January Reads: Setting the Tone for 2016!

[Iskaral Pust]

I just bought Sorcerer To The Crown based on the description above.

[RedEyedGhost]

I finished The Tainted City by Courtney Schafer on Thursday morning, and I thought it was fantastic.  I really enjoy the way she weaves a tale.  I'm also a big fan of the magic system, especially the way it was ramped up in this one.  I wouldn't mind a bit more in the world building department though.  It continues to amaze me how Nightshade actually failed, they put out some amazing books.

Now I'm about 75 pages into The Rising by Ian Tregillis.  It's excellent so far.  After that will be Gentlemen Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold.  After that I might wrap up Schafer's trilogy with The Labyrinth of Flame or maybe something else... but probably not.

 

On ‎1‎/‎23‎/‎2016 at 3:53 PM, beniowa said:

Finished The Tainted City, which was a great sequel to The Whitefire Crossing.  Schafer really put her characters through the wringer with this one.  I've never been a big fan of Robin Hobb, but those who are might give Courtney Schafer's The Shattered Sigil books a shot. 

You are not kidding.  There was some rough stuff in this one.  One thing different between Schafer and Hobb is, sometimes Hobb's brutalizing her characters don't always feel like it necessary or integral to the plot, but Schafer definitely does drive the plot as she's hammering her characters.

 

[SkynJay]

On 1/24/2016 at 5:44 AM, SkynJay said:

 

I plan on rereading The Warrior Prophet soon but first I will try Snakewood by Adrian Selby.  Don't know much about it other than its a debut from Orbit and recently they have had a pretty good track record with me.

If it turns out everyone thinks Snakewood is awesome I will go back to it.  But it is too disjointed (the plot is being told like someone is piecing it together from several sources; cool idea, thus far lacking in execution). For now it is going down as a DNF.

[HexMachina]

50% through Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis. Good stuff, very good stuff. Thanks to those who recommended it, you were all absolutely correct. For those who have been reading the Alchemy Wars and said Milweed was the superior series thus far; was this when taking e trilogy as a whole? Or did you feel it from the beginning? I only ask because although I am enjoying it a lot, so far I would rate The Mechanical and The Rising as being  better books. But again, it's only early days with Bitter Seeds.

[Isildur's Mane]

So January is about to come to a close now and I thought I would update what I have read so far. 

Which is not much. I finished a book the other week and was hoping to finish another one by the end of January, but no luck. Still only 1/20.

I'm 56% through 'Bullies, Bastards and Bitches', by Jessica Page Morrell and 46% through 'The Pillow Book of the Flower Samurai', by Barbara Lazar.

[Guinevere Seaworth]

It is still January for me.  I finished Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster    Bujold.  This is very much a Cordelia story. I enjoyed it for the most part aside from revelations about Aral that didn't quite seem to work for me.

Up next is Bands Of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson.

 

[Maester Llama]

SkynJay, Iskaral: I hope you enjoy Sorcerer to the Crown, that the mini-bandwagon might grow!

 

SkynJay: Shame about Snakewood. I wasn't paying too much attention to it, honestly, for a shallow reason, which is that I initially thought the word "fightbrews" was stupid, but I'd been seeing it picking up some good reviews, so put it on my list. I've noticed that we often have similar taste as well, so I'm glad I'm getting it from the library and so have not spent money [Last Song, by contrast, was a Christmas gift, so somebody spent coins even though it wasn't me, so I hope I feel differently about that one than you did.]

 

Helena, re Bitter Seeds: I'd say for me I liked Milkweed more based just on Bitter Seeds, yep. I definitely get why The Mechanical might be considered a better book, but it took quite a while for Jax to build up enough of a character, for me, and we spend a bunch of time with his ratbastard merchant family owners early on and I found them to be a bit cardboard. I enjoyed the book, but not as much as Bitter Seeds, in which Marsh and Will and Klaus and Liv etc clicked for me very quickly and I instantly thought Gretel was an enormous badass. I'll be interested to see how The Rising changes my opinion.

 

