What have you been reading this October?

[Robert]

I just finished Brothers in Arms from the long-running Dragonlance series.

Immolatus the ill-tempered dragon in human form is my new personal hero.

Here's my 🐲🐲🐲/5 review.

[Andrea]

Finished The Measure of the Magic, I mean its an ok addition to the Shannara storyline but didn't feel it added to it much, will see if the remaining books build on it.

Starting on Homerooms and Hall Passes: Heroes Level Up by Tom O'Donnell - the first book was a lot more fun than I expected it to be so of course I had to read the second and final one.

[Faith]

My review of Red River Seven by A.J. Ryan

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Kay]

Walker Papers series by C.E. Murphy

[Sean]

I've been reading the following high-profile SF/F recent releases (or recent in the UK at least), focusing on which books are the best-written, i.e. pay most attention to prose style, and gave each a mark out of ten.

More Perfect 2
Hangman 5
Time's Mouth 5
The Kindness 7
Mister Magic 5
Pink Slime 9
The Fragile Threads of Power 2
Cursebreakers 5
Godkiller 7
Rouge 3
The Future 5
The Circumference of the World 9
Girlfriend on Mars 8
The Blue, Beautiful World 3
Bride of the Tornado 7

Here's the opening to Pink Slime:

> When the fog rolled in, the port turned into a swamp. Shadows fell across the plaza, filtering between the trees and leaving the long marks of their fingers on all they touched. Under each unbroken surface, mould cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too. If I didn’t have Mauro, I’d spend all day wandering around, guided through the fog by the neon sign flickering in the distance: PAL CE HOTE . The missing letters hadn’t changed, though it wasn’t a hotel anymore; like so many other buildings in the city, it had been taken over by squatters. What day was that? Sometimes I can still hear the neon, its electric hum and the crackle of another letter on the verge of shorting out. The squatters kept the sign lit, but not out of laziness or nostalgia. They did it to remind themselves they were alive. That they could still do something arbitrary, something purely aesthetic. That they could still transform the landscape.

>If I’m going to tell this story I should choose a starting point, begin somewhere. But where? I was never any good with beginnings. The day I saw the fish? Certain details leave a mark on time and render a moment unforgettable. It was cold, and the fog condensed into droplets on the overflowing dumpsters. I don’t know where all that garbage came from. It seemed to consume and excrete itself. And how do you know we’re not the waste? Max might have said something like that. I remember turning at the old corner store, with its windows boarded over, and how the greenish-red light of the hotel sign washed over me as I stepped onto the rambla.

>Mauro would be back the next day, bringing with him another month of confinement and work. Cooking, cleaning, monitoring his every movement. Each time they came to collect him I spent a whole day catching up on the sleep he threatened or interrupted. This endless vigil was the reason Mauro’s parents paid me the exorbitant salary they knew would never compensate me. Breathing in the stale air of the port, prowling the streets, visiting my mother or Max; these were the luxuries I afforded myself on the days my time didn’t carry a price. If I was lucky, that is, and there was no wind.

>The only people on the rambla were fishermen with the collars of their jackets pulled up around their ears, their hands red and cracked. The water stretched wide in all directions, an estuary where the river became a shoreless sea. The fog blurred the horizon. It was ten o’clock or eleven or three under that flat, milky light. The algae floated nearby like bloodshot phlegm, but the fishermen seemed not to care. They rested their buckets next to their beach chairs, baited their hooks, and gathered the strength of their brittle arms to cast their lines as far as they could. I liked the sound of the reels spooling out: it reminded me of summers spent riding my bicycle in San Felipe, no brakes, knees angled high to avoid the pedals. That bicycle contained my whole childhood, just like those beaches that would later be cordoned off with yellow tape the wind would periodically destroy and a few policemen in facemasks would rehang. KEEP OUT, it said. Why? You’d have to be crazy to want to go like that: infected, exposed to a nameless disease that didn’t even promise a speedy death.

-----------------

I'm not sure if linking to my criteria for 'well-written prose' is allowed by group rules, so I won't do so. But here's a sample:

>You can expect the picks to feature some mix of inventiveness, virtuosity, energy, authority, clarity, precision, concision, richness, tonal complexity, musicality, and that elusive quality generally known as charm or charisma.

>Expect less tolerance for sentences that feel too second-guessed, whose writers seem frightened at the prospect of seeming to show off, or of writing with a strong and clearly human voice. This kind of prose, the Replicant Voice, features frustratingly often in prize-nominated and rave-reviewed publications.

If stylish prose matters to you, do please let me know if I've missed any especially well-written recent SF/F releases, and I'll have a look at them. Thanks for reading!

[Mary]

The Fiancee Chosen by the Ring, Vol. 1 by Jyun Hayase

[Andrea]

Finished Heroes Level Up, as I started I didn't think it would be as good as the first part way through I started enjoying it again. Fun and silly reverse DnD.

Now time to do my yearly Halloween Anne Rice read, no vampires this time since I've read all those already, an angel instead - Of Love and Evil

I'm also reading a paranormal mystery romance (could it have more genres?) - Let the Dead Sleep by Heather Graham

Also going to start on Terry Brook's anthology Small Magic: Short Fiction, 1977-2020. I'm torn here because I picked this for my BINGO but its got stories related to other things I feel I should read first (like a sequel to a Poul Anderson story, or a story in Landover). I'll start with the Shannara one and see how it goes - Allanon's Quest

[Gary]

Currently reading Crossroads of Twilight book 10 of the Wheel of Time.

[Michelle]

Gary wrote: "Currently reading Crossroads of Twilight book 10 of the Wheel of Time."

Nice!

[Robin]

Michelle, your back. Are your IT issues all sorted?

[Michelle]

Robin wrote: "Michelle, your back. Are your IT issues all sorted?"

I am, Robin, and what a fiasco! I had to create a whole new email address just to be able to use goodreads. It is absurd!

[Robin]

Yep, well we have all been there one way or another when the machines rebel...☺

[Audrey]

I listened to The Tobacco Wives. I am now re-reading The Hero of Ages and am reading the new Michael Vey book, The Traitor.

[Pierre]

An Echo of Things to Come is a DNF at 69% of the book. I have lost interest in the story, and one character in particular, Caeden ( aka Tal'Kamar aka Aarkein Devaed), gave me a lot of trouble.
It appears that I cannot enjoy fantasy like I used to earlier on; this may be an effect of aging.
Changing genre completely, I'll delve into an enormous book that was lent to me, in deadtree book form, by my young cousin: The Big Book of Cyberpunk by Jared Shurin. It has over 1100 pages, with text on two columns and quite small characters. I may pick stories in it, I doubt that I will read it cover to cover.

[Robert]

I've been listening to Persepolis Rising. Everyone got old! ;)