passion4reading's 2018 TBR challenge

This is the first time I'm undertaking the challenge and I hope that by committing in public to reading the books on the following list(s), I will finally manage to read those tomes that have been lingering on my shelves for too long.

The books don't belong to any particular category or genre, but I did want to make sure that I included some non-fiction books on the lists (a quarter); I work in publishing, mostly on non-fiction titles, so when I have time to read for pleasure I almost inevitably choose a fiction title for escape, and my non-fiction titles are being sorely neglected.

So, here goes:

Primary list:
1. Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs finished 09/02/2018
2. Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo finished 30/05/2018
3. Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch finished 18/03/2018
4. A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab finished 01/11/2018
5. A Conjuring of Light by V. E. Schwab
6. The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger finished 16/08/2018
7. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell abandoned 29/07/2018
8. Winter Siege by Ariana Franklin finished 25/04/2018
9. Plague Land by S. D. Sykes abandoned 24/07/2018
10. The Watchers by Stephen Alford finished 29/06/2018
11. Arctic Labyrinth by Glyn Williams
12. The Domesticated Brain by Bruce Hood finished 13/04/2018

Secondary list:
1. Fire Catcher by C. S. Quinn
2. Plague by C. C. Humphreys
3. The Secrets of Gaslight Lane by M. R. C. Kasasian
4. The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter by Rod Duncan
5. The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch
6. In the Labyrinth of Drakes by Marie Brennan
7. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
8. A Conspiracy of Alchemists by Liesel Schwarz
9. Dark Dawn over Steep House by M. R. C. Kasasian
10. Life on Air by David Attenborough
11. London Under by Peter Ackroyd finished 20/01/2018
12. Circulation: William Harvey’s Revolutionary Idea by Thomas Wright

I'm intrigued by Schwab's series, but apparently it's YA and I often find that too light to really dig in. I do intend to try Scott Lynch, haven't gotten there yet. Cloud Atlas was good, and the movie is too providing you read the book first. The Thirteenth Tale is a fun one for book lovers.

I've heard rough things about Ackroyd's London: The Biography, but your choice of his here sounds a lot more manageable.

Interesting that you mention that Schwab's series is apparently YA, as it didn't strike me as such when I read the first volume, A Darker Shade of Magic, in 2015; it's due for a re-read before I start on the other two because I can't remember a couple of plot points (I devoured it in one setting).

I'm looking forward to Cloud Atlas, though I've heard rather conflicting opinions about both the book and the film.

Welcome to the challenge! Looks like a great list. Republic of Thieves is where I'm at in that series too, I should probably put it in my 2018 challenge as well.

A list heavy on speculative fiction: there's too little of that around here. Good luck with your challenge, and I'll be looking forward to reading your reviews.

>2 Cecrow: If you'd like to read some YA fiction that allows you "to really dig in" and that's more thought-provoking and engaging than a lot of adult fiction novels, I can thoroughly recommend the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness.

>4 Narilka:, >5 Petroglyph: Thank you for the friendly welcome!

>4 Narilka: Very sad to hear that The Thorn of Emberlain won't be out until September 2019 at the earliest, after the publication date has been pushed back a couple of times. I believe that Scott Lynch isn't well.

>5 Petroglyph: I'm glad you think so. Looking at your, Cecrow's and Stacy's lists, all of them heavy on classics and literary fiction, I felt my list was a *fluffy* option.

>6 passion4reading:, ppfffft, that's just what I'm into at the moment. Eventually I'll run out of those and it'll be a year of all fantasy and sci-fi or something, maybe.

Some YA series I've liked. I think my favourite has been the Bartimeaus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. I haven't read its prequel but I might get to doing that. Mostly it's that I'm not so into teenage central figures anymore who get caught up in romantic tribulations. Dystopias and super powers are also starting to wear thin with me.

>6 passion4reading: I didn't know that. Hopefully the author gets well.

