August Reading List

[unicornduke]

Read

• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo - incredibly good, the bad guys make the best thieves style heist movie. Set in fantasy Holland which was incredibly amusing at first. Logically I know the Dutch were an empire at one point, but they aren't as recent an empire as the british (to an american eye hmm), so it feels really weird. But it really works and the story and characters are excellent. Set in a universe that is apparently popular enough to get a netflix series, will read those books later. library e-book
• Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee - I still don't get the space/calendar/math stuff but hell yeah let's destroy a space cult empire from the inside. library e-book
• Flux by Jinwoo Chong - time goes weird and awful and human experimentation is bad actually. physical library book
• Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo - second after Six of Crows and it's just a duology yay. Wraps many things up and leaves it nice and ambiguous for future books/fanfiction. Excellent as the first one. library e-book
• Someone You Can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell - cute but extremely gross descriptions of things, otherwise a sweet little story. Good but gross, decent amount of body horror if you think about it too much. physical library book
• He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan - It took me a long time to slog through this. First issue is that I read the first book too long ago to remember almost any of the characters. Second, it has a slow start. But a really good conclusion to the duology. library e-book
• The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed - really awesome novella, very visceral feeling post-apocolypse but like 100 years ago apocolypse. Can't wait to read the second one. physical library book'
• The Unrelenting Earth by Kritika H. Rao - The floating city nearly falls about a thousand times. I'm not sure I'd recommend this series. I think I'll read the third one just to find out the overarching plot but there's a lot of dead people so far and everyone is really dramatic in every possible way. Like, they could have had a conversation but no, they're busy and the misunderstandings pile up. Hmm. library e-book
• Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold - one woman gets fed up and solves a problem. efficiently. delightful, very good, thoroughly enjoyable. physical library book
• Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo - they're rich, in space, connected by the past and some shit is going down. fun read, not very deep. physical library book
• Assassin of Reality by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko - now that I'm typing this, I don't think I remember how this ended I was reading it on the train home at the end of the Raleigh trip and I was very tired. Hmm. I remember that it was good, no details though. ah well. physical library book

Re-read

• Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa - it's a sweet little book. library e-book

DNF

• Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi - only read this book if you enjoy things like multiple page descriptions of the city and all the different merchant people they rode past. I got a quarter of the way through and was bored out of my mind. more like a les mis or lotr experience. very little dragons in that first quarter of the book. library e-book
• All that She Carried by Tiya Miles - I wanted to like this book, but I don't know if it's because I don't read a lot of non-fiction or what, but I was very bored by this. Too much research in it maybe? I think it might not have been for me. library e-book

Comments

[reedrover]

“I’m tired of your stupid war. End it.”

[unicornduke]

SO GOOD

[reedrover]

I loaned Cordelia’s Honor (omnibus of Shards of Honor and Barryar) to my mother and told her she would have no doubt when she got to my favorite scene. She called me right after she hit that, laughing, to say she found it. Then she hung up on me so she could finish the book.

[unicornduke]

Amazing! It's truly an incredible scene. I was talking to A on the call Monday and it turns out she didn't like Miles in his own series, but I talked her into reading these two books and I'm hoping she likes them. I'm going to get reading about Miles soon, but need to get through my current library backlog.

[reedrover]

If Myles isn’t your or her jam but you like the writing style, I highly recommend Curse of Chalion/Paladin of Souls. It took me a bit to get into Chalion, but Paladin is one of my all time favorite books.

[reedrover]

I gave Mom two to dabble in - Cetaganda and Komarr - because of the romance and the strong women in them. She enjoyed those two well enough but Myles wasn’t enough to her taste to go back for the others. She wants more Cordelia. But because of my dad dying, I never told her that Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen came out. I think it would be too hard on her.