Delusions of Grandeur

To Shape a Dragon's Breath sync read post

2026-01-03T23:13:14Z

In conjunction with cyanmnemosyne and hamsterwoman (and whoever else wants to join!), I'm ~~finally!~~ getting around to reading Moniquill Blackgoose's To Shape a Dragon's Breath, which I was gifted by...hamsterwoman , I think? at least 2 years ago. XD It's always been one of those "I'll get around to it one of these days" books, but now that I know the sequel is coming out on Jan. 27, I figured I'd finally better get a move on. And oh man, am I in the mood for "magic school + scrappy underdog protagonist WITH DRAGONS"! :D

Usual rules apply:

Anyone is welcome! The post and comments are both public.
Spoilers will be unmarked up to the listed chapter(s), but please try to avoid spoilers from beyond that point.
No schedule/time limit - I'm hoping to have it done by the 27th, when To Ride a Rising Storm comes out, but that's not a hard deadline; the post will remain open pretty much indefinitely.
Have fun!

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Happy 2026! What happened this year, plus The Ministry of Time

2026-01-03T05:55:25Z

OK, I think this format is working out well: one item of life news (unfortunately generally of the waily-waily-waily variety these days), and then on to the fun stuff, generally books. :D

This entry's item of life news, of course, is Happy New Year! I hope 2026 brings kinder days for all of us.

2025 was A Year, to be sure. One of the biggest lessons I learned, best put by T. Kingfisher (I think?) is "outrage is not activism." Or, "bearing witness" (aka doomscrolling and feeling awful) doesn't change one single thing about the world; it just makes me a sadder and angrier person. I think there is a balance to be struck between being a well-informed person generally and not drowning in a sea of shit; that balance generally eludes me. That being said, Fix the News (thank you, Ada Palmer!) has been ENORMOUSLY helpful in counteracting that. I've found that most "good news" aggregators are generally of the "man saves puppy from drowning (but you still can't afford health insurance)" or "food pantry serves Thanksgiving dinner to record number of families (and also a record number of people are living below the poverty line because wages are stagnant and inflation is enormous)." Like, did you know that there's a twice-yearly HIV vaccine that's near 100% effective? Or that global hunger has fallen for the first time since 2020, with record harvests using less land? Or that child poverty has markedly declined, even accounting for global population increases? Or that there are now salmon in the Klamath River again? Or that there are now walking wheelchairs that can climb stairs? Seriously, it's some good shit.

Oddly (given the global aaaaaaaa), personally, this year was a pretty darn good one for me, although not unmixed with waily-waily-waily.

( In the waily-waily-waily column (mostly family health stuff)... )

( In the yay! column, on the other hand... (family stuff, WorldCon, work stuff, and tattoos) )

...whew, OK, I think that's just about it for me for 2025!

( The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley... )

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Life update, and Murderbot!

2025-08-09T21:59:21Z

So it's been a while since I've posted here!

I'll try to avoid talking about IRL politics/world events, especially US ones. Things are bad and scary for all of us, in various permutations. Those "joy is an act of resistance" posts that keep going around have never really worked for me. If even things that are supposed to be escapist are suddenly Heroic Political Resistance, then all this awful shit is truly inescapable. Let's just say that I'm taking Tolkien's direction to "think and talk about other topics than jailers and prison-walls" very much to heart. I'm also making a lot of soup. (I hate making soup. I'm not a fan of cooking in general. But it's something that I like to *have done*, and making soup in particular weirdly makes me feel better. Maybe it's a control thing - everything that's happening feels so wildly beyond my personal ability to affect it, but at least I can make sure my family has something nutritious and okay-bordering-on-good to eat, so that's one less thing to worry about. Or maybe it's so I can tell myself that I'm stressed and upset because I had to spend all afternoon making fucking soup, rather than all the other reasons to be stressed and upset. I dunno.)

So, yeah. I hope you're all escaping your prisons, making your soup, making somebody you love smile, whatever works for you.

