Sunday Status Update: October 7, 2018

And so ends the first week of October. Here’s what we’re reading!

Bill: This week’s genre reading was a bit disappointing as I was the outlier on a pair of books that have received mostly good reviews (including here at Fanlit). The Tiger’s Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera honestly just bored me, while The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson had lots to admire idea-wise but never really engaged me with its characters or story. In non-fiction, Putting the Science in Fiction, edited by Dan Koboldt, was a mostly successful collection of blog articles advising writers on improving their use of science in their writing; while Nine Pints, by Rose George, was an often-fascinating look at human blood.  Media-wise, thanks to the family being out of town, I binged all of The Man in the Iron Castle’s newest season which still has a rich look and pace (albeit languorous), and also some strong set scenes, but felt a bit too scattershot. And I’ve worked my way through most of Luke Cage season two, which has some pacing issues, but I’m loving the complicated characters and the acting.

Jana: This week I finished Julie Kagawa‘s Shadow of the Fox, and I’m definitely looking forward to its sequel; I was surprised by how much I liked this book, and I’m eager to see where Kagawa takes the story next. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Joseph Fink‘s Alice Isn’t Dead, and I’m enjoying the ways in which it parallels and diverges from the original podcast. I also began Seth Dickinson‘s The Monster Baru Cormorant, the first sequel to The Traitor Baru Cormorant; it’s too early for a judgement call, but so far I like how this novel picks up from its predecessor and I’m eagerly dreading what will happen in this volume. (If you’ve read The Traitor Baru Cormorant, you’ll know what I mean by that.) Time and weather permitting, I’m going to dive headfirst into Vic James‘ Bright Ruin, the concluding volume in her DARK GIFTS trilogy, because not knowing how it all ends is giving me pins and needles!

Marion: I think I posted reviews of most of the books I read last week. Writing Flash, an (appropriately) short book by Fred D. White, has been enjoyable and eye-opening. Fred is Terry Weyna’s husband and a retired English professor. Fred enjoys flash and has published numerous flash pieces; this book analyzes flash and provides some great writing exercises. It’s a good book for a writers group or an emerging writer who likes to experiment with flash. (Twitter-length stories sound especially intriguing.) I also read and didn’t especially care for a recent Michael Connelly novel, Two Kinds of Truth. It had the feeling of three novella-length plots hastily woven together to fill out a book.

I started Sharon Kay Penman’s 1988 historical novel Falls the Shadow, about British King Henry III and Simon de Montfort. Thank goodness she put a family tree in the front, that’s all I can say.

Terry: I started a whole passel of books this week:  Song of Blood & Stone by L. Penelope, which I’ve already finished and liked well enough not to regret the time I spent reading it, but not much more; Her Darkest Nightmare, a serial killer mystery by Brenda Novak; Glimpse by Jonathan Maberry, for that October horror chill; Vicious by V.E. Schwab, which, to my surprise, is only okay, not outstanding; and A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall, the first of a trilogy I’m determined to finish before the year is out. I still have bookmarks in another three books that have been hanging around for some time now, and I hope to finish and review at least one of them — Uncommon Miracles by Julie C. Day — this week.

Tim: This week I read Brandon Sanderson‘s Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds. It was a fun collection, in typical slick Sanderson style, but I did end up feeling that the cool premise somewhat overshadowed the actual stories.