John Scalzi

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.

Ancestors Atlas Complete

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Friends! I have completed my Atlas! I have essentially resorted to the behavior that I always end up resorting to, and purchased the last 5 unique maps from the trade market. There are two that are always grossly expensive because they unlock two exceptionally powerful meta-crafting recipes, so combined they were around 100 Chaos. The rest were dirt cheap in the 2-5 Chaos range, but having them done… means more to me than any currency that I had to spend to finish this off. I did manage to get all the way through the normal maps the “old fashioned way” which is either running adjacent maps and hoping for one to drop, or using the 3-to-1 Vendor recipe to try and convert three lower-tier maps into the one that I was missing from a higher tier. I think it took me a bit longer than usual, but this league did see me do a week one re-roll so that probably caused some manner of delay. I should probably keep track of when I accomplished various feats in a spreadsheet or something… so I can ponder them later.

My focus has very much shifted from mapping to Delving, and I am essentially only poking my head up above ground in order to regain Sulphite needed to keep diving deeper. I am essentially hovering around the 150 depth level… and quite honestly for me traditionally the 150-250 range seems to be the sweet spot. I cleared out four Delve Cities last night and fought a Lich boss in the Abyssal City biome. That one took me a bit by surprise and I forgot that I could not in fact stand in the laserbeam star thingy that they spread around the room. Truth be told… I find so few Liches as compared to Vaal and Primeval bosses that I am not near as seasoned at that fight. Doing the bosses in general feels like hopping back on a bike after a few years of not riding it… as the season goes on I get better but I am always a bit rusty at the start.

In other news, I started a third character for the league and am enamored with Lightning Tendrils. This is really cool ability and given that I can pretty much get through the campaign on ANYTHING… I’ve started choosing abilities that I have never used before to at least do the early levels. Lightning Tendrils is essentially a channeled frontal cone lightning attack that is shockingly powerful… pun intended. I’ve already transitioned to using Wintertide Brand, which is the halfway point before getting Storm Brand later… but I plan on keeping Lightning Tendrils as my burn spell to help out the brands a bit. I am sort of yoloing my way through a build while looking at what players are using in the endgame for Storm Brand through POE.Ninja. Essentially I filter out players with a Mageblood because while I am running Crimson Temple when possible, I have no illusions of ever actually having one of those. This is a bit of a redemption arc for the character I played during the Kalandra League, and I want to see what that build would look like knowing what I know now.

Lastly, I wrapped up Old Man’s War, and everyone who suggested I read this book… starting with my friend Vernie… was completely right and I did in fact love it. So much so that I pretty much finished it and then immediately started the second part of this series. This is pretty much my jam when it comes to science fiction, and made me realize how much I enjoyed this sort of genre in general. I also now understand why when I was reading The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes, a lot of the comments compared it to this book. Very similar genre, and if you like Old Man’s War then I highly suggest you check out that series as well. I’ve read the first two books and anxiously await the third one that I think is coming out at some point later this year. I’m about a fifth of the way through The Ghost Brigades and I figure I will be consuming it just as ravenously as I did Old Man’s War.

Now that I am getting back into the swing of things, I thought I would mention Bookwyrm again. Essentially it is a federated platform for tracking your reading, and if you are on the Fediverse/Mastodon you can follow my Bookwyrm account. I somewhat wish that a lot of these ancillary services like Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Peertube, and even OwnCloud had the ability to have some sort of account hierarchy so that my Gamepad.Club accounts could use the services, but not have to maintain separate credentials. I get that it mostly defeats the point of how ActivityPub works, but it would be nice if there was some form of identity sharing between platforms. It used to bug me that people might reply back to me on one of these services that I don’t really use AS social media… but when I stopped caring about likes and boosts… it stopped bugging me very much. I guess the shift to Mastodon as my primary platform has come with it a shift away from caring about being seen… and more about the utility of what good these services bring to my own life.

