Ry Herman's Blog

Sighting of the Book of the Month club edition of This Princess Kills Monsters in the wild – this one from Pittsburgh!

The standout book for me in March was:

CHILDREN OF STRIFE, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

An interspecies starship rediscovers a forgotten human colony. Then human crewmate Alis wakes to discover that she, her captain and the ship’s intelligence are the only ones left on their ship. What happened to everyone else?

What would it look like if a world were made in the image of the worst people on earth? Pretty horrible, as it turns out. It makes for a good book, though. I wouldn’t, however, think as highly as I do about this book for that alone. It’s a story about limitations. About what would people would do, as individuals, as a society, if they were given ultimate power, whether real or in simulation. What could stop them? Only the limits of their conscience and their imagination. And the second, the book argues, and argues well, is a hard, hard limit, a fact that has had and will continue to have terrible consequences in the real world.

Some other great books from March: SILENCED by Ann Claycomb, THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY by Edith Wharton, ARKHANGELSK by Elizabeth Bonesteel, THE EMILY WILDE TRILOGY by Heather Fawcett, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS by Arundhati Roy, COME CLOSER by Sarah Gran, and THE ONES WHO COME BACK HUNGRY by Amelinda Bérubé.

I think the audiobook of This Princess Kills Monsters is on sale right now. It certainly seems to be on sale on Apple Books, but I guess maybe also on Amazon.

What tipped me off:

The French language edition of This Princess Kills Monsters comes out today!

Once again, there are no books I specifically want to highlight, but a whole lot of books I very much enjoyed this past month:

THE POET EMPRESS by Shen Tao, GREEK LESSONS by Kang Han, TAPPING THE DREAM TREE by Charles de Lint, THE HUNGRY GODS by Adrian Tchaikovsky, BRIGANDS & BREADKNIVES by Travis Baldree, YOU WEREN’T MEANT TO BE HUMAN by Andrew Joseph White, TRESS OF THE EMERALD SEA by Brandon Sanderson, and THIEF OF NIGHT by Holly Black

Thanks to the works of Sigrid Undset and Xenophon, I now have every single letter of the alphabet represented by the author names on my bookshelf. This makes me obscurely happy.

The cover for the French language edition of This Princess Kills Monsters!

There’s no specific book I want to single out this month, but a whole bunch I very much liked, including:

SLOW GODS by Claire North, WE COULD BE RATS by Emily Austin, ASUNDER by Kerstin Hall, HEAP EARTH UPON IT by Chloe Michelle Howarth, TO RIDE A RISING STORM by Moniquill Blackgoose, WILD GEESE by Emmanuel Soula, SNAKE-EATER by T. Kingfisher, NEEDLE LAKE by Justine Champine, ONCE WAS WILLEM by M. R. Carey, THE PROJECTIONIST by Kirsti Wishart, THE ANTIDOTE by Karen Russell, and THE BEWITCHING by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

This one from Olympia, Washington courtesy of Ruth Apter!

It’s January 1, and that can only mean one thing… it’s time for THE RY AWARDS, given to the best books read by Ry in the previous year! It’s the most ignored, least prestigious literary award in the entire world, and it starts as always with Ry’s favorite genre –

FANTASY AWARDS

BEST FANTASY: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

BEST FANTASY MYSTERY: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

BEST HIGH SCHOOL FANTASY: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

BEST COLLEGE FANTASY: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

BEST CANNIBAL FANTASY: Star Eater by Kerstin Hall

BEST FANTASY SERIES OPENER: The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

BEST FANTASY SERIES CLOSER: The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri

BEST HISTORICAL FANTASY: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

BEST FANTASY RETELLING: Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

BEST LITERARY FANTASY: To The Chapel Perilous by Naomi Mitchison

BEST FANTASY NOVELLA (tie): The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar & The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Of course, after fantasy we have to have –

SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS

BEST SF: The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey

BEST LITERARY SF: Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis

BEST DYSTOPIAN SF: Dreamland by Rose Rankin-Gee

BEST LITERARY DYSTOPIAN SF (tie): Gliff by Ali Smith & Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

BEST HUMOROUS SF: Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley

BEST SCIENCE FANTASY SF: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

And after science fiction there’s no choice but –

HORROR AWARDS

BEST HORROR THRILLER ROMANCE: Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta

BEST LITERARY HORROR: Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

BEST VAMPIRE HORROR: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab

BEST APPALACHIAN HORROR: Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

BEST BOARDING SCHOOL HORROR: The Narrow by Kate Alice Marshall

Now, naturally we couldn’t finish without a couple of –

EXTREMELY SELF-INDULGENT AWARDS

BEST BOOK WRITTEN BY RY: This Princess Kills Monsters by Ry Herman

BEST BOOK WRITTEN BY A CLOSE FRIEND OF RY: Maisie Vs. the Himalayas by Jack Jackman

And finally, the beloved category that includes, well, everything else –

GRAB BAG AWARDS

BEST FORGOTTEN CLASSIC: The Passenger by Alexander Ulrich Boschwitz

BEST REMEMBERED CLASSIC: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

BEST NONFICTION: A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith

BEST LITERARY HISTORICAL (tie): Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta & The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

BEST LITERARY MYSTERY (tie): Little Mysteries by Sara Gran & Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

BEST LITERARY CONTEMPORARY (tie): Three Days in June by Anne Tyler & Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

BEST PHILOSOPHICAL FICTION: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

BEST ROMANCE: Nobody in Particular by Sophie Gonzales

BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL: Spent by Alison Bechdel

See you at the awards next year!