The one book I've finished recently that I didn't include in my previous post for length reasons was Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, by Brad Beaulieu: With the caveat that it's been a while since I started up a new epic fantasy series of the big-book variety, so I may have been particularly prone to buying what this was selling, I really, really liked it. It's thoroughly broad canvas epic fantasy, with despotic kings ruling over a desert city supplied by sandsailing sledships, deep dark secrets about how they gained and maintain their power, numerous foreign conspiracies and opposition groups, and some prophecy stuff going on, but this is all focused very tightly through the perspective of the protagonist, Ceda, who is bent on destroying the kings for what they've done to her family There are multiple povs -- four, I believe -- but Ceda's pov gets the lion's share of the book, and while the other perspectives provide us crucial information and deepen other major players her plotline is always the spine. Ceda herself is a complex figure of the kind I find I like most in political fantasy anywhere on the grimmer spectrum at this point: a fundamentally good person with some nontrivial problems, sometimes misguided by anger etc, but ultimately driven by the intention of doing good and achieving this more often than not. She has complex relationships with most of the other major characters, who are themselves an interesting and thorny bunch who always bounce off each other well. Despite the initially fairly clearcut premise -- the kings are despotic tyrants and stone cold murderers, and they must fall -- Beaulieu dances a wonderfully intricate and swervy line through ambiguous morality: The kings are absolute ratbastards on a sociopolitical level, but several of them appear, at least from the ambiguous glimpses we get, to be not-shit people; opposing them means earning the hatred unto death of people who are definitely not shit people; they [perhaps most importantly] really do make Sharakhai work as a city, and it would be hugely vulnerable without them; and, finally, the righteous anti-tyrannical faction that offers the kings their clearest organized opposition has very, very, very dirty hands.

 

The book is exciting, but not always fast-paced, building slowly toward action and revelation, and [as fun as fast pace can be] this is one of the reasons I like it so much: Ceda is very focused on her vengeance, but she's not a single-minded automaton; she has a complete life in the city of Sharakhai, and we see her pursue all aspects of that life, always guided by her quest, but never railroaded by it. It's a first volume of what looks like a big epic fantasy that is willing to stop and smell the roses [or in this case the spices] and let us immerse ourselves in the world and the characters, while also never losing sight of the goal and making sure everything feels like it contributes. However, speaking of everything contributing, I do feel the book's status as a first volume does get it into a little trouble in terms of making it clear how everything matters to this specific installment, particularly near the end: The climax is powerful stuff, but it involves sidelining antagonists the book [not necessarily Ceda, but the book] has been more focused on in favour of one who we the readers have spent relatively little time with, and in doing so ushering one villain in particular off-stage to await book 2 just as he seems to be about to articulate his longterm goals and thereby make quite a bit of what happens in the shadows in Twelve Kings make significantly more sense. This did wrong-foot me a little, but I think the book lays out so many indications for the reader, in terms of how it distributes story and foreshadowing, that this is the Launchpad for the kind of series that intends to get pretty comfortable in Sharakhai and visit it quite a few times that, as long as this long-form fantasy storytelling is something you're down for, it shouldn't be a huge bother. What else bugged me? Oh, Beaulieu hits the faux-middle English a bit now and then to make certain characters sound arcane and mysterious, and this worked for me very inconsistently and I know the these and thous annoy some people. It is rare enough, however, that I can't reasonably imagine it being a dealbreaker for most people. The writing flows wonderfully for the most part, with atmospheric descriptions of the city and the desert and the occasional flare-ups of arcane power, but for some reason I noticed more grammatical copyedit screw-ups than usual. Again, not a big deal. A recent highlight in secondary world fantasy for me, and I'd recommend trying it to pretty much anybody who likes longer-form, character-driven epic fantasy storytelling with lots of worldbuilding that mixes the grounded and political with the mysterious and magical.

 

It occurs to me that I've been liking a lot of stuff lately. Which is very pleasant, but what if I forget how to tell when something is shit? To this end I have ordered Terry Goodkind's Warheart from the library. For the moment, however, I am jumping on the Leigh Bardugo  train and reading Six of Crows, which is badass.

[RedEyedGhost]

15 minutes ago, Triskan said:

Finished Tyrant's Law by Abraham and will likely start on the next one today.  Quite solid.

Lucky you, the rest of us had to wait a year after that epilogue.

[RedEyedGhost]

9 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

50% through Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis. Good stuff, very good stuff. Thanks to those who recommended it, you were all absolutely correct. For those who have been reading the Alchemy Wars and said Milweed was the superior series thus far; was this when taking e trilogy as a whole? Or did you feel it from the beginning? I only ask because although I am enjoying it a lot, so far I would rate The Mechanical and The Rising as being  better books. But again, it's only early  days with Bitter Seeds.

I read a three of The Milkweed Triptych over a 3-4 month period, so I have a difficult job keeping them separate, which is unfair to The Mechanical.  But there's also quite a bit to still happen in Bitter Seeds, so your opinion might still change too

[polishgenius]

2 minutes ago, Triskan said:

And then presumably I'll be there with some of y'all waiting for the last one.

Those five weeks are going to be unbearable for you.

[Xray the Enforcer]

9 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

50% through Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis. Good stuff, very good stuff. Thanks to those who recommended it, you were all absolutely correct. For those who have been reading the Alchemy Wars and said Milweed was the superior series thus far; was this when taking e trilogy as a whole? Or did you feel it from the beginning? I only ask because although I am enjoying it a lot, so far I would rate The Mechanical and The Rising as being  better books. But again, it's only early days with Bitter Seeds.

