I'm listening to That Self-Same Metal right now and it is a lot of fun. Good magic system, diverse cast, Shakespeare, fae!

(MUCH more fun than Heavenly Tyrant, which was a terrible slog with a terrible MC that just barely redeemed itself in the final 50 page or so. Desperately hoping book 3 is the last in this series so I can be done with it.)

I'm re-reading the other books in the series because I just had forgotten too much, a third of the way into Witness for the Dead and hoping I can retain enough to not feel quite so lost when I get back to The Tomb of Dragons. I hadn't revisited Goblin Emperor in quite a while, that was worthwhile for its own sake, I think

Oh shoot I didn’t realize Tomb of Dragons was out yet. You’d think with all this AI and shit they’d be better about haunting me around this internet with books I want to read

And Olivia Waite's Murder By Memory comes out tomorrow, I feel like I've been waiting for that one for a long time, too. I suspect that I actually only heard about it fairly recently but it's a murder mystery in space by an author I like so I have been wanting it pretty intensely and I won't be able to drop everything and read it immediately is my point. All those books I was looking at March/April pub dates for lats fall and thinking "that's so long" are going to come all at once and overwhelm me.

Olivia is a friend of mine! I was just in online bookclub with her earlier this evening!

Nice!

Finished The Tomb of Dragons, really enjoyed it. I am glad I went back and read the earlier ones because there were details about the earlier murders that I had definitely forgotten and were probably not essential to know for this one but were good to have refreshed. Pleased with how the romance angle played out, personally. It’s such an interesting world, and the more time I get to spend with Thara the more I like him (and I liked him an awful lot when we first met him). Really eager for whatever comes next! I am hoping that heading to the court will mean more Maia, whether that’s in a Thara book or a Maia book with Thara in it

I haven't read those, but glad you enjoyed!

I've got two on audio that I am just "meh" on, so trying to see if anyone had any "No, no, keep going!" things to say. One is Hyperion. I liked the first "tale" well enough, though the protagonist took kind of a long time to figure shit out, but the second one was just ugh and with bonus bad sex scenes... I just skipped to the next chapter but then fell asleep and woke up in the middle of another chapter. Anyone have any thoughts?

Then I'm listening to Red Rising, and I'm just not getting into it. These plucky, young oppressed folk are not interesting yet. I feel like a curmudgeon. Anyone read the series?

I would never have picked up the Expanse series again had it not been for you all encouraging that one, so I want to check on these, too! I'm still missing the Expanse universe.

Right now I'm reading The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and I'm enjoying it so far, but I'm only forty or so pages in. I had to take a break from The Name of the Wind. For all its accolades, I'm finding it a little draggy. Maybe I just don't have patience to let a story unfold anymore. (No, that's not true. I'm just hitting a weird run with these right now.)

Becky Chambers is pretty great and that book might be my favorite of hers. There’s a lot to like about it!

I read Hyperion something like 30 years ago, it’s pretty hazy. I do remember liking it at the time but I think I was ultimately frustrated by how the whole series got resolved (or maybe didn’t get resolved? Honestly do not remember). I read a bunch of Simmons off the back of it and then figured I didn’t need to read him anymore and haven’t. What I retained from that is that I liked the short story Cold Carrion but he ruined it when he turned it into a novel and I’ve been low-key mad at him ever since. And his sex scenes are pretty bad. Not, like, award-winning get quoted all over the internet bad, but not good.

Red Rising I kept getting samples for at the end of something else (Murderbot? Something series because it was just something I came to expect in that context) and they didn’t make me want to pick up the actual thing. I did kind of feel like it was the sort of thing I ought to like but I just didn’t.

That's how I'm feeling about Red Rising -- I feel like I should like this, but I don't. So far it's just making me think of the "jolly steerage class partying it up" scene from Titanic, and it's just making me grind my teeth.

Good intel in Hyperion, thanks. Yeah, I maybe should have read it decades ago, but I didn't, and now I'm just... well, a curmudgeon.

I may give another chapter a shot with Hyperion, but I think I'm going to ditch Red Rising unless someone else here chimes in with more thoughts.