A Descent into Dullness

January:
Short Fiction:  Seanan McGuire's My Last Name, Velveteen vs. the Retroactive Continuity & Velveteen Presents Jacqueline Claus vs. the Lost & Found; Stephen Leigh's the Atonement Tango

New Read:  Eric Flint/Griffen Barber's 1636: Mission to the Mughals
Chuck Wendig's Star Wars: Aftermath
Yuya Sato's Dendera: Old ladies vs. enviroment.  And a marauding bear.
Mira Grant's Parasite
Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl:  Coming of age/starting college for the fanfic writer set.
Douglas Hulick's Sworn in Steel
Foz Meadows' An Accident of Stars.  Teen travel to magical worlds now with PTSD.
Paula Goodlett/Gorg Hoff's Bartley's Man: "Ring of Fire" sidestory, specifically the Sewing Circle/OPM/Barbies bit.
Grady Hendrix' Horrorstor:  There should be an umlaut over that 3rd o.  Haunt at not-Ikea.
Evan Curie's Into the Black
Rachel Aaron's No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished

Rereads: Eric Flint's 1635: the Eastern Front, 1636: the Saxon Uprising & 1636: the Ottoman Onslaught

Graphic Novels/TPBs/RPGs:  Chris Hastings & Guhiru's the Unbelievable Gwenpool vol.1: Believe It
Stjepan Sejic's Sunstone vol.5:  Final volume of the best bdsm-lesbian-romance comic.
John Layman/Rob Guillory's Chew vol.12: Sour Grapes: More than a bit of a downer ending.  Not Ex Machina levels, but still.

Total: 18


February:
Short Fiction: Seanan McGuire's Lay of the Land & Velveteen vs. Recovery, Yoon Ha Lee's Extra Curricular Activities.

New Read:  Robin McKinley's Deerskin
Tim Pratt's Liar's Blade: Pathfinder tie-in novel.
David Drake's Death's Bright Day:  Latest "Lt. Leary".
April Daniel's Dreadnaught: Nemesis:  Cape fiction with trans-female lead.
T. Kingfisher's Summer in Orcus  YA magical quest from one of the best in the genre.
Ben Aaronovitch's the Hanging Tree:  Latest "Rivers of London" with visits the American & Russian magic heritages.
Becky Chambers' the Long Way to the Small, Angry Planet (I'm not crying you're crying shut up) & a Closed and Common Orbit
Daniel Jose Older's Battle Hill Bolero
Jasper Fforde's the Eye of Zoltar
Jack Weathford's the Secret History of the Mongol Queens:  Non-fiction history on the female Mongol leaders.

Rereads:  -

Graphic Novels/TPBs/RPGs:  Jennifer Doyle's Knights Errant
Tom Neely/Keenan Marshall Keller's the Humans vol.1: Humans For Life:  Planet of the Apes meets outlaw biker gangs

Total:14


March:
Short Fiction:  This was basically the "Neverless, She Persisted" theme Tor.com did.  With stories by Seanan McGuire, Kameron Hurley, Hyssa Wong, Carrie Vaughn, Chalie Jane Anders, Nisi Shawl, Brooke Bolander, Jo Walton, Amal El-Mohter, Catherynne M. Valente.

