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The Pick & Mix in 2017
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Mervi2012
Posted 2017-09-01 2:22 AM (#16236 - in reply to #14868)
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I finished a couple of more Babylon 5 books: Blood Oath by John Vornholt and Clark's Law by Jim Mortimore.
Neither of them were as good as Tilton's book. Blood Oath centeres of G'Kar: an old enemy's daughter swears the blood oath against him and G'Kar is so afraid that he fakes his own death. Garibaldi and Ivanova investigate. This book invents G'Kar's wife and takes us to the Narn Homeworld.
Clark's Law introduces a new alien race. One of them goes insane and kills a human. Earthgov is determined to put that alien on trial and species tensions run high on the station. The new alien race was very interesting but the book wasn't canon at all for the show.

I also finished Winter of the Gods by Jordanna Max Brosky which is a sequel to her Immortals which I really enjoyed last year. I enjoyed this book just as much. The main character is Selene deSilva, the former goddess Artemis. This book is also a murder mystery. Selene and her new boyfriend investigate the murder of one of the Greek gods.
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dustydigger
Posted 2017-09-29 4:31 PM (#16304 - in reply to #14868)
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Location: UK		I had a very varied month this September,as I am working hard to get through my WWEnd challenges,early before all the December mayhem begins!
Phew!!! Battled my way through the final book of Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos,The Rise of Endymion. Lots of very slow bits,massive infodumps,and a protagonist who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer,plus plenty of religion bashing,par for the course in a lot of SF. Also time travel,teleportation,lots of space battles,cool tech,lots of space travel,and a truly wondrous version of a Dyson sphere,and a very satisfying tying up of all the threads tossed up over 4 books.Romance,horror,melodrama, plus several SF subgenres. Everything but the kitchen sink,tossed like a salad,but somehow it all sorted itself out in the end.Not a patch on Hyperion of course,but what is?
And the Shrike became a sort of good guy,at least in contrast with the truly horrific Nemes Rhadamanth. That lady is one scary creature!!!
I finished Charlaine Harris's Midnight Crossroad,a quietly enjoyable UF tale,no gore or the gratuitous sex that ruined the early promise of her Sookie Stackhouse series,once the TV series arrived.Its much more in her Harper Connelly style.
I plodded through Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss which disappointed and irritated me,because it was overcomplex,very slow and downbeat. I was really disappointed in this book which seemed to be trying too hard to be mysterious,ending up merely tediously obfuscated,and far too long.Annoying that it didnt follow the story and characters of Mythago Wood. Also I didnt care at all about the rather cardboard characters,so bye bye Holdstock.
I really enjoyed N K Jemisin's The Broken Kingdoms. You all know I get VERY bored with standard fantasy,but Jemisin is such a good writer.Her world building is very interesting,her plotting skilful,but where I give her top marks is the characters,definitely non stereotypical.Even small cameo characters are well delineated.I was of course disappointed that,like Lavondyss the major characters of the first book in the series The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms barely appeared,a mere handful of pages.Jemisin makes you think of her characters well after you finish the books and its,you so want to see more of them.An intriguing author,I will try to fit in The Fifth Season this year,ifpossible.
Also enjoyable is the Abraham Merritt Megapack from Wildside. I read Through the Dragon Glass and The People of the Pit,and intend to dip in and out as and when I have the spare time. I do love the ornate prose of weird fiction! At the time these stories were written it was still possible for authors to write about secret peoples in the Arctic,or hidden away on mysterious islands in the South Seas.Today satellite pics would have exposed the Pit to the world,and the people in the South Seas would be doing hula hula dancing for the tourists. Pity!
Cant believe that Wildside Press,via Amazon, are able to publish 5 novels and 10 short stories by Merritt for a mere 79 cents! Now thats what I call value.lol.
Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven was a poignant,elegantly written musing on the fragility of the modern world, the unpredictability of memory,and the decision as to whether it is more important to rebuild the past,or go forward shaking off the baggage of the past entirely. Made me think I had better savour the benefits of civilization while I can - and start stocking up for the coming apocalypse,whatever form it takes.lol.
Next up is Jane Yolen's Cards of Grief,Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring,and Damon Knight's Mind Switch.
I have now completed 74/80 of my Pick N Mix challenge,and in all we have read 619 books. Awesome! I still have hope that we can reach 800 books read by the end of the year. Keep it up Pick N Mixers!
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Mervi2012
Posted 2017-10-27 11:50 AM (#16411 - in reply to #14868)
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Lots of people have loved Marie Brennan's "A Natural History of Dragons" so I finally succumed to its lure and read it. It's written in a memoir style and starts from the main character's childhood. Isabella is a woman in a pseudo Victorian culture who has a passion to scientifically study dragons. I liked it a lot. Fortunately, the rest of the series is available in Finnish libraries so I intend to read them all.

