What are you reading in 2022?

[WayneLigon]

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.

I seem to remember that most of Book Two is about her.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'm glad to hear that the author corrects that imbalance. Is it of a similar measured/slow pace?

I seem to remember that most of Book Two is about her.

 

[Richards]

I started and finished The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu this week while on a business trip. It involves a race of aliens who crash-landed on Earth 65 million years ago (thereby killing off the dinosaurs - their living ship was the asteroid that caused their destruction) and have survived Earth's poisonous (to them) atmosphere by living inside the local life forms. Fortunately, the race of aliens - the Genjix - are immortal, able to leave a dying or dead host body and leap into another one nearby. But once inside a living host, there's no way to separate them short of the host's death.

Fast forward to present day, and the Genjix have splintered into two factions, as the core Genjix are manipulating humanity to their own benefit, trying to find a way to get back to their home planet, while a splinter-group, the Prophus, seek to find a way home that doesn't necessarily involve the destruction of the humans as a by-product. Tao from the book's title is one of these Prophus, whose most current human host was a James Bond type who unfortunately died in a combat mission. Tao, ejected from his host body and in a desperate search for a new host before the Earth's atmosphere kills him, ends up in the body of an overweight office shlub named Roen Tan. And now Roen finds himself in the middle of a desperate war the bulk of humanity has no idea is being waged all around them.

I'm now about a third of the way through the sequel, The Deaths of Tao. Those are the only two I picked up at the library book sale, but apparently there's a third one, The Rebirths of Tao, that I might have to go hunt down after I finish book two.

Johnathan

 

[Eyes of Nine]

(Somehow i stopped getting notifications of this thread...) I read the most recent Saga TP, vol 10. It was excellent, as usual.

I read the 2nd book in the Elizabeth George penned Inspector Lynley novel, Payment in Blood.

Also just finished the Ironsworn RPG and before that Tomb of Annihilation (which I am now running).

In between I read Penric's Travels by Lois McMaster Bujold. If you haven't read her Penric novels, I would recommend.

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

Finished The Lost Metal by you know who Brandon Sanderson .
The Wax & Wayne books to date were not my favourite series, but this book was a lot of fun and very well done . Lots revealed , and once it got rolling (which didn’t take long) it was action packed. And … the classic Sander-lanche finale, not many do it better .
Easy read (compared to Stormlight Archive) , wish I’d read it slower .

 

[HawaiiSteveO]

Short stories are a nice change, been meaning to check this out and not disappointed

Tales From the Magician’s Skull – No. 8 – PDF|Goodman Games Store

goodman-games.com

 

[trappedslider]

American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild

Spoiler

The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.

This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known, among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover; others less familiar, such as the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards O’Hare and the outspoken Leo Wendell, a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comrades—but who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.

A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that feel ominously familiar today.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished Moorcock's Champion of Garathorm. Fast and to the point, crackling with energy. Possibly less trippy than usual.

I also finished Poul Anderson's and Mildred Broxon's The Demon of Scattery. It was okay, not great. It was hindered, I think, by not being sure if the Vikings were the villains or the protagonists.

Now I'm re-reading Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising. I read it about a decade ago and didn't feel it so much. But having read some of Kurtz's Deryni short stories in collections since, I want to reassess it.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Reading the 3rd Elizabeth George novel, Schooled in Blood.

Next up though my library has a Jared Blando book How to draw fantasy rpg maps Looking forward to it!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26107242-how-to-draw-fantasy-art-and-rpg-maps

 

[dragoner]

I just finished "To Hold Up the Sky" by Liu, and now started a Silverberg Anthology.