From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L Armentrout

I picked up this book because it was everywhere on Instagram, especially in the fantasy hashtags. I couldn’t refresh my feed without seeing it or its sequels. The library had a copy, which was a surprise. Its English ebooks tend to be very behind when it comes to popular releases. I duly put a hold on it, and man was it popular there too; I think there were sixteen people ahead of me. I had no idea what it was about, except that it was a mix of romance and fantasy.

I jumped into the book without reading the blurb. Yeah, yeah, I know. I gave the blurb a glance, saw some bolded headings and lots of ellipses—that should’ve been a warning—but thought I might as well go into this blind. I didn’t even know the protagonists’ names when I started.

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

Book 2 of The Wheel of Time

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but laugh when I study this cover art. I’m sure the characters depicted match their descriptions in the text—Tor is very good at that—but they look so unfashionable. Also, Rand looks like he’s about to join a brass band. My school band wore similar colours, inverted. This is what happens when you grow up (or get published) in the 1990s.

I got my copy in the late ’90s, about the same time book seven came out. I pretty much bought one volume after another once I started reading the series and was flabbergasted to learn that the series didn’t end with A Crown of Swords. I mean, come on. Seven is a reasonable, epic-fantasy-like number. Even the title sounded like the good guys should be winning at that point, but alas, it was not so. 

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

It’s 1943. A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. A young woman—let’s call her Verity—has been captured by the Germans, and having broken under torture, she’s now writing her confession. The Nazis are asking about wireless codes and planes and airfields and state secrets. Verity claims to not know much about these things but writes anyway, to keep the Gestapo at bay, to stop them from torturing or killing her, to extend her life a few more days, a few more weeks. She sprinkles her confession with details of the war effort, about what planes they are flying and which airfields they are using, but what she’s really writing about is the story of her friendship with Maddie, the pilot of the crashed plane.

Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

I loved this one. While it’s definitely a space opera with high-level politics and a weird not-quite-alien threat looming in the background, at the same time it’s also a trope-filled romance with all the relevant boxes ticked for me.

At the outset, it looks like a simple, straightforward enough romance. Prince Kiem is shoved into an arranged marriage to the widowed Count Jainan to make sure the alliance between their planets holds. Kiem’s a scandal-magnet and irresistibly, incessantly charming, seemingly with no ambition, political or otherwise; Jainan’s reserved and studious and treats his duty as sacred. The empire is counting on them—if they don’t make their marriage work, the empire will lose its links to the greater galaxy, and there’s a threat of war brewing on the horizon. It’s a slow burn, and the way Kiem and Jainan keep tiptoeing around each other at the start makes you wonder if there are enough pages for the whole thing to unfold.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin

This was strange. And disturbing. And strange. I don’t even know what else to add here.

If you like stories of brilliant, tormented geniuses, then this might be for you. You even get two of them at the price of one. Mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing never met in life, but their ideas intertwined, and their tragic lives were strange mirrors of each other.

I picked the book up because it was featured in a ‘best of’ science books list, a bit surprised to realise that it was a novel. There’s no mathematics in the book; everything is in prose and philosophy and sufficiently simplified even for the most mathematically resistant of readers. 

Loving the Marquess by Suzanna Medeiros

This was a pretty random choice. I loaded this onto my ereader because I had finished my last read and I didn’t feel like searching for a new physical book. (I was away from home and I had packed extra books in my luggage, but I was too lazy to dig them out.) I sometimes download free ebooks from Google Play—this was one of them.

I’m not even sure why I picked this one to read; maybe the whole marriage of convenience thing was a familiar trope and I figured that there was no way for the story to end except with a happily ever after. It seemed short enough, and the cover was inoffensive, so why not give it a go?

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

I borrowed this ebook from the National Library. It’s a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories, quite a few of them set in the near future and featuring music. I don’t get along with short stories, honestly. I’m always like, ‘Huh, that’s it?’ and wonder what the fuss is about.

So it was a bit of a surprise when I ended up liking this collection. Predictably, I enjoyed the longer stories more, especially the somewhat wacky final story, ‘And Then There Were (N–One)’. That’s not a typo—there’s a convention where the Sarah Pinskers from different realities meet and, well, you can probably guess what happened from the ‘n minus one’ and the allusion to Agatha Christie in the title. You know you yourself are not capable of murder, but what about all those other yous?

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Book 1 of The Wheel of Time

Okay, this was a bit of a weird book choice. There’s a new Prime series based on the books and the trailers looked pretty cool, if somewhat LOTR-ish. ‘Maybe I’ll watch that,’ I thought, but when I found the time for it, I felt like I’d rather be reading. So I pulled out the first book and started rereading it instead.

Yep, this is a reread. I’ve read most of the series before, but I haven’t finished it. Definitely haven’t read the final books written by Sanderson, but I think there might be one or two by Jordan I haven’t read either. It’s been so long, I can’t even tell which was the last book I read. I pick one up and the blurb sounds familiar, but when I open the book I don’t recognise most of the characters. Might as well read the whole thing again; I remember I really liked the series when I first read it.

Tiamat’s Wrath by James S A Corey

Book 8 of The Expanse

What’s even there left to say when it’s the penultimate book of the series? Anything I wish to comment on would be rife with spoilers.

I enjoyed this one a lot. It might be my favourite book in the series, but then again those books with Miller and Prax were pretty great as well. Can’t quite make up my mind since I didn’t read the books back to back, and it feels like I read the first books ages ago. I infinitely prefer this to the adventures with the Free Navy we had some books earlier. Not that any of the books were bad—some were just better than the others.

The Clear Quran, translated by Dr Mustafa Khattab

This translation kept being recommended on Twitter, so I decided to check it out. If you asked me to choose from the ‘modern’ English translations (not that I’ve read that many), I think I still prefer the Abdel Haleem translation (OUP, 2008) over this one. Mind, I don’t know Arabic, so there’s no real way I can tell if one is better than the other; it’s just that I think the Abdel Haleem translation reads more smoothly.

That being said, though, this really is an easy-to-read translation. I like to flag pages when I come across words that I don’t know their meanings, including those I can guess from context, so I could look the words up later. I didn’t have to flag a single page here. That’s pretty amazing, honestly. For comparison: the last children’s book I read, A Face Like Glass—I believe the target audience was younger teens—had at least a dozen flags sticking out of it.