What are you Reading? April 2018 edition

Rereading "Monsters of The Northwoods" by Paul & Robert Bartholomew. It is about Bigfoot sighting near where I live in the early 1990's.

So I think I've watched as much TV in these past 3 months as I've watched in the past three years combined. That's still not a lot of TV, but it's been taking a chunk out of my reading time.

Picked up on recommendation Sarah J. Maas' The Throne of Glass. I think it's technically YA fantasy, but it was well done. She's got a good use of words, and crafts believable relationships. The main character is a Mary Sue, though starts as a broken Mary Sue and is taken orthogonal to her core competencies a good deal.

As an asside, I discovered something about myself. I've written before I have a fondness for well written tactical space battles. I've reread the whole Honor Harrington series more than once, and while she;s queen of the Mary Sues, I find that since she's actually something like 60 years old just in the body of a 20 year old due to their life-extension treatments, it's believable in-world. Someone is going to be at the far end of the bell curve. But in this book the character was a Mary Sue already in backstory, with multiple years of being exceedingly infamous when she was 17. And while it has the appropriate background nods to intensive training with "the best" of various disciplines starting when she was eight, it still rubs me the wrong way that she was better than anyone else regardless of experience by the time she was in the 14-17 range.

All of that said, I enjoyed it. (Actually, I'm not quite at the end. I'm in the denouement after the climax, or at least I assume, but it had a good number of pages to go and it was late.) Just ordered books 2-4 (of 4) off Amazon, they are fairly cheap so I don't expect they are big sellers.

I've got my normal To Read pile that I haven't made much progress on recently, plus I picked up Quillifer by Walter Jon Williams used. I don't know anything about the book (besides it says "Book One"), but WJW has plenty of cred with me. His earliest works like Voice of the Whirlwind were good, but I'd really loved books he's written since he hit his stride. Both his serious fiction and his farcical Maijstral books.

Totally agree on the main character of Throne of Glass being a Mary Sue, but somehow the book remains quite enjoyable. It was optioned for a TV series or movie, but I've not heard anything on that front for a while.

Walter Jon Williams’ Voice of the Whirlwind and its predecessor, Hardwired, are absolutely razor-sharp Cyberpunk novels. I really need to get to Solip:System soon.

Blue said:

Picked up on recommendation Sarah J. Maas' The Throne of Glass. I think it's technically YA fantasy, but it was well done. She's got a good use of words, and crafts believable relationships. The main character is a Mary Sue, though starts as a broken Mary Sue and is taken orthogonal to her core competencies a good deal.

I've got my normal To Read pile that I haven't made much progress on recently, plus I picked up Quillifer by Walter Jon Williams used. I don't know anything about the book (besides it says "Book One"), but WJW has plenty of cred with me. His earliest works like Voice of the Whirlwind were good, but I'd really loved books he's written since he hit his stride. Both his serious fiction and his farcical Maijstral books.

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megamania said:

Rereading "Monsters of The Northwoods" by Paul & Robert Bartholomew. It is about Bigfoot sighting near where I live in the early 1990's.

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Love this book!

I went to college at Castleton in the early 1990's. Had a few "strange" encounters on the walking trails near there. Then in the 1990's a friend at work lent me his copy and I was shocked how the dates lined up including a specific house shown that I had an unusual experience.

Went out and bought the book. This makes my third time reading it. (short and easy read)

Wish I had thought about the events more openly. I know thrown acorns are a typical "move on" tactic along with being followed.

The Path of Daggers, book 8 in the Great Wheel of Time Read is done. The ending of this book really felt like the author was saying “No, wait, don’t go, look at all these cliffhangers! Stuff happens in this book, really!”

Taking a break with Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. I enjoyed The Broken Sword, so I’m looking forward to this one.

After what felt like an eternity, I've finally finished 'The Republic of Thieves' by Scott Lynch. Although a bit tedious at times, I mostly enjoyed it, actually. I'm pretty sure I'm through with Locke Lamora and the Gentlemen Bastards, though.

Next up is Peter Hamilton's 'The Abyss Beyond Dreams', a return to his Commonwealth universe.

To be fair, it feels like Scott Lynch is as well. Going on five years since the last book came out.

Jhaelen said:

After what felt like an eternity, I've finally finished 'The Republic of Thieves' by Scott Lynch. Although a bit tedious at times, I mostly enjoyed it, actually. I'm pretty sure I'm through with Locke Lamora and the Gentlemen Bastards, though.

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Ralif Redhammer said:

To be fair, it feels like Scott Lynch is as well. Going on five years since the last book came out.

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To be fair, he did have six years between Red Seas and Republic. And has a cover image for The Thorn of Emberlain on his web site, but nothing else linked there seems particularly recent. Let me search.

Hmm, he's moved and gotten married to Elizabeth Bear since the last book. Nifty.

Ah, found something. An interview in August 2017 that he's going abotu 8 weeks of fixing things he doesn't like and then he can submit it.

http://www.6d.fi/index.php/previews/74-interview/1052-worldcon-75-interview-with-author-scott-lynch

If I recall, after final editing pass it's about a year from submission to print. Not sure if this is first submitted draft or final handling editor's feedback or what. So let's say a year from Oct 2017 minimum.

Interesting, Thorn of Emberlain was going to be the first book:

I’ve read that the seven book series was meant to have the first three as the introduction to the world and characters, with the four later books being the actual starting-point of the story. Is that true?
Yeah, that’s still pretty true. I was originally dead set on starting the story with what will be book 4 in the sequence, The Thorn of Emberlain, and I realized about two chapters into trying to write it that I did not feel that I knew the characters involved well enough. It just did not feel right. So I went back and essentially wrote three prequels to it. That cheapens the other novels, you know, in memory - that’s not entirely what I mean to do to them - but I wondered how my readers could feel involved in a setting and these characters if I myself did not feel sufficiently involved in them.

So yes, there will be a major structural difference in the first half of the sequence and the second half, in that the first half was location change, location change, location change, and the second half will be a lot more anchored in place. We will see some new locations, but we’re always going to be returning to Emberlain and the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows, as returning scene settings.

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Yeah, it was probably more snark than strictly necessary on my part. I do recall that for a time there was even a release date listed for the Thorn of Emberlain, before it…went away. I guess I’m a little burnt by certain other unfinished book series.

Blue said:

To be fair, he did have six years between Red Seas and Republic.

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