Finished	Title	Author
2014-01-01	Iron Council	China Mieville
Iron Council was a brutal slog and accounts for most of the month; I read the other five books in the last week. I liked it more than Perdido Street Station, but not, I think, enough for me to keep reading Mieville. I like the style of his writing at the small scale, and I like Bas-Lag, but the overall plots just leave me cold. PSS was "are you fucking serious? This won awards?"; Iron Council, like The Scar, was "wow, that was just...not worth the effort."
2014-01-02	Night Train to Rigel	Timothy Zahn
2014-01-03	Odd Girl Out	Timothy Zahn
2014-01-04	The Third Lynx	Timothy Zahn
2014-01-05	The Domino Pattern	Timothy Zahn
2014-01-06	Judgement at Proteus	Timothy Zahn
2014-02-01	Hard Magic	Larry Correia
2014-02-02	Spellbound	Larry Correia
2014-02-03	Warbound	Larry Correia
Correia is not a good writer but he is a fun one. The Grimnoir trilogy is basically alternate prohibition-era steampunk X-Men fanfic, and that's exactly what I was hoping for; sometimes you need to just shut your brain off for a while and watch the explosions.
2014-02-04	Warbreaker	Brandon Sanderson
Warbreaker was excellent; I liked it a lot more than The Way of Kings. My biggest complaint is that it felt like it ended too quickly, with very little denoument after the climax. I kept picking up my reader and expecting it to still be showing Warbreaker. It's not quite right to say that it didn't feel finished, but it felt like it took my brain a while to catch up to the fact that it was over.
2014-03-01	The Signal and the Noise	Nate Silver
2014-03-02	Swords & Dark Magic: the New Sword & Sorcery	Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders
Delicious, and it has me wanting more. I've read a lot of fantasy but relatively little of it with the feel that this collection evokes. The opening cites a number of classic authors and works that were the inspiration for it - foremost among them Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, and Howard, unsurprisingly, but relatively little in the way of modern-day influences. Maybe I should just go through the list of authors who contributed to the collection and check out their works. It is also worth noting that one of the stories, A Wizard in Wiscezan, is the only fantasy work by C.J. Cherryh I've actually enjoyed, although I wouldn't consider it one of the standout pieces of the collection.
2014-03-02	Elantris	Brandon Sanderson
Liked this more than Warbringer; it winds down much more satisfyingly.
2014-03-02	The Draco Tavern	Larry Niven
I'd read the first few stories in this before, but none of the rest. I'm not sure if I started reading this at one point and got interrupted, or came across them online or in other collections. Not his best work, I think, but it was interesting in that I've never read another SSC like it - a rapid-fire collection of extremely short stories, each one built around alien conceptions of some ethical or political topic.
2014-03-03	Leviathan Wakes	James S. A. Corey
2014-03-04	Caliban's War	James S. A. Corey
2014-03-05	Abaddon's Gate	James S. A. Corey
I got the recommendation for these out of this thread, I think. Very tasty; if summarized in a sentence it would sound like a first contact story involving zombies (or perhaps vice versa), but like the best zombie stories it is not about the zombies but about the way humans react when faced with a crisis they are unequipped to deal with. It has a pretty open ending, too; I wonder if he's going to write more in this setting?
2014-03-06	Strata	Terry Pratchett
2014-03-07	The Dark Side of the Sun	Terry Pratchett
Two early Pratchetts. Have to say, they haven't aged well. I think I read TDSotS once, many years ago, because it was very familiar to me; Strata was completely new. Unlike the Discworld books, I probably won't be rereading them. I would say "maybe he's just not very good at SF", but I loved the Nomes books. I think it's more that he was still finding his feet as a writer - these books predate even the first Discworld novels.
2014-03-08	The Colour of Magic	Terry Pratchett
2014-03-09	The Light Fantastic	Terry Pratchett
2014-03-10	Interesting Times	Terry Pratchett
The first two Discworld books have aged much better, although they are still noticeably rough around the edges - it's actually reading Swords & Dark Magic that got me in the mood for a reread of the first two books. Interesting Times remains one of my favourite Rincewind books and one of the first Discworld books I read after the first two.
2014-03-11	Gardens of the Moon	Steven Erikson
2014-03-12	Deadhouse Gates	Steven Erikson
With the Malazan Book of the Fallen series finished at last, I want to actually read the whole thing. Gardens, unfortunately, wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. It has a very schizophrenic feel, like Erikson wanted to get every single goddamn note about the setting, plot, characters, or history into the book and didn't much care that it meant the whole thing read like it'd been put through a blender. I'm not sure why I liked Gardens the first time I read it, but I'm glad I did, because Deadhouse is as good as I remember; it's much more focused and a better book for it.
2014-04-01	Memories of Ice	Steven Erikson
I didn't like this book nearly as much as I did Deadhouse Gates (or its sequel House of Chains). I don't think it's actually a worse book, but it has a bunch of things I object to: - It features a lot of Kruppe, and I cannot fucking stand Kruppe or his bloated, self-aggrandizing speeches. - The entire subplot with Silverfox, Mhybe, and the Tlan Imass could have been resolved in about five minutes if she'd spent those five minutes explaining her plans instead of acting secretive and paranoid; I have no patience for plots that hinge entirely on people who are able to talk to each other, but unwilling to. - I honestly cannot bring myself to give a shit about half the characters or the gods they worship, and most of the ones I do care about die messily at the end anyways. If I had to sum this one up, I'd say it feels like a Black Company book, except it's not as good at being one. At least it features more Quick Ben.
2014-04-02	House of Chains	Steven Erikson
And we're back to Malazan books I enjoy! The characters in Seven Cities and the Dryjna Rebellion interest me a lot more than the war against the Pannion Domin.
2014-04-03	Collected Stories of Morlock the Maker	James Enge
Not an actual book, but after reading a Morlock story in The New Sword & Sorcery I went and tracked down the rest; most of them are available online, and there's about a (short) book's worth. I'll probably read the novels soon, too, but I wanted something short and refreshing after 4000+ pages of Malaz. It's quite different from the fantasy I've been reading lately, and I really like it -- anyone have recommendations for similar books?
2014-05-01	Divergent	Veronica Roth
2014-05-02	Insurgent	Veronica Roth
2014-05-03	Allegiant	Veronica Roth
Read these after watching the movie with my wife, since we wanted to know more about the setting so we could speculate wildly about it. We were actually pleasantly surprised by a lot of it, including the author neatly avoiding some common-to-the-point-of-cliche fictional relationship failure modes. Allegiant in particular had a few parts where upon learning The Terrible Truth™ we went "wait, no, that's incredibly stupid", but it made more sense once we realized that basically everyone is either lying about the project, or have themselves been lied to, or both, so the actual objection is not "the fundamental basis of the backstory is stupid" but "these characters should have come up with better lies".
2014-05-04	The Eyre Affair	Jasper Fforde
2014-05-05	Lost in a Good Book	Jasper Fforde
2014-05-06	The Well of Lost Plots	Jasper Fforde
2014-05-07	Something Rotten	Jasper Fforde
Increasingly I find myself thinking I'm not actually going to finish the Malazan series; like Wheel of Time, I want to know how it ends but just cannot bring myself to slog through the 6000+ pages between me and that ending when I'm honestly not enjoying that much. I have so much backlog these days that mere curiosity is not enough to compel me to finish a series anymore. So I went to read the Thursday Next books instead. I'd read the first two before, the latter two were new to me. They are fun and lighthearted and a bit of a headfuck if you think about the time travel too much. All in all, good times, although Fforde needs to get off his ass and write a sequel to Shades of Grey already; I like Thursday Next, but Chromatacia is Fforde's best work and I want more of it.
2014-05-08	Freakangels	Warren Ellis
I like Ellis and I've had these in my backlog since Freakangels was finished years ago. I enjoyed the shit out of Freakangels, and it doesn't surprise me to see him citing Wyndham as an influence in the afterword (mostly The Midwich Cuckoos, obviously, although there's a bit of The Kraken Wakes in there too).
2014-05-08	Global Frequency	Warren Ellis
Global Frequency was not nearly as good. It's basically a short story collection, but the stories are kind of repetitive and also variable in quality. I can forgive the former if there's an overarching storyline, and the latter if they're written by different authors, but there isn't and they weren't; the only unifying factor is the basic theme and the characters of Zero and Aleph, who we don't generally see much of. It actually reminded me of Planetary, but unfortunately, Planetary is much better.
2014-05-09	T-Rex and the Crater of Doom	Walter Alvarez
I don't normally go in for paleontology, but this was pretty interesting. What really struck me was how recent it was; when I was learning about the mass extinction and the impact that caused it in school, it was a new and exciting discovery, not, as I assumed, something that had been known for decades. I was also amazed - and dismayed - to learn of the conflict between gradualist and catastrophist geology and how badly it had set things back. Yet another we can blame James Usher for.
2014-05-10	Mogworld	Benjamin Croshaw
Mogworld was a lot of fun. I've never played WoW (which it is very clearly riffing on, right down to the cover art), and I've played very little in the way of MMOs in general, but I still do enough gaming in general to get the jokes.
2014-05-11	Jam	Benjamin Croshaw
Jam was considerably less fun. It feels like a parody of disaster fiction, but for the most part it's not funny, just stupid. Maybe I just don't read enough disaster fiction for it to have the same effect as Mogworld, and someone who does (but does little gaming) would have the opposite reaction to the books?
2014-05-12	Blood of Ambrose	James Enge
2014-05-13	This Crooked Way	James Enge
2014-05-14	The Wolf Age	James Enge
The three Morlock the Maker novels. They all have a very different feel, and reading the afterword for This Crooked Way leads me to believe that was deliberate; each book was deliberately evoking a different type of classic fantasy literature. Overall, I think The Wolf Age is my favourite, although I enjoyed them all a great deal. Blood of Ambrose focuses more on the people around Morlock than on Morlock himself, but it's Morlock I came for. This Crooked Way is a collection of short stories woven together into a novel, and while the stories stand on their own just fine, it works less well as a coherent book; there is an overarching conflict of sorts in Morlock's attempt to restore Nimue, and Merlin's opposition, but most of the stories don't touch on this at all, so it ends up feeling like it was just kind of tossed in there for the sake of having it after most of the stories were already written. (I had also already read most of them elsewhere.) The Wolf Age suffers from neither of these flaws, although I think it would have been better had the Strange Gods been completely uninvolved; they don't really add much to the story. And arguably Morlock should have killed all of them at the end rather than just Death, since they clearly can't be trusted not to meddle disastrously in mortal affairs. In any case, I enjoyed the shit out of all three of them, and they also go down smooth; I started reading Blood of Ambrose on the bus into work three days ago.
2014-05-15	Berserkers: The Beginning	Fred Saberhagen
I finally have what I think is a complete set of Berserker short stories, and this is the first collection in that set. I had, I think, already read all of the stories in this collection. What I had not done was read them all together, or in order; in particular, there are four stories here -- The Stone Place, Masque of the Red Shift, In the Temple of Mars, and The Face of the Deep -- that are all part of the same continuing plot and should probably be read together. Previously I had reach one in a separate collection, years apart, and hadn't made the connections.
2014-06-01	Dragon Wing	Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
2014-06-02	Elven Star	Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Meh. The setting looked interesting, and it is interesting, but the rest did nothing for me. I'm trying to get better at realizing when I'm reading a book not because I'm enjoying it, but just because I'm curious about some aspect of the setting or overall plot, and the Death Gate books definitely fall into that category.
2014-06-03	Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas	Hunter S. Thompson
A friend of mine recommended Generation of Swine, and while I don't have that on my e-reader, I did have Fear and Loathing. The first chapter was kind of weird because it has been so extensively quoted and remixed that every line in it was familiar, but after that things got good.
2014-06-04	The Wizardry Compiled	Rick Cook
2014-06-05	The Wizardry Consulted	Rick Cook
Old favourites, and a bit of a relaxing nostalgia trip.
2014-06-06	Aluminum Sky: Journals of the Malatora Conflict	Something Awful
This is a collection of microfiction about Terra Malatora written and collected by goons. As expected, the quality is hugely variable, but with most of the stories only a few pages long, if that, it's all over too fast to leave much of an impression, good or bad, beyond "some people are really fixated on dragon dicks".
2014-06-07	Dauntless	John G. Hemry
2014-06-08	Fearless	John G. Hemry
2014-06-09	Courageous	John G. Hemry
2014-06-10	Valiant	John G. Hemry
2014-06-11	Relentless	John G. Hemry
2014-06-12	Victorious	John G. Hemry
I tried Hemry once before, with Stark's War, and couldn't even finish it. I decided to give him another shot with the Lost Fleet series, and I'm glad I did. On the one hand, it's fairly formulaic space opera that does nothing new or exciting with the formula, and the orbital mechanics are, at best, extremely questionable; on the other hand, I did quite enjoy it, and it need not be revolutionary to be fun. (And frankly, at this point I consider it a win if an SF author realizes that things orbit at all rather than just flying from place to place like zeppelins). My biggest complaint is that there is one major subplot -- the relationship between Geary and Desjani -- that made me want to slam my head into the wall until the blessed darkness of unconsciousness claimed me, because everyone involved is variously incredibly stupid, unbelievably childish and petulant, or both. And the fact that that subplot wraps up with Desjani playing stupid head games with Geary and Geary reacting by proposing to her rather than getting the fuck out and seeking out a relationship with a functional adult is (a) a pretty shitty ending and (b) leads me inexorably to the conclusion that a century in cryosleep did, in fact, cause lasting brain damage.
2014-07-01	Heavy Time	C.J. Cherryh
2014-07-02	Hellburner	C.J. Cherryh
2014-07-03	Rimrunners	C.J. Cherryh
2014-07-04	Cuckoo's Egg	C.J. Cherryh
2014-07-05	The Faded Sun: Kesrith	C.J. Cherryh
2014-07-06	The Faded Sun: Shon'Jir	C.J. Cherryh
2014-07-07	The Faded Sun: Kutath	C.J. Cherryh
Another CJC binge! Heavy Time and Hellburner are meant to be read in sequence (and have in fact been re-released as a single volume, Devil to the Belt). They're set before the Treaty of Pell, and along with Rimrunners are (I think) the only A-U books dealing with the Earth Company/Fleet side of things. I'd read them before, but out of order and separated by years; it's nice to finally read them in order. Things make a lot more sense when you've read Heavy Time first. The rest are straightforward rereads. The Faded Sun trilogy remains some of my favourite Cherryh.
2014-07-08	Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!	Richard Feynman
Feynman's memoirs! Quite interesting, and some of the stories remind me of my Dad's stories of his time working as a programmer on a US navy base. A lot of it is funny, but in a "ha ha holy shit this guy is an asshole" way; Feynman was quite the shit-stirrer.
2014-07-09	In Golden Waters: Stories of the Seastead	Something Awful
Another Goon short story collection. I didn't like this one nearly as much as Aluminum Sky. Part of this, I think, is that doesn't have as much to work with; "floating city-state built by, and for, libertarian assholes" just can't compete with "huge underground bunker complex built by, and for, people who have transplanted their brains into giant ten-dicked cybernetic dragon bodies made of magic future aluminum". On top of that, though, the overall quality is lower, and all the worst stories are front-loaded rather than scattered randomly through the book like in AS. Furthermore, there are a lot of stories that are clearly setting something up to be continued in a later chapter that never appears; presumably the author posted the first part and then fucked off and was never seen again. And there's a few stories from the thread that I remember liking that I can't find in this collection. All in all, rather a disappointment after Aluminum Sky.
