A Descent into Dullness

April
Short Fiction: Marie Brennan's "From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review", Glenn Hirshberg's "Freedom is Space for the Spirit", Tara Isabella Burton's "the Destroyer" & Genevieve Valentine's "La Beaute Sans Vertu".

New Reads:
Brandon Sanderson's Calamity and the Bands of Mourning.  The first finishes up his supers' trilogy and the latter is part of his steampunk-era "Mistborn" series.
Steven James' Blur.  An ok YA paranormal mystery.
Daniel Jose Older's Midnight TaxiTango.  2nd novel of his "Bone Street Rumbo" series.
Tim Dorsey's Florida Roadkill.  First foray into Dorsey's  modern crime/pulp stuff.  A bit too wide a spread of characters and plots for me.
Adrian Tchaivosky's Guns of the Dawn.  A black powder-fantasy book where one of the two warring nations begins conscripting female soldiers to shore up its manpower shortages.  Feels a little like of an Austen character was the lead in a Bernard Cornwell Napoleonic book.
Elizabeth Bear/Sarah Monette's a Companion to Wolves.  Monette is the writer of the Goblin Emperor under a pseudonym and Elizabeth Bear is Elizabeth Bear.  So this is very well written.  It also has a LOT of really graphic gay sex, much that borders on the edge of non-consensual.
Daniel Abraham's the Spider's War.  The final to "the Dagger & the Coin" epic fantasy series which features the heroism of the banking system and using it to fight mad, religious tyrants.
Seanan McGuire's Indexing: Reflections.
Charlie Higson's the Enemy
Sherwood Smith's Remnala's Children.  Some follow-up stories to the Crown/Court Duel books.
Michael Shea's the Extra.  Future dystopia where filmmakers can literally kill off their extras in movies.
Emmie Mears' the Masked Songbird.  First of Mears' "Shrike" supers series.

Rereads:
Eric Flint/George Huff/Paula Goodlett's 1636: the Kremlin Games, 1636: the Barbie Consortium & 1636: the Viennese Waltz
Iver Cooper's 1636: Seas of Fortune
Lois McMaster Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance & Gentelman Jole & the Red Queen

Graphic Novels/TPBs/Rulebooks:  I'm moving rpgs and other non-fiction here since I don't really go thru enough of it for its own category.
Faith Erin Hicks's the Nameless City.  Alt history in a pseduo-China/Mongolia border setting.
Ultimate Intrigue (Pathfinder).  I liked this sourcebook quite a bit.  The roommate fell in love with the evil version of the Leadership feat and other new rules for his wizard/rogue crime boss.

Total books: 22


May
Short Fiction: Theodora Goss' "Red as Blood and White as Bone", Emmie Mears' "Uncaged", Brit Mandelo's "the Pigeon Summer", P. Djeli Clark's "a Dead Djinn in Cairo", K.B. Spangler's "Who Tells Your Story", Dennis Danvers' "Orphan Pirates of the Spanish Main" and Seanan McGuire's "Waking in Las Vegas".

New Reads:
Sharon Lee/Steve Miller's Alliance of Equals.  Their most recent "Liaden" novel.  Actually an eARC for the most recent.
Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory.  Steampunk/Western with a bisexual female prostitute as the lead.
Emmie Mears' Rampant.  2nd "Shrike" novel which are set in Edinburgh.
Kameron Hurley's Mirror Empire.  Super-grim and violent fantasy series about parallel worlds and invasions between them.
Marko Kloos' Chain of Command
R.J. Ross' Cape High Christmas
Kate Elliot's Jaran, An Earthly Crown, His Conquering Sword & the Law of Becoming.  Both a pseudo-Mongolion horde "fantasy" and a Conquered Humanity sci fi series.
Alex Shvartsman (ed) Funny Fantasy.  What it says on the box.  A collection of previously published comedy fantasy stories.
Nick Mamatas/Masumi Washington (ed) Hanzai Japan.  Japan-set scifi, much with a noir or horror slant to it.
Amy Poehler's Yes Please.  Poehler's autobio.