>6 passion4reading:
Well, "fluffy"... I use this challenge to make me read more diversely, i.e. it is stocked with books that I know are good for me but that I'm less likely to just pick up and read. I do go through plenty of speculative fiction (mainly SF, with regular doses of Fantasy); I generally don't need to be nudged into reading those, since I'm all too eager to dive into the shiny new book I just found out about, leaving the Owned-but-Unread piles to swell out of control.

This challenge is what you make of it: the only "rule" is that you commit to reading the ones on your list, for whatever reason you put them there.

>6 passion4reading: - Don't worry about the "fluffy" factor. In fact, outside of a couple of classics mine is fairly stacked with mysteries which are completely my comfort reads. I tried for a balance of books that have been on my shelves forever that I think I'd like but just never picked up and books that will be easy to get through when I'm feeling stuck with the challenge.

Yup as others said, fluffy is fine! The challenge is best used however it will best help/appeal to you! Also as others mentioned, I don't need a push for most of my fluff (which in my case is generally horror/thriller stuff), it's what I read to lighten things up between the heavier stuff. It's more stuff that falls under "literature" that sometimes gets glossed by for too long, plus I have a handful of authors whose body of works I collect whenever I encounter them, so I keep them on my list to make sure I keep active at chipping away at them. ;) We each have our own methods and purposes for how we utilize the challenge, anything goes! :)

Happy new year and happy reading, everyone!

Owing to work commitments and needing to finish two review copies first, I'm finally ready to start the first book on the list.

Please can anyone tell me how to add hyperlinks to my full reviews and photos of book covers to my posts? I still haven't been able to work this out myself.

Adding hyperlinks to reviews is easy:

<a href="INSERT ADDRESS HERE">This is where you type the text that you want to turn into a hyperlink</a>

The text you want to turn into the hyperlink is at the centre; to the left is an opening tag (<a>) and to the right a closing tag (</a>). The opening bracket contains the attribute href="ADDRESS", which specifies the actual address.

Much of html code works like that: the text you want to be affected you put between an opening tag (without /) and a closing tag (with /):

<b>This is how you do bold</b>; <i>this is how you do italics</i>; <u>this is how you do underlined</u>; <strike>and this is how you do strikeout</strike>.

(Or follow instructions here)

---

Images work similarly, but you don't need a closing tag (since there is no text to be affected). Instead of the href="ADDRESS" attribute, you use the src="ADDRESS" attribute, and in it you paste the address to the image you want to insert. So the following code:

<img src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/159474758X.01._SX450_SY635_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg" height="300">

will give this result:



Note that you can specify the height of the image in pixels. (Or width="PIXELS"). You don't have to, but it helps keeping images the same size. You get better looking results if you start with a larger, HQ image that you force into a smaller size using the height attribute.

(Further instructions and examples here)

>14 Petroglyph: Thank you so much for the instructions! I'm familiar with using tags for bold, italics and "spoiler alert", and figured hyperlinks and images would probably work the same way, but I never could work out how. Much appreciated!

Sometimes LT can be quirky where HTML is concerned. For LT-specific directions, I've bookmarked this: http://www.librarything.com/topic/104943

>14 Petroglyph:, >16 Cecrow: Thanks a lot to you both. I just wrote my first HTML tag!

1. London Under by Peter Ackroyd



I used to live in London for several years and have always been fascinated by its varied history. The book was a chance find in a small bookshop while we were on holiday in Wales several years ago.

Review

In this shortish volume Peter Ackroyd goes beneath the surface of Britain’s bustling capital to discover what lies underground. In a conversational, chatty style – though occasionally slipping into a more academic tone – he guides the reader through 2,000 years of London’s invisible history, from Roman artefacts to the modern Tube. There is no real overarching narrative and some of the chapters read more like an enumeration of topics that he had to cross off his list, though you can still find some fascinating snippets of information (a species of mosquito unique to the London Underground tunnels, for example). This is especially true for the early chapters dealing with London’s archaeology and geology; once stories centring on actual human beings can be told, his writing becomes more fluent and engaging, as can be seen in the chapters on London’s underground rivers and the construction of the tunnels and sewers, and at times his prose becomes almost lyrical. London’s forgotten past is captured beautifully and to great effect by the inclusion of reproductions of contemporary lithographs, drawings, photographs, reports and eyewitness accounts.