2014-07-10	If Only They Could Talk	James Herriot
2014-07-11	It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet	James Herriot
2014-07-12	Let Sleeping Vets Lie	James Herriot
2014-07-13	Vet in Harness	James Herriot
2014-07-14	Vets Might Fly	James Herriot
2014-07-15	Vet in a Spin	James Herriot
US readers may know these better as the omnibus editions All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Wise and Wonderful and All Things Bright and Beautiful. These are stories about rural veterinary practice in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1940s, and are mostly autobiographical -- with names changed to protect the guilty, and some embellishment. These too are rereads, but it's been over a decade since I read them last. In the intervening decade I've married one woman who grew up on a farm, and dated another; this has let me soak up some knowledge about farming and given me an even greater appreciation for them.
2014-09-01	Conqueror's Pride	Timothy Zahn
2014-09-02	Conqueror's Heritage	Timothy Zahn
2014-09-03	Conqueror's Legacy	Timothy Zahn
More Zahn rereads. I had forgotten how the viewpoint flips around; the first book is written from the perspective of the humans, the second from that of the conquerors, and the third from both. It works pretty well.
2014-09-04	Dragon and Thief	Timothy Zahn
2014-09-05	Dragon and Soldier	Timothy Zahn
2014-09-06	Dragon and Slave	Timothy Zahn
2014-09-07	Dragon and Herdsman	Timothy Zahn
2014-09-08	Dragon and Judge	Timothy Zahn
2014-09-09	Dragon and Liberator	Timothy Zahn
Not rereads. When I first saw these I went "huh, I didn't know Zahn did any fantasy". Turns out he doesn't; the "dragon" is an alien symbiote that bonds to the protagonist after being shot down by space pirates. YA, so they're uncomplicated and go by really quickly, but are pretty much typical Zahn: not groundbreaking, but fun.
2014-09-10	Most Secret War	Victor Jones
US readers may know this as The Wizard War. Nonfiction about signals intelligence and the development of radar and ECM during WW2, written by the physicist who was ADI (Science) during the war and directed much of the British EW and SIGINT work. A fascinating read; I picked this up mostly for the chapters on the Battle of the Beams, but it is well worth reading the whole thing. This one goes next to Ignition on my shelf, I think.
2014-09-11	Shoggoths in Bloom	Elizabeth Bear
Short story collection. Very eclectic; we've got Norse myth, postcyberpunk murder mysteries, Lovecraft, urban fantasy, and more, often all in the same story. Possibly as a result it was extremely hit and miss for me, but the hits were good enough that I'll be checking out her novels as well.
2014-09-12	The Dragon Never Sleeps	Glen Cook
The best way I can describe this is that it's Warhammer 40,000 with all the stupid parts filed off, and the resulting nub then grown back out until it can support a full story. Keeping track of the various people and planets and the passage of time can be a full-time job, though.
2014-09-13	The Swordbearer	Glen Cook
I enjoyed it while reading it, but it honestly didn't leave much of an impression on me.
2014-09-14	Devices and Desires	K.J. Parker
2014-09-15	Evil for Evil	K.J. Parker
These were recommended to me by a friend who I increasingly suspect has fundamentally incompatible tastes in books. On the surface, these look up my alley. Parker's writing isn't awe-inspiring but is always at least competent, and I am a big fan both of intricate plots of revenge and of characters exiled to an alien culture who must then figure out how to survive in it, which this trilogy has in spades. Unfortunately, the good guys, such as they are, are all idiots. I've mentioned earlier in this thread that I have a distaste for plots that hinge entirely on characters who can talk to each other refusing to; these books have loads of that and the characters in question have some kind of severe brain damage. The love triangle, such as it is, is only the tip of the iceberg. So, on the side of the angels we have a bunch of well-meaning fools who are constantly at odds with one another due to an inability to behave like functional adults. What are they up against? A superintelligent, innovative, supernaturally lucky, sociopathic mass murderer. Welp. (Halfway through the book he gets a sidekick, an equally intelligent and innovative but rather less lucky serial rapist.) If you think the odds look a bit stacked here, they are, and the end result is that the first two books basically consist of the barely likeable characters getting their lives constantly and thoroughly destroyed by the completely unlikeable characters (while praising the latter as their saviours because they've been decieved and mainpulated that thoroughly). It's a bit like watching someone upend a bucket of deformed but still lovable kittens into an industrial blender. It's really unpleasant even if (as I often did while reading these books) you wish all the idiots would just die already. It's made all the worse because you can usually see it coming. Why? Because much of the books are actually written from the perspective of the villain. Now, in general, I don't have a problem with this. I like a story from the point of view of a complex, multifaceted, somewhat sympathetic bad guy. I like it even more when it's ambiguous who the bad guys are, or if anyone can even be called "the bad guys". The problem here is that the villain in question is kind of unbelievable and totally unsympathetic. If this were, say, a thriller about a serial killer, it would be one that spends a chapter on the police as they investigate clues (and end up arresting the wrong guy because the real killer has cunningly framed them), and then three chapters watching over the killer's shoulder in loving detail as he tortures his next victim. It's more than a little squicky. Further complicating matters is that the books are structured around the villain in a way that initially encourages thinking of him as the protagonist. This creates some serious dissonance as you learn more about him and become increasingly unwilling to cheer him on or even watch him work at all. I'm not sure if this was a deliberate thematic choice (in which case, well done, but it makes the books really fucking unpleasant to read), or if Parker actually thinks this character is the protagonist and expects the reader to take their side (in which case that's horrifying and makes me wonder how many dismembered corpses the author has in their freezer).
2014-09-16	Blood and Iron	Elizabeth Bear
I liked this more than the stories in Shoggoths in Bloom that I disliked but less than the ones I liked. Part of this is that I was expecting more Promeathean shenanigans and less Faerie politics. Good, but not what I wanted to read.
2014-11-01	A Shadow of All Night Falling	Glen Cook
2014-11-02	October's Baby	Glen Cook
2014-11-03	All Darkness Met	Glen Cook
These are some of Cook's earlier works, and it shows. They don't read as well as The Black Company, and it's harder to get a handle on the plot or the characters. Close attention is absolutely required, as plot-critical characters, places, and events will be mentioned in passing and then not referred to again until half a book later, and time will skip forward or backwards years, decades, or centuries at a time with the only warning of this being the date in the chapter heading. They also feel very detached, for lack of a better word; the best way I can describe it is that it feels like it wants to be a history more than a story. This doesn't help.
2014-11-04	Berserker Base	Fred Saberhagen
Meh. I like the Berserkers setting, but IMO, Saberhagen isn't that good a writer -- he's an ideaman, like Niven or PKD. And like those two he's at his best writing short stories. This is a collection of four novellas loosely stitched together with a frame story; I greatly preferred the short story collection I read earlier this year. I've also come to the conclusion that I like Laumer's Bolos more, I think.
2014-12-01	Cowboy Feng's Space Bar & Grille	Steven Brust
Not nearly as good as I remembered it. I like unreliable narrators but it wasn't used to nearly as great effect as it could have been. His Draegara books are much better.
2014-12-02	The Phoenix Guards	Steven Brust
2014-12-03	Five Hundred Years After	Steven Brust
The first two books of The Khaavren Romances, a five-book prequel trilogy to his Vlad Taltos series heavily inspired by (and to some extent parodying) Dumas's d'Artagnan Romances, including an excessively verbose and circuitous literary style. The frame story -- a historian turning some of his notes on a planned N-volume treatise on events leading up to and immediately following Adron's Disaster into a series of pop-history novels -- lets the narrator digress in ways that would be out of place in the Vlad books but works brilliantly here. I remembered liking them, what I hadn't remembered was how funny they are.
2015-01-01	The Paths of the Dead	Steven Brust
2015-01-02	The Lord of Castle Black	Steven Brust
2015-01-03	Sethra Lavode	Steven Brust
This wraps up the Khaavren Romances. Paths is probably the weakest book of the series, consisting as it does almost entirely of setup for the next two books, establishing the setting of the Interregnum and introducing new characters; treated as the first third of one long book (as the structure of the series encourages you to do), it holds up a lot better, and the whole thing finishes with a bang -- and very nicely fills in some backstory of the Taltos books. Including everyone's favourite characters, Morrolan and Lady Teldra. Sethra herself remains as much a mystery as ever, though; even the book bearing her name raises more questions than it answers.
2015-01-04	What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions	Randall Munroe
A christmas gift, and the book of the website. Which, honestly, is a lot more entertaining than the comic itself. The book is about 50/50 stuff that's already been featured on the website and completely new material for the book. If you like what-if and want several months of updates worth of material in one go, you should read this; if you don't like it you won't like this book either.
2015-01-05	The Three Musketeers	Alexandre Dumas
Brust is intentionally aping Dumas -- in particular the d'Artagnan Romances -- with his Khaavren Romances, and I remember liking The Count of Monte Cristo as a kid, so I figured I should go to the source. That turned out not to be such a hot idea, and I almost didn't make it through the book. Somehow, Dumas spends twice as many words as Brust in order to say half as much, and the main characters are all thoroughly unlikeable -- something that the author is well aware of, as he frequently apologizes for them as being a product of their time (or words to that effect). The Phoenix Guards was fun; The Three Musketeers was a slog. (Note: my French is not robust enough to read the original, so I read the English version on Project Gutenberg, which doesn't credit a translator. It's possible it would be more enjoyable in the original French or in a different translation, but it would still be a long book about people I dislike.)
2015-01-06	Spirit's Oath	Rachel Aaron
2015-01-07	The Spirit Thief	Rachel Aaron
2015-01-08	The Spirit Rebellion	Rachel Aaron
2015-01-09	The Spirit Eater	Rachel Aaron
2015-01-10	The Spirit War	Rachel Aaron
2015-01-11	Spirit's End	Rachel Aaron
I read the first four books some years ago, only for things to end on a massive cliffhanger with the end of War. Since then she's released a prequel novella (Oath) and the fifth and final book, so it was time to go back and read the whole thing. These books are pretty quick reads and I burned through the whole series in less than a week. They aren't what I was originally looking for when I first read them -- I was expecting something more heist-y and Lies of Locke Lamora-esque -- but they're still a great read in their own right and some seriously cool worldbuilding. And End actually wraps things up very satisfyingly and answers basically all of the questions I had; it's a fantastic finale to the series.
2015-01-12	Swords and Deviltry	Fritz Leiber
2015-01-13	Swords Against Death	Fritz Leiber
The first two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books, a classic series of sword & sorcery short stories featuring a barbarian bard (Fafhrd) and a thief-wizard (the Grey Mouser) -- Pratchett fans will recognize an echo of them in Bravd the Hublander and the Weasel. The first book is pretty weak, consisting entirely of their origin stories -- one for each character, and one for the "Fafrd & Mouser team", as it were -- which can be summed up as "Fafhrd and the Mouser are idiots and get a bunch of people killed including their girlfriends". The second book is a lot more enjoyable, and I'll probably gradually work my way through the rest of the series over the course of the year. That said, part of what prompted me to look these up was reading modern stories inspired by these (among others, like Vance), and it's clear that the Sword & Sorcery genre has come a long way since then.
2015-01-14	Reasons for the Decision of the Associate Chief Justice J.D. Rooke in Meads v. Meads (2012 ABQB 571)	J.D. Rooke
Not, strictly speaking, a book, but a 160-page analysis of "Freemen on the Land" and other, related scams (such as "Sovereign Citizens" in the US) written by a Judge of the Queen's Bench of Alberta who was sick of dealing with this shit. It includes a taxonomy of the scams themselves, prominent conmen writing them (and their distinctive styles), a dissection of the legal arguments they use (and why they fail), and suggested countermeasures that the courts, the lawyers, and the marks themselves can employ. If (as I have) you've seen FotL mentioned in passing (say, in the news, or in D&D) and found yourself completely lost as to what the fuck is going on here, this is a great breakdown of the scam. It's also worth reading this decision from an Ontario court, which cites the above and is much shorter (and funnier). (Although in the end the FotL stuff ends up being irrelevant to the decision; the case is thrown out because you can't charge someone with "resisting arrest" or "assault on a police officer in the course of resisting arrest" if the arrest itself was invalid.)
2015-01-15	More Than Two: a Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory	Franklin Veaux & Eve Rickert
My wife and I have both found the website very helpful, so when we found out that Franklin was kickstarting a book with one of his partners, we jumped on it. The book covers a lot of the same ground as the website, but it's not just a collection of articles from the site in print form; all of the content was written specifically for the book, so it comes together as a coherent whole. Reading this helped both of us kind of crystallize a lot of stuff in our minds, actually pinning down and putting into words stuff that we'd vaguely thought or known or felt. It's also something that I wish I could send back in time to the me of two, six, or fifteen years ago. It's written from a poly perspective, but a lot of the stuff it covers is useful in any relationship, poly or mono.
2015-02-01	The Rhesus Chart	Charles Stross
The latest Laundry novel. I didn't like it as much as The Fuller Memorandum but enjoyed it more than The Apocalypse Codex, and it's nice to see stuff that happened in the earlier books coming back to haunt Bob.
2015-02-02	The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance	Kevin Underhill
Meh. Too much breadth, not enough depth. I don't want to know that these laws exist, I want to know why they exist and whether, and how, they've been enforced! I realize that's a much larger research project but I think it would also be a much better book. In general I seem to have this disappointment with "PYF books", and should probably just avoid them in the future.
2015-02-03	Wasp	Eric Frank Russel
This book has a premise that appeals greatly to my love of cunning strategems and heist-like things: a single man is dropped on a hostile planet, there to blend in with the natives with the ultimate goal of crippling the government and military with a one-man exercise in sabotage and psychological warfare. The title comes from the observation that "a single wasp can kill several adult humans and destroy tonnes of expensive machinery simply by making the driver of the car panic". The book generally lives up to this; it's dated, but both pleasingly heisty and quite funny in places.
2015-02-04	Shadows over Baker Street	Michael Reaves & John Pelan
This is a collection of short stories on the basis of the Cthulhu Mythos crossed with Sherlock Holmes. When it goes right, it goes really right; far and away the high point of the collection is Gaiman's contribution, A Study in Emerald, which I dare not say more about for fear of spoilers. Unfortunately, when it goes wrong you get, instead of a Holmes story in Lovecraft's setting, a Lovecraft story using Doyle's characters. This, I find, is not nearly as enjoyable. Elizabeth Bear continues to be very hit and miss with me; Tiger Tiger was one of the latter type of stories and not a particularly interesting one at that, but her previous foray into Lovecraft, Shoggoths in Bloom, I considered one of the best stories of the collection bearing that name.
2015-02-05	Deep Space Craft: an Overview of Interplanetary Flight	David Doody
David Doody was an engineer on the Voyager missions and is currently engineering and ops lead for Cassini, so he knows his stuff. This book is exactly what it says on the tin: a broad overview of how deep space probes work, starting with interplanetary communication and moving on to navigation and tracking, attitude control, propulsion, the physical structure of the spacecraft, sensors and science experiments, and finally wrapping up with a look at the overall procedure that goes from an initial proposal to a launched and operational probe. The first few chapters are great, but it gets really dry once it starts talking about sensors. Still a pro-read if you're interested in space, but Ignition was much more readable. It's also made me want to play KSP again and install kOS so I can write safing routines for all of my probes. By design, it's more broad than deep, but it goes more in depth than I expected and it is meticulously cited if you want to go in-depth on any of the topics it covers.