Rereads:
Andre Norton's Gryphon in Glory.  While this was a reread, I honestly couldn't remember anything at all going in.
Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small

Graphic Novels/TPBs/Rulebooks:
XCrawl (d20).  Picked up on the cheap with a stack of other rpgs from Bookmans.  Competitive reality show dungeon crawling works better in concept than the actual execution.
Mike Maihack's Cleopatra in Space vol. 3: Secret of the Time Tablets.  Caps off the trilogy with a reveal of the origin of the big bad and some idea of why Cleopatra of all historical figures.
Scott Snyder/Jock's Wytches.  This was honestly one of the more disturbing horror comics I've read in awhile.
John Layman/Rob Guillory's Chew vol.11: the Last Suppers & Chew vol. 10: Blood Puddin'.  I actually ordered and read vol. 11 and then realized I'd skipped the 10th volume.
Krazy Krow/Rocio Zuchhi's Spinnarette: Crisis in a Bunch of Ohios.  Latest print collection of the supers/humor webcomic.
Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&! vol.13.  We get to meet Yotsuba's grandmother.

Total: 24


June:
Short Fiction: Harry Turtledove's "Typecasting", A.J. Hartley's "Chains" and Monica Byrne's "Traumphysik".

New Reads:
Cat Valente's Speakeasy.  Roaring 20s plus Faires with Valente lyrical-style.
Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver.  Paranatural-YA with external temparture triggered werewolves.
Ian Thomas Healy's Tusks & the Lion & the Five Deadly Serpents.  "Inception" style dream adventure and 70's era kung fu in Healy's "Just Cause" supers setting.
Naomi Novak's League of Dragons.  The finale for the "Tremaire" series.
Jim Hines' Revisionary.  And another finale, this time for the "Libriomancer" series.
Drew Hayes' Corpies.  I like Hayes' supers books, but they all feel like they could use another editorial pass once they're collected together from his original free chapters online source.
Jennifer Henshaw/Allison Lin (ed) Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft.  There are some really good scifi stories in this collection.  No really.
Ryan North's Romeo and/or Juliet.  I do like that several of the ending options involved the teens just talking to their parents and avoiding a whole lot of deaths.
Andre Norton Cat'seye. Human/animal psychic partnerships.  Different from the "Beastmaster" ones.
Chuck Wendig's Atlanta Burns.  Kind of white-trash "Veronica Mars".  Or maybe Really Angry and VIolent "Nancy Drew".

Reread:
Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men, a Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Midnight & Shepard's Crown.  Shut up, I'm not crying.  You're crying.

Graphic Novels/TPBs/Rulebooks:
the Dresden Files RPG: Your Story (FATE)
Evan Dahm's Vattu: the Sword & the Sacrament
C. Spike Trotman (ed) New World: An Anthology of Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Jim Zub/Steve Cummings' Wayward vol. 3
Tony Cliff's Delilah Dirk & the King's Shilling.  To England!

Total: 22

October ended up having a larger than average number of books I just didn't care for. And for most it wasn't even that they were bad as that they didn't click with me. Like Colin Harvey's Winter Song about a barely habitable arctic colony world and it vaguely Norse-ish inhabitants. Or Kevin Anderson & Doug Benson's Ill Wind which looks at a bio-engineered plague that ends up eating everything made from fossil fuels. Or Anthony Neil Smith's Yellow Medicine, a pulpy book about a crooked cop who ends up the frozen backwoods of Minnesota after getting caught being a crooked cop in Missouri. Actually this one with its collection of psycho gangsters and possibly terrorists begins to edge into being a bad book more than a bad fit...

Also on the free classics front, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau just didn't do anything for me. I still like the concept of Dr. Moreau and his island of beast/men, but the book itself? Enh. And as for Robert Louis Stephenson's Kidnapped? All I can say is the young lead in this one is no Jim Hawkins...

And normally I like Tanya Huff, but her short story collection Nights of the Round Table just has two stories that left me totally cold. Both dealing with Evil Overlord/Queens who are hyper-competent and somehow unbeatable and thus really, really boring...

But really the only one for the month that I'd classify as genuinely bad was Duane Swierczynski's Fun and Games. Which has simply ludicrous premise. That the ruling elite of Hollywood has some kind of death squad made up of wannabe actors, directors and writes who can get to anybody and make it look like an accident. So stupid...

Anyway, over to the stuff I actually enjoyed for October. Starting with a Vorksogian novella by Lois M. Bujold, Winterfair Gifts. A story from the perspective of one of Miles' armsmen during his wedding, that takes place between A Civil Campaign and Diplomatic Immunity...

Then some Bernard Cornwell, with an American Revolution military history fiction, The Fort. And if Cornwell is at all accurate, then man Paul Revere was a giant tool...

