Reading Meme for March 20 2024
Mar. 20th, 2024 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishWhat I’ve Read:
Exit Strategy – Murderbot Diaries #4 – Martha Wells – (Re-read #4) Crossing Book Club – Still a great story, and a solid conclusion to the first four books of this series.
Witchmark – CL Polk – Fun with Necromancy Book club – A Re-read from 2019 – my god, this was readable. Just a lovely book with engaging writing and worldbuilding that details likes a chef adds spice. There’s never a whole paragraph of just info-dumping – it’s seeded gently thru-out. CL Polk writes good banter but also just interesting people who feel real enough to make the world feel grounded. This story comes from the POV of Miles, a profoundly compassionate man who escaped an awful and powerful family only discover that his current medical mystery connects to a conspiracy that his family is hiding. He’s joined by an…. An elf? A fae? An angel? Who is pulling the same threads from another world. They fight crime! The crime is a murder of a reporter that ties nicely back into a larger conspiracy that implicates the awful family that Miles escaped from.
It’s honestly great, and while I am entirely certain that it started life as a Supernatural fanfic, I didn’t catch that the first time I read it and I don’t think the finished story actually maps onto SPN all that well.
Stormsong by CL Polk – For myself, because the first book in the trilogy was so good. I’ll highly recommend that you move thru the books in this series swiftly – there’s maybe two or three days in-world between the events of each book and the next, and the plots are pacey, so you don’t really a lead-in chapter. This book focuses on a character introduced in the last book, Grace, who is facing both political and personal changes on a grand scale at the same time, with absolutely no room to breathe. Where Miles had made his choice for his own independence years ago, Grace is just starting to make hers, and there are some times where you just want to shake her a bit, but it’s all very rooted in good character development.
This book also is fascinating to read as a piece of fiction that loves politics – Grace and Miles take actions that have real impact on people in their country and they get to actually see some of that impact. Grace’s change of heart came at the end of book one, but it’s playing out here and you can really see the slower transformation of her character as she chooses the kind of person she wants to be, and rejects the path set out for her of consolidating power without worrying about the morality of using it.
What I’m Reading:
Soulstar - CL Polk What can I say, I’m on a kick. Like the first two books of the trilogy, this takes off basically a day after the previous book (if even that) and changes the POV character to someone who was introduced back in book one. Are some elements of this series predictable? Yup – but in a good way, where the author has laid out breadcrumbs for us.
Dune – Frank Herbert – started as an audiobook, we’ll see if I finish it that way. I thought the “full cast” style would not work for me, and I’m not entirely wrong – I would prefer something other than this. There is a narrator for everything but the character’s spoken words, and voice actor for each character. Anyone who has opened Dune will see the issue – the book has a wealth of internal monologue for each character, often in the same scenes as the character’s dialogue. So you end with functionally a character that speaks with two voices, one of them an actor giving a performance and the other is just the narrator doing a little intonation. It’s very weird and more than a little confusing.
However, given that I picked the audiobook as the means to power thru these books and see if I could ignore the elements of the writing that ignore me, I will give this a solid try.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York– Robert Caro – about 23% - Got to listen to the podcast ep, it was great.
The 99% Invisible podcast has special episodes on the chapters along this schedule, which I am trying to keep up with:
Reading schedule under the cut
Episode 3 — March 15 — Chapters 11 through 15 – done!
Episode 4 — April 19 — Chapters 16 through 20
Episode 5 — May 17 — Chapters 21 through 24
Episode 6 — June 21 — Chapters 25 through 26
Episode 7 — July 19 — Chapters 27 through 32
Episode 8 — August 16 — Chapters 33 through 34
Episode 9 — September 20 — Chapters 35 through 38
Episode 10 — October 18 — Chapters 39 through 41
Episode 11 — November 15 — Chapters 42 through 46
Episode 12 — December 20 — Chapters 47 through 50
Fellowship of the Ring – JRR Tolkien – 17%
What I’ll Read Next:
Silver Nitrate
Gunslingers Paean #3
Murderbot #3
Exit Strategy – Murderbot Diaries #4 – Martha Wells – (Re-read #4) Crossing Book Club – Still a great story, and a solid conclusion to the first four books of this series.
