Since reading “Threshing Day,” I have finished four books. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds; they’re all really short. That said, let me know if you want to see any reviews of these, since I’ve got a bit of choice paralysis going on right now:
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I only just started Nicked tonight, but it’s about stealing St. Nicholas’ corpse, and it’s already sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to check a historical claim which turned out to be true. It’s only 220 pages, though, so I’ll finish it just as quickly as the others. The short version is that I enjoyed all of them, but let me know if you want more details.
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.
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.
I read books, did you know that? Let’s talk about a few of them real quick:
A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
“A bold and biting satire, Yesteryear…will have you cackling and gasping right to the final page.” —Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid series
I already own a book called Trad Wife, and I realized the other day that there is another book called Trad Wife coming out soon, and I sort of feel like I should buy that too so that I can put them next to each other on the shelf. Simple things please me, I suppose.
Read those. Don’t read this. It’s one of the worst books I’ve finished this year. It’s not a “satire” so much as a book about an asshole, the twist at the end is mind-blowingly bad, and it squanders every bit of goodwill the premise– which is genuinely interesting– might engender in the reader. Everyone in it sucks.
“One of 2026’s literary triumphs.”—Boston Globe
From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungocomes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires.
Spoiler alert! Everyone is gay. Everyone is gay. And no one will admit to anyone else that they’re gay, except everyone kinda knows that the gay people are gay, and if anything this is a better satire of repressive religious environments than Yesteryear was, and this book isn’t a satire either. I enjoyed this one, although the fact that the main character is John-Calum and his father is John (thus the “John of John”) led to me getting embarrassingly far into the book before I realized that Old John was getting some POV bits here and there and the author wasn’t just randomly swapping between calling his main character John and calling him Cal. You can absolutely blame me for that but I will feebly point out in my own defense that had their characters on the page been more distinct I wouldn’t have been able to make such a dumb mistake. POV John and Cal’s Dad John from Cal’s Perspective are very different characters, let’s leave it at that.
I still don’t know what literature is, but this was enjoyable, and I look forward to Shuggie Bain, currently on my Unread Shelf.
Stephen’s god died on the longest day of the year…
Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind…
From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair.
Okay, granted, the phrase “love on the far side of despair” is right there, but just be aware before you get into this that it’s a romance. No, it’s not a romantasy, it came out in 2021 before that word existed, but I wasn’t aware of what I was getting into when I picked this up. That sounds like a criticism; it’s really not. I don’t mind romance, and I don’t mind romantasy, either, a lot of the time, but I really feel like the cover and the copy lead you to expect a certain kind of book that you will get tantalizing glimpses of here and there but is not this book. That said, I’ve already ordered the rest of the series, and I may reevaluate the first book once I’ve read the rest of them. I don’t remember being a huge fan of The Twisted Ones, which is the only other T. Kingfisher book I’ve read, but she’s got about a thousand books so there’s a lot to dig into with this author.
New York Times bestselling author Shannon Chakraborty sets sail into the second adventure of pirate Amina al-Sirafi as her quest to track down magical artifacts brings her to the island lair of a sorceress whose woven enchantments are impossible to flee.
I loved the first Amina al-Sirafi book, which was my fourth-favorite book of 2024, and this was every bit as good as the first book, with an intensely creepy villain and a great, twisty mystery to unravel. I have a weakness for pirates and Arabian-themed fantasy, and, well, again, judge this book by the cover, which features a shipwreck and a griffon. I can read books about this character forever, and I want at least twelveteen more of them. Seven thumbs up.
One of the things I said about The Bone Raiders, the first book in Jackson Ford’s Rakada series, was that you could go ahead and judge it by its cover. The cover of that book was five badass women of color, draped in human bones and carrying weapons, plus a giant, fire-breathing lizard that is not technically a dragon but may as well be.
I am tempted to point out that this cover features two fire-breathing lizards, hit “Publish,” and retire for the night.
I fucking loved the first book, about a group of raiders in a heavily Mongolian-inspired steppe setting, who decided to try and tame the aforementioned fire-breathing lizards so that they could ride them into battle. By the time this book begins, they have mastered taming said fire-breathing lizards (which are called araatan, by the way) and all four of them have their own. Which means that the psychic crazy lady from the first book who thinks she’s immortal until she makes good on a deal she made with God now rides a dragon.
Its name is Sponge Bath. I’m not sure there are sponges in this world. I definitely don’t care. Ford can have that little anachronism for free. Two others are Tooth Monster and Princess. The fourth’s name is a plot point and I won’t reveal it.
And then the araatan start getting sick, and all four women have the same vision at the same time, featuring the words “You can save them,” and we’re off to the fucking races.
Jackson Ford is so good that it makes me sick. My jealousy is off the charts; this shit is simply not fair. I’m coming off several books in a row that didn’t hit the way I wanted them to and I needed my ass kicked, and I’m glad I saved this book for when I needed my ass kicked, because damn. Somehow a book about four women wearing bones and riding dragons also gets way deeper into everyone’s character than the first one did, and the ending is so crushing that I didn’t believe it at first, fully expecting a particular plot development to let one character hit the reset button on everything that had happened, and … nope. If you are a crier, in addition to kicking your ass, this book will make you cry, and you won’t see it coming. I am not a crier and it still almost got me.
Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and betrayal and violence and possession and gods. Because like hell we’re not going to up the stakes on this one.
I don’t like writing negative reviews of books by authors I like. I especially don’t like it when authors I like write two books in a row that I have to write negative reviews for. Kuang’s sixth book, Katabasis, wasn’t a bad book, and I didn’t dislike it, necessarily, but when you’re coming from an author whose books have nearly all ended up on my end-of-year best-of lists, a book not doing that is a downgrade. But I said in the review of that book that it might have fallen victim to my own expectations for it, and that I wanted to reread it at some point, and I still plan to do that.
Here’s the second-worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: it’s the first of Kuang’s books that I’m nearly certain I’m never going to revisit. Here’s the worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: if this was my first R.F. Kuang book and not my seventh, I would not be planning to pick up her next book.
And yet I’m still not willing to call it a bad book. If you are interested in character studies, and if the idea of spending just shy of 300 pages in the head of an American college sophomore who has moved to Taiwan for a ten-week intensive summer Chinese program sounds like something you might want to read, you will probably like this book! I am, unfortunately, not that reader. Character studies really aren’t my thing, and while I generally don’t need my books to be about people who are like me– I read about wizards and dragons and space aliens, for fuck’s sake– Lily is so closed off and so internal that I couldn’t find a way to care about her. And while I’ve studied enough languages to know that a ten-week residential Chinese course would be insanely difficult, it … doesn’t make for a good story, unfortunately. Lily doesn’t really do much over the course of the book. She doesn’t get along with her roommate, she has the most insanely awkward sex scene in the history of the written word, and that’s really about it.(*)
The meat of the story is supposed to be about when her grandfather dies, a grandfather who she barely knows because she lives in America and he’s still in China, and it leads to this mental crisis where Lily feels like she was learning Chinese to get to know her family and her history, and one of her few connections to China has just died, and her grandmother is sliding into dementia and barely remembers her most of the time. She has a few conversations with her mother where it becomes clear that she doesn’t really know much about her family’s history, partially because she never asked and partially because no one ever bothered to tell her anything, and she has a bit of a breakdown for a while, and I can imagine someone who finds this really fascinating, but it’s just not me.
I’m also frustrated because for the second book in a row I feel like forces external to the book have affected my opinion of it. In the case of Katabasis it was the pre-reading checklists and the idea that the book was super complicated and deep and you needed background knowledge to properly appreciate it that was circling around, and it just turned out to not be true. In the case of this book, Kuang’s grandfather literally died while she was in Taipei at an intensive residential language study. I would really like her next book to Not Be About Her. Do I get to tell her what to write? No, I don’t. Do I get to be disappointed by her choices anyway? I do. But the big difference between Kuang and Lily is that Lily is 19 and Kuang’s experience was in her late twenties, so she’s written Lily as less mature and able to process her feelings than she thinks she was, and again, it just didn’t work for me.
Again, the book’s not bad by any means, and I’m still in on day one for whatever she writes next. But this one just didn’t work for me.
(*) It was awful. I had to put the book down and walk away for a while. Like, the scene was supposed to be alienating and kind of creepy and weird, and it succeeded so much in that goal that it made me not want to read the book any more for a while. That’s sort of a compliment? But I’m still cringing from secondhand embarrassment right now, and I finished this book three days ago.
It is possible that you just read this piece and are surprised that I didn’t address The Controversy. That is because I find The Controversy to be so fucking stupid that I lose brain cells every time I think about it. If you are unaware of The Controversy, do yourself a favor and don’t look into it. If you are upset by The Controversy, go touch some fucking grass and find a real problem, you zygote.
This was one of the most purely fun movies I’ve seen in a while.
I had an epic Labor Day weekend, y’all. Got two projects done around the house that needed doing. Read two and a half entire books. Took naps. And, wonder of wonders, last night my wife and I watched a movie.
This movie has been out for a while, and I’m far from convinced that my opinion matters at this point, but I think if you’ve ever played D&D in your life you probably owe it to yourself to give this a watch. If you never played D&D or are otherwise unfamiliar with the fantasy genre in general, I’m not sure how well it will hit with you– the interesting thing to me is that the harder the movie leaned into the Forgotten Realms setting, the less I liked it. For some reason, references to Baldur’s Gate kept tossing me out of the movie, and Elminster himself makes an appearance that just felt weirdly inappropriate. It’s rare that I think something should have been more generic, but at least for me this movie could have been pulled out of the Realms and dropped into its own setting and I would have been fine with it.