Anyways, I hope you are having a most excellent week. We are nearing the end of Blaugust and I am preparing to do the likely all-day job of tallying all of the participants. Essentially expect my Friday post to land a bit later in the day than usual, because I will be scrambling to catalog the over hundred participants. I really should devise some sort of a self-reporting system, but that is perhaps a challenge for another year given that it is a bit late to shift gears this year.

Eighteen Books

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Eighteen Books read out of my Twenty Books Yearly Goal

Good Morning Friends! This year has been extremely unusual in that I have been consuming more books than I have likely ever consumed in a single year before. Previously I needed to do a disclaimer because the year I burned through ten Dresden Files books in rapid order might have completed. However, now that I have reached the point where I have finished eighteen books out of my original goal of twenty books for this year… I am absolutely certain that I’m treading undiscovered territory. The weird part about this is that I have always loved books, and will never turn down a chance at going to a used bookstore. However my entire life I have struggled with some general feelings of anxiety over how slow I actually read. Granted I’ve not proved this wrong time and time again this year, but I still feel like I do not read anywhere near as fast as my wife does. She is I think on book 38 of the year for reference.

Libby App Screenshot showing three library cards on my account

This rapid transformation has been due to a few different variables clicking into place. Firstly we “discovered” the Libby App, or in truth were painfully late to that party. This gives you easy access to all of the books and audiobooks available in your local library collection. In my State there are effectively three Library systems: The Tulsa City-County Library, the Metropolitan Library System covering the Oklahoma City area, and the OK Virtual Library which allows smaller rural libraries that can’t afford their own access to sign on to a collective system. Recently we got the third of these accounts and now in theory have access to the collections of all of the libraries in our state. This has been deeply beneficial because not all of these accounts are created equal and some systems have had books that others did not. Even more common is that the hold lines for a given book may be shorter out of one of the collections than they are out of our “home” TCCL collection. Granted we are now also paying $50 a year for our OK Virtual Library account and $75 per year for the Metro Library account… but we figure the money goes to supporting the public library system in general which is another win.

The Kaiju Preservation Society – John Scalzi

When last I updated you on my book journey, I was about a third of the way through The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. I have to say this is probably the best book I have read all year to this point, and it is very unlikely that another is going to dethrone it. It feels like the love of Kaiju seems to be one of the common GenX traits, and I grew up watching the original Toho Godzilla films broadcast each summer during “monster movie” weeks from my local “pre-Fox” UHF channel. Now I just desperately want the KPS to exist and for me to somehow end up as an IT Guy for it. This was precisely the sort of read that I needed following Red Seas Under Red Skies. The Locke Lamora novels are so dense with plot elements and I have never really understood the concept of a “light read” until this point, but I was desperately in need of it. I guess I should warn you that this is very much also a novel about the pandemic and how it changed society set against the pastiche of giant Monsters. There are just so damned many things I loved about this read, and I realistically burned through it in less than a week at my oftentimes sluggish before-sleep reading pace.

Truth of the Divine – Lindsay Ellis

I only really know about this book series in the first place, because I have always loved Lindsay Ellis and her long-form video essays. While other YouTubers were securing book deals to talk about themselves… she pitched a handful of science fiction novels. Axiom’s End was excellent and I have described it many times as X-Files meets WikiLeaks meets E.T. but with a cast of adult characters. It is so rooted in the early 2000s internet nonsense that it was this weird delightful trip down memory lane, as well as setting up some of the more interesting extra-terrestrial interactions I had seen in a while. The problem with the first novel however is that Linsay is a researcher at heart, and the novel was so filled with random Apocrypha of the early 2000s, and random bits of information that take a while to click into place tightly.

The sequel is no different, including random screenshots at the head of some of the chapters of AOL chatroom-like interfaces with discussions related to the events of the novel. Thankfully coming off of the “light read” of KPS, I was ready for more nonsense detail and this book delivered. I’ve described this story as Enemy Mine meets Pretty In Pink meets the Iran-Contra scandal. Essentially we get to know so much more about the Amygdalan species, their cultures, and how widely different their personalities can be. There is a somewhat creepy relationship that bothered me a bit in this book featuring some sorta fucked up power dynamics, but if you can look past that the book is centered around a very imperfect human being trying to make the best of a sort of fucked up situation that they have been thrust into. I will absolutely read the third book which is set to come out later this year.

