What are you reading in 2022?

For those of you who are Pratchett fans - I really appreciated this blog post on Scalzi's blog that gives some spotlight to an upcoming authorized biography of Pratchett by his personal assistant.


I'm hoping to read this at some point.

[edited to add: Apparently released today according to Goodreads]

Also, at the risk of going way off topic (but it's humor. about dwarves!) this one's been making the rounds.

Knowing I'd be on a business trip from Tuesday through today, I picked up four books in the Destroyer series I hadn't read before:
I finished up the first one on Tuesday, the second one on Wednesday, and the third one yesterday. They're all mindless fun, which is all I was looking for, given a week in a hotel room. I'm about a third of the way through the last one, and I'll be sad to finish up this batch and move on to other books, although I have some interesting possibilities in my stack of library book sale books to be read.

Johnathan

Richards said:

Knowing I'd be on a business trip from Tuesday through today, I picked up four books in the Destroyer series I hadn't read before:

Destroyer #60: The End of the Game - A bored billionaire sets about manipulating people for his own amusement, leading to a possible nuclear war.​

Destroyer #69: Blood Ties - An assassin is using Remo Williams' name - is it his father, despite Remo being raised believing he was an orphan?​

Destroyer #80: Death Sentence - Remo is on death row with no memories (just odd dreams) of his time working for CURE - what's going on?​

Destroyer #85: Blood Lust - Master Chiun is believed dead and now Remo has to deal with the cult of Kali on his own.​

I finished up the first one on Tuesday, the second one on Wednesday, and the third one yesterday. They're all mindless fun, which is all I was looking for, given a week in a hotel room. I'm about a third of the way through the last one, and I'll be sad to finish up this batch and move on to other books, although I have some interesting possibilities in my stack of library book sale books to be read.

Johnathan

Click to expand...

Man, I respect you that you can read those out of order. When I think about reading them out of order, and starting them at not-volume-one I start to twitch...

Fortunately, for the most part each Destroyer novel is a standalone story, so it doesn't really matter in which order you read them. The one I'm reading now is a bit of an exception, though, because apparently at the end of #84 it looked like Master Chiun had been killed and Remo's starting out #85 all despondent at the apparent death of his mentor, but I know from other books further down the line that his apparent death was just that - only apparent. (It's even mentioned that there was no body found, which is a bit of a giveaway to a comic book fan like myself.) I'm seriously hoping that they get that resolved in this novel, because I'd like to see how Master Chiun escaped his apparent death.

It also helps that I read the first 40-50 or so in the series in order, albeit several decades ago. The series starts out with Chiun and Remo mostly fighting crime bosses and the like before it takes a turn into the spies and science fiction realms, with later opponents including gene-spliced monsters, robots, and the types of supervillains you'd expect to see in superhero comic books, like a guy who can transform his body into electricity and travel through the phone lines. And they get into various mythologies as well, as Sinanju myth holds that Remo is the physical embodiment of Shiva, the Destroyer, and in the current novel it looks like he's up against a sort of avatar of Kali, the Hindu Goddess of Death.

Johnathan

I recently started Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I'm about 50 pages in and loving it so far. I watched the TV show already so I know most of how it goes, but it's still enjoyable.

Finally getting around to reading the classic "It can't happen here" by Upton Sinclair

I finished CAS' Zothique. As always, so dang good. I've read the one story, Empire of the Necromancers many times, and will always read it when it pops up. Now I'm reading Manly Wade Wellman's After Dark.

Destroyer #85 turned out to be that rarest of anomalies...a Destroyer book with a cliffhanger ending! Now I guess I'll need to hunt up Destroyer #86....

In the meantime, I started Say Goodbye by Lisa Gardner. It deals with a pregnant FBI agent hunting down a serial killer who kills pregnant hookers with - get this - spiders. That's a new one....

Johnathan

Finished reading Wesley Chu's "The Art of Prophecy". Very fun read with lots of ideas for someone looking for either east Asian or technological advancements to add to a D&D campaign. Eagerly awaiting the next one.

And then went back and finished the "Keen Edge of Valor" anthology. Liked several of the stories enough that I went back and picked up the first volume by these editors (had already read the second). Got the 2nd and 3rd because they had Glen Cook stories.