Hi!
If you, like me, are always happy to get your mitts on a bunch of Le Guin novels without wrecking your budget, here you go.
The complete Earthsea and Annals of the Western Shore series are there. With the exceptions of The Dispossessed and The Telling, the Hainish Cycle is not included, so you'll have to track down The Left Hand of Darkness and the rest elsewhere.
I'm listening to The Great Transition which is fantastic - incredibly well written and narrated -- but deeply deeply unsettling in the way good near-future sci-fi books tend to be. Highly recommended for people who wanted New York 2140 to be good. The characters here are SO fully realized and I just want to hug them both so hard.
The climate-related world building is so good I can't tell yet if I'm hoping this book comes true or praying it won't (it's probably both).
Huh. I got hung up on the Nov/Dec 2023 issue of F&SF and thought I was 6 issues behind but apparently it’s only 2. Confusing, but less daunting for catching up
It’s that time of year literistas—my annual first lines challenge: [link]
No excuses this year. For realz.
People have done a great job so far, but there are still a few books left to guess and I know some of you have surely read at least one of them.
Hints are up: [link]
Good luck!
Heh, I like the narrator's work on the Expanse series a lot (he does great accents, and he switches character voice well but subtly) -- however, he never looked up how to say EVA suit, because he says "Eva" like the name, instead of pronouncing each letter. There are a LOT of EVA suit references in Cibola Burn. It matters not one little bit, but it's both sort of cute and grating at the same time.
Shallow observation: I'm watching the series, too, and I'm in the "find Mae" story now. Pax is much yummier on my screen than he was in my mind -- for some reason, I had him older and sort of ragged.
I read the books, and watched the series. Now I think I am going to listen to it on my trip north next year.
This has gone around BlueSky in a specific circle, but if you've read Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books and would like to enable her to finish the last two books, she now has a Patreon. Details here:
[link]
If you missed the John Scalzi Humble Bundle last time 'round, it's being offered again for the next three days.
There are still two days to pick up the Le Guin bundle, too.
I'm so frustrated by Scalzi. He seems an enormously decent human being, and his fiction just leaves me cold.
As in, I just bought and read Starter Villain, and the premise deserved to be either a short story or a much denser novel. It was meh.
In other news, I read The Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins for book club, and it was great, although felt rather unfinished (she had a stroke 3/4 of the way through writing it and her daughter worked with her on the ending but it's a big shaky).
Currently loaded on the kindle is Countess by Suzan Palumbo. No, I have no idea why I borrowed it from the library. Presumably I saw a rec for it, put it on hold, and now it has shown up on my Kindle. Hope it's good!