Summer Reading List 2020: Joe

There are many things in this life which I really, really like. Two of them are reading books and making lists. A third would be making lists about reading books. Strangely, I'm not sure if I want to read a book about making lists, so we'll just move right on from there, shall we?

It is something of a tradition here at Nerds of a Feather to post one's Summer Reading List. Now, since I've been adulting for quite a number of years, the concept of "summer" doesn't have quite the same cache for me as it might have two decades ago. I have to go to work in July much the same as I do in February. And while the summer does mean more trips up to the family cabin, now that I have a child, some of that time spent reading on a swing overlooking a lake with a beer in my hand is going to be spent playing with my children. This is not a bad thing.

With all of that said, I do rather enjoy making lists about books. Nerds of a Feather is a genre blog, so while I plan to continue to read more non fiction each year and I've been reading an increasing amount of non SFF fiction, I do still get through more than one hundred books each year, so what I'm going to highlight is some of the science fiction and fantasy I plan / hope to read this summer.
 
For those keeping score at home, I read five of the six books I listed last year and expect to get the last one this summer, especially as the weirdness of this year has me reading more from that giant stack of books next to my bed.

1. The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich has been one of my favorite authors for more than twenty years now, since the day I first read Love Medicine and June Morissey walked out into the snow. From that moment, which has been reinforced by everything she has written since, each of her novels has been essential reading. The Night Watchman is her latest.

2. Sailing to Sarantium, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay is one of those authors I've always meant to read more of. I read Ysabel not long after it was published, loved it, and somehow never went back to Kay. So many of my friends and readers I trust are fans of Kay's work and, well, what better time to hit some of those long unread books on my to be read pile than this summer?

3. The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin

For all of the same reasons The City We Became was on my most anticipated novels of the year list, it is on my summer reading list. Is there a novel more anticipated this year than The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin's first novel published after her phenomenal Broken Earth trilogy. As I said back in January, "in a year filled with significant novels, The City We Became is a must read."


 

4. The Fire Dragon, by Katharine Kerr

At this point I'm not sure if I am going to continue with my Reading Deverry essay series (Part 1, Part 2). With the exception of Seanan McGuire, there are very few writers I am likely to read more than one novel from in a year and that pushes each of the Deverry essays several years apart. The Fire Dragon is the third novel of Deverry's Act Three and the eleventh novel overall. There is still quite a bit of story left in Deverry, but as I suggested last year, the farther we get from the Rhodry and Jill storyline the more this feels like a completely different series. Katharine Kerr has reset the series and Rhodry is back as the berserker he was early on. I don't love the arc in this Act, but I'm interested to see how both the Act and the series as a whole is resolved. Whether I write about it is another story.

5. The Rage of Dragons, by Evan Winter

I've had a copy of The Rage of Dragons for almost a year now and even though I wasn't initially excited about the debut (which is dumb, I should trust Orbit by this point) - I've been told by a good many people I trust that The Rage of Dragons is the truth, that The Rage of Dragons is a spectacular debut and the sort of epic fantasy we should all be reading. 



 

6. Valor's Choice, by Tanya Huff

A few years back I was both looking for some new old space opera to read and just happened to be browsing through Uncle Hugo's (a wonderful science fiction bookstore destroyed in the fires of Minneapolis this year) when I stumbled across an omnibus edition of A Confederation of Valor, the first two Valor novels from Tanya Huff. As so often happens when I buy books they then sat proudly on my bookshelf for years. It's time. And I may well push right into The Better Part of Valor.




POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Bear, Elizabeth. The Stone in the Skull [Tor, 2017]
Publisher's Description:

Hugo Award–winning author Elizabeth Bear returns to her critically acclaimed epic fantasy world of the Eternal Sky with a brand new trilogy.

The Stone in the Skull, the first volume in her new trilogy, takes readers over the dangerous mountain passes of the Steles of the Sky and south into the Lotus Kingdoms.

The Gage is a brass automaton created by a wizard of Messaline around the core of a human being. His wizard is long dead, and he works as a mercenary. He is carrying a message from a the most powerful sorcerer of Messaline to the Rajni of the Lotus Kingdom. With him is The Dead Man, a bitter survivor of the body guard of the deposed Uthman Caliphate, protecting the message and the Gage. They are friends, of a peculiar sort.

They are walking into a dynastic war between the rulers of the shattered bits of a once great Empire.

Why We Want It: Shana and I don't always overlap in our New Books Spotlight, but when we do we Elizabeth Bear. Normally, I would leave this one off my list and let Shana's selection stand on its own, but I adore the fiction of Elizabeth Bear. The opening novel in a new trilogy set in the same world of her Eternal Sky? You know I'm there.

Brust, Steven. Vallista [Tor, 2017]
Publisher's Description

Full of swordplay, peril, and swashbuckling flair, Steven Brust's Vallista is a treat for longtime fans of this popular fantasy series, a deep dive into the mysteries of Dragaera and all within it. 

