What are you reading in 2026?

[jian]

Read The Ten Thousand Doors of January in an ongoing attempt to catch up on Alix E Harrow's oeuvre, and it's pretty good.

January Sculler is a girl who has mostly been raised by her austere but sympathetic (and wealthy) guardian, Mr Locke, in the 1910s in New York state. Her father, who works for Mr Locke as a travelling obtainer of collectible treasures, is away most of the time. Gradually, via various events, with the support of a few allies, January starts to realise that her Daddy-Long-Legs life is much more sinister than it appears, and that her name is much more meaningful than she thought. You'll see the reveal coming a couple of miles away.

January is definitely one of those protagonists who starts out with a chronic inability to pay attention or work stuff out, but in her defence she is an angry teenager and quite conditioned and traumatised most of the time, and she does get better. There are definite parallels with the male protagonist in The Everlasting, and of course a narrative similarity in that both books are based in writings by the main characters, often to each other.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished reading Shiner's Frontera and enjoyed its tale of space and corporate espionage/war. Written in the 80s, the idea of corporate-owned space flight must have felt an impossible fiction. Heh.

I then read The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed. Her first published work in 29 years, it's tight, dystopian, yet beautiful. Reed hasn't lost a step in the intervening decades.

Now I'm reading K.C. Alexander's Necrotech. Been sitting in my TBR pile for a while, that one.

 

[jian]

Read The Electric State by Simon Stalenhag, which had wonderful art but a very depressing story, just about what I expected. I don’t know what made the Russo brothers think they could make a fun sci-fi action adventure movie out of it.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Started reading the newest October Daye book from Seanan Maguire Silver and Lead. I'm getting a bit tired of the protagonist - but she's definite a story driver, often to her own detriment. My understanding is Maguire's got less than a handful of volumes left, and the author is talented enough to keep me through to the end. Also there's still one huge hanging mystery that I have a theory about, that I'm sticking around to see if I'm right or not...

 

[Autumnal]

Continuing my theme of reading books I somehow never got around to, I’m reading C.J. Cherryh’s Gates of Ivrel, and enjoying it a lot. She certainly became a better writer with more practice, but the enthusiasm Andre a Norton gives in her introduction seems earned. I can see the source of a bunch of things that showed up in local RPG campaigns at the time.

 

[Alzrius]

So I finally got a print copy of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride from my local library, letting me read the "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret" novella at the end.

I may have mentioned before that each of these vignettes is from the point of view of a different character. But what I didn't appreciate before (which is to say that I was aware of it, but didn't recognize its significance) is how each character knows just a little bit more about what's happening; not about the nature of the world or the larger plotline, but what's going on among their own group. They don't always have the full context necessary to appreciate what they know, nor even necessarily any awareness that they're possessed of more insight than some or all of their confederates, but the narrative always makes it clear to us, the readers, that they see just a little bit deeper into the web of intrigue than the previous character did.

The result is that we have a progressively greater sense of just how screwed they all are. Not just because of the fact that they're all very small cogs in a very large machine, but because of the sheer degree to which things are arrayed against them. I mentioned in my overview of the previous entry in this novella that this created a sense of futility due to how the characters had factionalized, working against each other in a struggle that was completely pointless. That's still true, but this chapter saw fit to remind us that there's still a massive, sprawling entity of powerful interests arrayed against them, and who are shameless about lying and feeding the characters false hope in order to better control them, unconcerned with their ultimate fates.

But to my surprise, this entry introduced something I didn't expect:

A little—very little—bit of hope.

True to the nature of this story, that hope doesn't come from any sort of altruistic interests, but rather from sheer dumb luck happening to work in the little guys' favor.

Remember what I said before, about the characters being cogs in a massive machine? Well, sometimes cogs come loose. And when they do, they bounce around the innards of the machine in ways that no one can predict, possibly starting a cascade of destabilization. But it's too early to tell if that's what's going to happen at this stage, with the novella ending before we could see the full effects of the sudden twist it introduces.

Fortunately, I picked up a print copy of the next book as well, so I'll be able to find out in short order.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Well I'm a few volumes behind Alzirus, just got Carl's Doomsday Scenario from the library. Already to chapter 7. The words, they just fly by. I've already reserved the next volume at the library...

 

[gnarlygninja]

Just finished Three Days to Never, and like most Tim Powers books I'm not sure I understood fairly large portions of it nor could I explain it to someone but I enjoyed it.

 

[Kaodi]

My local library branch re-opened today after being closed for renovations. I went too early thinking they would open at the regular time. However the mistake did offer me the chance to finish the last 120 or so pages of the book I had so I was able to be the first person, I think, to return one. (For clarification I went back home to read.)

 

[Alzrius]

Well, I just read the "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret" novella for This Inevitable Ruin, and all I can say is...finally!

The main plotline of the Dungeon Crawler Carl saga and the "Backstage" plotline are finally starting to directly intersect! You might recall how, in my overview of the rest of this book, I mentioned that one of the two "cameos" the novella had with regard to the main storyline seemed rather important? Turns out that it was, with Carl's brand of insanity now having direct consequences for the "Backstage" characters.

Of course, the nature of those consequences remains uncertain due to the story being ongoing. What we do get, rather unexpectedly, is some answers as to the larger nature of what's going on. Like what the Pineapple Cabaret is, and the motivations of the person running it. It's nice to have some mysteries revealed at long last. Of course, that comes on the heels of things now being thrown completely for a loop, with the usual irreverence that makes what would otherwise be appalling loss of life—and depraved indifference to that loss—into something completely hysterical. Humor is found in absurdity, and few things are as absurd as someone who's reactions are completely at odds with what seems appropriate to a situation of exceptional egregiousness.

I'm still in queue for the next book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which came out last month. It'll be nice to be able to go over both the main story and its adjacent novella again.