#REVIEW: Threshing Day, by Rebecca Yarros

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This isn’t really going to be a review; if you have already read the three Empyrean books you’ve probably already bought this, and no one is going to start with it. It’s a novella with thirteen short stories about the day thirteen characters from the series met their dragons, and because of that, in a lot of ways it’s thirteen of the same story. There’s no one out there who needs to be convinced to buy this or not to buy this; it’s already baked in. No sane person would start the series with this book.

That said, I’m kind of crabby right now, and I have to put tomorrow’s lessons together and I don’t want to, and I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of other stuff to write about, so I want to make this point: this is a really cool special edition, guys, and if there’s any chance that you were going to pick this up and for some reason you haven’t yet, you probably want to grab it this weekend. The first printing has full-color artwork of all thirteen of the dragons to start each chapter, and full-color endpapers, and even the dragon silhouettes at the bottom of each page are in color, and in general the whole book looks amazing. With all the color artwork and the sprayed edges I’m surprised the book was only $24.99; the “standard edition” that is already showing up on Amazon has none of that for the same price and you may as well wait for paperback at that point.

The current mystery: I saw a video on TikTok of someone taking the dust cover off of their copy, and the actual front cover was dragon scales, and it was gorgeous, and I can’t find any evidence that it was real. My copy has just a basic black cover with the name and author printed in silver on the spine, and we were in Barnes and Noble the other day and theirs were the same. Google has not helped me, and naturally I can’t find the video any longer. If you know if the scales edition is real, let me know, because I need one. Book goblin has spoken.

EDIT: Ohhhhh you dirty bastards it’s the German version.

The Gathering Sanderlanche

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I have not been secretive about the fact that I am finishing the Wheel of Time books mostly out of spite. Okay, entirely out of spite. While it would be a huge exaggeration to claim that I haven’t enjoyed a single minute of this series, I have enjoyed a much lower percentage of minutes than I would generally be willing to put up with from my reading, particularly something of this massive scope.

According to my Kindle, I’m about 45 minutes of reading from the end of The Gathering Storm, the first book co-authored by Brandon Sanderson after Robert Jordan’s death and the twelfth book in the series, or the thirteenth if you count the prologue book.

And I’m … enjoying it? Quite a lot, actually? Which has made me really curious about what the general reception of the Sanderson books was from the broader Jordan fanbase, a group I don’t really consider myself a part of. Now, it’s probably worth pointing out that Sanderson wasn’t hired to write these books, he was hired to finish them, which is a subtly different beast; his job was never anything other than to bring the story to a close and so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s going after dangling plot threads with a broadax and shoving the whole thing forward as fast as he can– which, as it turns out, was still three books and probably 2500 pages at least. But it’s kind of fascinating to me that when you actually have things happen in these books, they’re pretty good! Sanderson has done a good enough job of mimicking Jordan’s style, including his weird ideas about gender and his creepy spanking fetish, that I don’t think I would ever have realized that Jordan was no longer writing the books were someone else’s name not on the cover. And it’s probably worth pointing out that on a sentence-to-sentence level, I have no idea how much Jordan actually wrote; for all I know, Sanderson’s role, especially on this first book, was more of an assembler and an editor than an actual co-writer. I assume his contribution grows as his trilogy continues.

But damn. There’s a bit midway through Storm where (spoiler alert for something you’ll never remember reading about if you haven’t read the books yet) Rand gets an a’dam put on him by one of the Forsaken. Had Jordan been writing, he would have been stuck in that fucking thing for three more books. Sanderson wraps up the whole thing in like five pages. I genuinely rolled my eyes and set my Kindle down for a minute when it happened, unwilling to believe what I had just read and extremely disinterested in reading Rand having even more reasons to be miserable for, surely, at least the rest of this book and most of the next one. But no! Five pages. Almost like it didn’t even happen. And then he kills the fuck out of Semirhage and another one of the Forsaken? In the same book? The same book that mentions all of the core characters except for Elayne, and moves everyone’s stories forward? Is that even legal?

Turns out it is. I’m not going to go straight into the next book when I finish this one; I need a hell of a palate-cleanser after my last two books being over two thousand pages long, so I’m going to read a bunch of short stuff for a while, but I probably won’t wait until the end of the month to pick up the next one.

