Pale Violet Light
Explorer
Never? Now that sounds like a challenge to my spongy brain. There’s at least a 76% chance that I think any two characters whose name starts with the same letter are the same person. 27 different people and I’m done.
What are you reading in 2025?
- Thread starter Elodan
- Start date
I'm just starting Douglas Preston's Extinction - basically, Jurassic Park, but in a Colorado valley in the Rockies, and with Pleistocene mammals instead of dinosaurs. He's a reliably entertaining author whose previous works I've enjoyed, so I'm expecting it to be a good read.
Johnathan
Johnathan
Autumnal
Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
It’s been a hell of a month between the US in general, problems with Mom’s care, and my health doing some strange things. My reading has been kind of weird by my own standards. Let’s see if I can get anywhere within hailing distance of brevity.
For my 100-book challenge:
8. Liminal Spaces, edited by Kevin Lucia. A horror anthology on the title’s theme. Nearly 50/50 split between C-grade stories and A-grade ones. Well worth it, and new names for my list of authors to watch out for.
9. Kingdoms of Death, by Christopher Ruocchio. Sun Eater #4. More epicness, including the narrator spending a bunch of time as a Cielcin prisoner. Someday I’ll wrist a post comparing Ruocchio’s handling of this with some sequences in the Malazan Book of the Fallen and why preferred this so much. A whole bunch of surprises, once again keeping up the excellent pace. A three-hanky job in the best way.
10. The Prince of This World, by Adam Kotsko. Evolving ideas of God and his principal adversary in Jewish and Christian thought, and ways they linger in secular thought and politics. Fascinating.
11. Ashes of Man, by Christopher Ruocchio. Sun Eater #5. Nobody as young as Ruocchio has any business writing so well about grief. He also keeps excelling at the flow of a galaxy where it can take decades and centuries for events happening about as fast as they can.
12. Late Revelations: Rediscovering the Gospels in the Second Century CE, by Adam Litwa. A short book - 95 pp - arguing for late dates of composition for the canonical gospels (and Marcion’s), distinctive for a fresh look at what composition within a community of shared belief means in practice. Worth reading if you want to, say, include stuff being transformed from oral to written tradition in a fantasy setting.
13. How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy. If you haven’t read much written this century about the subject, this’d be a fine book to read. It covers the. Empire from the 200s to the 600s, and is very current on archeology and history. Less uniform me because of been on something of a late antiquity jag in recent years, but I’m an outlier.
And that’s it for June. July is starting off with more Ruocchio and with Robin Hobb.
For my 100-book challenge:
8. Liminal Spaces, edited by Kevin Lucia. A horror anthology on the title’s theme. Nearly 50/50 split between C-grade stories and A-grade ones. Well worth it, and new names for my list of authors to watch out for.
9. Kingdoms of Death, by Christopher Ruocchio. Sun Eater #4. More epicness, including the narrator spending a bunch of time as a Cielcin prisoner. Someday I’ll wrist a post comparing Ruocchio’s handling of this with some sequences in the Malazan Book of the Fallen and why preferred this so much. A whole bunch of surprises, once again keeping up the excellent pace. A three-hanky job in the best way.
10. The Prince of This World, by Adam Kotsko. Evolving ideas of God and his principal adversary in Jewish and Christian thought, and ways they linger in secular thought and politics. Fascinating.
11. Ashes of Man, by Christopher Ruocchio. Sun Eater #5. Nobody as young as Ruocchio has any business writing so well about grief. He also keeps excelling at the flow of a galaxy where it can take decades and centuries for events happening about as fast as they can.
12. Late Revelations: Rediscovering the Gospels in the Second Century CE, by Adam Litwa. A short book - 95 pp - arguing for late dates of composition for the canonical gospels (and Marcion’s), distinctive for a fresh look at what composition within a community of shared belief means in practice. Worth reading if you want to, say, include stuff being transformed from oral to written tradition in a fantasy setting.
13. How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy. If you haven’t read much written this century about the subject, this’d be a fine book to read. It covers the. Empire from the 200s to the 600s, and is very current on archeology and history. Less uniform me because of been on something of a late antiquity jag in recent years, but I’m an outlier.
And that’s it for June. July is starting off with more Ruocchio and with Robin Hobb.
Clint_L
Legend
Just read the 2025 Pulitzer winning James by Percival Everett. It's a (sort of) re-telling of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave that Huck accompanies. But that really only scratches the surface of the novel, which is really a deconstruction of the performative nature of racial identity in America, and a lot more.
It's brilliant - like HF, the plot is basically a non-stop series of ever-escalating situations, making it a compelling read. Everett mines a lot of pointed irony out of the dialogue, and the novel is often very funny, even as the situations Jim (James) finds himself in become increasingly horrific. Can't recommend it enough - I read it in basically one sitting.
I also recently read Emily Tesh's' Incandescent, which follows a year in the life of a tacher at school for magic. I teach IB Diploma, which is modelled on the British A-Levels system, and Tesh must have been an A-Levels teacher because she nails the dynamics of teaching kids in their exam year (of course, she's teaching them how to summon demons), and has a lot of interesting points about pedagogy, all of which enhance a compelling modern fantasy with a bit of romance. I liked it even more than her Hugo-nominated Some Desperate Glory.
And I finished off Adrian Tchaikovsky's Dogs of War trilogy with the last novel, Bees. This series has a really long arc, and the final novel is probably my favourite yet. It definitely includes my favourite character in the series, the sardonic, snake-like bioform Irae.
It's brilliant - like HF, the plot is basically a non-stop series of ever-escalating situations, making it a compelling read. Everett mines a lot of pointed irony out of the dialogue, and the novel is often very funny, even as the situations Jim (James) finds himself in become increasingly horrific. Can't recommend it enough - I read it in basically one sitting.
I also recently read Emily Tesh's' Incandescent, which follows a year in the life of a tacher at school for magic. I teach IB Diploma, which is modelled on the British A-Levels system, and Tesh must have been an A-Levels teacher because she nails the dynamics of teaching kids in their exam year (of course, she's teaching them how to summon demons), and has a lot of interesting points about pedagogy, all of which enhance a compelling modern fantasy with a bit of romance. I liked it even more than her Hugo-nominated Some Desperate Glory.
And I finished off Adrian Tchaikovsky's Dogs of War trilogy with the last novel, Bees. This series has a really long arc, and the final novel is probably my favourite yet. It definitely includes my favourite character in the series, the sardonic, snake-like bioform Irae.
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Those all sound great. I really loved Erasure so I’ll definitely be looking up James.
Bee Speaker sounds a bit more depressing than the first two in the series but I’m sure I’ll be reading it in due course,
Clint_L
Legend
I didn’t find it depressing at all. No spoilers, but I will say that it ends on a hopeful note.
Very early in James is a funny and thought provoking scene where he is teaching his daughter the “correct incorrect grammar” to keep her off white folks’ radar. At that point, you either love the book or you don’t.
I haven’t read Erasure but now I will!
Erasure got made into a film - American Fiction - which did pretty well at the Oscars a year or two ago. It’s a great film but not as good as the book, I think.
HaroldTheHobbit
Hero
Currently doing a slow re-reading of Warhammer TOW rpg, to decide if the system really is as great as my first impression was. Other than that I’m on a nostalgic Faulkner spree.
Old Fezziwig
this is a low-flying panic attack
I came to Faulkner late, but I've never regretted reading him only coming to him late. How are you picking your Faulkners?
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