Category: Reading

In which the plan failed

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I sat down at about 6:45 intending to read until 8:00 and then write a blog post, and before 7:00 was nodding away in my chair. This book I’m reading isn’t a bad book by any means, and in fact has some really strong aspects to it, but my God is it not catching my attention. That’s probably a me thing and not a book thing, but I think it’s gonna lead to a DNF anyway. The good thing about books is if you leave them on the shelf they stay there; they can always be picked up again later. I’ve gotten up and done some minor things and I’m still half-asleep, so unless this cup of tea I brewed wakes me back up (and the caffeine level in white tea is pretty minimal) the new plan is to go to bed early tonight and not worry about the rest of the world.

If the tea wakes me up, maybe I’ll throw some more Nioh 3 in there before bedtime. Which will probably lead to being up until midnight. Ah, inconsistency, what would I do without you?

Reading and relaxing

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We got a lot of work done around the house today, including installing new lights in the garage, which is brighter than the surface of the Sun now. I have decided my goal for tonight is to finish this John Lewis biography. It’s a good plan, I think.

#REVIEW: The Poet Empress, by Shen Tao

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Bear with me, if you will: before I review this book, I have to review this book. As in, the object made of paper and cardboard that can be held in your hands. I have amassed a lot of special editions and Special Editions over the last couple of years— I have an entire bookshelf where the books are arranged spine-in so that the pretty painted edges are visible, and yes, I can still tell you what damn near all of them are anyway.

I have two copies of Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress. One of them is a book-box special edition from Illumicrate. The other is, supposedly, the regular edition, the one you’ll get from Amazon or if you walk into a brick and mortar bookstore.

The regular edition may very well be the prettiest book I own.

If you love books at all as art objects in and of themselves, go grab this book right now before this printing sells out, because I doubt future editions are going to look like this first one. Don’t read another word; the story doesn’t matter, this book is that pretty and you want to own it so you can look at it. I am going to have to figure out a way to display this one front-facing. The endpapers are gorgeous, the edges are gilded beautifully, and the cover has this lovely sparkly texture on it that I can neither take nor find a decent picture of. It just doesn’t come through properly in photographs. Go buy this book, right now.

Oh, you want to read it? Yeah, you should do that too, because I know it’s only mid-February and things change but right now I feel like this is going to be high in the running for my favorite book of the year. I think the last time I was this impressed by a debut novel was Jade City. Which I think wasn’t actually Fonda Lee’s debut, but it was the first of her books I read. Close enough. It’s matching my enthusiasm for To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which … I also compared to Jade City. Along with Scarlet Odyssey. And Iron Widow, so maybe I’m overusing this particular comparison, but the point is I really loved all of those books. This is up there with them.

It’s totally prettier than all of them, though.

Anyway, the story: the main character, Wei Yin, is a peasant girl living in the backwoods of a famine-ridden, crumbling empire controlled by the Azalea Dynasty. The empire is, more or less, Not China; roll with it. The emperor is dying, and has chosen his second son, Prince Terren, as his successor, and Prince Terren is seeking a bride. He has sent emissaries all over the country seeking out women who wish to compete for the honor of marrying him. Wei Yin manages to get herself selected, in hope that she will be able to marry the prince and use her influence to save her family and her village from the famine. Prince Terren, unfortunately, quickly turns out to be a horrible bastard.

Now, I’m gonna be honest: at first glance this doesn’t sound great. Does the phrase “enemies-to-lovers romantasy” mean anything to you? Because even the marketing for this book has been leaning into this, and you are just going to have to trust me that this book absolutely is not a romantasy and is far too intricate for such nonsense as “tropes.” Terren and Wei Yin are both impressively complex, layered characters, and … well, I’m not spoiling anything, but this is absolutely not an enemies-to-lovers book. Why is the book called The Poet Empress? Because much of this world’s magic is based on poetry, and when Wei Yin decides that her best bet is to murder Prince Terren, she realizes that the only way she’s going to be able to do it is to write a very particular kind of poem, one that requires her to know and understand the target on an immensely intimate level.

Oh, it’s illegal for women to be able to read, by the way. Which sorta complicates things.

I know, I know, some of you are shaking your heads. Of course she’s going to marry the prince. The damn book is called The Poet Empress, not The Peasant Girl Who Came In Twenty-Third and Got Her Head Chopped Off. I promise you no other aspect of this book is going to be predictable, and the “competition” is dispensed with much more quickly than you think it’s going to. And once that happens the book can get on with its actual goal, which is sinking its claws into you and slowly tearing your heart out. You will be fifteen pages from the end of the book and you will still not know how it’s going to turn out.