October also saw me getting another of friend Joe Selby's books to beta read. This time a Young Adult book in a pseudo-Middle Eastern fantasy setting called Prince of Cats. Needed a little tweaking, but another one from him that I can hopefully one day pick up a published copy of...

From the borrowed from the roommate's shelf list we start with Mira Grant's Feed. Which is a near future zombie Earth book. With the title being a reference to the zombies and to the protagonist's jobs as bloggers who join the press corps of a presidential candidate. Grant really impresses, not just for her skills at dialogue and story. But in how well thought out her world building is, especially in the "science" of her setting's undead plague...

Then the new Lev Grossman, the Magician King, his follow up to the Magicians. This one actually manages to be even more bleak than the first, with its partial focus on the non-Wizard School magical community...

After that was the two latest Gaunt's Ghosts books by Dan Abnett, mostly because I got the roommate the most recent as a birthday gift. Blood Pact has Gaunt and his men slowly falling apart as they spend an extended period stationed way behind the lines. Until a potential turncoat and the Chaos forces sent to assassinate him prod them back into being bad-ass action soldiers again. Salvation's Reach. has the Ghosts taking part in a dangerous mission against a Chaos research station. Plus they're working with Space Marines. Warhammer 20K Imperial Space Marines a crazy hard-core...

Also got the newest Terry Pratchett, Snuff, last month. A new Sam Vimes sub-series book, with a focus on goblins, the Disc's lowest intelligent species. Some excellent scenes with Vimes and Willikins his butler and Vimes and the country gentry and Vimes and Young Sam learning about poop together. This one lacks a bit in the Big Bad department, but the always wonderful characters makes up for that small lack...

Reread the first two Beka Cooper books by Tamora Pierce, Terrier and Bloodhound again. In expectation of getting the final book in the trilogy towards the end of the month. And then my copy got delayed from Amazon, so I didn't get to it until November. Oh well, still some of my favorites...

I finished up the month starting on David Weber's "Honor Harrington" scifi space opera/military series. In part because Baen has the first two, On Basilisk Station and the Honor of the Queen available as free e-books, with the rest at $5 each. So after Honor's first two stories ended the month with A Short & Victorious War and Field of Dishonor. Good military space battle stuff, with technology premises that make them similar to wooden ship and cannon type stuff. And the politics of Kingdom of Manticore remind me a lot of Elizabeth Moon's "Familas Regnant" series. In a good way. The only slightly annoying quirk I found was Weber uses a lot of info-dump exposition to world build. Where a character will go to use something or think about something, which then turns into a big expository thing. Not the worst way to drop world build info, but it was noticeable...

Total books: 21

Followed up April's reading of all the "Ring of Fire" anthologies with rereading the shared world novels for the series in May. Starting with Eric Flint's 1632 and then Flint and David Weber's 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War...

Then a brief break to check out Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot. Which is the start of an urban fantasy series set in London following a rookie half-North African rookie cop slash trainee wizard. The main villain in the debut is a rage-inducing mad ghost...

Then back to RoF with the Flint edited 1634: Ram Rebellion anthology and the Flint/Andrew Dennis Papal States books 1634: the Gallileo Affair and 1635: the Cannon Law...

And then back to Aaronovitch again. His second book Moon Over Soho with jazz-obsessed spirits, vindictive river godlings and a secret magical cabal from the 70s. I'm really digging this series. Very dry British wit combined with some truly horrible violence and horror...

But then more of the Grantville time travelers. Flint and Virginia DeMarce's 1634: the Bavarian Crisis and 1635: the Dreeson Incident, Demarce alone on Tangled Webs and finally Flint soloing 1635: the Eastern Front and 1636: the Saxon Uprising...

After that I got to some ongoing series. The latest from Charlaine Harris', Dead Reckoning. Where one of Sookie's various old foes (or maybe someone new) attempts to burn down Merlotte's. Plus fucked up vampire politics thanks to King of Nevada's take-over of the Louisana territory. Which does lead to a confrontation whose centerpiece is a return of Bubba. Not having brain-damaged Elvis in the tv series is the one change I'm most unhappy with about "True Blood"...

Then more time travel. This time with Connie Willis Blackout. A middle book to the academic time traveler series that started with To Say Nothing of the Dog. Excellent look at the London Blitz from the perspective of three different trapped undercover historians...

