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Reading roundup, fiction edition
Writing up a few books I've read over the last few months and never wrote about. (There will be a separate post for the nonfiction. Probably. Eventually.)
Out Law by Jim Butcher - This is a Dresden Files novella set during or perhaps shortly after Twelve Months that came out in May. It took me a while to read it because the summary looked like it featured Marcone heavily and I ... really do not like Marcone AT ALL. (I know this is a very minority opinion among Dresden Files readers.) However, it turns out that he appears for a couple pages in the beginning to set up the plot, and is otherwise Sir Not Appearing In This Book. And I really enjoyed it!
Spoilers/reactions: Harry gets tasked with helping one of Marcone's thugs go straight, for reasons that turn out to be supernatural in nature. From various references, this guy (Gregory Tripp) apparently was in a previous book, I GUESS - maybe Twelve Months? - but I have absolutely no recollection of that. I was very lukewarm on him at first, but ended up really liking him and his dynamic with Harry by the end. He's very different from most of the people Harry interacts with, and that made an interesting and fun dynamic. Also: Bear!! I ADORE Bear, she's rapidly become one of my favorite Dresden side characters over the space of just one book, and I'm delighted that it looks like she's sticking around for a while, and also delighted to have quite a lot of her in this book. JIM BUTCHER PLEASE WRITE A BEAR SPINOFF BOOK, I'M BEGGING YOU.
I continue to have absolutely ZERO feelings about Fitz, Harry's new apprentice. I guess he was a tiny bit more interesting in this than in Twelve Months, but it's from like 0 to 0.5 on a 10 scale, alas.
I really loved the conversation that Harry and Tripp have about hard things. Basically Harry says that life is all made up of hard things, but you get to pick which ones. He uses the example of exercising - you can either do the hard thing (exercise) or deal with the hard thing later (the consequences of not exercising) but either way there's still a hard thing to deal with; you just get to choose which one. That's a neat way to look at it, and very true.
I also liked that this book was more about dealing with a street-level threat, but still one that was challenging enough that it was hard for Harry, at his present power levels, to deal with. And most of the people in the book other than Bear were either ordinary humans (Tripp, Max) or extremely low-powered (Fitz). Butcher is at a point in the series where it could easily run into the Dragonball Z problem where the threats and the main characters are so powered up that ordinary people are basically irrelevant, and this book avoided that neatly, I felt!
Generally I enjoyed it very much. I felt like Dresden Files had a pretty steep mid-series slump (at least for my personal enjoyment) but it feels like it's getting its feet under it again.
Emmett Hardy series by Chris Kelsey (books 1-6) - This is a noir-flavored series of mystery/crime/police procedurals set in small-town Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s that I inhaled over the course of the spring.
More about that: I enjoyed the early books better than the later ones; the sense of historical ambiance is really well done, including the past being a very different place than the present, and the more modern it got and the more modern it felt, the less into it I was. (I also felt like the mystery plotting was shakier in the last couple of books than the early ones; I had a few "wait, what?" moments.)
But in general, it's a solid mystery series with vivid characters, a great sense of place and time, and a wonderful sense of deadpan absurdity as well. These books can be absolutely pitch black - they are NOT light reads, and the crimes involve things like a lynching, a dead child, and the racially motivated murder of a prostitute. The police chief and protagonist is an alcoholic whose dog wanders the town unsupervised. Honestly one of the reasons why I didn't like the later books as much as the early ones is because of how generally unselfaware the characters are in the early books about how completely messed up their reality is; they're just sort of floating through it, from the racially segregated town to weird small-town crimes involving stolen livestock and oil lease theft to the wildly corrupt county-level government, and I think I enjoyed that more than the more modern outlook on all of this that the 1970s-era version of the characters have. But I also really liked the characters and it was interesting to see them develop over 15 years or so of in-universe time.
I don't know if I would continue reading the series if there are more, since I was less enthused with the later books, but it was an excellent series to sink into for a while.
The Inheritance by Ilona Andrews - This is "Ilona Andrews does portal fantasy." The first 2/3 or so of the book was GREAT. And then the ending was staggeringly disappointing. So all in all, I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it.
