Natasha Pulley: The Bedlam Stacks
A short novel that crams a lot of adventure and mystery in its 300 pages. It starts off as a historical story about an attaché of the East Indian Company tasked with smugling quinine trees out of Peru. Once he reaches a village on the edge of the cinchoya forest however, the tale shifts to magic realism, with the mysterious markayuk, sacred stone guardians standing by ancient Incan grounds, playing a major role.
Completed my massive personal reflection on favourite/recommended books, one for each year of my life so far. So much fun doing this! The list includes notes from me on each of the books listed for 1972-2024. Favourite and recommended books by year throughout my life | Viv's Academic Blog
Over the past ~month and a half, I’ve read all of Shirley Jackson’s novels—two rereads, the other four all new to me. It’s probably obvious that I’m a fan! Have also read a bunch of her short stories, and can definitely say at this point that she’s one of my favorite authors. The Haunting of Hill House is my favorite of the novels, but Hangsaman is a close second.
Thanks for your list. I’m scribbling titles and authors in my little notebook to look them up in the library or whenever I go to the second-hand bookshop.
Redwall, Babel, The Player of Games, all sound very interesting. It’s nice to see some familiar and well-loved books and authors too, like Pratchett (I’d probably pick The Truth too, or Thief of Time), Bill Watterson (you chose the one with the second best title, my favourite is Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat), and Ellis Peters.
Also thanks for reminding me to finally read Wolf’s Hall. It’s been waiting for me on my father’s bookshelf forever.
Wolf Hall is so so good!
I’m starting Long Island Compromise next; I really liked Fleishman is in Trouble so looking forward to it!
This is an amazing list and I really enjoyed the little blurbs with each book.
I enjoyed browsing your list! We’re a similar age and there are quite a few of my favourites on it. As a child I loved Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence, along with Alan Garner she got me interested in fantasy and British folklore. They’re both still alive, and they’re both 90! Another nonagenarian we both love is Tom Baker - I was fortunate enough to meet him and have a signed copy of his Doctor Who novel Scratchman, though I’ve yet to read his autobiography. And Forest of Doom is one of my favourite entries in the Fighting Fantasy series.
I’ve never read Redwall, but I presume you’re aware that Scott Adams’ company Clopas has adapted Mossflower into an interactive fiction? It’s called The Lost Legends of Redwall: Escape the Gloomer. I have played it, and enjoyed it very much!
Currently enjoying Memory of Sky.
Just finished A Dance with Dragons, the fifth of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. I was absolutely enthralled.
And now I find myself in ice-and-fire-limbo.
I’ll read the latest Hungergames prequel now.
I’m reading Diplomats and Demagogues, the memoir of controversial 20th-century American diplomat Spruille Braden. I was never very curious before about the work of an ambassador, but this book is fascinating.
I’m gonna be very curious what he ends up saying about Juan Perón, considering Perón won the 1946 election (technically against José Tamborini) with the slogan “Perón or Braden”.
I’ve started on a reread of Ojamajo Doremi 16, the first of the sequel light novels to the anime Ojamajo DOremi. It’s pretty rare I reread something, but as I said in the Good things thread, I just discovered yesterday that a translation exists for the nearly 8 volumes I’ve never read before, and it’s been nearly a decade since the translation I read previously stalled after the first chapter of the third novel in the series, so rereading the first two volumes and the first chapter of volume 3 before delving into the new to me content of a 10 volume series I’ve been wanting to read since it was first published over a decade ago(I even own the first 9 volumes in their print Japanese editions, the only LNs I’ve imported, I don’t own the tenth volume as it was shadow dropped like five years after the LN series concluded with volume 9 and my finances went to hell in those five years and never recovered).
Plus, the anime is only readily available fansubbed, I can’t read subtitles due to being blind, My Japanese is barely passed my foreign language in highschool 20 years ago level, even if I could find the dub the US got, it’s a hack job and only goes for 50 of 214 episodes, and despite Ojamajo Doremi being widely considered one of the best Mahou Shoujo anime, one of the best anime originals(there’s an Ojamajo Doremi manga, which I’ve never read, but this is the rare case of the Anime being the original and the manga being a poorly done adaptation, and even one of the best anime of all time full stop, there is depressingly little English fanfiction of it. I’ve been getting my fix via an anime review blogger that’s working through the anime at like 3 episodes a year, so I’m ecstatic at the prospect of probably half to three quarters of a million words of deutercanonical content, ~80% of which is new to me to sink my teeth into, especially when it’s been 13 years since I last was able to properly watch an episode of the anime(I started getting black spots on the edges of my vision around the Fourth of July in 2012 and things deteriorated pretty quickly).
