+- Forums (http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomForum)
+-- Forum: Doom Arts (http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomForum/forumdisplay.php?fid=6)
+--- Forum: Doom Books (http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomForum/forumdisplay.php?fid=13)
+--- Thread: TQ's Book Count 2026 (/showthread.php?tid=8719)
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-02-2026
#24: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. I should have read these books in order; or if not in order, by sub-topic. Within the Discworld series, there are a few uncategorized, standalone books, but several that each belong to a subtopic.There are the books focusing in the wizards, another series related to witches, another about the City Watch, several about Death, and two others I haven’t run into yet. It’s almost like watching a multi-year series with different seasons and watching them out of order.
This one was the first in the City Watch series, explains the Patrician, the origin of Captain Vimes and how he met his wife, and introduces Nobby and Colon who I’ve met in subsequent City Watch books. Nice to now understand the background, and it certainly would have enriched by experience of Men At Arms and Jingo.
Ah well, whatever. My brain will unscramble it all eventually.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-05-2026
#24: Eric by Terry Pratchett. Eric is a rich man’s spoiled son, playing around with summoning demon the way a modern nerd might play around with hacking networks, because he’s bored and wants to live forever, world domination and a gorgeous chick with boobs. Eric somehow manages to summon Rincewind, a wizard who was trapped in an adjacent dimension (and who featured in earlier Discworld books as the wizard famed for his practical cowardice, and whose lack of talents and desire to be happily bored was thwarted by being adopted by sentient luggage and accidentally falling in with companions who led “interesting” lives). Rincewind is very surprised to be trapped in a magical circle and even more surprised when, having agreed to attempt to fulfill the brat’s wishes, snaps his fingers and finds they’ve traveled to the beginning of Time (because if you’re going to live forever, you have to start from the moment the world was created). Yes, there are two more finger snaps, and two more worlds and no, Rincewind didn’t suddenly become magically powerful, he’s just being used by a demon with an ulterior motive.
On the whole, it was a satisfying short story, but not enough Luggage in the story.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-08-2026
#25 Platform Decay by Martha Wells. Our favorite Murderbot rescues Mensah’s wife Farai, and daughter, Sofi, as well as the children of a Barish-Estranza employee, with a pocketful of drones and some help from Three. This is the first Murderbot book I’ve read since seeing the Apple TV version with Alexander Skarsgard. I was very clearly seeing and hearing Alexander Skarsgard in my head while reading the book. Can’t wait for more, either in print or on TV.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-10-2026
#26: Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. Another in the Death subtopic. In this one, Azrael agrees with some nebulous auditors that Death has a bit too much personality and needs to be replaced. When Death discovers he’s about to die, he decides to use the time he has left to experience a bit of life. He learns the value of work, sleep, dreams, interaction with others, and why efficient threshing machines are not necessarily better than a good scythe in the hands of one who knows how to use it well.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-16-2026
#27: Archangel’s Eternity by Nalini Singh. Per DM, as this is a romance novel, there is no need for me to review it.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-19-2026
#28: Keeper by Tana French. As someone else here is about to start reading this, I won’t include any hints or spoilers. All I’ll say is that it was good. A little slow, but the pace of the story and the detail seemed appropriate for the story. Having read the previous two books in this trilogy, it was enjoyable to fall back into the familiar characters and watch them evolve.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-21-2026
#29: Marsh Mystics by Jana DeLeon. This is the latest in the “Miss Fortune” cozy mystery series (the violence and sex occur “off the page”). Fortune Redding, (a former CIA assassin who relocated to Sinful, Louisiana to start a new life as a private detective), and her two senior citizen friends, Ida Belle and Gertie (who served in the military in Vietnam) investigate the unsavory financial circumstances surrounding a suspicious suicide at a spa. I find Fortune to be an interesting character because of her very flexible moral boundaries. She thinks it would be wrong to fail to help an ailing neighbor clean a house, and is the first to volunteer to redistribute an overabundance of donated food less fortunate, but is happy to lie to her fiancee (the local police chief) about where she’s been or what she’s done whenever she knows she’s bent or broken a law he might have to enforce. (And I’m not sure why he’s content with being lied to, but that’s a choice the author the made.) In this story, the victim (of course it wasn’t really suicide) is a fairly nasty woman who victimized several relatives, and Fortune has no problem helping the killer get away with the murder.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-25-2026
#30: Cat on a Hot Tin Woof by Spencer Quinn. Latest release in the Chet and Bernie series. Bernie is hired by a rich teen influencer to find Miss Kitty, her stolen cat (the co-star in her on-line videos). The case rapidly expands into a double-murder investigation, with the killer & cat kidnapper trying to set up Bernie as the fall guy. If that weren’t enough, the ex-wife is having trouble with her current marriage and demands Bernie’s help. As always, Chet provides back up to all hijinks (and creates some of his own).
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 05-29-2026
#31: Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber by Andy Borowitz. Although certainly amusing, this book was also terribly depressing. Although I’ve lived through most the misery he covers in this book, I’d mercifully forgotten some, and hadn’t run into others, so it just made the manure pile just a little bit deeper than I’d realized. But perhaps the hardest part of getting through this book was the conclusion; that what I’ve been doing about the horrible state of this country isn’t enough. It’s not enough to be an educated voter, to donate to worthy candidates, to stay informed and to scream about what’s wrong… especially when what’s wrong is us. Not “us” the people reading this post, necessarily, but “us” the political spectators. We root for the right team, but we’re not actively *doing* anything other than voting, and that’s no longer enough. We have to actively participate in getting the people doing even less than us to vote, to organize, to register people to vote, to attend town halls, and find opportunities to change the minds of people not helping the educated candidates to defeat the morons. I’ve been through a “being involved” phase of life and it was tiring. I don’t know if I’ve got any gas in the tank for this stuff any more. But I certainly understand the point he’s making.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 06-09-2026
#32: The Brothers McKay by Craig Johnson. Greg is in the midst of reading this one, and he’s better than I am at summarizing, so I’ll leave it to him in his books thread. I’ll just say that I always enjoy watching what weird circumstances Sheriff Walt manages to find himself having to survive, and that my favorite character in this story was Borax, the mule.
