Sunday Status Update: April 21, 2019

Happy Easter from FanLit!

Bill: Into the grading silly season this week and next, but I did read Guy Gavriel Kay’s newest, A Brightness Long Ago. Review to come shortly but c’mon, it’s Kay—could it be anything but full of grace, craft, and beauty?  I also finished Human Errors by Nathan H. Lents, a quick (even slight at times) look at all the ways the human body could have been designed better. In audio,  I’ve neared the end, sadly,  of Mark Miodownik’s  excellent Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives. On video, my son and I reached the wonderful “Under Pressure” rendition of The Magicians, Season Three and wrapped up season two of The X-Files. I also finished Sabrina’s second season, which I mostly liked better than season one (especially the first half of the season), though the lack of subtlety in several of thematic arcs pained at times.  And of course, Game of Thrones which gave me some lump in the throat moments (reunions) but also had me wishing they could have had another 20 minutes or so to linger a bit longer in some scenes.

Jana: This week I finished Jessica Brody & Joanne Rendell’s Sky Without Stars (review forthcoming) and made progress in Ashok K. Banker‘s Upon a Burning Throne, read T. Kingfisher‘s “The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society,” and made some progress on books waiting to be reviewed. I’ve also been making my way through Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor’s Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes Vol. 1; it’s fun to read through scripts for the first series of the podcast and pick out the episodes that began some of my favorite story- or character-arcs. (And Jessica Hayworth’s delightful/unsettling illustrations for each episode are just perfect.) I’ll be moving on to Volume 2, The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, as soon as I’m done with Volume 1.

Marion: I finished the third book in Sebastien de Castell’s GREATCOATS series, Saint’s Blood. Now, while I wait for my local bookstore to get me the fourth book, I’m amusing myself by “fan-casting” the TV adaptation in my head. I finished an ARC of an engrossing eldritch horror novel, Memento Mori; the Fathomless Shadows ,by Brain Hauser. The book’s due out from Word Horde in May, and a review will follow. 

I’m also reading an interesting nonfiction book, Servants, by Lucy Lethbridge, about servants in Britain, most notably during the late 19^th/early 20^thcenturies. I’m reading it as research, in kind of a general way, but it’s another book that makes me grateful I was born when and where, and into the economic stratum, that I was. Those people worked hard!

Tadiana: This is a summary update for my last three weeks of reading (I’ve been a Status Update slacker again): I loved John Scalzi’s The Consuming Fire, the second book in his INTERDEPENDENCY space opera series. Now I’ve got a long wait for the third book! Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman, authors of the popular ILLUMINAE FILES series, are starting up a new YA SF series, and I read the first book, Aurora Rising, also due to be published May 7. It’s a good one for older teens. I also read Recursion by Blake Crouch, a stand-alone SF novel to be published in June, which should appeal to those who liked his Dark Matter SF techno-thriller. In the non-SFF area, I read the 1966 Cold War spy novel The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman, the first book in a successful series. It’s somewhat dated but a fun read. Currently I’m reading the recently-published Finder by Suzanne Palmer, best known for her recent Hugo win for the novelette “The Secret Life of Bots.”

Terry: I read Unseen Demons by Adam-Troy Castro, the third novella in his ANDREA CORT series. Good stuff! Now on to the novels:  Emissaries of the Dead and The Third Claw of God. I’ve already read the latter, but a reread is in order now that I’ve got the other stories under my belt. I finished The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, which was an okay mystery, not great. I read Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water by Vylar Kaftan, which really seemed to need more than a novella’s worth of words to tell the story properly. And finally, after seeing The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay on a bunch of ballots for various awards, I’ve started reading it. It probably tells you all you need to know that I was pretty nervous walking from my reading nook in the family room to my bedroom upstairs after only the first chapter.