I Enjoyed That

The nice thing about having a Kindle is that it constantly reminds you of your collection. Here! Here are the books you've read! Here are the words you've looked up! Here's how long it'll take to get to the next chapter!
It's an astounding machine, and possibly the best gift I've ever gotten. I haven't really thought about ranking gifts received so far, but it's up there. Both of the ones I've gotten are up there.
Here's what I've been up to in 2017.

Kraken - China Mieville
While I was reading Embassytown, I got given a hard copy of this book. Paperbacks are jarring now. Double pages are nice, but the inability to cart them about or longpress a word to get immediate gratification definitions are too big of a downside to ever go back.
Mieville, as I always feel obligated to mention, is always a hit or miss. Kraken, then, was a surprising medium - an interesting story about an unwittingly special guy getting sucked into an otherworldly power struggle with lots of the ol' Meiville special sauce. Say it with me now - Cities as Organisms, The Vast Magical Underworld, Sadist Enemies As Art, Language and the Written Word as Power, Weird Shit. Points against it were it being set in the modern world, which I think limits his strengths as an insane worldbuilder, and the unnecessaryness/flatness of some of his characters. I read it a little bit at a time each night, which I don't normally do. Small bites.

The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin
The sequel to my 2016 best dang book, The Fifth Season, which picks up from the first book's ending at a satisfyingly-well-led-up-to reveal. Boy, that's a real shit sentence I just put together huh.
The Obelisk Gate expands on the existing universe way more dramatically than the first book - it's almost jarring how openly some tantalizingly mystifying lore stuff is discussed compared to Fifth Season. Some new characters show up, some old characters are revised and I'm very into it. First book was more polar in who was 'good' and who was 'bad', despite the myriad character flaws. This one is way more grey and I'm not sure who's side I'm on. I feel like constantly comparing it to the first book robs it of its own weight, but I'm also having a hard time finding any other point of reference. It's a sequel. If you liked the Fifth Season, and of course you did it's butternut squash, you're gonna shit your pants at the second half of this book.

So I finished it and went digging, and found out the third and final book is coming out at the end of this year, which is simultaneously batshit that someone can chug out a book a year of this quality and also excruciatingly a million years away.

Luckily she wrote other, earlier stuff! A fantasy series!

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin
The idea that this is somebody's debut novel is gross because it's so good. The aforementioned Broken Earth series, while utilizing (quite literally) magic, isn't categorized as 'fantasy' in my brain. The fantastical elements are handled too clinically, scientifically. I'd almost call it science fiction. Some beautiful mesh of the two. This book, the first in her Inheritance trilogy, is mother fucking fantasy. Crazy ass ruling caste floating kingdoms powered by chained gods. An entire universe built on cosmogonic myth. A girl thrown into the middle of it all. Once again, my lack of Court Intrigue experience led to me being absolutely delighted. The world is exquisite and detailed. The characters are fascinating. The sex with gods is abundant and unexpected. The gods themselves are choice. It is a very, very well done mythology. Almost tolkeinesque in its "this was definitely created as a mythos first and then a story just sort of spooled out of it".
If the Broken Earth left you wanting more magic and godfucking and rebirth, you're in luck.

The Broken Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin
Okay so first of all, there's three of these books. Loosely connected in the sense that it involves some threading characters, mostly a-thefuckinggodsthemselves, in the same universe. Maybe a decade later. BOY is it going to be hard to talk about this one without spoiling the first one in a major way.
This one is not a sequel, it's just the next one in the story. If that is a thing. The world has changed, significantly, and this book does a wonderful job of shifting the tone and focus to accommodate it. It is a smaller story, a much more introspective and insular personal story, as befits the...necessary...changing. Jemisin writes achingly human characters, including the gods. She refuses to avoid the universal threads of sadness that are a natural part of life. It is impossible to talk about this book further without spoiling it. It isn't necessary to enjoy the first one! You can read the first one in its own right. It ties up nicely. But obviously read this one too.

The Kingdom of Gods - N.K. Jemisin
This book. Thiiiiis motherfuckin book. This book cuts deep, in that it absolutely makes some deep references to the first two and also wrecks you emotionally. This book is about gods and what that means and humans and what that means and how ones nature shapes who one is. And vice versa,  I suppose. If the first two books are building up the world this one is taking it and running with it into oblivion. This book is about a trickster god growing up in every sense of the word, and the humans he drags along. This book is long. Several times I was confident I was at the end and then shit went all Gurren Lagann and I got ten more chapters. This book is good. An Amber Spyglass sort of trilogy tie-up. Which should tell you just about everything you need to know to make a decision on whether or not to read this series.

I took a break after that. Obviously. Then I went and harvested a new crop that I'm quite excited for.
I'm currently maybe...3/4ths done with
The Chimes - Anna Smaill
This book is a post-post-apocalyptic dreamy mystery written by someone with far too much technical knowledge on music. The story plays with unreliable narrators since lost memories are sort of a central theme, as is the music that steals them and creates them. It's dense, with a lot of clever musical wordplay that is absolutely mystifying unless you do some research into modern European classical music. It has an unapologetic musical jargon. This is another book I have to read in spurts, because it is slow and intentionally obfuscated. It reminds me of Amnesia Moon (Jonathan Lethem), mostly because that book also was dreamy and dreary and foggy.
The book is interesting enough to keep me reading but I sure hope there's a good payoff at the end because otherwise the 'being set in a post-post-apocalyptic semi-dystopian London" thing is a hard strike against it. It would've been nicer, I suspect, to just be its own world.

But I cannot think of a situation in which that wouldn't be the case. I just hate using Future Earth as an alien setting. Why not just make an alien setting? Then you're free. And this is my own personal opinion, unrelated to the review.