BooksFinishedT. Thorn Coyle, The Panther Chronicles #2
To Wrest Our Bodies From the Fire: Alt history series set during the heyday of the Black Panther Party, in a world with lots of different kinds of magic, in which some of the members of the Black Panther party are panther shapeshifters and magic users, and J. Edgar Hoover is an evil sorcerer. Which might make it sound silly, but it's not.
Seanan McGuire, InCryptid series #6–7,
Magic for Nothing and
Tricks for Free: Urban fantasy series in a world with lots of different kinds of supernatural creatures, ghosts, and some magic users. The Price family in the US is trying to protect the supernatural creatures and the Covenant, based in the UK, is trying to exterminate them. The books are from the points of view of various members of the Price family. I like this series almost as much as the October Daye series and better than other series McGuire has written.
Liz Williams,
The Shadow Pavilion (Detective Inspector Chen #4): Similar to the others, discussed in a previous post. There is a fifth book out,
The Iron Khan, and at one point there was a sixth book, which wrapped up the series, available directly from the author, but I don't know if that's still true.
ReadingSarah Zettel,
Reclamation: Just started it; it seems like space opera. It won a Locus award for best first novel.
AudiobooksFinishedKaren Charlton,
The Sans Pareil Mystery (Detective Lavender #2): Read by Michael Page. Series is set in Regency London and the protagonist is a member of the Bow Street Runners. I liked it OK, but there was more romance than I tend to like in my mysteries. Both this and the first book in the series had pointlessly evil villains (although they were less annoying in this book than the first one).
Caitlin Doughty,
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes And Other Lessons From The CrematoryRead by the author, nonfiction/memoir. She is a mortician, and this book is mostly about her experience working at a crematory and attending mortuary school. Recycling the review I posted at Audible: I liked the parts of this book that were about the work Doughty did at a crematory and about the way the death industry operates, and I applaud her for passing on the information that people have choices about how to handle the practicalities of death other than embalming and/or cremation. I'm glad there are more choices available now than there used to be. However, I didn't find the author's personal story interesting, and I disliked the way she judged ways of handling death other than the one she advocates. Not only are embalming and asking professionals to handle corpses wrong, she suggested, but they're to blame for everything that's wrong with society. Seems a bit of a stretch! Although she paid lip service to the notion that people from different cultures approach death in many ways, and she admitted to cultural ignorance at times, in the end she made it clear that she thought their ways were quaint, offensive, or outré. Many of the stories and vignettes involved some kind of shaming, whether against people arranging for cremations over the internet, fat people who are more difficult to cremate, or people who don't understand the limitations of embalming. (Also, ableism and racism). Anyway, if you want to read it, I recommend getting it in text rather than audio so you can skim past the annoying parts.
ListeningCharlaine Harris, An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1): Narrated by Eva Kaminsky. Alternative history / Western / fantasy. Really enjoying it.
TVWatchedBabylon Berlin: German neo-noir series on Netflix streaming, made by one of the creators of
Sense8, and you can see the stylistic similarities. Set during the Weimar Republic. There are three seasons on Netflix so far. The first two seasons (16 episodes) make up a complete arc. I've heard it said about
The Wire: "The first four seasons were great art, the fifth was good television." That's how I felt about the first two seasons of this show vs. the third season. This Youtube video is a good preview (except too fast-paced) and performance of my favorite song from the series, "Zu Asche, Zu Staub":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uekZpkYf7-E This is my third favorite series right now, after
Babylon 5 and
The Expanse.
WatchingAltered Carbon: Netflix original series based on the books by Richard K. Morgan about a cyberpunk universe where people's memories and personalities can be digitally saved, backed up, and downloaded into different bodies ("sleeves"). The protagonist in the first season is played by Joel Kinnaman, who's a pretty versatile physical actor. (I know this because he gets tortured for long periods of time, so he has to portray discomfort, fear, and terror in a creative variety of ways, lol.) He also played Robocop in the 2014 reboot. In Season 2 (which I haven't seen yet) the character is played by Anthony Mackie.
MusicI'm really enjoying a playlist I found on Spotify, "Scandal; Complete Discography"
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/38mWZkhyejqb1HJ6x9Vgjg?si=tiygIr--QYOMrpwDPZeqtQ ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}