Category: Reading

“The Steerswoman” by Rosemary Kirstein is great. It’s the first book in an ongoing series that is great.

The series follows Rowan, a “steerwoman”, in a vaguely medieval setting. Steerswomen wander the world, making maps, collecting knowledge, and figuring things out, until they get too old to travel–at which point they go back to the Archives and help organize and train.

A Steerswoman must answer honestly any question asked of her. However, anyone who lies or refuses to answer a question that a Steerswoman asks is placed under the “Steerswoman ban”, which means no Steerswoman will ever answer your questions again.

The Steerswomen are well-liked, and everyone considers them helpful and good, except for the wizards. All the wizards are under the ban, because they refuse to discuss how their magic works.

At the beginning of this novel, Rowan decides to investigate these flat purple and silver jewels that have started to show up. Before long, the wizards are hunting her down. WHY?! WHY?! YOU’LL HAVE TO READ IT TO FIND OUT.

“Shades of Grey” by Jasper Fforde is legitimately the weirdest novel I have ever read. A few chapters in, I discussed what I had already read with my wife, and I said, “I think this might be from the point of view of board game tokens.” (It’s not.)

It’s pretty easy to get spoilery about this. The society is repressive, and something bad happened in the distant past, and sentence by sentence, page by page, you, as a reader, realize a little more about who they are and how their world works. This isn’t a happy book, but it certainly was fun.

Wow.

I read quite a bit–about 100 novels a year, now that I have a toddler. I read “The Library at Mount Char” a few weeks ago, and I keep thinking about it. It’s engrossing, and dark, and pretty disturbing. It’s definitely not for kids.

The main character is the adopted daughter of … a God, basically? He’s probably the third God, and he’s been God for something like 60,000 years. He “adopted” a handful of children during the Carter administration (kinda), and has been training them in a particular school–like medicine, or languages, or war. Time is weird, but a little before the start of the book, he goes missing. His now adult children come together–a little–to find out what happened.

I weaselworded that quite a bit, as the book is pretty twisty and turny. I wouldn’t say it’s confusing, but it isn’t completely straightforward.

Anyway, 5/5, even if it is a little darker than I usually read.