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Reading Wednesday
May. 20th, 2026 06:58 amJust finished: Five Points On an Invisible Line by Su J Sokol. I don't have a lot to add since I'd almost finished it last week, but the final setpiece, a massive, multi-tactic demonstration, is really well done.
Currently reading: Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. Time to start Aurora Awards reading. TBH I started one of the best novels—won't say which one—and found it very much unparsable in the way that some secondary world fantasy is just too much for me, so I moved on to this one. I'm around halfway through and the jury's still out.
This one is set in Fantasy Medieval France and follows a tavern poet who's recruited by the local provost to help him solve the murder of a duke who is running the country, since his brother, the king, suffers from an undisclosed madness. Great concept, cool characters, the setting is a breath of fresh air, and I cannot argue that Kay is a superb prose stylist.
And yet I almost always bounce off his work. There's a certain Tolkienesque narrative distance that I think works for Tolkien but feels peculiarly pre-modern. Objectively, I respect this as a deliberately alienating technique, but it means that I don't bond with it in quite the same way, and takes a tremendous feat of writing elsewhere to make me love it. It's entirely possible that this will hit that and I'm giving it a chance but so far I'm feeling that I like what he's doing but don't feel emotionally invested.
Currently reading: Written On the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay. Time to start Aurora Awards reading. TBH I started one of the best novels—won't say which one—and found it very much unparsable in the way that some secondary world fantasy is just too much for me, so I moved on to this one. I'm around halfway through and the jury's still out.
This one is set in Fantasy Medieval France and follows a tavern poet who's recruited by the local provost to help him solve the murder of a duke who is running the country, since his brother, the king, suffers from an undisclosed madness. Great concept, cool characters, the setting is a breath of fresh air, and I cannot argue that Kay is a superb prose stylist.
And yet I almost always bounce off his work. There's a certain Tolkienesque narrative distance that I think works for Tolkien but feels peculiarly pre-modern. Objectively, I respect this as a deliberately alienating technique, but it means that I don't bond with it in quite the same way, and takes a tremendous feat of writing elsewhere to make me love it. It's entirely possible that this will hit that and I'm giving it a chance but so far I'm feeling that I like what he's doing but don't feel emotionally invested.