Ackroyd uses multiple examples from literature and film to explore the effect subterranean spaces have had on the human mind, and reminds us that they present humans with a long-standing sociocultural oxymoron: underground passages and tunnels have since prehistory been seen as places of safety, with water, for example, connected to ritual and the sacred; yet at the same time anything underground is often regarded as dangerous and dirty, not to mention unsavoury and distasteful. This book changes the reader’s perception of the city, leaving them with the impression that there is almost as much history and activity beneath the ground as there is on the bustling surface, though of course the activity below the ground is for entirely different reasons. At times Ackroyd falls back on conjecture, speculation and fancy to tell his story, but for the most part this is a well-researched, fascinating and well-told exploration of London Under.

At times this reads almost like a guide book to the hidden features of the city, and I would love to take it with me next time I visit the capital to help me look out for the clues to its secret history. Occasionally I felt slightly frustrated when the author presented an interesting historical fact in a statement but then failed to follow it up; a recommended reading list is included in the appendix, but as this extends to nearly three full pages it is impossible to determine which book a particular fact came from, if at all. Still, a worthwhile read, I find, especially for readers with a personal connection to London, or those interested in social history.

ETA: Rating: ****

P.S.: Please can anyone tell me how to add proper stars to posts?

>18 passion4reading:, that would definitely be fascinating if I knew the city. Sounds better than Victor Hugo's sidestep into exploring the history of Paris sewers in the midst of Les Miserables.

>19 Cecrow: I've never read Les Miserables but at times this wasn't far off from an exploration of the London sewers, with some quite graphic reports of the conditions the so-called 'flushers' and 'sewer-hunters' faced. Brrr!

2. Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs



Essential reading after the first two volumes as I really needed to find out how the story of Jacob, the other peculiar children and Miss Peregrine ends. This was a Christmas present in 2016, so again has been sitting on my shelf for a while.

Review

Still facing the hollowgast on the London Underground platform and pursued by wights at the beginning of the book, Jacob, Emma and Addison need to think quickly how to make their escape and help their friends and Miss Peregrine, who have been abducted.

Taking up the thread right where the second volume ended, it is essential that the reader is at least halfway familiar with the characters and events in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City, as otherwise the majority of the novel will make little sense.

I'm not really sure what I was expecting (not that you really can expect anything in this series) but I was hoping for a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. Instead, it appeared to me that Ransom Riggs ran out of ideas and steam to tell his peculiar story. Characters faint a lot in this final instalment, as if the author couldn't think of any other reactions to certain events they were experiencing, and there are several credibility-straining coincidences woven into the narrative, without which the plot wouldn't have progressed. I also found the general story arc strangely predictable while retaining its unfailingly imaginative plot strands, with one or two genuine surprises. It was disappointing to find out that the villain, when we finally meet him, is in the end just another garden-variety kind of megalomaniac, even if he goes about it in a peculiar way.

It is true that Jacob and Emma grow into their characters in this novel, but to me their romance never had a grain of truth to it, there not being an ounce of chemistry between them (not to mention it having a slight yuk factor as Emma was previously attracted to Jacob's grandfather), and it is just too convenient for Jacob to suddenly develop more peculiar abilities at their time of need, which might just save the day. To me this has the whiff of deus ex machina about it, with the author desperate to come up with plot devices to wrap up the storyline. Along with several small, niggling inconsistencies and contradictions, this is by far the weakest volume in the series, and the heavily contrived ending nearly ruined the entire book for me, if not the series.

On the plus side, the descriptions of Devil's Acre are very atmospheric, the character of Sharon provides a little light relief, and while I felt that the photographs dictated the storyline in Hollow City to a certain extent, this wasn't quite as apparent here, and some of the photos are so bizarre they have to be seen to be believed.

In short, after a highly original and mostly engrossing first volume the author couldn't maintain the high standards he'd set himself, and while Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children had a message of tolerance towards others who are different in some way at its heart, in Hollow City and Library of Souls this had turned into a sort of good-against-evil trope, with admittedly rather peculiar characters peopling the story, and a rather straightforward (and hence predictable) chase and flight for survival. I can't help but feel disappointed as I had expected more. Still, it'll be interesting to see what project the author comes up with next.

