Recently FinishedThe Keeper of the Isis Light is the science fiction of my childhood, though i didn't read it then. a young woman lives an innocent and carefree existence manning an interstellar outpost until colonists arrive, and then she has to learn about her world and her place in it from another point of view. i enjoyed it now; i would have had SO MANY FEELS about it as a teen.
otherwise i have been reading this one book all week, then realized
it's an omnibus edition. i've finished
The Riddle-Master of Hed and
Heir of Sea and Fire from the Riddle-Master trilogy.
these books are deeply weird. McKillip notes in the forward that she was heavily influenced by Tolkien, and i see it, but there's something about these books that is so...Cliff's Notes of a modern fantasy novel? it's very detached and distant from both the characters and the events; hugely important things happen to our protagonist offstage and often i barely catch things that turn out to be important. and then there are a bunch of people who have names that are only one letter off from other people's names. but this is a nifty world and i do want the answer to the central mysteries.
note: none of the things they call riddles are actual riddles. they're just straightforward questions along the lines of the Bilbo Baggins classic "what do i have in my pocket?"
Currently ReadingHarpist in the Wind, the third one. everyone is overpowered and we still don't know what the antagonists want or what our hero is actually supposed to do.
What's Nexti have so many library books queued up that i'm starting to hit return dates. fortunately the oldest ones are on my kindle which is in airplane mode, so they won't disappear. also i have beta reading to do for C, and he's been very patient. (this pileup came from a combination of Jólabókaflóð suggestions and that big list
james_davis_nicoll posted at the end of the year.)