New Read:  Jo Walton's the Just City: Athena & Apollo attempt to create Plato's "perfect" Just City.  Shockingly the actual and the theoretical do not mesh perfectly.
Chuck Wendig's Invasive.  Sequel to the Zer0es.  With this second volume its very much supers type bad guy in an espionage/adventure setting.
Chuck Wendig's Atlanta Burns: the Hunt: 2nd of his YA white-trash pulp.  "Winter's Bone" meets Veronica Mars I guess.
RJ Ross' Coyote's Howl:  Latest "Cape High" book.
C.B. Lee's Not Your Sidekick: YA semi-dystopian with supers.
Seanan McGuire's Magic For Nothing:  Latest "InCryptid", with youngest sibling Antimony this time.
Patricia Brigg's Silence Fallen:  Latest "Mercy Thompson", with Mercy kidnapped to Europe 'cause vampire politics.  And the vamps are really the last interesting part of Brigg's urban fantasy series.
Jim Butcher/Kerrie L. Hughes' (ed) Shadowed Souls:  Urban fantasy anthology.
Louis McMaster Bujold's Mira's Last Dance
Anne Leckie's Ancillary Mercy
Matt Dunn's A Day at the Office
Clifford D. Simak's City
George R.R. Martin/Melinda Snodgrass' (ed) High Stakes:  This "Wild Cards" volume was actually a bit too dark even for me.  I'm looking forward to at least slightly more upbeat future books.


Rereads:  John Scalzi's Lock In & Redshirts
Douglas Adams' the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.  Rereading this I'm suddenly left with the feeling Adams just gave up around the final act.

Graphic Novels/TPBs/RPGs:  G. Willow Wilson/Adrian Alphona/Tekeshi Miyezawa/Cameron Stewart's Ms. Marvel vol.6: Civil War II:  Carole is in an idjit, out-idioting Tony from the first one.
Gwenda Bond/Kate Leth's Girl Over Paris: Lady high-wire walker vs. ghost mystery.
Marguerite Bennett/Ming Doyle/Marguerite Sauvage/Laura Bragen's Bombshells vol.1: Enlisted
Kate Leth/Brittany Williams' Patsy Walker aka Hellcat! vol.2: Don't Stop Me-ow.  Now with teen mom/vampire Jubilee.
Tom King/Michael Walsh/Gabriel Walte/Mike Del Muado's Vision vol.2: Better Than a Beast
Jason Bulmahn's (et al) Pathfinder: Horror Adventures
Sandy Petersen's (et al) Call of Cthulhu: Keeper's Handbook

Total: 24

As far as Man Vs. CGI Monsters goes, an entertaining movie.  Slight on actual plot or character.  But in the upper third of movies where people fight evil monsters.  Say not at the level of Aliens or Pacific Rim, but ahead of Starship Troopers or World War Z.  Plus you get Matt Damon doing, what I've been told, is an Irish accent.

This movie was a delight.  A beautiful stopmotion fairy tale.  Young story-teller Kubo ends up on a quest for magic mcguffins joined by Monkey the monkey and Beetle the cursed samurai.  Its also very melancholy despite a somewhat uplifting final battle solution.  A+ voice work.  I avoid 3d though so I don't know how much better or worse that version is.

Only three free-range short pieces for September.  The GOON Squad Summer Special 2014 by Jonathan L. Howard is several short shorts showcasing brief interludes for the main characters of his "GOON Squad" series.  Kendare Blake's When Gods & Vampires Roamed Miami has a retired goddess being mistaken for a vampire by would-be child-of-the-night.  And finally Lavie Tidhar's Selfie is a quick little horror piece involving a cell-phone haunt...

Of Limited Loyalty is the second of Michael Stackpole's "Crown Colonies" books, an alt history of the American Revolution with magic and dragons and necromantic pre-human races.  Well building up to the American Revolution.at least...

Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings and Words of Radiance are the first two of his "Stormlight Archive" books.  Where he goes all-out for the Big Epic Fantasy, with these being the first of a ten-book series, as well as having them tie-in to a many worlds "Cosmere" setting that seems to involve the majority of his other fiction.  Sanderson delivers perfectly on the Epic Fantasy with a sprawling cast, betrayals, mysteries and of course plenty of Big Damn Hero moments for his leads...

C.M. Priest's Maplecroft takes the Lizzie Borden story drops it into a Call of Cthulu campaign.  Let us just say that she had some very defensible reasons for taking an axe to her father and stepmother...

Seanan McGuire continues her "Tobey Daye" series with the Winter Long.  Where someone thought dead returns, old alliances and friendships are shaken and beliefs about her enemies motivations are torn down...

It has been many years since I'd last read Diana Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle and I'd forgotten how really, really good it was...

Conservation of Shadow is a collection of scifi and fantasy stories by Yoon Ha Lee.  All heavy on the metaphor and stylistic reintirpitation of South Asian history...

Arianne "Tex" Thompson's One NIght in Sixes is another alternate American history.  This time with her fantasy setting being the American Old West and a dangerous border town...

Stephen Baxter's Stone Spring has an interesting setting, a lush forested area now under the waters of the North Sea.  But his prehistoric peoples can kind of be summed up by saying life was short and often brutal and everything smelled like farts.  I just couldn't invest myself in any of his characters...

Orbus is another of Neal Asher's "Polity" books with increased focus on the alien Prador and dangerous secrets revealed on the history of the world of Spatterjay.  Plus lots of high end scifi gun fights...

Carla Speed McNeal's latest "Finder" trade is mostly a collection of the shorter pieces she did for Dark Horse Presents.  But Finder: Third World includes a few new sections, plus her usual in-depth footnoting and, BONUS, all in color...

Patrick Weekes follows up his delightful fantasy/caper book, the Palace Job, with the Prophecy Con.  The sequel also manages to both be a Epic Stakes fantasy story as well as a fast-paced caper story...

Dis Enchanted by Robert Kroese is a moderately entertaining fantasy story that wants to be a boffo fantasy comedy.  It was a cheap e-book and a fairly quick read...

Total Books: 14

Short Fiction: Ray Wood's In the Sight of Akresa is a fairly depressing story about denying your true self and letting your lies damn those you care about.  Then issues four thru six of John L. Howard's supers series Goon Squad.  And finally Hero of Five Points by Alan Gratz is an entertaining bit of "Gangs of New York" steampunk style that serves as an intro to his full length novel series...

Jaye Wells' Dirty Magic is a better-than-average urban fantasy/police procedural.  With the War on Potions replacing the War on Drugs...

At the Queen's Command is the first in a trilogy by Michael Stackpole, a fantasy alt history for the American Colonial period.  The conflict here is the equivilant to the French/Indian War with the names changed...

The latest Ring of Fire  book is from the team of Eric Flint, Georg Huff and Paula Goodlett, 1636: the Vienna Waltz.  Mostly set up for bigger events still to come and shake out from mainline events.  Still I enjoyed seeing the mostly grown up Barbie Consortium and Sewing Circle entranpeneurs...

The Illana Andrews finally have Kate meet her dad in the latest "Kate Daniels" novel, Magic Breaks.  Where I think the main lesson is that he's basically an asshole DM who likes to show off his latest crazy-ass dungeon design...

The Widow's House continues Daniel Abraham's "the Dagger and the Coin", with more heroic bankers vs. the evil empire and its mad priest hood.  Also a depressive dragon...

Bluebell Hall by Kayla Basha is a cute little YA romance set at a magical girls school...

I think what draws me to the cheaper self-puplished supers stuff like R.J. Ross's Steampunk Time (latest "Cape High") is nostalgia for being college age and part of the "Superguy" mailing list.  Though this latest of Ross' fluffy supers series does go a beat deeper into the world building..

The weirdest/intresting-est bit of old Ed McBain "87th Precinct" crime books like Fuzz is police work data tracking in a pre-computerized era...

Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins is difficult to sumarize.  Its a bit magical alt history with what seems to be a Russian perspective.  And some spies vs. revolutionaries with alien god-like beings in the background.  Intriguing but not a quick read...

T. Kingfisher is a pen name for Ursula Vernon, creator of the great ended webcomic Digger.  Toad Words & other Stories is a wonderful collection of her fairy tale inspired short fiction...

Scott Meyer's Off to be the Wizard and Spell or High Water are fantasy books where wizards are all people who basically stumbled onto the computer cheat codes for reality...