"The Brightest Fell" is the 11th book in Seanan McGuire's urban fantasy series and I loved it just as much as the previous books and I'm looking forward to the next ones.

Pip Ballantine's and Tee Morris' third book in the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences steampunk series unfortunately didn't work for me as well as the previous books. In "Dawn's Early Light" our heroes Eliza Braun and Wellington Books travel to America to consult in a case of disappearing sea and air ships. However, they stumble into a plot to create a horrifying scientific weapon. Unfortunately, the book also has two romance triangles, which was two too much for me.

I just finished Mercedes Lackey's "Fortune's Fool" which is the third book in her Five hundred kingdoms fantasy series. Instead of focusing on just one fairy tale and twisting it, this book borrows from a variety of different fairy tales from Japan, Russia, and Arabian Nights. I really enjoyed the main romance between Katya who is a mermaid and a spy for her father and Sasha the seventh son of a king and therefore the fortunate fool. Really fluffy and light fantasy.

I'm going to read the next book, too, which seems to be a mashup between Sleeping Beauty and Snow white.
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dustydigger
Posted 2017-10-27 12:30 PM (#16412 - in reply to #14868)
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Location: UK		I managed to crack on with my challenge reads this month.
Jane Yolen's Mythopoeic Award winner of 1985 Cards of Grief was a fascinating look at earth anthropologists making a study of a First Contact world,earnestly confident that they will make a minimal effect on that world.Well depicted world setting but little characterization.Well,after all it was only 144 pages long,amazing how much interesting stuff was packed in there! lol. Ah,the good old days,when books were short but packed with ideas....
In Damon Knight's Mind Switch (aka The Other Foot) a reporter visiting the Berlin Zoo to view a new alien inmate finds their minds swapped Mostly we follow the culturally naive alien in the human's body as he battles to cope with our bewildering culture.Ase cute deeply ironic ending is a final twist in an amiable rainy afternoon read. That makes 25/27 Grand Masters of Science Fiction read in my WWEnd challenge. I only need to read a Michael Moorcock and a James E Gunn to complete that list. Not looking forward to the Moorcock,havent got more than 30 pages in on any of his works! James E Gunn will be more fun I think......next year.......
Really enjoyed Amanda Steven's follow up to The Restorer,The Kingdom. The heroine can see ghosts,and we learn much more about her background while she battles against witches.Nicely spooky at times. I have acquired book 3,The Prophet,and will read it near the end of the month for my Halloween Spooky Read challenge.
Also read Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring,the follow up to The Integral Trees,pleasant enough but often difficult to follow exactly.
Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon,a short story collection set in an Irish bar where various aliens from thegalaxy a well as aliens from American sciety come to tell their tales.Under that guise Spider is obviously working out his difficult emotions in connection with the Vietnam war,and the dire straits of American society in the 70s.A few too many puns for my tastes,and the rather sentimental and would be hopeful thoughts on the futureof the book at the tail end sat uneasily with the bleak tone of the rest of the book under the humour. But a amiable enough read for this female Brit. Probably a whole lot more resonant for US males I should imagine.
C J Cherryh's Serpent's Reach had that bleak,dark sort of tone that much of her hard edged early fiction,like The Faded Sun trilogy, I wish I had read this many years ago,before I read much of the Alliance -Union cycle,because this tale really gives an understanding of just why the Alliance abhorred the whole idea of programmed humans,the azi. Good stuff. Last year I read 40,000 in Gehenna,which gave us glimpses of the azi,and now I think I really need to reread Cyteen,which I read early on back in the late 80s,before I had read more than the Chanur saga. I am sure it will make much more sense now. There's one book already on next year's list! lol.

Well,I am FINALLY finished my Pick N' Mix for 2017,80/80 read.!! Its been an interesting year,I've got closer to my plan to read all the Hugos (two more on the agenda for this year,then the remaining dozen for next year). I am down to ten Nebulas left so maybe next year I will complete them all!Some awfully big tomes there,the books get thicker by the decade.
Well done to those who have finished the challenge - Abalone,daxxh, Elizabeth R, - and of course our glorious Weesam an awesome lady indeed! lol
Some others are very close indeed,like Ann Walker,39/40,ScoLgo 37/40,and sushicat 19/20 .Several other Pick N Mixers have only 5 or 6 books to read,so here's hoping they finish! Keep it up
WE have read 668 books between us this year,excellent.two moremonths to go!
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ScoLgo
Posted 2017-10-27 6:55 PM (#16413 - in reply to #16412)
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Nicely done, Dusty! I will definitely finish this year. I only have ~2.5 books to go - but they are The Book of the Short Sun trilogy by Gene Wolfe so the going is rather dense. I have also become distracted with several Hallowe'en reads this month but expect to get back to Pick & Mix in November.

I read quite a bit of Cherryh this year. Mostly as part of the Grand Mistresses of Genre Fiction challenge. Hestia, Wave Without a Shore, 40,000 in Gehenna, Cyteen, Regenesis, Heavy Time, and Hellburner. I was really glad I read 40K in Gehenna before Cyteen since the references, while not necessary to the Cyteen story, still gave me a fair amount of relevant background. Regenesis is a direct sequel to Cyteen so that might make two for your 2018 list?!?

Thanks for mentioning Serpent's Reach. I'm going to have to read that soon as I didn't realize it ties in so much with Alliance-Union. I also loved The Faded Sun trilogy, which I read for Pick & Mix in 2016. If Serpent's Reach is in that wheelhouse, I am sure to like it.
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Mervi2012
Posted 2017-11-23 3:10 AM (#16470 - in reply to #14868)
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Well, Lackey's "Sleeping Beauty" wasn't as interesting to me as some of the other books in the series but I liked it well enough. Once again, it has a quite capable heroine, especially for 16-year-old. The two male leads and their friendship was also very nice.

I just finished the newest book in Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Diving series "The Runabout". It's the sixth in the series and still going strong. Boss and her crew are now investigating a starship graveyard and they come across one very interesting one. It's shorter book than the others but just right for the story. Eagerly waiting for the next one.
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dustydigger
Posted 2017-11-24 7:05 PM (#16475 - in reply to #16470)
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Location: UK		Mervi,I have never read any of Rusch's books,but I just looked at the Diving series and it looks my kind of thing. So the first book,Diving Into The Wreck has the honour of being my first book on the TBR for 2018.One down and only 79 other titles to sort for next year's Pick N' Mix! lol.
I always have great fun preparing my reading list each year.
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Mervi2012
Posted 2017-11-30 10:12 AM (#16491 - in reply to #16475)
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dustydigger - 2017-11-24 7:05 PM
Mervi,I have never read any of Rusch's books,but I just looked at the Diving series and it looks my kind of thing. So the first book,Diving Into The Wreck has the honour of being my first book on the TBR for 2018.


I hope you like it! Boss seems to be a character readers either love or hate.

I always have great fun preparing my reading list each year.


I like that, too, but end up often reading quite other books, as mood takes me.
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dustydigger
Posted 2017-11-30 2:53 PM (#16494 - in reply to #16491)
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Location: UK		One month left of the challenge.Congrats to,Abalone,Anne Walker,daxxh,ElizabethR,piebald and Weesam for finishing,
.Diane,Mervi and ScoLgo have one more book,and several others have a chance of completing if they crack on. We've read 702 books.Brilliant!
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Mervi2012
Posted 2017-12-05 4:13 AM (#16505 - in reply to #14868)
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I finished the challenge! My two last books were Rusch's "Runabout" which is a novella in the Diving universe. It focuses on the captain of starship Geneva. I enjoyed it a lot.

