I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”
I have all the books. Do you understand?
And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.
This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.
So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:
along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.
We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.
It’s nice to be surprised once in a while, although maybe this book shouldn’t have been a surprise. I’ve been losing steam with my Illumicrate book box subscriptions; I cancelled my quarterly horror box after the third book in a row that I already had, and upon reading the description of the book that turned out to be S.A. MacLean’s Voidwalker, I very nearly skipped it. To be clear, the way Illumicrate works is their boxes are semi-blind; they’ll give you a description and a theme but you’ll have to do a bit of detective work if you want to know the actual title of the book before it shows up on your doorstep. And as Illumicrate’s main subscription line has been leaning far too hard into romantasy lately for my tastes, and the brief description of Voidwalker I had felt pretty bog-standard for the genre, I was disinclined to pay for it at first. Then I learned that the author was the same person who had written the excellent The Phoenix Keeper and decided to go ahead and let it ride.
(I suddenly find myself wondering how MacLean managed to get featured in two Illumicrate boxes in less than a year; her agent may be owed a raise.)
The premise still isn’t the most original thing on the planet, even considering that romantasy is a genre ruled by the trope and its biggest fans seem to literally want a checklist of Things What Are Supposed to Happen that they can go through as they’re reading. The main character is a smuggler; there’s a turf war happening between two members of a vaguely-fascistic race of antlered and tailed humanoids who each rule a chunk of the world and, oh, also eat people; the turf war turns into a revolution, and one of the daeyari (those are the monsters; I’m picturing Nightcrawler with antlers, but not blue) turns out to be really sexy.
And … well. There’s an interesting mix of fantasy and science fiction going on here, the main character rides a Void Horse, which is a horse that is actually a lizard, possibly my favorite kind of horse; and there’s lots of hints at a wider world that I assume will pay off in future sequels. I’m being snarky, but I didn’t really expect much from Phoenix Keeper and loved it; I expected even less from Voidwalker and enjoyed it enough to write about it and recommend it. MacLean has a great grasp of character that serves this book quite well; the relationships between MC Fionamara and the other secondary characters in the book are what keeps the book interesting, and while Antal, the daeyari, initially comes off as the same Tall Dark and Scary broody big-dicked male character that I’ve read about in a thousand Sarah J. Maas books and more recently in Alchemised, he’s got enough unexpected twists to his personality that I ended up liking him by the end. And while I hate the phrase “slow burn,” MacLean takes her time with the romance angle of things, so by the time Fi and Antal start boning it feels earned and not inevitable.
Honestly, my biggest gripe is a deeply nerdy one, which is that S.A. MacLean doesn’t know the difference between antlers and horns. Do you know the difference? I didn’t until recently, but now that I do I’m going to notice every time the words are misused in books for the rest of my life. There are other differences, but antlers are shed, and horns are permanent, and what the daeyari have are horns, even though they look like what you’re probably picturing when you hear the word “antler.” This would have been less of a big deal was it not an actual plot point that daeyari horns grow throughout their entire immortal-unless-killed lives and so you can get an idea of how old one is by the number of points and bends in the horns. So they are definitely horns and not antlers.
And now you know. Even if you weren’t interested in the book, hopefully the random factoid made reading the post worth it.
It may be that there’s no cliché less true than “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” You not only absolutely can judge a book by its cover, you are supposed to. That’s what the cover is for! It’s to attract peoples’ attention, particularly those kind of people who are likely to enjoy the book.
And let me tell you something: I absolutely encourage you to judge Jackson Ford’s The Bone Raiders by its cover. Five badass-looking women of color holding weapons and a fire-breathing technically-not-a-dragon in the background? Sold. Gimme. We’re done. I don’t quite get why they decided to put the Billy Joel quote on the cover, but that’s not just my biggest gripe about the cover, it’s my biggest gripe about the book. Because this book is everything that you think it is upon looking at that cover, except maybe a little smarter than you’re expecting. I’m super psyched that it’s a trilogy, because I want more of these characters and more of this world, which can be fairly boiled down to “Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan, but dragons and feminism,” and that’s really all I need.
