I have yet to start reading this year, but I will share that I did gift some books for christmas.

The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton. I had two chances to read it because I got them as gifts the past two christmases, and one person actually seems to like it. I always had an interest in the idea of witches, more as a form of spiritualistic individuality (not supernaturalistic, rather the sense of cognitive realization, a kind of fantastical pseudoidentity if you will) and their history as cultural boogeyman and scapegoat. But I've yet to read it in whole, so I'm not going dwell on it.

Ringworld by Larry Niven, which I have read and fully recommend as a fun sci-fi adventure. While I haven't read any of the follow up novels, I will comment that it does have an interesting set up to a universe.

I have always wanted to read more, but I find my mind constantly wandering from thing to thing, and it doesn't help that the local library around here seems to only exist out of sheer inertia than any actual commitment. It is by far the worst library I've ever visited.

Unsurprisingly...

Żegluga wzdłuż brzegów zachodniej Afryki na lugrze Łucja-Małgorzata 1882–1883

The author, with a couple of their colleagues, organized an expedition to explore Cameroon, and the book is a description of a travel from Le Havre to Santa Isabel (now Malabo) on a lugger Łucja-Małgorzata (Lucie-Marguerite). It’s an okay book, some parts more interesting than other, some observations about locals were not always flattering - but such were the times I suppose. What I liked about it, was that it gave me an opportunity to follow the journey on maps, new and old.
An interesting bit, Stefan Szolc-Rogoziński was 21 years old when they set sail to leave from France.

Elizabeth Moon's:
Serrano's Legacy Book 1. Good, funny, and at the same time a similar sort of story to ones I've read before. Set in a similar world to Vattas War, so that helped. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 8.5/10 (1Q, 2023)
Paksenarrion 1-10 + 2 add-ons | 9/10 as a series. (2Q, 2023)
Serrano's Legacy Book 2. a good story. (April 30, 2023)

Finished listening to Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz book 5 from Graphic Audio. (1Q, 2023)

Lloyd Alexander's Black Cauldron (1Q, 2023)
Serrano legacy 3-7 (May-June, 2023) Good, but 4-7 are not as good as the first 3 books. 8/10 overall

Listened to Brandon Sanderson's "Bastille vs the Evil Librarians" (Alcatraz Book 6) (2Q, 2023)

Mercedes Lackey: (June, 2023)
Arrows of the Queen 8.5/10
Arrows Flight 7.5/10
Arrows Fall 8/10
Take a Thief 7/10


Christopher Paolini
Eragon 7.5/10

Catching up with reviews:


Eversion, Alastair Reynolds
A mystery that stops being a mystery halfway through the novel. Which is a shame, because a couple of breadcrumbs to make you hungry for answers was more interesting than the story they’ve been dropped in. And while the mystery has had been bluntly explained, there still remained the majority of the “proper” SF story that needed to get to a bitter-sweet conclusion. It touches on matters of morality in a doctor’s choices and matters of a friendship, but it's not deep and there’s no subtly intriguing mystery anymore in that.


To be honest I have no idea how to write about the novel without completely spoiling it. And I suck at reviews in general, usually I don't have much to say about anything.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman

A young book-worm finds a new friend and gets into a lot of trouble after he’s taken on a seemingly trivial supernatural adventure to find out what's “giving people money”.

- I liked the novel’s magical-realism and the narrative, but I will admit, the plot could have been more fleshed out and the ending will certainly not please everyone, especially those who want everything explained.
- Gaiman stated that this had not originally been intended as a novel, but rather a short story that just kept growing. I believe this statement because the novel feels like a few short stories stitched together.

The Legion of Time by Jack Williamson. This actually collects two short novels by Williamson. The first is The Legion of Time, which is a foundational time travel story. Not among the first time travel stories but the first that involves actually changing the course of history. A guy keeps having visions of two beautiful women, one is benevolent and peaceful and the other is an armored amazon, each represents a possible future for humanity. The good one rules a scientific utopia, the other rules an oppressive empire with the help of an army of mutant ant-men. The hero is eventually pulled aboard a ship that exists outside of time and enlisted to help ensure the good future happens, which is a tough fight because the bad guys have almost entirely ensured that they'll come out on top. There's a bit of technobabble about quantum physics, geodesics, and probabilities. What it ultimately comes down to is that the bad guys snatched a crucial object from history, something that would inspire a poor hillbilly boy to get educated and become a great scientist and start the road toward the positive future and the heroes have to put it back in place. This concept for a while was known as a Jonbar Hinge - you don't see it as often anymore.