2015-02-06	Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes	Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein
This one was a christmas present from my boss. Short, entertaining, had some jokes I hadn't heard before, but all in all not a lot of substance to it. It could work as an "ok, which fields of philosophy sound interesting to me", but unlike Deep Space Craft it doesn't come with extensive citations, so you have to hunt down further reading on your own. It does make a nice, light break between second half of Deep Space Craft and the next book in my queue, the equally dry The Polyamorists Next Door.
2015-03-01	The Polyamorists Next Door	Elizabeth Sheff
An ethnography of polyamorous families with children, this is repeatedly cited in More Than Two and is particularly relevant to my wife and I. The results are pretty much what we expected (to boil down an entire book to a single sentence): kids in poly families grow up pretty much the same as kids in mono families, but may have to deal with disapproval from outside the family. Some of the stories are pretty adorable, actually. Apart from that, the book also contains accounts of the author's own experiences with polyamory and her fights with the IRB to get her studies approved, and both are big buckets of :wtf:. In the latter case, she had to jump through many more hoops, and clear higher bars for approval, than colleagues making essentially the same studies but of monogamous or single-parent households, because apparently the non-mongamous aspect makes it "sex research" regardless of what she's actually studying. In the former, she tells the story of a long-term relationship with a guy who...honestly, it sounds like a douchebag with a fantasy of having a harem of subservient women who freaked the fuck out when he realized that his girlfriend would have a much easier time finding additional partners than he would, and that some of those partners would be (horrors) other men. I don't want to get all scotsman fallacy here, but the end result kind of falls down on the "ethical" part of "ethical non-monogamy".
2015-03-02	The M-1 Rocket Engine	Walter F. Dankhoff
A technical report rather than a book per se, this is short, dense, and extremely dry. Had it ever been built (individual components were tested, but the whole engine was never assembled) and used, this engine would have been the second stage engine for a manned mission to Mars, powering the departure from LEO of a 500 tonne spacecraft. It dwarfed the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V and ran so hot that the 350°C gas from the turbopump was used to cool most of the engine bell. This report was written when M-1 research was still ongoing. Wikipedia has the epilogue: throughout the 1960s, M-1 funding was cut to support Apollo, finally being defunded entirely in 1965. The complete engine was never built.
2015-03-03	Good Omens	Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
2015-03-04	Equal Rites	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-05	Pyramids	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-06	Small Gods	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-07	Feet of Clay	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-08	The Fifth Elephant	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-09	Thief of Time	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-10	Going Postal	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-11	Thud	Terry Pratchett
2015-03-12	Making Money	Terry Pratchett
A Pratchett binge, for obvious reasons. RIP Sir Terry Pratchett. For this I picked out books that I remembered liking but weren't my absolute favourites that I frequently reread. It's interesting, I think, to see the overall arc of the Discworld like this. The Things from the Dungeon Dimensions are completely absent from later books, and magic and the gods have a greatly diminished role in general. Overall the world becomes more technological and less magical over the course of the series, and there's increased appearance of reskinned real-world political issues and technologies. Of these, I think the early ones have aged most poorly -- Equal Rites and Pyramids were written when he was still getting a handle on what the Discworld actually is -- but the later ones are weaker out of the gate, especially Making Money. Unusually, it's the middle Discworld books I like most. With most series, either the first books are the best and then there's a steady downward decline as the author runs out of ideas, or the first books are the worst but things gradually improve as the author hones their skills.
2015-04-01	Mélusine	Sarah Monette
2015-04-02	The Virtu	Sarah Monette
There's two more books in the series, but I'm calling it here; The Virtu had a relatively happy ending and I don't want to see what fresh tortures the author has in store for these characters in book 3. I'm just going to tell myself that Felix and Mildmay sort out their issues and, I don't know, maybe form a stable Z with Gideon and Mehitabel and everyone lives happily ever after.
2015-04-03	Deadman Switch	Timothy Zahn
This kind of reminds me of Angelmass, except instead of a cosmic phenomenon that makes the people near it more virtuous, it's a cosmic phenomenon that cannot be navigated except by the recently dead. The plot twist is easy to see coming but it's a fun ride nonetheless, like most Zahn.
2015-04-04	The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark	Carl Sagan
Meh. I think I went into this with unrealistic expectations; I was expecting a history of science, pseudoscience, and superstition and how the former has (mostly) supplanted the latter two. Instead this is more of a book-long argument in favour of the importance of science and science education, which I agree with but isn't actually enjoyable to read. I suspect I'm not the target audience.
2015-04-05	Heirs of Empire	David Weber
2015-04-06	In Fury Born	David Weber
Schlock, but entertaining schlock, and I needed to just turn my brain off for a bit.
2015-04-07	The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination	John Joseph Adams
The standout story for me was "Laughter at the Academy: A Field Study In The Genesis Of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder" by Seanan McGuire. The overall style actually put me very much in mind of Narbonic by Shaenon Garrity, and I would not be surprised to find out that was an influence. The same author has written (as Mira Grant) a few books that I've had in my queue for a while, and after reading this, I'm increasing their priority. "Rocks Fall" by Naomi Novik was also a good read and lends more weight to my friends badgering me to read Temeraire. Third place is probably "Letter to the Editor" by David D. Levine. The low point of the collection was "The Space Between" by Diana Gabaldon. It's thematically inconsistent with the rest of the collection and way too long. I'm not sure why it's in here at all. Runner-up (down?) was "Ancient Equations" by LA Banks, which reads like the journal of a sexually frustrated conspiracy theorist -- which may be what they were going for, but as with KJ Parker earlier this year that leaves me saying "well done, you've written something that's really unpleasant to read, now fuck off".
2015-04-08	The Warrior's Apprentice	Lois McMaster Bujold
2015-04-09	The Vor Game	Lois McMaster Bujold
A while ago I tried Shards of Honour and couldn't get through it. The Warrior's Apprentice is a more enjoyable introduction to the series, and I enjoyed both books well enough, although neither will ever be numbered among my favourites. As usual, I don't have a lot to say about books that I neither loved nor hated.
2015-04-10	Doomstalker	Glen Cook
2015-04-11	Warlock	Glen Cook
2015-04-12	Ceremony	Glen Cook
Wow, Glen Cook is all over the map, isn't he? I loved The Black Company, hated Garret, PI, and found The Dread Empire a slog. This? This actually reminds me a bit of CJ Cherryh, which is never a bad thing. He does some of the same casual skipping forward across years that shows up a bit in The Dragon Never Sleeps and a lot in Dread Empire, but not enough to make the book hard to follow (as in the former) or enjoy (as in the latter).
2015-04-13	The Last Wish	Andrzej Sapkowski
The first Witcher short story collection. Pretty good stuff, and a good translation; I'll definitely check out the novels at some point. This also explains where the opening FMV from the first Witcher game comes from, since it seems to have nothing to do with the game itself -- it's a surprisingly faithful recreation of the climax of the first story in this collection.
2015-04-14	Luck in the Shadows	Lynn Flewelling
2015-04-15	Stalking Darkness	Lynn Flewelling
Fantasy thieves who are also super double secret spies for the queen! This breaks no new ground but is plenty fun, and I also think the career of the Rhiminée Cat would make a fantastic Thief 2 mission pack. This is also the second pair of books this month to feature unrequited gay wizard romance (Mélusine and The Virtu were the first), which is an unusual coincidence. The books are larger than they look at first, and the second book neatly closes out the first major story arc, so I think I'll take a break from these and read Roads of Heaven to start May.
2015-05-01	Five-Twelfths of Heaven	Melissa Scott
2015-05-02	Silence in Solitude	Melissa Scott
2015-05-03	The Empress of Earth	Melissa Scott
Space opera where FTL drives work by way of "the music of heaven". Pilots are conductor-mystics, engineers are organists. It starts with an inheritance dispute, a polyamorous marriage-of-convenience, and space pirates, and never really slows down after that. The last book was not what I expected, but in a good way, and the ending was quite satisfying. Definitely going to look for more books by her.
2015-05-04	Palace of Illusions	Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
A novelization of the Mahabharata (which I have heard of but never read), from the perspective of Panchali (the wife of five of the main characters in the original epic). Good, but kind of stressful to read; I find tragedies easier the less you know about them in advance, and this one you can see coming from a long way off even if you haven't read the original. A horrible Rube Goldberg machine of vengeance where you insert Unforgivable Insult into slot A, and three generations later pipe Q dispenses Everyone You Love Is Dead.
2015-05-05	Rockets and People, Volume 1	Boris Chertok
The first volume of Chertok's massive four-volume history of the Soviet rocket program, from the 1920s to the fall of the USSR. A combination autobiography, collection of memoirs, and comprehensive history of the space program, the first volume extends from Chertok's childhood and prewar work as an aircraft electrician, to the end of Soviet rocket research in East Germany a few years after WW2, when they pack up and move everyone and everything back into Russia. It's not as smooth a read as Ignition!, but is still fascinating. The first volume is primarily concerned with aviation, as Chertok didn't become heavily involved in rocketry until the war, but the BI-1 rocket-powered interceptor sees a fair amount of discussion. One thing that I found fascinating was reminders of what aeroplane design was like in those eras by mentions of when it changed. For example, he describes their first experience designing a plane with these fancy new "flaps" that let it change the wing cross-section for takeoff and landing -- thus reminding the reader that everything mentioned prior to that in the book didn't have them! I was stoked to start Volume 2, which is where things really get off the ground -- so to speak -- but it's a double-page PDF which my e-reader chokes on, so I took a break while figuring out a way to reformat it.
2015-05-06	The Hot Rock	Donald E. Westlake
The first Dortmunder book! The best way I can describe Dortmunder's crew is that they are the A-Team of thievery -- which is to say, they're very good at what they do, very unlucky, and more than a little crazy. By the end of the book they've conducted six heists, cons, or raids of various kinds and started work on a seventh and still haven't really gotten what they were after. It's rather more slapstick than, say, the Lies of Locke Lamora.
2015-07-01	Rockets and People, Volume 2: Creating a Rocket Industry	Boris Chertok
2015-07-02	Rockets and People, Volume 3: Hot Days of the Cold War	Boris Chertok
These, for me, are where the meat is. Volume 1 was interesting, but these two volumes deal mainly with the R-7 (more commonly known today as the Soyuz rocket) and UR-500 (Proton) rockets, and the many missions launched on them -- primarily the Sputnik, Luna, Mars, and Venera probes, and the Vostok and Voskhod manned missions.
2015-07-03	The Rook	Daniel O'Malley
I needed a break before tackling volume 4 and a friend recommended this. I loved it. The one sentence summary sounds a lot like Stross's Laundry books, but those have a kind of "Pratchett does Lovecraft" feel, whereas this is a lot less Lovecraft and a lot more X-Men. It can get a bit expository at times (and feels more than a little "I've written all these cool setting notes and want to show them off" when it does), but it also has a convenient built-in explanation for it -- the expository text is the contents of letters the main character is reading, written by her predecessor in an attempt to give her a crash course in how to be the Rook. The result is a rather pleasant oscillation between present-day events, explanations of the setting and characters, and reminisces about the previous Rook's missions. My biggest complaint is that, if you call the base of operations "The Rookery", the rank should be Rook as in birds, not Rook as in chess. I was expecting a rank structure based on corvidae and instead I got one based on chess pieces.
2015-07-04	Rockets and People, Volume 4: The Moon Race	Boris Chertok
This, honestly, is where it rather bogs down. After the Luna probes -- already well covered in volumes 2 and 3 -- the USSR didn't really participate that much in the moon race. There were four failed N-1 launches, which get described here, but for the most part the book is focused on the administrative and political reasons behind the failure of the N-1 and the Soviet moon program in general, which I don't find nearly as interesting as the technical aspects. A number of interesting programs happen in this era -- the Salyut and Mir manned stations, the Energiya heavy lifter, and the Buran spaceplane -- but as Chertok was only tangentially involved in these, they get only a few paragraphs each. On the whole, Rockets and People was worth reading, but I think if I had known going in how long it would take I might have sought out something a bit more focused on the rockets and less on the people.
2015-08-01	David Starr, Space Ranger	Isaac Asimov
2015-08-02	Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids	Isaac Asimov
2015-08-03	Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus	Isaac Asimov
2015-08-04	Lucky Starr and the Sun of Mercury	Isaac Asimov
2015-08-05	Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter	Isaac Asimov
2015-08-06	Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn	Isaac Asimov
A series of kid's SF from the 50s, I had the middle four books growing up but never the first or last. Now I finally have all six, so it was time to read them. These were initially published as "Paul French" -- there was talk about making a TV series of them, and Asimov didn't want his name anywhere near television -- but he didn't try very hard to conceal who the author was, and after those plans were scrapped, later printings were under his own name. These versions have prefaces that the ones I had as a child lacked, discussing how our knowledge of the solar system has changed since these were written; for example, we now know that Venus has no oceans and Jupiter's moon Io is a volcanic hellhole rather than a relatively serene ball of methane snow. Re-reading them as an adult, two things in particular stood out: - There's a lot of science facts inserted into the narrative. It's hard to read these and not come away with at least some knowledge of astronomy, the solar system, and physics. And while they aren't always inserted particularly smoothly, they never bring the book to a grinding halt for a science lecture either. - There are no women. I don't just mean "all of the pro- and antagonists are male"; I mean in all six books the only female character who gets page time is an engineer's wife in Oceans of Venus, who has a line or two. Apart from that, there's a space pirate who mentions that some of them have wives and children back in the asteroids and...that's it.
2015-08-07	Dream Park	Larry Niven
2015-08-08	The Barsoom Project	Larry Niven
The Dream Park books are basically commercial LARPing + murder mystery, but they predate organized LARPing (and indeed some modern LARP organizations take names and procedures from the Dream Park books!), and this being near-future SF, the game is augmented with holographic projections, force fields, and the like, with the GM controlling a multi-acre playing area and coordinating dozens of actors from a central control room. You end up with a sort of layer cake of plot, with the in-character progress of the game, out of character interactions between the players and NPCs, and murder investigation all occupying different layers -- and inevitably the murder investigation overlaps with the game in some manner. Dream Park and The Barsoom Project were rereads; Voodoo Game was new. And I didn't like it; I read a few chapters in and it completely failed to engage me. It leaves me wondering if the first two books would suffer the same fate if I were reading them for the first time now, rather than getting that hit of nostalgia when I open them up.
2015-08-09	Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers	Mary Roach
This is not really a book about what happens to our bodies after we die -- chemically and biologically, I mean -- but about what people do with dead bodies. Some of the book is devoted to various forms of funeral rites, including a new and rather promising approach where they free-dry the corpse, pulverize it, put it in a biodegradable urn, and plant a tree over it, which sounds much more to my taste than either traditional cremation or being interred whole -- but most of it is about the medical and scientific uses to which we put human corpses.
2015-08-10	The Girl with All the Gifts	M.R. Carey
Recommended both in this thread and on IRC, recommendation was extremely solid. Loved it. As usual I don't have a lot to say about books I really liked. Even if you hate "zombie books" (and god knows there are enough terrible ones to make anyone hate them), this is worth picking up.
