aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. Also, I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
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There is a Wild Man who lives in the deep quiet of Greenhollow, and he …
story about a young man who gets stuck in an ancient wood as it's protector in tree form. if you like faeries and dryads and stories about them, this may be for you. like stories about gods, it's not my thing.
Dark Lord Davi rules the kingdom, but she must now break the time loop that …
Have set Libby to notify me when the library has copies.
Groundhog Day meets Deadpool in Django Wexler’s raunchy, hilarious, blood-splattered fantasy tale about a young …
The premise is that Davi wakes up naked in a small pond in a magical world, where she is proclaimed to be the messiah of prophecy. Only after doing this 237 times and the hordes of the Dark Lord overrun the Kingdom every time, she gives up. She decides she's going to become the Dark Lord instead. There's a bit of Groundhog Day in this, but thankfully Wexler only takes us through those motions for the first chapters.
Davi is the kind of character I usually find annoying. Way too quick with quips and never serious, like every damn character in a Scalzi book. Thankfully there's an actual character arc where Davi comes to realize other characters aren't just NPCs in her personal video game, and she becomes less self-obsessed over the course of the book.
This is one of the few books lately where I became more interested in …
The premise is that Davi wakes up naked in a small pond in a magical world, where she is proclaimed to be the messiah of prophecy. Only after doing this 237 times and the hordes of the Dark Lord overrun the Kingdom every time, she gives up. She decides she's going to become the Dark Lord instead. There's a bit of Groundhog Day in this, but thankfully Wexler only takes us through those motions for the first chapters.
Davi is the kind of character I usually find annoying. Way too quick with quips and never serious, like every damn character in a Scalzi book. Thankfully there's an actual character arc where Davi comes to realize other characters aren't just NPCs in her personal video game, and she becomes less self-obsessed over the course of the book.
This is one of the few books lately where I became more interested in the story as it got further along.
Two “paleonerds” embark on a roadtrip across the West in search of fossils.
The new …
Paleobotanist Kirk Johnson and artists Ray Troll take an epic road trip through fossil beds & museums of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah and New Mexico, describing & drawing the flora, fauna & geology of the lands that were buried under the Great Plains and then uplifted back into surface proximity by the Rocky Mountains. Troll's artwork steals the show. If you've seen his shirts you now the distinctive style. Sadly, either I got a bit inured or the book just tails off a bit toward the end, where it feels more like a mad dash to get back to Denver on time than the more thoughtful gee-whiz exploration that it starts off as. This is the recently published second edition, and a lot of the narrative has been updated to reflect happenings since the original publication in 2007.
Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells, scholar of curses and magical history, has spent several years …
Finished creating a list for all the works cited in Reactor Magazine's article "Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2024". There's a lot of really interesting looking books mentioned there. This is the last book from that.
The list can be found on SFBA.club. If you follow me, your bookwyrm instance should have the list as well. I made sure all the books on the SFBA.club version have high-res covers and descriptions, but other instances will only pick that up if they didn't already have a copy of the book listed. (There's two short stories without covers.)
HOW HUMANITY CAME TO THE PLANET CALLED ANJIIN IS LOST IN THE FOG OF HISTORY, …
Ensemble characters. Characters that say "yeah" semi-resignedly a lot. Some characters will die on you. It's constructed like The Expanse, but the plot is definitely going to go very differently.
The Carryx suddenly swoop in to the world of Anjiin, where humanity lives but where their origin is lost to time. The Carryx quickly conquer humans, killing 1 out of every 8. Dafyd Alkhor's group is transported across the universe to a glorified prison planet where the team is given the task of making themselves useful to the Carryx. If they do not, humanity will be obliterated. Lots of intra-group conflict. Lots of conflict with other prisoner species. Lots of perceived conflict with the Carryx, who mostly ignore them until they've proven themselves useful.
Do they collaborate and maybe live to fight the Carryx another day, or go out in a blaze of glory since it's likely humanity is going …
Ensemble characters. Characters that say "yeah" semi-resignedly a lot. Some characters will die on you. It's constructed like The Expanse, but the plot is definitely going to go very differently.
The Carryx suddenly swoop in to the world of Anjiin, where humanity lives but where their origin is lost to time. The Carryx quickly conquer humans, killing 1 out of every 8. Dafyd Alkhor's group is transported across the universe to a glorified prison planet where the team is given the task of making themselves useful to the Carryx. If they do not, humanity will be obliterated. Lots of intra-group conflict. Lots of conflict with other prisoner species. Lots of perceived conflict with the Carryx, who mostly ignore them until they've proven themselves useful.
Do they collaborate and maybe live to fight the Carryx another day, or go out in a blaze of glory since it's likely humanity is going to die anyway so why not go down fighting? Climax is a giant trolley problem. Don't forget that trolley problems are largely constructed as thought exercises, and here it's a thought exercise to move the plot along. In other words, don't get too attached to the philosophy. Whichever way they go it's just a story.
Clear is the story of a minister dispatched to a remote island to "clear" its …
John Ferguson is a minister in the Free Church of Scotland as it is trying to establish itself. With no parish to support him, he takes a job for an estate landlord to "clear" or remove the last remaining tenant on a remote island owned by the estate. Although conflicted, he really needs the money. Shortly after arriving, he falls off a cliff and is rescued by Ivar, the tenant he is supposed to evict.
A really well-written story of a relationship between John and Ivar. You get a bit of the history of the Scottish Free Church, a bit of the history of the Highland Clearances, a few moral dilemmas deftly handled, some feminism appropriate for the time, and North Sea adventures. I suspect this is quite good as a read, but it's amazing narrated by Russ Bain with a Scottish accent, a bit over 3 hours in length.
In In the Bleak Midwinter, Julia Spencer-Fleming's Malice Domestic-winning first mystery, Reverend Clare Fergusson was …
Clare Fergusson gets embroiled in a series of gay-bashing crimes in Miller's Kill. Spencer-Fleming captures how liberal uncomfortableness with homosexuality contributes homophobia even when they think they are supportive. But the gay-bashing is too obviously calculated and the ultimate motivation is economic. It's a too-fantastic of a scheme. As a police procedural, the story doesn't hold together well either due to how involved Russ Van Alstyne (the Miller's Kill police chief) allows Clare Fergusson to be. He can bring in professionals, but allows a hard-charging Fergusson to drive the investigation, even when he says it's a bad idea.
An astronaut’s interstellar mission is a personal journey of a thousand second chances in an …
Humanity invents a way of traveling at near light speed by encoding people as energy and reconstituting them at the destination. So one traveler sneaks an engagement ring onto his body when he is scanned, because his ex-wife will also be one of the people sent to the stars. I didn't understand why, but the original encoded group is then sent on to further destinations, giving the main character even more chances at a do-over.
The story does understand just how wrong-headed the attempt at a do-over is.
She has just one week to stop a killer.
Emma Makepeace is headed to Edinburgh …
Emma Makepeace is chosen to lead a team trying to figure out how Russia plans to disrupt a G7 meeting in Edinburgh. The catch is that she may have to be a "honeytrap" for Nick Orlov, a Russian asset, in order to find out what they are doing, and she's not sure how she feels about that.
Not thrilled with the story. Makepeace isn't really leading the team, for instance. That seems more like a line thrown in by the author to justify Makepeave getting to sit in on a meeting between the heads of the Home Office, MI5, MI6 and the Agency. Another is that the Russian plot is extremely clumsy. Early on, an FSB agent wanders around photographing Carlowrie Castle, the site of the G7 meetings. When we find out who some of the characters carrying out the plot are, I cringed. It's a convenient authorial reason to …
Emma Makepeace is chosen to lead a team trying to figure out how Russia plans to disrupt a G7 meeting in Edinburgh. The catch is that she may have to be a "honeytrap" for Nick Orlov, a Russian asset, in order to find out what they are doing, and she's not sure how she feels about that.
Not thrilled with the story. Makepeace isn't really leading the team, for instance. That seems more like a line thrown in by the author to justify Makepeave getting to sit in on a meeting between the heads of the Home Office, MI5, MI6 and the Agency. Another is that the Russian plot is extremely clumsy. Early on, an FSB agent wanders around photographing Carlowrie Castle, the site of the G7 meetings. When we find out who some of the characters carrying out the plot are, I cringed. It's a convenient authorial reason to involve a character from the Scottish police, but it makes little sense from a plot perspective.
Emma Makepeace is a good character, but I want to see better stories written around her.
Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Here are strategies for …
Like this review which I just boosted, I found some really good stuff. In addition to the articles mentioned in the linked review, I thought chapter 27 (EXCERPT FROM “MOVING BEYOND CRITIQUE”) was good because it looked at how one TJ project worked from the inside, and highlighted how messy that project was structurally. A lot of the items got hand-wavery in their discussion of what the issues could be; that one was very specific.
Jack Reacher is on the road, hitching a ride with some earnest young Canadians who …
Reach decides to hitchhike to the Canadian border, where he befriends a pair of hikers who've decided to trek across the border via a wilderness path. Reacher is about to head on when the military arrives and seals off the trail, but our hikers have already snuck in. Will the government track down the hikers? Will Reacher help them? Do the hikers have an ulterior motive and has the governent laid a clever trap for them?
Maaaaayyyybe.
Driven by his dreams, Asa will stop at nothing to find Tanja Duhr again: he …
Main character goes to a big city in the neighboring empire because he believes he was the lover of a famous poet of that city in a previous life. The famous poet is old now, and hasn't really published poetry like she had when she was younger. Can our MC's dreams awaken the poet she once was? Am I going to care? No.
King Shrewd is dead at the hands of his son Regal. As is Fitz—or so …
Content warning mild spoilers, although not much more than can be gleaned from reading the chapter titles
Waking up from the dead, Fitz vows to kill Regal, the would-be king who had him arrested and tortured, and who has usurped the throne of the Six Duchies.
There's an overlong journey to the new capital of the Six Duchies, a visit with the Old Blood (aka others who can talk to animals like Fitz) that feels shoehorned in so that some of the later magic doesn't feel as rough around the edges, way too many heel turns by new characters, and finally many many chapters in the realm of the Elderlings where the characters have to figure out how Elderling magic works.
This book needed to be about half as long as it was.
Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Here are strategies for …
In early 2021, (IIRC) Nikkita Oliver helped develop and lead a class on restorative justice. I bought this book, part of the curriculum, at the time because of that but work started taking over much of my time, so I didn't read any of it. Gonna see how it sits with me now though.