The fifth Hungergames book tells Haymitch’s history.
The events in the actual Arena take up a less prominent place in the book, and they’re told rather hurriedly. Understandable, since the story is written in the first person, so it’s Haymitch’s own recollections of that gruesome experience we’re reading.
A lot more attention and depth goes to the events leading up to the Games, and the horrible aftermath where President Snow decides to learn this recalcitrant winner a lesson or two. These, even more than the trials and the killing in the Arena, are the experiences that form Haymitch into the man we later see in the original Hungergames trilogy.
A strong addition to the series.
My son picked another book for me. The Beasts of Barakhai by Mickey Zucker Reichert looks like an eminently forgettable fantasy hobby-project, a slim paperback with cover-art like a badly drawn Magic; The Gathering trading card.
But it got me. To be clear, it is mostly run-of-the-mill fantasy, a predictable hodgepodge of the familiar tropes. But the protagonist show such authentic personality that I could easily look past the novel’s shortcomings and sympathise with the main character.
I actually really enjoyed it.
Mickey Zucker Reichert - Wikipedia
(I was quite surprised by this Wikipedia page. M.Z. Reichert is apparently a firmly established writer of speculative fiction, even invited by Berkley Books to write three prequel novels to Asimov’s I, Robot.)
Finished my reread of Ojamajo Doremi 16 and have started rereading Ojamajo Doremi 16 Naive, the second in the series.
During a quantum computation experiment, the lead physicist *poofs* (quantum tunnels/leaps?) out of existence and materialises in a parallel universe, on a parallel Earth in exactly the same geographical spot. This parallel Earth is populated with a strange sort of humanoids, with sharp protruding bone structures on their lower jaws. Also, they have no browridges like our quantum physicist does.
Yes. The physicist is a Neanderthal and he’s been transported to our world. Somewhere between 30.000 and 60.000 years ago, Earth’s timeline split. One timeline led to our familiar homo sapiens-dominated world, in the other we went extinct and homo neanderthalensis rose to be the dominant hominid.
Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids, the first part of The Neanderthal Parallax, is a very entertaining paleo-anthropological SF novel. At its core is the simple question of if and how Ponter Dobbit (the Neanderthal physicist) can find his way back home, but it goes far beyond that. Our own history and political organisation and ideologies are contrasted with those of the Neanderthals. And most interesting to me, the consequences of the disappearance of Ponter from his home, the effects on his mate and children make up a big part of the story. The crime investigation and lawsuit drama following his disappearance form the most exciting parts of the novel.
Interesting reading… (adding Rovarrsson in the shortlist of potential betatesters 
)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I’ve been reading Hedesa by Rachel Numeier, the book #10 in the Tuyo series which the author released on Patreon a few days ago. The whole series is full of thoughtful exploration of fantasy culture clash, but this lastest book turns it up to 11. A proud young lord from a pseudo-fantasy-Europe civilisation joins an expedition through the lands of nomadic ‘barbarians’, to visit an even stranger land further north. Most of the book is travelling and characters having interesting conversations which I love. Language barriers and the complexities of translation/interpretation, navigating differences in culture, the basic level of food/politics/architecture but also how laws and expectations of behaviour are decided and enforced, which character traits are valued, how people gain respect and have their opinions take seriously.
Right now I’m reading the second World of Tiers novel by Philip Jose Farmer.
I have just finished the fourth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series - The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman. This is a mad series where the main character (and millions of other humans) are trapped inside a very complex dungeon crawler game run as an intergalactic reality show by an alien corporation. Carl is accompanied by his ex-girlfriend’s cat.
I have never read anything like these books and I am not sure that is praise. About 40% of the text is exposition explaining the labyrinthian rules - carl is constantly getting achievements and items that buff his stats (people get an extensive list of stats) just like a really complex version of Nethack.
Needless to say, these books are horrendously gory as an overpowered Carl (and his cat) mow through thousands of NPCs and occasionally hostile PvPs, all the while trying to figure out the complex corporate politics behind the show.
These books are not high art but I must admit they tickle the part of my brain that likes to see a room full of orcs dispatched in short order.
