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Tried a few comic fantasy anthologies and tried Guards! Guards! by Pratchett but hit the same wall as I have with his other books. It started well enough, the secret society meeting almost read like a Monty Python sketch (which is great) then just kinda fell flat. So I set it aside. Maybe I’ll try another in a few months or pick this one up again.
I jumped back to Mushoku Tensei and finished Vol 7. Also read Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. It’s more of his thoughts on writing, his process, his history of writing, and references to his writer friends than a how-to book.
I think Meddling Kids and Mushoku Tensei Vol 8 are up next. Meddling Kids is a horror-comedy spoof of Scooby Doo.
I get the objection and I have similar ones to similar issues (especially to the very 2015 Tumblr notion that writers "shouldn't be allowed"* to write fantasy settings with homophobia as an issue, or racism or the like - luckily great authors like NK Jemisin have utterly ignored this idiot notion) but I feel like you're underestimating Bardugo and throwing her in with a lot of inferior writers simply because she didn't dwell on the realities of the issue in that particular society.
There have been real-world societies with strong - in fact stronger than Ketterdam - patrilineal inheritance which celebrated homosexual relationships and even put them above heterosexual ones to some extent - they just had the potential male inheritor have children with a woman whilst having a primary romantic relationship with a man (Athens, some subsets of Samurai culture in Japan and so on). I feel like, conversely, a lot of fantasy is unwilling to engage with historical stuff like that because it's not pretty enough for them, and it's too close to misogyny. We're primarily talking a specific single individual too - Wylan - there's no real evidence it's remotely normative (I cannot think of a single actual other Kerch who is homosexual) in the society, just that it's tolerated and non-illegal. I suspect the thinking Bardugo has is, as cruel, small-minded and unpleasant as Wylan's father is, he wouldn't give him the boot for being homosexual because that in no way prevents you from having a child (do we need to discuss the huge proportion of primarily or even virtually exclusively homosexual men, closeted and uncloseted, who have had children, historically?) and carrying on the line, but being so severely dyslexic (and they have no word for it even) that he's permanently illiterate does disqualify him from running the family business, because you'd need someone utterly permanently beyond reproach as your reader, because otherwise that person would be potentially scamming you (and people would put pressure on them to do so). And honestly - I don't think that Jesper - who I love - even is that guy. I don't think someone with a crippling gambling addiction can really, in the long-term, be trusted to manage the written side of Wylan's affairs, but that's a whole other story. I will say though that I found the "I'll just murder him" plan Jesper's father had seemed a little implausible on various levels- I feel like he'd have tried disinheritance seriously before that - a society like Kerch must have clear, legally-defined ways of disinheriting people, even if it's sending them to a monastery or something - a tried and true way in many Christian societies.
If you don't mean W+J I don't know what you're referring to though!
I do actually have a bugbear with Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom myself, which is all the characters are like, about 5 years too young to be believable in how they act, even in a rough 1700s-1910s-type society as they're in. They're just too wise, too calm, not hormonal enough and they understand the passage of time as 30-something or older adult does, and almost no 17-year-old does. But it's across the board and it honestly wouldn't meaningfully change anything beyond minor specifics if they were all more around 22 than 17. This is a common flaw in YA fiction and a lot of anime, so I can get over it, but it's there. I notice the portrayal of Alex Stern doesn't suffer in the same way so either it's part of the stylization of Six of Crows etc. or Bardugo has grown as a writer.
* = Let's be clear, that's not overstatement or hyperbole, if anything I'm playing down the rhetoric that was downright common at the time.
You're right that there's frankly a lot more wrong there, that didn't hold up under scrutiny... But I don't actually think fantasy books should generally be exposed to that much scrutiny, this is just a specific issue that catches in a particular fold of my brain like grit. Absolutely a me problem.
I actually had some issues with Jemisin's books for similar reasons, though much less pronounced. Her blending of fraternal/paternal/romantic relationships in the Dreamblood books bothered me, I think mostly in that it isn't at all resonant with my lived experiences; I'm a gay man, and I think that's also a me problem, in that I feel some sense of ownership over that experience. Obviously there's nothing fundamentally wrong with portraying a society that does things differently and that's not even really what the book is about, it just left me unsettled.
We're coming up to the end of year, so I'm currently rereading all of Azalea Ellis' A Practical Guide to Sorcery. Ellis is a much better writer than her genre (progression fantasy) demands, and catching up on Siobhan Naught's increasingly messy life is one of my favorite parts of the holidays.
Finished System Collapse, the new Murderbot novel. Very good. It had some non-standard stuff for a Murderbot book, while I thought was good and was written well and fit very well with the theme. There was standard Murderbot stuff as well, which was fun as usual.
I'm currently reading Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. It's the second book in a duology set in the Grishaverse, the first book being Six of Crows. Earlier books in the Grishaverse were made into the Netflix series Shadow and Bone.
I won't spoil it for anyone, but it basically follows a group of thieves that weren't sent to pull off an impossible heist, which happens in the first book, Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom deals with the aftermath of that. It's a great read, very character driven in a semi-magical world similar to 1800's. Lots of plans and counter-plans due to double crosses and unexpected reveals. I'm really enjoying it as I've never read a fantasy heist book before. You could easily read these books without having read any of Bardugo's other novels.
Finished Noor, it was good, I liked it. I don't think I have read many books where the protagonist was a cyborg. Now on to the Amber Chronicles omnibus.
They haven't taken off for precisely the reason I'm describing.
You've got your 1 Audible credit per month.
What do you want to spend it on, this good space opera novella that will is 4 hours long, or this good epic space opera that is 29 hours long.
HMMM DIFFICULT CHOICE. If it all the longer books sucked or something maybe it would make sense, but that's just not the case. You buy one of Adrian Tchaikovsky's recent space opera series, and you're getting as much excitement and as good writing as Martha Wells' Murderbot series, you're just getting almost 10x as much for your buck.
And with Kindle or other ebooks, it's even more obvious - I could spend £7.99 on Murderbot #4 (163 pages) or I could spend £4.99 (LESS!!!!) on the Children of Time (608 pages). Again HMMM DIFFICULT CHOICE. There's no delta in quality, really. Murderbot isn't like, super-premium ultra-amazing - it's good but it's not like it's some cut above. But the price is exactly the same as full length or even very long novels, often higher than those, in fact. There's no relationship whatsoever between length and cost - you can see this with Murderbot #5, which is £6.99, but a much more respectable 342 pages, nearly twice the length of the £7.99 book by the same author with the same character and setting.
And a lot of novella pricing is like this.
Not all of it - you do see some novellas priced very low, and I've certainly bought those before. But an awful lot are priced higher than well-written full-length novels.
These days I'd much rather read a book that's 200 pages or less than a 600 page book. I generally feel that once a book hits 400 pages and up, for me the book needs to work that much harder to justify the high page count.
I'd also add that maybe GRRM and Rothfuss might not have had over a decade in gaps between books if they were just writing 200-300 page books instead of phonebooks. But then again, maybe not.
These days I'd much rather read a book that's 200 pages or less than a 600 page book. I generally feel that once a book hits 400 pages and up, for me the book needs to work that much harder to justify the high page count.
I'd also add that maybe GRRM and Rothfuss might not have had over a decade in gaps between books if they were just writing 200-300 page books instead of phonebooks. But then again, maybe not.
I tend to invest quite a lot of effort into determining whether I'll like a book before starting with it, and for whatever reason, I've had much worse luck with shorter books than longer. I don't know what the exact cause is, but it seems like a pretty annoying/vapid 200-300 page book acquires good reviews much more easily than an equally vapid 400-600 page one.
