What are you reading in 2025?

[jian]

Lord Dunsany towers over the field. To my taste, waiting on reading him is like postponing Shakespeare for a bunch of generic Jacobean revenge tragedies. I mean, there’s good bits in MacDonald, but nothing to compare to one of my favorite Dunsany lines:



Italics in the original.

Meanwhile, as of midnight, the audio version of Christopher Ruocchio’s Shadows Upon Time, is here in my hot little hands. Okay, Audible app on my phone, same diff. This is the concluding volume of his Sun Eater Saga, and it is an ox-stunner: 884 pages, 44h 26m at 1.0 speed. But I’ve really, really enjoyed the series so far, and so far this volume iOS holding up just great.

I think I’ve only read Sacnoth? I should read some others. I realise that one of my favourite Kage Baker books, The Bird of the River, is named after a ship in Idle Days of the Yann. Now I think about it, Baker’s fantasy work generally is definitely influenced by Dunsany.

 

[Vael]

Onto book 7 of Dungeon Crawler Carl ... This Inevitable Ruin.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

Oh, I read that one! Not often something I'm familiar with gets mentioned in this thread!

 

[Autumnal]

My first DNF in a few months, The Invaders: How Early Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, by Pat Shipman. I read one of her other books, on the domestication of dogs, and it was great. What I could understand of this was great, too, but too much was simply beyond me. I am, for instance, just not getting the nuances of settlement bone and stone fragment densities measured in fragments per meter squares per thousand years, and her target audience doesn’t need them explained. So went much over my head, I should have put on a long leather duster to take advantage of the wind and walked somewhere in slow motion. If you know more about paleontology than I do, you may well enjoy this book a lot.

Meanwhile, Christopher Ruocchio’s Shadows Upon Time has also been great so far and shows no sign of letting up. And this one I do understand.