And then got to E.E. Knight's Winter Duty. I never understand why the roommate dislikes this series set in a post-apocalypse Earth. Or William Dietz' "Legion of the Dammned". Both have basically evolved into slightly modified milspec fiction. And he enjoys that genre with Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40k stuff or Bernard Cornwell. Oh well, Winter Duty has Valentine struggling to keep his unit of former Quisling troops active after a change in government leaves them out in the cold...

Next I tried out another book of the roommates, from the giant pile of stuff he bought practically blind. Gods of Manhattan by Al Ewing is a pulpish bit of alt history with expies of Doc Savage (Doc Thunder), the Shadow (Blood-Spider) and Zorro (El Sombra). Fairly enjoyable book full of secret Nazi/criminal groups, somewhat steampunk-ish modern trappings and over-the-top heroes and villains. Though I'll admit to be somewhat ashamed at how long it took me to figure out who deceased vigilante the Blue Ghost was an homage to. Especially with his former sidekick, Japanese street kid turned cop Weston East...

I am proud to say that I read Terry Pratchett and Bernard Parson's the Discworld Almanac - the Year of the Prawn as it (and all almanacs) was meant to be read. Over a month, when on the toilet...

Finished up the month with another pair of ongoing urban fantasy series entries. Kat Richardson's Vanished where her Greywalker lead ends up in London dealing with crazy vampire infighting. It is nice to see the occasional series in this genre where the vamps aren't misunderstood angsty dark angels. But just various styling of total fucking bastards...

The other and final book was Mark del Franco's Uncertain Allies. I like the sereis. But I occasionally wonder about the magical groups in the world who aren't based on Celtic or Teutonic folklore. Are they all just smart enough not to get exiled back to the human world or something? I mean given the arrogant idiocy of the leadership of the Celtic Faeries and German Elves I can see not being willing to have anything to do with anything they've touched...

Total books: 20

And after much delays from sickness and my normal levels of procrastination I get to year-end book recap. Lots of the once-and-current roommate's books for last month. Though the first one I finished for the month on the 1st was the second book of Suzanne Collins "Hunger Games" books, Catching Fire. Which is a book where the President and the mostly faceless ruling council for the Capitol vault way up on my list of Fictional-People-I-Want-To-See-Cut-to-Pieces-With-Razors. Man do I hate them...

After that I started on the L.E. Modesitt, jr's "Recluce" series. Finishing The Magic of Recluce on the 3rd, the Towers of the Sunset on the 5th, the Magic Engineers on the 8th and the Order War on the 24th. The latter three being prequels to the first. I like the setting and the concept of balancing Order and Chaos magics well enough, but by the 4th book the protagonists and the Chaos Wizards opposing them were all blending together. Though I've been told that gets better as the series progresses and expands the origins for the lead's origins...

On the 6th I finished the final third of the relaunched "Wild Cards" shared-mosiac novels, Suicide Kings, edited by George R.R. Martin. And man, even by this series standards, this one had some darkness to it. And even if it ended up costing several characters I liked, I was pleased with the finale for the Radical and Mark Meadows...

The 10th saw me finishing Lev Grossman's the Magicians. Which could be simplified by just calling it Harry Potter for Adults. But while that is an accurate summation of the book's high concept, it does the book a disservice. The book has more to it than just faux Hogwarts and Narnia, including a truly scary villain introduction...

After that I picked up Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Shadows of the Apt" series. I had intended to alternate them with other books, but once I started them I could just not stop until I'd read all four volumes the roommate owns. Not only full of great characters, heroic and villainous and just-doing-their-job-ous, but a great new setting. Basically a fantasy world whose ecosystem is dominated by giant insects, so that humanity has, somewhere in its distant past, merged with traits of them. Becoming various sub-species or Kinden. For example the main leads from the first book are two Beetle engineers, a Wasp soldier/spy, an Ant/Beetle engineer, a Spider duelist and a Dragonfly prince. Plus the setting is excellent mix of steampunk technology and fantasy magics. The word Apt refers to those species (Beetles, Ants and Wasps) who can master technology and used it to overthrow the old mystic Kinden (Moths, Spiders and Mantids). The books start with the newish Wasp Empire expanding outwards in violent conquest. Great series and I'm still annoyed that I can't download book 5 to my Kindle. Anyway, finished Empire in Black & Gold on the 14th, Dragonfly Fallen on the 15th, Blood of the Mantis on the 17th and Salute the Dark on the 19th...

On the 21st I managed the yearly tradition of reading (or watching one year) Pratchett's Hogfather...