Spoilers proceed: The main character, Ada, is a 40-something mom who is part of a team that explores gateways to other realities. Earth is in the middle of an apocalyptic alternate dimension incursion, in which gates are opening randomly worldwide and spilling nearly unkillable monsters into our reality. They also caused ordinary people like Ada to develop powers called Talents. Teams like Ada's consist of military personnel and Talented civilians, who enter the breaches and try to shut them down while also attempting to retrieve valuable materials, technology, and ores from inside.
(So basically, it's Stargate, but with monsters and superpowers.)
Ada's entire team is slaughtered and her gate is sealed, trapping her inside an alien labyrinth of caves and monsters; the only other survivor is a K9 dog from the team. Ada must survive the labyrinth and search for a way to finish shutting down the gate before it reopens and sets a bunch of monsters free in the city where her kids live. In the process, she acquires an alien artifact that starts powering her (and her dog) up in various weird and unpredictable ways.
This was apparently written as a serial on the Andrews' blog, and like I said, the first 2/3 or so is wonderful - the alien worldbuilding is fascinating and creative, Ada's fight for survival is incredibly tense, and I also enjoyed the occasional cuts back to what is happening back on Earth as another team (led by a character who has very obvious Potential Love Interest written all over him) prepare to go in and try to find survivors from the other team.
And then it just ... stops?? Ada somewhat anticlimactically finds and shuts down the gate, but manages to escape back to her reality before it collapses; the team who was preparing to go in never has the chance, and it all wraps up in a chapter or two of debriefing that never really deals with the fact that she's clearly powered up way beyond normal humans *and* found out a bunch of meta-lore about how the gates work that is never going to be expanded upon.
It all feels very much like the Andrews were gearing up for a series, or a long serial, and then suddenly decided to wrap it up for some reason - couldn't get a publisher interested? Decided they didn't want to commit to another long series? It ends in a place where it definitely could have a sequel, but I'm not sure if I want one because everything that I was interested in got suddenly and anticlimactically wrapped up in the first book.
(Ilona Andrews are very open about being a husband-and-wife writing team, hence the plural.)
Out Law by Jim Butcher - This is a Dresden Files novella set during or perhaps shortly after Twelve Months that came out in May. It took me a while to read it because the summary looked like it featured Marcone heavily and I ... really do not like Marcone AT ALL. (I know this is a very minority opinion among Dresden Files readers.) However, it turns out that he appears for a couple pages in the beginning to set up the plot, and is otherwise Sir Not Appearing In This Book. And I really enjoyed it!
Spoilers/reactions: Harry gets tasked with helping one of Marcone's thugs go straight, for reasons that turn out to be supernatural in nature. From various references, this guy (Gregory Tripp) apparently was in a previous book, I GUESS - maybe Twelve Months? - but I have absolutely no recollection of that. I was very lukewarm on him at first, but ended up really liking him and his dynamic with Harry by the end. He's very different from most of the people Harry interacts with, and that made an interesting and fun dynamic. Also: Bear!! I ADORE Bear, she's rapidly become one of my favorite Dresden side characters over the space of just one book, and I'm delighted that it looks like she's sticking around for a while, and also delighted to have quite a lot of her in this book. JIM BUTCHER PLEASE WRITE A BEAR SPINOFF BOOK, I'M BEGGING YOU.
I continue to have absolutely ZERO feelings about Fitz, Harry's new apprentice. I guess he was a tiny bit more interesting in this than in Twelve Months, but it's from like 0 to 0.5 on a 10 scale, alas.
I really loved the conversation that Harry and Tripp have about hard things. Basically Harry says that life is all made up of hard things, but you get to pick which ones. He uses the example of exercising - you can either do the hard thing (exercise) or deal with the hard thing later (the consequences of not exercising) but either way there's still a hard thing to deal with; you just get to choose which one. That's a neat way to look at it, and very true.
I also liked that this book was more about dealing with a street-level threat, but still one that was challenging enough that it was hard for Harry, at his present power levels, to deal with. And most of the people in the book other than Bear were either ordinary humans (Tripp, Max) or extremely low-powered (Fitz). Butcher is at a point in the series where it could easily run into the Dragonball Z problem where the threats and the main characters are so powered up that ordinary people are basically irrelevant, and this book avoided that neatly, I felt!