Rating: **½

Bummer on failed expectations, but woo for knocking it off the list! :)

It always stinks when a series has an unsatisfying ending, especially after you enjoyed the other books.

>22 .Monkey.: >23 Narilka: Couldn't agree with you more! Maybe I had an inkling it wasn't going to live up to the promise of the first volume, and that's why it lingered on my shelf for so long?

>24 passion4reading: Anything is possible. At least you finished it. Otherwise you'd always wonder.

3. Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch



Essential reading as I've accompanied Peter Grant on his investigations into supernatural crime on the streets (or Underground tunnels) of London on three previous occasions, and I'm really intrigued to find out where the author is taking the narrative.

As before events take unexpected twists and turns. The beauty of reading fantasy is that the author can give their imagination free rein so that the reader won't have any idea of what's coming next; this novel has the bonus of featuring a stupendous cliffhanger, though it does also feature some chapters in the middle of the book where the plot dragged somewhat – probably not unlike a real police investigation, I imagine. You can read the full review here.

Rating: ****

I have his first book already marked on my wishlist. Sounds like I should make an effort to get to it soon.

>27 LittleTaiko: It won't be to everyone's taste, but the voice of the narrator is so engaging and the plot unpredictable that it's a pleasure to join him on the ride. Be prepared for the long haul, though; if anything, this fourth instalment shows that the author is playing a long game. I have numbers 5 and 6 on the shelf, and a seventh was published last year. Goodness knows how many books Ben Aaronovitch is planning ...

4. The Domesticated Brain by Bruce Hood



I found this at one of the local charity shops. I remembered the author's name because I had watched him give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures a few years ago.

The mysterious case of the shrinking brain – Scientists have discovered that human brains have shrunk by about the size of a tennis ball over the last 20,000 years. The author hypothesises that this shrinkage is a result of self-domestication as our ancestors learnt how to live in larger communities at the end of the last Ice Age, through coordination, cooperation and cohabitation, and that it was this fact that made it possible for collective intelligence to thrive, not the other way round.

I found the chapter on group psychology, linking the perceived passivity of the German people during the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich and mass shootings to feelings of belonging to a group and being excluded from it, respectively, particularly fascinating.

You can read the full review here.

>29 passion4reading: That sounds fascinating.

It was. Very well and engagingly written too, with thankfully little on the anatomy and physiology of brain structures and more on how our brains react to different situations and images. It also included the wonderful little science snippet that sea squirts start life with a brain (albeit quite a rudimentary one) to move around and find a rock to attach themselves to, but then lose it because it is no longer needed once they've attached (presumably for life)!

I agree that this sounds quite fascinating. I love getting insight into why we do the things that we do.

5. Winter Siege by Ariana Franklin



This book was a Christmas present from a few years ago. When I requested it I thought it was the conclusion to the author's Mistress of the Art of Death series; when I found out that it is a stand-alone title I admit I suddenly wasn't quite so keen on reading it any more.

Interesting fact: the author died before she could deliver the manuscript and so the book was completed by her daughter.

The novel is set in England during the Anarchy, a period of bloody civil war in the twelfth century when Empress Matilda was fighting her cousin King Stephen for her right to sit on the throne of England after her father Henry I's death. It is set out as a frame narrative, with the narration alternating between the abbot of Perton Abbey and the events nearly half a century before, while the action (at the beginning of the 1140s) changes between the viewpoints of Maud of Kenniford on one hand and Penda, a young girl from the fenlands, and the mercenary Gwil on the other.

The historic setting is flawless, and the harsh realities of a winter in the fenlands, with most of the men gone to build castles for this lord or the other, or a castle under siege were brought home to great effect. In contrast, the characterisation remains a little too bland for my taste, with the exception of Penda and Gwil (and possibly William), and the villain is so out-and-out evil that he appears almost as a caricature of himself. Additionally, for most of the time the book uses time-appropriate language relating to features of the castle or an aspect of weaponry or armour, and then out of the blue more modern terms (such as "managerial", "gave up the ghost", "immune" and "willy-nilly"), unknown at the time the novel is set, appear, with specific characters being addressed as "Milly" and "Girly", respectively. Ahhh! Each time I flinched as the use is so incongruous and jars terribly.

