What are you reading in 2026?

[gban007]

Read Hive by Dan Abnett, very good book, easily 5 stars out of 5 for me.

I've always enjoyed Abnett showing the more everyday people, and this is a great showcase of people at all levels of society in a Hive., and what it is like in the 40k universe.

Good story, starts ad a bit of slice of life ( and i think I could enjoy an entire novel on 40k slice of life), before starting to wrap up tension and sense of dread building to a strong finish.

Is a 40k story at heart, but highly recommend to anyone who enjoys 40k, and I think could be a good introduction to the setting as well.

 

[Autumnal]

Sounds like Abnett doing Abnett things, which I love.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

That sounds interesting. As someone who got up when young to watch Thunderbirds at 6:30 am Saturdays on a local channel, I have a long-time interest in things Anderson and Anderson-like.

It’s been a week of mixed reading and rereading for me: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, Every Heart a Doorway and Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire. A few pages paragraphs words about each.

The Ted Chiang book is a collection of short stories. The movie Arrival is a good adaptation of the title story. Others include the building of the a tower of Babylon (not Babel) and finding out what’s beyond the vault of Heaven, a couple very different takes on superhuman intelligence, what it’s like when angelic manifestations are routine and dangerous, and like that. You know, the usual. Chiang is one of those writers like Greg Egan and Howard Waldrop, whose ideas all seem not just dazzling concepts brilliantly executed but like nothing other minds would ever, ever have come up. Like Tanith Lee, he writes stories that always make me want to go home up for a few years and write myself.

You’ve either seen Hitchcock’s film version of The Birds or at least you know about it. Du Maurier’s original is more compact and darker. There are several stories in this collection that I don’t think I’ve read before, like “Monte Veritá”, and I liked or loved them all. They all lie somewhere in the lands of weird fiction, where (swiping a definition from Michael Cisco’s scholarly Weird Fiction: A Genre Study) an unexplained/inexplainable intrusion into the lives of the protagonists, and the intrusion becomes destiny for them. It makes me happy.

The Seanan McGuire books are stand-alone novellas, the first of a series of a dozen or so. They share a setting: a boarding school for teenagers who’ve been off to fairylands and other places through hidden portals, gotten stuck back on Earth, and need to live with being here and now again. As is pretty predictable for McGuire, there’s a rich broad fantasy foundation, including axes of world types like high Logic versus high Nonsense (or Whimsy) and high Virtuous versus high Wicked. And there’s intense, deep individual characterizations and stories, all shaped by the fact that we want and need love, and readily give our love to those who may not be good recipients of it at all.

I read the first four or so they came out, loved them all, got distracted by things like losing the ability to stand up without fainting, and am now catching up. So far, so great.

The Wayward Children series is exceptional. To my mind, it manages to balance the postmodern take with love of the genre in a way that The Magicians tried to and wasn't as successful at.

 

[Autumnal]

A lot of it, I think, comes down to great characters. McGuire’s characters are very deep. There’s that great bit in Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” about his kind of stories needing a man who is fit for adventure. McGuire’s characters are fit for their world, with histories built around change, consent (or its absence), acceptance or rejection of personal history, and the difference between love and morality. So they can get up to a lot and not drift out of character because their potential is so wide.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

got distracted by things like losing the ability to stand up without fainting, and am now catching up. So far, so great.

Oi mate! Take good care.

Hey, I was looking through a game at my FLGS, and a collaborator's name was Benjamin Baugh. The game was called Cavaliers of Mars. Any relation?

 

[Autumnal]

Amusingly enough, Ben and I aren’t related at all, though we get along and generally admire each others work.

There is another Bruce Baugh out there writing, but he’s a philosopher and there’s very little overlap between our work.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

A lot of it, I think, comes down to great characters. McGuire’s characters are very deep. There’s that great bit in Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” about his kind of stories needing a man who is fit for adventure. McGuire’s characters are fit for their world, with histories built around change, consent (or its absence), acceptance or rejection of personal history, and the difference between love and morality. So they can get up to a lot and not drift out of character because their potential is so wide.

Where would you recommend a McGuire noob start? I’d always heard vaguely negative things; I think from people annoyed at her dominance at the Hugos (?) a few years back. But clearly there’s a lot of folks who think she’s the bee’s knees.

 

[jian]

Where would you recommend a McGuire noob start? I’d always heard vaguely negative things; I think from people annoyed at her dominance at the Hugos (?) a few years back. But clearly there’s a lot of folks who think she’s the bee’s knees.

I personally like the InCryptid books, which you can start at Discount Armageddon.

 

[jian]

After reading Quite Ugly One Evening I realised I had a few other Brookmyres in my Kindle library that I'd bought when they were cheap. Dead Girl Walking is a pretty straightforward (but still good) Tartan Noir thriller, this time set in the world of touring music bands, also starring Jack Parlabane.

(I do quite like Brookmyre's asides about IT security, such as "your ingenious unbreakable encryption is only as clever as the dumbest person who uses it" and the way Parlabane breaks into a secure iPad that the mark is never ever without.)

And then there was The Cracked Mirror, which deservedly won an award when it came out in 2024. It starts as a odd couple murder mystery - a retired librarian in the Highlands and a disgraced LAPD detective start investigating the same story from different ends - but then turns into something much more interesting. I'd imagine you'll work out the twist some time around the 50% mark, but then it's fun seeing how it comes together, and surprisingly touching.

 

[Autumnal]

Where would you recommend a McGuire noob start? I’d always heard vaguely negative things; I think from people annoyed at her dominance at the Hugos (?) a few years back. But clearly there’s a lot of folks who think she’s the bee’s knees.

I suggest Every Heart A Doorway. But she has other series, and I’ll let other speak up about them.