I have issues with multiple POVs, compounded by very different settings, but Abraham is such a good writer that he made it work. It’s all one world, different parts of it, and Abraham brings things together well and powerfully. Very much worth trying again IMO.
Strong agree. Fantastic author.
Started Broken Earth. This thing sure comes out swinging, don’t it?
Prepare buffer zones to defend your sensitive feelings; do not read all three books without pausing; take some time each book to break away and breathe.
It really is that intense.
I hope you enjoy it. If nothing else, I’m confident you’ll find it interesting.
I really like the series but will note that my experience was apparently far less intense than Sharpe’s.
That does sound intriguing. Thanks for the explanation, though it may be a bit too literary for me at the moment. I think part of the reason Craft didn’t grab me is I’m just not in a place right now for heavier reading - between teaching overloads, dealing with the pandemic, and managing an insomniac 1 year old in a too-small apartment something like Cradle is definitely more my in the near term.
Abraham’s Dagger and the Coin is another good fantasy series, more traditional than the Long Price, but with some really interesting ideas in it nonetheless.
I really enjoyed Dagger and the Coin.
I imagine that this setting started with a drunken conversation about D&D: “It is ridiculously silly that any fantasy world has two sentient species (e.g., Humans and Elves) alive on the planet at any one time, much less dozens like most D&D campaign settings posit! How could any such setting have come about?”
And then there was a booze-fueled bet, and this series was the result.
Oddly, that one has the better blurb. Regardless, I’ve added both series to the wishlist, though as previously noted I may stick to lighter fare for the time being.
Took a break from one fantasy series to turn to another - the first book in Deborah Harkness’ All Souls series, A Discovery of Witches. This is a modern urban fantasy romance featuring a witch and a vampire. That sounds like a recipe for complete schlock and I’m sure such exists somewhere, but this novel actually has depth of character, interesting world-building, and well-crafted (though slow-developing) plotline. Yes, there’s a bit more heart-fluttering and heavy breathing than I like, but it’s not a bodice-ripper and the romance proceeds slowly without hogging all the limelight. The characters aren’t all terribly likable, but all the primary actors are well-rounded and gain plenty of depth through the story. The author weaves evolutionary science and genetics into the magical underpinnings of the world in a way that worked for me (though I’m sure experts in the field would find nitpicks), and there’s enough artifacts and reminiscing from the long life of the vampires to give a bit of historical fiction feel to the story as well. I was less impressed with the bad guys in the story, who get talked about a lot but rarely actually do anything - and when they do, commit the Evil Overlord failures of giving the good guys plenty of ways to escape and recover. The good guys have a whole lot of powers and resources so it’s a bit difficult to really feel like they’re in the danger that the book wants you to feel. It’s the first in a series and the plot is by no means complete in this book, so don’t expect a nicely wrapped ending. I enjoyed it enough to put the next one on my hold list at the library - maybe the enemies won’t be so inept moving forward.
The novella Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey is a dystopian Western featuring a variety of LGBT women (and gender-indeterminate persons). Forty years ago, it would have been a groundbreaking story. But in the present day, to me it feels like a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale and Lonesome Dove decided they needed to be combined with an all-queer cast. It’s not a bad story, but it doesn’t feel particularly creative to me. If I was a great fan of any of the source elements, I’d probably like it better, but as it stands I felt it was just a bland mashup.
The Long Price is not particularly literary. Abraham writes serviceable prose. (Not at all intended as a slight. His prose is clear, straightforward, and has a consistent narrative voice.) It’s unusual for fantasy in its settings and themes, but is a pretty rousing story. Here’s my recommendation: it’s my favorite fantasy series of all time.