It's a very fun, action-packed story. The idea of these heroes, who all "died" in great conflicts, continuing to fight in this nether-realm has very deliberate echoes to Norse mythology. The ending has a slight, thought-provoking twist on it. In classic pulp style, most of the characters are guys who have a nationality and a stereotypical accent and that's it. Even as a guy who wrote books for a very long time, Williamson never really got on top of nuanced characterization. He was always a Big Ideas sort of guy.

The second novel included is After World's End, which is a straight-up space opera. A guy volunteers to be the world's first astronaut, but when he's blasted into space something goes wrong and he ends up frozen and in hibernation for a million years (take that, Buck Rogers!). For reasons explained later, he has a sort of astral experience in which he sees his descendants as they embark on scientific careers and one of these creates an AI robot named Malgarth (can't imagine anything with a name like that being bad...) that immediately murders him (oops). Interestingly, instead of barging out and punching every human to death, Malgarth instead goes into business for himself, going to his creator's robot-building company and convincing them to give him a spot on the board. For the next million years, Malgarth builds the company into the most successful business ever, supplying robots and securing increasing influence over the Galactic Empire. Then he finally decides it's time to kill everyone by turning his robot army on everything. The narrator is found and woken up by human rebels trying to stop Malgarth and it all hinges on finding a woman who is custodian of an artifact that has power to kill Malgarth. Williamson seems to have been big on this trope of seemingly nonthreatening women (often redheads) who have this sort of ultimate power to save the day. I'm guessing it was inspired by his wife?

This one is fun, although not as good as Legion of Time, nor as good as his other Legion of Space stories. What holds it back is that the narrator is largely a passive observer of everything and I dislike passive protagonists. Of course he does have one thing he has to do before the end, but it's just one thing and his pirate friends are the ones who do all the heavy lifting in the rest of the story. But as often with Williamson, there are at least still some really big and entertaining concepts packed into it.

For me it is (last month):

The One Thing by Gary Keller

Dopamine Detox

Presently, I am trying to finish death of the necromancer (kindle) and the Atomic attraction audiobook.

Kindred Straits

Full disclosure: I received Kindred Straits for free, in a giveaway, but this hasn't in any way influenced the opinions expressed in this review.

Since this is the first book in a series that's a prequel for another, those who have read The Sum of Ages will have background information that I didn't, and definitely a much better grasp of the terms used. Yes, some are explained to various extents as they appear and the author makes pretty good use of Olenka's sheltered life to keep those sections from being jarring information dumps, but when you couple all of those terms and concepts with my lack of familiarity with both merfolk and the "real" cultures used as inspiration for that of the Bantay Tubig, I'd have quite clearly been stumbling around if I wouldn't have read the included Glossary before anything else... Which makes me wonder why's it placed at the end instead of the beginning. And also why's it written as if by a character, which seems to only be an unnecessary complication and even stranger when that character doesn't otherwise appear in the book and the story isn't otherwise presented by a narrator.
Still, that choice can't be why I continued to feel lost, especially during the first part of the story. I'm not saying that the writing is entirely to blame, some of it may be my problem as well, but much more could have been done to ease readers who are unfamiliar with such a world and society into it... And choosing a different name for Daisay or Diwala, or both, would have also helped a fair bit, since I kept confusing them, the moments when they were called Dai and Di only making it worse. It was much better after their paths split, but I sometimes found myself needing a moment to remember which was which even then.
Otherwise, the writing style could do with some more cleaning up. The handful of obvious mistakes are pretty easy to fix, but what may pose more of a problem is that many times I felt that the author was struggling to just squeeze his way past style errors in a very strict sense, such as a short sentence inserted to break up what would be a repetition, which doesn't really change the impression, or all of the moments of uncertainty created by the different style used in the sections focusing on Daisay, which kept making me wonder whether various potential issues that I was noticing were intentional or mistakes. And there are a few things that don't add up as well, such as the Bantay Tubig being able to hold their breath for 15 minutes but apparently blacking out after being choked for mere seconds during combat, or the number of guards on the ship, possibly also the skill level of the two sides, and quite clearly the number of things that the characters get away with, especially when it comes to the sisters... And to Olenka's very presence.
That said, this is not a bad book. The choice of setting and culture is quite bold, a lot happens in a very short amount of time, the action can pull you along from one moment to the next, the bond between Olenka and Marikit can be quite endearing and some of the character development may also be worth mentioning... Even if it may be too sudden. What I'm uncertain about is how seriously the author intends this book to be taken, because it may work better if you take a cue from the behavior of the secondary characters, mainly the sisters and to some extent also Daisay, and assume it to be more lighthearted, but on the other hand it also tackles dark and potentially painful topics, most notably sex trafficking, but also mental health or discrimination, and presents protagonists that are obviously flawed, and in fact broken in one way or another.
To conclude, I definitely didn't dislike Kindred Straits, and I'm sure that other readers will find it much more enjoyable, especially considering my lack of familiarity with this sort of setting and culture. But more care should have been taken to ease the readers into this world, to make various matters clearer and more fleshed out, and it'd probably be better if one path, whether darker or more lighthearted, would be chosen and adhered to... And I also found myself wishing for more commentary against the caste system and the discrimination based strictly on the kudori. Of course, Daughters of the Storm will inevitably steer in the direction of The Sum of Ages, so the answers to these questions are likely known to those who have read that series, but I'll again state that I haven't and, since this series takes place before that one, there should be no need or expectation to do so first.

