What are you reading in 2022?

[Blue]

Was doing some traveling for work, and got in some reading time. Reread Going Postal by Terry Prachett. Fantastic as always, I think this was the fourth time through it. If you want a full review, tough. Just go read it.

Read Charles Stross' Dead Lies Dreaming. It's a side series set up in the world that his Laundry Files has morphed into. It was good, but lacked a certain zing to it. Call it a 7/10. It did keep the action going and have an interesting cast of characters. But then again, I quite liked early & mid Laundry Files while I'm only a moderate fan of where everything ended up once they introduced superheroes. And the characters in this are an outgrowth of that.

I started The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, which I've heard good things about. But somehow the writing style feels dated and isn't catching me.

On Kindle Unlimited I started We are Legion (We are Bob). It feels like good fanfiction. That's not a knock down at all, just an observation. Worth the time to read so far, but the characters outside the main character are given precious little time to be more than 2D cutouts.

 

[trappedslider]

Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune Hardcover
by Keith Thomson

Spoiler

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than three hundred daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline, raiding cities, mines, and merchant ships. The booty: the bright gleam of Spanish gold and the chance to become legends. So begins one of the greatest piratical adventures of the era—a story not given its full due until now.

Inspired by the intrepid forays of pirate turned Jamaican governor Captain Henry Morgan—yes, that Captain Morgan—the company crosses Panama on foot, slashing its way through the Darien Isthmus, one of the thickest jungles on the planet, and liberating a native princess along the way. After reaching the South Sea, the buccaneers, primarily Englishmen, plunder the Spanish Main in a series of historic assaults, often prevailing against staggering odds and superior firepower. A collective shudder racks the western coastline of South America as the English pirates, waging a kind of proxy war against the Spaniards, gleefully undertake a brief reign over Pacific waters, marauding up and down the continent.

With novelistic prose and a rip-roaring sense of adventure, Keith Thomson guides us through the pirates’ legendary two-year odyssey. We witness the buccaneers evading Indigenous tribes, Spanish conquistadors, and sometimes even their own English countrymen, all with the ever-present threat of the gallows for anyone captured. By fusing contemporaneous accounts with intensive research and previously unknown primary sources, Born to Be Hanged offers a rollicking account of one of the most astonishing pirate expeditions of all time.

The Time Traveler's Guide to Regency Britain: A Handbook for Visitors to 1789–1830 Hardcover by Ian Mortimer PhD

Spoiler

This is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets; the paintings of John Constable and the gardens of Humphry Repton; the sartorial elegance of Beau Brummell and the poetic license of Lord Byron; Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo; the threat of revolution and the Peterloo massacre. In the latest volume of his celebrated series of Time Traveler's Guides, Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the most-loved period in British history: the Regency, or Georgian England.

A time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behavior, it was perhaps the last age of true freedom before the arrival of the stifling world of Victorian morality. At the same time, it was a period of transition that reflected unprecedented social, economic, and political change. And like all periods in history, it was an age of many contradictions—where Beethoven's thundering Fifth Symphony could premier in the same year that saw Jane Austen craft the delicate sensitivities of Persuasion.

Once more, Ian Mortimer takes us on a thrilling journey to the past, revealing what people ate, drank, and wore; where they shopped and how they amused themselves; what they believed in, and what they feared. Conveying the sights, sounds, and smells of the Regency period, this is history at its most exciting, physical, visceral—the past not as something to be studied but as lived experience.

 

[Nellisir]

Started travelling for playground builds again, which is usually two days of travel and a week of exhaustion. Read The Singer and the Sea by Michael Scott Rohan, and Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. Both rereads, and thus by definition ones I enjoy.

 

[Richards]

I'm reading Swarm and Steel by Michael R. Fletcher. It's an odd sword and sorcery book filled with all kinds of weird religions with German-sounding names. The two people illustrated on the cover are a living desert culture man and a dead (not that that prevents her from moving around just fine) woman with a severed left hand and a blindfold over her eyes (which covers the fact that she has gaping, empty eye sockets where her eyes used to be, but of course she sees just fine). I'm of two minds: the numerous various factions are getting really difficult to keep track of and I'm not a big fan of the names, but the characters are just interesting enough for me to want to see how it all plays out. But truth be told, I'm looking forward to being done with this one and moving on to something else.

Johnathan

 

[Nellisir]

Ended up starting The Citadel of Winds, the direct prequel to The Singer and the Sea (characters from Citadel are protagonists in Singer, but otherwise the two are independent). Also just found out The Winter of the World (the overarching series) got an RPG adaptation in 2018, so that's on my list.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished Hambly's The Time of the Dark. Good stuff. It manages to both embrace fantasy tropes and subvert them at the same the time. And it absolutely delivers on the cover's promise of a wizard sitting in a present-day kitchen cracking open a beer.

Now I'm reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

 

[Zaukrie]

I finished Hambly's The Time of the Dark. Good stuff. It manages to both embrace fantasy tropes and subvert them at the same the time. And it absolutely delivers on the cover's promise of a wizard sitting in a present-day kitchen cracking open a beer.

Now I'm reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

That was a good read.

 

[Nellisir]

I finished Hambly's The Time of the Dark. Good stuff. It manages to both embrace fantasy tropes and subvert them at the same the time. And it absolutely delivers on the cover's promise of a wizard sitting in a present-day kitchen cracking open a beer.

Now I'm reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

I love Hambley's stuff.

 

[Cadence]

Currently part way through the Maltese Falcon and the short story anthology Keen Edge of Valor. 1619 Project still about 1/3rd of the way done.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Not sure which one you're talking about, but yes!

That was a good read.

This is only my second Hambly book, but I'm really digging her writing.

I love Hambley's stuff.