My New Year's resolution this year was to read more, so bumping this to talk about some shit I'm reading or have read.
Project Hail Mary - Go read this fucking book. It's incredible. It's from the author of The Martian (Andy Weir) and pretty similar, but also just better in almost every way. I breezed through it in five days, and would have finished it quicker had my parents not been visiting for the first two.
Dark Matter - It's been ages since I've read anything from Blake Crouch. I read his Wayward Pines books years ago, but haven't followed him at all since until I saw this getting a lot of good reviews. And I gotta say, they were warranted. This was a really fun book with one really predictable twist and a couple of others that were legitimately surprising. This is a classic page-turner where you just want to see what happens next. I finished it in two days.
The Prince of Nothing - I've been meaning to read Bakker for a while now and finally got around to it a few months ago. I'm glad I did. He has a very unique, philosophical approach to fantasy. This series follows the march of a Holy War and very much feels inspired by the Crusades. However, there are secondary plots dealing with an impending apocalyptic resurrection of the No-God, an ancient deity that almost spelled the end of mankind two thousand years earlier, along with the emergence of a man from a line of ancient royal kings who may be seeking to hijack the Holy War for his own ends.
Bandits - It had been a while since I'd read any Elmore Leonard, but there's still a lot of his library that I haven't touched. Bandits was one of those. If you like Leonard, you'll probably like this.
The Sun Also Rises - Reading this for the first time right now. Honestly, I think this might be the first Hemingway I've ever read, as browsing through his titles, I don't recall any of them being required reading for me in high school or college. I've enjoyed this far more than I expected, even if the book is largely just interesting people getting shitfaced. I suppose that's Hemingway writing what he knows. I started this yesterday and I'm almost done with it, so I guess that means it's good. It's not super long, which is why I chose it as a palate cleanser between Bakker novels.
The Aspect-Emperor - This is the first novel in Bakker's sequel series to The Prince of Nothing. It takes place around twenty years after the culmination of the Holy War from Bakker's original trilogy. I thought it was a fantastic book, with a segment that truly called back to how I felt the first time I read through the Mines of Moria segment in Lord of the Rings. This is the first in a four book series, and I think it does a good job of providing some great moments while also introducing several key mysteries that will no doubt be resolved over the course of the series. I took a break after this one to read the aforementioned Hemingway novel.