After Christmas were two books bought using work's Secret Santa gift card for Borders. Kelly Link's Magic for Beginers anthology on the 27th and Jane Lindskold's 9 Gates on the 28th. Link has a very lyrical style that reminds me of Cat Valente. Worth checking out for the curious though. 9 Gates is the second in Lindskold's "Breaking the Walls" series with it's Chinese myth realms and mah jong based magic. This second also adds some glimpses at the other magical traditions for the setting...

I ended the month with S. Andrew Swann's Hostile Takeover trilogy omnibus, a sequel of sorts to his "Moreau" quartet, set several hundred years in the future from those near future books. The books concentrate on a plan by the Terran Confederacy to drag the anarchist planet of Bakumin. One created by the ancient spymaster that focuses on a pair of rival brothers. Finished Profiteer and Partisan on the 29th and Revolutionary on the 30th...

Total: 17

newbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbooknewbook*GASP*

NEWBOOKNEWBOOKNEWBOOKNEWBOOK!

1. Post and I'll pick one thing off your interests list and ask you five questions about it.
2. Post this on your journal so you may do the same to your friends.
3. Hopefully we will learn more about each other and new fandoms!

So furikku asks about Terry Pratchett:


1) Which series (different Discworld areas count as individual serieses) is your favorite?

Right now I'd say its the Vimes and the Ankh-Morpokh Watch books. But the Weatherwax/Aching Witch books are a close second and if/when the last of those comes out it might pull ahead...

2) If you could pick one Pratchett character to be your roomie, who would you pick and why?

I'd say Maurice because I'd like a kitty and Greebo would attack everything in the neighborhood and You is Granny's cat...

3) If you could live anywhere on the Discworld (assuming you'd have an equivalent housing and job situation to what you've got now), where would you and why?

I could see myself opening a small hotel in Lancre that catered to the burgeoning Ramtops Tourist industry. See the Lancre Gorge! See the other gorge! Enjoy the Dwarf Bread Experience!

4) What do you feel Pratchett's greatest strength and weakness as a writer are?

His greatest strength is his characters. They have a depth and realism to them no matter how fantastic. I'd say his biggest weakness of late has been a tendency to drop in some new concept (the Devices, the Expanding Box, etc) as something that has been around forever but no one has paid any attention to or knew about until recently...

5) When did you first read a Pratchett book?

Oddly it a non-Discworld series and I didn't know it was his until YEARS after I'd become a fan thru that series. Pratchett has a kids series called "The Bromeliad" that I read way back in grade school. Its urban gnomes/wee folk who live in a super-market or something and its being demolished, so they have to migrate somewhere else. Very Borrowers/Littles/etc type thing, which I was on a kick for at one point. Much later I looked over a synopsis of the series while looking at books done by Pratchett and had a "Holy shit, I've read those" moment...

First the bad. One, the exposition. The constant stream of exposition. Ok, yes not every viewer will have read the book(s). So some set-up I can understand. But it just didn't stop. Are people REALLY that stupid that they can't infer details from the story as is? Gah!

Second, no Death of Rats. They've got Quoth (and I like the bird like tics they gave him) but no Death of Rats. Boo! We demand adorable skeletal rats! Also no Catseye or Peaches. And they don't even attempt to show the Scissor-Man...

Third, the Auditors. Visually fine. But they gave them INDIVIDUAL VOICES. Which misses the whole damn point about them being only a THEM. Plus they tended to sound like annoyed petty clerks rather than just lifeless. And speaking of visuals, I didn't really like their depictions of the Bogeymen as just old guys with weird little giraffe like horns...

Fourth, any scene that wasn't in the books felt flat and pointless. Like with Mr. Whatshisface. The father that Susan worked for. They have him dressed as the Hogfather at one point to further hammer home the whole kids not believing thing. It wasn't needed and and didn't work at all...

Fifth, lots of scenes cut. The peasant and the king. The finale to the shower. The Good Cheer Fairy. Everything with DoR of course. The God of Wine getting the effects of the hangover cure. I know, the movie is already at three plus hours. Still...

As for the good. The actors were all pretty spot on. I especially liked Susan, Mr. Teatime, Twylla, Nobby and Banjo. Honestly the actors are the only reason I can see to watch it. Maybe it works better if you're not already a Discworld fan. I don't know, since I can't really judge it that way. But I was just disappointed for the most part...

Off of I can has cheezburger?

I really needed that image after giving the guv'mint all my money. Well nearly all...

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantement.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.