wednesday reads n' things
What I've recently finished reading:
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (ARC), the second in the Locked Tomb series. I'll start with a mostly-unspoilery assessment: The beginning's a bit difficult, as it's in second person POV (most of the first 3/4 of the book is in second person POV), set in a completely different milieu than the first with mostly unfamiliar characters, and dialogue and flashbacks that seem to contradict basically everything that happened in the first book. But those inconsistencies are hooks that pull you on. I spent most of the first part of the book thinking, "okay, this makes no sense, but there's got to be a REASON this makes no sense," and coming up with various ideas and drawing tentative conclusions, and eventually I was gloriously rewarded. It takes a while, though; the pacing's a bit off, with a perhaps slower-than-needed build and a rushed conclusion, but it's well put-together, with clever foreshadowing that makes you go "aha" when you get to the payoff. If you enjoyed Gideon the Ninth for the necromancy, the odd combination of science fiction and gothic horror, the sheer wackadoodle-iness of the writing, and the lesbian-flavored loyalty kink, you will get all that and more here. (If you were put off by the memes, apparently there are memes here, too; I tend to miss that sort of thing because I'm not super meme-savvy. Also, if reading about dissociation, delusion, and possible insanity will upset you, you may have issues with this book.)
I was really happy to see that not only do we revisit (some of) the first book's characters in flashback (from Harrow's POV), there is a sort of afterlife that is accessible to necromancers, which was implied but not shown in the first book, and we meet some of the dead characters in the 'now' as well. (We learn towards the end of GtN that the reason Abigail Pent was killed first was that she is a 'speaker to the dead' - so that neatly cut off any exploration in this direction. But I am pleased that in a universe with necromancers, death is not necessarily the end of the narrative, since that wasn't clear from GtN.)
A lot of the worldbuilding holes are filled in here; we learn why the Emperor Undying is at war, and what that kind of war entails, and why becoming a Lyctor involves what it does. In some sense it's another highly-bounded scenario, in that most of it takes place on a space station inhabited only by the Emperor and his Lyctors, but we do get glimpses of other worlds and other people. We also learn the answers to questions more explicitly raised by the first book, but of course, many new questions are raised.
But it's a wild and crazy ride, with a lot of angst, pining, conflict, despair, and triumph along the way. Also a lot of modern internet references, most of which I'm sure I missed; but there are some wonderful nods to fandom, including a series of confabulated delusions incorporating AU type scenarios, culminating in, I shit you not, a coffeeshop AU that made me laugh out loud. (To the point that I went into the Locked Tomb discord server, where I had been up until then a lurker, and requested access to the special HtN channel just so I could squee about the marvelous and stupid pun that made me lose it entirely.)
I will say that the tagline "the necromancers are back and they're gayer than ever" is a bit misleading. The LGBTQ content of this book is about on a level with that of the previous book. Also, I thought the structure of Death here remarkably like that of the Old Kingdom books (not calling plagiarism - it's just that they both clearly draw on the same lore); and Ianthe lost her arm at the end of GtN, and in this book she gets a gilded version, so I'm already writing the crossover in my head.
(I am happy to answer questions if there's something that you're intensely curious about or want to know before deciding to read. Also I am happy to share the discord server info if anyone wants in - it's a general server for fans of the book series, with a restricted channel for HtN so as to keep spoilers out of the main channels.)
Also, in audio, the final episode of Underwood and Flinch: Underground, which is the third book of the Underwood and Flinch podcast/book series that I have been following for three and a half years. (The podcasts of the first two books are available for free online at Underwood and Flinch; I think the first book is free on Smashwords, but really, the audio version is outstanding.) This third book is Patreon-only at the moment, and the author, Mike Bennett, is starting the fourth book in March, I believe, so I'll keep listening!
What I'm reading now:
Still listening to Gulp by Mary Roach, on the chapter about what would have happened to the biblical Jonah when he got swallowed by a whale. I don't really like her flip style, but I do appreciate her choice to detail various tangents to the main theme, which I think makes it a far more interesting book.
I have picked up Sword Song again, the fourth book in the Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell, which I temporarily abandoned just before Yuletide.
What I'm watching now:
We have seen the first four episodes of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I read the book *checks Goodreads* ten years ago, and have forgotten most of it, apparently. It's okay? Entertaining enough but honestly I'm not super into it, and I don't think B is either. We'll watch the whole thing, but I gave the book four stars and a glowing review, and I don't feel the same way about the show.
I have not watched any more of The Untamed.
What I'm playing now:
Still Obduction! I did find a walkthrough, which I use every so often, but I try to do things on my own first and then resort to the hints, and only then to the walkthrough. The last time I used it was when I was going through a sequence of ever more complicated swap-mazes (one of the main mechanisms of solving physical puzzles here is to swap worlds to another location where one can do certain things one can't in the first location - if you've played the time-travel game The Silent Age, it's like that) and after solving several I hit a multipart one that I started out brute-forcing, but it was soooooo tedious, so I looked up what the solution would look like, and then I did the solution on my own.
I do like the hints page - it's an html copy of Cyan's official guide, which comes in PDF with the game - because it gives background "story bits" every so often which are not really inferrable from the gameplay (IMO). The hints come in levels: subtle nudge, gentle push, body check - but the actual answer isn't always explicitly given, so if I'm still stuck it's nice to have the walkthrough.
B's playing Red Dead Redemption 2, which I had encouraged him to buy when it got ported to PC because it seemed to me the sort of thing he would like. (Mostly, HORSES.) It was so buggy he got frustrated, though, and he switched to Skyrim instead, and by the time he finished that, most of the bugs had been patched. He's so into RDR2 now, it's delightful and amusing to see him squee about it. (And he'd kill me if he knew I was using the word 'squee' to apply to him.)
