It’s the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!
What’s the best book you read in August 2024 and why did you love it?
It doesn’t have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. We just want to share some great reading material.
Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.
And don’t forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our 5-Star SFF page.
One commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose one of these prizes:
- a FanLit T-shirt (we have sizes M, L, XL)
- a $5 Amazon gift card (this is the only option for non-USA addresses).
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Glass Houses by Madeline Ashby.
This is a really angry book – angry like She-Hulk is angry. And I can’t stop thinking about it.
It’s also a really, really good book. There is horror there, ranging from the personal to well statistical.
Go get this book. Read it.
An Inheritance of Magic by Benedict Jacka. Best and most fun book I’ve read in a lot time. Great characters, pacing and plot. Loved every minute!
Best read for August was Karel Capek’s War With the Newts, another one of his acerbic fables about the human race being undone by its greed and exploitation of supposedly lesser beings. In this case, it’s an aquatic race of humanoid giant salamanders that turns the tables on the human oppressors who treat them as expendable laborers, in a tale with obvious applications to colonialism and class warfare.
Best new book: Play of Shadows by Sebastien Sebastien de Castell
Honorary mention for The Naming Song by Jebediah Berry for a great premise and start even if it didn’t fully keep its promise
Best read: Lord of the Rings, because it had been too long since the last one
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. A science fiction classic from the mid-1970s that I wish I had read a long, long time ago.
The Dispossessed is a great read indeed!
For me, it’s Avatar: The Last Airbender “Imbalance, Part One”, in which the Gaang return to Toph’s father Lao Beifong’s new business Earthern Fire Industries and discover a simmer conflict brewing between benders and non-benders in the expanding town of Cranefish.
The next installment in Goldeen Ogawa’s “Professor Odd” series is the latest one released so far, #12 “Cerberus Retired”, serving as the ‘Season 2 finale’. It’s the classic setting of a train in space (e.g. “Mummy on the Orient Express”), but Professor Odd and her companions are hijacked by marauders who harbor a dark secret.
Continuing with my political readings, I enjoyed George Stephanopolous’s The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, which is full of surprising facts about each of the twelve presidents covered. Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump, although he rarely visited the room, comes off the worst.
Bravo ,if you live in the USA, you win a Fan Lit T-shirt (please specify 1st and 2nd preferred sizes) OR a $5 Amazon gift card. If your address is outside of the USA, you will get a $5 Amazon gift card.