What are you reading in 2026?

[Autumnal]

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

I’ll be looking forward to your thoughts on this.

I reread Hyperion and am halfway through The Fall of Hyperion. It’s been interesting, in several senses. Simmons’ prose is absolutely as good as I remembered, and so are the good parts of these books. The overall cosmology and story, the growing darkness and the eucatastrophe, th complexity of the threads of plot and the elegance of their weave, the ways individual lives connect so intimately to the great movements of history and physics, the astonishing beauties of places like God’s Grove, the marvelous wonders like the River Tethys, and on and on.

But then there’s the stuff I’ve learned to look for since the 1990s. Everyone is straight: there is one possibly gay couple, in Rachel’s story - a guy “and his friend”, who may be living together or may just be buddies in business together - and a couple homophobic jokes from Martin Silenus. That’s it. Everyone is cisgendered. There are people who do radical things with genetic engineering and body sculpting, but no hint of doing anything with gender.

Apart from the Templars, there are no vegetarians. Nearly everyone happily enjoys beef on many occasions; cloned meat is mentioned disparagingly as something for the poorest of the poor.

And that’s before the Islamophobia I noticed even then.

I’m still enjoying this reread, but I think it’ll be my last unless sometime I’m doing specific research. And that won’t be general pleasure reading.

 

[Retros_x]

I finally finished Wot #3 and will take a break here, fitting IMO because if I remember correctly the first 3 books were originally planned to be the first one of a trilogy.

It felt much longer han #2 and almost as long #1 - but appereantly was the shortest one? Very weird. Overall I liked it more than #2, but it felt so loaded and I am bit annoyed that once again the super sorcerer women needed rescue by the men.

I did really enjoy Mats POV, they were a lot of fun. I did enjoy a lot the POV of Nynaeve, Elayne & Egwene, the mystery of finding the undercover evil Aes Sedai was a lot of fun - unfortunatey the resolution was really dumb and disappointing. In general the white tower as an institution felt extremely incompetent and did not fit the reputation that was build up in the first two books. These sorceresses basically rule the world? Thats hard to believe.

I missed Rands POV. Perrin was OK. Overall the plot felt kinda forced. Like the author really did want X to happen so everything needs to bent towards that. I start to understand where Sanderson got some of his annoying quirks from. At least Sanderson get it over with, but I am only three books in WoT and already so annoyed by "the wheel weaves..." as a meta self aware justification for every plot contrivance.

 

[Parmandur]

In general the white tower as an institution felt extremely incompetent and did not fit the reputation that was build up in the first two books. These sorceresses basically rule the world? Thats hard to believe.

That is a major theme of the series, ultimately: nobody rules the world, especially those who think they are powerful.

 

[cranberry]

I've started reading Children of Ruin by by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A couple of years ago I read the first book Children of Time.

 

[Voadam]

I read the Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum, by Grant Morrison.

Good, but does not quite work for me. A bit too opaque in both conveying the story elements (how the interwoven 1920s arkham story eventually connects into the current batman one) and graphically hard to read. That lends a bit to the intended horror and insanity themes, but I mostly found that annoying and caused me to read faster to try to get a better sense of things rather than to linger and ponder/savor things. I am sure I missed a lot of specific symbolism of the varied art.

I do not really care for Batman's portrayal here, when pushed and stressed he is an unpleasant person. There is a lot of potential for doing interesting things with how mentally off batman is and him recognizing and fearing it in Arkham, this particular delve did not particularly show me aspects this way that seemed interesting to me.

A bunch of the villains have aspects thrown in that are really not fun too. The mad hatter's pedophilia suggestions, Two-Face descending into literal incontinence. I did like how the art and writing and lettering shifted depending on who the villain was. A bit too obscured for my tastes on most of them though, like a movie or TV show with very dark scenes where details are often hard to make out.

I much prefer the portrayals of mad villains in say Batman the Animated Series such as Scarface or even Maximillian Zeus whose episodes I have recently seen for the first time. Creepy, engaging, and very fun with interesting interactions. Stuff that seems like it could work well in a Ravenloft game.

I have high hopes for the next graphic novel in line from my neighbor's collection A Death in the Family.

 

[Autumnal]

The best part of Arkham Asylum for me was some of the amazing blue and blue-green hues in Dave McKean’s palette. Overall, it just didn’t work for me. But overreach is a thing that happens sometimes when very talented people, which those two are, go experimenting.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I have high hopes for the next graphic novel in line from my neighbor's collection A Death in the Family.

"A Death in the Family" ranges from solid to very good. Some of it's rather dated, but -- but! -- the art is fantastic, just classic Batman stuff from Jim Aparo, and the covers by Mike Mignola are wonderful. About two years later, in the 450s, Peter Milligan and Kieron Dwyer do a three-parter, "Dark Knight, Dark City," which is one of my favorite standalone Batman stories (more Mignola covers, too). The only real complaint I have is that, when I think of it, I picture Norm Breyfogle pencils in the interiors, and Dwyer's just not as interesting as Breyfogle is, IMO. He just drew the most expressive Batman.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I finished up a few of books since I last checked in here. This isn't all of them, just the most recent three.

• Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, which never really got off the ground for me. I felt like there were some mildly interesting ideas for essays that devolved into suggestive and vague conclusions. It was all rather half-baked, though the last five or six essays were enjoyable (excluding Chapter 20 and its tables of possible futures for D&D, which I skipped, just as I skipped the RPG at the end of William White's book on The Forge -- not for me).
• Dan Jones's The Wars of the Roses, which reads well and is a page turner. It's a bit shallow at times, and Jones doesn't break much new ground. I was particularly let down by his handling of Richard III, who was presented in line with the usual vile Tudor propaganda Shakespeare's portrayal and the standard reading of him. I'm inclined, at least right now, to see Richard III as more of a fool, who let events get away from him. Still a fun read and a good refresher.
• Polostan by Neal Stephenson. A latter day Baroque Cycle, or, at least the beginnings of one. It feels a bit sparser than that one and a little lighter. Dawn is a likable main character, if a bit thinly drawn (I read one review that noted Stephenson doesn't write women particularly well, which I'm willing to grant, and that he focused on clothing too much, which I'm not -- the latter made sense when it was brought up, given Dawn's movement through different social strata throughout the novel what she's wearing does matter, though I'm not sure that it was quite paid off). I enjoyed it, but it's still far too early to know if it'll end up being good. And the cameos by famous real life historical figures felt weirder given how close we are to the events of the book compared to the others. (Also, I think I may have enjoyed this more for having watched Reds for the first time recently.)