234.The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty - I used to joke that this series is about groups of djinn who keep fighting each other and oppressing each other and no matter how many times they try to make peace, there's always someone there to ruin it. Oh yeah, they also hero worship the authors of each other's atrocities.
So some light reading to take one's mind off of current events.
This became even funnier/more horrific after October 7 when all the backburner oppression and murder was pushed to the forefront with Bluesky overnight turning into an orgy of victim blaming and bullshit about decolonization and resistance being applied to murder and rape. And mostly from hypocritical white people who lived on the bones of the murdered peoples whose genocide directly benefitted them (or Europeans who really need to just STFU about the Middle East forever, especially the British motherfuckers).
I digress.
But the real fantasy isn't so much the magic water spirits and Tiamat and slave genies and the like, but the fact that everyone does work things out. Like the main goal of our heroes is to either figure out how to make peace in Daevabad or invade Daevabad and set up a system that isn't a monarchy.
It's brilliant and beautiful and one caveat is that the villain is not quite as great as the first two books. In the first two books we had the king who pulled off some really nasty shit but at very least you understood that his motivation was to keep everything from collapsing into civil war. In this book we get Manizheh mustache twirling and monologuing and committing atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities until it become obvious that the only way to get rid of her is to kill her. It's a very satisfactory ending, but it's like if President Snow got replaced by Hitler (which is kind of what was implied at the end of the Hunger Games when Katniss shoots that woman instead).
Anyhow, it's brilliant and I feel like I shouldn't say too much more.
234.The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin - I don't think I've ever been quite as happy to not love a book as this one. I was thinking that there's a sequel book but never a trilogy as Nora went on to write the Broken Earth trilogy. Apparently the plan is or was to write more books in the same world but whenever she wants. And that low energy approach is obvious. I suspect that Jemisin was less enthusiastic about the ending of this book than she was in the beginning.
Basically, this is a book about dreams and Egyptian mythology with the main character being a Gatherer who comes to people, shares a dream with them and then takes their "dream blood" sending them off to the after world. From the perspective of these Gatherers, they are doing a great service and providing an ending to the people they are charged with "gathering". From the perspective of everyone else, they are freaky guys who walk into any house and kill people. So when the main character (and his apprentice) are charged with gathering a woman (supposedly corrupt) and finds out that it might be a politically motivated charge instead of a religiously motivated one, he's trying to figure things out. Also the Prince is really a bastard and there are "Reapers" or Gatherers who just kill without all the religous trapping.
Anyhow, it's a pretty solid story about politics and corruption with a fantasy element that is much more interesting than the average fantasy, but it's also pretty low stakes and I'm not chomping at the bit to read the next book. I might read it. I might enjoy it. But this is a complete story (of course, the Inheritance Trilogy was also three complete novels that ended. They just changed perspectives and made connected stories in the same world)
So some light reading to take one's mind off of current events.
This became even funnier/more horrific after October 7 when all the backburner oppression and murder was pushed to the forefront with Bluesky overnight turning into an orgy of victim blaming and bullshit about decolonization and resistance being applied to murder and rape. And mostly from hypocritical white people who lived on the bones of the murdered peoples whose genocide directly benefitted them (or Europeans who really need to just STFU about the Middle East forever, especially the British motherfuckers).
I digress.
But the real fantasy isn't so much the magic water spirits and Tiamat and slave genies and the like, but the fact that everyone does work things out. Like the main goal of our heroes is to either figure out how to make peace in Daevabad or invade Daevabad and set up a system that isn't a monarchy.
It's brilliant and beautiful and one caveat is that the villain is not quite as great as the first two books. In the first two books we had the king who pulled off some really nasty shit but at very least you understood that his motivation was to keep everything from collapsing into civil war. In this book we get Manizheh mustache twirling and monologuing and committing atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities until it become obvious that the only way to get rid of her is to kill her. It's a very satisfactory ending, but it's like if President Snow got replaced by Hitler (which is kind of what was implied at the end of the Hunger Games when Katniss shoots that woman instead).
Anyhow, it's brilliant and I feel like I shouldn't say too much more.
234.The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin - I don't think I've ever been quite as happy to not love a book as this one. I was thinking that there's a sequel book but never a trilogy as Nora went on to write the Broken Earth trilogy. Apparently the plan is or was to write more books in the same world but whenever she wants. And that low energy approach is obvious. I suspect that Jemisin was less enthusiastic about the ending of this book than she was in the beginning.
Basically, this is a book about dreams and Egyptian mythology with the main character being a Gatherer who comes to people, shares a dream with them and then takes their "dream blood" sending them off to the after world. From the perspective of these Gatherers, they are doing a great service and providing an ending to the people they are charged with "gathering". From the perspective of everyone else, they are freaky guys who walk into any house and kill people. So when the main character (and his apprentice) are charged with gathering a woman (supposedly corrupt) and finds out that it might be a politically motivated charge instead of a religiously motivated one, he's trying to figure things out. Also the Prince is really a bastard and there are "Reapers" or Gatherers who just kill without all the religous trapping.
Anyhow, it's a pretty solid story about politics and corruption with a fantasy element that is much more interesting than the average fantasy, but it's also pretty low stakes and I'm not chomping at the bit to read the next book. I might read it. I might enjoy it. But this is a complete story (of course, the Inheritance Trilogy was also three complete novels that ended. They just changed perspectives and made connected stories in the same world)