What are you reading in 2026?

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished Milan's The Cybernetic Shogun. Didn't like it as much as the Cybernetic Samurai. I feel like it had about 1-2 more POV threads than it needed. And it had a lot of unnecessary orientalist tropes.

Now I'm reading The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan.

 

[sabrinathecat]

Just finished Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.
It was a fun, self-aware mystery.

 

[prabe]

Just finished Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.
It was a fun, self-aware mystery.

There are a novel and a novella as sequels, and I gather they also are good--at least, my wife liked them a good deal. I've read the first book but not the sequels, because reasons.

 

[Richards]

I flew on an all-day courier mission today, so I went through the first two novels in Richard Avery's "Expendables" series. The main concept is a small group of people, many of whom would have been in prison for life otherwise, are sent to explore potentially dangerous new planets to see if they're ripe for human colonization. The first one, The Deathworms of Kratos, set up the premise nicely (and I had never read it before; when I was in high school I read #2 and #4, all the school library had for some reason, and only recently decided to track down the series and see how many there were - only four, alas). The planet Kratos seems perfect, except there were these large mounds of unknown origin that needed checked out - and sure enough, they were the result of the the aforementioned deathworms, monster-worms similar in size to Dune's sandworms. The second book, The Rings of Tantalus, has the team - seven humans and six robots - exploring another potential world, only with the added danger that one or more of the crew may be terrorists trying to destroy the ExPEND mission, so the vast quantities of money the program uses can be spent elsewhere on Earth. Throw in some robot monkeys, and you're got yourself a vintage 1970s science fiction novel.

I'll be moving on to Expendables #3: The War Games of Zelos starting tomorrow.

Johnathan

 

[sabrinathecat]

There are a novel and a novella as sequels, and I gather they also are good--at least, my wife liked them a good deal. I've read the first book but not the sequels, because reasons.

I needed something on the airplane and the subsequent road trip. (Rescued my nephew from having to live in Sioux Falls or having to move to Arizona). Will look at sequels when I've cleared off some other books.

 

[Reynard]

I just started Slow Gods by Catherine Webb. I am going to stick it out for a little longer but boy is it unsubtle and, well, kind of whiney. The universe it presents is like The Outer Worlds without the humor, and its protagonist appears to be yet another "on the spectrum" self insert character (looking at you Murderbot). I feel like popular sci-fi has gotten very bad about being on the nose for this sort of thing.

not that we shouldn't be talking about late stage capitalism or people fitting in to society or whatever, but books are place where we can actually ask the audience to think (since heavens knows that Hollywood has nearly abandoned the practice).

Anyway, I am intrigued by the premise but I hope it gets better soon.

 

[Cadence]

I just finished Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh for a bookclub/podcast thing i do and man do I not get the appeal of the British Mystery Novel.

There are still a lot of classic mystery authors I haven't read yet, but what sets Marsh apart from Stout (US), Tey or Sayers (UK), and most of the adaptations of things on BritBox is how long she consistently spends building up the other characters before the main detective even shows up. In Scales of Justice, Alleyn isn't mentioned until 26% of the way through the book and doesn't show up himself until a page or two later. So a lot of what I felt about each of her books was how much that start drew me in (as opposed to some others where it is clearly the detective(s) that had that job).

Is that common in golden age British style mystery novels? (Marsh is New Zealand, right?)

I also wasn't a big fan of how she portrayed romantic relationships - maybe its the fear that in real life we are all that goofy when twitterpated.

 

[jian]

There are still a lot of classic mystery authors I haven't read yet, but what sets Marsh apart from Stout (US), Tey or Sayers (UK), and most of the adaptations of things on BritBox is how long she consistently spends building up the other characters before the main detective even shows up. In Scales of Justice, Alleyn isn't mentioned until 26% of the way through the book and doesn't show up himself until a page or two later. So a lot of what I felt about each of her books was how much that start drew me in (as opposed to some others where it is clearly the detective(s) that had that job).

Is that common in golden age British style mystery novels? (Marsh is New Zealand, right?)

I also wasn't a big fan of how she portrayed romantic relationships - maybe its the fear that in real life we are all that goofy when twitterpated.

Ngaio Marsh was a Kiwi (not Māori, I think, despite the name) but spent a lot of her time (not most, several chunks of several years) in the U.K. (especially in drama and theatres) where most of her books are set. My wife was a volunteer at the Ngaio Marsh House in Christchurch (NZ) when we were there.

My wife (who’s read basically every golden age detective novel ever) says that while other writers definitely do the building characters up beforehand thing in some novels, Marsh probably did it more and is probably least interested in the detective or the mystery - many of her novels would work fine as fiction without the murder, which is definitely not the case with Christie, for instance.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There are still a lot of classic mystery authors I haven't read yet, but what sets Marsh apart from Stout (US), Tey or Sayers (UK), and most of the adaptations of things on BritBox is how long she consistently spends building up the other characters before the main detective even shows up. In Scales of Justice, Alleyn isn't mentioned until 26% of the way through the book and doesn't show up himself until a page or two later. So a lot of what I felt about each of her books was how much that start drew me in (as opposed to some others where it is clearly the detective(s) that had that job).

Is that common in golden age British style mystery novels? (Marsh is New Zealand, right?)

I also wasn't a big fan of how she portrayed romantic relationships - maybe its the fear that in real life we are all that goofy when twitterpated.

My partner is the real crime fiction expert, but I think it’s fairly typical of Marsh. In fact Alleyn is so bland that I think she is deliberately trying to keep the detective out of the spotlight.

But relegating the detective to minor character is something most of them do occasionally, all the way back to Conan Doyle.

 

[jian]

Just finished Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone.
It was a fun, self-aware mystery.

Yup, as prabe says, the sequels are good too (I think I preferred Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, the sequel that is set on the Ghan tourist train).

I did like the way that the books firmly cleave to golden age mystery rules, citing John Dickson Carr's rules (no hidden information, no twins, no Chinamen*, etc.) from the outset. Seishi Yokomizo's Japanese golden age detective stories (The Honjin Murders etc) do this, and they're of course also referred to in Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Knives Out film.

*It's honestly a bit unclear what he meant by this but it's probably something like "no untraceable Asiatic poisons (that gets its own rule anyway), no magical qi nonsense, no magic generally (also gets its own rule)".