Well here we are: the last month of 2024. And what a ride 2024 has been! From the crazy Summer Olympics to the US elections, it’s been up and down… sideways too. So stock up on chocolate and books and hold on, the crazy is just beginning!
So whatcha all readin?
On Kindle: Save the Vampire by Maz Maddox, an MMM urban fantasy with holy armies, vampires, horny incubi, and a talking skull…
Audio: Disturbing the Dead by Kelley Armstrong, the 3rd in her Rip in Time series. Our 20th century detective transported to Victorian England has just discovered that mummy use in medicine was genuinely a thing…
Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.
(Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel in 2010 - I’m trying to read them all.)
A police procedural set in the fictional eastern European city-state of Beszel. The twist is that the city of Beszel occupies the exact same location as the equally fictional city of Ul Qoma. There are parts of the cities where one can cross over, but this is strictly controlled, so that only one building serves as the formal “border”. People are taught to ignore people that they can see in the other city.
The brilliance of the book is that this is all explained very slowly as the story unfolds, and that at the end, it’s not really clear whether this a sci-fi phenomenon like paralell universes, or just a very strange social convention.
Home sick today, picking up books and putting them down again. I did finish The Wood at Midwinter, by Susanna Clarke. It’s a short “story” with no plot. I like Clarke but I’m glad I didn’t pay for this.
Finished Another Time: An Anthology of Time Travel Stories (1942-1960), edited by Jean-Paul L.Garnier, of which the best story was “Stop, You’re Killing Me!” by Darius John Granger. Also finished Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected, by Nnedi Okorafor, which was okay.
Now I’m reading Let It Crow! Let It Crow! Let It Crow!, by Donna Andrews.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden. She’s most famous for her Russian-folklore-fantasy The Bear and the Nightingale. This book is significantly different: it follows a Canadian nurse sent home from the Great War after a terrible injury, who receives news of her soldier brother’s death, and goes to investigate. The fantasy is a slow burn, but I absolutely loved it: Arden’s prose is gorgeous, the characters were compelling, and the fantasy blended with the history in the best way. One of my favorite books of the year!
Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell. I was hooked by the second paragraph, when the narrator talks about eating her siblings in the body her father. Weird alien point-of-view characters are fun. By 25% of the way through the book, I’d transitioned to hate-reading it. This alien organism who barely has any contact with humanity–much less with GenZ social media–is constantly talking about “abuser personality” and “holding people accountable” and “being in denial” and “consensual touch” (keep in mind, the alien obsessing over consensual touch also eats people and absorbs their skeletal system). The author’s note talks extensively about being disabled, and the book was a very thinly veiled allegory for growing up neurodiverse, and it missed the fucking mark so bad. For a much better take on a similar idea, check out Ann Leckie’s brilliant Translation State.
I finished Save the Vampire by Maz Maddox. It’s off the walls insane, which makes it perfect for me.
I am nearly finished with Disturbing the Dead by Kelley Armstrong. I’m really enjoying the whole series.
Annnnnnnnnd finally after years of waiting G.L. Carriger published The Dratsie Dilemma the fourth book in her San Andreas Shifters series. I am vibrating with excitment since she will be IN Salt Lake City tomorrow night! (I would crawl out of my coffin for this chance to meet her )
Last night I read It Will Only Hurt for a Moment, by Delilah Dawson. Maybe I was all hopped up on cold meds, but I found it implausible and too many threads were left dangling (including the ugly death of some innocent bunny rabbits).
I’m taking a break just past the halfway point for the audiobook of The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, a fantasy novel about a master thief and con artist in a decaying seaport. It’s kind of a slog, but I still want to see how it turns out.
I’ve been reading John Scalzi’s latest, Starter Villain, aloud with one of my sons. More like crime comedy than Scalzi’s usual sf; we’re enjoying it. The protagonist just met the genetically-engineered and extremely rude dolphins who now work for him.
I finished June Thomson’s pastiche Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black, with Dr. Watson helping out Holmes in retirement on the Sussex Downs. Meh. Definitely not her best.
About two-thirds of the way through Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, light-hearted advice on how not to get overwhelmed by your to-do lists. It’s OK but not great.
My book club’s latest book is James by Percival Everett, a retelling of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the POV of Jim, the runaway slave who was Huck’s companion. I’m really enjoying it, although there are some passages which sound a bit more 2024 than 1884.
I just finished T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call. In it, a middle-aged woman who’s a little dumpy and has an irreverent sense of humor confronts a super creepy supernatural threat, and with the aid of friends overcomes it, and I realized that T. Kingfisher tends to write the same protagonist, in much the way that John Scalzi does. Which isn’t bad–it’s a highly entertaining protagonist in both cases–but I hadn’t noticed it before.
Huh, so that’s what that book’s about! I keep seeing it pop up everywhere, but the title just didn’t grab me. Now that I know, I think I’ll give it a whirl.
I finished Disturbing the Dead by Kelley Armstrong, the 3rd bookin her Rip in Time series. I am very much enjoying the series and look forward to book 4 next spring.
I finished listening to An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris. It’s a somewhat long (16 hours) historical novel, presented by a first-person narrator regarding the Dreyfus Affair, a subject about which I knew precious little. The narrator is none other than French Army Colonel Georges Picquart, who discovered that Dreyfus was accused and convicted of espionage through trumped-up and false evidence, largely because he was Jewish. After I finished, I read a few accounts of the whole ordeal, and it appears that Harris does a great job of following the actual events as they transpired. I wasn’t sure if I would like the book because of its genre, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and would certainly recommend.
I enjoy Donna Andrews’ books as well. I’m a year behind them as they’re published, so I don’t have to wait for them at the library. I liked Let It Crow! Let It Crow! Let It Crow! even more than usual, because I’m a fan of the blacksmithing the main character does when she’s not sleuthing and organizing things.
Next up: A Christmas Sourcebook, edited by Mary Ann Simcoe and Reincarnations, a collection of stories by Harry Turtledove.
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