Geopolitical aaaaaaaa aside, weirdly, the news in my life has been mostly good. R2 continues to be the Actual Best Husband, and a few years ago we adopted two extremely fluffy and wonderful cats, Jasper (who is voluminous and gentlemanly) and Sammy (who is paranoid but slowly coming to accept that we're not trying to eat him *all* the time). Pics to come!

( My brother P moved in with us temporarily... I think two years ago now? )

( I'm a capital-L librarian now! )

Overall, my IRL life has been a series of surprisingly bright spots!

Reading/fandom stuff has been... a bit up and down, actually. There were quite a few things that looked promising but staggered in vital ways/failed to fulfill their early promise, but there were also a few solid hits, and a few at least interesting failures! (Or at least "I respect what you're doing even if I don't like it.")

First, because it's what everybody is talking about: the Murderbot TV show. I know I always harp on about how I miss the old 24-episode format, which allows for broader and less-hurried character development, but for this, the 10-episode prestige miniseries format worked perfectly. For a short, tightly-written, fairly high-octane story, it made a short, tightly-written, fairly high-octane miniseries.

Did I like it? ...I think so. I definitely liked that everyone involved seems to have been a massive fan of the books, that Martha Wells was involved so heavily, and (it sounds like) that she was given so much creative control. I think most of the things that annoyed me are actually either "they changed it and now it sucks" or inevitable consequences of the print-to-screen process. So while my overall enjoyment might have been like a 7/10, fairly I think this is a solid 9-9.5/10 show.

( My thoughts (spoilery for the show, plus all books through System Collapse)... )
I had planned on writing about a whole bunch of other stuff (Le Guin! Romance novels! Hugo nominees!) buuut I do want to get this post out sometime this week, so I'll have to save those for next time. XD

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Terra Ignota - Perhaps the Stars

2024-02-20T01:00:58Z

Perhaps the Stars, by Ada Palmer.

( SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS omg so many spoilers! Seriously, do not read this unless you've finished this book... )

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Things I'm Grateful For

2023-11-25T00:16:35Z

'Tis the season, right?

But seriously, I am so goddamn lucky to have such a wonderful life. Every year at Thanksgiving, I used to say "I'm grateful for my problems," since holy shit they could be worse. These days, I think "I'm grateful for my problems" sounds a little smug and facile, so I don't say it anymore, but I'm very aware, and very fortunate, that my problems are along the lines of "I don't get along particularly well with one of my siblings, although we're both trying" or "I have a weird sensory processing disorder that gives me a hard time at work" or "I worry a lot about climate change." I have a roof over my head, a fridge full of food, a meaningful job that pays well, and a life full of wonderful people who love me, and this situation is likely to continue on pretty much the same. Oh, and great wi-fi. What more could I ask for?

( R2, my cats, the rest of my family, Bestchat, my health, my job, my home - that's a lot to be grateful for! )

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Terra Ignota - The Will to Battle

2023-11-03T05:23:41Z

The Will to Battle, by Ada Palmer.

( Usual disclaimer: major spoilers for this and all preceeding books... )

Well, I'm off to start Perhaps the Stars! I'm suddenly very grateful that I'm not reading these as they were released, and I don't have to wait like four years to read it. :D

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Terra Ignota - Seven Surrenders

2023-11-03T04:46:19Z

Next up!

Seven Surrenders, by Ada Palmer.

( Usual disclaimer: spoilers for this and the previous volume. I did my best to avoid spoilers for book 3, but I wrote this after finishing book 3, so I can't make any ironclad promises... )

Which morphed into:

( Extra cut because the formatting to messed up somehow... )
Seven Surrenders really upped the ante of Too Like the Lightning, and some of the murkier plot threads have started to come home to roost. But the best is yet to come!

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Terra Ignota - Too Like the Lightning

2023-11-03T03:52:49Z

A good number of years ago now, I got together for dinner with R2 and hamsterwoman . She was more breathlessly fizzy than I’d ever seen her about something that wasn’t Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, or Dragaera, and it was over some apparently very crunchy sci-fi with an unreliable narrator. It was written in the style of, and drew heavily from, Enlightenment philosophy. It was heavy going, she said, but well worth it.

