1. I started off with When It’s a Jar by Tom Holt, the second in a series I’ve been reading out of order without any particular damage to my appreciation of it. A significant part of the plot hinges on the joke in the title, which just goes to show you that Tom Holt can write a book about anything. If you read a Holt novel and enjoy the zany, you will like this one, although it featured fewer goblins that I would have wanted. I did find myself skimming through some of the flabby middle, but it ended fine, with some alternates in the multiverse created and destroyed. Like you do.
2. And then The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu happened. I abandoned this one at just over 50% because I was pretty fed up with the almost total absence of women. While I liked a lot about the ideas–seven kingdoms unified under one that is slowly losing control over various rebellions and factions–and I love an Asian-inspired fantasy, I could not get over how boring a rebellion it was. Aside from some of the glaring problems (some hero is eight feet tall with two pupils per eye, for no discernible reason) and the sogginess of the genre “silkpunk” (silk wasn’t even important), I kept thinking how poorly it compared to Lian Hearn or Guy Gavriel Kay. So I stopped.
3. While I was waffling over the Liu, A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin came in at the library so I downloaded it to my Kindle and have made it about a fifth of the way through. Having been warned by superfan friends that the fourth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series is the weakest, I lowered my expectations. Which was just as well, because the prophecy has held true so far. A whole chapter of Jaime just standing vigil, thinking? Woot. Whatever, I’ll finish reading it because I am determined to, but if it’s a perspective character I don’t love, I’m very willing to skim. This is why I decided to read these in ebook even though I have mass market copies stashed away somewhere: the Kindle is much lighter. And this is why I break up the books by reading one a month: they are very long.