2015-08-11	Feed	Seanan McGuire
2015-08-12	Deadline	Seanan McGuire
2015-08-13	Blackout	Seanan McGuire
After Stiff and Gifts I decided it was time to keep riding this corpse train and finally read McGuire's Newsflesh trilogy. These are more books with zombies but they aren't zombie books, if that makes sense; in this setting the zombie apocalypse happened ~25 years ago, and civilization didn't collapse, it just changed. Blood tests to get indoors, licensing (with mandatory firearm training and ownership) to travel in the countryside, and suchlike. As such, this is actually a political/conspiracy thriller in a post-zombie America. The computer security bits strained my suspension of disbelief a bit. If I were a virologist or biologist, the biology bits would probably strain it a lot. But despite that these books were fun as hell and I enjoyed every page.
2015-08-14	San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats	Seanan McGuire
A novella in the Newsflesh setting, detailing the first fully documented large-scale outbreak of the Kellis-Amberlee virus: San Diego Comic Con, 2014. Good, but you don't really have time to get fully invested in it before it's over, and if you've read the main Newsflesh books, you kind of don't want to, because you know how it ends.
2015-08-15	Cold Magic	Kate Elliot
2015-08-16	Cold Fire	Kate Elliot
2015-08-17	Cold Steel	Kate Elliot
Kate Elliot keeps coming up in recommendations, and I tried her Jaran books and did not like the first one. I decided to give her another try with the Spiritwalker trilogy, and while I liked it enough to read through it, I don't think I'd recommend it and I probably won't be reading any more of her work. The first book I found repeatedly jarring because I consistently failed to build a working mental model of most of the characters. I don't know if this is what actually happened, but it kind of felt like she wrote the book out of order, during which time her model of the characters changed, and then stitched it together, resulting in dramatic changes in tone even within a single scene. In the second and third books this largely goes away, revealing the other major problem I had with it: the main character never wins. In any conflict, the best she can hope for is to escape with her goals unmet. There is no ally who will not betray her, no protector who will not sacrifice her, and no safe haven that does not conceal an ambush. And this applies to everything from small verbal skirmishes to the climatic showdowns at the ends of books 1 and 2, where, for example, her starting goal is "take revenge on those who betrayed me", this gets quickly revised to "get my family out of here safely", and even at that she fails. It does actually end on a very upbeat and hopeful note, but it's a long and wearying grind to get there.
2015-09-01	Homes and Other Black Holes	Dave Barry
Found this while doing some cleaning and read it in passing -- it's quite short, and like all Barry goes by very quickly. Still funny, and especially relevant right now with my mom moving into a new house. I prefer his columns to his books in general, though.
2015-09-02	The Dracula Tape	Fred Saberhagen
The frame story here is that Dracula -- having survived his supposed death at the end of the novel -- has tracked down the descendants of the Harkers in an attempt to tell his side of the story and set the record straight. This book does a pretty excellent job of showing how a lot of Dracula's actions in the original novel can be explained as genuine misunderstandings or mistakes (such as might be made, for example, by a centuries-old nobleman used to living in isolation trying to reintegrate into society), inflated by fear and superstition in the retelling, and portraying Van Helsing as a murderous lunatic, while at the same time showing Dracula himself as someone who, while thinking of himself as a genuinely good guy, can't quite bring himself to view ordinary humans as people rather than livestock or, at best, favoured pets. Apparently he teams up with Sherlock Holmes in later books, which sounds just crazy enough to be awesome.
2015-09-03	Catch-22	Joseph Heller
A black comedy about WW2 where everyone is insane. Funny, but gets increasingly dark towards the end. Reminded me a lot of Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, actually.
2015-09-04	The Blind Owl	Sadeq Hedayat & tr. Iraj Bashiri
Taken at face value, as a novella about a destitute painter's opium-fuelled descent into madness, this is a difficult and not particularly rewarding read. According to the commentary, it is actually a brilliantly constructed allegory for Buddhist philosophy and beliefs, but one that requires years of study of said philosophy, the author's history and reading habits, and the text itself in order to unravel. Since I do not have the time or the inclination for such a study, and my understanding of the work in light of this is based entirely on blind acceptance of Bashiri's analysis with no way of verifying or refuting it, it remains unrewarding.
2015-09-05	The Martian	Andy Weir
I haven't read a proper castaway story in years. As usual, you can see the hand of the author setting things up for the protagonist -- the potatoes here, the crates full of suspiciously useful supplies in The Swiss Family Robinson, and so forth -- but that doesn't detract from the fun. You've never in any doubt that he'll survive, but the enjoyment is in finding out how.
2015-09-06	Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead	Tom Stoppard
What do minor characters do when off stage? Have existential crises, apparently. It was funny, but I think I'd have gotten more out of it if I'd read or seen Hamlet recently -- I kept having to context switch to look up characters and plot points I'd forgotten.
2015-09-07	Theft: A Love Story	Peter Carey.
It's not bad, it just completely failed to take or hold my interest at any point. It doesn't help that I don't like any of the characters.
2015-09-08	Germline	T.C. McCarthy
You know, I think a lot of interesting stuff could be done with the idea of a "subterrene war" (as the trilogy is called). Strategic manouvers in three dimensions, limited by the speed of a boring machine and impossible to hide from seismometers. Cramped firefights that either side can retreat from with impunity by collapsing the tunnel. A surface patrolled by drones and automated defences that no human can escape. The constant psychological weight of never seeing the sky. This is the picture painted by the first few chapters. Unfortunately, after that, McCarthy completely forgets about the original premise, everything moves on to the surface and what we get is boilerplate MilSF from its plasma artillery to its vat-grown supersoldiers. Meh.
2015-09-09	Sled Driver: Piloting the World's Fastest Jet	Brian Shul
You won't find any details about the Blackbird's capabilities or specific missions in this book, but it does a good job of getting across what it felt like to fly it. Short, though. I think the main draw of the book is meant to be the pictures, which are amazing and take up about a third of the book. At some point I'd like to read something more detailed about the Blackbird's design and operational history, though.
2015-10-01	The Departure	Neal Asher
Um, wow. Were the Polity books this heavy-handed and overtly libertarian and I just didn't notice? Or has Asher just started caring less about keeping his politics out of his fiction? The main character is a Randian superman, a child prodigy who grew into a genius polymath (and cybernetically enhanced master of several martial arts styles and expert marksman, of course). But rather than being able to take his natural course and become a Captain of Industry™, he was declared a Societal Asset and forced to work for the government. When he rebelled against this, they erased his memories and sent him for execution -- but he saw this coming and set up an intricate system of failsafes that would see him free and more dangerous than ever, ready to enact his revenge. That's the setup and backstory. The actual book is revenge porn as he sets out to bring down the one world government, which is of course omnipresent and all-powerful but also so inefficient and corrupt that one man can plausibly destroy it (and so incompetent that billions will inevitably die in the next few years anyways, so it's OK if the main character sets off armageddon). There also some jabs at contemporary socialized medicine in there. I think I can safely not read the next two books.
2015-10-02	Wool	Hugh Howey
2015-10-03	Shift	Hugh Howey
2015-10-04	Dust	Hugh Howey
Holy fuck, I'm reading a lot of soul-crushing books this year. This is another one where I'm constantly going oh shit oh shit oh shit because I know any temporary success the protagonists may be achieving is, indeed, temporary. It ends up on an upbeat note, kind of, but honestly I'm not optimistic about their chances (or the fate of the other silos). The theme of these books can be pretty well summed up as "The person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." Hell, the entire second book is basically about what happens when smart, dangerous, powerful people panic.
2015-10-05	Broken Angels	Richard Morgan
I had a persistent feeling of deja vu reading this. I'd swear I've never read it before -- I have Altered Carbon and Woken Furies in hardcopy, but didn't have a copy of Broken Angels until this year. Maybe I read a plot summary before starting Furies? Anyways, it's a typical Kovacs novel, more or less. A simple job gets progressively less simple, there are double- and triple-crosses, some people get horribly fucked up, Kovacs needs a new sleeve. A fun ride, but I didn't like it as much as the other two, I think. I picked up Black Man along with Angels, and I've had Market Forces on my bookshelves for years -- maybe I'll get around to reading them before the end of the year. For now, though, I'm reading The New Space Opera, a short story collection.
2015-11-01	The New Space Opera	Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan
A mixed bag, and more miss than hit, honestly. My favourite was probably Who's Afraid of Wolf 359? by Ken MacLeod; what I've read of his novels didn't do much for me, but I really liked this. The low point was -- unsurprisingly -- Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons. Like Hyperion, he spends so much time pointing out that he's read the classics that he forgets to do anything else.
2015-11-02	The Things They Carried	Tim O'Brien
A semi-autobiographical collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. Powerful stuff. Also prompted me to do some reading on the war, which I knew almost nothing about -- it's not really covered in Canadian history classes, or wasn't when I was in school.
2015-11-03	Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie
2015-11-04	Ancillary Sword	Ann Leckie
2015-11-05	Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie
I can see why everyone loves these. This year has involved a lot of books ranging from "meh" to "it's ok, I guess", but very few that I greatly enjoyed and was hugely enthusiastic about. These are in the latter category. I think I actually liked Ancillary Sword the most overall, although my favourite individual scenes were in Justice (specifically, the bits where Justice of Toren is carrying on multiple conversations at once and the narrative is interleaving all of them). They're all great, though.
2015-12-01	The Spirit Lens	Carol Berg
2015-12-02	The Soul Mirror	Carol Berg
2015-12-03	The Daemon Prism	Carol Berg
This is a slow burn that doesn't really get going until halfway through the second book, but once it does, oh boy. It's not going to make it into my top-books list, but it's nice to see Berg is still writing good stuff that isn't Lighthouse or Song of the Beast, and this trilogy mixes things up a bit more than her earlier work, which I felt was kind of rehashing the same basic plot structure each time.
2015-12-04	A Review of Criticality Accidents, 2000 revision	Los Alamos National Laboratory
https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf Wow. People are stupid. The takeaway here is that (a) there is no safety system so foolproof that someone won't disable it and (b) plutonium solutions really want to kill you. I now know more about criticality physics, too!
2015-12-05	Mating Flight	Bard Bloom
2015-12-06	World In My Claws	Bard Bloom
These were an unexpected gem; I know the author, but didn't know anything about these books until I saw them getting all excited over Mating Flight making it onto the Nebula reading list. I enjoyed the shit out of them and powered through both in two days, though. They're basically a fantasy portal exploration story, science fiction alien invasion story, and romantic comedy where all the protagonists are dragons. Adolescent dragons, no less -- the twelve-year-long titular mating flight is the final ritual that marks entry to full adulthood -- and they are quite believably flawed and bad at relationships and at being mature adults. Which would normally drive me a bit crazy, but they do learn from their mistakes and get better at things over the course of the books. The first book drops a bunch of nasty surprises on them and sets up some big problems; the second one largely involves them trying to fix the things they broke in the first book.
2015-12-07	Roadside Picnic	Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky
I played STALKER before ever opening this up, so a lot of the content was already familiar to me. Good to see where it all came from, though, and it's a much smoother read than most Russian literature I've looked at -- not sure whether to credit the Strugatsky brothers or their translator for that. The foreword and afterword were quite interesting; the former by Ursula K. LeGuin, on the reception of cold-war-era Russian SF in the US, and the latter by Boris Strugatsky on the troubles they had getting it published in the USSR in the first place -- apparently the original Russian edition was quite badly butchered.
2015-12-08	His Majesty's Dragon	Naomi Novik
2015-12-09	Throne of Jade	Naomi Novik
It's Honor Harrington in 1800 England with dragons in place of both spaceships and treecats, basically. Fun, but I do worry that like Harrington it will get less fun as it goes on.
2015-12-10	Departmental Ditties	Rudyard Kipling
2015-12-11	Barrack-Room Ballads	Rudyard Kipling
These are two of his earliest collections, and reading them, I think I like his later work a lot more. The fact that he's trying to render what he thinks of as a lower-class soldier's accent in text doesn't help the readability any, either. The introductory essay by George Orwell was worth the price of admission, though.
2016-01-01	Black Powder War	Naomi Novik
With this I think I'm all done with i{Temeraire} for a while. They've spent the last two books faffing about in Asia and honestly not doing much, and while I can see how this serves to set up the long-term conflict of spoiler{equal rights for dragons in Britain}, the series i{starts} by getting you all pumped up for the Napoleonic Wars and I'd like to get back to that.
2016-01-02	Atomic Accidents	James Mahaffey
Nonfiction about atomic accidents throughout history and, incidentally, about the history of nuclear physics, power, and weapons. It ranges from the story of the radium cave prospectors in the 1800s to the Fukushima disaster a few years ago. It covers a lot of the same ground as i{A Review of Criticality Accidents}, but is a lot more readable without being sensationalized (although the preface does acknowledge that, like the locomotive crash shows of the age of steam, most of the audience is here for the spectacle). It also covers assorted non-criticality accidents, and goes to some trouble to establish the broader context and root causes of each accident. I've occasionally said that I wanted to read more nonfiction like i{Ignition!}, and I think this fits the bill. :tipshat: to the FOOF thread for the recommendation.
2016-01-03	Trading in Danger	Elizabeth Moon
2016-01-04	Marque and Reprisal	Elizabeth Moon
2016-01-05	Engaging the Enemy	Elizabeth Moon
2016-01-06	Command Decisions	Elizabeth Moon
2016-01-07	Victory Conditions	Elizabeth Moon
The Vatta's War series. The romance subplot towards the end felt kind of tacked on, but overall this is some solid, enjoyable space opera. Don't have much to say here, really.
2016-01-08	Parasite	Seanan McGuire
2016-01-09	Symbiont	Seanan McGuire
2016-01-10	Chimera	Seanan McGuire
I picked this up primarily on the strength of her Newsflesh trilogy, which made my best-of list last year. I didn't enjoy this nearly as much, though. Largely, this is because the main character is very, well, passive and helpless. She spends most of the first two books being shuttled from one prison to another without putting up any sort of effective resistance and gets drugged into unconsciousness so frequently that after a while it starts being funny, which I don't think is what McGuire was going for. She does realize this and makes an effort to improve, especially in the last book, but after the level of competence and proactivity demonstrated by Georgia & Shaun Mason in Newsflesh, Sal is kind of frustrating to read, and it feels like a lot less actually happens despite occupying roughly the same amount of book.
2016-02-01	The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Volume 1	tr. Powys Mathers & tr. J.C. Mardrus
The M&M translation isn't the best, but this is the version I had growing up and I always planned to one day read all four volumes (we only had the first one). These are out of copyright and available as PDFs, although none of them will work well out of the box on an e-reader and, annoyingly, none of them are quite typeset the same way either, so if you're cropping or repaginating them, you need to tune the script differently for each volume. This volume opens with a number of short and exciting stories before getting terribly bogged down in the tale of the barber, which then occupies most of the rest of the volume. Also, if there's a unifying theme to these stories, it's this: - Don't get married; your wife will cheat on you with every man in the city, your husband will lose everything you own in ill-advised business ventures, or if by some miracle neither of these happen, one of you will be framed by a jealous rival and killed by the other. - Djinni are colossal assholes and should be avoided whenever possible, even when they're ostensibly trying to help.
2016-02-02	Planetfall	Emma Newman
A good but unpleasant read, and not really what I was expecting or looking for. This was described as a "big dumb object" story, but to me what appeals about a BDO is the discovery, the way there's a new mystery or device or alien or just something cool around each corner. SF authors are often (and with some justice) accused of putting setting ahead of plot or characters, but a BDO story is a place where that vice can be indulged to the fullest. Instead, this is a story primarily about a group of religious fanatics living in the shadow of a BDO but refusing to do anything with it.