Because I'm interested in medieval history I couldn't bring myself to give it away before reading it; now that I have it's going to the charity shop - goodbye!

Is that the sound of a fond farewell? Alas, some of them are like that.

I suppose if the author's deceased, this means you'll never get that series conclusion you were looking for :(

Yes, it's true - the book and I will part company.

I think there was some hope that Samantha Norman, the author's daughter, would pick up her mother's pen to complete the series, but this book came out several years ago and I don't think there is any great call for her to complete it now. :-(

6. Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo



Anyone who still thinks that YA fiction lacks believable and relatable characters, an intelligent plot and fast-paced action needs to read this duology, of which this is the second volume. I enjoyed the author's world-building, but what to me really stands out is the characterisation: each character is portrayed with their frailties and flaws, but also their determination, courage and loyalty to their friends, and I cared for them deeply and wish the series had continued.

>36 passion4reading: I read that this year and also loved it :) I need to try her Grishaverse books. Have you read those?

>37 Narilka: I remember your review. It was because you enjoyed Six of Crows so much that the two books were given a higher priority in the challenge!

I have to say that her Grisha trilogy doesn't appeal as much from what I've read in the LT reviews, with the romance angle (esp. the dreaded love triangle) playing a much more pronounced role. I liked the fact that the romance didn't interfere with the story-telling in the two books but was part of who the characters were; in showing they cared about another person the author very cleverly demonstrated their individual personal growth and raised the stakes for the character involved. I can't stand romance for romance's sake, no matter how good the rest of the book may be.

If you're planning on reading her other books, please let me know what you thought.

Oh lordy. Why do YA authors need to do love triangles? That has to be one of my most hated tropes. I have the first Grisha book on my kindle so it's mostly a matter of when :) I'll definitely let you know after I read it.

7. The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford



This was a birthday present from four years ago that I finally got round to reading, even if it took me nearly four weeks. Because of that I feel some of the continuity was lost, which I hope to remedy during a second reading sometime in the future.

In this book Stephen Alford gives a detailed account of the men who chose (or were occasionally *persuaded*) to protect Elizabeth's life and government during the tumultuous years of her reign; far from being the Golden Age we often associate with it, the years between Elizabeth's accession in 1558 to her death in 1603 were anything but stable, characterised by disease, famine and religious upheaval, set against a backdrop of a divided Europe.

Most of this history was, out of necessity, kept secret, and the author has extracted the details from a variety of documentary and other sources. The result is not entirely successful: the chronology and the prose aren't as clear as they should be in a book like this, which made keeping track of the multitude of characters even more difficult, although it didn't help that I took nearly four weeks to finish the book. While the first part is filled with interesting facts, the pace doesn't really pick up until Mary Queen of Scots appears on the scene, and even then the account often reads like a spy's travelogue and who did/said what when – a cohesive narrative it is not, and there are several questions that are left open.

Though it is clear from the outset that the author intends to shine a spotlight on the men in the shadows and those in government who handled them, it still came as something of a surprise that some of the wider implications were not sufficiently dealt with in my opinion; we hear of the passing of the Act for the Queen's Surety that in the end made it possible to arrest and execute Mary Queen of Scots, and how the government approved of the use of torture to extract information, but I felt there was little else that explored the prevailing mood among England's general population (did the paranoia experienced by Elizabeth's closest advisers extend all the way to the common man and woman on the street?). Where the author is successful, though, is in conveying how dangerously close Elizabeth came to a premature and violent death by describing the numerous plots to invade England and attempts on her life; it's quite miraculous (and no doubt due to the vigilance of the loyal advisers around her) that they never amounted to anything, and Elizabeth died of natural causes in her bed at the age of 69.

