What are you reading in 2025?

[Paul Farquhar]

That still bothers me. The whole of the sci-fi fantasy community coming together to mercilessly bully a kid over a book he wrote at 16. Utterly unforgivable

It’s just jealousy. I still don’t have the attention span to finish writing a book (irrespective of quality) and it’s a long time since I was 16.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That still bothers me. The whole of the sci-fi fantasy community coming together to mercilessly bully a kid over a book he wrote at 16. Utterly unforgivable.

Rebecca Black similarly getting crap over something that happened when she was 16, even after more than a decade of work to prove she's a "real" musician.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Getting several degrees in literature and related topics made me absolutely hate just about anything described as literary. Gimme something with a plot any day.

One of the great things about the rise of nerdom in pop culture is that barriers between fiction and genre fiction are dissolving to a certain extent. People are writing dissertations about Robert E. Howard!

That still bothers me. The whole of the sci-fi fantasy community coming together to mercilessly bully a kid over a book he wrote at 16. Utterly unforgivable.

Dude got out there at age 16 in a pre-internet age. That's no small achievement.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I just finished reading Ursula K. LeGuin's The Farthest Shore, which I last read when I was in fifth grade, riding the bus to elementary school. (We lived on a military base and it was a long commute each way each day.)

I didn't remember much of it before I started, other than -- as a kid -- it didn't really speak to me. I had a professor in college who advised rereading books in different stages in life, as they'll mean different things to you. He was speaking specifically about Beowulf, but it's apt here as well.

This is Ged's final adventure, although not his final book, since LeGuin started writing Earthsea books again 18 years after this one came out. She was only in her early 40s when this was published in 1972, but death and aging was clearly on her mind, along with the concept of passing the torch on to younger people.

It's a much less optimistic book than even the Tombs of Atuan, which was fairly bleak. In her afterword, LeGuin talks about seeing all of the idealism of the 1960s be replaced by cynicism, greed and drug abuse. One of the islands in this book is shockingly bleak and the overall threat facing the world in this book is pretty grim. Lots of authors have done the "magic is going away" plot, but none as well or as spookily as LeGuin, for my money.

I've never read the last three Earthsea books, although I gather they're not the romp people wanting them to be A Wizard of Earthsea 2 wanted them to be. Looking forward to them, although I suspect they'll be at least as contemplative is this one.

I do think this book would be a good pick-up for DMs, including the afterword, where LeGuin talks about dragons. She does a much better job of talking about the overlap between magic and dragons than WotC (who were clearly at least somewhat inspired by her ideas with making Draconic the language of magic) ever have.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

I was always disappointed with The Farthest Shore, because I wanted to see how Tenar’s story continued more than Ged’s. Never really warmed to the young prince and found it a bit too similar to Wizard of Earthsea in tone - shadow’s just a bit bigger in scale this time.

The later books felt like an attempt to redress some of the perceived missteps in the earlier trilogy, and I don’t think they do so well. Too many new elements drawn in that don’t feel like they’re quite part of the same world. But I may just be a grouchy old man who hates change.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

I’m very embarrassed about my buttposting; I hope no one draws attention to it.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I’m

No, you're

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Wrapped up Broken Homes (Rivers of London, Book 4) this morning at an hour when I should have been sleeping. It was fine? I still enjoyed it, but I might have been too aggressive in reading it right after Whispers Underground. The climax of the book came on suddenly, and, although I enjoyed the setpiece sequence at Skygarden, I found the prose a little overwrought at times and the big twist to be somewhat telegraphed, even if I did think it was plausible (Lesley was kind of always a bit awful and cynical, and Peter gives her a pass because she is/was very pretty and is better police than he is, certainly in Midnight Riot, and it just wasn't a stretch to see her throw in with a villain). It's probably time to give the series a break. I have some long flights coming up, and that might be a good time to save the next few books for.

 

[the Jester]

Over the last week I read the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book, which I found disappointing after how much I'd seen and heard it hyped up, and Red Rising, by Pierce Brown, which I thought was fantastic.

Both are the first books in series; I don't really feel too compelled to go on in the DCC series, but damn, I can't wait to continue the story that starts in Red Rising.

DCC might have sat better with me if I hadn't seen and heard such high praise for it, but I found it... all right. It has one of the things that annoys me most in books with alien species- the aliens (at least the ones we talk to) are all just too human.

 

[Richards]

I just started Jonathan Maberry's Patient Zero, the first in his "Department of Military Science" series. Joe Ledger, former Army soldier, former Baltimore cop and detective, and about to join the FBI, gets shanghaied and ushered into a Black Ops organization - the DMS - which deals with the kinds of threats normal groups can't handle. This one's about a terrorist group about to unleash a deadly bioweapon that can turn ordinary people into more-or-less zombies. (I've already read The Dragon Factory, another in the series, and liked it so much I reached out online and bought four more.)

Johnathan