2016-02-03	Fortune's Pawn	Rachel Aaron
2016-02-04	Honour's Knight	Rachel Aaron
2016-02-05	Heaven's Queen	Rachel Aaron
MilSF heavily seasoned with romance. Also features power-armoured knights armed with thermite swords fighting zombie space velociraptors. I don't think is as good as the later books in the Legend of Eli Monpress, but I enjoyed the shit out of it.
2016-02-06	The Green and the Grey	Timothy Zahn
Timothy Zahn writes urban fantasy? Well, kind of. This is "sci-fantasy", in that it's functionally indistinguishable from urban fantasy in almost every way, but there's SF backstory/explanations for most things. There's a pretty obvious Romeo and Juliet influence, except instead of feuding Veronan nobles it's feuding New Yorker dryads and gargoyles, with the humans caught in the middle.
2016-02-07	Libriomancer	Jim C. Hines
2016-02-08	Codex Born	Jim C. Hines
2016-02-09	Unbound	Jim C. Hines
Urban fantasy where the central conceit is that there exists a secret society of wizards who can pull objects out of books. Anything that can fit through the page is fair game, but the more people have read the book (and the more recently), the easier it is and the more powerful the objects you extract from it are. Half the fun for me is (since the author seems to share a lot of my taste in books) trying to identify what book something is from when it's not explicitly stated. It's also nice seeing characters who are not complete idiots about relationships and manage to not completely fuck it up, even when it's something new and unconventional to them. Also, unlike most UF in this vein that I've read (e.g. Dresden Files), where the protagonist starts out as a loose cannon at odds with the magical authorities over some past disagreement and gradually reconciles with them, in this Isaac is an active and trusted member of the secret society right from the start. Who then has a bitter falling-out with them and is in open conflict with them by the end of book 3, albeit with some pretty heavy justification. At least it's going in the opposite direction than usual. Unfortunately, I forgot to load the fourth and final book, Revisionary, onto my e-reader before leaving on a business trip.
2016-02-10	This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It	David Wong
The sequel to John Dies at the End. I didn't like this nearly as much, actually; it holds together better as a coherent story (unsurprising, as it was written as a single book rather than as a bunch of serialized novellas), but it's more graphic and not as funny. John Dies was funny but also managed to be genuinely creepy in places, while Spiders is mostly just gory. The eulogy at the end was pretty great, though.
2016-03-01	The Fall	Garth Nix
2016-03-02	Castle	Garth Nix
2016-03-03	Aenir	Garth Nix
2016-03-04	Above the Veil	Garth Nix
2016-03-05	Into Battle	Garth Nix
2016-03-06	The Violet Keystone	Garth Nix
Nix's Seventh Tower series. Needed some light reading on a plane trip and decided to knock off the YA category. It's not bad, but seems to be written for a younger audience than Sabriel or Shade's Children. Meh.
2016-03-07	Uprooted	Naomi Novik
Novik needs to stop writing Temeraire and write more stuff like this, holy shit. Head and shoulders above her other novels, and I can see why a friend of mine described it as "the reason [my book] has no shot at the Nebula this year".
2016-03-08	Trouble and her Friends	Melissa Scott
It's the queer feminist version of The Shockwave Rider, basically. It has what I think of as that "vintage cyberpunk" feel, which is really optimistic technologically and really pessimistic socially and environmentally. It's interesting to see what it's optimistic or pessimistic about, though (the book was written in the 90s and is set sometime around 2040-2050). For example, direct optical interfaces are ubiquitous, and neurojacks are a proven and increasingly popular technology, but omnipresent wireless connectivity is nowhere to be seen. The US coasts have been devastated by pollution, but global climate change isn't on the radar at all. Being a woman in tech still gets you a lot of shit, but being openly gay makes you a social outcast almost everywhere and AIDs is still a death sentence and an omnipresent, terrifying threat. It does feel like some subplots were very heavily hinted and then not followed up on at all, like Coigne's unusual level of interest in the intrusion. I didn't enjoy it as much as a story as The Roads of Heaven, but it's more fun to dissect.
2016-03-09	Mighty Good Road	Melissa Scott
I think this is the weakest of the Melissa Scott books I've read, but that's not to say it's bad. It actually reminds me a lot of much of Zahn's work, but it involves very little in the way of direct confrontation, and ends with a bunch of forensics work rather than a showdown with drawn blasters and then the protagonists decide that maybe the past really is better off buried, which is not at all typical for the genre.
2016-03-10	Sex in the Sea	Marah J. Hardt
Nonfiction about the reproductive habits of various sorts of sea life. Just as weird and interesting (and, occasionally, horrifying) as I was expecting. The contents of our oceans are, frankly, much, much weirder and more alien than most of the aliens that appear in SF.
2016-03-11	Revisionary	Jim C. Hines
The last Magic Ex Libris book. Holy shit does he end the series with a bang. It does kind of feel like the limits of libriomancy in general and Isaac's powers in specific get less and less well-defined as the series goes on, but not enough to really bother me.
2016-04-01	The Codebreakers	David Kahn
A lot of text is spent on the history of cryptography, back to ~2kBC Egypt, and its discussion of modern crypto focuses heavily on American efforts during WW1 and WW2, in contrast to most other books on crypto/sigint I've read, which focus more on the British side. That said, it shows its age; it predates the major declassifications of the 70s and 90s, so there are some huge (and, to a modern reader, glaring) gaps in the historical account, and it doesn't discuss modern (computerized, public-key) cryptosystems at all. Interesting, but hasn't aged well.
2016-04-02	The Traitor Baru Cormorant	Seth Dickinson
This book rarely surprised me; I could generally see where things were going well in advance. (From Seth's comments in the SF/F thread, this is deliberate.) This didn't make it hurt any less when I turned out to be right, though. I want to shake the author's hand in congratulations and then firebomb his house.
2016-04-03	The Goblin Emperor	Sara Monette
The perfect read after Traitor Baru. It's just a very mellow, relaxing book and is wonderfully relaxing. Not a lot happens, but that's ok sometimes!
2016-04-04	Command and Control	Eric Schlosser
It's a fucking miracle that no-one's set off a nuke by accident.
2016-04-05	The Risen Empire	Scott Westerfeld
2016-04-06	The Killing of Worlds	Scott Westerfeld
Some solid, crunchy space opera. Westerfeld is a terrible tease, though. You hear about The Imperial Secret right at the start of the book; the protagonists don't learn what it is until most of the way through the second one, and the reader has to wait until the very end!
2016-04-07	Three Parts Dead	Max Gladstone
2016-04-08	Two Serpents Rise	Max Gladstone
Do you like mage-lawyers, offshore tax havens powered by prayer, and dead gods defined by the contracts they've made? This feels a lot like "urban fantasy", but the setting isn't the usual modern-day-Earth-but-with-magic; it's an alternate earth where the surviving gods live in an uneasy truce with the lich-kings who supplanted them, where intricate webs of contracts bind both, money is quite literally power, and corporate mergers require not just forms signed in triplicate but magical rituals. The fifth and final book isn't out yet, but the books all stand on their own, so I'm not worried about getting an early start on this.
2016-04-09	A History of Epic Fantasy	Adam Whitehead
This actually helped me put a lot of books I'd read in historical perspective; things like Memory, Sorrow and Thorn are more impressive when you realize they were written around 1990 (and not in 2008, when they were reprinted and I read them). I also got a bunch of new book recommendations out of it.
2016-05-01	Eric	Terry Pratchett
The only Discworld book I hadn't reread before. It's better than I remember, but definitely not one of my favourites. It seems to exist mainly to explain how Rincewind gets from the end of Sourcery to the start of Interesting Times.
2016-05-02	Full Fathom Five	Max Gladstone
2016-05-03	Last First Snow	Max Gladstone
I think Full Fathom Five is my favourite Craft novel; it's definitely a tossup between that and Three Parts Dead. Last First Snow was not particularly enjoyable, in large part because, having read Two Serpents Rise, I knew just how fucked everything was going to be and spent the entire book just waiting for the inevitable trainwreck.
2016-05-04	When Someone You Love Is Polyamorous	Elizabeth Sheff
This is really too small to be a book, but it's too large to be a pamphlet, and since it's nonfiction it can't be a novella. I'm not sure what it is. A booklet? Anyways, it's a short, friendly "poly 101" intro aimed at people whose family or friends have just come out as poly. This seems like it could be pretty handy when people are exhibiting well-meaning confusion, but it's unlikely to do much for outright hostility because you have to get them to read the thing in the first place. Which means it's probably not going to be useful for dealing with the in-laws.
2016-05-05	Stealing Light	Gary Gibson
2016-05-06	Nova War	Gary Gibson
2016-05-07	Empire of Light	Gary Gibson
The first two books were basically about everyone manipulating and backstabbing everyone else constantly and the main characters spending an awful lot of time being captured and horribly tortured, both of which get old fast. Despite that, they were interesting enough to keep me reading through to the third book, in which they find ancient, open-to-interpretation alien writings which they interpret as "go here for an artifact of immense power that will solve your problems", so they go there and find an artifact of immense power that solves their problems. While not quite as egregious as in, say, Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy, this is an idiotic trope that I am completely sick of and the author should be ashamed of using it. Also, I'm not sure if this was what was intended, but I interpreted the ending as Dakota getting constantly resurrected throughout the centuries so that the Magi Fleet could use her as an unwitting weapon with which to destroy the caches, systematically cutting everyone off from FTL travel which is pretty fucking bleak even by the standards of this trilogy.
2016-05-08	The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet	Becky Chambers
It's The Goblin Emperor in space! Like TGE, not a lot actually happens in the course of this book; instead you basically spend the whole time chilling out with a bunch of hoopy froods and learning their life stories. I'm ok with this. Probably one of my favourite books of the year; definitely my favourite of the month.
2016-05-09	The Annihilation Score	Charles Stross
I'm probably not going to be re-reading this one. Originally I was really excited to see how Bob deals with Angleton's death and his new role as the Eater of Souls; then when I heard it would be from Mo's point of view, I was just as excited to see what her day job is like. Instead we got superhero bureacracy with a really predictable twist at the end. I do like that we finally got answers about (and some closure on) the Zahn violins, and props to Stross for not doing the cliché of having Mo, Ramona, and Mhari constantly at each other's throats. Basically, I like everything about the book except the main plot.
2016-06-01	Ship of Fools	Richard Russo
This is more like what I was looking for when I wanted a "big dumb object" story than Planetfall, although it still doesn't quite scratch the same itch as Rama.
2016-06-02	Indexing	Seanan McGuire
2016-06-03	Indexing: Reflections	Seanan McGuire
As I've mentioned before, I'm a complete sucker for "Men in Black vs. the ____" stories. In this case, the ___ is faerie tales trying to impose their patterns on the world, and the men in black are primarily people who have either had narrow escapes from, or become part of, the tales. It's a fixup -- a bunch of short stories edited together into a single book -- and as such it kind of resists coming together in a satisfying way; I'd recommend it only hesitantly if you're not as enamored of MiB as I am.
2016-06-04	Stories from the Polycule: Real Life in Polyamorous Families	Elizabeth Sheff
A collection of essays, poetry, and art from people in polyamorous relationships, organized by type (about relationships starting, or ending, or day to day life, or being parents, or being children, etc). Lots of heartwarming stuff; some cautionary tales. A nice slice-of-life thing to remind you that you're not alone.
2016-06-05	Sparrow Hill Road	Seanan McGuire
Ghost stories! Stories by ghosts, for ghosts. Like Indexing, this is a fixup, but focused on hitchiking ghosts rather than faerie tales. I like the setting but the overarching plot feels like it never really delivers closure.
2016-06-06	Discount Armageddon	Seanan McGuire
2016-06-07	Midnight Blue Light Special	Seanan McGuire
It's Seanan McGuire writes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, basically. With hyper-religious mice. Good fun. There's more books in the series, but there's also a viewpoint jump between the second and third books that's a natural place to take a break, and I don't think I want to read the whole series in one go.
2016-06-08	Bitter Seeds	Ian Tregillis
2016-06-09	The Coldest War	Ian Tregillis
2016-06-10	Necessary Evil	Ian Tregillis
This was sold to me as "British wizards vs the Nazi X-Men in an alternate WW2", which is one of those descriptions that's technically correct but also extremely misleading. Good, but extremely bleak. I am pretty pleased with myself for calling both the time travel shenanigans and the twist that the final timeline was our own well in advance, though.
2016-06-11	Masked	Lou Anders
I was in the mood for some more cheerful and traditional, for lack of a better word, superhero fiction after Tregellis, so I picked up this short story collection. I enjoyed it, but looking back on it a month later, nothing really stands out as exceptional.
2016-07-01	Ex-Heroes	Peter Clines
2016-07-02	Ex-Patriots	Peter Clines
2016-07-03	Ex-Communication	Peter Clines
2016-07-04	Ex-Purgatory	Peter Clines
2016-07-05	Ex-Isle	Peter Clines
After Masked I wanted more superheroes punching things. These books are basically the Avengers vs. the zombie apocalypse, with some (both zombie and non) supervillains to liven things up a little. They're fun for what they are but don't really aspire to be anything more than that; I've read much better on both the superhero side and the zombie side.
2016-07-06	Banewreaker	Jacqueline Carey
2016-07-07	Godslayer	Jacqueline Carey
These are, in gross structure, basically the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings. The names and geography are all different, but there's a pretty obvious correspondence between major characters, artifacts, locations, and plot points. What makes it interesting is that unlike the reams of shitty LOTR imitations out there, this is written from an unashamedly pro-!Morgoth perspective, with the protagonist one of the !Nazgul, although the actual viewpoint bounces around a fair bit. It also manages to do this without turning the "good guys" into irritating Lawful Stupid caricatures. The end result is a story in which most of the characters are legitimately decent people trying to do the right thing while treating their friends with loyalty and their enemies with respect -- and ending up with an extremely high body count despite that. The biggest problem is that, as soon as you realize what the books are doing, you know exactly where the plot is going. So you spend most of the books seeing the light in the tunnel and knowing beyond any doubt that it's an oncoming train even when the characters don't. This is not a sensation I particularly enjoy.
2016-07-08	Claws of the Cat	Susan Spann
2016-07-09	Blade of the Samurai	Susan Spann
2016-07-10	Flask of the Drunken Master	Susan Spann
Father Mateo is a Jesuit priest! Hiro is a trained assassin! Together, they fight crime -- in 16th century Kyoto! It's been ages since I read a proper, traditional murder mystery, one where the author gives you everything you need to solve the mystery before the reveal if you are just attentive enough. (I'm not.) These aren't great, but I enjoyed them.
2016-07-11	The Engines of God	Jack McDevitt
2016-07-12	Deepsix	Jack McDevitt
Xenoarchaeology aaaaadventures! Except it's less archaeology and puzzle-solving and mysteries and more Indiana Jones style close escapes, which is also good but not quite what I was in the mood for. Of the two, I liked Engines more; Deepsix felt like the least interesting parts of Engines (a desperate attempt to escape from a natural disaster in which not everyone will make it out alive) expanded to fill an entire book.
