What are you reading in 2022?

[Zaukrie]

I must be in the minority, I couldn't finish the collected Vance novels. Not even close.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I must be in the minority, I couldn't finish the collected Vance novels. Not even close.

Whew, glad someone else had the same experience... I feel the same about Glen Cook's Black Company novels...

 

[Hex08]

Unfortunately, I find my reading time limited, but I am slowing making my way through the Books of Swords trilogy by Fred Saberhagen. I am about four chapters into book two. One I am done with those I will go back to Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company. I have read the first three and really want to finish the rest.

 

[Cadence]

Just finished Moon Pool by Merritt (from Appendix N). I really liked the first half and then it was... okish. To much tell instead of show? And the cosmology was just ok.

Reading the collected Lord Darcy now.

(First time on both books).

 

[Nellisir]

Whew, glad someone else had the same experience... I feel the same about Glen Cook's Black Company novels...

I'm honestly not sure what sells me on the Black Company, honestly. I love them dearly, but totally understand that other people don't.

 

[Scottius]

I'm honestly not sure what sells me on the Black Company, honestly. I love them dearly, but totally understand that other people don't.

Black Company, at least the first trilogy of books they kind of petered out for me after that, are some of my favorites. I think the viewpoint being that of a morally grey mercenary group makes it stand out. And it has some of my absolute favorite depictions of powerful magic users as well. The original ten who were taken are far more interesting and do so much more than say the ringwraiths. I find them terrifyingly human and inhuman at the same time.

 

[Nellisir]

Black Company, at least the first trilogy of books they kind of petered out for me after that, are some of my favorites. I think the viewpoint being that of a morally grey mercenary group makes it stand out. And it has some of my absolute favorite depictions of powerful magic users as well. The original ten who were taken are far more interesting and do so much more than say the ringwraiths. I find them terrifyingly human and inhuman at the same time.

I almost said "the personalities, I guess" in my reply above. I mean, I LOVE the Black Company. I love most of Cook's writing. But I totally understand why people can't get into it, or get fed up with it, or find it unlikable.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I ran into a similar situation with the Moon Pool. The first half was chilling and eerie, the second half vague and misty, hard to imagine. While I loved Creep, Shadow, Creep! I found a similar experience with The Metal Monster. There's something about Merritt's language that can be hard to picture at times. I give him props for not just falling back on "unknowable vistas beyond human imagination" and instead actually trying to describe things, but I find that it can make for difficult reading.

Just finished Moon Pool by Merritt (from Appendix N). I really liked the first half and then it was... okish. To much tell instead of show? And the cosmology was just ok.

I finished Moorcock's The Final Programme. It felt very much like an homage to J.G. Ballard. I dug it, though wouldn't rank it amongst his greats.

Now I'm reading L. Sprague De Camp's The Tritonian Ring.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I liked the writing. The characters were interesting. However, there wasn't really a single POV character I could hang my hat on - the stories were really not about any individual, but about the company as a whole. I appreciate the risk the author took with that approach - and get why people like it. But for me I guess I need a single protagonist to follow.

Spoiler: Random swipe at GRRM who hasn't even been brought up until now

And one that doesn't get killed at the end of the first book of an X-length and 2 million word+ mega series... I actually read the first 2 books and 100 pages of the 3rd when I finally said - the only person likeable in this entire series is a girl on the run who only shows up in about 4% of the pages. Buh-bye...

 

[jdrakeh]

Right now, I'm re-reading The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. It's a really great book.

 

[Richards]

I finished The Drowning City last night and am now about to start the sequel, The Bone Palace by Amanda Downum.

Johnathan

 

[Cadence]

Just finished Moon Pool by Merritt (from Appendix N). I really liked the first half and then it was... okish. To much tell instead of show? And the cosmology was just ok.

Reading the collected Lord Darcy now.

(First time on both books).

"Lord Darcy" (the collected edition edited by Eric Flint) was spectacular.

Have two more Merritt books to go to next.

 

[KiloGex 22]

Finally getting around to reading UbiquiCity. I've had the book for a year, but just never got around to it. Got it because I was playing in a game based in the world, but then the game ended. Still an incredible setting, so I'm still moving on to it.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Finished de Camp's The Tritonian Ring. I enjoyed the story, but it's got problems. I read a tone of Appendix N and adjacent works, so I'm used to a certain level of dated, problematic content. But The Tritonian Ring hit my tolerance threshold in a few spots. There's some really egregious, offensive stuff in it. And the offhand way in which it's presented somehow makes it even worse.

