#so i'm glad the 20 books between then and now have almost all been fucking great it's made this so enjoyable

[sharkneto]

For the ask game: Top 5 books?

I'm cleaning out my ask box! Slowly but surely! Let me respond to this from (checks notes) definitely not nine months ago!

It's also good I waited on answer this because I've read a bunch of books in the past nine months. So, top five books I've read this year, in no particular order:

Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir. Love this world, adore the characters, great little mystery going on. The usual tagline of "necromancer lesbians in space" does not do this series justice. It is way more nuanced than that, there is so much queer shit going on and none of it is like And Here Is Our Lesbian Character! This Character Is Trans! People are just people and sometimes (oftentimes) those people are queer. Also, the love and grief of this series is So Good. I listed Gideon here because it's my favorite of the series, but Harrow the Ninth has one of the best reveals in a book I've read in a long time and it makes me ache.

Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells. I'm counting the whole series as one long book. Loved, loved, loved reading these. Murderbot is the best, I love its friendship with ART and the humans, my favorite thing about it is how clearly its a person but it is absolutely not a human and that should never be forgotten.

The Goblin Emperor - Katherin Addison. My friend recommended this book to me because one of my favorite things in fiction is Just A Normal Guy up against not-normal circumstances, and this book is about A Really Normal Guy (goblin) suddenly thrust into being king thanks to all the successors ahead of him dying in a crash. It's a relatively simple premise but I love it for that. It doesn't try to be more than it is, I loved the main character and how he approached the problems of Suddenly Being King. I know there are more books in the series but I don't think they follow the King as the main character anymore and I loved him so much, I haven't had the heart to go try them yet.

Way of Kings - Brandon Sanderson. I would be remiss to not include one of the Stormlight Archive books, as I'm working my way through them. Do I complain a lot about how Brando Sando could use an editor while I'm reading these books because they're too damn long? Yes. Do I still absolutely enjoy them? Yes. Brando is really good at taking 800 pages to set up all his details so that you can have the most satisfying 200 pages of your life as every single fucking piece slams into place, each conclusion you've been waiting for for the past 400 pages hitting and it's So Good. I was miffed about the very end of Words of Radiance, but Way of Kings was a triumph the whole time. I love Kaladin - who doesn't? - and the world building and positioning to get everyone primed for where they need to be in the other character POVs is masterful.

Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo. I fucking love heists, and Six of Crows has a fucking great heist. Kaz is also exactly my kind of character, so it's no shocker I loved this book. I didn't read any of the Shadow and Bone books, I have no plans to, but I did watch the TV series first so I knew the basics of the world and Grisha and whatnot. Idk how much of a learning curve there would be if I hadn't done that first, but I doubt it would be much worse than the usual learning curve of a new fantasy series - but it was nice to be able to just jump in and hit the ground running. I cannot emphasize enough how satisfying a heist this was to read, though, excellent and interesting characters aside.

I feel like honorable mention time to some of the nonfic books I read?

Pageboy - Elliot Page. Was very good, with the incredible added bonus of that I got to see one of his author talks in person. He was an absolute delight to listen to. The book was a very interesting and enjoyable read, but I think he could have made his time jumps back and forth more purposeful. It felt very much like he was trying to emulate:

Man Alive - Thomas Page Mcbee. I read this one and Amateur, and I liked Man Alive better, probably just because it reflected me a bit more in where I'm at in my transition. His jumping between time points worked really well as he described figuring himself out around different moments in his life. Both really great explorations of gender and just what does it mean to be a man.

Into Thin Air - John Krakauer. My twin and I went on a hard binge of mountaineering disasters, and you can't do that without including Into Thin Air. A really tragic and gripping true story about the climbing disaster on Everest in 1996. An as honest as possible look into what happened and what went wrong that cost eight people their lives, and the even wilder details on how some of them survived.

It's been really fun to get into books again, this year. I was one of those kids who constantly had his nose in a book growing up and fell out of that when college hit. I refound audiobooks this year which have been a godsend to listen to at work, and physical books have snuck their way in, too, for more books happening. It's fun to be thinking about plots and new characters again and having opinions on how x or y played out (I still think about my predicted ending to Gideon, I think that would have been fucking incredible, not that the actual ending wasn't fantastic - I had the big beats predicted correctly at least lol).

My current book I just started is The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I'm already enjoying immensely and all my friends who recced it to me were like "what do you mean you haven't read that yet? you'd love it".

Anyone got any good book recs, hmu.

#i think i'm up to like 22 books read this year #i've really liked almost all of them #the last couple i read - nona the ninth and words of radiance - i overall really liked but they had some points that didn't hit for me #which was a bummer but allowed #i think my year of reading started with horse - which is another book that didn't hit for me for various reasons #so i'm glad the 20 books between then and now have almost all been fucking great it's made this so enjoyable #book club #that's what i'm preemptively calling this becaues i'm hoping i will have more chances to ramble about books later #ask response #long post