The Shadow of the Gods – John Gwynne

I have no clue who suggested this book to me, but it is essentially my first playthrough of Skyrim or at least feels a lot like that. In that very first playthrough, I was a Nord warrior that aligned himself with The Companions of Whiterun, and the whole dynamic of that group, feels deeply similar to the Bloodsworn from this novel. They are a band of warriors known throughout the land by their “Battle Fame” and one of the core characters is a former slave a “thrall” that just happened to find their way into the group. The novel shifts back and forth between a few perspective characters that weave in and out of the narrative and give us a view into different points in the plot.

I will say at the first… this novel maybe felt a little “Too Norse” for my tastes. I mean I have always loved all things Norse… but this was a lot and forces you to get used to a number of very specific terms for things. However about halfway through the novel my brain got used to it all and was able to spend less time trying to imbibe words, and more time focused on the story as it evolved. I am absolutely going to continue forward in this series, but I would throw it in the “heavy read” column and it was maybe a mistake rolling straight to this after Truth of the Divine. In truth, it was chosen in part because my hold came open and it was available. I think I am going to need some lighter fare for the next book.

Hexed by Kevin Hearne

So originally prior to divine into Truth of the Divine, I was originally planning on rolling into the second book of the Iron Druid Chronicles series. I think I am probably going to pick back up that plan because the first novel in that series was fairly light. I could use a bit of formulaic fiction for the moment to sink into like a warm blanket. Unless something changes and one of my holds comes open, I am likely going to start on this one tonight. It has been interesting how quickly this whole “always reading a book” thing has become a habit. I’m kind of mad at myself for not doing this sooner, but really… it is the easy access to books that have made the key difference. Then there is also that subtle pressure of knowing that once I start something… I have to finish it because I have a very limited amount of time that I can borrow the book. In past years I had a night table full of partially read novels, and being forced with a timetable helps me actually keep moving forward.

The only negative of this whole thing… is that I have all but stopped watching television or any of the big series. I have yet to start the new season of The Mandalorian for example, and I still need to sit down and finish The Bad Batch. It is like I have shifted all of my energies that used to rapidly consume series… to rabidly consuming books.

Fifteen Books

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Good Morning Friends! It has been a bit since I gave an update on my reading journey, so I figured I might as well close out the week with one. At this point, I’ve read fifteen books and am currently working on my sixteenth. As sad as this sounds, this is more books than I have ever read in any given year at any point in my life. Traditionally I am at max a five-books-a-year sort of person save for that one year where I read ten Dresden Files novels back to back. I love books and I even love bookstores more, but I’ve never really carved out a place for reading in my life. My wife on the other hand reads every moment she has available so it isn’t like books are an uncommon objective in our household. However in the past, if I had time to fill, I would do it with games, movies, television, anime, or comics well before I would sit down and read a block of prose.

Now Audiobooks have helped a lot in this venture because I can play something while listening intently to the radio play happening in my ears. However, I’m now working away on my fifth actual book of the year so something seems to have clicked in my brain. I’ve said before that I always considered myself a slow reader in the past, but I’ve also noticed that this seems to no longer be the case. I’ve only been working on my current book for two nights and only then in an hour or two before I fall asleep and I’m already a dozen chapters in. Granted I have largely pushed aside everything but gaming from my normal diet of media and dove full-on into this experiment. At some point, I will probably pause these proceedings and catch up on things like my growing queue of Netflix and Disney Plus shows. For now, I am going full steam ahead and seeing how far I can get.

When last I talked about my reading journey, I mentioned that it was pretty likely that I would be starting Hounded the first book in the Iron Druid Chronicles pretty soon. I had this recommended to me by my good friend Lyle as a somewhat Dresden Adjacent series of stories. When I read through the Heroic Hearts compilation of short stories, there was a short story called Fire Hazard centered around the perspective of Atticus’ Irish Wolfhound companion Oberon. This gave me the impression that this series was going to maybe be a bit too “Captain Planet” for my tastes, but thankfully after having finished the first novel this was very much not the case. I am guessing the perspective of a dog sort of cartoonized the tale and sanded down the rough and jangly bits to smooth it down into a largely technicolor experience.

