john

Naomi Novik Deadly Education 99p UK Kindle store.

I did notice the link in the final book in Impossible Times It’s definitely interesting to consider that all of the magics and technologies in all of the settings all link back to Lawrence’s ideas about time.

Just a daily deal, unfortunately. I was pleased to get it although I do feel a bit bad since I also paid 99p for Doors of January. I agree with you about too many books too, it’s amazing how often the kindle deals feed my addiction of owning books. Garth Nix’s Left Handed Booksellers of London was on there yesterday.

Alix Harrow Once and Future Witches is 99p on UK kindle today.

It's not as goofy as Schumacher Batman. The setting is quite gritty, it feels kind of like the Wire, minus the cop stuff (and in LA, crips and bloods gang wars and stuff) but written with a lot of humour and camaraderie. Ide was a screen writer before so he's good at dialogue and quickly drawing characters (also Snoop Dogg is apparently making it into a tv show). They're very readable, very entertaining, but I mainly wanted to say that it's nearly all action, there's not much unravelling of puzzles. Even though the main character's a genius, he mainly works things out on the fly and uses his long list of skills plus improvised gadgets, it's not your more thoughtful detective book. The first three books are quite often on offer for ebooks (on UK Amazon anyway). I got the first one cheap but couldn't resist paying full price for the next few, isn't that always the way.

Been reading the "IQ" books by Joe Ide, which the promotional materials describe as about a "street smart Sherlock Holmes." Not really true, it's about a smart guy and his partner who's a bit of a gangster sorting out street level problems in inner city LA. They mainly drive around getting into fights with people, its more like Batman than Sherlock Holmes. Lots of wacky, larger than life characters, high energy and wit, entertaining set pieces. At times it feels more like an adult Hardy Boys than a serious crime book. So cautiously recommended if you like that kind of thing.

I noticed from a quick perusal via amazon that Harrow the Ninth is written, at least partly, in the second person which is a bit off-putting.

Man, I wish that existed. No the McLean books are almost pure police procedural, with just a tiny taste of supernatural to intrigue fantasy fans. eta - Yes! I’d also recommend Derfel’s books if you want a bit of supernatural crime in Scotland. Connolly is a lot darker and spookier. Oswald is more like Rankin, except a ghost might’ve dunnit And yeah, we were talking about his deals. I believe he said 50k (gbp) for his five book fantasy series and 150k for the first two McLean books, climbing to 200k as the series went on.

Yeah, James Oswald, it seems like fantasy is his first love, I’ve seen him around cons and stuff. Still decent amount for his Sir Benfro series, which I wouldn’t have said was very popular. But his crime books (actually crime with an undercurrent of fantasy) are mega bestsellers in the UK, so I’m sure they’re taking that into account after the first one, as well as crime just being bigger than fantasy. Also interesting Jemisin saying she didn’t ask for big advances, she’d rather have regular royalty cheques. She does confirm the publishing industry is racist though.

I mean it’s true that Lynch has a better example of young male friendship but you might as well say that GRRM is better at medieval politics. It’s just different subject matter. But if you want to directly compare them on that, is Dunk and Egg not a fairly close match to the bantering camaraderie of Locke/Jean? Wheel of Time is a better example of a fantasy “failing” to do good friendships, it’s a story about a bunch of friends who don’t really act that much like friends.

I think Farseer and ASOIAF are similar in their imagined historicality. How to shoe a horse, how to raise a pup, how to oil a weapon. Right down to the nitty gritty of eating, bathing, cleaning your teeth with sand or whatever. KJ Parker is good at this too and recently John Gwynne is doing the history turned fantasy thing. GRRM goes further with the swearing, bleeding, shitting, fucking, for which you’d have to look to Abercrombie, although I don’t think he’s as intense as Martin. Also character work, there’s a similar depth even to peripheral characters and there’s frankly nobody in the genre as good as Martin and Hobb at that, although I do think Hobb has the edge there. edit- actually Martin is better at minor characters, Hobb is better at the major characters but she is painting a less broad tapestry. Lynch I’d say is more heightened reality, more cartoonish (in a good sense). I’d compare Rothfuss to him. I also recently read Kingdom of Liars by Nick Martel, which I found very similar in tone to Lies of Locke Lamora, but, unsurprisingly, not quite as good.

Scott definitely appeared to be under the impression it was ready to be published in September 2019, I heard him say so at a con in Luxembourg earlier last year. When it first missed it I just thought it must be some technical publishing slot reason. But now it seems like the author and the publishers/editors might have different ideas about the final draft.

My favourite series - Boris Akunin’s Fandorin books, starting with Winter Queen, Russia 1870s to 1920. Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man and sequels, British Raj India between the wars. His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Scottish crofting community around 1860s. SJ Parris’ Giordano Bruno books, Heresy etc, medieval Europe. Interpretation of Murder, Jen Rubenfeld, Sigmund Freud solves murders. Similarly Frank Tallis Death in Vienna series. J Robert Janes Beekeeper etc, detectives in Nazi occupied France. edit - actually Beekeeper isn’t the first book, my mistake. First one’s called Mayhem. I could go on.

Helena being booted was insane. How do you cut someone who won one of the challenges? And that giant squid thing was incredible. And they said it was incredible too. I can pretty much guess every week who’s going from how they talk about them (don’t always agree since often things that Paul and Prue say look “elegant” looks like shit to me). But I would never have guessed Helena would go because she won one of the fucking challenges!

Good news about Susanna Clarke new book. Slightly odd thread to find it in but very exciting nonetheless.

Prime Video is also one of the worst functioning apps I’ve ever used. It’s insane. The layout sucks in the first place, the way you can scroll through, the way they recommend shows. Everything seems calculated to the worst user experience. And then half the time it breaks anyway. I have to reboot my TV about every second time I use it. So, living in a country without a dedicated Amazon, we have this Prime Video service, which is just the shows and no other prime services. However, we discovered this month that they’ve now added the one day delivery to the deal. Which is nice and everything but I don’t really need it, feel guilty about the impact of it and would generally prefer they just had the content only package. They’re probably going to keep adding services and raise the price though. Other than that (and Netflix), we have HBO Go, which is pretty good in Europe, it tends to hoover up all the content you can’t get elsewhere, as well as HBO shows. Does seems a bit indulgent already, with Disney+ it would definitely be too much stuff.

Kindle UK, for Amazon’s June “first in series” sale, has a bunch of fantasy titles for 99p. Pick of them seems to be Cold Iron by Miles Cameron.

The Republic of Thieves was a decent book but it did have a few bad missteps, IMO. Including the apparent revelation at the end. Plus Lockes characterisation as a shrewd manipulator was undermined, like BFC says, by some of his daft election pranks, hope he ups his game for the wartime spymaster stuff. Generally though I love Lynch, I’ll read anything he writes. Recently heard him reading his story The Fall and Rise of the House of Markurial from one of the Dozois collections, it was great.

I recently read a few of these. They were great. More thrillers than mysteries, with lots of police procedural stuff. The action is intense, it’s puts you right in the shoot outs, car chases and whatnot. There’s like 30 of them so I’m going to put them in my rotation.

Ok, didn’t know that. That’s too bad. Although I read as much crime fiction as spec fiction, it doesn’t bring out my fandom side as much so I don’t tend to read around behind the scenes, from reading his Wiki now I also just found out he was Scottish! Sansom is really a gift to any fan of crime and fantasy cause he gets across so well the absolutely alien landscape of Tudor England.

I’m a big crime/thriller/mystery fan. I have mixed feelings about this thread because I’m sure I’ll have to check out some recs and already I must have literally hundreds of unread crime books filling up my kindle and bookshelves (plus I just found out CJ Sansom has cancer!) My absolute favourite is Boris Akunin, a megastar in Russia (like JK Rowling level), he wrote the Fandorin series, very funny, clever books, all deliberately with a different kind of feel to explore different genres within crime fiction and with historical Russian literary overtones. One particular novel (in a different series) Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (about a nun solving the mystery of a miracle on a remote island) is one of the best mystery stories I ever read. Otherwise, if you like golden age, Margery Allingham writes these old fashioned thrillers with a modern sensibility that makes even Sayers look quaint. The Inspector McClean series by James Oswald is a lot like Rankin but with a hint of the fantastical underpinning it. Peter James is pretty good, Ragnor Jonasson, Belinda Bauer, Adrian McKinty, Tana French, already mentioned but is fantastic.

UK kindle store - Mark Lawrence’s new one One Word Kill is 99p (or free if you have prime) in their Kindle First programme.

It was a bit odd that he came out of nowhere just to put craster down but I guess it would have been out of character for Rast to do it. It was a good scene, had the same sort of menace as in the book when you realise the NW is full of seriously bad men who don't necessarily like to take orders. I could totally see that guy stabbing Kit Harrington to death in a few seasons time.

Burn Gorman was awesome. Why can't he have a proper part?