>40 passion4reading:, that whole premise feels counter to the current trend: shedding light on the women forgotten by history who stood behind the men we know. But I've gotten the sense before that Elizabeth did require a lot of support, for all that she did keep a steady hand on things herself.

8. Plague Land by S D Sykes



Another birthday present from two years ago that I only got round to reading now. Unfortunately the wait wasn't worth it.

I was looking forward to this book, as a historical whodunit is one of my favourite genres, but unfortunately I found the characters and the plot rather formulaic and predictable, and was able to correctly identify the culprit within the first 100 pages. I gave up about a third of the way in as the story simply didn't hold my interest, despite of the interesting period setting.

Historical whodunit is your thing? I can assume in that case that you already discovered The Name of the Rose a long time ago?

>43 Cecrow: Yes, I read the book in German years ago, and still have the English edition on my shelf because I'd like to revisit it. The historical whodunits aren't restricted to a certain time period, though; I've read books set in Ancient Egypt and the Second World War, and nearly every time period in-between.

What did you think about The Name of the Rose? I think this is one of those books that benefits from multiple readings, where you discover something new each time.

>44 passion4reading:, I'm not much of a re-reader but I've read three others by Eco after that one, he's one of my favourites.

>45 Cecrow: I've heard that The Name of the Rose was one of the easier ones to absorb and digest, and that Foucault's Pendulum in particular splits public opinion. Which ones did you read, and what did you think?

Foucault's Pendulum was my favourite; me being generally anti-conspiracy, there was a lot of funny underlying it
Baudolino was another great treat, obfuscating the line between truth and fiction
The Island of the Day Before I read just last year; least impressive of the bunch but fine if the others have already won you over

Still planning to pursue a couple more of his someday, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery. Also, some of his non-fiction pieces sound interesting too.

>47 Cecrow: Ohh, sounds intriguing. Maybe I'll give his other books a try someday.

I didn't know he'd written any non-fiction. Must look into that. Thanks.

9. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell



I found this in a charity bookshop three years ago. I had heard that Cloud Atlas was considered a book that divided opinions and was curious where I would fall on this divide, considering I loved reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, with its wonderful, lyrical, crisp and crystal-clear prose. Well, now I know.

Despite the best intentions and an open mind, I just couldn't get into this one, and I tried, I mean really tried. This is an ambitious and audacious literary experiment, and it simply doesn't work for me. The writing is all over the place, the characters are unlikeable and unrelatable, and the depicted events just so dull that I didn't give a fig about what happened next. From what I've read in reviews, this isn't the point of the book, but I'm afraid I can't take one without the other.

To have two DNFs within a week is quite a record for me, seeing as this is now equals the number of books I didn't finish over the last two years. Well, that's one way to reduce my TBR pile.

>49 passion4reading:, I didn't find it so bad as that, but it didn't charm me as I'd hoped either. Coincidentally I just weeded my copy out of my shelves a couple weeks ago.

>50 Cecrow: Did you make it to the end? Did you think the device of splitting the novellas worked?

I've got The Bone Clocks sitting on my shelf, still unread. It'll be interesting to see how I fare with that one; I believe it deals with similar themes to Cloud Atlas.

I think I've recently become stricter with myself; where I would have persevered to the end with a book I didn't enjoy only a few months ago, I've now started to think that time is too short and there are still so many good books to read.

>51 passion4reading:, the split made things interesting, but I didn't find the various stories bound together as strongly as I would have liked. Doing it myself, I would have inverted the model (started with the story furthest in the future, gone inwards to the story farthest in the past), setting up mysteries about the past through the first half, a reveal in the middle, then watch the repercussions play out through subsequent times moving forward again in the latter half. Doing it by his model, I think he limited where he was able to go with the merging of theme and plot.

I'd not read anything else by David Mitchell, and didn't feel teased enough to try him again since. I still persevere to the end every time, but I'm at least very choosy about who I spend more time with.

>52 Cecrow: That would be a very good way of doing things in Cloud Atlas, and might have made it more appealing.

