Newslettering

How the World Made the West - Josephine Quinn
The Incandescent - Emily Tesh
A Song of Legends Lost - MH Ayinde
The Maid and the Crocodile - Jordan Ifueko
Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera
The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley
Heavenly Tyrant - Xiran Jay Zhao
The Tusks of Extinction - Ray Nayler
The Breath of the Sun - Isaac Fellman
Vox Machina: Stories Untold
Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Forest of a Thousand Eyes - Frances Hardinge
The Rose Rent - Ellis Peters
Motherland: A Journey Through 500,000 years of African Culture and Identity - Luke Pepera
The River Has Roots - Amal El-Mohtar
The Mercy Makers - Tessa Gratton

Death of the Author - Nnedi Okorafor
City of All Seasons - Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley
The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects - Bee Wilson
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain - Victoria Mackenzie
Some Body Like Me - Lucy Lapinska
The Death of Mountains - Jordan Kurella
The Dragonfly Gambit - AD Sui
Pluralities - Avi Silver
I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman trans Ros Schwartz
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel
Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops - Tim Robey
The Deep Dark - Molly Ostertag
Wheel of the Infinite - Martha Wells
Remember You Will Die - Eden Robins
Pagans - James Alistair Henry
Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones

Witch Week - Diana Wynne Jones
Archer's Goon - Diana Wynne Jones
The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
The Night Parade of 100 Demons - Marie Brennan
Penric's Mission - Lois McMaster Bujold
We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain - Lanre Bakare
The Memory Hunters - Mia Tsai
All Systems Read - Martha Wells
Artificial Condition - Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol - Martha Wells
Exit Strategy - Martha Wells
Network Effect - Martha Wells
Fugitive Telemetry - Martha Wells

This is a three month round up because August happened to me so much. But! It did also feature me discovering that I could reread Murderbot, so I had a great time with that. (Still not sure I've recovered my ability to reread in general, but nice to add in something else I can handle rereading.)

I read a lot of things that I loved these last few months, but the words for most of them are not coming, so here we are. I do want to try and get back in the habit of writing stuff up as I go along, and maybe even actually posting monthly again - we shall see if I manage it.

The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley (four stars), Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky (three stars)

The Ministry of Time
I wasn't sure as I was reading this whether or not I liked it, but I blazed through it at a rate of knots and I think I've come down on the side of yes. It's near-future sf about a woman who becomes the liaison to a time-displaced polar explorer (and also makes a lot of bad choices, just so many, I loved her so much and had such a low opinion of her decision making skills), but it's also a thriller and a romance and has a lot of stuff about climate change and the experience of being an immigrant... and yet it somehow manages to make all of that work together incredibly well. And it's very funny, and the characters are all beautifully drawn - yeah, I think I loved it.

Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky
I would have liked this a lot more if it had been shorter. It's a satire on the dangers of letting automation take over from humanity, and it makes its points well, but it makes all of them over and over and over again and it gets quite frustrating. I was invested enough in the main characters and their relationship to finish it, and I did like that it resisted the trope of the robot who inevitably becomes human, but it really needed to be half the length.

Didn't finish:

A Palace Near the Wind - Ai Jiang, When the Tides Held the Moon - Venessa Vida Kelley

A Palace Near the Wind - Ai Jiang
I've really enjoyed some of Jiang's shorter fiction, but this one really wasn't coming together: it was just deeply unclear all the time how anything in its world actually worked ("the trees are people!" "all of them? How tree-y are they? How TALL are they?"), and while shorter fiction in particular can often get away with worldbuilding on vibes, the fact that I was questioning it suggested that the writing wasn't fully taking me with it. It did also feel like it was tipping from "protecting the environment is important" into "we should live in the woods, eschew all technology and eat only plants" in places.

When the Tides Held the Moon - Venessa Vida Kelley
As we know romance is more miss than hit for me, but I was intrigued by the setting of this one. I started off quite enjoying it, but the pace was so slow that it gave me time to notice that the characters and world were on the thin side, and ultimately I got bored and wandered off about halfway through. I did love the illustrations, though, and I think if the pace had been tightened up a bit I would probably have finished and liked it.