2016-08-01	Half-Off Ragnarok	Seanan McGuire
2016-08-02	Pocket Apocalypse	Seanan McGuire
More InCryptid books, these two dealing with Verity's brother Alex and his adventures managing a basilisk breeding program and visiting the most horrible place on earth spoiler{Australia}. This is a bit of a tonal shift from the Verity books, less i{Buffy} and more I'm not sure what, but it's still fun. And we finally get to meet Grandma Angela! :neckbeard: I know the Prices are the main characters, but it's Angela, Sarah, and the mice who are the real stars.
2016-08-03	Healy Family History	Seanan McGuire
2016-08-04	Price Family History	Seanan McGuire
Not actually published books, these are compilations I made of all of the i{InCryptid} short fiction. The first one contains all the Healy stories (i{The Flower of Arizona} through i{The Way Home}), set before the start of the novels; the second all of the stories about Antimony and Verity Price, Artie Harrington, and Istas, set between books 2 and 5. The stories stand on their own better than, say, the chapters of i{Indexing}, but nonetheless each group of stories forms an overarching storyline. I think the most disappointing overall was "Survival Horror"; it's not one of the better ones in its own right, and on top of that it's disappointing because you aren't getting more of Antimony's roller-derby shenanigans. The quality is good overall, though, and is a nice mix between adventures, relaxing slice-of-life stories, and gut-wrenching tragedy. Conspicuously absent from the stories, however, is any mention of how they met Grandma Angela or spoiler{what happened to the baby Cuckoo in i{Oh Pretty Bird}}.
2016-08-05	The Paladin	C.J. Cherryh
Is this Cherryh's only non-fantasy, non-SF work? It's set in what is clearly ancient China with the serial numbers filed off, and there's no magic or supernatural powers (although some people believe there are, and spoiler{the protagonists are not above exploiting this}). Despite this, it feels much more "Cherryh" than, say, i{Fortress in the Eye of Time} does, and reminds me a little bit of i{Serpent's Reach}. Not one of my favourites, but I enjoyed it.
2016-08-06	Hammerfall	C.J. Cherryh
I reread this to prepare for the sequel, i{The Forge of Heaven}, only to find out that after finishing it and reading a few chapters into i{Forge}, I had no interest in continuing. :( i{Forge} is set so far in the future from i{Hammerfall} that it might as well be a different setting, and the characters I was invested in in i{Hammerfall} either play a minor role or are entirely (and, in at least one case, inexplicably) absent.
2016-08-07	The Kindly Ones	Melissa Scott
I continue my slow wander through Melissa Scott's bibliography. This one has less talking and more gunfire than her other books I've read, but is enjoyable for all that.
2016-08-08	Guided by the Beauty of their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs	Philip Sandifer
This started out interesting and got progressively less interesting as it moved further and further away from the subject of the starting essay (the 2014 Hugo awards and the Sad/Rabid puppies). The best parts, for me, were the title essay and the subsequent interview transcripts; the rest of the book moves away from modern SF/F writing and towards television I haven't watched (i{Strange & Norrel}, the most recent few seasons of i{Doctor Who}), comics I haven't read (i{V for Vendetta}), and games I haven't played (the SNES was never a fixture of my childhood). All of this falls within the book's rather broad scope, but I was hoping for more focus on the parts of SF directly related to the Hugos, and also for more content written specifically for the book -- the latter half consists largely of reprints of content from i{Project SNES}, i{Last War in Albion}, and i{Recursive Occlusion}. And i{RO} doesn't even work properly on my e-reader!
2016-08-09	Tooth and Claw	Jo Walton
This was...ok? I didn't [i]dislike[/i] it, but I think my greatest objection to it is that it doesn't really gain anything from being populated with dragons rather than humans. [i]Mating Flight[/i] is not as tightly plotted or as cleanly wordsmithed (intentionally so, given the frame story), but the fact that the protagonists are dragons, with abilities, motivations, and mindsets alien to humanity, informs everything about the plot. In this you could have replaced the dragons with humans without significantly affecting the plot, I think. Indeed, while reading it it's very easy to forget that they're dragons at all at times. So, without the novelty value of "everyone is dragons", it's just a bit of comedy of manners/romance/legal drama all tossed together, which isn't particularly my jam.
2016-08-10	A Matter of Oaths	Helen S. Wright
This was recommended to me as a "if you like C.J. Cherryh, you should read...", and that was a solid recommendation. It reminds me a lot of some of Cherryh's faster-paced work; you have the fish-out-of-water setup, the political machinations -- it even "ends with a bus ride to a gunfight". This is an excellent first novel and I would be tracking down everything else she'd written if not for the fact that she never wrote anything else. It is at least [url=http://www.arkessian.com/]available for free[/url] on her website.
2016-09-01	The Pastel City	M. John Harrison
2016-09-02	A Storm of Wings	M. John Harrison
Viriconium (which consists of three novels and one collection of short stories) is my Wildcard for this year, and I'm really not sure what I think of it. On the micro scale, his writing is an absolute delight; not a chapter goes by in which I don't learn at least one new word, and hardly a page without some new and delightful turn of phrase. He's a fantastic wordsmith. But on the [i]macro[/i] scale, I find myself almost completely disinterested in either the plot or the characters. The end result is that I kind of had to force myself through it despite enjoying individual parts of the book quite consistently.
2016-09-03	Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body	Neil Shubin
A neat pop-sci book looking at various elements of the human body and looking at how they evolved and what features in other species they developed from, or are analogues of, interspersed with anecdotes about the author's research and time as a paleontologist. Nothing mindblowing, but pretty cool.
2016-09-04	Daughter of the Empire	Janny Wurts & Raymond E. Feist
2016-09-05	Servant of the Empire	Janny Wurts & Raymond E. Feist
2016-10-01	Mistress of the Empire	Janny Wurts & Raymond E. Feist
I i{really} liked the first two books; they consists almost entirely of Mara creating intricate schemes to turn a badly losing situation into a survivable stalemate and, ultimately, victory. And I am a great fan of intricate schemes and plotting leading to come-from-behind victories. My biggest complaint is that i{Servant} is twice as long as i{Daughter}, and feels like it has two major plot arcs each with their own climax (the Night of Swords halfway through the book, and then the actual ending); furthermore, it wraps up the main plot started in i{Daughter} quite nicely. Because of this, I think it might actually have made more sense for i{Servant} to have been published as two books, neatly rounding out a trilogy, and then i{Mistress} as a one or two book coda, similar to how Zahn's i{Thrawn} and i{Hand of Thrawn} books were published. The third book takes place some years later and deals with all the fallout from Mara's plots in the first two books coming back to haunt her. I thought it started out pretty weak, but it gets better, and finishes extremely strong. That said, I still think it's the weakest of the trilogy, in large part because it spends a lot of time (especially in the first half) focusing on characters who aren't Mara, and activities that aren't Mara's plotting (which she doesn't do nearly as much of, either, focusing more on high-level strategic decisions). Since that was the main draw of the first two books for me, the third can't help but be a letdown, no matter how cool i{the Cho-Ja mages} are.
2016-10-02	The Final Reflection	John M. Ford
The other JMF Star Trek novel. I think this was a better read than i{How Much For Just The Planet}, especially for someone (like myself) who is largely disinterested in Star Trek and has only seen a handful of episodes -- I've actually read a lot more than I've seen, thanks to getting into my mom's collection of James Blish Trek adaptations growing up. A nice mix of Klingon culture, space battles, and political machinations. One thing that I didn't expect is how surprising transporters are. I know they're a i{Trek} staple, but it's been so long since I've read anything in a setting with ubiquitous teleportation that I kept being startled every time they used a transporter rather than docking or using a shuttle.
2016-10-03	Brokedown Palace	Steven Brust
This is, I think, the only Dragaera book from an Eastern perspective; yes, Vlad is an Easterner, but he's also completely immersed in Imperial culture. It has a very different perspective and a much more ethereal, faery-tale quality to it. It also contains, as the prologue, a telling of the Legend of Fenar, the story of how Fenar traveled alone into the Faerie, with a fey-sword and a taltos-horse, to confront Kav, Lord of Faerie on his throne; and how he lost both the horse and the sword, but gained a promise of peace from Faerie that endures to this day. Fans of Paarfi may recognize this as spoiler{chapter 30 of i{The Phoenix Guards}} as filtered through a thousand years of retellings, which of course meant I had to reread that, too, and as ever it's funnier than I remembered. Apparently we're getting a new Paarfi book sometime next year. I'm stoked. (And yes, while Brust is probably best known for his Dragaera books, he's also a musician; a drummer, singer and songwriter with a number of albums to his name, both solo and in groups.)
2016-10-04	The Rescuers	Margery Sharp
I was going through a box of books from my childhood and populating my son's shelves with them -- he's not reading on his own yet, but he'll damn well have lots of books to choose from once he is -- when I came across this old favourite and had to stop and reread it. It's bite-sized these days but just as delightful as ever, although I have a new appreciation now for the engineering marvel that is Miss Bianca's mouse-scale, i{atomic-powered} speedboat. :science: It's interesting to see the contrast in personalities between the Miss Bianca of the books and the Miss Bianca of the movies (which my son was briefly but intensely obsessed with earlier this year); she is by no means a delicate flower (once she gets into the swing of things, anyways), but neither is she the enthusiastic adrenaline junky of the movies. But the movies have very little in common with the books anyways.
2016-10-05	Rise: The Complete Newflesh Collection	Seanan McGuire
This was ok -- I enjoyed it -- but I didn't love it. I liked the main i{Newsflesh} books, and basically everything i{InCryptid}, a great deal more. Part of this is a number of small but nagging inconsistencies with the main books; part of it is that it's mostly novellas, a format I'm not overly fond of; and partly I think it finishes with the weakest story in the collection, "Coming To You Live". spoiler{Georgia & Shaun earned their retirement, dammit, and if McGuire is going to drag them out of it I want to see a slice of life in post-zombie Canada, not a retread of territory and characters already well covered in the novels.} After this I think I would actually rank i{InCryptid} over i{Newsflesh} overall.
2016-11-01	The Firm	John Grisham
This was good, but it was also pretty stressful, because it does that thing where it constantly cuts away to the antagonists and shows them closing in. I have to be in a certain mood to enjoy this sort of book, I think. Also, wow, Grisham really doesn't try at i{all} to make his antagonists even slightly sympathetic.
2016-11-02	Wave Without a Shore	C.J. Cherryh
Continuing to fill in the gaps in my Cherryh. This one I feel I would have gotten a lot more out of had I any sort of formal education in philosophy, and it ends quite abruptly.
2016-11-03	So You Want To Be A Wizard	Diane Duane
I needed some comfort reading and this is an old favourite that still holds up today. It's a warm, comforting book, which seems odd to say given that spoiler{most of it takes place in a twisted hellscape of alternate NY and all the supporting characters die}, but it really is in a way that i{The Book of Night with Moon} isn't.
2016-11-04	The Importance of Being Earnest	Oscar Wilde
This was funny, but I think I would have gotten more out of it with more knowledge of the social conventions of the time that it mocks. (While not formally banned, this is the play that led to Wilde being outed as gay and his subsequent exile and the end of his career as a writer; I think that counts.)
2016-11-05	Agent of Change	Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
2016-11-06	Conflict of Honours	Sharon Lee Steve Miller
The first two Liaden Universe books. The first one was merely alright, but was also a fast read, so I decided to keep going and check out the second one, which I enjoyed a great deal more. Definitely going to keep checking these out when I want some light "potato chip" space opera.
2016-11-07	A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers
:neckbeard: i{The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet} was one of my favourites of the year, and i{Orbit} lives up to my expectations as a sequel. Absolutely delightful. One might argue (just as with i{Angry Planet}) that not a great deal i{happens} during the book, but like its predecessor it's not a book about laserspewpew, it's about settling down over tea and getting to know the characters. I do miss the ensemble cast of the i{Wayfarer}'s crew, though. I think this is probably a better book than i{Angry Planet}, but one that I'm less likely to reread.
2016-11-08	Stiletto	Daniel O'Malley
This was a blast. An improvement on i{The Rook}, I think, although I miss Mwyfany's letters -- it has a lot less exposition, but when it does happen it's more jarring, because it's the narrator expositing at you with no in-setting justification. (And half of it is Shit I Already Know, since I read i{The Rook} -- can the author not safely assume that if the reader is reading book #2 they probably read book #1 first?). On the plus side we get to see more angles of the Chequy and learn a lot about the Grafters, too. More humour in this one, too, I think -- or perhaps i{The Rook} was funnier than I remember. I spent the first half of the book being pretty unhappy that spoiler{Grootvader Ernst refused to tell the Chequy about the Antagonists}, but I can see why they did it now. I felt pretty proud of myself for figuring out that spoiler{"Pawn Sophie" was actually an enemy agent} and that spoiler{melting blonde dude was part of the Gestalt}, but this is somewhat tempered by not figuring out spoiler{what Odette's new throat implants were for} (ok, that one wasn't exactly heavily clued) or spoiler{the true nature of the Antagonists} -- that latter one is really embarassing considering how many clues there were pointing in that direction, in retrospect.
2016-11-09	Star Trek	James Blish
2016-11-10	Star Trek 2	James Blish
2016-11-11	Star Trek 3	James Blish
My parents had some of these growing up (numbers 8-12, I think). Like all the other SF on their shelves, I read them all as a kid, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I learned they were adaptations of the actual episodes (not having seen any TOS, and precious little Trek in general). I recently had cause to help a friend track them down (she's a big Trek fan but had no idea the Blish adaptations existed) and took the opportunity to read some of them before handing them over. To be honest, I didn't enjoy them as much now as I did when I was younger. They're showing their age, and since these are some of the volumes I i{didn't} read as a kid, they don't come with that nice hit of nostalgia.
2016-11-12	(unnamed 4th Mating Flight book)	Bard Bloom
My first experience as a beta reader! This is ostensibly the fourth i{Mating Flight} book, but it's set (mostly) before Mating Flight and has no characters in common (a few cameos notwithstanding). It has a similar "voice" to Mating Flight, but unlike MF is straightforwardly narrated rather than being presented as the contents of the protagonist's journal, which makes its distilled recitation of events feel somewhat unusual; it's not i{bad} but it's a style that I gather was much more common in the 50s than it is today, at least for non-epistolary novels. It's rougher around the edges than the first two books were, but this is hardly surprising since Mating Flight had seen years of editing and polishing before publication by the time I read it. I quite enjoyed it nonetheless, although I don't think I will like it as much as Mating Flight even once it's finished.
2016-11-13	The Palace Job	Patrick Weekes
2016-11-14	The Prophecy Con	Patrick Weekes
2016-11-15	The Paladin Caper	Patrick Weekes
The i{Rogues of the Republic} trilogy. It starts off as a straightforward heist, with the protagonist escaping from prison and assembling an ensemble cast of thieves and conmen to steal her inheritance back from the noble who double-crossed and imprisoned her in the first place. Then things escalate a i{lot}. If I have one complaint about it, it's that when the chips are down it relies a bit too heavily on Loch's admittedly impressive dirty fighting skills, but there's enough trickery and clever strategems going on to keep me interested.
2016-12-01	Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants	John D. Clark
A perennial favourite, now that an (unofficial) e-reader friendly version is available [FIXME: insert link], I had to reread it. I'd probably get more out of this if I had more than basic high-school chemistry knowledge, but even not understanding most of the chemical names, it's a great read with a lot of entertaining (and alarming) stories.
