lirazel (
lirazel) wrote2025-07-09 10:10 am
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what i'm reading wednesday 9/7/2025
What I finished:
+ A Lonely Death by Charles Todd, another Ian Rutledge mystery. I don't really have anything to say about this! It's an entry in a mystery series--you know what you're getting!
+ The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is only the second Tchaikovsky I've read--I've started a few but up till now, the only one I liked enough to finish is Elder Races. I don't read nearly as much scifi as I do fantasy, mostly because most scifi (emphasis on most) seems like it's more focused on the ideas than on any of the other stuff that makes a book for me--characters, emotional resonance, even worldbuilding from a cultural perspective rather than a technological one.
However, I do like to read them now and then, and this was an example of one where the idea was indeed very intriguing--extradimensional cracks between worlds as an excuse to think about what sentient life might have looked like if it had developed at other points on the evolutionary tree. Very cool, actually! I liked the idea, I liked Tchaikovsky's prose well enough, I liked the unconventional way of giving information (via excerpts from a diegetic text--btw, can you use diegetic to talk about things other than sound? I am simply going to do so because I think it's a very useful word).
There's a wide-ranging cast of characters, too, which I enjoyed, varying in race, gender, and sexual orientation though not nationality (all the human characters are British). I could have done with some truly old characters--I am one of those people who thinks that every story can be improved by the inclusion of an old lady--but I won't complain about that since if I complained about that I'd have to complain about 90% of books. The characters were pretty well-developed but for reasons I can't articulate, I didn't emotionally connect very deeply with any of them. It was more like me going, "That's a good character design," than me truly caring about the characters. But I find this is true in a lot of scifi, and it's not a dealbreaker for me when there's other interesting stuff going on.
This is one of those books that ended up being so long that if I'd gotten the physical copy and seen that it was 600 pages, I might not have started it at all, but it was an ebook so I didn't know when I started! And I did read the whole thing over the course of a long weekend, so clearly it was readable enough even at that length. I thought the pacing was good, and the toggling between character perspectives was enough to keep it moving briskly, so it didn't feel as long as it is.
All in all, a book I enjoyed but did not love.
What I started but abandoned:
+ A Fate Inked in Blood, a Norse-inspired fantasy that was a massive bestseller, which I'd heard good things about from someone whose taste usually completely aligns with mine, but...nah, this isn't for me. I was initially intrigued by the fact that our heroine is married to a terrible guy, which is just not something you see a lot. But then in the opening chapter, along comes this super hot guy who is so clearly coded as Our Male Romantic Lead that I found it annoying, and then they started flirting, and I was like, "I am too ace for this," and I peaced out. I also wasn't impressed by the first person perspective/prose style, so I don't think this is any real loss for me.
What I'm reading/what's on pause:
+ On recommendation from
chestnut_pod, I started Sofia Samatar's The White Mosque, and I am very enamored of it despite wishing that Samatar's prose style was about 15% more conventional (more on that when I actually write this up), but I have put it on pause. The book is a memoir about half-Mennonite, half-Muslim Samatar tracing the steps of a 19th century group of Mennonites who traveled through and settled in Central Asia for a few decades--one of those unexpected quirks of history that gets me wildly excited. But I got a chapter or so in and she referenced a nonfiction book about the same topic that covers the historical trip in detail, I saw that we have it at the library of the university I work for, and so I decided I would go read it before I read this book. But I am so looking forward to getting back to this.
chestnut_pod was correct that this book is Extremely Relevant To My Interests.
+ I also started Godkiller by Hannah Kaner but I am literally a chapter and a half in so I can't possibly speak to whether I'll like it or not.
+ A Lonely Death by Charles Todd, another Ian Rutledge mystery. I don't really have anything to say about this! It's an entry in a mystery series--you know what you're getting!
+ The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is only the second Tchaikovsky I've read--I've started a few but up till now, the only one I liked enough to finish is Elder Races. I don't read nearly as much scifi as I do fantasy, mostly because most scifi (emphasis on most) seems like it's more focused on the ideas than on any of the other stuff that makes a book for me--characters, emotional resonance, even worldbuilding from a cultural perspective rather than a technological one.
However, I do like to read them now and then, and this was an example of one where the idea was indeed very intriguing--extradimensional cracks between worlds as an excuse to think about what sentient life might have looked like if it had developed at other points on the evolutionary tree. Very cool, actually! I liked the idea, I liked Tchaikovsky's prose well enough, I liked the unconventional way of giving information (via excerpts from a diegetic text--btw, can you use diegetic to talk about things other than sound? I am simply going to do so because I think it's a very useful word).
There's a wide-ranging cast of characters, too, which I enjoyed, varying in race, gender, and sexual orientation though not nationality (all the human characters are British). I could have done with some truly old characters--I am one of those people who thinks that every story can be improved by the inclusion of an old lady--but I won't complain about that since if I complained about that I'd have to complain about 90% of books. The characters were pretty well-developed but for reasons I can't articulate, I didn't emotionally connect very deeply with any of them. It was more like me going, "That's a good character design," than me truly caring about the characters. But I find this is true in a lot of scifi, and it's not a dealbreaker for me when there's other interesting stuff going on.
This is one of those books that ended up being so long that if I'd gotten the physical copy and seen that it was 600 pages, I might not have started it at all, but it was an ebook so I didn't know when I started! And I did read the whole thing over the course of a long weekend, so clearly it was readable enough even at that length. I thought the pacing was good, and the toggling between character perspectives was enough to keep it moving briskly, so it didn't feel as long as it is.
All in all, a book I enjoyed but did not love.
What I started but abandoned:
+ A Fate Inked in Blood, a Norse-inspired fantasy that was a massive bestseller, which I'd heard good things about from someone whose taste usually completely aligns with mine, but...nah, this isn't for me. I was initially intrigued by the fact that our heroine is married to a terrible guy, which is just not something you see a lot. But then in the opening chapter, along comes this super hot guy who is so clearly coded as Our Male Romantic Lead that I found it annoying, and then they started flirting, and I was like, "I am too ace for this," and I peaced out. I also wasn't impressed by the first person perspective/prose style, so I don't think this is any real loss for me.
What I'm reading/what's on pause:
+ On recommendation from
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+ I also started Godkiller by Hannah Kaner but I am literally a chapter and a half in so I can't possibly speak to whether I'll like it or not.