(Every POV character is a woman except for the first and last chapters; the first chapter is an okey-doke and the last chapter is a tease for the next book. There are hardly any men with dialogue. I can’t believe a guy wrote this, to be honest.)
But yeah. This is one of those reviews where I don’t need to belabor the point at all. Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and … animal husbandry. If you’re remotely interested in a book with that cover, go grab it right now. You will be well rewarded. I want the sequel, and I want it tomorrow.
I am in a horrendous mood, as the world is continuing to go to shit and nothing seems to be able to stop it or even slow it down, but there are still books out there, so I may as well talk about them. I don’t have the energy to make a full post about either of these so let’s just do a couple quick paragraphs each and call it a day.
Samantha Downing’s Too Old For This is a book about a serial killer forced out of retirement when a documentarian comes calling who wants to make a series about her. She was never actually brought to trial for her crimes, but changed her name and moved across the country anyway, and she’s less than interested in someone dragging all of that back into the light again.
She’s in her seventies, by the way.
This book ended up being lightweight and quick and more fun than it probably had any right to be, as Lottie Jones’ life keeps getting upended more and more as she attempts to cover for her crimes– both the old ones before she moved away and the new ones she has to keep committing as she keeps making mistakes that wouldn’t have mattered when she was killing people decades ago but are a bit of a problem in an era of near-constant surveillance by our own possessions. I can imagine a reader who is bothered by the fact that the protagonist is an unrepentant serial killer who we’re more or less expected to like, or at least enjoy reading about, but I’m not that reader and I had fun with this. I may look into more of Samantha Downing’s work if I ever allow myself to buy books again.
So, yeah, okay, I finished it, and it’s a thousand pages long and I have a full-time job and I still finished it in less than a week, and because of that I can’t really call it bad, but … if you weren’t going to buy this anyway, don’t let anyone talk you into it. SenLinYu is a perfectly cromulent author and no one would ever read this book and figure out on their own that it was originally brought into the world as Harry Potter fanfiction, but it’s way overhyped, at least from my perspective. I keep seeing videos about people who were in tears for the last two hundred pages or whatever, and I feel like these people need pets or significant others or something, because in the end it’s just a book and it’s being treated like a life-altering event online. I said in my first post that I was buying this out of FOMO, and I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m never going to be missing out if I don’t read a book TikTok likes.
(I deleted the app again today; we’ll see how long it lasts this time.)
Again, it’s not awful, but it’s definitely romantasy despite all the people insisting that no, it’s dark fantasy— I’m pretty sure “dark fantasy” is just romantasy with at least one rape scene to these people– and I’m tired of romantasy as a genre. It’ll look good on my shelf, and I didn’t hate it like I figured I would, but those are the best things I have to say about it.
Finished Alchemised tonight, and I’m going to use the evening to decide if I have anything interesting to say about it. While playing Ghost of Yotei, of course.
One quarter down. Man, this school year is flying by.
I’ll be halfway done with this beast of a book before I go to bed, and … it’s not terrible, but it’s kinda boring? And I was expecting any number of possible reactions to it, and “boring” was not one of them.
One indisputable good thing: there has not been, after about 430 pages, even a single trace of the source material to be found. I have no idea how SenLinYu managed to adapt this from a fanfic of any kind. I’m not going to go looking for the original to compare them or anything, but I think it’s reasonable to lay that worry to bed.
Anyway, off to — no, not reading, you silly goose, Ghost of Yotei is out. My PS5 is calling.
