Arctic Light

I really enjoyed this one! I feel like the series has really picked up with the recent books, now that we're getting into the endgame and the modern-day timeline of the plot is starting to move again.

( Spoilers )

I finished it tonight! It occurred to me when it came out that this is (I think) the first new Vlad book since I marathoned the whole series back in circa 2018/19 or so.

( Spoilers in brief )

I slept and read a lot this weekend, and apparently I really needed it. I've now reread Jhereg and Issola, and I'm working on Dragon. (I love that the series can be read in any order. Very handy when you want to read certain books and not others.)

Reading Taltos and then Jhereg, in that order, was really interesting because I did actually find that Taltos is a more sympathetic initial introduction to Vlad than you get in Jhereg, nominally the first book of the series. Jhereg is excellent and does eventually get into the aspect that really sold me on Vlad and his world, which is how much of the book revolves around loyalty and friendship. (I remember having gotten the impression, from what little I had osmosed about the series, that Vlad was a lone-wolf hero type, and he is literally the opposite of that.) But you also spend the first few chapters watching him plan a murder, which admittedly could be a bit offputting if that's the first time you meet the character.

Meanwhile ... my edition of Issola might be missing some lines. It's the omnibus edition with Issola and Dragon, which I hadn't actually read before - I originally got the books from the library and then bought the omnibuses (omnibi?) because I wanted to own them. Can someone who has the non-omnibus version of Issola tell me if there is something missing here?

( Cut for image - also some spoiler talk about Issola )

So here's the post pulling together my Thoughts On Dragaerans from my emails with rachelmanija while reading the Taltos books. Spoilers up through the latest, Vallista. (In fact, spoilers mainly for that one.)

( Cut for all of that )

ETA: rachelmanija has additional thoughts building off my post; you can read them here. (Also very spoilery.)

... I'm pretty sure Vallista has my favorite Vlad-ism in the series so far: The poor bastard couldn't catch a break with a break bucket during a break storm.

First is a (not too spoilery) scene from Taltos, which I think is a lovely example of one of the reasons why I like these books so much.

( Mild spoilers - I tried to keep it vague )

The other thing is a particular exchange between two series regulars in Issola that made me laugh but is also a nice little summation of their friendship.

( Context is a little bit spoilery but not too much )

So I read this summary of the new Homestuck epilogue and ... wow, okay, that is definitely a thing that exists in the world. I'm glad I didn't attempt to read the actual epilogue itself with my very own eyeballs (fortunately I'd already been warned away) and also somewhat selfishly glad that Homestuck isn't really a thing I'm still into, because that is a seriously sucky thing for a canon to do to you. Poor Homestuck fans.

I guess it's not that much of a shock that it ended on a note of pure disaster, because the author has clearly always enjoyed trolling his readers, but back in the day, the comic also had a lot of touching and heartfelt and genuinely epic moments, and now it's ... that. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a series torpedoed so thoroughly by its own creator, as opposed to being brought down by stupid editorial decisions and the like.

On a happier note, I have also read the next two Taltos books over the last week or two. Mini book reports follow:

Athyra: ( Spoilers )

Orca: ( Spoilers - really major ones )

Speaking as someone who was an utterly voracious reader as a kid, it's pretty rare for me to run into a fairly well-known fantasy series from the 80s that a) I've never read, and b) still holds up really well today. The Taltos books by Steven Brust are that. I had kind of vaguely heard of them, think I might have tried to read one of the later ones about 20 years ago and bounced off it, but that was all I knew until I borrowed the first one, Jhereg, from rachelmanija when I visited her at the end of March to read on the plane. I devoured it. I wanted more. I just got done with book 4, Taltos, today. And there are so many more of them to read! They're great! I love everybody in this (weird, jhereg-and-assassin-filled) bar.

Based on what I knew about the series, I was expecting "snarky asshole loner hero"; what I was not expecting was a snarky asshole who claims to be a loner while absolutely tripping over himself at every turn to do everything he can for his friends, right up to dying for them (repeatedly). And his friends are just that loyal to him, too. The narrative voice is delightful -- it's very contemporary urban fantasy; the books themselves are a sort of weirdo SFF/high-fantasy/urban-fantasy mashup. The worldbuilding is strange and original and fun. And (not at all a given in a 1980s fantasy series) the books do great with women, both in the way that individual female characters are written, and the worldbuilding in which it is perfectly unremarkable to encounter female mooks, guards, businesspeople, farmers, ship captains, and the like.

Spoilery comments on individual books follow.

( Under the cut )

Anyway, I am head over heels for this series right now and will be running off to start reading PHOENIX shortly.