Finally Chris Moriarty's Spin State is the start of a scifi trilogy where the main FTL transportation slowly degrades your memory.  Leaving people dependant on electronic back-ups to maintain the accuracy of their own past.  This book concentrates on a military commando forced to confront the past she hoped to have buried in order to solve a murder and keep a political crisis from blowing up...


Total Books: 14

I haven't done one of these in a while.  Which explains why so many movies.  Caught Million Dollar Arm in the theaters way back at the start of Summer.  Cute, formulaic Disney movie.  John Hamm is charming even when being a jack-ass.  And I like that they go looking for Indian cricket players to try and convert to baseball and get a pair of more general track and field types...

Also from the actual theater was the recent Dwayne Johnson Hercules.  Which reminded me more than a bit of his Scorpion King movie.  Together they make me wonder, if like Vin Diesel, Johnson also has an Awesome D&D Campaign I Really Want to Tell Everyone About...

Inside Llewyn Davis was wonderfully made, has some great folk music, great acting all round and a lead character I wanted to see die in an alley.  Fucking cat abandoner...

Blue is the Warmest Color is probably the first lesbian-centric romantic, coming-of-age movie that really earned its NC-17 rating.  I mean those were some seriously graphic and lengthy sex scenes.  Also looooooong movie...

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 wasn't as cute or charming as the original.  Still plenty of cuteness and food gags and charm.  Just not as much.  Also an actual villain rather than a more Person vs. Enviroment theme...

Earnest and Celestine is an adorabley sweet movie about a bear who wants to be a musician and not a lawyer and a mouse who wants to be an artist and not a lackey of the rodent dental industry.  And how they become best friends forever and ever...

Finally we've got the Lego Movie.  Which was not quite as Totally, Perfectlly Awesome as it was hyped.  But it comes dang close...

Really procrastinating on these now. *sigh*  Anyways, lets start with the free-range short fiction.  Seanan McGuire's IM is part of her "InCyrptid" series.  Sadly it feels more like a pro or post-logue than a full story. Her latest "Velveteen" story, Velveteen vs.Santa Claus, is a much stronger piece.  Even if it makes you want to punch Santa in the junk.  Ken Scholes' Jay Lake & the Temple of the Monkey King is an ok bit of pulp-parody which is likely very moving if you were one of the late Jay Lake's friends.  Ian Daffern & Ho Chi Anderson's Charcoal is a high school based tale of supernatural vengeance.  Chapter 6 by Stephen Graham Jones takes a look at the zombie apocalypse from the viewpoint of a pair of anthropologists.  Gene O'Neill's Skitterbugging is an old Traveller rpg tie-in story I came across in a back issue of Dragon.  And finally Little Knife by Leigh Bardugo is a folk tale about beauty, obsession and poor decisions in magical complusion...

A trio of short fiction anthologies for June as well. Salsa Nocturna Stories is a collection of fiction by Daniel Jose Older, a strong selection of fantasy, horror and near future.  Older has quickly become someone whose name attached to a project can make me take notice.  Like the collection Subversion, edited by Bart R. Leib.  The stories in the anthology are all on the theme of rebellion, both large and small.  The last collection, the Good Fight, edited by Scott Bachman, is by various supers e-book writers.  Some of the writers involved I was already familiar with, while the only one or two of the new to me ones seemed worth looking into.  Still free book...

Actually that should be four collections.  Almost forgot By Chance or Providence a collection of Becky Cloonan written and drawn fantasy stories.  Wonderful stuff and a pleasant surprise when it arrived in the mail as I'd long since forgotten I'd pre-ordered it...

Andy Weir's the Martian is probably one of the best hard scifi books I've read in a while.  The story of an astronaut accidently left behind on the first manned Mars mission and his struggle to survive was funny, poignant, informative and uplifting...

