Meg

https://www.instagram.com/meggatzabookclub

https://www.goodreads.com/megatza

Meg’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (3370)
currently-reading‎ (3)
read‎ (2810)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
romance‎ (470)
fantasy‎ (317)
arc‎ (300)
historical-romance‎ (298)
netgalley‎ (271)
audiobook‎ (214)
science-fiction‎ (203)
ya‎ (192)

buddy-read‎ (170)
lgbtq‎ (130)
npr-top-100-sf-f‎ (101)
contemporary-romance‎ (96)
read-harder‎ (91)
fairy-tale‎ (90)
historical-fiction‎ (82)
regency-romance‎ (81)
academic‎ (73)
religion‎ (69)
victorian‎ (66)
paranormal‎ (65)

dystopias‎ (62)
india‎ (43)
non-fiction‎ (43)
speculative-fiction‎ (43)
sapphic‎ (29)
medieval‎ (28)
mystery‎ (27)
recommended-by-ella‎ (27)
novella‎ (26)
indian-fiction‎ (25)
fantasy-romance‎ (24)
kiss-and-let-me-telechat‎ (24)

pirates‎ (24)
read-harder-2020‎ (24)
read-harder-2019‎ (21)
read-harder-2017‎ (20)
scotland‎ (20)
short-stories‎ (20)
dnf-maybe-return‎ (19)
christmas‎ (18)
historical-fantasy‎ (18)
horror‎ (18)
favorites‎ (17)
partial-read‎ (17)

Stats | More…

Meg is Currently Reading

Meg is currently reading

A Right Honorable Soldier (Secret Soldier #2)

by Jane Hadley (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Mar 24, 2026 04:29AM

Meg is currently reading

Heart of Obsidian (Psy-Changeling, #12)

by Nalini Singh (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Mar 23, 2026 04:42AM

Meg is currently reading

These Burning Stars (The Kindom Trilogy, #1)

by Bethany Jacobs (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: netgalley, science-fiction, lgbtq, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in November 2023

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Meg said: " Genre: Science fiction

Sometimes revenge can take decades. Esek Nightfoot is powerful, brilliant, and ruthless. On a visit to the Kinschool of Principes, Esek has the opportunity to watch a class of promising clerics. Students are genderless and go by Genre: Science fiction

Sometimes revenge can take decades. Esek Nightfoot is powerful, brilliant, and ruthless. On a visit to the Kinschool of Principes, Esek has the opportunity to watch a class of promising clerics. Students are genderless and go by numbers, and Esek is as impressed as she should be by the first five she watches fight. But then there’s Six, who is utterly brilliant. Ruthless Esek challenges Six, telling it, “impress me, and I’ll consider giving you a spot as my novitiate.” Years later, the matriarch of the Nightfoot family instructs Esek to find Six, to hunt it down, and Esek, who has begun to think of Six as “them” rather than “it” takes on a new obsession to find out Six’s identity and what it has to do with interstellar politics, jump drive resources, and the fate of the Nightfoot family.

A debut novel with an absolutely impressive scope, Bethany Jacobs tackles so much in this science fiction political thriller and drama. The time span of this book is twenty years, but the revenge arc actually stretches from before the story begins. It still moves quickly, as the intensity of the chase is pressing. The present-day timeline has urgency while the timelines in the past are a bit more reflective. Luckily for audiobook listeners, this is handled very well on audio, with the year-of-action recited at the beginning of each chapter.

These Burning Stars also has some of my favorite SF worldbuilding - you learn enough about Esek’s world - and her worldview - in the first chapter without info-dumping, and more about the Houses, space travel, the political backdrop are revealed along the way, most of the time as those details relate to plot. The mark of good worldbuilding is to never say “well that couldn’t happen” about an event or technology because the appropriate groundwork wasn’t there. Jacobs does a fantastic job of giving us an expansive empire, a brutal inheritance system, and cutthroat machinations and revenge.

While I did receive an eARC for this from @orbitbooks_us I primarily listened to a library audiobook copy (by the time I received the ARC, the book had been published), but I found that this was an excellent multi-format read. Places, names, and dates were easier to track in print, but I also love Natalie Naudus’s narration. Naudus has a way of making intense action feel intimate as she reads, and I loved listening to this.

These Burning Stars is out now! And I can’t wait to see what Bethany Jacobs comes up with next! ...more "

Nov 04, 2023 07:45AM · see review

Meg’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6)

The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6) by Ursula K. Le Guin

3 highlights

“Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls ‘facts.’ It is different from business,”

See Meg’s 17 books with notes and highlights…

Meg’s Quotes

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

1471 likes

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

tags: humour, individuality, science-fiction

6239 likes

“Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.” And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.”
― Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

14 likes

“Myths are compost. They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the stories that accrete to religions as they grow. (“If”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

2 likes

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

5886 likes

More of Meg’s quotes…