Book related ramblings: free Bujold and a series guide to Discworld
This is pretty awesome - Baen have made the entire of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, bar one novel, available for free here and as a CD included with hardcover copies of the latest book Cryoburn. Which is unusually generous for a publisher. (The missing book is Memory, by the way, and it's my favourite in the series as well as possibly being the most pivotal, so I'd recommend seeking it out.)
Which reminds me that I haven't posted anything for Cryoburn, but it's hard to because I'm still trying to process... things. Spoilers are spoilery -- good book, bit painful, mostly because I knew a certain spoilery event would occur and was dreading it. Annoyingly, I wasn't even spoiled as such, just knew the direction the series had to go in. But still. Ouch.
Also, this is a very handy guide to Discworld. I don't know that I'd use it for reading order strictly in terms of 'What should I read first?' but it certainly works as a guide to which books fall into which series-within-the-series. Most of the Discworld books can be read in any order, with the exception of maybe the Tiffany Aching series? And I think Night Watch is enriched by having read the early Watch novels, but it's an incredible story on its own terms.
I Shall Wear Midnight, which would slot in after Wintersmith as the latest published, is a great book as well, typically Pratchett in its handling of the characters (I love how he really gets female characters and their world, and I love that he handles every single character with insight, even the loathsome ones). It's a dark book in some ways with heavy themes: the role women have filled and do fill, how someone has to do the jobs that need to be done - often without thanks or reward, the things they see, and how easily fear and darkness manifest and find outlet within a community. As for the villain-creature-thing... brr.
Erm, this got rather side-tracked. Suffice to say, I liked it a lot. And I like Discworld books a lot in general. *g*
Which reminds me that I haven't posted anything for Cryoburn, but it's hard to because I'm still trying to process... things. Spoilers are spoilery -- good book, bit painful, mostly because I knew a certain spoilery event would occur and was dreading it. Annoyingly, I wasn't even spoiled as such, just knew the direction the series had to go in. But still. Ouch.
Also, this is a very handy guide to Discworld. I don't know that I'd use it for reading order strictly in terms of 'What should I read first?' but it certainly works as a guide to which books fall into which series-within-the-series. Most of the Discworld books can be read in any order, with the exception of maybe the Tiffany Aching series? And I think Night Watch is enriched by having read the early Watch novels, but it's an incredible story on its own terms.
I Shall Wear Midnight, which would slot in after Wintersmith as the latest published, is a great book as well, typically Pratchett in its handling of the characters (I love how he really gets female characters and their world, and I love that he handles every single character with insight, even the loathsome ones). It's a dark book in some ways with heavy themes: the role women have filled and do fill, how someone has to do the jobs that need to be done - often without thanks or reward, the things they see, and how easily fear and darkness manifest and find outlet within a community. As for the villain-creature-thing... brr.
Erm, this got rather side-tracked. Suffice to say, I liked it a lot. And I like Discworld books a lot in general. *g*