It’s 4:10 PM…

…and I’m making a pot of coffee.  I managed to land another two-day weekend, my second of the past eight weeks, only I didn’t know that I was getting it until showing up to OtherJob yesterday to pick up my paycheck and noticing I wasn’t on the schedule.

I am emphatically not complaining.  So far today my activities have included finishing a book I was reading and taking a long nap and not bothering to shower until 2:30, so I’m working hard.

*stares into space for literally twenty-three minutes*

*gets up and gets coffee, drinks half a cup*

So.  Yeah.

Let’s talk about that book for a minute, actually, although this isn’t going to rise to the level of a review:  Nemesis Games, the fifth book in James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series, and the book that is, I think, finally going to get me started on buying the series in hardcover once volume 6 comes out in December.  In some ways, Nemesis is a sloppy mess of a book; I don’t know if it’s because I was trying to read it as an author or what, but it’s clear for the majority of the book that a) there’s a lot of deliberate moving around of chess pieces so that the right characters can be in the (improbably) right places for the action of the book to move forward, and b) this isn’t a book itself so much as a setup for the next book or, more likely, the next couple of books.  I feel like you can see the architecture on this one in a way you can’t with most books and you haven’t been able to in the previous four Expanse novels.

That probably sounds like a complaint, so let me follow it up by saying that Nemesis Games surprised me in a way that I haven’t been surprised since reading A Game of Thrones for the first time, and that it’s virtually impossible to talk about the book in any detail without spoiling how Corey wipes the status quo almost completely clean and throws every corner of his(*) universe into turmoil by the end of the book, only to then turn around and introduce a whole new problem in the final chapter of the book.  It’s a hell of an ambitious thing, Nemesis Games is, and even if the story wasn’t as compelling as it was I’d respect the hell out of it for what it managed to do.  My wife read it before I did, and she’s been chewing her nails for weeks waiting for me to get around to it since she wanted to talk about it and refused to tell me anything before I’d finished the book.  That’s compelling, guys.  Like I said, the book’s kind of a mess as a standalone artifact, but maybe as book 5 of what is probably a series with no planned end it doesn’t need to be.  I mean, it’s not like anyone’s starting with Book 5, right?

…you should probably read these books, is what I’m saying.  There’s a season of TV floating around out there that you should get into, too, as it’s quality stuff, even if the TV version of Amos is fighting with the Amos in my head in a way I don’t like.  My Amos is better and he needs to win.

(*) James S.A. Corey is actually two people, but saying “their” in this context feels weird.  They’re both dudes, so “he” it is.