We’ll begin with my absolute favorite thing for book reviews: Disclaimers! First, that I got a copy of this book for free (it comes out on Tuesday) and second, that I’ve known the author for a vaguely shocking twenty-two years, and not in the usual parasocial Internet way that I know a fair number of authors but in a “he’s been in my apartment and we’ve worked on grad school projects together” sort of way. There’s a review of his book The Monsters Know What They’re Doinghere; this is actually his fifth book, technically part of a series but, given that they’re all roleplaying sourcebooks dedicated to helping game masters for TTRPGs do their jobs better, there’s no reason to feel like you need to read them in order. I admit it; I have not read the books in between, although I intend to.
Here’s the thing about Keith, guys: Keith is one of the smartest motherfuckers guys I’ve ever met. He’s ludicrously well-read and he’s got a mind like a steel trap. If he had been born seven hundred years ago he would have been a monk and would have discovered something that we all take for granted by now; if he’d been born in the 1810s instead of the 1970s you would never have heard of Gregor Mendel. However, he was born in the 1970s, so instead of more or less inventing genetics as we know it, he writes about roleplaying games.
Making Enemies is, ostensibly, about creating home-brew monsters for your TTRPG campaign. He doesn’t limit himself to Dungeons & Dragons with this one; attention is paid to Pathfinder, Shadowdark and Call of Cthulhu, along with another system that I have to admit I’ve never heard of called the Cypher System. Each section of the book begins with a more generic introduction to/discussion of the aspect of monster design being discussed, such as morphology, abilities, size and number, quirks and weaknesses, etc; and then there will be sections afterward dedicated to the differences you’d see among each of the specific systems. I felt like Call of Cthulhu got a little shorted, as it doesn’t quite work the same way as the rest of the systems (You Are Fucking Doomed is more or less Call of Cthulhu’s entire thing, and this book is about making good enemies for your players, not killing them in seconds) and of course D&D gets a bit more attention than the others, but there’s good stuff here for everybody who plays TTRPGs.
Nothing I’ve just said is sufficient to prepare you for just how deep this book gets, over and over and over again. The chapter called Weird Nature, about monster type and morphology, could be copied and pasted into a biology textbook with barely a sentence changed. The book interrogates the entire concept of “monster” over and over again in a way that is completely fascinating and yet in some ways entirely unnecessary to a book about TTRPGs, which are generally much more lowbrow than this. There are interviews scattered throughout the book with professional game designers, and it’s stunning how high-level, no pun intended, some of these discussions get. I would love to know how much actual research went into this book that had no direct relationship to TTRPGs. My guess is: lots.
(Memo to Keith: go whole-hog on your next book. I want four hundred pages on your theory of game design. Do it.)
But seriously. I feel like I should have been taking notes and adding Post-Its into the book while I was reading it, and the reader of this book should be prepared to see the occasional quotes from genuine academic works of philosophy and then less than a page later an anecdote about The Muppet Show. That’s not to say that this book doesn’t have a ton of good old-fashioned in-the-weeds nerd math, because it does. Witness:
I’ve talked about this before: I love enthusiasm. My favorite thing about TikTok is how great of a vehicle it is for people to share activities they love with other people. And the reason I feel so comfortable recommending what by rights ought to be a very niche book to literally everyone I know who reads is that Keith’s incredible enthusiasm for game design and TTRPGs shines through every page of this book. I enjoyed The Monsters Know What They’re Doing quite a bit and recommended it, but I was clear (and so was the book!) that it was a book for people who ran TTRPG games. I think there are people out there who would enjoy this regardless of what they’ve done in the TTRPG space; if you consider yourself an autodidact and an intellectual (dare I say “polymath”?) you may find yourself skipping the weedier sections here and there that get into specifics about the systems, but the interviews and the beginnings of every chapter and the relentless attention to careful thinking throughout are going to bring a smile to your face.
Making Enemies comes out October 7th. Check it out.
Book of the Month is … somehow, The Butcher’s Masquerade, by Matt Dinniman, with a special “yes, I’m serious, and no, I can’t explain it” runner-up award for You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 