That sounds awesome! I thought, and then proceeded to do exactly zip on it for the next like six years, barring being excited for her when she got to meet the author at Worldcon 2018. XD (For the record, I spent at least five of these years somehow thinking that the book she was talking about was Philosopher’s Flight, which I think she also gave me.) A few months ago, I realized I was in a rut of either fluffy, inconsequential reading, or things that tried to be weighty but failed to pan out in one or more major ways. I remembered that crunchy sci-fi thing that hamsterwoman , who has pretty high standards for this kind of thing, ~~flung forcefully in my general direction~~ recommended, and I thought, “what the hell? Might as well give it a shot.”

...anyway, here I am three books and a 28-page review later. (Spoiler: I liked them a lot.) I’m pretty sure that DW won’t let me post all *checks* 12,260 words in one entry, so I’ll split it up by book.

Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer.
( I did my best to avoid spoilers for books 2 and 3, but I wrote most of this after finishing book 3, so I can't 100 percent promise that this doesn't spoil future installments... )

So, yeah, I liked it an awful lot - it was exactly the sort of bracing, engaging, high-concept SF that I needed, but I wasn't fully in love with it yet.

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The Eidolon (and "The Separation," I guess)

2023-06-02T03:05:37Z

I am now officially up to date with the Tarot Sequence! :D

The Eidolon, by K.D. Edwards

Apparently this was a whole subplot that had to be excised from The Hourglass Throne for length reasons, and KDE used the opportunity to expand it into a whole-ass novella. In some ways, this really shows - it doesn't stand on its own or anything like, and it did have a certain Lower Decks Episode feel - but overall it feels more cohesive than the mishmash I was expecting.

( Terrible Teens shenanigans, more Portenteousness, and the requisite Big Bad scenery-chewing... )

Continuity-wise, I held off posting this review because I wanted to pair it with my review of "The Separation," the last of the free stories on KDE's website, but it's all of four pages long, and the plot is thus: a tutor tries to separate toddler!Rune and toddler!Brand, and gets whacked on the ankle by Brand, glowed angrily at by Rune, and yelled at by Lord Sun for his troubles. It's cute, but there's not exactly a lot to unpack. XD

But hey, since I did hold off, I've had time to dive into the fandom a bit, and I have fic recs! Only a couple so far, but as predicted, this is a fandom that lends itself *very* well to fanstuff.

You and Me, You and Me, You and Me, by Z_Aggro: one snapshot of Rune&Brand per year, from birth to age 20. Some are cloying (the cookie heist thing), some are heartbreaking (Rune after his own assault vs. Rune after Brand's whipping), and some are actually pretty goddamn adorable (their superhero game!!!). We also got some good insights into Brand's character - apparently he's a sci-fi nerd/Trekkie, or at least he was before the fall of the Sun Court! His favorite color is yellow ~~for totally not-Rune-related reasons!~~ Mayan taught him to play the guitar as post-Sun Court therapy! Anyway, this was sweet and incisive, with spot-on characterization and some great moments.

The Past Rewinds, by TheWriterWhoNeverWrites: Addam takes a hit meant for Rune, and temporarily loses the last ~15 years of his memory; implied to take place about 2/3 through The Hourglass Throne. I really want to see this idea explored more, because what we got is excellent. The surface stuff is mainly funny, fluffy, casefic/slice-of-life stuff (Addam immediately hits on ~~Brand~~ the mysterious hot Companion who apparently saved him, for example, and comes to some...interesting conclusions about what's up with his hand), but the undercurrents are all actually kinda heartbreaking. It's clear that Lady Jade, who launched the spell in the first place, meant to incapacitate Rune by sending him back to the time immediately after his assault, which would have been Very Bad, and Addam is heartbreakingly happy to see Quinn, who he last saw as a tiny baby, already deeply beloved but with very low chances of survival, as a happy, healthy (minus some nosebleeds and the occasional training-induced bruise), and thriving teenager. Again, great characterization, and leaning in an OT3 direction that I'm entirely happy with. :D

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The Hourglass Throne

2023-05-14T19:16:27Z

The Hourglass Throne, by K.D. Edwards.