On frugality

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

Just got back from an impromptu date night with my wife, which ended up, as I suspect many middle-aged date nights have, at Costco.

(Trigger warning: mild bragging, or at least a failure of humility)

The first thing you see when you walk into a Costco, of course, is the giant TVs. None of us really watch television, to be honest, and what TV is watched is generally done on a tablet; the TVs that are in the house are there for video games. But we glanced at the $2000 98″ set at the door and, as happens sometimes when encountering high-end electronics, I took a minute to reflect on how much better off we are now than when we got married.

“I could impulse-buy that TV,” I said. “Right now. Absolutely nothing bad would happen. We wouldn’t have to cancel anything or even cut back on anything. Just, fuck it, and buy a $2000 TV.” She laughed, we did not impulse-buy a $2000 TV, and we kept on walking. And, like, okay, there was no chance that we were buying a TV, but if we did, the actual problem with it would be where to put it, and not the cost.

Less than a minute later we walked past the saddest man in the world, some poor bastard who was trying to sell whole-house generators to random Costco people walking by. He greeted me, I said no as politely as I could, and then my wife surprised both of us by stopping and asking him what the basement price was to acquire such a thing. The hilarious thing was that it was completely obvious that no one had asked him anything during the time that he was there, as he took way too long to come up with an answer, which was ten thousand dollars, and then went straight into complaining about how two years ago it would have been five thousand dollars, and it was crazy how expensive his product that he was trying to sell us had gotten.

After we were done talking to him, my wife reminded me that we do, in fact, talk about having a generator installed every time our power goes out, which generally happens about once a year. So, okay. Ten grand, if we wanted to do that. Put that in the back pocket for now, though.

A few minutes later we were in the produce aisle, and I discovered they sold organic dates. The last time I had dates of any variety was in Israel, nearly thirty years ago. I would like to eat a date, I thought to myself, trying to ignore the fact that because we were in Costco the only real option would be to buy many dates and not just the one or two that would probably satisfy me, and then looked at the cost. $10, basically, for, I dunno, a couple of pounds of dates.

And I, the same dude who had just discussed impulse-buying a 98″ TV and had just had a serious conversation about a $10,000 home generator system (likely more than that, because remember, $10K was this guy’s floor,) almost put them back because the notion of spending $10 on dates was more than I was willing to do.

We bought the container. I look forward to throwing 95% of them out in a week or so. Or maybe longer. Hell, I have no idea what the shelf-life of organic dates might be.

Monthly Reads: September 2026

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Book of the Month is going to be a tie between Sisters of the Lizard and The Tapestry of Fate.

Unread Shelf: September 30, 2026

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Given the sheer number of new releases this month and the number of books I read that didn’t come off of the Unread Shelf, I’m impressed the carnage is this limited.

#REVIEW: The Rouse, by China Miéville

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I’m not gonna lie. Y’all, I have no idea.

I assume I’m not the only person who does this; when I am reading a book I know I’m likely to write a review of, I read it with that eventual review at least somewhat in mind. I’m not always likely to take notes or anything like that, but bits and pieces will jump out at me and I’ll stick them in the blog-part of my brain to discuss later.

The problem is that I could say literally anything about this book and I’m pretty sure it would be true. I hated it and it was brilliant. I loved it and it was exhausting. It’s got a complicated, detailed plot and it makes no fucking sense at all. I cannot tell you, as I’m sitting here, whether its central mystery was ever resolved, as it’s entirely possible that it was resolved in such an oblique manner that I missed it. Bits of it are, literally and without a trace of sarcasm or exaggeration, gibberish. At least six different languages make their way into the book, none translated, some not in Latin characters. There are two different main fonts, at different sizes. I don’t know what percentage of the words in this book Miéville straight made up but whatever you’re thinking it’s way higher than that. The book is largely dialogue, mostly of the circumspect and elliptical variety, but there isn’t a single fucking quotation mark in the book and sometimes it’s very difficult to tell who is talking or whether someone is speaking or thinking, and sometimes that’s because the characters themselves do not know if they’re thinking or speaking out loud.

One of the main characters spends a couple of chapters kidnapping children, exposing them to eldritch horrors, and returning them to their parents. The eldritch horrors in question: a literal ghost under a white sheet. The other’s vaginal secretions are more important to the story than vaginal secretions have ever been in a book before. She also occasionally drips from other orifices.

