Tim Akers, Dead of Veridon. I like how Akers writes, and I wish he didn't write about zombies. I still hate zombies. A lot. No, really, more than that. A lot. This is only half a book. I expect I'll have fun with the other half at some point, but there's no apparent word on when it'll exist, so...not what I would call highly satisfactory despite being a smooth and easy read.
Boris Akunin, The Turkish Gambit. Second volume in its series, in which Akunin is apparently going through and writing one of what he perceives as each "kind" of mystery novel. This one was a spy mystery, historical Russian spy mystery in translation, cross-culturally interesting, interesting for its exercise within the mystery genre, fast read.
Rae Carson (
raecarson), The Shadow Cats. Kindle. When I heard Rae had done a short story prequel to Girl of Fire and Thorns, I was a little curious how it would work. It really felt like the start of that book is the start of that story. And it is, but Rae made the right choice here: to shift perspective character, to shift to someone else's story completely, to illuminate world by going a completely different direction with it. So that worked for me.C.J. Cherryh, Finity's End. I reread this for a Cherryh panel I'm on at Farthing Party, because I remembered it as one of my favorites. It still is. It's the kind of intimate voice of SF I have been missing so much lately, and reading it made me miss it more. It deals with trust and family and when these things break and which things do and do not work to mend them. And it deals with the SF technologies and conceits inherently while doing this. And the angsty Cherryh hero has reasons to be angsty, he isn't just Filled With Woe. It is Good Cherryh. If you do not already know that you inherently dislike Cherryh, I really think this is one of the good and right places to start. I think it's one of the places she shines.
Warren Ellis, Stormwatch: Force of Nature. Quoth the
mrissa: meh. We have three more volumes of this, and I am not reading them. It's got noirish superhero things that I just couldn't manage to connect to except the rogue activation plot, which was getting lost in other things, so: lots of other stuff in the world to read.Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening. Oh, this book. Oh, you guys, this book. I...I loved this book so very much. It was so full of awesome. There are things in this book about the '48ers from Germany and Austria and how they affected the US Civil War in Missouri. Doesn't that seem like the sort of thing we should know? Here it is. And there were the Fremonts, and there was the future President Garfield acting like one of the guys I went to Gustavus with when he was taking a philosophy course and falling in love with each philosophy as he encountered it, and...I do not consider myself a US Civil War buff. It is one of my least favorite Civil Wars. But seriously, this book could fuel two Miyazaki movies and four historical fantasies. I draw little hearts around this book's name on my algebra notebook.
