What I'm Reading

I subscribed to Kindle Unlimited ($10/mo for "free" books, including some of the newer stuff). Authors opt in to the service, and I imagine it pays peanuts the way that Spotify pays its artists peanuts, but I've enjoyed what's there.

I got the chance to read the Wool series through the service, which was pretty great and is ranking near the top of SF/Fantasy, probably at least a little because of its participation in the service. I also read some trashy, Kindle-only witch books, some more decent witch books, Animal Farm, a few newer series, and the like.

Rysa Walker won the Amazon New Writer award last year (I think it was last year) for her Chronos File premiere. The second book just came out, also on Kindle Unlimited, and it was great fun. I wouldn't exactly call it great writing, but it's a serviceable story with an interesting enough concept. Like all time travel stories, one would have to go into it with a very strong suspension of disbelief. It's impossible to do time travel without concession. At least, I haven't yet found a time travel story that didn't immediately have a ton of plot holes. I think the most successful ones place severe limits on what time travel does and how it's accomplished. There aren't as many of those in this series.

Another series I've read is the Paper Magician series, which currently has 2 books out. It's very much a YA-style novel in that it's got a narrow, straight-forward conflict and a fairly heavy emphasis on a relationship. It's a slice-of-life bildungsroman. Anyway, this is another of those stories where I forgive underwhelming prose for an interesting concept. In this series, materials wizards are bonded with a particular material: paper, fire, metal, glass, etc. The protag has been forced to bond with paper because she is a polymath, there are few paper magicians (it's less sexy, after all), and she's willing to "do her duty." The concept of paper magic is built around Folding, which is essentially origami infused with purpose that animates the material. It's especially neat because of the subtlty that is built into the process. Paper quality and construction matters. So does mathematically precise folding, crisp edges, intent, etc.

I've gotten Slow Regard of Silent Things (a Kingkiller Chronicles interim novella) but haven't yet read it. I also got Neil Gaiman's The Sleeper and the Spindle (courtesy Grefter, since it won't be available in the US for a year or so) which is on my list. I've saved those two for 2 reasons:

1. They're not on Kindle
2. They deserve greater attention than I've been able to muster lately.

I predicted that the Kindle was going to be a device upon which I read mostly trashy, throw-away fiction I wouldn't have wasted money buying in physical form, and that's mainly been true. The books I really care about I buy in a physical medium, generally hardback. I often try to get them signed. It's shortly going to become a quirky affectation given the trends in media consumption, but I'm okay with that. There will always be a personal library in my life. I studied literature so old that 95% of it no longer exists and one of history's greatest tragedies was the loss of singular manuscripts in the burning of the Library of Alexandria. I think it's safe to say I have an obsession with physical literature. (Not that pop fiction or SF/F can really be classified as "literature," but hey, I own things like Michael Chabon as well!)

I think I'm going to find time and space to read poetry again. I have a fondness for clever writing and allusion and with that comes a responsibility to familiarize with contextual media. Once my brain kicks back into gear, I can dive into the classics, which I've come to accept as "those books writers read." They feed that context which is so important to the things writers write.

...

Okay, enough about all that.