I'm reading A Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. #3 in the Wayfarer's series so far. Becky is a fantastic science fiction writer who creates amazing characters from all sorts of fictional species which are incredibly textured with their own languages, religions, cultural norms, gender and sexual identities.
#2 was amazing and I fell in love with those characters so much so I felt a real sense of grief when I'd finished the book. This one is great so far.
I'm reading this
very soon. Book #2 was probably my favorite book last year, tied with The City in the Middle of the Night. My expectations for this one are mixed, I've heard some conflicting opinions, but I'm still looking forward to it.
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I ended up reading 5 books this month, which, wow. Don't think I'm managing that again but maybe it's a sign I should increase my reading goal for the year.
Didn't like it as much as I thought I would, considering I adore the TV show. It's obvious the TV show had the benefit of coming after several books and knowing how to introduce plot points and characters before they actually made an appearance in the books, and that made it way more stronger. It's also way longer than I was expecting, and I felt it was dragging by the end. I think I'm gonna stick to the TV show for now.
I absolutely
loved this book. Some of the characters are cliched, there's a very clear "evil" threat with few shades of grey, the pacing goes to hell in the last third of the book.... but it's so much FUN. Literally the definition of more than the sum of its parts. I was also convinced to read it by the promise of a single-volume fantasy epic, knowing I can leave the world behind after just the one book and be satisfied from a fantasy story is a rare occurrence, and it definitely delivered on that front. It has a really interesting world and likable characters and for whatever it's worth it kept reminding me of Fire Emblem: Three Houses in terms of story and characters. Really a treat.
A dystopian-magic realist book about a town where memories disappear and there's a police that enforces those disappearance. This book is beautifully written (and translated, the writing flows ridiculously well and due in part to the translation and its literary genre it has the ethereal, dream-like feeling of books like Haruki Murakami's without the uncalled for women body descriptions). It felt very allegorical, and it tackled some heavy themes. My soul was crushed by the end, don't go into this one expecting a fun ride, but what a ride.
This one may be cheating, but I did read it all. I'm trying to get into bread baking and this was recommended to me. Very good book, super thorough recipes and explanations, and structured in a very intelligent, guided way. I haven't made all of the recipes in the book obviously and I read it in like one sitting but I'm very much looking forward to using it more in the future.
After reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a book about an ambassador from a subjugated space station/colony being sent to the capital planet of the empire to investigate the death of their predecessor and try to save the colony from total annexation sounded like it was gonna trigger a ton of dejavu, but this managed to be its own thing even if many of the themes from Baru Cormorant regarding cultures dominating another and getting to choose what "normal" means are there, beyond just the change of setting from fantasy/alt-history to sci-fi. There's some neat stuff having to do with memories in the ambassador's culture and there's a lot of emphasis about how language is shaped by culture. Very quotable. That ending tho. Looking forward to book #2.