Generally I enjoyed it very much. I felt like Dresden Files had a pretty steep mid-series slump (at least for my personal enjoyment) but it feels like it's getting its feet under it again.
Emmett Hardy series by Chris Kelsey (books 1-6) - This is a noir-flavored series of mystery/crime/police procedurals set in small-town Oklahoma in the 1960s and 1970s that I inhaled over the course of the spring.
More about that: I enjoyed the early books better than the later ones; the sense of historical ambiance is really well done, including the past being a very different place than the present, and the more modern it got and the more modern it felt, the less into it I was. (I also felt like the mystery plotting was shakier in the last couple of books than the early ones; I had a few "wait, what?" moments.)
But in general, it's a solid mystery series with vivid characters, a great sense of place and time, and a wonderful sense of deadpan absurdity as well. These books can be absolutely pitch black - they are NOT light reads, and the crimes involve things like a lynching, a dead child, and the racially motivated murder of a prostitute. The police chief and protagonist is an alcoholic whose dog wanders the town unsupervised. Honestly one of the reasons why I didn't like the later books as much as the early ones is because of how generally unselfaware the characters are in the early books about how completely messed up their reality is; they're just sort of floating through it, from the racially segregated town to weird small-town crimes involving stolen livestock and oil lease theft to the wildly corrupt county-level government, and I think I enjoyed that more than the more modern outlook on all of this that the 1970s-era version of the characters have. But I also really liked the characters and it was interesting to see them develop over 15 years or so of in-universe time.
I don't know if I would continue reading the series if there are more, since I was less enthused with the later books, but it was an excellent series to sink into for a while.
The Inheritance by Ilona Andrews - This is "Ilona Andrews does portal fantasy." The first 2/3 or so of the book was GREAT. And then the ending was staggeringly disappointing. So all in all, I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it.
Spoilers proceed: The main character, Ada, is a 40-something mom who is part of a team that explores gateways to other realities. Earth is in the middle of an apocalyptic alternate dimension incursion, in which gates are opening randomly worldwide and spilling nearly unkillable monsters into our reality. They also caused ordinary people like Ada to develop powers called Talents. Teams like Ada's consist of military personnel and Talented civilians, who enter the breaches and try to shut them down while also attempting to retrieve valuable materials, technology, and ores from inside.
(So basically, it's Stargate, but with monsters and superpowers.)
Ada's entire team is slaughtered and her gate is sealed, trapping her inside an alien labyrinth of caves and monsters; the only other survivor is a K9 dog from the team. Ada must survive the labyrinth and search for a way to finish shutting down the gate before it reopens and sets a bunch of monsters free in the city where her kids live. In the process, she acquires an alien artifact that starts powering her (and her dog) up in various weird and unpredictable ways.
This was apparently written as a serial on the Andrews' blog, and like I said, the first 2/3 or so is wonderful - the alien worldbuilding is fascinating and creative, Ada's fight for survival is incredibly tense, and I also enjoyed the occasional cuts back to what is happening back on Earth as another team (led by a character who has very obvious Potential Love Interest written all over him) prepare to go in and try to find survivors from the other team.
And then it just ... stops?? Ada somewhat anticlimactically finds and shuts down the gate, but manages to escape back to her reality before it collapses; the team who was preparing to go in never has the chance, and it all wraps up in a chapter or two of debriefing that never really deals with the fact that she's clearly powered up way beyond normal humans *and* found out a bunch of meta-lore about how the gates work that is never going to be expanded upon.
It all feels very much like the Andrews were gearing up for a series, or a long serial, and then suddenly decided to wrap it up for some reason - couldn't get a publisher interested? Decided they didn't want to commit to another long series? It ends in a place where it definitely could have a sequel, but I'm not sure if I want one because everything that I was interested in got suddenly and anticlimactically wrapped up in the first book.
(Ilona Andrews are very open about being a husband-and-wife writing team, hence the plural.)
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also my opinion, but that's not to surprising because I never like Mafia guys
(didn't read the rest to avoid spoilers)
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That's cool.
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