That’s my only complaint, though. Everything else I have to say is positive. The cast is excellent across the board; I’ve never had any particular feelings about Chris Pine one way or another but he’s perfectly cast as a bard, and Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian character is a lot of fun as well. Everyone is really pretty and I feel like the director had a goal with the cast to push back a little bit on the idea that fantasy fiction has to be white– there are a ton of racially-ambiguous brown people in this movie, and Pine’s Ed is in an interracial marriage, and their daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman, is freaking adorable. Hugh Grant is perfectly cast as a slimy con man, the villain is creepy as fuck, and in general the group dynamics make you feel like everyone had a lot of fun making this movie. The movie isn’t precisely a comedy but where it’s funny it’s funny, and the action sequences were genuinely awesome. There’s a bit at about the 1/3 mark where Rodriguez’ Holga character wins a fight with a paving stone she pries out of the road at her feet, and her fights are always full of improvised weaponry and creativity. They’re amazing, and there’s never any question about what’s going on. I wasn’t expecting action this well-shot from this movie, and it was great to see. Bigger action directors should learn from it, honestly.
Plus? Owlbears. Gelatinous Cubes. Freakin’ displacer beasts. A fat dragon. If they’d found a place to stuff a Hook Horror into the movie they’d have hit nearly all of my favorite D&D monsters. If you thought for even a minute that you might enjoy this, give it a watch while it’s on Netflix. Thumbs way up.
Allow me to tell you a story about the game Rise of the Ronin. It came out in March of 2024, and was by the same people who make the Nioh games, easily my favorite game franchise of all time that doesn’t have the word Souls in the name. Maybe even then. I was excited about it. I bought it. I didn’t get to it immediately, because I was playing something else. But then I played it a little bit. Maybe the first ten percent or so.
And then Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree came out on June 21, and I was done with Rise of the Ronin. And it sat on my PS5 for literally two years, being ignored and making me feel guilty. I even deleted it and reinstalled it a couple of times, intending to get to it and never actually doing it. And finally, this summer, I had the combination of a wild hair up my ass and nothing new coming out and I finally deleted my old save file and started afresh.
70 hours later, I Platinumed the Goddamned thing, and then I deleted it from my PS5, never to be reinstalled again.
I’m very tempted to say “the end.”
This is an open-world samurai game, clearly a test run for Nioh 3 and honestly not terribly far removed from Elden Ring or any of the other Soulslikes that are more or less all I play nowadays, so you’d think it would be right up my alley. And in a lot of ways, it was! Lots of different weapons, multiple stances for every weapon, customizable special moves, all the stuff I like.
Two fatal flaws: 1) it was way too easy, and 2) every single mission and I mean every single mission boiled down to “go here, and kill all the humans.” Human enemies came in two flavors: Little Guys and Big Guys. There were also dogs and pigs occasionally– and, bizarrely, sometimes you’d get sent to take out a local outlaw and the outlaw would be a pig with a name. One of the big side missions was pacifying unruly parts of the countryside, by– you guessed it– going there and killing everyone. Sometimes everyone there would be a dog or a pig. I have no explanation. It didn’t happen often, but I’m not making this up. Enemy variety was practically negligible, and even bosses were all more or less the same fight– sometimes literally so, because for some reason Team Ninja really resists actually killing people in boss fights, so they were forever escaping and threatening you with more of the same later.
Dude, we have fought five times and I have whipped your ass all five times. Next time run the fuck away.
I have a serious weakness for games with big overworld maps with lots of icons on them, I admit it. But there needs to be some fucking variety in what you’re doing, and everything in this game got to feeling very, very samey after a while, and “samey” combined with “easy” isn’t a great mix. I think the toughest boss in the game took me two tries? Maybe three. I almost never died, and when I did it was because I stopped paying attention and got sloppy. The customizable martial arts moves? I never used them, and even the stance-switching, which was supposed to have a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going on with the stances your enemies used (helpfully indicated by an icon showing whether your stance was the effective one or not) was something I didn’t really bother learning until very, very late in the game. Button mashing would get you through 90% of the game so long as you paid a little bit of attention to your stamina.
So, yeah: sadly, the major achievement of having beaten Rise of the Ronin is that I don’t have to think about Rise of the Ronin anymore, and I suppose I should be grateful that Team Ninja learned some lessons from this game and applied them to Nioh 3, which was a vastly superior game.
And speaking of Nioh 3 and DLC, guess what dropped in the last couple of weeks? So I’m going to go do that for a while now.