#33: White Silence and #34: Dark Light, both by Jodi Taylor. I’ve read a couple of Jodi Taylor’s other series and I’m eating this one up with a spoon. I don’t know what it is about her style of writing that makes me devour it, but I’m hardly conscious of time passing while I read her books. I start one, and the next thing I know it’s a couple hours and a few hundred pages later than it was a moment ago. In this series, her heroine is aware she has abilities that are different from “normal” people and she does her best to ignore and suppress them by being as blah, ordinary, and boring as possible in behavior, appearance, and routine. The story begins after her husband dies and she discovers that pretty much everyone she knows, including her dead husband, were keeping a very close eye on her and her potential abilities. No one — including the heroine — knows for sure what she’s capable of, and until late in the 2nd book, she really doesn’t want to know. If I didn’t have to work tomorrow, I’d undoubtedly start the next book in the series right now.
I just love a story where you can’t wait to find out what happens next.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 06-11-2026
#35: Long Shadows by Jodi Taylor. Book 3 of the series is a huge escalation. It starts with her slowly evolving and growing out of being a comfortable frump with some interesting abilities and questionable backstory into a massive story change: the person she thought she was doesn’t exist; it’s a cover story for a damaged demigod inhabiting a mortal. The question of course is *why* and this book only deals with the what and how. So… off I dive into the next one.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 06-15-2026
#36: Bad Moon by Jodi Taylor. I have to hand it to her. Not only did she come through very satisfactorily with the why, after temporarily allowing her frump to try to hide, she helped her shake it off and become a far better version of herself. And collapse. And stand up again. She also wrapped up several unfinished stories from two earlier books that needed more attention and detail, and opened at least three new cans of worms. I’m thoroughly enjoying this series and I am very sad to have finished the last available book. Now i have to wait for her to write more. I hate when that happens.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 06-22-2026
#37:Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews. Kate Daniels is mostly human mercenary on an earth where magic and tech take turns in prominence and necromancers and shapeshifters fight for dominance, while Knights try to maintain order and justice. Kate prefers to rely on her weaponry and guile, but is armed with spells, and of course, an attitude. In this first book with many sequels, Kate’s guardian/tutor is murdered, and she seeks the killer, a rogue vampire who is experimenting with breeding new kinds of monsters using women with magical abilities. I’ll put this series aside unless I’m bored and out of other options: the writing is fine, but the characters are just familiar rehashes of a million other fantasy series. It’s okay, semi-tasty junk food, but it’s definitely junk food.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 06-28-2026
#38: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson. Throughout most of the story, I thought it was just another typical fantasy with young self-involved “heroes” undergoing challenges, emerging victorious only to face the reality that the system is rigged and that all the adults have been deceiving them. And I got that, and enjoyed the story, but surprisingly, discovered it has a little more, or at least, a little different than the “typical” story of this type. The characters all begin with that sheen of stereotype, then become rougher and more human as the story unwinds. I’m confused by the villains; the magically-talented ruler is somehow both a madman and a long-term planner, which seems unbalanced and counterintuitive. The right-hand man is painted as wanting nothing but order and continuity, but does little about cumulative disrepair and cockroaches. The gods behave as two-dimensionally as they were imagined, both real and unreal, simultaneously. The wife and mother of the villain is somehow both a plotting puppet master and a macguffin. I’m enjoying the development of the central heroine, and look forward to the next book. Wish it was due to be released sooner.
RE: TQ's Book Count 2026 - The Queen - 07-04-2026
#39:Small Magics by Ilona Andrews. A series of short stories which retell scenes in other books from the series from the perspective of a different character. Surprised by how appealing this was. In the series books, the author never has the main character re-tell a story that occurred earlier in the book or the series; if Kate needs to fill in another character in on something we've already read, she handles it as, “I explained what happened” and then immediately moves on to new information. This book appears to be the only revisit of memorable scenes.
#40: Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews. Yeah, I know I said I wasn’t going to dive deeper into this one, but… I lied. Didn’t have anything else immediately and I’m glad, because the second one was better than the first, and the third really sucked me in. The narrator keeps surprising me with details about her background that make everything make more sense. The chain of events are, as with most series, just a vehicle for revealing character detail. In this one, Kate rescues and adopts a teenager who can’t recognize that her crush is an evil schmuck who’s using her, helps out the local shape-shifter pack and becomes more entangled with them and their leader, and reveals additional hints about just how potentially powerful she could be if she didn’t have a conscience or empathy.
#41: Magic Strikes by Ilona Andrews. In this one, Kate has to choose between being a good friend or a smart caretaker, and chooses being a friend. That leads to a friend getting permanently disfigured, having to fight monsters in a gladiatorial setting, and outing the identity she’s been successfully hiding through the first few books. Of course, the important thing is that during this series of events, she very nearly has sex with the leader of the shapeshifter pack. So many issues with this potential couple: she has an extraordinarily problematic quest that he knows nothing about (yet) and shouldn’t go anywhere near because of his commitment to ruling and caring for his pack. The adopted niece gets a small cameo in this one, and a crush on her aunt’s young disfigured friend. No doubt that will develop in upcoming books. So much entertaining angst, mixed with a lot of swordplay and monsters and magic.