Vlad Taltos is an Easterner—an underprivileged human in an Empire of tall, powerful, long-lived Dragaerans. He made a career for himself in House Jhereg, the Dragaeran clan in charge of the Empire’s organized crime. But the day came when the Jhereg wanted Vlad dead, and he’s been on the run ever since. He has plenty of friends among the Dragaeran highborn, including an undead wizard and a god or two. But as long as the Jhereg have a price on his head, Vlad’s life is…messy.

Meanwhile, for years, Vlad’s path has been repeatedly crossed by Devera, a small Dragaeran girl of indeterminate powers who turns up at the oddest moments in his life.

Now Devera has appeared again—to lead Vlad into a mysterious, seemingly empty manor overlooking the Great Sea. Inside this structure are corridors that double back on themselves, rooms that look out over other worlds, and—just maybe—answers to some of Vlad’s long-asked questions about his world and his place in it. If only Devera can be persuaded to stop disappearing in the middle of his conversations with her…

Why We Want It: Vallista is the fifteenth of a proposed nineteen novels featuring Vlad Taltos and they're all friggin great. As I mentioned in my 24 Books I'm Looking Forward to in 2017: It's a new Vlad Taltos novel. This is a cause for celebration.

Erdrich, Louise. Future Home of the Living God [Harper Collins, 2017]
Publisher's Description

Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.

Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.

There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.

A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.

Why We Want It: A new Louise Erdrich novel is a literary event that seldom disappoints. Everything about the description of Future Home appeals to me, not the least of which is simply knowing that it is written by Erdrich.  I've already pre-ordered this one, which is not something I say lightly.

Modesitt, L. E., Jr. The Mongrel Mage [Tor, 2017]
Publisher's Description:

The Saga of Recluce chronicles the history of this world with world-building detail and an ingenious and disciplined magic system. L. E. Modesitt, Jr. returns to his longest and bestselling fantasy series with volume nineteen, The Mongrel Mage, which marks the beginning of a new story arc.

In the world of Recluce, powerful mages can wield two kinds of magic—the white of Chaos or the black of Order. Beltur, however, has talents no one dreamed of, talents not seen in hundreds of years that blend both magics.

On the run from a power hungry white mage, Beltur is taken in by Order mages who set him on the path to discover and hone his own unique gifts and in the process find a home.

However, when the white mage he fled attempts to invade his new home, Beltur must hope his new found power will be enough to save them all.

Why We Want It: Recluce. I'm tempted to leave it at that. I've loved these novels since I first stumbled upon Creslin skiing away from Westwind in Towers of the Sunset. Reading Recluce is like coming home.

Pullman, Philip. The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage [Random House, 2017]
Publisher's Description

The much-anticipated new work from the author of The Golden Compass is coming at last! 

Renowned storyteller Philip Pullman returns to the parallel world of Lyra Belacqua and His Dark Materials for a thrilling and epic adventure in which daemons, alethiometers, and the Magisterium all play a part. 

The Book of Dust will be a work in three parts, like His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass). The book is set ten years before The Golden Compass and centers on the much-loved character Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon.

Philip Pullman offers these tantalizing details: “I’ve always wanted to tell the story of how Lyra came to be living at Jordan College, and in thinking about it, I discovered a long story that began when she was a baby and will end when she’s grown up. This volume and the next will cover two parts of Lyra’s life: starting at the beginning of her story and returning to her twenty years later. As for the third and final part, my lips are sealed.

“So, second: is it a prequel? Is it a sequel? It’s neither. In fact, The Book of Dust is . . . an ‘equel.’ It doesn’t stand before or after His Dark Materials, but beside it. It’s a different story, but there are settings that readers of His Dark Materials will recognize, and characters they’ve met before. Also, of course, there are some characters who are new to us, including an ordinary boy (a boy we have glimpsed in an earlier part of Lyra’s story, if we were paying attention) who, with Lyra, is caught up in a terrifying adventure that takes him into a new world.

“Third: why return to Lyra’s world? Dust. Questions about that mysterious and troubling substance were already causing strife ten years before His Dark Materials, and at the center of The Book of Dust is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organization, which wants to stifle speculation and inquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free. The idea of Dust suffused His Dark Materials. Little by little through that story the idea of what Dust was became clearer and clearer, but I always wanted to return to it and discover more.”

The books of the His Dark Materials trilogy were showered with praise, and the Cincinnati Enquirer proclaimed, “Pullman has created the last great fantasy masterpiece of the twentieth century.” With The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman embarks on an equally grand adventure, sure to be hailed as the first great fantasy masterpiece of the twenty-first century.

Why We Want It: It's like this. I read His Dark Materials as an impressionable teenager and they left, well, an impression on me. I haven't read them since, so I don't know how they've aged or - more specifically, how I've aged. But I've been eagerly awaiting The Book of Dust for pretty much my entire adult life - since the title was announced with no details and no word for the better part of two decades. I'm not sure this can possibly live up to my expectation, but that's no reason to not read the book.

Wallace, Matt. Gluttony Bay [Tor.com Publishing, 2017]
Publisher's Description

Gluttony Bay is the penultimate Sin du Jour affair, Matt Wallace's funny foodie series about the New York firm that caters to the paranormal, which began with Envy of Angels.

Welcome to Gluttony Bay High Security Supernatural Prison. We value your patronage. For your entertainment this evening, we are delighted to welcome the world's most renowned paranormal culinary experts.

And on the menu: You.

Why We Want It: Matt Wallace's Sin du Jour novellas are an absolute treat. They're some of my favorite pieces of fiction written over the last two years and, sadly, we're nearing the end. Each story comes with my highest recommendation and I could not be more excited for it.



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Writer / Editor of the mostly defunct Adventures in Reading since 2004. Minnesotan.

Joe's Summer Reading List 2016

There are many things in this life which I really, really like. Two of them are reading books and making lists. A third would be making lists about reading books. Strangely, I'm not sure if I want to read a book about making lists, so we'll just move right on from there, shall we?

It is something of a tradition here at Nerds of a Feather to post one's Summer Reading List. Now, since I've been adulting for quite a number of years, the concept of "summer" doesn't have quite the same cache for me as it might have two decades ago. I have to go to work in July much the same as I do in February. And while the summer does mean more trips up to the family cabin, now that I have a child, some of that time spent reading on a swing overlooking a lake with a beer in my hand is going to be spent playing with my child. This is not a bad thing.

With all of that said, I do rather enjoy making lists about books. Nerds of a Feather is a genre blog, so while I plan to read more non fiction this year (just finished The Devil in the White City, just started Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS), I do still get through more than one hundred books each year, so what I'm going to highlight is some of the science fiction and fantasy I plan / hope to read this summer.



1. The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin

You've all read The Fifth Season, right? The Nebula and Hugo Award nominated The Fifth Season? Alright, well, it's only my favorite novel published in a very rich 2015 filled with friggin amazingly excellent novels and the more I think about it, the more I appreciate it. Here's my review of The Fifth Season. The Obelisk Gate is the second volume of the Broken Earth sequence and while I can't imagine how Jemisin is going to top the amazingness that was The Fifth Season, I also can't wait to read it.




2. A Time of Exile, by Katharine Kerr

Now that I've completed the first half of my Deryni re-read and it's been several months since I wrote about the first four novels in the Deverry Cycle, I think it's time that I return to Deverry and see what happens in the first book of Act Two: The Westlands. With a surprise Deverry novel on the horizons in late 2017, I need to get cracking on this series.





3. Pride's Spell, by Matt Wallace

Do you remember when I wrote about the first two of Matt Wallace's Sin du Jour novellas? I've mostly avoided finding anything out about Pride's Spell because I want to have the perpetual expression of "what the hell did I just read" on my face as I experience the glory that is a new Sin du Jour novella for the first time.

4. LaRose, by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is my favorite author. LaRose is her latest novel. Now, I do understand that I mentioned in my introduction that I would highlight science fiction and fantasy and that there is no indication LaRose is genre at all, but I can't not mention Louise Erdrich on my summer reading list. If we need a genre tie, remember that Erdrich's novel The Antelope Wife won the World Fantasy Award in 1999.

5. One-Eyed Jack, by Elizabeth Bear

The Promethean Age is one of my favorite fantasy series. It's not so much an alternate history as it is a exploration of a five hundred year long secret war which takes places on the fringes of what we think we know of real life. Start with either Blood and Iron or Ink and Steel and thank me later. Ink and Steel is the first half of the Stratford Man duology, which is one of my favorite things of all time. Anyway, for years the four published Promethean Age novels were it, that's all we were getting because sadly, they didn't sell well enough - until late 2013 when Bear was able to publish a fifth Promethean Age novel, One-Eyed Jack - this one set in the Las Vegas of 2002 and in the midst of a magical turf war. Of course I bought the book right away in a squeal of happiness - and then, perhaps because I knew and suspected that this might really be the last Promethean Age novel this time and I just couldn't bear (pun intended) to not have another Promethean Age novel to read for the first time. I finally understand how a friend of mine who loved The Next Generation but refused to watch the final episode because then it would be over. But, maybe it's time to finally read this.

6. Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny

It may come as a surprise to many that not only have I never read any of Zelazny's Amber novels, I have also never read Roger Zelazny at all. Given that I own copies of both Lord of Light as well as the Amber omnibus, it is high time to correct this oversight. I have no idea where to set my expectations, but Zelazny shall be read.






POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004. Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015, editor since 2016. Minnesotan.