What are you reading in 2025?

[Autumnal]

Now I’ve finished The Deadhouse Gates, second volume of the Malazan Books of the Fallen. In brief:

1. I loved it.
2. Watching Erickson’s improve noticeably by the volume is neat. The scene between Tull and Duiker where they talk about the changes forced on us by accumulated horrors and griefs is going into my notional commonplace book; so, probably, is Fiddler’s awareness of the victims in the maze around the Azath.
3. Holy cow, that was brutal in places. Definitely a book to check the trigger warnings on - I wouldn’t want anyone ambushed by it.

Coming up, something shorter. Maybe history, maybe comfort-food rereading…I’ll have to see what looks appealing.

 

[jian]

So, finally finished the Krakoa era of X-men comics by reading Resurrection of Magneto*, X-men 6, Fall of the House of X/Rise of the Powers of X, and Invincible Iron Man 3. It’s been a blast and I’m very sorry to see it all end. A bit like the Tony-Emma marriage, which was amazing.

*Man, even by X-men standards, that death did not last long.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Like many of the rest of you, I just finished Grossman's The Bright Sword. I liked it very much, in particular the way that Grossman handled Gawain and Lancelot. He managed to be respectful of previous traditions while carving out some interesting nuance for the characters. Gawain's not as much of an ass, and Lancelot is somewhat more of one, which was fun.

I also had a flight today and was able to finish Ryan O'Hanlon's Net Gains, a book on analytics in soccer. The bulk of it was interesting, but I thought his conclusions were a bit rough. I need to sit with it some more, maybe reread the last chapter and make sure that I'm being fair, but finishing a book on analytics in soccer with the suggestion that maybe it's all a mystery was a bit of a letdown.

 

[Voadam]

Finished book seven, the latest of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and it stays fun even as the power and scope get more epic.

I restarted the Geomamcer’s Apprentice series by Yin Leong and finished book two and started in on book three The Corpse Ritual. I am excited about the possibilities of supernatural wrongness among the Smithsonian Natural History Museum collection in 2020 DC. It’s (so far) a series about supernatural Feng Shui demon hunting with a bunch of Asian supernatural beasties. Yin is a friend of mine and I am so excited she has a modern supernatural series. Combining Chinese/Singapore folklore and mythology monsters like the yaogui and a Feng Shui supernatural powered protagonist in DC where I work is a lot of fun for me.

 

[Cadence]

As after finishing the 3rd of the Matthew Venn books by Cleeves (they were ok), I picked up her "The Glass Room". It's the only Vera one not to be made into an episode. It did a fine job of catching the feel of the show and I enjoyed it more than the Venn ones. Not sure how I feel about the end, and I wonder how many of the readers picked up on a few of the clues (I know I had know way of recognizing them).

Currently part way through a Rex Stout's biography and his early book Seed in the Wind.

 

[the Jester]

Just started Sanderson's most recent Stormlight Archive book, Wind and Truth.

 

[overgeeked]

Another few shorts in the Swords and Sorcery anthology. The first one by Lord Dunsany. The title is Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller. Sorry to say, this is almost a non-story. There’s basically zero showing and all telling. I don’t remember there being a word of dialogue. It’s just a long series of overly convoluted sentences that’s more in love with the words than conveying a story. It also ends with the worst cliched ending, effectively it was all a dream. It might have been new and hot back then, I don’t know.

This story is not done any favors by being placed immediately before a ripping Robert E. Howard Conan yarn called Shadows in the Moonlight, which opens with the original version of these opening lines of the 1982 Conan movie:

“Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!”

And the yarn itself opens with evocative action and description…

“A swift crashing of horses through the tall reeds; a heavy fall, a despairing cry. From the dying steed there staggered up its rider, a slender girl in sandals and girdled tunic. Her dark hair fell over her white shoulders, her eyes were those of a trapped animal.”

Wanting to avoid flat, unexciting stuff is why I read sword & sorcery. Maybe that’s the difference between “heroic fantasy” and “sword & sorcery.” Heroic fantasy is sword & sorcery plus the more…ugh…plotless literary stuff.

 

[Autumnal]

Finished The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson. I left this review at StoryGraph:

Like Wilson’s other books, this is an intensely humane story of people caught in the midst of strange circumstances. The characters’ specific situations couldn’t exist without the mysterious monuments from the future that change the world and their individual lives. But the griefs, joys, loves, fears, and hopes they feel are the same as ours and Wilson makes it easy for readers to care as much about them as he does. This is a heartbreaking yet deeply satisfying story, and I’m very glad to have read it.

 

[Mistwell]

Currently part way through a Rex Stout's biography and his early book Seed in the Wind.

I love Rex Stout. Never read that one though, or his biography. How were they?

 

[jian]

Read Hell of a Witch, the second in Rachel Aaron’s Tear Down Heaven series. Aaron is excellent at action-packed urban fantasy and this is no exception. There’s a really solid and interesting cosmology that has a massive and yet personal scale, much like the Sea of Magic in Aaron’s DFZ books, which is generally all great, especially the most recent Changeling series.