Hey Folks! I appear to be on this short book kick right now. One of my goals for this year was to not have this massive gulf where I was not really reading anything. Essentially last year I went through this period from the launch of Dawntrail in the summer through to November where I was not consuming books at all. I am really happier when I am actively reading things, and as such one of my big focuses this year is to get back into the swing of things. After only reading a book or two a year for most of my life I have so much catching up to do and so many excellent series that I have never touched. I have this backlog in my head that I should probably document somewhere, but apparently right now I am going through a cycle of reading a bunch of short books.
Right now I am on this kick of tearing through the Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries series. I had to title this post “I Love Murderbot!” because there is this great quote on the cover of each of the books I have read so far and in truth I fully agree with that sentiment. I deeply relate to Murderbot and their outlook on the world. I really like protecting people… I play tanks in video games… but I also don’t really like being observed by other human beings. I get this is a weird take given that I devote tons of my life to actively blogging… but the secret there is that when I am writing these I am effectively talking to myself. This is my private journal and I am just letting you all read it. Anyways I am not sure how many of these books there are but I can already see that I am pretty much going to burn through all of them in a row. I do this occasionally with series, and that is one of the big benefits of being deeply late to the party.
I’ve also recently read through the first two books of the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. The first book What Moves the Dead is essentially this delightful revisiting of Fall of the House of Usher featuring a retired sworn soldier Alex Easton and their assistant Angus. The first book is delightful, the second book What Feasts at Night was enjoyable, but not quite as much so. What Moves the Dead leans heavily on being a retread of a familiar story and gains a lot of ground from that. What I really enjoyed about both books however is the characters… specifically Ms Potter the Mycologist. I am pretty sure that my friend Ace recommended these books to me, but also so did Storygraph so I figured I should probably pay attention. Well worth your time and both are extremely short.
Another book I have finished since the start of the year is the third part of The Divide series from J.S. Dewes called The Relentless Legion. I feel like this book series is a relatively unknown gem. Legitimately I only read this because I was looking for something to check out from the library and this was a new release. Did you like playing Mass Effect as FemShep? Did you enjoy The Expanse or the aging Chris Carter series Space Above and Beyond? Legitimately pick this series up and give it a read because it is extremely good. The third book mostly wrapped everything up neatly, while leaving enough room to potentially have follow up books that expand this beyond a trilogy. It was a satisfying end, but also there are still a bunch more questions because there are longer tailed events that will eventually have to be dealt with.
I don’t always do a great job of sharing the books that I am reading on this blog. If you are so inclined and have an existing Fediverse/Mastodon/Pixelfed account you can follow my progress via my Bookwyrm account. Occasionally I give my thoughts about a book when I update my statuses in that application. I am also keeping Storygraph up to date mostly because I like its recommendation system. So if you are using that system already you can also follow my progress there. I am going to make an attempt to start logging recommendations in the “To Read” section of Storygraph because I have been bad about actually keeping track of that, and I don’t really love the Bookwyrm implementation.
All in all though the year is off to a good start book wise. Have you been reading anything good? Drop me a line below and I will pilfer your suggestions.