May I ask a question about the end of that book?
How come the colonel with the thermobaric bomb ended up blowing himself up? They had set dozens of those off before.
I tried to split that off to a different thread, but apparently it did not work
“Water lapping salt at his cheek roused him, a fresh cold trickle finding its way into the hollow of sand where his face rested.”
Blood of Tyrants: Book 8 of Temeraire, by Naomi Novik
“Here’s your new baby.”
Cry When the Baby Cries, by Becky Barnicoat.
“The bells stopped tolling hours ago, so it must be near midnight.”
Warrior Princess Assassin by Brigid Kemmerer
“I was running away. I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from drabness, fustiness, snobbery, the claustrophobia of close horizons and from my inability, although I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race. In fact, I was running away from almost everything except the law.”
The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming
“Jack Holloway set the skimmer to HOVER, swiveled his seat around, and looked at Carl. He shook his head sadly. ‘I can’t believe we have to go through this again,’ Holloway said.”
Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi
“The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it. It was minus fifteen degrees Celsius and a storm had passed just hours before.”
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
“The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.”
– The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens
War and Charlie Chaplin did not sit easily together in the mind of the Reverend Matthew Hearn.
Deeds of Darkness, by Edward Marston
“Some people would say it’s a bad idea to bring a fire-spider into a public library.”
Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines
“She breathes in time with the sea.”
The Sirens by Emilia Hart
Reggie Nancarrow secured the body of his father after it had slid down and dragged behind the travois for a second time.
Slake Your Thirst by D. G. Morris
Later, not a single person will recall seeing the lady board the flight at Hobart Airport. Nothing about her appearance or demeanour raises a red flag or even an eyebrow
Leanne Moriarty, Here One Moment. Highly recommended!
Sounds interesting! But I can’t find it anywhere.
Made it about a quarter of the way through that and took it back to the library.
Presumably you’ve checked the library. The four in our system have a total of seven copies.
I checked the library, Goodreads, and Google! It’s kind of a moot point anyway, as our library system isn’t currently doing interlibrary loans due to budget cuts. 
Sorry @Dung_Beetle. Slake Your Thirst is my novel awaiting publication. I’ll let you know where you can purchase when/if it ever gets published!
Aha! Well, you got a kick-ass first sentence there. 
Well. that explains why I couldn’t find it on Libby!
I will again draw your attention to the name of the thread, and suggest that you take any actual discussion of books to this thread: Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - January 2026 edition.
Thanks!
“As the phone started ringing, the leftmost indicator bulb in the row of seven lit up, blinking in time with the jangle of the buzzer but bright enough to shine clearly through the red gel and a patina of dust.”
Scale, by Greg Egan
“History shows us how to behave.”
History Matters, by David McCullough
It was perfect Zeppelin weather – a dry, moonlit night without a breath of wind.
Dance of Death, by Edward Marston
Catching up:
“My name is Aruthur James Donovan, Jr., and for twelve seasons I played football in an organization called the National Football League.”
Fatso - Football When Mere Were Really Men, by Aruthur J. Donovan, Jr.
“When he was young – seventeen and eighteen years old – Lyndon Johnson worked on a road gang that was building a highway (an unpaved highway: roads in the isolated, impoverished Texas Hill Country weren’t paved in the 1920s) between Johnson City and Austin.” – The Years of Lyndon Johnson – The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro.
“There are certain idiosyncratic notions that you quietly come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain.”
Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson