Bookstack

I just finished Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy. It came out on Tuesday, but I saved it until today to read because I knew I would have a long tattoo appointment to endure, and then I read the entire thing in one galloping stretch, train ride through tattoo through second train ride. Now I just want to lie dreamily on the floor.

I laughed a lot. I cried, too. I made startled and/or gleeful noises out loud at inopportune moments and drew Looks on the train. Really, so highly recommended. So much fun, and right now I am so rapturous from the reading that I can’t even be sad the trilogy is done.

That will be tomorrow, I expect.

I’ve just finished Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown, which honestly surprised me by wrapping me up so thoroughly in its second half that I stayed up well past my bedtime the other night to gallop through to its end. It’s a perfectly charming fantasy dressed up in witty and impeccable Regency style, and I want to be best friends with both of the main characters. The author’s command of her milieu is a delight.

I did have one fair problem with the structure of the story, but as it doesn’t seem to have diminished my overall enjoyment in the slightest, that’s probably just my inner crank waving her cane. I liked the book; I expect you will too.

A book I was very much expecting to enjoy, and had been looking forward to for months, was Paul Cornell’s Witches of Lychford, and I suppose it’s mostly to its credit that I was disappointed chiefly by its brevity. It is a novella, and so entitled to be short, but I wanted more from it: more development, more stakes, more … I don’t know. I will set it aside wistfully and hope it is the introduction to something splendid and substantial, and/or that these women (is it too much to hope?) make further appearances in Cornell’s Shadow Police series.

(Of course, I already have a list of wishes/demands for the Shadow Police series that’s half as long as my arm, but in that case, what’s one more? I love that series, by the way, and those characters, and if you haven’t read the books yet I direct you to them at once. Cornell’s treatment of his brilliant cast is such that I want to scoop them all up protectively and make soothing noises and tea. I am casting really stern looks in your direction, sir.)

I’ve just this morning begun reading Kai Ashante Wilson’s Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, and am already so absorbed in its language and the texture of its world that it’s hard not to play hooky from my own work.

But I won’t. I’m going to work, I will, as soon as I finish posting this.

Maybe.

Currently digesting:

The Godless, by Ben Peek

Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie

Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear

Small Island, by Andrea Levy

Caribbean Volunteers at War, by Mark Johnson

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, by Jack Weatherford

A fairly even mix of entertainment and research. My haphazard attention span makes no guarantees as to timetables.

Other diversions at present include:

• The MMO The Secret World, which I’ve recently rediscovered; I’d initially abandoned it shortly after its painful, buggy release, but it’s been polished since then and is amazing fun for anyone who enjoys myths and urban legends, conspiracy theories and secret societies, and a little R-rated creepiness
• AMC’s Turn, which I’ve just begun but am enjoying
• and Netflix’s Sense8

Sometimes I am also writing things.