What Are You Reading?

[greek_jester]

Just finished "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" by T Kingfisher. I cannot recommend it enough. I really, really hope that the author eventually writes a sequel, since there's a couple of plot threads that hint at the possibility of one. I loved the world-building, and the characters just felt real. Plus, while the main protagonist was a teenage girl, she felt like an actual teenage girl in an awful situation as opposed to an idealised teenage girl in an awful situation. Also, no shoe-horned in love interests!

[Mikkel]

The Venus trilogy by Pamela Sargent. I'm at the last book.

[Ghel]

I finished The Lies of Locke Lamora, and I was pretty disappointed by it. I loved the worldbuilding, but it leaned way too heavily on the trope of the boy / young man who resolves everything with his cleverness and luck.

Now I'm starting A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green. It's the sequel to his first novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I'm really looking forward to this one. AART explored a lot of the ways in which we use the internet, social media, etc. and how it shapes the way we view the world. I'm expecting similar themes in ABFE.

[Dreamstalker]

I just picked up the first Murderbot book based on recs from here and Ask A Manager, and got another glowing rec from the bookseller as I was being rung up.

[greek_jester]

What with one thing and another the last few years I had forgotten about the series after buying the first book. When I had time to pay attention again I bought the rest and ended up reading through the whole lot. I do love Murderbot. Some of what they think in group situations or of humanity in general reminds me of me!

[It's me]

I just finished the latest Murderbot book, "Network Effect". Lots going on in this one. I should have re-read the prior book in the series first though. There are lots of references to people and events that only make sense if you know what happened in the earlier book.

[Deserted]

I recently found a copy of P.D. Terry's Compilers and Compiler Generators: an introduction with C++ on my hard drive. Super nerdy stuff, but right up my alley. Even though my relevant projects are well along, I've paused them to read through this, in case it can help me.

[greek_jester]

Just finished "This is going to hurt: secret diaries of a junior doctor" by Adam Kay. It's put together from the diary he was required to keep as a doctor working for the NHS.

I laughed (frequently). I cried a few times as well. The final incident that eventually led him to leave the medical profession made me go and hug my dog for a while.

While some of the problems he dealt with (the excessive hours) are now a lot more closely monitored, it still shines a light on what NHS medical staff go through. It also reminds me how grateful I am that the NHS exists.

Oh, just in case you decide to go with the Kindle edition; do not, under any circumstances, eat or plan to eat after you read the extra entries that never made it into the main book. My stomach churned for quite a while after I read the one about the old lady.

[depechemodefan]

I'm reading "The Mirror and the Light" by Hilary Mantel. Third book in the series, the last one because spoiler alert Cromwell dies.

It's the sequel to "Wolf Hall". I like historical novels, but I don't know why I'm reading it because for these two books I sometimes don't know who is talking, there are time jumps so you don't know what event is happening now, and sometimes the author uses something from a primary source where an event happens but you don't know what happened. Like one character gets tossed out the window but you don't know until latter on if he was killed by being tossed out the window. Or just now in this book a son of Duke of Norfolk starts insulting Cromwell but it's so sudden, no lead up. It's not confusing all the time but once in a while something happens/is being said and I have to go back to reread the paragraphs.

[AnaKhouri]

Savage Legion, a fantasy novel by Matt Wallace that I won in a Goodreads giveaway. It's SO GOOD y'all.

AND. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, the sequel to Gideon the Ninth, comes out August 4! Gideon was my absolute favorite book of last year and early reviews for Harrow are spectacular so I am STOKED!

[Ironclad Alibi]

I have started reading The House In The Cerulean Sea.

[It's me]

My latest read is "A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark" by Harry Connolly.

The writing is a little uneven, part of which I think is due to faulty editing. But the story is
interesting.

Blurb from Amazon:

After years of waging a secret war against the supernatural, Marley Jacobs put away her wooden stakes and silver bullets, then turned her back on violence. She declared Seattle, her city, a safe zone for everyone, living and undead. There would be no more preternatural murder under her watch.

But waging peace can make as many enemies as waging war, and when Marley's nephew turns up dead in circumstances suspiciously like a vampire feeding, she must look into it.

[Kit-Ginevra]

I'm kicking into Julia Golding's Cat Royal
series about an orphan who grows up in the Drury Lane theatre in London in the 1790s,mixing with lords and ladies who patronize the theatre but also the barrowboys and street urchins who lurk about outside. In the next books, she ends up on a slave plantation in Jamaica and being pressganged into a pirate ship...

[Ironclad Alibi]

Hmm, Cline's book sounds like a nice, apocalyptic read ...

Indeed it does. I found out about the book from his talk at a National Capital Area Skeptics program. It is on YouTube.

[Pixelated]

Hmm, Cline's book sounds like a nice, apocalyptic read ...