#cascade failure

hello there! i can do you one better! here's the character art from the pre-order art card :)

✨Impromptu Book Club!✨

I've been reading quite a bit lately and feeling really good about it! I go through phases of reading lots and then nothing at all, and it's always a delight to get back into the swing of things again after a little time off 😍

Currently Reading:

Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie (audiobook performed by Adjoa Andoh). A collection of short stories, many of them stand-alones but some set in the same universe as Leckie's military sci fi Imperial Radch series and a few others in the world of her fantasy novel The Raven Tower. Ann Leckie is one of my auto-read authors - actually auto-listen, since I almost exclusively "read" her on audiobook. Adjoa Andoh is a phenomenal performer, though I find some of her accent choices a little... difficult in this collection 😅 The writing itself is stunning though, and it's lighting up my brain in all those good and tasty ways that good books should.

At the same time, I'm relistening to Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, also performed by Adjoa Andoh. I've lost count of how many times I've listened to this one honestly, and it's still as good as ever.

Technically I'm also still reading The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, but mostly just because I haven't officially DNF'd it yet. This is the second book in Rothfuss's incomplete triology, and the first one was really quite terrible. But I found it sort of compelling, in a schlocky, shitty sort of way. The second one is, somehow, much worse. I mean like, "stopping every third page to laugh out loud at how bad it is" bad. I thought I knew what I was getting into, but possibly this is actually too terrible for me to finish.

Recently Finished:

The Proposal by Bae Myung-Hoon (translated by Stella Kim) - A funny, literary sci-fi novella that is fundamentally about love, set against the backdrop of looming interstellar war. I wasn't really expecting to enjoy this as much as I did, but I ended up really loving it! It was far funnier than I expected, and I read it in two massive sittings while we were up at Matt's parent's house in Donegal. Gorgeous cover art, too.

Ocean's Godori by Elaine U. Cho - I really enjoyed this right up until I really, really didn't. It was a little slow to get started, but overall I was really digging the rooty-tooty spaceship shooty vibes. All the characters were cartoonishly good-looking and it basically felt like a glossy comic in novel form. And then about 75% of the way through, Cho dumps a ton of exposition that resolves nothing, and ends the book so abruptly I truly believed for a second when I turned the page that there was a chapter titled Acknowledgements. I knew it was the first of a duology, but apparently she actually wrote the story as a single book and then just chopped it in half when publishers weren't biting. Which is not how stories work!!!!! Infuriating, disappointing, still mad.

The Men by Sandra Newman - I absolutely loved this, from beginning to end. It follows a handful of different women making their way in the world after everyone with an XY chromosone disappears. I've read The Heavens by Newman and found this explored some of the same ideas at the end, which was really interesting to compare. I loved the actual prose, she writes brilliantly, and I found it to be a really chewy exploration of the ways that public and structural power dynamics influence and interact with private and intimate relationships.

Binned Off:

Cascade Failure by L.M. Sagas (audiobook performed by Torian Brackett) - I was going to explain the genre of this but immediately got stuck because honestly, it seems kind of confused about what it is and what it wants to be. It's almost cyberpunk but also wants to be cosy found family SF, which perhaps could work in the hands of a more experienced author but really wasn't a combination that was working for me here. I found it retrod some very, very old ground and reminded me of a billion other Firefly knock-offs I've seen over the years.

“It’s okay,” Saint told him, softer than he thought he knew how to be. He was a hard-nosed bastard with a thick skin and a thicker head, but Jal cried like he couldn’t breathe, like he was drowning under all that grief and fear and pain... - THAT SCENE from CASCADE FAILURE