The last book was Lois McMaster Bujold's "Mira's Last Dance". It another novella set in the Chalion/Five Gods universe. The main character is Penric a young divine and sorcerer in the Bastard's order. It's a sequel to "Penric's Mission" and it seems that the story will continue in the future. It's light reading with a strong romantic element. I liked the first two Penric novellas somewhat more than these later ones. Patiently waiting for the continuation.
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DrNefario
Posted 2017-12-05 7:55 AM (#16506 - in reply to #14868)
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Location: UK		Is that not The Prisoner of Limnos, which is already out? (I haven't read any of them yet, myself)
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Mervi2012
Posted 2017-12-06 7:01 AM (#16512 - in reply to #16506)
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DrNefario - 2017-12-05 7:55 AM

Is that not The Prisoner of Limnos, which is already out? (I haven't read any of them yet, myself)


Yes, it seems to. Thanks!
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Engelbrecht
Posted 2017-12-06 5:34 PM (#16514 - in reply to #14868)
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Hi Dusty!

 Like last year, I've used this challenge to show my 10 favorite reads of the year - some great stuff this year!

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dustydigger
Posted 2017-12-10 4:16 AM (#16522 - in reply to #16514)
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Location: UK		@ Mervi,well done!!.
I just acquired LMBs Paladin of Souls for next year's challenge - and it is HUGE!!! lol

@Engelbrecht. Thanks for doing the challenge. Interesting that you chose Ninefox Gambit. Opinion seems rather divided on this one.some people found it a bit disappointing. I havent even heard of many of your choices .
I'm still working my way through Hugos and Nebulas,at a rate of about one a month.(read 54/66 and 43/53 respectively) and usually read 50s and 60s stuff,and this year Defining books of the 90s,so I havent a clue about the wider world of SF/F and books of the day. You are so close to finishing all the major SF award winners. Think you'll finish them in 2018?.
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Mervi2012
Posted 2017-12-19 6:22 AM (#16543 - in reply to #16522)
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dustydigger - 2017-12-10 4:16 AM

@ Mervi,well done!!.
I just acquired LMBs Paladin of Souls for next year's challenge - and it is HUGE!!! lol


Thanks, Dustydigger!
I hope you like Paladin of Souls.
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ScoLgo
Posted 2017-12-26 5:21 PM (#16563 - in reply to #14868)
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With Return to the Whorl, I finished my 40 books for this challenge a couple of weeks ago. Looking forward to picking titles for 2018!

Edited by ScoLgo 2017-12-26 5:22 PM
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dustydigger
Posted 2017-12-28 3:16 PM (#16583 - in reply to #14868)
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Location: UK		Good for you ScoLgo!
And well done all the 24 Pick N Mixers who read a magnificent 727 books this year.
I am going to do the challenge again this year - cant believe this will be the fifth year! - but I think the discussion thread will be barely a token thread. I used to keep it up well,but now have very limited time to spend running the thread,and there is little response anyway.We'll see! But many thanks to those who have posted on the thread in the past. Much appreciated.
See you all in the New Year when we Pick N Mix once more!
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ScoLgo
Posted 2017-12-28 4:18 PM (#16584 - in reply to #16583)
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dustydigger - 2017-12-28 1:16 PM

Good for you ScoLgo!
And well done all the 24 Pick N Mixers who read a magnificent 727 books this year.
I am going to do the challenge again this year - cant believe this will be the fifth year! - but I think the discussion thread will be barely a token thread. I used to keep it up well,but now have very limited time to spend running the thread,and there is little response anyway.We'll see! But many thanks to those who have posted on the thread in the past. Much appreciated.
See you all in the New Year when we Pick N Mix once more!


Dusty, thank you for all you do!

It's true I don't post much here. I don't even post all that much on LibraryThing, which is my main hangout now that Shelfari & Leafmarks are gone. The 'conversations' just don't have the same feel.

I do still read the challenge threads here and post occasionally so, should you decide to create a 2018 thread, I'll do my best to participate.
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Leyra'an
Posted 2017-12-28 6:23 PM (#16585 - in reply to #14868)
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Location: USA		Well, 2017 didn't turn out well for me as a reader. Too many conflicting priorities getting in the way of reading and writing time, and when push comes to shove writing is always the higher priority. Made it through 12 of 20.

Since I stink at predicting the future (obviously) I'm reluctant to set up a list of more than 10 titles for 2018. Being an incurable optimist, I'll probably make it 20 and be embarrassed again this time next year. lol
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