![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've been simply wretched at tracking stuff I've read, so I'm just going to leave some brief notes here of my most recent reads. Only the vaguest of spoilers (and I, a spoiler-phobe, am not sure they even qualify at all).
Magic Ex Libris series (Libriomancer; Codex Born; Unbound; Revisionary) by Jim C. Hines: Very well done and entertaining. I don't think I'll read them again, though; nothing really grabbed me (or my id) -- which doesn't entirely surprise me, since I had the same reaction to his Princess series. Glad I visited; don't need to go back. Book 3 explicitly deals with depression but didn't feel as written-from-within-depression, wow-that's-bleak as the fourth book in the Princess series did, oddly. Book 4 was harder for me to get into because political infighting and conspiracies are soooooo not my thing -- I'm reading fantasy to get away from that stuff! -- but it moved somewhere more interesting to me after about the first quarter. Somehow, even though book 4 was published in 2016 and therefore couldn't have been plotted and written within 2016, it nailed the sociopolitical feeling of 2016/2017.
"Interim Errantry 2" ebook (which might actually be titled "On Ordeal"? Not sure) by Diane Duane. I'd already read (and possibly paid for) the first of the three stories here, which was frustrating. The other two were fine but read more like rambly worldbuilding fill-in fanfic than anything essential to the Young Wizards universe. I don't think these stories would make any sense to anyone who hasn't read at least most of the main-series Young Wizards books, and they have spoilers for two of those books anyway. ("A Wizard on Mars", along with the "Rafting" short story from the first "Interim Errantry", are lightly spoiled by the second story; an important plot development in "A Wizard Abroad" is spoiled by the third story.)
Magic Ex Libris series (Libriomancer; Codex Born; Unbound; Revisionary) by Jim C. Hines: Very well done and entertaining. I don't think I'll read them again, though; nothing really grabbed me (or my id) -- which doesn't entirely surprise me, since I had the same reaction to his Princess series. Glad I visited; don't need to go back. Book 3 explicitly deals with depression but didn't feel as written-from-within-depression, wow-that's-bleak as the fourth book in the Princess series did, oddly. Book 4 was harder for me to get into because political infighting and conspiracies are soooooo not my thing -- I'm reading fantasy to get away from that stuff! -- but it moved somewhere more interesting to me after about the first quarter. Somehow, even though book 4 was published in 2016 and therefore couldn't have been plotted and written within 2016, it nailed the sociopolitical feeling of 2016/2017.
"Interim Errantry 2" ebook (which might actually be titled "On Ordeal"? Not sure) by Diane Duane. I'd already read (and possibly paid for) the first of the three stories here, which was frustrating. The other two were fine but read more like rambly worldbuilding fill-in fanfic than anything essential to the Young Wizards universe. I don't think these stories would make any sense to anyone who hasn't read at least most of the main-series Young Wizards books, and they have spoilers for two of those books anyway. ("A Wizard on Mars", along with the "Rafting" short story from the first "Interim Errantry", are lightly spoiled by the second story; an important plot development in "A Wizard Abroad" is spoiled by the third story.)