – John Scalzi

After reading through three dense novels… I once again needed a bit of a break. I had been holding Redshirts by John Scalzi in my back pocket for such an occasion and dove in happily. By the title and branding… you know without a doubt this is going to be a bit of a parody of Star Trek. I was expecting something light-hearted along the lines of Galaxy Quest, Orville, or even The Lower Decks cartoon. I did not expect this to be one of the weirdest meta-narrative rides taking common Science Fiction tropes and taking them in some truly odd directions. Like I finished the novel section… and it was pretty great… but then I read the Codas and lord some stuff happened. I enjoyed the book immensely but also I am not entirely certain this is going to be for everyone.

The Power – Naomi Alderman

Some time ago one of my friends suggested this novel, and I added it to my Library hold list. It was described as a novel where Women suddenly develop superpowers, which leads to a bit of a gender-flipped Handmaid’s Tale. They also warned that the novel was rather graphic at times… and I was thankful for that the first time I encountered a rape scene. I have to be honest… I am not sure if I enjoyed this novel or not. That is not to say that I don’t believe that it was worth reading, but it also isn’t going to be something I probably actively suggest to anyone who is not already prepared for this. There is an Amazon Prime series that is actively releasing episodes currently, and I expect that it probably going to sanitize things a bit. There are a lot of messages that one can take from this novel, but I think the most important would be that Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. Twisted abuse of power is not an inherently gendered thing, just that one gender has traditionally held the locus of power in our society.

No Predictions

I wrapped up The Power last night, and usually at this point I would make some prediction about what novel I am going to start next. So far this has been wrong each time I have done so, and as a result, I am just going to skip this practice. I figure by tonight I will have chosen something, and that will be entirely dependent upon my options at the time and how fleeting they might be. Right now I am leaning towards Old Man’s War, but who knows where I will be by the end of the day. I am still wishing I had sorted out my Library Card and easy access to digital lending years ago because I have greatly enjoyed this year in reading so far.