I've had Karen Healy's When We Wake sitting on my Kindle for a bit now.  Sort of Sleeping Beauty story using cryonics and a hard weather Australian setting.  Clever and touching and I'll have to pick up that sequel soon-ish...

Aces Wild is the latest "Capes High" book by R.J. Ross.  The books are still pretty fluffy, but are steadily moving beyond the well-treaded high school romance concepts.  Or at least expanding to be more than just that plus super powers.  Fellow supers writer Drew Hayes' NPCs steps away from the cape-set for a parody of D&D style fiction with a story where a group of village NPCs have to step into the role of quest-taking adventurers...

Doughnut by Tom Holt, explores concepts in quantum many worlds theory and how that can be best exploited for fame and profit.  I liked the Disney character/Planet of the Apes style world best...

Hilldiggers is another "Polity Space" book from Neal Asher, though this story of two warring human-descended worlds is a bit of a bridge between his regular Polity line and the Spatterjay sub-line.  Unlike Polity Agent, which is fimly in the main story-arc, with the Polity A.I.'s, their special agent Cormac and his allies continuing to work against the threat of the Jain super-nano technology...

MIchael Poore's Up Jumps the Devil and Michael Boatman's Last God Standing are both subversions of accepted Christian mythology.  The former has much of American history and expansion being guided in part by the Devil.  Less thru maliciousness, then poor impulse control, heart ache and a mischievous curiosity.  Really he's more Coyote than Lucifer.  Boatman's setting has the various divinities mostly living lives as simple mortals.  Partly because of the strong-arming of the Christian God, who wants a chance to pursue his stand-up career and maybe propose to his girlfriend.  I found myself more interested in the side-lives of the various gods mentioned in passing than the actual story though...

Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small serves as comfort reading.  Like Bujold's lighter books or Pratchett, Keladry's story of obstinate heroism and clever animals serve to balance out some of the darker or less optimistic works...

Like Weston Ochse's Grunt Life where much of humanity has already fallen to an alien invasion of telepathic insectoids.  And only an army made up survivor guilt soldiers might have the key to our survival.  Or the even grimmer and more depressing Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis.  Where Nazi psychic super-soldiers created thru torturous experiments are opposed by British Chthulu-mythos style sorcerers.  It is all pretty crazy bleak.  And apparently the next two books get progressively worse.  I honestly don't have the reserves to find out for myself...

Happily Martin Millar's latest "Werewolf Girl" book, the Anxiety of Kallix the Werewolf is a much happier book.  Which is a testimony to Millar's ability to balance humor and drama, not just how friggen' dark those previously mentioned books were...

Then back into the darkness.  Well, dark-ish, with a pair of black powder fantasies.  Brian McCellan's second "Powder Mage" book the Crimson Campaign, with a new push from the evil empire backed by their possibly mad divine patron.  And Django Wexler's the Thousand Names which follows a sort-of Foreign Legion/Africa Corps company under a new charismatic officer who could be leading them to their doom or salvation...

Total Books: 20

Didn't get too many free-range short stories last month.  Just Forsworn by Brian McCellan, another prequel story to his "Powder Mage" series. And the Price of Doing Business by D.B. Jackson, also a prequel story, for his "Thief-taker" series.  I think the second of Jackson's books might be out and I should check on that.  Though the first book for both writer's fantasy series are worth getting...

The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu about the secret war throughout history between two alien factions was pretty good.  The aliens have to live in a symbiotic relationship with a human host and the set-up has that most major historical figures were hosts.  Given that, its a little disappointing how the setting world is basically identical to ours.  Still if the roommate were to get the sequel I'd more than likely read it...

Broken Homes is the latest "Rivers of London" urban fantasy/police procedural from Ben Aaronovitch.  These books are soooo good.  And the character swerve at the end is a total gut puncher...

Finally, FINALLY, finished up the Vance-tribute Songs of the Dying Earth anthology, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.  This took me months, not because it wasn't full of talented authors writing in the Vancian style.  But because that style just started to wear down on me every three or four stories...