All told I greatly enjoyed this first novel. I like this setting and its take on the Druid and in large part the Fae. The character of Atticus O’Sullivan was largely enjoyable as well. It rode the line between having a being with immense power and trivializing every encounter. There were actual dangers and they get bonus points for looping in Witches, Werewolves, and Vampires without making it a setting ABOUT Witches, Werewolves, or Vampires. I get the Dresden Files reference because it does feel really compatible with that body of work. If you had told me that these two individuals inhabited the same space I would have probably believed you… other than some slightly incompatible bits centered around specific spins on how magic works in each world. Then again that could even be chalked up to just the perspective of each family of casters. I’m absolutely going to dive further into this series at some point.

In fact, I almost did dive into the second Iron Druid book and probably would have were it not for the fact that my Library Hold on the second book in the Gentleman Bastards series came open. Red Seas Under Red Skies is the second outing of Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen and it picks up pretty much immediately following the events of the first book with a very broken Locke convalescing very poorly. I am not entirely certain who told me this, but I had it expressed to me that the first book in this series was excellent and that they largely went downhill after that. I heartily disagree because if anything I like this second book considerably better than I did the first. Sure you have the same pattern of “Locke Plans a Big Heist and Things Go Horribly Wrong Until they Don’t” but the details are unique and nonetheless still enjoyable to experience.

I’ve never aspired to be a thief or a criminal mastermind, but I absolutely get why this sort of character is so fond by the fanciers of skullduggery. I think more than anything I enjoyed the introduction of some interesting crews of pirates, and honestly, I am hoping some of those characters show back up in the third story. Republic of Thieves is the next book in the sequence and it was released in 2013, and Thorn of Emberlain has been announced for years… with constantly sliding release dates with the speculative date of January 2021 long past. I am trying to set my expectations of this being a series that might be something I very rarely get to visit given the seemingly slow release schedule.

Truth be told, Locke Lamora’s books are so dense that I could not handle reading more than one of them in a row. They involve having to keep a bunch of characters and details in your head while consuming them, in order to try and keep the plot that often jumps around between time periods straight. This led me to my current book The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. This was recommended to me by my friend Ace, but even before then I knew of its existence and the title alone would get me interested. I love “monster movies” in part because I grew up with a UHF channel that would play marathons of them during the summer months. Mothra is the queen and we should all bow down before her. I am not sure what it is but I think the love of Kaiju is a specifically Gen X trait, as most of my friends of similar age brackets also have a thing for them.

So far I’m about a dozen chapters into this novel and I am enjoying it greatly. I would classify this as a very light read, not getting bogged down in too much cryptic detail. Granted I am only a short way into the book as a whole so that might change, but if it does it will have earned it by giving me a long on-ramp of relatively chill prose. As is often the case I don’t want to talk too much about the details because my goal with my book talk posts is to not really dive too far into the story beats or risk spoiling anything. Suffice it to say however this is a book where Kaiju are very real and a group of scientists of assorted disciplines is studying them. Rather than seeing Kaiju in the trappings of a disaster movie, this is more of a clinical and scholarly setting, which I am enjoying greatly. Think of the corporation in Cabin in the Woods that maintains all of the Lovecraftian horrors, but instead this friendly group studies Kaiju. If that premise at all interests you then I suggest you give this one a look.

I don’t usually plan too far ahead, but at this point, unless something really shifts around and changes I am likely to dive into book two of the Iron Druid chronicles once I finish with my Kaiju friends. The only thing that would really change this is if one of my longer Library Holds come open, but so far that looks unlikely. They both estimate that it will be months before I see any of my holds. I’m not sure if anyone out there really cares about my reading journey, but considering it is part of my world at the moment it ends up presented in blog form. I am enjoying myself so I guess that is all that really matters.