Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - February 2026 edition

Cafe Society
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February is here and my part of the state got our FIRST snow of the year (2nd of the season) but, of course, climate change isn’t real…

What is real is BOOKS! Lots of books, comics, graphic novels, manga, plotlines scribbled on the back of that meeting-which-should-have-been-an-email agenda!

Whatcha all reading?

Whisper in the Dark By Darcey Burke, the 2nd in her Victorian Raven & Wren series. Hadrian is a bit toooo good for a mid 19th century man but I’ll allow it because he has beautiful eyes. :laughing:

The Floating World by Axie Oh More YA and I’m floundering a bit since so many YA cliches are already presenting: orphaned character, character’s family is about to be killed, rigid social lines, character decides to show off and puts others in danger… you get the drift.

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.

Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - April 2025 edition
Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - January 2026 edition
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Last month: Well that happened… again

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107 Days by Kamala is good. I do like politics.
Already read Original Sin.

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Hard Time by Jodi Taylor. I’ve gotten onto a Taylor kick lately and am working my way through her various series. Quite fun!

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A very recently published book called “The three musketeers” by some chap called Dumas, I think he shows promise…

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I hear it’s really good.

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I was astonished when I read this at how the musketeers were fucking assholes. Like, the dudebros in Revenge of the Nerds had nothing on these guys. I could only enjoy the book by acknowledging that and moving on.

Two new books for me:

Long Live Evil, by Sarah Rees Brennan. Girl dying of cancer is projected into the romantasy that her younger sister is reading to her, and ends up in the body of the main villain. I read this for a book club. It was already an uphill climb for me: spoofs don’t tend to do much for me, nor does romantasy. And a main character who can’t go two pages without talking about her jiggly boobs, without purring sexily, without Zoomerspeaking about how villainous she is? Hoo boy. The best I could say for the humor is that I could mostly tell what was supposed to be a joke. The exception may have been the epigraphs before each chapter, excerpts from the fictional romantasy into which the protagonist is projected. Were these intentionally awful, as a joke, or were they supposed to be compelling? Reading other reviews where people say they’d like to read that fictional romantasy is making me second-guess my conclusion that they were intentionally terrible. I’m glad so many people liked it, but this is absolutely not a book for me.

And then I just finished reading a book that’s gonna end up on my “Best of the year” list. The Starving Saints really puts the gory back in phantasmagory: a medieval castle undergoing a brutal siege gets suddenly, horrifically weird. Cannibalism, magic, and sapphic power exchange – holy crap this was good!

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I realized this when I read it the second time in my 30s. Athos really was an awful person and I caught myself wishing Milady had gutted him like a fish.

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Recommendation accepted.

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I kinda like that, they are shown not as immaculate heroes but as people of their time with the virtues and defects of their time. (more defects than virtues by far)

About that though, I agree, no matter how noble the author tries to describe Athos as, it’s impossible for anybody with modern sensibilities to understand murdering a woman (in cold blood to booth!) for the crime of what? pretending to be of noble blood? being a criminal and marrying a noble?.
But Athos was universally considered noble, or at least I don’t know of contemporary critics denouncing him, so I guess values in 1845 were far closer to 1630 than to 2025.

All in all I enjoy these books a lot, and seeing noblemen of that era, even the protagonists, behave in historically appropriate, if utterly barbaric to us, ways is part of the enjoyment.
(I laughed a lot when Planchet, D’Artagnan servant asked him for his pay after months of not receiving it and was properly trashed by D’Artagnan for having the utter gall of nagging a gentleman for money)

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Book 8/9 of the Slough House series. It will be a bad day when it all ends. Unless, of course, there is a book 10 in the works (and the quality stays high).

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My brother-in-law gave me the first one for Christmas, and it was an absolute delight. I keep forgetting to put them on hold at the library, but I am looking forward to the remaining ones!