2016-12-02	Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China	Jung Chang
An autobiography and family history of three generations of Chang's family, starting with her grandmother's life as concubine to a dying warlord in the 1920s and ending after her escape to the UK on a study permit. It's a fascinating and often horrifying look at life "on the ground" in China during WW2 and under Mao, something that I learned basically nothing at all about in school.
2016-12-03	Rosemary and Rue	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-04	A Local Habitation	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-05	An Artificial Night	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-06	Late Eclipses	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-07	One Salt Sea	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-08	Ashes of Honor	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-09	Chimes at Midnight	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-10	The Winter Long	Seanan McGuire
2016-12-11	A Red Rose Chain	Seanan McGuire
The i{October Daye} series. This is the series that McGuire started first, and the first few books are noticeably rough around the edges compared to her later work (and the first book especially suffers from the "i{Parasitology} problem", where the protagonist spends so much time being knocked out and carted around that it stops being dramatic and starts being funny). There's a definite upward trend throughout the series, though -- in the quality of the writing, the power level of the characters, and what's at stake. I'd rank it below i{InCryptid}, but above i{Indexing} and i{Sparrow Hill Road}. There's one more book after this, but i{Red Rose Chain} wraps some major plot arcs and I'm told that i{Once Broken Faith} kicks off some new ones, so I think I'll wait until she's written some more of these before I continue reading.
2016-12-12	Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice	Bill Browder
This really does read like a political thriller rather than like stuff that actually happened, although if it were fiction it would probably have a more satisfying conclusion. Highly recommended if you are thinking of starting a business in Russia and need reasons not to.
2016-12-13	Disintegration	Bard Bloom
Finally wrapping up the Mating Flight series (so far) with book #3. (Yes, this means I read them out of order, but #3 and #4 have nothing to do with each other, so it hardly matters.) I agree with Bard that this is weaker than i{Mating Flight} itself, but I still enjoyed it a lot (and sent Bard a pile of bug reports -- i{Disintegration} hasn't yet seen the years of polish that i{Mating Flight} got before publication). This also refreshes the contrast with Jo Walton's i{Tooth and Claw}; Walton may write more tightly planned plots, but Bard writes better (read: weirder and less human) dragons.
2017-01-01	Foreigner	C.J. Cherryh
2017-01-02	Invader	C.J. Cherryh
2017-01-03	Inheritor	C.J. Cherryh
I don't, in general, think that Foreigner is Cherryh's best work, and I'm kind of disappointed that she seems to have gotten into a groove of writing ~infinity Foreigner books rather than, say, more books in Compact Space, or the sequel that i{Cyteen} wants (and didn't get in i{Regenesis}). Despite that, these books are an old favourite, warm, comfortable, and familiar. They don't have nearly the degree of nostalgia attached to them that the Chanur books do, but they're relaxing in a way Chanur generally isn't. That said, ever since I heard someone say that "all of C.J. Cherryh's books end with a bus ride to a gunfight", I can't unsee it, and it's i{really} obvious in the first three Foreigner books. I'm planning to read up through book 15 this year, although not all at once.
2017-01-04	The New Space Opera 2	Gardner Dozois (ed.)
There were no stories in this that I absolutely loved and compelled me to seek out the rest of the author's work, but lots that I liked; I don't think I can pick out a favourite. The weakest ones were definitely i{Cracklegrackle} by Christina Robson and i{The Far End of History} by John C. Wright, though. All in all, a solid collection.
2017-01-05	Precursor	C.J. Cherryh
2017-01-06	Defender	C.J. Cherryh
2017-01-07	Explorer	C.J. Cherryh
i{Foreigner} arc 2. This, for me, is where it gets interesting, with spoiler{the Atevi reaching out into space and encountering i{another} alien species}, against the backdrop of the tension between i{Phoenix} command and the Pilot's Guild. If I have one complaint it's that spoiler{first contact with the Kyo} seems to go a bit i{too} quickly and easily -- granted, no faster than in i{The Pride of Chanur}, and it's explicable by the fact that spoiler{the Kyo seem to have encountered a number of other spacefaring species already and Prakuyo presumably has specialized training for that}, but it still bugs me. On the other hand, this trilogy features a lot more Illisidi, which forgives many sins. This is where my reading of i{Foreigner} stopped last time (on account of running out of books). A bunch more have been written since then, and my plan this year is to continue reading through to the end of Arc 5.
2017-01-08	The Book of Night with Moon	Diane Duane
2017-01-09	To Visit the Queen	Diane Duane
Same setting as i{So You Want To Be A Wizard}, different protagonists -- this time the team of feline wizards responsible for maintaining the Grand Central Station worldgate complex in NYC. Neither, I think, is as tightly plotted as i{SYWTBAW}, but i{Moon} is an old favourite that I've read probably a dozen times over the years and keep coming back to. It's a warm, cozy hit of nostalgia that I can read in an afternoon and enjoy the book equivalent of having an old, lazy cat sprawled across my lap. i{Queen} I've only read once before, and on re-read, I see why; it's good enough, but I only like it, I don't love it. Apparently there was a third book, i{The Big Meow}, but it was crowdfunded and released online on a site that no longer exists. :(
2017-01-10	Critical Failures	Robert Bevan
2017-01-11	d6	Robert Bevan
2017-01-12	Fail Harder	Robert Bevan
Perennial favourites of the SF/F thread here, a tale of four assholes who piss off the GM in a game of s{D&D} Caverns and Creatures, only to get trapped inside the game when it turns out that he is an actual fucking wizard. This is...I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, the protagonists are a group of painfully unfunny douchenozzles who probably deserve to spend four books and change getting dicked around by a vengeful wizard god. On the other hand, the situations they find themselves in -- and the ways they escape -- are often genuinely (if morbidly) funny. At this point I'm much more interested in their continuing misadventures than in the overarching plot of their attempts to get back home. I don't think I can take long runs of this, but I will likely return to it later. i{Horse.}
2017-01-13	Mother Night	Kurt Vonnegut
My first Vonnegut! I've had two others on my shelves for years (i{Cat's Cradle} and i{Timequake}), but somehow never got around to them. But this was the BOTM, and it was a blast. I went through it in a day and enjoyed every page of it, and I think it might benefit from a slower reread sometime next year. It also reminds me, although I can't put my finger on why, of some of Stanislaw Lem's work.
2017-01-14	The Futurological Congress	Stanislaw Lem
And here's Lem! All I knew going into this was that it was an Ijon Tichy book, so I was expecting something similar to i{The Star Diaries}. What I got was a drug-fuelled descent into madness, like if i{Memoirs Found in a Bathtub} mellowed out a bit and took a massive hit of LSD. A+, would recommend. And as I cast back my mind to ten years ago and remember what i{The Star Diaries} were actually like, maybe that shouldn't have been so surprising. I should reread them.
2017-02-01	An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth	Chris Hadfield
This was fantastic. It's structured as a series of anecdotes about Hadfield's life and career, and his path from being a kid looking up at the moon during Apollo 11 to commander of the ISS, but each chapter also connects that to some lesson about the skills needed to be an astronaut -- and how those skills are applicable to day to day life on earth (hence the title).
2017-02-02	A Choice of Destinies	Melissa Scott
An alt-history novel wondering what would happen if Alexander the Great had had to turn back before starting his Indian campaign. It was alright, but I suspect I would have gotten a lot more out of it had I more than vague knowledge of Alexander's life and campaigns.
2017-02-03	Uptown Local and Other Interventions	Diane Duane
Despite the title, only two of the stories in this collection are about wizards. (At least overtly. One could probably argue that all of them i{are} interventions, and those two are just the only ones written from the wizard's perspective.) It starts out kind of slow -- the first story is both the longest and, for me, probably the least interesting -- but picks up after that.
2017-02-04	Old Man's War	John Scalzi
2017-02-05	The Ghost Brigades	John Scalzi
2017-02-06	The Sagan Diary	John Scalzi
I've gotten a lot of solid book recommendations off of Scalzi's blog but I've never actually read his books. Then my e-reader died and it turned out the backup only had i{The Dracula Tape} and the first three i{Old Man's War} books on it, and I'd already read the former. These were not particularly unusual or thought-provoking, but they were i{fun} and I'll likely go back and read more of his stuff later. I'd put him more or less in the same bucket as Zahn, I think.
2017-02-07	Burning Bright	Melissa Scott
Like i{Mighty Good Road} and i{Trouble and Her Friends}, this features a lot of politics and threats and very little actual violence, and a central conflict that's resolved via informational leverage rather than by a shootout. This seems to be a favoured plot structure of Scott's (similar to Cherryh's "bus ride to a gunfight"), and she does it well. i{The Roads of Heaven} are still my favourite of her books, though.
2017-02-08	Voices from Chernobyl	Svetlana Alexeivich
Monologues from people who lived near Chernobyl or were in some other way involved with the disaster, collected in the ten years following. I've read stuff before about the disaster itself, but this is the first look I've had from the point of view of people who just lived in the Zone. It's...horrifying. A few parts had me swearing out loud at the book, like the scientist talking about how they were testing samples from towns near the ractor and saying "this isn't milk, it's nuclear waste"...and then they turn on the TV and it's a public service announcement talking about how the meat/crops/livestock in the Zone are totally safe for human consumption, nothing to worry about.
2017-02-09	Bloodchild and Other Stories	Octavia E. Butler
So the challenge this year finally prompted me to get off my ass and read those Octavia Butler books I've had sitting on my shelves for years and i{holy shit}. I regret not doing this earlier; I enjoyed this as much as some of the CJ Cherryh and Melissa Scott I've read. I've got a few more of her books in the queue and I'm really looking forward to them now.
2017-03-01	Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad	Minister Faust
This was a wild ride. I was hooked from the first page, and while I think I liked it i{less} as it went on -- I don't think it quite lives up to the promise of the epilogue (which is, of course, at the start of the book) -- I never stopped enjoying it. Faust is very good at making different characters have different voices (the viewpoint bounces around a lot), but he also writes out the accent for everyone who has a significant one, even in their internal narration -- which makes some things hard to follow and made one chapter completely incomprehensible to me.
2017-03-02	From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain	Minister Faust
Holy shit this got bleak in a hurry. :stonk: I mean, I'm not saying he's wrong about how this would go down, but goddamn. Given the premise I was expecting something between, say, i{Emperor Mollusc vs. The Sinister Brain} and i{Soon I Will Be Invincible} in terms of "just how fucked is everyone, really" and instead it ended up somewhere dark of i{Watchmen}. It's really good but maybe don't read it if you're looking for something jovial and upbeat.
2017-03-03	Dawn	Octavia E. Butler
2017-03-04	Adulthood Rites	Octavia E. Butler
2017-03-05	Imago	Octavia E. Butler
Butler's famous Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood trilogy. Really good, and much more about humans and aliens trying to figure out how to coexist long-term than about laserspewpew. The aliens are more...i{predatory} than they are in, say, most Cherryh, too. I mean, they argue that they're symbiotes, and I even agree, but I also understand why a lot of people don't buy it. Also comes with a large platter of genderfeels as a side dish, especially the third book.
2017-03-06	The Human Edge	Gordon R. Dickson
And now for something completely different, a collection of short stories that are all variations on the theme of humans outwitting (or, occasionally, overpowering) aliens that on paper seem like they should have an overwhelming advantage. This was one of those books I think of as "popcorn books": it was enjoyable while I was reading it, but leaves no lasting impression. Reminds me a bit of the Retief stories.
2017-03-07	The Stars Are Legion	Kameron Hurley
I bounced off i{God's War} last year, but i{The Stars Are Legion} has been getting a lot of good press and I decided to give it a look. And I enjoyed the shit out of it. It's slightly i{Planescape Torment} and slightly i{Septerra Core} and very, very moist. It also plays its cards close to the chest WRT the setting; I have some theories about it but the book politely refuses to confirm or deny them. I'll definitely be checking out her i{Mirror Empire} books this fall.
2017-03-08	Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day	Seanan McGuire
This isn't explicitly in the same setting as i{Sparrow Hill Road}, but it can, I think, comfortably coexist with it. I liked it a great deal more; it's shorter and more focused, and comes to a more satisfying conclusion.
2017-03-09	Takeoff!	Randall Garrett
A collection of short stories that are all pastiches or parodies of the styles of (or, in some cases, specific stories by) classic SF authors. I wasn't familiar with all of them, but the ones I did know, he nailed. I had to skip most of the "Reviews in Verse" on account of not having read the stories being reviewed, though.
2017-03-10	Skeen's Leap	Jo Clayton
Got this in a hundle, and it's been a long time since I read any portal fantasy. This was alright, but honestly the main draw for me is what happens after Skeen gets back home, and based on how i{Leap} ends it's looking like that won't happen until the end of book 2 (or the start of book 3). I'll probably get around to reading i{Skeen's Return} at some point this year, but it didn't grab me enough to want to dive back into it immediately.
2017-04-01	Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots	Seanan McGuire
2017-04-02	Velveteen vs. the Multiverse	Seanan McGuire
2017-04-03	Velveteen vs. the Seasons	Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire does superheroes. The first of these is a fixup, like i{Sparrow Hill Road}: a bunch of short stories she later combined into a book. The others, AFAIK, were written as novels from the start. Not, I think, my favourite of her work; I'd put it above i{Sparrow Hill Road} but below i{InCryptid} or the later i{October Daye} books. But fun, and they're all a short read of perhaps 200-250 pages. And since it's Seanan McGuire this is less "people in spandex beating up the bad guys" and more "people in spandex getting fucked over by corporate malfeasance and making ill-advised bargains with elder gods to get out of it". The high point is definitely i{vs. the Multiverse} (which could plausibly be retitled i{Seanan McGuire vs. The Reader's Emotional State}, but honestly that's like 70% of what she writes), and that also wraps up the first major plot arc, so if you're liking it but not super into it that's a good place to stop; i{vs. the Seasons} kicks off another major story arc that doesn't get resolved by the end.
2017-04-04	The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger	Marc Levinson
This was pretty neat. The shipping container has been ubiquitous for my entire life; I had no idea it was such a recent invention, or what a clusterfuck "breakbulk" shipping was before it. I also think I kind of understand why some people have a visceral aversion to unions now.
2017-04-05	More Tales of the Black Widowers	Isaac Asimov
I haven't read the first one, but really, there's no continuity to these; each story stands on its own. The stories are extremely formulaic, but the book is short enough that you run out of stories before you run out of patience, and it's fun trying to solve the puzzle before Henry does. The afterwords are always interesting, too.
2017-04-06	Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner	Judy Melinek
A book about forensic pathology (as practiced today, as opposed to i{The Poisoner's Handbook}, which was about its origins). Very interesting, and occasionally funny, but also very hard to read in places, at least for me. Some of the cases she worked were pretty horrifying, but it was the stories about her father that hit me hardest.
2017-04-07	Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children	Ransom Riggs
Meh. This was recommended to me, but in the end I was completely unimpressed by it. The use of the found photos was interesting as a behind-the-scenes tidbit but the actual book did nothing for me.
2017-04-08	Valor's Choice	Tanya Huff
2017-04-09	The Better Part of Valor	Tanya Huff
Decent but not exceptional military SF, I guess? I enjoyed them while reading them but a year from now I won't be able to tell you anything about them. Also kind of let down by the second, which looks like it's going to be a BDO story but spends most of the book fighting bugs instead.
