Just finished The Empire of Gold by S. A. Chakraborty, the final book in The Daevabad Trilogy. I loved the series, a couple more series like this, and I would’ve to add Chakraborty to my favourite authors list.

Haven’t started anything yet, may go with next book in Elly Griffiths’ Dr. Ruth Galloway mystery. They are quick and easy to read, and work as good palette cleanser.

So, what have you been reading or listening lately?

  • GreyShuck
    6•8 months ago
    • Finished Sandra Newman’s Julia - retelling Orwell’s 1984 from this character’s perspective, and I ended up re-reading the Orwell original in parallel with it. Julia adds a great deal of texture and additional layers to the original, whilst staying extremely faithful to it at least for the first half. In the third quarter, Newman takes the plot in some new directions that I can imagine some purists may object to insofar as they could be seen as diluting Orwell’s message. However, this is still entirely consistent and, once this extention has taken place Newman concludes her tale in a way that feels absolutely true to Orwell’s style. Overall, very impressive.
    • Currently reading T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone. I have read a couple of this author’s other books and found them engaging and enjoyable, if rather too similar to each other, so had some idea what to expect here. In fact this is surprisingly different to either of the others. Still fairly engaging, but the deliberate ‘fairy tale’ setting of this one seems a bit inconsistently applied and is leaving me rather distant from the world of the book. I appreciate that this is not the aim of the tale, but more texture and world building would keep me more involved. At the two-thirds point things are dragging a bit. However, I am enjoying it in general and it makes its points clearly enough.
    • @dresdenOPMEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      First, I have been watching Sienfield, and whenever I see Newman mentioned, my brain goes “Hello, Newman” in Jerry Sienfield’s voice. I think it has “ruined” the name Newman for me. 😀

      Julia sounds interesting, I’ll probably just re-read 1984 before reading it though, reading in Parallel rarely works for me.