Books read, uh, most of 2017?
Okay, so the last time I posted about what I’d been reading was in February, at which time I noted that I’d fallen out of the habit of book-blogging and wanted to get back into it. Welp, clearly I fell right back out again.
My log for 2017 is not complete, I know — I failed to log things in my file as well as write about them here. And it will be even less complete as I exclude various things like my own work (re-read for editing purposes), things I’ve read for review or critique, things I’ve blogged about already, and the pile of folkloric epics I’ve been reading for research (the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Popol Vuh, the Kalevala, the Táin Bó Cuailnge, and a very abbreviated rendition of Journey to the West). But it’s still a decent pile, so let’s get started.
Lace and Blade, ed. Deborah J. Ross. Read as a kind of research, because I was going to be submitting a story to the fourth installment in this anthology series. This is “romantic fantasy” in the Zorro/Scarlet Pimpernel/swashbuckling-and-intrigue sense of romance; there is also love, but not always. I still remain a less-than-ideal audience for anthologies, because my preference is to sink into a longer story, but I enjoyed several of the pieces in here.
Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch. Didn’t hang together as well as its predecessor, alas. The con Locke and Jean were running wound up basically being an afterthought, while the parts of the story that took place at sea didn’t feel integrated with the rest. It was still fun, but fun kind of in segments, rather than forming a powerful whole.
Coyote Still Going: Native American Legends and Contemporary Stories, Ty Nolan. Collection by a Native American storyteller. It interleaves the legends themselves with anecdotes about situations in which he’s told those stories, reflections on the people and communities he tells them to, and even some recipes, which I think is a really interesting approach.
The Republic of Thieves, Scott Lynch. Better-constructed than the second book in the series, and we finally — at long last — get to meet Sabetha. For a story in which we mostly see her through Locke’s pov, she was fairly successful in escaping the trap she’d been caught in before, which was being defined as the Object of Desire for Locke. She very clearly has her own desires and opinions about things, even when Locke himself is too caught up in his feelings to notice, and her own goals that she’s pursuing by her own means. (I can’t help but contrast her with Denna from The Name of the Wind.)
Legend, Marie Lu. First in a dystopian YA series, with a privileged young woman hunting down a young male rebel. Romance ensues, naturally, because it’s a dystopian YA series. 
