Book Review: Raven Stratagem

This is a spoiler free review for the second book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy. Care has been taken to not explicitly spoil the events of the first book, but it may be possible to infer certain things from my discussion.

Summary: Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee is a good follow up to Ninefox Gambit, with a strong sense of character and worldbuilding. It suffers a little from weaker pacing and a less direct plot than its predecessor and any flaws from that book carry over also.

Weekly Roundup

It was a good week for reading, a bad week for blog posts, click ahead to see what I’ve been reading this week and what I plan for the week upcoming.

Weekly Roundup

Welcome to a new feature I’m going to try out, a weekly roundup of what I’ve been reading in the week, and what’s upcoming.

2021 Reading Goals

After seeing others come up with goals for the next year, I thought I’d come up with some of my own. Now, I have two young children, and am a flightful mood reader, so any goals I set are more guidelines than anything I’ll beat myself up over. With that out of the way, let’s get started.

Retrospective: Books That Surprised Me

Hello blog, it’s been a while. I’ve been neglecting any updates due to new phases in my children’s sleeping habits making it too difficult for me to reliably write and stay sane concurrently. It’s made me less keen to update this thing unfortunately.

However, I thought I’d try my hand at a little retrospective on the year so far with some books that surprised me. I’ve read probably more books this year than any other year of my life by far, and my reading tastes are more diverse than ever before, so there’s been plenty of opportunities for me to be surprised, especially when I’ve had a chance to form any opinions on many of those books before reading them.

Status Update 1

I thought I’d make a short status update to get down my thoughts about where I’m at with current projects, and how I’m feeling about them.

Firstly, I recently finished the first draft of Reflectionist short story. I’ve got it sent to a few people, but I’m going to let it rest for a little while, and come back at it with new eyes for revision. My first thought in completion is that the central conflict comes too late in the story, and that the confrontation didn’t hold enough weight. We’ll see.