“weekly thread” was clearly a lie
I’ve just finished cleaning up my Calibre library and switched to the Story Graph - I really like the filters for figuring out what to read next.
Currently reading The Lefthanded Booksellers of London by Garth Nix. I’ve been trying to avoid YA content but picked this up as a palette refresh. So far, I’m enjoying the world-building and the snappy dialogue.
I just blew through the Gild series by Raven Kennedy - it was a random Story Graph recommendation but apparently it’s huge on Booktok. I generally enjoyed it, particularly the world-building and character development. The fourth book dragged as there’s a lot of set up for the final book (to be published) in the series.
And of course, Dungeon Crawler Carl, book 6! It’s getting very complex but the core elements that drew me to it are still there. How in the world is this going to end?
Excitedly waiting for the audiobook of dungeon crawler carl book 6 to become available
I’m reading The Passage by Justin Cronin. It’s great. It feels like many books in one book. A very enjoyable, though slightly jarring read. I’m looking forward to the next books in the series.
Rereading Malazan Book of the Fallen, with all the side books mixed in with the core 10.
Side books as in the other 10 Malazan books, written by that other author (Sorry, forgot his name), or there are some other books too?
Yeah, all the Esslemont ones, in the order the authors recommend on the wiki. There is the new Witness Trilogy from Erikson (#1 The God is Not Willing is out - it and the audiobook are great).
Babel by R. F. Kuang, really enjoying it. I’ve been trying to learn a second language this year, and the idea that determining the relationship between languages can be a source of magic is very fun.
Also, the Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I understand it’s a good faith attempt to examine 1969 America’s notions of gender and sex, but 50 years on, the age is showing. The default pronoun for all these non-gendered characters being ‘he/him’ scratches my brain continually.
The pronoun thing bothered Le Guin a bit too. If you dig around, you’ll find a short story set in the same world, Winter’s King, that uses she/her pronouns instead. (I confess that I don’t remember much else about it, though.)
Yeah, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but the idea of a spacefaring civilization only having a concept of he/she pronouns is very amusing.
Eh, I put it in the same category as spaceships with ashtrays, or spacefaring humanity still building giant 1960s-style batch-oriented mainframe computers even though they’ve reached distant solar systems. It’s something you have to be able to ignore to enjoy the older works.
(It’s also better than James White’s solution of calling anyone who wasn’t a gender-distinguishable member of the speakers’s own species “it”.)
