Currently getting perilously close to the end of Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer (the fourth and final book in his Southern Reach series).

I’m enjoying it, but it’s a trip. Every 100 pages or so my wife will ask how the book’s going, and I’ll respond “er, it’s gotten stranger…”.

Here because of Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Moving on to “This non-violent stuff’ll get you killed” by Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Finished Ireland by Frank Delaney, who fittingly, is himself Irish which I’m claiming solves the top row of my bingo card.

This book follows one of the last traditional itinerant storytellers in Ireland who visits a home in 1950 and has a lasting impact on the young boy there. It’s about this mysterious Storyteller, the boy, and Ireland. It includes a decent summary of Irish history from Newgrange to the Easter Rebellion of 1916, which I did need a refresher on. I suspect it’s not a very academic history of Ireland and that some of the Storyteller’s versions are probably embellished if not fabricated, but it’s good enough for me.

Just read “Will of the Many” by James Islington. It was fantastic. Kind of an adult Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones but the world is more Roman influenced.

Basically an empire conquers the whole continent and they have a heirarchy system where 8 people give their will/strength/life force to those above. The people at higher levels have so much will coming in that they have telepathic abilities as well. Those at the bottom are half as stong as normal. Its a very interesting magic system.

Plot wise lots of twists and turns. Betrayals and redemptions, political backstabbing and plenty of mysteries to uncover.

I had a few gripes with the boy saviour trope and the lead character Vis being good at everything but not enough to kill an otherwise excellent story.

I don’t want to say anymore than that for fear of ruining it.

The sequel “Strength of the Few” just came out. I’m holding off reading it though because i know I’ll inhale it.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Wonderfully optimistic, we failed him.

I’m currently reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Someone mentioned it in one of the threads here and to my surprise my library had it. It’s a really interesting story. I love how Le Guin is able to create a world that is so different yet feels like a real place.

The only issue I have is that it takes place on a planet aptly nicknamed Winter where it’s so cold all the time. And it’s been a really cold week here too, and reading about the freezing cold only makes me feel colder. If anyone knows any good books set in hot climates, I’m all ears.

Just finished American Sirens, the story of the first paramedics in the US. Everyone should read this book. It should be made into a movie, ala Hidden Figures. It’s frustrating and fascinating and well written. You will be amazed at what they used to do before CPR was invented in the 60s.

I picked up The Aeronaut’s Windlass again. It’s by Jim Butcher, who I have now learned also wrote the Dresden Files after reading this post! It’s a fun, cool read.

There’s almost two stories happening alongside each other. One about the cool, veteran ship captain trying to fix up his airship after the opening scene. The other about a group of young people almost out of the guards academy. I think I like all of them.

I really like the worldbuilding. Something happened to the surface of the Earth (I presume) and now humanity lives in a few giant spires, growing mana crystals to power airships to fly between them. On top of being a sucker for flying sailing ships (thanks Treasure Planet), I like how there isn’t really one exposition dump at any point about how the tech works, just context clues about why the current tech being discussed is relevant.

There are also people that talk to cats. It’s a little weird, but I like the cats enough to not be put off by it.

Still listening to Words of Radiance… it’s so long! Thanksgiving travel is providing several hours worth of listening time and I’m still only 3/5ths through it. My Libby loan is gonna run out on Sunday and I’m honestly not sure I’m gonna make it. I have and read a physical copy of The Way of Kings and while I rather like the narrators now that I’m used to them, I’m wondering if I’m just gonna have to continue with physical copies because I don’t do Audible and I can’t manage to get through a whole book in the three weeks or whatever that Libby gives me.

I’m about 2/3 of the way through All Systems Red by Martha Wells, the first Murderbot story. I can see why it’s so well-liked.

__

Finished:

Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi (historical fiction with elements of myth) | bingo: minority author, based on folklore, steppin’ up, political

A lowly blacksmith adjusts to her new life as the future bride of a powerful ruler.

According to the blurb, this is based on the myth of Persephone, but even clarifying that as “loosely” is generous. That said, outside of a couple of minor quibbles, I enjoyed this, and now I feel like I know a tiny bit about traditional West African culture. There is a brief glossary in the back, but I spent some time on Wikipedia, too.

Dead Cert by Dick Francis (mystery thriller) | bingo: different continent, motion picture, saddle up, game

A jockey investigates the death of his friend.