However, I do think you should try to read a David Mitchell: I can recommend The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Slade House - two stories that are poles apart in terms of period, location and genre, but they're both excellent. The former is historical fiction, set in Japan at the turn of the 18th century, the other is a very clever haunted house story, divided into five interweaving sections. Now that I'm thinking about it, Slade House shares several similarities with Cloud Atlas in terms of style and concept.

>53 passion4reading:, definitely I would try Thousand Autumns if I give him another chance. Japanese historical fiction is a big thing with me.

I really enjoyed Slade House and The Bone Clocks but haven't tried the others. I keep getting such mixed messages on Cloud Atlas that I tend to shy away from it. However, The Thousand Autmns of Jacob de Zoet sounds fascinating.

>55 LittleTaiko: What was your opinion of The Bone Clocks?

>54 Cecrow:, >55 LittleTaiko: When I was reading Thousand Autumns there were moments when I could have wept for pure joy at the beauty of the prose, especially in combination with the Japanese culture and landscape; this was made even more poignant by the tragic love story at its heart. That's why I felt I was somehow let down by Cloud Atlas. Maybe he was still experimenting with his style then? I haven't read anything earlier than Thousand Autumns.

10. The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger



A Christmas present from 2015 I now have finally got round to reading. Though in my opinion not as good as the first volume, A Burnable Book, it is worth reading for the author's ability to recreate the smelly, noisy mess that was London towards the end of the fourteenth century, along with plenty of historical facts and political intrigue. Coincidentally, this was the third book set during the fourteenth century I have read in recent weeks.

This is the second volume in Bruce Holsinger's series centred on the poet and dealer in information John Gower. With this book the reader is plunged into tensions both domestic and international, with King Richard II at odds with the lords appellant and a portion of England's citizens, and the realm under threat from invasion from the combined forces of France and Burgundy. Into this political mix is thrown the evolution of the portable gun, which marks a seismic shift in the way humans deal out death.

To me these were the most interesting aspects of the book, while the whodunit element wasn't quite as successful. Furthermore, the narrative is subdivided into two further strands: one tracking the two escapees and the second following a talented smith and founder who becomes instrumental in the development and eventual deployment of the new weapon; while the second plot strand definitely adds to the story, the first could easily have been dispensed with as it doesn't add anything to the narrative per se. Still, this is an intelligent historical political thriller and I'm looking forward to further stories with John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Nice review!

Thank you.

Congratulations on finishing the challenge more than four months early! I'll be lucky if I can make it past twelve on the list, the rate I'm going. On the plus side, by reading all these fabulous new books, I'm preventing them from being added to a future TBR list :)

Exactly! The joy of new books! I don't usually get my list all read. And I have a few old long books for next year. So I probably won't finish next year.

11. A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab



The fact that this sequel starts almost at the point where the first volume ended, and therefore requires in-depth knowledge of the preceding events, necessitated a reread of A Darker Shade of Magic, which I'd read more than three years ago – and I'm glad I did as some of the references would have been greatly puzzling. Unfortunately it also made the different pace in both books rather more noticeable: whereas A Darker Shade of Magic was one giant roller-coaster ride, A Gathering of Shadows was a comparatively gentle excursion on a calm sea, with the wind freshening once the Essen Tasch got under way, and the book ending in a full-blown storm. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the novel is a lot more character driven than the first volume, but I did wish several times that something would happen. Still, the last few chapters alone push the rating closer to a 4.25, and I am so glad that I don't have to wait a year to find out how to story continues! The concluding volume to the series is already lined up.

I've paid more attention to V.E. Schwab since a fantastic speech she recently delivered to the Tolkien Society that I read the text version of. She has a good handle on where the fantasy genre is at, and where it's capable of going.

I found the speech you mention above; that's pretty powerful stuff, and her talk about finding a door to the world of books speaks straight to my heart. Apart from her Shades of Magic series, I've also read her Monsters of Verity duology and her novel Vicious, which I recently found out was only the first part in a series. The thing I like most about her books is that they explore the genre in a way that I've never encountered before. Certainly some other books she's written, of which she gives a synopsis during the speech, seem also worth exploring.

Nice review! my daughter highly recommended this series. I guess the three books I have should all be read in a row?