2017-05-01	Ninefox Gambit	Yoon Ha Lee
Another thread favourite, and this one blew me the fuck away. I'm not even mad that it's not a stand-alone book, and I can't wait for the sequel. Like i{The Dragon Never Sleeps}, this feels a lot like what you would end up with if you filed all the stupidity off WH40K and then built it back up into something that can stand on its own, but it takes it in a totally different direction. It's also easier to follow than i{Dragon} without being in any way less interesting or exciting.
2017-05-02	The Invisible Library	Genevieve Cogman
2017-05-03	The Masked City	Genevieve Cogman
2017-05-04	The Burning Page	Genevieve Cogman
I like books, I like wizards, I like secret societies, I like heists, and this is a series about a secret society of book wizards conducting heists, so it is very much my jam. I do wish it were a bit more heisty and a bit less fate-of-the-multiversy, but it is ever thus. The Language also owes a clear debt to Diane Duane's Speech, which I was not at all surprised to see acknowledged in the postscript.
2017-05-05	Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up	Dave Barry
2017-05-06	Boogers Are My Beat	Dave Barry
I was recently reminded of the existence of Dave Barry and checked out these two collections I hadn't previously read. The first is the usual assortment; the second, a collection of columns specifically about politics around the 2000 elections, closing out with two about 9/11 (which seem shockingly naive and optimistic in retrospect). They were amusing, but not as funny as they were when I was younger, despite getting more of the jokes.
2017-05-07	Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind	Yuval Noah Harari
This was...surprisingly alright. It digresses sometimes into how the author thinks the world i{should} work, but for most part concerns itself with i{what} and, to the extent we know, i{why} and i{how}, which is pretty much what I was hoping for. There's an awful lot of speculation but it's generally clearly marked as such (and usually a bunch of different leading speculations are presented and contrasted).
2017-05-08	Ghost in the Wires	Kevin Mitnick
Holy shit, this is nonfiction but reads like a goddamn techno-thriller. It was recommended to me as "if you liked i{The Cuckoo's Egg} you should read...", and that recommendation was spot on; I couldn't put it down. I was 9 when all of this was going down and barely cognizant of current events in my home country, let alone in the US, so I missed most of this when it happened. And even with my currently high level of cynicism it was pretty shocking to see the degree to which law enforcement just stopped giving a shit about constitutional rights and the due process of law once they decided they wanted to make an example of him.
2017-06-01	Anabasis	Xenophon
The "March of the Ten Thousand", Xenophon's journal of Cyrus the Younger's disastrous campaign for the throne and the subsequent escape from Persia of ~10k Greek mercenaries he brought with him. This has been used as inspiration (or in some cases outright ripped off) by a lot of authors over the years, especially in MilSF, and I figured I should finally give the original a look. It really does read like a journal or a history, not a story; it's a fairly bare recitation of events, which may be useful for historians but means it's not a very engaging read.
2017-06-01	Blueprint for Armageddon	Dan Carlin
2017-06-02	Dreamships	Melissa Scott
A bit space opera, a lot cyberpunk. Don't really have much to say about this. Felt the ending was a bit of a cop-out with the definitive answer to spoiler{the nature of the shipmind}; there's a sequel that might deal with this a bit more interestingly, but I can't find it anywhere.
2017-06-02	The Rising	James Doohan & S.M. Stirling
2017-06-03	Chaos Choreography	Seanan McGuire
:neckbeard: Incryptid #5 and a return to Verity Price! I think this is actually the weakest of the bunch so far, but still highly enjoyable. And holy shit that ending. i{Magic for Nothing} is going to be a wild ride.
2017-06-03	Magic for Nothing	Seanan McGuire
2017-06-04	(assorted short stories)	Seanan McGuire
I can't start reading i{Magic for Nothing} yet, since my partner hasn't, so I read a bunch of InCryptid and Sparrow Hill Road shorts to take the edge off.
2017-06-05	The Chimerical Marriage of the Junkyard Dryad and the Dragon Golem	Bard Bloom
Bard says that this is their "most embarassingly self-indulgent work", which it probably is. It can accurately be described as "wish-fulfillment portal fantasy", and it even hits a lot of the beats common in what I think of as "typical" WFPF, but it does so in a kind of sideways manner that means this description may be as misleading as it is useful. It's not in the same tier as i{Mating Flight}, but it's still an enjoyable, relaxing, warm-and-fuzzy-feeling kind of book.
2017-07-01	Raven Strategem	Yoon Ha Lee
Sequel to i{Ninefox Gambit}. Fantastic, although I think I liked i{Ninefox} more. The reveals towards the end had me saying "oh fuck yes" out loud. Ok, this is technically a podcast, but at 23 hours long the only thing distinguishing it from an audiobook is the somewhat more conversational tone and the fact that there's no text version available. And I find that tone a lot easier to follow in listening than normal audiobooks. This is Carlin's take on WW1, focusing primarily on the western front, but still containing an awful lot of things I never learned in school, including spending the first several hours untangling the causes of the war and the clusterfuck of alliances and agreements originally set up by Bismarck. He also recommends a whole pile of books and authors, some of which I'll likely check out later. This was co-written by Scotty of Star Trek fame, but what it really reads like is a quite good [i]Wing Commander[/i] novel. Possibly that says more about what I brought to it than what the authors had in mind? InCryptid #6, and the first full-length book starring Antimony Price. The ending of i{Chaos Choreography} put the cat among the pigeons and now Antimony gets to deal with the fallout. This was really good, and really tense -- I liked it a lot more than i{Choreography} -- but I am sad that her roller derby activities merit only two scenes in the entire book. I would read an entire book of cryptid roller derby stories. i{Tricks for Free} won't be out for a while, but while {Magic} leaves things kind of up in the air it also feels like a complete story in its own right, so the waiting hopefully won't be too bad.
2017-07-01	Unsafe at Any Speed	Ralph Nader
It's weird to think that that recently, crash testing was something no-one did and seatbelts were a luxury item. This is primarily a critique of, and call to action against, the car companies that knowingly make unsafe cars and the regulators that permit them to do so, but also, almost in passing, serves as a brutal indictment of The Glorious Free Market™.
2017-07-02	The Privateer	James Doohan
2017-07-03	Independent Command	James Doohan
Wraps up the Engineer trilogy quite nicely. Not much to say about these; I enjoyed them but probably won't particularly remember them a year from now.
2017-07-04	The Line of Polity	Neal Asher
2017-07-05	Brass Man	Neal Asher
2017-07-06	Polity Agent	Neal Asher
2017-07-07	Line War	Neal Asher
A reread of the latter four Agent Cormac novels. I enjoyed them, but not as much as I did the first time around -- these aren't books that get better and reveal something new on each reread. It's interesting to compare the politics on display here with the ones in i{The Departure}; I don't know if his political beliefs have changed that dramatically in the intervening time or if he was deliberately writing against type in Cormac and only decided to make his books an author soapbox in Departure.
2017-07-08	Deathless	Catherynne M. Valente
Valente does Russian myths! The story is, of course, centered around Marya Morevna and her husband Koschei the Deathless, but the world they occupy is one in which all the myths are true -- and it also spoiler{provides an explanation of why they are no longer true today}. It is tempting to say that it is, perhaps, a bit too predictable -- but is it not ever thus in books based on well-known stories?
2017-08-01	The Compleat Angler	Izaak Walton
This is completely uninteresting to me as a how-to, since I have no interest in fishing, but is fascinating as a literary artifact. It's still written in modern english, but the style and word choice is completely different from what I'm used to, which is enough to keep me interested even if I don't care about the subject matter. Also, the opening dialogue is...a thing. The book presents itself as a conversation between Piscator (angler), Venator (hunter), and Auceps (falconer), and the first chapter goes like this: PISCATOR: so I'm an angler VENATOR and AUCEPS: lol, fish suck PISCATOR: what's so great about your hobbies then AUCEPS: [a page on why falconry is great] VENATOR: [another page on why hunting is great] PISCATOR: [most of a chapter on why angling is great] AUCEPS: oh look, there's my stop, great talking to you, bye forever VENATOR: i am completely overcome with the glory of fish! please teach me, o great master! PISCATOR: if you insist :smug:
2017-08-02	Lost Things	Melissa Scott & Jo Graham
2017-08-03	Steel Blues	Melissa Scott & Jo Graham
2017-08-04	Silver Bullet	Melissa Scott & Jo Graham
Hermetic magic and defiance of gender roles in 1920s/30s America. I really liked the first book, but the magic took a back seat for the next two and that made them less interesting to me. I'll probably read the other two at some point, but the end of book 3 is a good place to take a break.
2017-08-05	Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain	David Gerard
The first half is about Bitcoin, and it's fascinatingly dumb. The second half is about Etherium and it's i{so much dumber than I could have imagined}. This was an amazing read if you like pointing and laughing at trainwrecks, which cryptocurrencies definitely are.
2017-08-06	Death Throes of the Republic	Dan Carlin
I've decided to add all the "book-length" podcasts to this. This was about the decline of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of its transformation into the Roman Empire, starting with Tiberius Gracchus's ascension to the Tribunate in the -130s and ending with Julius Caesar's death in -44. This is stuff I pretty much completely missed out on in grade school, and is super interesting. Listening to this at the same time as reading i{The Bloodwing Voyages} also significantly enhanced the latter, since the Rihannsu Star Empire is very clearly modeled after the late Roman Republic.
2017-09-01	My Enemy, My Ally	Diane Duane
2017-09-02	The Romulan Way	Diane Duane
2017-09-03	Honour Blade	Diane Duane
2017-09-04	The Empty Chair	Diane Duane
2017-09-05	Binti	Nnedi Okorafor
2017-09-06	Binti: Home	Nnedi Okorafor
2017-09-07	The Tower of Fear	Glen Cook
2017-09-20	The Fifth Season	N.K. Jemisin
2017-09-21	The Obelisk Gate	N.K. Jemisin
2017-09-23	The Stone Sky	N.K. Jemisin
2017-09-24	The Madness Season	C.S. Friedman
2017-09-25	Patreon Stories, 2016	Seanan McGuire
2017-10-01	Fortress in the Eye of Time	C.J. Cherryh
2017-10-02	Fortress of Eagles	C.J. Cherryh
2017-10-03	Fortress of Owls	C.J. Cherryh
2017-10-04	Fortress of Dragons	C.J. Cherryh
2017-10-05	The Wizard Hunters	Martha Wells
2017-10-06	The Ships of Air	Martha Wells
2017-10-07	The Gate of Gods	Martha Wells
2017-10-29	Provenance	Ann Leckie
2017-10-30	Jhereg	Steven Brust
2017-10-31	Yendi	Steven Brust
2017-11-01	Teckla	Steven Brust
2017-11-02	Taltos	Steven Brust
2017-11-03	Phoenix	Steven Brust
2017-11-04	Athyra	Steven Brust
2017-11-05	Orca	Steven Brust
2017-11-07	Killers of the Flower Moon	David Grann
2017-11-08	Dragon	Steven Brust
2017-11-09	Issola	Steven Brust
2017-11-10	Dzur	Steven Brust
2017-11-11	Jhegaala	Steven Brust
2017-11-12	Iorich	Steven Brust
2017-11-13	Tiassa	Steven Brust
2017-11-14	Hawk	Steven Brust
2017-11-15	Vallista	Steven Brust
2017-11-23	Evil is a Matter of Perspective	ed. Adrian Collins
Disappointing! I picked this up for the story by Janny Wurts, but that turned out to be one of the stories I liked least. Or rather, thematically I felt it was one of the best of the lot, but the writing style grated on me hard -- which was suprising after how much I enjoyed i{Daughter of the Empire}. It looks like most, possibly all, of these stories share settings with other works by the same author; perhaps the stories would have more impact if I had read any of those, since then I'd be contrasting the portrayal of the characters and actions in the stories with their portrayal in the original works. But I haven't, so most of them come across as Standard Fantasy Antiheroes and as a result it feels like most of the authors completely missed the point.
2017-11-24	The Library at Mount Char	Scott Hawkins
2017-11-25	Lady Windermere's Fan	Oscar Wilde
2017-11-26	Fledgling	Octavia Butler
2017-12-01	Wild Seed	Octavia Butler
2017-12-02	Mind of My Mind	Octavia Butler
2017-12-07	Clay's Ark	Octavia Butler
2017-12-09	Patternmaster	Octavia Butler
2017-12-10	The Black Tides of Heaven	JY Yang
2017-12-11	The Red Threads of Fortune	JY Yang
A duology of novellas about the Tensorate, a China-inspired fantasy setting with five-elemental magic. Both books are about a brother-sister pair, the first from the perspective of the brother, the second the sister some years after everything has gone to shit at the end of the first book. They're good in their own right, but also contain a bunch of genderfeels due to the way the Tensorate handles gender -- children are genderless and remain so until they choose a gender (which is optional!), and until they do so are effectively on puberty blockers thanks to the life-mages. Once they choose a gender, the life-mages shape their body appropriately. The gender of most characters in the stories is unimportant and, in many cases, undisclosed.
2017-12-20	Probability Moon	Nancy Kress
2017-12-25	Probability Sun	Nancy Kress
2018-01-04	The Drowned Tome: a Salt & Sanctuary Analysis	ASUKO_XIII
2018-01-05	Tuf Voyaging	George R.R. Martin
2018-01-08	The Star Diaries	Stanislaw Lem
When I originally read this, I didn't like it nearly as much as The Cyberiad. On reread, I still don't.
2018-01-12	The Forge of God	Greg Bear
This was really good and reminds me a bit of Lucifer's Hammer, in that it's a global apocalypse that the protagonists can't really do anything to mitigate or avert. Despite that, it ends on a hopeful note, and also with obvious sequel bait for The Anvil of Stars.
2018-01-12	Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything	Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith
A gift from Kaela, this was a highly entertaining and informative read. Some of the stuff (space access) I was already well familiar with; others (bioprinting) I had heard of but knew nothing about. I also thought the overall tone was great; very "Dave Barry does pop-sci", and since I grew up reading Dave Barry this makes it both entertaining and nostalgic while still being new.
2018-01-19	Anvil of Stars	Greg Bear
Very different in tone from The Forge of God, and much more a look at what happens to a small group of people under constant pressure. The Braids were neat (and remind me of the Tines somewhat) but I wish they got more screen time.
2018-01-19	Rolling in the Deep	Seanan McGuire
2018-01-23	Into the Drowning Deep	Seanan McGuire
Didn't like this nearly as much as Newsflesh. The viewpoint isn't really tightly coupled to any one character, but this means it spends a lot of time drifting and expositing on the setting or on people's internal state -- it does a lot of telling rather than showing. Overall, a disappointment.
2018-01-29	Binti: The Night Masquerade	Nnedi Okorafor
A good ending to the Binti trilogy, and I love love love the resolution to the subplot with the edan.
2018-01-29	Snake-Armed Girl	Bard Bloom
I kind of forget how much I enjoy Bard's books until I'm reading one, and then I really enjoy it! This is set in the same universe as Mating Flight but is independent of it apart from one of the antagonists being an astral dragon -- which actually makes me wonder how it fits in with the fourth Mating Flight book, which is set ~five years before this one (earth time) but involves considerably more interaction with astral dragons, and also aliens. Maybe they aren't in the same universe after all, or it's a different Earth. Anyways. Story about a teenager trying to save the world while also coming to terms with the realization that she's a lesbian and also that she has seven semi-independent armoured snakes where her arms should be.