MAJOR SPOILERS, and series-standard TW for sexual assault mention.

( Continuing the theme of the Tarot Sequence speedrunning the Dresden Files (albiet with like 800% less weird attitude towards women), this was some real Changes shit right here... )

So yes, I will be reading The Eidolon and I will be watching KDE's twitter like a hawk for a The Misfit Caravan release date, but I won't be holding my breath, given that THT was only released, like, a year ago. But, point is, soon enough I'll stop yelling at y'all about the Tarot Sequence ~~and start yelling at y'all about something else~~.

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Tarot Sequence novellas/short story collections

2023-05-11T04:09:26Z

Scenes from Quarantine, by K.D. Edwards

( Apparently COVID happened in this 'verse! Look here for all the 'love in the time of COVID' fluff you can shake a stick at but not so much for plot or structure... )

Scenes from the Holidays, by K.D. Edwards

( A step up, in that there was something vaguely approaching a plot (invlolving stakes, conflict, etc.), but still with a highly fanfic-y vibe... )

The Great Atlantean Battle Royalchemy, by K.D. Edwards

( The best of the bunch - there's an actual plot this time! With a potentially deadly problem to solve and everything!... )

So that's it for the novellas/short story collections! They increased dramatically in quality (or at least in my enjoyment of them) from earliest to latest, but even the...least engaging of them was short enough to go down smooth, and the most engaging of them was a damn good time.

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Further Tarot Sequence squee - The Sunken Mall, The Hanged Man

2023-05-08T02:16:04Z

Still working on the Big Family News post, but in the meantime, I've plowed through two more installments of the Tarot Sequence.

The Sunken Mall, by K.D. Edwards.

(Contains spoilers, and series-standard TW for child abuse.)

Alas, I enjoyed the first novella much less than the first novel. A lot of the good stuff was still there - the snappy dialogue, the good pacing, the strong relationships - but this one landed on the wrong side of self-indulgent, and ended up feeling a bit saccharine. It was very clearly meant to be a quick, easy, cutesy little bit of holiday fluff, and it accomplished that, but... I know it could be so much more, y'know?

( A lot of the stuff I didn't like boils down to it being written (apparently) quickly and without a lot of oversight, but the good stuff from TLS remains... )

The Hanged Man, by K.D. Edwards

(Spoilers throughout, and series-standard TWs for child abuse and sexual assault.)

I actually finished this novel in two days, but DW ate my review of it, aaaauuuuuurrrrgggghhhh! I was absolutely fucking livid when I opened up my draft yesterday morning, after having spent most of the previous day writing; I had meant to just tighten some things up and then post it… only to find that it had disappeared entirely. And this was, like, the one time that I didn’t back up my draft to a google doc, extra aurgh! So now I’m mad at the tech fail as well as at myself for not properly following the librarians’ creed of LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, aka back up your data in multiple formats). I’ve contacted DW support, on the off chance that they have older auto-saved drafts backed up on a sever somewhere, but for now, I’m using this as an opportunity to see The Lost Review as a first draft, and improve upon it in this one. I still reserve the right to be colossally pissy about it, though.

( Still a few more wobbles than The Last Sun, but the found family and action sequences are still everything I'd hoped they would be... )

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The Last Sun

2023-04-30T20:16:52Z

This was supposed to be a long and hopefully not too maudlin post about Big Family Health News, but then I tripped and fell headlong into this book, so y'all are getting the fun review first and the waily-waily-waily IRL stuff ~~whenever I finish the post~~ a little later. :D

The Last Sun, by K.D. Edwards.

May I just say: I fucking LOVED this book. It has so much of what was good about the Dresden Files - the snappy smartass dialogue, the cool fight scenes, the tight pacing, the genuine noir feeling - but so few of what was... less good. I certainly don't get the feeling that "yiiiiiiikes, Harry's attitude towards women isn't just a narrative choice, is it? D:", and when Rune's teenaged apprentice(/ward) develops a crush on him, he shuts that shit right down instead of awkwardly ruminating about how hot said teenaged apprentice(/ward) has become, But I Mustn't.

( As promised: snappy dialogue, cool fight scenes, tight pacing, genuine noir, and now with bonus found family!... )

So, yeah, I liked this book a normal amount. I've already requested the next novel, The Hanged Man, from the library, and I've discovered a delightful treasure trove of bonus stuff on the author's website, including an interim novella, which I've barely begun but hope to have finished in short order. :D

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Paladin's Hope, Swordheart, River of Silver, and The Virtu

2023-04-12T04:20:18Z

Happy spring, y'all! Life has been proceeding apace here; enough so that I will probably have to do an entirely separate IRL update post. But, in the meantime, books!

Paladin's Hope was the Paladin book I was most looking forward to reading, and, sadly, the one I enjoyed reading the least. It had this kind of... rushed, unfinished quality, where there were a couple of important elements that could have used more fleshing out, and it relied more heavily on tropes than usual in ways that worked against it rather than for it.

( Pluses and minuses... )

( Swordheart was where I realized that T. Kingfisher is, more or less, re-writing the same story over and over again, at least when it comes to romances... )

River of Silver, by S.A. Chakraborty.

( Not essential reading, but a lot of fun stuff the trilogy proper didn't have time and/or space for... )

The Virtu, by Sarah Monette.

I generally don't make a habit of adding trigger warnings to my reviews (to avoid spoilers, if nothing else, and I generally don't read many books that are super heavy on the most common triggers anyway), but oh my god the kids are not alright in this one. Like, it's enormously well-written, and sometimes even beautifully-written, but definitely give this one a miss if Very Bad Things (emotional/sexual/physical abuse and death) happening to kids is a no-go for you.

( Some of these pieces were difficult for me to read, but in different ways... (And there's fun stuff too, I promise!) )

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I got my tubes tied! and also continued Saint of Steel squee

2022-09-26T21:37:29Z

First, the big news: I had my first Actual Grownup Surgery with general anesthesia and very serious instructions for incision care and everything! I got my tubes tied last Friday. Or rather, I guess I should say I had my tubes removed - apparently the risk of ectopic pregnancy is to high with tying/clamping/burning/otherwise separating the Fallopian tubes, so now they just remove them altogether, which also greatly decreases the risk of ovarian cancer. Yay!

( I've known I didn't want to have kids ever since I became aware that it was an option... (TW: abortion, miscarriage, generally unpleasant medical/childbirth stuff) )

Anyway, tl;dr: getting one's tubes tied is a big decision, and not one to be made lightly, but I made it, and here I am!

( The actual procedure went pretty smoothly... (TW: medical stuff) )
Speaking of! I inhaled Paladin's Strength pretty much as soon as I got it, but overall I think I liked Paladin's Grace a little better. I was very much looking forward to a longer Saint of Steel novel, but ultimately I think this one could have been a good 15% shorter with not much lost.

( A little too much yearning for my taste, but plenty of )

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Itty-bitty life update, Forging Silver Into Stars, and Paladin's Grace

2022-08-18T04:37:02Z

So it's been, uh, a hot minute since I posted. XD

( RL-wise, things are going pretty decently, all things considered... )

Anyway, what did I come on here to talk about? Oh yeah, book reviews!

Forging Silver Into Stars, by Brigid Kemmerer.

When I started reading it, I found the characters insipid and the prose almost painfully clunky. After giving it a good think, I realized that the problem may just be that I was also simultaneously re-reading LotR and Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent, so of course anything that wasn't absolutely incredible would seem awkward and badly-written by comparison.

Well, I sat through all 400-odd pages of it, and it turns out that it really is just awkward and badly-written.

( Mostly bitching, er, kvetching, with a few positives thrown in for flavor... )

Paladin's Grace, by T. Kingfisher.

