Month 33 of 260 (12.69 percent)
Size of list: 86,832 pages (11.64 percent above start)
Pages read: 17,111 (19.71 percent)
H-list: 4,932/23,114 (21.34 percent)
N-list: 6,584/36,694 (17.94 percent)
O-list: 5,595/27,024 (20.70 percent)
Finished: The Fifth Season, The Fires of Heaven
Next up: Aerie
Next up: Aerie
This month overlapped nearly perfectly with the World Cup, so honestly I'm amazed I read anything at all. I had set a target at the beginning of the year that accommodates the World Cup; I didn't meet it. Oh well.
The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin, was the 2016 Hugo Best Novel winner. Its sequel, The Obsidian Gate, was the 2017 winner; the final volume, The Stone Sky, is a finalist this year, and if it wins it will be the first trilogy to win for all three volumes, and the Jemisin will be the first author to win Best Novel three years in a row, so I'm going to be watching the Hugo ceremony this year like I used to watch the Belmont Stakes, waiting for the first Triple Crown winner in decades. (When I was 10-ish one of my favorite books was The Triple Crown Winners, a collection of biographies of the horses that had won; it ended with Seattle Slew in 1977 so for years I was unaware that Affirmed had won in 1978.)
Anyway, the book itself was wonderful. It is three stories, each told in a different tense: third person past, third person present, and second person present. The characters are orogenes, who honestly I'm not sure whether they're human or near-human, but anyway they are people with an affinity and control of the earth, who can cause or stop the earthquakes that rattle the continent ironically called The Stillness. Orogenes remind me of the telepaths of Babylon 5; they are hated and feared, and regulated into an organization that trains them and sends them on missions for the good of the greater government, or not.
The other book I finished, after months, was The Fires of Heaven, book 5 of The Wheel of Time. At the end of nearly a thousand pages, all I can say is ugh. Some of the characters join a traveling menagerie; a legend of the past is brought out of the dreamworld into reality; what appears to be a battle with one Forsaken turns into a confrontation with another; and a character actually has sex without it being written around to the extent that I wonder if it actually happened. All of these things should be interesting, but Jordan writes so long that honestly I'm questioning why I'm taking the time to read all this. I probably still win. Probably. But comments from my friends like "the next six books are the doldrums, but then it picks up" do not help.
The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin, was the 2016 Hugo Best Novel winner. Its sequel, The Obsidian Gate, was the 2017 winner; the final volume, The Stone Sky, is a finalist this year, and if it wins it will be the first trilogy to win for all three volumes, and the Jemisin will be the first author to win Best Novel three years in a row, so I'm going to be watching the Hugo ceremony this year like I used to watch the Belmont Stakes, waiting for the first Triple Crown winner in decades. (When I was 10-ish one of my favorite books was The Triple Crown Winners, a collection of biographies of the horses that had won; it ended with Seattle Slew in 1977 so for years I was unaware that Affirmed had won in 1978.)
Anyway, the book itself was wonderful. It is three stories, each told in a different tense: third person past, third person present, and second person present. The characters are orogenes, who honestly I'm not sure whether they're human or near-human, but anyway they are people with an affinity and control of the earth, who can cause or stop the earthquakes that rattle the continent ironically called The Stillness. Orogenes remind me of the telepaths of Babylon 5; they are hated and feared, and regulated into an organization that trains them and sends them on missions for the good of the greater government, or not.
The other book I finished, after months, was The Fires of Heaven, book 5 of The Wheel of Time. At the end of nearly a thousand pages, all I can say is ugh. Some of the characters join a traveling menagerie; a legend of the past is brought out of the dreamworld into reality; what appears to be a battle with one Forsaken turns into a confrontation with another; and a character actually has sex without it being written around to the extent that I wonder if it actually happened. All of these things should be interesting, but Jordan writes so long that honestly I'm questioning why I'm taking the time to read all this. I probably still win. Probably. But comments from my friends like "the next six books are the doldrums, but then it picks up" do not help.