Rating: 3/5

Apollo 13, Lovell, Kluger

I liked the book. All I had known previously about the mission was that it had to be aborted due to some serious malfunction and that the astronauts were brought back to Earth alive despite very difficult circumstances. By the way, did you know that “Houston, we have a problem” is not an exact quote?
During the perilous journey the crew had to deal with numerous serious issues. Teams of NASA’s engineers and employees back on Earth had to come up with solutions to those issues in order to bring the spacecraft with its crew back home. They had to deal with things like preserving electrical power and water (which was not only needed for crew but also for electrical systems, which used it up to keep cool by evaporating it into space), removal of CO2, course corrections.
I’ve seen some reviews saying the book is too technical, but I disagree. I think authors managed to provide just enough necessary information so a reader could understand what when wrong and how they dealt with it.
One fifth of the book was about Apollo 1, Apollo 8 and Lovell’s career. Most of which I’ve already read about in two books about Apollo 8. I didn’t particularly like frequent colloquialisms, they often threw me off for a moment and, in my opinion, didn’t really fit gravity of the events.

Doña Bárbara - Rómulo Gallegos

The young lawyer Santos Luzardo changes his plans to sell his old family farm on the steps of Venezuela’s Apure region and decides to raise it to it’s former glory. To accomplish his plan, he gets into conflict with his dangerous and greedy neighbor doña Bárbara, who is said to command supernatural forces, and the corrupt government.

I haven’t read many works from Latin-American authors, but the few I have, I liked; Doña Bárbara didn’t change that.

The stars, like dust - Isaac Asimov

A new edition of a very old Asimov novel that I got as a Christmas gift from my girlfriend.

Reads a lot like a two hour action thriller movie, with your typical Asimov tropes thrown in. I enjoyed it, but it's far from my favorite among his books. Not all twists landed well enough and some things felt a bit forced, but it may be a lack of proper time for the characters to be better explored and developed.

And it is, of course, a 1950's book through and through. A lot of things in it aged rather poorly.

I know I sound a bit too disappointed, but I really did enjoy the read.

I just finished "Berlin Prepper", by Johannes Groschupf.

Blurb from the back cover:
"As an online editor at a major daily newspaper, Walter Noack has to delete the vulgarities and hate speech in the comments. Thousands of times a day, he is confronted with the most disgusting insults. His nerves become even thinner when he, and later a colleague, are beaten up by strangers, apparently for no reason, and he also has to suffer a private loss. The police show themselves powerless in all this. The daily poison, the permanent hatred, finally seeps into Noack's soul. He gradually slips into the murky scene of gun hoarding preppers, Reichsbürger and Right-Wing militias, repelled and fascinated at the same time. When large-scale wildfires, riots and open anarchy break out in Berlin during the brutal summer heat, he realizes he has gotten involved with the wrong people. Now it's a matter of life or death."

It started off somewhat promising.
But in the end - it didn't really deliver.

The characters are all "hollow" and "shallow". Nobody seems to be real.
Characters get introduced and storylines get started, but almost nothing ever really gets resolved (in a satisfying way).

And when I read the last sentence, I found myself thinking: "And that's it? This is how this story ends?"

It kinda seemed as if the author started the story without having planned out his characters, and how his story was supposed to end.
That's never good.

Would I recommend it?
Rather not.

I'm due to read that shortly ... next month probably.

My Reading List for 2023

For great SciFi and or Fantasy I recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky, a fairly new author for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky