The thought of writing full reviews of all of these makes me tired, and it’s been a long day and my wife is out of town for the next eight days for work so I’m kinda crabby and tired already, and I’ve tried to write these for a week and not gotten anywhere. So we’re going to do this! I’m going to post four book covers! You should read those four books. If you want to know more about them, ask me in comments, and I’ll either respond in comments or write a full review of them this weekend sometime when I’m feeling more like a human being who can be engaged with in society.

At any rate, Canticle woke up my Religious Studies Brain, and after finishing it I immediately texted my friend with a doctorate in theology and insisted that she read it as soon as possible. This is historical fiction and is the only book on the list with no real genre elements, and God, it was so good. So so good.

I could have done without the romance angle in Weavingshaw, but everything else about it is so good that I can overlook it.

This was awesome, and one of the rare books that I wish was longer, especially for those of us who don’t really know anything about Moroccan culture. I wanted more story after The Thing happens, but The Thing doesn’t happen until very late in the book.

Absolutely brilliant, although I’m uncertain why Kay used his fictional Sarantium and didn’t just use Constantinople. I mean, there’s bits of magic and the supernatural here and there, so maybe that in and of itself is why, but I could have accepted a Byzantine Empire with that stuff. I have the sequel to this on my shelf already, though, and this is my first book by Guy Gavriel Kay, but I suspect I’m going to read a lot by him this year.