A Dorkish Collation: What I’ve been reading
It’s been almost two years since I shelved the books I’ve been reading, so it’s time once more to stack ‘em high, and then put them in the right places. This time, there are 29 physical books in the stack, along with 19 e-books. Plus border collies, of course!
Indy, the star of The Gap Year and The Unbent Curve is on the left
Adrian Tchaikovsky is well represented, as usual. I read his Shards of Earth before the last harvest, but I had pulled it back out for some reason when finishing the Final Architecture series. The standout of his books this last year was Service Model, which was a fun little one-off with some satirical elements that reminded me of John Scalzi. But I’ve liked pretty much all his books so far. He’s a bit like a very prolific, slightly more serious version of Iain Banks, which is something the world needs more of.
New to me this time was Travis Baldree, whose Legends & Lattes series was a gentle but compelling read about a young orcish mercenary who hangs up her sword to open a coffeeshop and find true love. Though as you might expect, her violent past keeps interrupting her plans.
I finished up a few Ann Leckie books that I had somehow slept on, Provenance, Translation State, and Lake of Souls. I went back and re-read her Imperial Radch series first, to get my head back into her writing, and found that she’s one of the few authors who I was a bit lukewarm on the first time, but then super-enjoyed the second time around. At this point, I’ll buy anything she writes, even short-story collections, which I’m usually not a fan of.
R. F. Kuang keeps on crushing the dark academia with Katabasis, which felt thematically similar to her earlier Babel, and is in a similar genre to Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, which I listened to on audiobook. I hadn’t really realized that “dark academia” was a thing, though retrospectively Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy was probably the first I’d read of this genre, back in 2020. Kuang’s last couple of books feel like she’s a young Umberto Eco, and I’m totally here for it.
My standouts this time were local Austin author Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption, which are sort of a “Watson and Holmes solve murder mysteries in a decadent, jungle-y fantasy empire”. I’ve been reading his books since his Divine Cities trilogy started in 2014, and he’s just been getting better and better. He’s always been great at building unique fantasy worlds that feel deep without being needlessly lore-heavy, and his latest series shows his mastery of this kind of writing.
I also read a ton of “LitRPG” a new-to-me genre that feels like “what if you wrote a book that reads like the characters are playing a videogame”. This sounds weird, but it’s actually a lot of fun to read, and the top authors writing it are getting better with each new book. I read seven books of Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl, and twelve books of Travis Deverell’s He Who Fights With Monsters series, and I’m counting the days until the next installments come out. I read these as e-books, since these guys are insanely prolific, and I’m trying to conserve shelf space!