aja > Recent Status Updates

i feel like the andrews have a voice much better fitting for urban fantasy than this hybrid of high fantasy & isekai so i'm not 100% sure how i feel about this yet, but the kate daniels series means so much to me i will absolutely be sticking this one out unless something particularly egregious happens

i realize i am reading this very slowly but that is only because for some reason my brain is determined to only read it at work. i am having a GREAT time. just genuine endless delight

why did they do that with the title of this edition.............................. anyway i am picking this up because leave it (un)read had an entire blog post about georgette heyer's regency romances & it sounded NUTS so i figured it would be a fun early foray into romance novels. really enjoyed this opening chapter, we open with our romance hero killing a man & the quickly move on to lots of fun sharp gossip

hmmmmmmmm. undecided how i feel about this so far, but then, we are only two stories in. i liked the second better than the first

another very mixed bag here-- a couple were fine, one i thought was interesting but disliked in execution, and then 'to follow the waves,' which i really, really liked. please stop telling me what your story's moral is, el-mohtar, and just TELL ME YOUR STORY. this is always when you are at your best

highlight of this so far for me is very easily "and their lips rang with the sun," which runs closest to what i love about a good fairytale and also doesn't feel like someone's hitting me in the head with a mallet that reads "this is the moral of this story." "the lonely sea in the sky" had some rly fun & interesting concepts but i was somewhat less impressed w the the delivery. also for once i enjoyed a poem

liked the short story featured at the end of 'the river has roots' enough that i decided when this came out i would check it out so we shall see how this goes. undecided whether this first one is too heavy handed-- that is often the way of fairytales, after all?

love love love the sense of impending and inevitable doom in this section, a kind of sword of damocles of cosmic scope. we cannot stop it, we cannot change it. things happen this was because there is no other way for things to be. aiat.

i was half dreading and half hoping i'd still like this, and well. what can i say. i'm a sucker for this kind of strange melange of genres: science fiction, fantasy, horror, the blend of pulpy westerns and arthurian grandeur with a multiverse our characters are painfully aware of, the dream-like state of it all. it would be even better if stephen king knew how to be even VAGUELY normal about women

haven't read this in ages and i couldn't figure out anything else i was in the mood to read so. curious to see how this goes for me now lol

i'd forgotten how genuinely fun this was!

haven't read this since college i think but i've been meaning to ever since i read the extraordinarily unimpressive 'katabasis' & finally just grabbed it off the bookshelf to start. part of a collected edition of all three books but i don't intend to read them all in one go, so. anyway from the introduction today i learned that according to the bible the sun & (presumably) the earth are both aries signs. who knew!

completely forgot about my dresden files reread lmao. woops?

this is really inspiring my own journaling habits i will say

now what is THIS thing

18 pages in & i am already stressed out this is gonna be great

confident this has been designed in a lab to irritate me in particular. as a whole it's fine -- the action sequences are good, and i like the characters. but as someone who is both pedantic and familiar enough with the source material to have a good sense for when things are off i think i'm like. the worst kind of reader for this book lol. also we just hit the start of the real plot like. 30 pages ago. good grief

very nitpicky complaint here but why, in a book of norse-allegory, are we italicizing the non-english old norse/icelandic words. i hate when we do that in general bc it's so othering but like. the people whose POVs we are reading know what a knarr is. they know what hird means. esp when other words like berserk (WHICH IS NORSE) and weregild are not, this feels so jarring & just keeps taking me out of the story.

not 100% sold on this yet but i'm willing to forgive quite a bit for a fun romp through a norse-inspired fantasy so we shall see how this goes

need something short & quick to tide me over between finishing my book yesterday & rose bringing my next one home from the library & OMQ has yet to disappoint lol so

our handling of the vastness of space in our intergalactic travel and communication is SO FUN. god i love cherryh so much

started this at work today & i am annotating as i go so we are reading slower than usual but i am having a GREAT time. picked this up bc i was excited for the way cherryh plays with alien gender & already it is so fun; the different cultures she invents for her works are always so, so interesting, and this is certainly no exception. the kif names are so fun to say-- ikkkukkt. hinukku. akukkakk. i love it

two scifi novels back to back, who am i

"LUCIFER HAS FALLEN" and we are talking about nuclear bombs. sick as fuck. also the IMMACULATE CONCEPTION???

book ii finished-- i loved this so much. such an interesting juxtaposition of church vs science and how our personal prejudices bend both to suit our agendas. love too that so far each book has ended with the buzzards eating the remains of one of the characters we met in that book. cathartes aura regnan!!! the world was created especially for buzzards

updating once again bc i have finished book i. rly enjoying this, excited to see where book ii takes us

i swear i am actually reading this!!! sick brain made reading over the weekend tricky tho lmao. anyway i just learned about the original process for making blueprints by reading this, which is always fun. also ever entertaining to see the way authors deliberately warp knowledge of our current/recent eras to account for how understanding of that knowledge might change over centuries w less technology. having fun!