I've been kinda sidling towards T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon for a while, mainly on the strength of hamsterwoman 's major heart eyes for the Hamster Princess series, which is both charming and genuinely clever. Paladin's Grace was in my "maybe" pile when I went to Powell's a few weeks ago, which I winnowed down by the time-tested method of flipping to a random page and seeing how I felt about the style/authorial voice. (BTW, this saved me from what looked like a really cool heist-y fantasy, but turned out to be written in tight third person, and the narrator spoke entirely in a truly unbearable brogue.) I liked the random bit I opened to - some guy was attracted to some lady and felt kinda bad about it for some reason, but he still got weird squishy feelings when she laughed - but more than that, I just really liked the writing itself. I immediately got a sense of both characters and their situation, and I liked how...sprightly? the narrative was. There really seemed to be a sense of genuine joy, and an enjoyment of the writing for its own sake on the author's part. I recently came across a couple of really interesting posts by hedgehog-moss about sound vs. meaning of language, and which cultures tend to value one over the other, so I think I've been paying a little extra attention to the actual aesthetics and flow of individual sentences, rather than just their cumulative effect.

Anyway, I just finished it today and GODDAMN is it good. I laughed out loud at least three times, which I don't think I've done since...Murderbot, maybe? Or maybe even Terry Pratchett. Point is, I started out kindly disposed towards it, but I fell hard at "Was no one suitably worried about the severed head situation?" in Chapter 4.

( HEART EYES, MOTHERFUCKER! ... )

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Reviews: Gideon the Ninth and Mélusine

2021-08-02T01:07:00Z

Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir.

Overall, I liked Gideon the Ninth? I think??? I certainly came away with very...mixed feelings about it. I spent most of the book preemptively mad at it for what I thought would be the reveal that Magnus and Abigail were the villains all along - I thought I'd been spoiled for that at some point in the past, but I guess not. I didn't much like Gideon as a protagonist, although I did like her as a narrator. (More on this later.) I thought that both she and Harrow were interesting characters, and I liked some of their couple-y moments, but ultimately they fell flat as a couple for me. I liked a lot of the other Houses a LOT, and I wish we'd gotten to see way, way more of them, particularly the Fourth and Fifth.

You see what I mean about mixed feelings. XD

( Spoilers herein... )

Overall I think I enjoyed Gideon the Ninth, even though I did find it frustrating a lot of the time. From what everybody has said, both aspects are amplified in Harrow the Ninth, so while I probably will read it eventually, I think I'll have to let the frustration/annoyance fade a bit before I do.

Mélusine, by Sarah Monette.

( I hope you like your swashbuckling and political intrigue with a side of Oh No That's Actually Horrifying... )

TL;DR: All of the trigger warnings for sexual assault and very child-unfriendly violence. That said, though, this was a great mix of deadly decadent court politics, good old-fashioned skulduggery, and intense magical WTF-ery. Actually, "intense" is a good word for Mélusine in general - it sucked me in early on, and I was *gone* until almost the very end. And yes, I do have the second volume on order from the library. :D

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Reviews: Winter's Orbit, The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls

2021-03-27T04:51:45Z

Review time!

After having been on a losing streak for a while (Witchmark, The Angel of the Crows, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, and Shadows Rising were all varying degrees of disappointing), I appear to be on an equal-and-opposite winning streak, because each of the books below was a Fucking Delight, albeit in different ways.

Usual blanket warning for All The Spoilers below the cuts!

First, off: Winter's Orbit, by Everina Maxwell.

( Mutual competence kink! Political machinations! Bears!... )

TL;DR: Delightful tropey space opera that helped me crystallize a lot of why I like the things I like; plz fling violently and lovingly at the head of your nearest Vorkosigan Saga fan.

And, speaking of Lois McMaster Bujold's works...

The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

( Apparently I just really like Lois McMaster Bujold as a writer... )

TL;DR: Not at all what I expected, but 95% utterly delightful (by which I mean "frequently painful") and 5% "...why does this need to be here again?" romance.

Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

( I've never read a protagonist quite like this before... )

TL;DR: I remain utterly in awe of LMB's skills regarding characterization, worldbuilding, and creating utterly unexpected protagonists that I love wholeheartedly.

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