Sunday Status Update: October 24, 2021

Kat: Since you heard from me a couple of weeks ago, I’ve read four of the five novels in Rachel Aaron’s HEARTSTRIKERS series: Nice Dragons Finish Last, One Good Dragon Deserves Another, No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished, and A Dragon of a Different Color. Also Andre Norton’s MOONSINGER / MOON MAGIC series:  Moon of Three Rings, Exiles of the Stars, Flight in Yiktor, and Dare to Go A-Hunting.

Marion: My reading streak cooled this week because I had to review galleys, but I managed to read an old and fun urban fantasy/paranormal romance, Nightshifted, by Cassie Alexander. The book’s main character, Edie, is a nurse with a junkie brother and a habit of making bad life choices. Circumstances land Edie at the County hospital, on the semi-secret floor that treats zombies, vampires and were-creatures. Alexander is a nurse herself, which makes this book loads of fun. I’m halfway through an Ann Cleeves mystery, Dead Water, set on the Shetland Islands, and I just started Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol; Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. McGirr was not a fan.

Terry:  It was another difficult work week, so I got little reading done. I did make progress with The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, and am looking forward to diving into the follow-up, The Women of Troy immediately. I also read Downfall of the Gods by K.J. Parker, a novella that shows how Parker has nailed this form.

Tim: This week, I finally wrote comprehensive exams, which means that after 5-ish months of reading from a defined list of texts, I actually felt comfortable tentatively poking my nose out into speculative fiction again. What did I pick? Uh… John Carter, actually. It’s weird, but I often turn to that pulp era for my easygoing comfort food, and this time it was a sort of double-feature of The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars. I feel I’m an outlier in the BARSOOM crowd in that I’m not the biggest fan of these novels in particular (too much Carter pomposity, too many “your princess is in another castle” moments), but that also means that I haven’t read them more than once before. They still feel relatively fresh, and I very much enjoyed revisiting that world.