If China Miéville had not written this, I would never have finished it. But no one other than China Miéville could have written the fucking thing in the first place. You should pick this book up if and only if you are already a big fan of China Miéville. Not “I liked the Bas-Lag books.” You should pick this book up if and only if you have reread either Kraken or The City and the City, on purpose and of your own free will. And if that is the case, you already own it.

It is 1260 pages long and you will not have any idea what is going on the first time you read it. Expect to have to read it at least twice. There are four hundred and sixty-seven characters and they all go by their last names and one of them changes his name midway through the book for a reason that technically is given on the page but still doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. The lead antagonist might be Satan. The lead antagonist also might be one of the main characters. Or one of their friends. I’m really not sure.

The following is the entire “Plot” section for this book on Wikipedia as of 7:54 PM on September 29, 2026, and at least one of these sentences is not true:

The novel revolves around the suicides of multiple British army soldiers. It is set during the Cold War.

I’ve tried to read some “professional” reviews of the book; most of them are paywalled, unfortunately, but I did read one where the reviewer was honest enough to admit that he doesn’t have any idea what the fuck the book was about either. He still recommended the book. I get it.

I gave it three stars on Goodreads and Storygraph; it cannot be ranked using such a pedestrian manner as stars.

The physical copy of the book is really fucking cool, but I read it digitally, because a lot of time I read laying down and I would have broken my nose on this fucker at some point.

I’ll write another review after I read it again. When will that be? I have no earthly idea.

93%

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

Just a bit over a hundred pages left, and I was going to try to get you a review tonight but one of the cats decided it would be a better idea if we took a nap in the chair instead. The Kindle says I have an hour and sixteen minutes of reading left, and it usually overestimates but that puts me uncomfortably close to bedtime for someone who also doesn’t have lesson plans for tomorrow ready yet.

So another placeholder blog post tonight, and hopefully a review tomorrow, and then straight into the first of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s three Wheel of Time books, because I am nothing if not a glutton for punishment.

It’s too early for this post

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

My two reading projects this year, such as they are, were to finish The Wheel of Time and Temeraire, both of which are … lots of books. Both projects are on track; I have three books left in both series, and I’m going into the first Brandon Sanderson WoT book after I finish The Rouse (77%!) and may just blow through all of the rest of them in October if I find Sanderson’s version more palatable. I was also going to get further into Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings this year; that’s been put off to 2027.

The second project is going to be second chances for books I feel like I should have liked. This is going to be books that I picked up but didn’t finish and feel bad about, whether I liked them the first time through or not. I may still not like them! I may discover I just wasn’t in the mood for that series at the time. I don’t know how many books I want to include here, especially since several of them are book one of a series, but I have three in mind immediately:

The Terra Ignota series is finished now; I DNFed this in December of 2016 and to be completely honest I don’t remember why. (EDIT: I called it “too precious and proud of itself for me” on Goodreads!) Every other person I’ve talked to about this series has loved it. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood? I dunno. Either way, it’s first on the list of books I’m going to give another shot.

This is Book 1 of a trilogy; the second book is out (and I, uh, have it, despite not having finished this) and the third one is nowhere on the publishing horizon as far as I know. I may hold off on this until the end of the year and hope that the third book is at least announced by then. I like Marlon James, but I bounced off this book really hard in April of 2019. It’s kind of stuck in my craw ever since. I know writers I like can produce stinkers every now and again, but damn it, a fantasy novel by Marlon James should be my thing. I want it to be my thing. I’m trying again.

Stephen King is a liar, because I picked this up on January 21 of 2020 and put it down on January 22 of 2020. Did you know Leigh Bardugo went to Yale? Because Leigh Bardugo totally went to Yale, guys, and the first 75 pages of this reminded me of that so many times that I couldn’t tolerate it any longer. I have since read and enjoyed two other Bardugo series, and I have friends who like this series a lot, so I’m giving it another shot. Hopefully if I go in expecting a little Ivy League snobbery I’ll be okay.

That’s what I’ve got so far. There will be more, I’m sure, but those jumped out immediately when I started thinking about this. Maybe I’ll consider House of Leaves the unofficial first book; I’m planning on tackling that over winter break (Why? Dunno, but it’s the plan) and that’s close enough to 2027 to count.

Have you ever hated something on the first read and gone back to it?