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (ARC), the second in the Locked Tomb series. I'll start with a mostly-unspoilery assessment: The beginning's a bit difficult, as it's in second person POV (most of the first 3/4 of the book is in second person POV), set in a completely different milieu than the first with mostly unfamiliar characters, and dialogue and flashbacks that seem to contradict basically everything that happened in the first book. But those inconsistencies are hooks that pull you on. I spent most of the first part of the book thinking, "okay, this makes no sense, but there's got to be a REASON this makes no sense," and coming up with various ideas and drawing tentative conclusions, and eventually I was gloriously rewarded. It takes a while, though; the pacing's a bit off, with a perhaps slower-than-needed build and a rushed conclusion, but it's well put-together, with clever foreshadowing that makes you go "aha" when you get to the payoff. If you enjoyed Gideon the Ninth for the necromancy, the odd combination of science fiction and gothic horror, the sheer wackadoodle-iness of the writing, and the lesbian-flavored loyalty kink, you will get all that and more here. (If you were put off by the memes, apparently there are memes here, too; I tend to miss that sort of thing because I'm not super meme-savvy. Also, if reading about dissociation, delusion, and possible insanity will upset you, you may have issues with this book.)
I was really happy to see that not only do we revisit (some of) the first book's characters in flashback (from Harrow's POV), there is a sort of afterlife that is accessible to necromancers, which was implied but not shown in the first book, and we meet some of the dead characters in the 'now' as well. (We learn towards the end of GtN that the reason Abigail Pent was killed first was that she is a 'speaker to the dead' - so that neatly cut off any exploration in this direction. But I am pleased that in a universe with necromancers, death is not necessarily the end of the narrative, since that wasn't clear from GtN.)
A lot of the worldbuilding holes are filled in here; we learn why the Emperor Undying is at war, and what that kind of war entails, and why becoming a Lyctor involves what it does. In some sense it's another highly-bounded scenario, in that most of it takes place on a space station inhabited only by the Emperor and his Lyctors, but we do get glimpses of other worlds and other people. We also learn the answers to questions more explicitly raised by the first book, but of course, many new questions are raised.
But it's a wild and crazy ride, with a lot of angst, pining, conflict, despair, and triumph along the way. Also a lot of modern internet references, most of which I'm sure I missed; but there are some wonderful nods to fandom, including a series of confabulated delusions incorporating AU type scenarios, culminating in, I shit you not, a coffeeshop AU that made me laugh out loud. (To the point that I went into the Locked Tomb discord server, where I had been up until then a lurker, and requested access to the special HtN channel just so I could squee about the marvelous and stupid pun that made me lose it entirely.)
I will say that the tagline "the necromancers are back and they're gayer than ever" is a bit misleading. The LGBTQ content of this book is about on a level with that of the previous book. Also, I thought the structure of Death here remarkably like that of the Old Kingdom books (not calling plagiarism - it's just that they both clearly draw on the same lore); and Ianthe lost her arm at the end of GtN, and in this book she gets a gilded version, so I'm already writing the crossover in my head.
(I am happy to answer questions if there's something that you're intensely curious about or want to know before deciding to read. Also I am happy to share the discord server info if anyone wants in - it's a general server for fans of the book series, with a restricted channel for HtN so as to keep spoilers out of the main channels.)
Also, in audio, the final episode of Underwood and Flinch: Underground, which is the third book of the Underwood and Flinch podcast/book series that I have been following for three and a half years. (The podcasts of the first two books are available for free online at Underwood and Flinch; I think the first book is free on Smashwords, but really, the audio version is outstanding.) This third book is Patreon-only at the moment, and the author, Mike Bennett, is starting the fourth book in March, I believe, so I'll keep listening!
What I'm reading now:
Still listening to Gulp by Mary Roach, on the chapter about what would have happened to the biblical Jonah when he got swallowed by a whale. I don't really like her flip style, but I do appreciate her choice to detail various tangents to the main theme, which I think makes it a far more interesting book.
I have picked up Sword Song again, the fourth book in the Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell, which I temporarily abandoned just before Yuletide.
What I'm watching now:
We have seen the first four episodes of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I read the book *checks Goodreads* ten years ago, and have forgotten most of it, apparently. It's okay? Entertaining enough but honestly I'm not super into it, and I don't think B is either. We'll watch the whole thing, but I gave the book four stars and a glowing review, and I don't feel the same way about the show.
I have not watched any more of The Untamed.
What I'm playing now:
Still Obduction! I did find a walkthrough, which I use every so often, but I try to do things on my own first and then resort to the hints, and only then to the walkthrough. The last time I used it was when I was going through a sequence of ever more complicated swap-mazes (one of the main mechanisms of solving physical puzzles here is to swap worlds to another location where one can do certain things one can't in the first location - if you've played the time-travel game The Silent Age, it's like that) and after solving several I hit a multipart one that I started out brute-forcing, but it was soooooo tedious, so I looked up what the solution would look like, and then I did the solution on my own.
I do like the hints page - it's an html copy of Cyan's official guide, which comes in PDF with the game - because it gives background "story bits" every so often which are not really inferrable from the gameplay (IMO). The hints come in levels: subtle nudge, gentle push, body check - but the actual answer isn't always explicitly given, so if I'm still stuck it's nice to have the walkthrough.
B's playing Red Dead Redemption 2, which I had encouraged him to buy when it got ported to PC because it seemed to me the sort of thing he would like. (Mostly, HORSES.) It was so buggy he got frustrated, though, and he switched to Skyrim instead, and by the time he finished that, most of the bugs had been patched. He's so into RDR2 now, it's delightful and amusing to see him squee about it. (And he'd kill me if he knew I was using the word 'squee' to apply to him.)
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth