RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

It's Wednesday! What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[white_aster]

What I've finished: Ghost in the Cowl by Jonathan Moeller. My first book by this author, picked up an omnibus somewhere for cheap. A lowish fantasy about a spy who in mourning dead friends took an assignment to go build up the spy circle in a foreign city. She manages to get involved with freeing slaves, stealing from the rich, terrifying slavers, and foiling the nefarious plans of powerhungry mages. A solid premise. You'd think that I'd enjoy this! And I kind of did, for about the first half, before the book started to feel like a very competently done outline with no soul to it. It was well paced, well-edited, I just...felt like it was really lacking some...originality? Creativity? I'm not even sure. It kind of read like a video game.

Then I just absolutely devoured Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher. First I'd read of hers, and wow, I liked it! From the blurb about the main male character's dead god, you'd wonder if this was some kind of gritty fantasy, but no, it was mostly also a low-ish fantasy about a paladin mourning what he's lost, but then it rapidly becomes a romance with some touches of mystery/detective-ing to it. Then toward the end it became a bit of a courtroom procedural, and if this sounds like a lot to stuff into one book, it kind of was? The genre conventions of each didn't always mesh, and some of the plotlines felt really underdeveloped. Not to mention, everything came together kind of suspiciously well in the end, despite how far off the rails it had all gone. But.... But. This was a book with some 30/40ish characters who read as adults, mature in their own ways and flawed in others, which was a relief after romances where everyone feels like an overdramatic teenager. These folks had gone through the fire already, and though they were understandably upset when the fire threatened again, they kept their dumb mistakes to a minimum. Also, though I could have done without some of the internal stream of consciousness monologue that could get annoyingly off-topic and often made the main female character seem ditzy when she really wasn't, there was a lot of fun banter and I immediately put every other book in that series on hold at the library.

What I'm reading: Started Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi. I'd forgotten I'd put this on hold. I'm not big on short story collections, but this one is a lot of interesting African-inflected sci-fi, so it's going along quickly.

What I'll read next: The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov is also ready for me. I kind of hope it's a bit better than The Caves of Steel.