What are you reading in 2022?

[Zaukrie]

I just devoured The Three Body Problem. Told my wife that hard science science fiction is so hard to recommend. I hated Aurora, where others loved it. If you don't like physics, I'm not sure how you will handle pages and pages of it......I may have to buy the next two.....

 

[dragoner]

I just devoured The Three Body Problem. Told my wife that hard science science fiction is so hard to recommend. I hated Aurora, where others loved it. If you don't like physics, I'm not sure how you will handle pages and pages of it......I may have to buy the next two.....

I'm reading "To Hold Up The Sky" by Liu right now, a collection of short stories. I really like his work, especially the characters.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Currently most of the way through Seanan Mcguire's Sparrow Hill Road... Great take on ghost stories/urban legends.

Everyone knows the old stories about the ghostly hitchhikers still trying to find a ride home, the phantom racers haunting the highways, the serial killers stalking the interstates...
Sparrow Hill Road follows what happens to Rose, "The Girl in the Green Dress", after she's run off the road and killed in 1952... Thinking that her boyfriend has ditched her when he doesn't show up to pick her up for the Prom, she borrows her brother's car and heads to the Prom on her own. But she never makes it. Now she's a ghost - a hitcher, wandering the highways of the US in search of a ride, a borrowed coat and a warm meal at a diner, the original inspiration for all the other urban legends and local tales of ghostly teenage passengers.

She's spent the years since her death traveling America, drawn to impending accidents, sometimes able to save a few people, mostly arriving just in time to guide the ghosts of the victims onward toward their afterlife...
...And still playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the immortal killer who ran her off the road that night in 1952 and wants to finish the job.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I enjoyed Gideon, but I'm not sure I loved it. Very well written. Very unique. But something was missing for me to make it great? It might have been that, like I said, I mixed up the characters (not our two protagonists) and had a hard time identifying with them? Also, something about the end seemed rushed, which is NOT how I felt in general (the pacing was too slow in the middle, maybe).

I think you're on to something about the pacing. just finished Nona the Ninth, and I feel like it had the same acceleration into and through the ending that you've mentioned here. I'm not sure I trust my memory, but Harrow the Ninth did the same thing, if I recall correctly. I've been thinking about it, and I feel like it might be a sense of the endings being rushed more than them actually being rushed (which may amount to the same thing, all told) — Muir spends a lot of time in the build up and pays out on her plot threads pretty aggressively as the books come to a conclusion.

For me, now, I'm thirty or so pages into John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting and two chapters into Simon Kuper's Football against the Enemy. (I like to swap between fiction and nonfiction sometimes.)

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished Stavely's The Emperor's Blades. While I get why people like it, and there were plenty of parts I liked, there was a lot I didn't like. It takes forever to get going. Maybe I've read too much Appendix N, but anytime a book goes over 400 pages, I feel like it has to work that much harder to justify its length. The other thing is that there's a bunch of baked-in sexism - the way women are described, the fact that of the three POV characters, it's the woman that gets maybe a third the number of chapters of the other two, if that.

Now I'm re-reading The Silmarillion. It's been seven years since my last read-through of it, and after watching Rings of Power, I feel like I need to revisit it.

 

[Zaukrie]

Alloy of Law. Which. Dang. It's pretty good, as you'd expect.

 

[Zaukrie]

Alloy of Law. Which. Dang. It's pretty good, as you'd expect.

I thought I read the last book fast. Finished this in three sit downs! I might need to reread parts, as in writing a book and want to understand the point of view better.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I thought I read the last book fast. Finished this in three sit downs! I might need to reread parts, as in writing a book and want to understand the point of view better.

The books in the Wax and Wayne quadrilogy are shorter than the ones in the first trilogy, so that might be why.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished the Silmarillion, for the umpteenth time. Still a magical read.

Now I'm onto Michael Moorcock's The Champion of Garathorm. After reading a 600- and 400- page book it's nice to go back to something more compact.

 

[WayneLigon]

Just finished the third book in the Maradaine Elite series, People of The City. This is the twelfth and last book in Phase One of the Maradaine series - and unlike the others it cannot be read in any order. You need to read this series last because People of The City brings every Phase One plot thread to a head, features all seven main characters, and there is a summary of all the other books in the forepart.

So good. Now to take a break and then start on the two books of Phase Two.