It’s also dark as hell, so be prepared for that; Terren is terrible, and Wei Yin is put through some absolutely terrible things as a result of being connected to him, much less actually married to him. On top of that, many of the women who didn’t win the competition are fairly powerful and well-connected in their own rights, and a number of them immediately decide to kill her. And then there’s the dowager empress, who is also unhappy with her son’s choice of bride. And the prince who got passed over in favor of his younger brother. Comparatively, dying of famine in a squalid village almost feels quaint.

This is brilliant fucking work, guys, and I cannot wait for more from Shen Tao. Go get this book right now. Even if you just look at it, it’s worth the money. The fact that there’s an amazing story in there is a bonus.

#REVIEW: Operation Bounce House, by Matt Dinniman

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In a word: skippable.

I’m genuinely tempted to make that the entire review, to be honest. This is the ninth Matt Dinniman book I’ve read, and the tenth is going to be out in March, and of the nine I’ve loved seven of them, thought the eighth (Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon) was okay, and … then there was this. I forced myself to buckle down and finish it over the course of last night and today, and to be honest I could have put it away after a hundred pages and been fine with it. It really feels like a manuscript that he had lying around and the publishing house was desperate to put something out that was trad-pubbed from the beginning, so he gave them this.

I don’t want to spend a ton of time shitting on this book, especially since it isn’t going to affect my enthusiasm for Dungeon Crawler Carl, but skippable is probably the perfect single-word review, and if I were to write a two-word review it would be half-baked. Nothing about it is particularly well thought-out, the main character is entirely indistinguishable from Carl, including his uncanny ability to come up with complicated plans on the fly, and I defy you to explain to me why the book (or the in-universe show the book is named after) is called Operation Bounce House. Everyone talks like they’re a teenager in 2020 even though the book is set hundreds of years in the future and on a planet Earth has colonized. I cannot emphasize enough how there has been no cultural change of any kind during all this time. I spent the whole book waiting for a twist where it turned out they had been on Earth the whole time and not actually in the future.

The plot: Oliver, who is Carl, is a farmer on a colony planet. The planet gets attacked by mechs being remotely piloted by, mostly, bored and wealthy teenagers on Earth who have spent lots of money to be part of a game show and may or may not realize they’re killing actual people. There’s lots of talk about how the showrunners are portraying everyone on the planet as terrorists. They fight back.

Why does this game show exist? Why are they killing people? No reason, really. Dungeon Crawler Carl earns a certain amount of “don’t think about it too hard.” This book very much does not. Nothing feels like it has been thought through.

It is not a LitRPG, by the way, even though the attackers are technically playing a game. There are no statistics or leveling up or unlocking abilities or anything of that sort; it’s more of a military sci-fi than anything else.

I have read worse books, to be sure— hell, I have read worse books in 2026— but I have no real reason to recommend that anyone else pick this up. Read Dungeon Crawler Carl, definitely. Ignore this one.

Monthly Reads: January 2026

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Aka the “This is getting ridiculous” edition, AKA Snow Days Edition.

The most ridiculous thing? I forgot to grab K.X. Song’s The Dragon Wakes with Thunder and decided not to go back for it. So that’s not all of them.

Book of the Month is Children of Ash and Elm, with a special recognition for Hekate the Witch.

Unread Shelf: January 31, 2026

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I think this counts as progress, actually.

Quick #review: For We Are Many, by Dennis E. Taylor

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Okay, I can get this written. I think.

I promised that once the second Bobiverse book, For We Are Many, showed up I’d get it read quickly so I could follow up on whether there were any women in this one. Good news and bad news: the first time a woman speaks is a hundred pages in. She has one line, it is about her son, and she disappears for a while afterwards. But one of the more important secondary characters is female! In fact, she’s kind of important to one of the bigger themes of the book. Now, unfortunately, we’re nowhere near passing the Bechdel test or anything like that— to the best of my recollection there isn’t a scene with more than one woman talking at all, much less to each other— but this book represents an improvement, if not a huge one, over the first.

It is still good in all of the ways that the first one was good, and frankly it’s genuinely getting more interesting, so I’m kind of hoping that as time moves on a lot of the male secondary characters all have daughters and we can interact with them some more. All of the Bobs, of course, are immortal so long as they aren’t killed, so I would expect the secondary cast to change a lot.

Book Three comes out in the fancy new edition in March; I might cave and read it digitally before that. We’ll see.

It’s cold outside so I’m reading

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It’s cold as fuck outside and I’ve got an upset stomach, so I read all 700 pages of this today. I’m not sure that it’s a good book in an objective sort of sense but it was absolutely what I was looking for.

Now I have to read a Wheel of Time book, so I’m going to be miserable for a few days.