Uno reverse! 3 and 24 for the end of year book asks
3. What were your top five books of the year?
Answer provisional, vague, unordered and subject to change but:
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh (as a trilogy)
The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, by Anthony Kaldellis
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Pale Lights (continuing web serial) by ErraticErrata
Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang
Honorable mentions: The Incandescent, Where the Axe is Buried, The Butcher of the Forest, Convenience Store Woman, The Lotus Empire, Fight Club
24. Did you DNF anything? Why?
A few things I got 10-30 pages into and found myself asking 'why am I reading this in particular?' without a good answer. Sadly my goodreads activity feed does not go back far enough to remind me what any of them actually were.
More substantially, I am 370 pages into book 4 of Malazan (House of Chains) by Steven Erikson and have been for several months now. There's just so much of it, and after the first hundred and change was spent as an enjoyable Conan-pastiche that was actually having fun with its unreliable narrator and gleeful amorality going back to flitting between a half dozen conventional epic/military plots with three dozen important proper nouns per chapter and the momentum of a drunken snail is a slog. (There is an upper limit to have many thousands of words of graven-voiced monologues about how the empire conquering everyone is for their own good a text can expect me to swallow before it stops being plausible it doens't expect me to believe it, also). In a better word someone would extract Felsin and put her in a smaller book. Preferably a less racist one.