Witchmark – CL Polk – Fun with Necromancy Book club – A Re-read from 2019 – my god, this was readable. Just a lovely book with engaging writing and worldbuilding that details likes a chef adds spice. There’s never a whole paragraph of just info-dumping – it’s seeded gently thru-out. CL Polk writes good banter but also just interesting people who feel real enough to make the world feel grounded. This story comes from the POV of Miles, a profoundly compassionate man who escaped an awful and powerful family only discover that his current medical mystery connects to a conspiracy that his family is hiding. He’s joined by an…. An elf? A fae? An angel? Who is pulling the same threads from another world. They fight crime! The crime is a murder of a reporter that ties nicely back into a larger conspiracy that implicates the awful family that Miles escaped from.
It’s honestly great, and while I am entirely certain that it started life as a Supernatural fanfic, I didn’t catch that the first time I read it and I don’t think the finished story actually maps onto SPN all that well.
Stormsong by CL Polk – For myself, because the first book in the trilogy was so good. I’ll highly recommend that you move thru the books in this series swiftly – there’s maybe two or three days in-world between the events of each book and the next, and the plots are pacey, so you don’t really a lead-in chapter. This book focuses on a character introduced in the last book, Grace, who is facing both political and personal changes on a grand scale at the same time, with absolutely no room to breathe. Where Miles had made his choice for his own independence years ago, Grace is just starting to make hers, and there are some times where you just want to shake her a bit, but it’s all very rooted in good character development.
This book also is fascinating to read as a piece of fiction that loves politics – Grace and Miles take actions that have real impact on people in their country and they get to actually see some of that impact. Grace’s change of heart came at the end of book one, but it’s playing out here and you can really see the slower transformation of her character as she chooses the kind of person she wants to be, and rejects the path set out for her of consolidating power without worrying about the morality of using it.
What I’m Reading:
Soulstar - CL Polk What can I say, I’m on a kick. Like the first two books of the trilogy, this takes off basically a day after the previous book (if even that) and changes the POV character to someone who was introduced back in book one. Are some elements of this series predictable? Yup – but in a good way, where the author has laid out breadcrumbs for us.
Dune – Frank Herbert – started as an audiobook, we’ll see if I finish it that way. I thought the “full cast” style would not work for me, and I’m not entirely wrong – I would prefer something other than this. There is a narrator for everything but the character’s spoken words, and voice actor for each character. Anyone who has opened Dune will see the issue – the book has a wealth of internal monologue for each character, often in the same scenes as the character’s dialogue. So you end with functionally a character that speaks with two voices, one of them an actor giving a performance and the other is just the narrator doing a little intonation. It’s very weird and more than a little confusing.
However, given that I picked the audiobook as the means to power thru these books and see if I could ignore the elements of the writing that ignore me, I will give this a solid try.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York– Robert Caro – about 23% - Got to listen to the podcast ep, it was great.
The 99% Invisible podcast has special episodes on the chapters along this schedule, which I am trying to keep up with:
Reading schedule under the cut
Episode 3 — March 15 — Chapters 11 through 15 – done!
Episode 4 — April 19 — Chapters 16 through 20
Episode 5 — May 17 — Chapters 21 through 24
Episode 6 — June 21 — Chapters 25 through 26
Episode 7 — July 19 — Chapters 27 through 32
Episode 8 — August 16 — Chapters 33 through 34
Episode 9 — September 20 — Chapters 35 through 38
Episode 10 — October 18 — Chapters 39 through 41
Episode 11 — November 15 — Chapters 42 through 46
Episode 12 — December 20 — Chapters 47 through 50
Fellowship of the Ring – JRR Tolkien – 17%
What I’ll Read Next:
Silver Nitrate
Gunslingers Paean #3
Murderbot #3