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I read, and mostly enjoyed, Fluke by Brian Klaas. It talks about the role of random chance in our lives, with discussions about probability, determinism, and other mathematical and philosophical topics. I’ve encountered many of his conclusions in other books I’ve read, but there was enough new here (and enough good examples) to make it interesting.

For fiction, I’m most of the way through Buckeye by Patrick Ryan (no, not my congressional representative; another one). Mostly about two couples and their children in a small Ohio city during and after World War II. Families, marriages, secrets, adultery, sexuality, clairvoyance, regrets, and more. We’ll see how it comes out but so far it’s spectacular. I’m really drawn into the writing, the characters, and the plot, so quite the trifecta! Fingers crossed.

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I started Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge, part of my step-out-of-my-comfort-zone mindset since horror isn’t really my thing. But it’s short and I admit to being a sucker for pumpkin heads. I have this guy So we’ll see what happens…

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I’ve been rereading David Brin’s Sooner trilogy and I just started the third book, Heaven’s Reach.

I’m a big fan of Ben Macintyre and I’m reading his latest book, The Siege.

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Finished Scale, a science fiction mystery by Greg Egan, which was one of the most original SF books I’ve ever read with excellent world building, and History Matters, by David McCullough, which I enjoyed. I remember going to a lecture by him.

Next up: Jazz, by Toni Morrison; and The Journey with Jonah, a play by Madeleine L’Engle.

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Today I finished Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi, which was a re-read with my son. It’s about an Earth prospector on an alien jungle world who discovers a catlike maybe-sentient alien race which gets in the way of the megacorp exploiting the planet’s resources. Not Scalzi’s best, but still worthwhile. It has some of the best courtroom-drama scenes of any sf book I’ve ever read.

Also recently finished: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, a terrific distant-future political/military thriller. A former soldier of a galactic empire, appalled by a massacre on a subject world and then the murder of a respected superior officer, decides to seek revenge against the empire’s ruler. Leckie cleverly creates a detailed, highly advanced but credible interstellar society and then pulls you right into the story. Highly recommended - I’m almost certainly going to go on to the next two books in the trilogy.

I’m now well into Dan Chaon’s new book, One of Us, a supernatural novel set on the Great Plains in the 1910s. It’s about a pair of oddball twins hiding out as carnies while on the run from their murderous “uncle,” who leaves behind a trail of bodies as he draws ever nearer to them. Good stuff.

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Finally finished Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang, with mixed feelings! It took me over a week to read it because life suddenly got too hectic. So I was picking it up for brief moments, or reading for a solid hour, or having to let it be for a day or two. However, I was always looking forward to getting back to it, and when I did, had no trouble remembering what was going on in the story. On the other hand, I think if I’d been able to read it straight through, the pacing would have annoyed me. There’s a lot of exposition that doesn’t advance the plot. Events grew weirder and descriptions vaguer, especially towards the end (yes, it’s set in Hell, but still). My impression at the end is that the book was a hot mess, and yet I did enjoy it. I’m not going to search out other books by this author, but if I run across one that seems intriguing, I would give her another chance.

Next up, Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher. I could give it five stars right now, but I’ll read it first.

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I’ve finished “The Three Musketeers” for the first time unabridged (I had read a couple of abridged and sanitized versions for children but never the real thing) which I liked less than the sequele “Twenty years later”.
Then I devoured “Les Misérables” (but in Spanish, not in French, so “Los Miserables”) which I liked very much.
Now trying to decide whether to continue with the 19th century French authors binge (Maybe reread “the Vicomte of Bragelonne”, the only book that made me cry in a public library, but that I haven’t read again since then… (my god I think it was 30 years ago or so!) or another book from Victor Hugo (not Notre Dame which I already read last month), I don’t think I’m ready for Balzac or Stendhal (but then again I was wary of Hugo until last month…) or go with something else.

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I have my copy too. I decided to read at least one T. Kingfisher book a month this year. Last month was Snake-Eater and my bookclub is reading A Sorceress Comes to Call this month.