Tough to say. I would rate Bitter Seeds and the Mechanical as maybe about the same. The writing is slightly more polished in the latter, but the there are just no pulled punches in the former. And between The Rising and The Coldest War, it's no contest. TCW wins hands down. I'm hoping that the third book of the Mechanical trilogy can get back to the glory of the first book. 

[RedEyedGhost]

43 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Those five weeks are going to be unbearable for you.

 

Indeed, those five weeks will surely seem as long as the year and a half the rest of us have been waiting.  Trisky is doing it right though, and I find my self doing that more and more - unless it's one of my top authors, then I can't wait.

[David Selig]

I am currently reading The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts' latest novel. it's fascinating so far. The main idea is really interesting and original - what if it is possible to prove Kant's ideas from Critique of Pure Reason by using an AI which doesn't rely on human senses to perceive reality and then use that AI to manipulate "the thing itself" (Ding an sich) and achieve teleportaion and similar supposedly impossible feats? The blurb is quite misleading and make it sound as if it's some some sort of a quasi-remake of Carpenter's The Thing in a novel form, but actually only the first chapter takes place in Antarctica and resembles the movie.

[Puntificator]

I hate stories that are supposed to take place in our world, on our planet, and in our time (or thereabouts) that have sentient animals in them. I mean I really hate them. Or so I thought. In the past twelve months, I have read two novels that I liked immensely that had sentient animals in them. Both were debut novels. One was the very weird The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, a 2015 book. And the other is a book I have just finished: the newly published (January 2016) and very quirky All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. It's an amazing and beautiful tale. And very, very character-driven. A plot-not (what?) story. Science fiction and fantasy (with magic) blended together like an Everly Brothers harmony.  

[C Rutherford]

Let's see.  Some January highlights:

 

Kingfisher by Patricia A. McKillip.  Some really lovely elements that are pure McKillip.  Rich and evocative and a style I have missed these last couple of years.  She mixes Arthurian second world fantasy with modern setting.  It is odd and even a little jarring.  And yet it works.  Still there is a flaw in the pace and scope.  Sudden and abrupt shifts and almost rough turns to resolution.  There is just so much here and too much doesn't get enough exposition.  It ends feeling like a series got edited down to a single volume.  Still I love her style that I can excuse a bit and I'm just glad to have a new work by her.

 

Dreaming Death by J. Kathleen Cheney.  I liked this.  It is a bit slow at the start and it has a little issues in establishing the world building and setting.  A vague drop in the middle and then a shift towards a bit of info dumping.  But this is nice sort of traditional type of fantasy and more interested in telling the story than piling on all kinds of attempts to show how intricate and unique her imagination is.

 

Son of Morning by Mark Adler.  I've heard about this since it took a year or more to come to the US.  Decent.  It is a little rough in narrative at times.  Interesting take on historical speculative fiction with some decent action.  Not great.  But good.

 

Currently reading The Immortals by Jordanna Max Brodsky.  Think that next will either be The Last Days of Magic by Mark Tompkins  or Snakewood by Adrian Selby

 

Set aside after an initial try to a later go:  This Census-Taker by China Mieville (not the hugest fan and just not in the mood), The Children's Home by Charles Lambert (a little too slow; feels like a book you have to try to push through in a sitting and just didn't have enough time to dedicate a whole afternoon which I suspect it deserves)

[Bjornbert]

19 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

50% through Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis. Good stuff, very good stuff. Thanks to those who recommended it, you were all absolutely correct. For those who have been reading the Alchemy Wars and said Milweed was the superior series thus far; was this when taking e trilogy as a whole? Or did you feel it from the beginning? I only ask because although I am enjoying it a lot, so far I would rate The Mechanical and The Rising as being  better books. But again, it's only early days with Bitter Seeds.

I've read both series. Feel Milkweed is more entertaining but The Alchemist books are better. I vastly preffered the writing in let's say The Rising compared to Bitter Seeds.

[Starkess]

Just in time for January, I finished The Endless Knot, the conclusion of the Albion trilogy. It was not so good. So glad to be done with that trilogy. It wasn't quite bad enough for me to give up on it, but now that's done, it seems like a waste. Not sure what people see in these books. Maybe it's some Christian thing I'm missing (based on the 5 star reviews).

Have so many books I want to read, and reading this thread doesn't help (so many books that sound great!), but I think I am going to finally get around to Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice.

[Richard Writhen]

Gonna give Charles Portis'  True Grit  a shot ...  

[Queen Alienor]

I was recommended Jeffrey Archer's Only Time Will Tell and found it horrible. Very predictable, very soapy, I'm really not sure why people thought I'd like it.

[A wilding]

Rule of thumb: anyone who recommends a Jeffrey Archer book has zero literary taste and should not be taken seriously about anything book related. Don't be shocked if you discover they can't read without moving their lips.

Either that, or they were winding you up.