Now I'm reading Samuel R. Delany's The Jewels of Aptor.

 

[Guest 7034872]

I just finished Zelazny's Amber Chronicles (thanks again to Snarf). The first several books I enjoyed very much, though I admit the whole thing did become formulaic after a while: mix in equal portions of Sam Spade, the Three Musketeers, incessant political intrigue (Bond-style explanatory monologues and all) a funny kind of Neoplatonism, and David Lewis' pluralism about possible worlds, and there you have it. Really, though, that's the worst I can say of the books by way of criticism. They were fun, crisply-written, easy reads, and generally a lot more well-thought-out than most stuff I see today. I'm not likely to re-read them, but I do recommend them.

 

[WayneLigon]

Currently reading (and in a few cases, re-reading) the entire Maradaine series by Marshall Ryan Maresca

MARSHALL RYAN MARESCA

mrmaresca.com

The setting is a low-magic pre-gunpowder world about at 'Age of Sail' levels of sophistication and ingenuity, helped on in places by geniuses like Verci Rynax. Most of the action concerns the huge City of Maradaine.

Right now, there are four series, and a stand-alone book:
The Maradaine Novels (The Thorn)
The Maradaine Constabulary
The Streets of Maradaine
The Maradaine Elite
Stand alone: An Unintended Voyage

There are overarching plots between all the books, which run in parallel with each others. There are two suggested reading methods:

1) In-world chronological means the first books of each series, in the order above.

2) Sticking with the same characters reading order is:
The Streets of Maradaine
The Maradaine Novels (The Thorn)
The Maradaine Constabulary
The Maradaine Elite

Both end with 'An Unintended Voyage'

Then Phase Two starts with 'Assassins of Consequence', which is Thorn Book 4

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I enjoyed Delany's The Jewels of Aptor. It reminded me a bit of a more pulpy A Canticle for Leibowitz, though of course Delany infuses it with layers of meaning as he does.

Now I'm back to the Wayward Children series with Seanan McGuire's In an Absent Dream.

 

[Blue]

Haven't been reading for enjoyment as much recently.

I'm in the middle of two books, but I've had urges recently for some short reads based on mood. One was The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein, but I could not find my copy and was denied. The other was Chess With A Dragon by David Gerrold. I picked it up after arriving home Sunday night, and finished it in one sitting.

It's a concise read, a novella in length at best, and spends little to none of that on character development. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't pack quite a story into those few pages. My favorite chapter is like five paragraphs long, and the next chapter is even shorter.

The pages are yellowing, but except for some touchstones to the USSR as shorthand for descriptions of a side character it has held up well. Hard to say of a lot of SF of that era.

It's so short I really don't want to say anything about it as basically everything is plot relevant, except that humanity feels correctly portrayed.

It has 3.8/5 on GoodReads, and that's probably where it belongs. For the effort you put into reading it, you'll get a lot out. Including, it seems, an urge out of the blue to reread it four or five years later.

 

[Richards]

I finished The Bone Palace on the plane today (it was another courier trip day, this time to the east coast and back) and moved on to a book I picked up at a Half-Price Books I discovered over by the Gamers store where we took my son's Playstation 4 to get fixed a town away: Destroyer #63: The Sky is Falling. Yep, another novel in the series featuring Remo Williams and Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, this time putting a stop to a superweapon that drills holes in the ozone layer and turns pure sunlight into a deadly beam. Light-hearted fun and almost always worth a read; this one's as entertaining as expected.

Johnathan

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I recently finished Skyward and Starsight by Brandon Sanderson. I really enjoyed Skyward. Starsight was still enjoyable, but I liked it less than Skyward (don't get me wrong, the books aren't bad, he just took a different direction with the series after the first book than I would have preferred). I started Cytonic, but stopped midway through it because I just wasn't invested enough in it to finish it (for now, at least).

I've now moved on to The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. I'm only about 50 pages in, but I'm enjoying it so far. So far it really hasn't explained some of the main elements of the setting necessary to understanding the story, but I've also read The Way of Kings, so I'm fairly accustomed to that feeling.