Sunday Status Update: June 24, 2018

Another week, more books!

Jana: Last week I mentioned that I was starting Claire Legrand’s Furyborn and Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Bloodprint, and this week I made the tough decision to DNF both of them. Furyborn because it was a pale imitation of far too many other YA fantasy novels out there, and The Bloodprint because I couldn’t connect with the characters. It’s possible that I might like The Bloodprint more if I tried it again sometime in the future, though. But sitting on my desk is Carrie Vaughn‘s The Wild Dead, the sequel to Bannerless, along with Theodora Goss‘ European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, the sequel to The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, and I think it’s easy to guess how much I’m looking forward to reading each of them in the coming week.

Marion: This week I finished two five-star books. You know me; that’s rare! I finished Stephen King’s The Outsider. I don’t know how he does it, but King hits is out the park again. And I was delighted with Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Warrior, which continues the adventures of the teens in the oha coven that began in Akata Witch. I highly recommend this series. I’m about halfway through Theodora Goss’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, and enjoying it immensely.

Nathan: I have started Dyrk Ashton’s PATERNUS trilogy (thanks Dyrk!); on the non-fiction side, I just finished John McKay’s Discovering the Mammoth, which is about how we learned that mammoths are not, in fact, gigantic moles which are instantly slain by exposure to sunlight (!)–and all the other things people used to believe about mammoths and mastodons as evidence of their existence gradually percolated to the surface.

Sandy: Moi? Having just completed three novels by pulp writer Norvell Page, I am now moving on to some more wonderfully pulpy fare. As I mention in my Fantasy Literature minibio, when I was in high school, I could not get enough of the adventures of Doc Savage and his crew, and must have devoured around five dozen of the Doc Savage books that Bantam released in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. But between this and that, I have not read a single Doc Savage adventure in all that intervening time … and it’s been a loooooong time since I was in high school! But now I am reading one of the Doc Savage tales that I never got around to reading back when, Quest of the Spider, which was initially released in the May 1933 issue of Doc Savage magazine, and am really loving getting refamiliarized with an old favorite. My review to come…

Tim: This week, I began listening to Red Winter by Annette Marie. I’m interested by the Japanese setting and the central premise, but the sweet, pretty, sheltered ingenue with the tragic backstory and the I-Will-Defend-You-to-My-Last-Breath love interest doesn’t feel particularly fresh. That said, I’m only in the opening section, so maybe things will pick up.