Harry Connelly's the Overlook was the last of a small pile of mystery & noir writers I was testing out.  Not a terrible book, though it takes a bit to really get moving.  Still I doubt I'll be binge buying on Connelly anytime soon...

Also in the been sitting at the bottom of the literal physical pile was the Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson.  I have no idea what prompted me to pick this up.  I got it it YEARS ago thru the BOMC and I cannot think what about it originally made me choose it.  The story involving someone severely maimed from a car crash and the love he finds with a mentally challenged artist and how maybe time travel or past lives or some combination of the two might be happening.  Yeah.  Nothing in that grabbed and I just skimmed thru entire chapters of characters that didn't hook me...

Deep Six by Ian Thomas Healy is another from their "Just Cause" supers series of e-books.  This one focuses on a super-villain prison and of course a break out.  I really liked the depth of the prison guards, many of whom were minor talent supers themselves.  Plus a pretty bad-ass and chilling main villain...

Joey Comeau & Jess Fink's We Are Become Pals is an illustrated story about the friendship between two girls.  It was originally a series of blog/journal posts by the pair, now collected and expanded in a physical book.  Very sweet and funny...

Another from the back log of unread, this time off the Kindle, in Flora's Fury by Ysabeau Wilce.  The third book in her YA alt-history fantasy set in California.  Its listed as the "Flora Trilogy" but the ending doesn't feel like a final ending.  Hopefully she's doing multiple trilogies maybe?

Like a Mighty Army is the latest "Safehold" book from David Weber.  And all the criticisms you can find are true.  Weber does a ton of info dump expositioning.  And the series is more than a bit bloated.  And the original plotline is getting partially side-lined by the details of the current conflict.  Still, I enjoyed it more than a little.  I'm a sucker for Weber's Honorverse and Safehold books no question...

Starpilot's Grave is the middle book of Debra Doyle & James McDonald's original "MageWorlds" trilogy.  Which still has that sort-of but not-really Star Wars homage to it.  Again, like someone writing fanfic for the series having never actually seen it, only having it described second or third hand.  But its an enjoyable bit of space opera on its own merits...

Roadside Picnic by Russian brothers Arkady & Boris Strugatsky is an older scifi novel.  With attempts by humans to explore, study and/or exploit bits of alien detritus left behind by a sort-of First Contact with some very unknowable aliens...

And finally Cecil Castellucci's YA scifi Tin Star.  The young lead here has to struggle to survive aboard a space station in the intergalatic boonies after she's beaten and left behind for dead by the corrupt leader of her colony group.  Pretty tight start for a series and always good to see some YA that isn't urban fantasy or post-apocalyptic at this point...

Total books: 13

The Cat Returns:  Its that same old story told so often.  Girl rescues cat from traffic.  Kingdom of Cats declares themselves in her debt and mess with her life.  Girl goes for help from magical cat that used to be a statue.  Girl is kidnapped into the Kingdom of Cats.  You've probably seen it a million times...

Pain & Gain: Michael Bay should concentrate on making movies about stupid real life criminals instead of shaky cam giant robots and alien ninja turtles.  'Cause this was pretty darn entertaining...

Despicable Me 2:  Cute love story and Gru the Dad bits are great.  But there really isn't an antagonistic spark with the villain of the film like there was in the first one...

The dragon looked great. And Tauriel was a pretty cool action lady. And despite all the padding the movie moves at a fast pace. And a bunch of that padding is letting the dwarves be bad ass instead of just getting captured by spiders, captured by elves, thrown into barrels and then sitting around while Bilbo talks to the dragon. But still such padding. Extra stuff with the Elves and Sauron and the graves of the Ring Wraiths and..really lots of padding. Fun and all but man. I'm betting by the end of it all it will take a whole week to watch all the Jackson/Tolkien mash-up...