Marion: I finished up The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso, which gives us a vagrant queen with an unusual problem, set in a well-realized second world. It’s Book One of a series and the second book, The Ikessar Falcon, is out now. In between revisions, and reading that, I browsed the poems of Xochitl Julisa Bermejo, in Posadas. “Our Lady of the Water Gallons” is the poem I keep returning to.

Bill: Mostly buried under papers this past week. I did manage to finish Einstein’s Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and cold Explains the Universe, an excellent non-fiction work by Paul Sen, and two collections of poetry: Not for Luck by Derek Sheffield and What Water Knows by Jacqueline Jones LaMon (favorite line: “it only costs a dollar to quench our deepest thirsts”).  My only genre therefore was episode two of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which was a lot of fun now that the intro stuff is out of the way.

Terry: The Bram Stoker Award nominations for horror published in 2020 came out recently, and Stephen Graham Jones is on there twice, for The Only Good Indians, a novel, and Night of the Mannequins, a novella, so I read the latter, and wow! Seems to me this one will be difficult to beat. I also read Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, which was nominated for this year’s Nebula Award, and which is another excellent novella. And I finished Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown, a novel that I found a bit perplexing in tone, but in a good way. Finally, last night I started reading The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey; I’ve only read the first two chapters so far, but I can already tell I’m going to love it. It’s written beautifully, has a compulsively readable plot, and is difficult to put down.

Tim: For a while now I’ve been reading primarily academic work, but this week I made a tentative foray back into the world of fantasy with N.K. Jemisin‘s The Awakened Kingdom, a sequel to her INHERITANCE TRILOGY. I have to admit that INHERITANCE is not my favorite of Jemisin’s works – I’m a BROKEN EARTH guy, personally – but this new novella is very entertaining so far.

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  • Tim Scheidler

    TIM SCHEIDLER, who's been with us since June 2011, holds a Master's Degree in Popular Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Tim enjoys many authors, but particularly loves J.R.R. Tolkien, Robin Hobb, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke. When he’s not reading, Tim enjoys traveling, playing music, writing in any shape or form, and pretending he's an athlete.

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