I’ve read North American Lake Monsters. And it is a truly incredible collection of short stories. I’ve been reading Josh Malerman’s Goblin in parallel and it’s just unfair. Goblin is really good, but Balingrud is so much better. Even if horror isn’t your bag you owe it to yourself to read this collection. The horror elements are almost beside the point in every story. They’re just a foot in the door to really dig into the seedy, desperate, wholly realized lives of his characters. It is astonishing where Balingrud goes with these stories. Thanls much to @tomchick and everyone else who recommended this. Wounds is next on my to-read list.
Both North American Lake Monsters and Wounds are a couple of my favorites. I still think back to the first story in NALM and it hits me hard. Great stuff.
I just finished the Last Graduate and all I can say is holy shit. What an awesome book. WTF Lake
I’ve been reading through some Junji Ito manga lately, Uzumaki, Sensor, Shiver and Junji Ito’s cat diary: Yon and Mu. Uzumki was great. Nicely weird as expected. Sensor was disappointing after reading a lot of praise earlier in the year. Shiver was a really good collection. Several stories i recognized from an earlier anime series. The Cat Diary was totally unexpected and great. It’s a humorous book and was a fun read.
I forgot about another great one I read recently. I heard @tomchick singing the praises of Laird Barron’s short story collection The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All in the movie podcast for In The Earth so I had to check it out. It was great, I think the The Men From Porlock was mentioned and it was good but I think my favorite was Hand of Glory.
I liked them so much I read the Raksura series (flying shape shifters) and am now starting another of her books. I saw a blurb that said Wells studied anthropology which would explain the attention to social structures and habits. Reminds me of CJ Cheryl who had the same training.
Yeah, holy shit. And the supernatural horror there is just there to lend a slight tonal quality to the story. It’s like a small grey cloud in the corner of a painting that affects the quality of the light so that you know a storm is brewing. Doom lurks on every page of that story, but most American fiction is tinged with the myth of individualism. It’s cultural and hard to escape. Balingrud nudges it aside by just dropping in bit of almost cliche horror, but it’s enough to expose the yawning chasm of desperation lurking just behind all of us.
It’s interesting to see parallels between Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” and Balingrud’s eponymous story “North American Lake Monsters.” It has to be intentional, so it’s interesting to speculate about what Balingrud is trying to say.
I read M John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. I haven’t read any of his stuff before.
One of two things is true: Either this book isn’t for me, or I just totally didn’t understand it. Or both, I guess. I am absolutely, totally not exaggerating when I say this book would have made just as much sense to me if I had read every other paragraph. Or even every third paragraph. Like, most of them contain nothing but weird musings. Just at random, here’s an example:
Out in the cemetery again, he felt as if he was still going through someone else’s belongings, and not even out of interest. The woman he had seen when he arrived was back on the bench, slumped and still eating. He couldn’t place her. She was older than the mothers you saw in East Sheen during the day, in their compression tights and expensive running shoes; her posture wasn’t good. Thin old gravestones leaned at sharp angles behind her; next to the bench a red plastic watering can lay in the grass on its side. Since his last visit to the medium a council emergency number had appeared on the noticeboard by the gate. What kind of emergency, Shaw wondered briefly, occurs in a graveyard? The sudden need to bury someone?
I mean… what? You might well say, “that’s nice, I wonder who the woman on the bench is, or why the emergency number is there”. I hope you like mystery, because none of these people or things will ever be mentioned again.
There is kind of a story to it, but it goes on in the background. The two main characters are only peripherally involved in it; they don’t really know what’s going on, and for the most part they fail to find out. The reader, too, is, I guess, expected to either piece together the story mostly on their own, or just not be concerned with what the story is.
I have no idea whether or not to recommend this book. I’m sure it’s for somebody. Somebody is probably going to read this book and love it; it’ll be their favorite book of the year, or the millennium or something. For me… I’m glad it was short.
Lol. That excerpt sold me. Emboughtened.
Oh! He was the guy who wrote Viriconium. It was terrible.
Useful to know, I’ll nudge it up the list a bit. Would you say it’s an easier or harder read than the Expanse books?