First in a series. Lots of horse racing, has that 1960s-era writing feel. This was decent, although the romance wasn’t great, and it hasn’t aged well in a couple of places (an understatement in one case).

The Widow by John Grisham

Still re-reading all of Iain M Banks.

Currently Matter

It’s the one about Sursamen, the shellworld.

Sursamen collected adjectives the way ordinary planets collected moons. It was Arithmetic, it was Mottled, it was Disputed, it was Multiply Inhabited, it was Multi-million-year Safe, and it was Godded.

The Shellworlds had been built by a species called the Involucra, or Veil, the best part of a billion years earlier. All were in orbits around stable main-series suns, at varying distances from their star according to the disposition of the system’s naturally formed planets, though usually lying between two and five hundred million kilometres out. Long disused and fallen into disrepair, they had, with their stars, drifted out of their long-ago allotted positions. There had been about four thousand Shellworlds originally; 4096 was the commonly assumed exact number as it was a power of two and therefore – by general though not universal assent – as round a figure as figures ever got. No one really knew for sure, though. You couldn’t ask the builders, the Involucra, as they had disappeared less than a million years after they’d completed the last of the Shellworlds.

The colossal artificial planets had been spaced regularly about the outskirts of the galaxy, forming a dotted net round the great whirlpool of stars. Almost a billion years of gravitational swirling had scattered them seemingly randomly across and through the skies ever since: some had been ejected from the galaxy altogether while others had swung into the centre, some to stay there, some to be flung back out again and some to be swallowed by black holes, but using a decent dynamic star chart, you could feed in the current positions of those which were still extant, backtrack eight hundred million years and see where they had all started out. That four-thousand-plus figure had been reduced to a little over twelve hundred now, mostly because a species called the Iln had spent several million years destroying the Shellworlds wherever they could find them and nobody had been willing or able to prevent them. Exactly why, nobody was entirely sure and, again, the Iln were not around to ask; they too had vanished from the galactic stage, their only lasting monument a set of vast, slowly expanding debris clouds scattered throughout the galaxy and – where their devastation had been less than complete – Shellworlds that had been shattered and collapsed into barbed and fractured wrecks, shrunken compressed husks of what they had once been.

The Shellworlds were mostly hollow. Each had a solid metallic core fourteen hundred kilometres in diameter. Beyond that, a concentric succession of spherical shells, supported by over a million massive, gently tapering towers never less than fourteen hundred metres in diameter, layered out to the final Surface. Even the material they were made from had remained an enigma – to many of the galaxy’s Involved civilisations at least – for over half a billion years, before its properties were fully worked out. From the start, though, it had been obvious that it was immensely strong and completely opaque to all radiation.

They had been machines. In fact, they had all been part of the same vast mechanism. Their hollowness had been filled, or perhaps had been going to be filled (again, nobody could be certain this had actually been done), with some sort of exotic superfluid, turning each of them into a colossal field projector, with the aim, when they were all working in concert, of throwing a force field or shield round the entire galaxy.

Precisely why this had been thought necessary or even desirable was also unknown, though speculation on the matter had preoccupied scholars and experts over the aeons.

With their original builders gone, the people who had attacked the worlds seemingly also permanently missing and the fabled superfluid equally absent, leaving those vast internal spaces linked by the supporting Towers – themselves mostly hollow, though containing twisted webs of structurally reinforcing material, and punctured with portals of various sizes giving access to each of the levels – it had taken almost no time at all for a variety of enterprising species to work out that a derelict Shellworld would make a vast, ready-made and near-invulnerable habitat, after just a few relatively minor modifications.

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History - takes a look at a bunch of international context around the time. Quite interesting so far (but I’m only a few chapters in).

War for the Oaks - urban fantasy from 1987! The main character gets drafted by the fae to help them in a fae war. I’m also not very far into this one.

Currently the sexual politics of meat by Carol Adams and its a good blending of feminist and vegan theory and their intersections definitely recommend also a few chapters into American War by Omar El Akkad which is starting decently but not far enough in to have a strong opinion about a us civil war in 2074 over fossil fuels.

I finished A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. It was an excellent. I can’t wait to see how the story continues.

Now I’m reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. It is a surprisingly gripping read. Painful in certain ways of course, but so well-woven that I find myself in awe of the author’s mastery.