Sixty-One Nails is probably the worst book on this year’s list of books read, or rather, it has the worst opening pages because I stopped reading. Second, sad to say, is Hoyt’s Touch of Night, a truly tonedeaf Pride and Prejudice with vampires. I have read a better take on the idea at (unsurprisingly) a fic archive.
Treason’s Shore completes the Inda sequence and is awesome. Okay, it isn’t perfect, and no fourth book concluding a saga of such length and complexity could possibly satisfy every reader, but it is awesome. If you dislike epic fantasy because it’s the chosen young man and the long cross-country slog and the cardboard-cutout baddies and the obstacles that don’t quite make sense, you should read this (start with Inda)—and I have read quite a bit of the usual run of epic fantasy, tyvm, all of which makes me appreciate Smith’s work the more. Posts on the first three books: one, two, three.
Invisible stands out amongst the pitifully easy to solve mystery novels for treating its own premise with some respect. Ivy has some grace as the little old lady no one suspects of investigating her friend’s death. The greying of the so-called baby boom generation (the richest demographic, on average) leads me to hope that we’ll see more books worth reading with protagonists past the first flush of youth.
I found the first five volumes of YKK (Cafe Alpha) charming and subtly thought-provoking, and then the Tōhoku quake occurred and it felt wrong to read about a post-apocalyptic Yokohama. I mean to return to it.
More in another post. I haven’t looked at Yuletide yet.
:-)