What are you reading in 2026?

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, Severian is NOT a ideal person by a long shot. Very unreliable narrator and certainly a lot of an antihero as protagonists go. Wolfe's pretty clear in showing Sev's ignoble aspects despite his philosophizing and pretensions.

 

[jian]

I haven't read the source book, but the quote did not sound like the description of an ideal to me.

That’s true. But I also don’t think the statement is particularly true - people don’t believe what they’re forced to believe, and they generally can’t force others to believe things about them. I’d also say it’s unclear what’s meant by strong or weak - the definition sounds like a projection or an ideal, and not one I like at that.

 

[jian]

Wolfe isn’t holding it up for unqualified admiration, either. But the language is so good.

Sounds like I need to read some Aiken.

Hope you like her work. I think I always have, coming back to her ever since we read a passage from Black Hearts in Battersea in class when I was eight.

 

[Mannahnin]

“Weak people believe what is forced on them. Strong people what they wish to believe, forcing that to be real. What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?”

I haven't read the source book, but the quote did not sound like the description of an ideal to me.

That’s true. But I also don’t think the statement is particularly true - people don’t believe what they’re forced to believe, and they generally can’t force others to believe things about them. I’d also say it’s unclear what’s meant by strong or weak - the definition sounds like a projection or an ideal, and not one I like at that.

I don't think we're meant to believe it's true. It's Severian's opinion (himself a young, ambitious judicial torturer and executioner), and these two sentences tell us a couple of related things about the character and give us clues about how he's going to act and what he's going to do in the future.

Wolfe loves unreliable narrators, some of whom are so out of ignorance/limited perspective, and some of whom are deliberately misleading for one reason or another. But Wolfe gives you lots of clues to figure stuff out despite them.

 

[jian]

I don't think we're meant to believe it's true. It's Severian's opinion (himself a young, ambitious judicial torturer and executioner), and these two sentences tell us a couple of related things about the character and give us clues about how he's going to act and what he's going to do in the future.

Wolfe loves unreliable narrators, some of whom are so out of ignorance/limited perspective, and some of whom are deliberately misleading for one reason or another. But Wolfe gives you lots of clues to figure stuff out despite them.

I haven’t read The Book of the New Sun, so I was parsing the statement as given, and it does indeed sound like an ideal - of Severian about himself and his view of the world - which I personally find unpalatable, and I’m glad I’m meant to.

 

[Alzrius]

I just finished Carl's Doomsday Scenario, book two of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and it was everything I'd hoped it would be.

It's been some time since a contemporary (i.e. not completed yet) fiction series caught my interest, and I'm pleasantly surprised to find that (so far), this one is another entry on that list. There's not much to say about this book that I didn't already say about its predecessor, but that's not a bad thing, as it means it maintains the first book's magic. I've already put a hold down at my local library for the third book, and I hope I'll enjoy it just as much.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Cracking along the Rivers of London series.

I have almost all of them out from the library, so I guess I'm going to read them. They have large print and large margins, so while 300+ pages are actually pretty quick reads.

One thing about them is in almost every one there's a bit that bugs me. In the most recent I finished, Broken Homes Peter is practicing his magic in the garden that surrounds the housing tower where he's supposed to be undercover. In mid day. With a tree spirit who teases him to chase her until they both fly (for a bit). In broad daylight. Did I mention it was in a garden next to a housing tower? While yes, the tower is only marginally inhabited, there are still MANY people living in it who could look the window and see someone doing spells. Maybe I missed a sentence clarifying that the garden was not visible from the tower.

However, this volume also ended with kind of a MAJOR REVEAL, so I'm going to keep reading :-D

Oh, and I read volume 2 of the Shrouded College, and it was much more interesting than volume 1. The Bloody Dozen. 3 people have to go get 9... people. Yup, that's a dozen. It was pretty fun. So yeah, I guess I'll read cold Witch once it drops (or maybe it already has and I have to track it down).

Oh also, I think I'm going to be cutting cord with my FLCS for GNs and seeking on my own on the interwebs. Probably at mycomicshop.com. If anyone has other suggestions, open to them. Note: dead tree versions only.

 

[Autumnal]

One more Wolfe bit before I move along, commenting on both the setting and Severian’s perspective:

Dr. Talos leaned toward her as he said this, and it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox (a comparison that was perhaps too easy to make because his bristling reddish eyebrows and sharp nose suggested it at once) but that of a stuffed fox. I have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past. No matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. If there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, Dr. Talos’s face was a fox’s mask on a wall, and I marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which made expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of the nose and brows, an amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity.