David R. MacIver's Blog

Recent Fiction Reading

This post was originally published at notebook.drmaciver.com.

My more recent non-fiction reading has been eating in to my fiction reading a bit, but here are some things I’ve been reading recently.

Books that I thought were decent but not great

• I read Rachel Aaron’s “Minimum Wage Magic” and this prompted me to finally get over the fact that the titles of her Heartstriker novels are incredibly terrible and give those a try. They’re actually pretty good. Rachel, if you’re reading this (why would you be reading this?) just FYI I have literally been resisting Amazon’s recommendations of your novels for over two years because of how bad those titles are.
• Finders (Firstborn, Lastborn) by Melissa Scott. I struggle to place it in a genre. It reads like fantasy in some ways (I think because of the bizarre coloured tech system and the borderline magical nature of the ancient tech), but is actually far future post-crash sci-fi. Enjoyable enough but unremarkable.
• The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams. Reasonable enough sci-fi. Did that annoying thing of having a very high world building to plot ratio, which resulted in an interesting premise that I didn’t really feel got used much.
• Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. Interesting book. Well enough constructed. Didn’t really like it very much though, partly because the characters in it were mostly unlikeable or underdeveloped, which meant the big reveal lacked the emotional impact that it was maybe meant to have (as well as being quite obvious by the time we got there, to the point where the central mystery of the book was resolved by one of the characters saying “oh, well, it’s obvious isn’t it? Why are you still worrying about that?)
• Siphon (A Touch of Power) by Jay Boyce. OK this is the second LitRPG novel that I think qualifies as decent. It’s no Worth the Candle, but I had fun reading it.
• The Immortals Quartet by Tamora Pierce. This was fine. I enjoyed the first three or so books but by the fourth book I was bored and didn’t finish it.

Books I thought were pretty good

• I continue to enjoy the Starship’s Mage books by Glynn Stewart.
• I was enjoying “Confessions of the Fox” by Jordy Rosenberg, but the format (it’s very very footnote heavy) works too badly on Kindle, so I stopped reading it and preordered the paperback. Once I’ve read more of it I may upgrade this to great.
• Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is a Robert Jackson Bennett novel and as such is pretty good in the standard Robert Jackson Bennett novel ways.
• The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells. These are enjoyable partly for their characters and partly for their incredibly weird-ass biology. The plots are decent enough too. I am hoping that Martha Wells is one of those authors who has a tipping point in their career after which everything is good (Jo Walton) rather than one of those authors who accidentally succeed with a single character and endlessly fail to recreate that (Robin Hobb) because Murderbot is amazing and everything else by her previously to that is merely OK to good.
• The System by Skyler Grant. I don’t really know where to put these books in the lists because they are utterly terrible and I love them, so they get to go in the compromise list.
• Magic Triumphs by Ilona Andrews was a satisfying resolution to the Kate Daniels series.

Books I thought were great

• Ruthanna Emrys wrote another Innsmouth Legacy book (“Deep Roots”) and this makes me happy.
• Swordheart by T. Kingfisher is a book by T. Kingfisher and thus automatically great, a return to her Clocktaur universe and thus automatically great, and also really enjoyable in its own right. I found some of the sexual politics in this book a little off but I accept that that’s partly because it was coming from a character who is basically Conan and is probably not the author’s literal views on the subject.