If you have not read the Lymond Chronicles, they are a series of six books following the fictional Francis Crawford of Lymond in the mid 16th century across Scotland, England, France, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. It is as historically faithful as the author could make it while introducing the most brilliant man ever. Yes, if you have an issue with utterly brilliant protagonists, you will not like these books. Though make no mistake, Lymond (as he prefers to be called most of the time) has plenty of flaws to balance his amazing talents.

Spoilers for the whole series as well as some spoilers for Janny Wurts’s Wars of Light and Shadow follow.

This is hardly new territory for Kay; over the course of his career, reflections on the nature of storytelling have become increasingly more central to his writing. “You can die at the margins of a story as easily as at the centre of it. Or just be a glancing comment in another tale.” he writes at one point, reminding us again that a book (like life) is a tapestry of interwoven narratives. Someone who appears only briefly in one story, perhaps even dying there, remains at the heart of their own.

Ever since The Fionavar Tapestry, Kay has occasionally paused the main narrative to briefly follow characters who might otherwise be mere footnotes. Over time, these asides have claimed more space—and perhaps influenced his choice of protagonists. They are no longer the epic, larger than life characters of the early novels, but instead they might easily have been those marginal figures in one of his earlier works. While it is true that anyone, no matter how important, can be a passing mention in someone else’s story, it is much harder to imagine a character like Ammar or even Crispin passing through a story without leaving significant ripples.

To continue beyond these initial musings on the novel, I need to venture into spoiler territory.

You see, this series had long been a source of some discomfort for me, as I am ashamed to say it was lingering unfinished on my shelf. Unless I misrecall, I picked up the first book soon after its publication and was very much taken with the concept. And, lets face it, with Arithon. Temperamental and high-strung pirate/bard/mage who unfairly gets pinned as evil and who has a penchant for getting people loyal to him killed even though he tries his best to sacrifice himself for them – what’s not to like? Now that I’ve revisited the series, the influences from Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond are very plain to see.

Alas, despite the fact that I was very much hooked from the start, I did not make it all the way initially. I read books two and three as they were published, but the four-year wait between book four and five meant that I forgot too much of the intricate plot and while I think I started book five I never finished it.

Several things contributed to this. Had it been some years earlier when this little break between books happened, I would still have had the habit of rereading books regularly, but at this time there was such a wealth of fantasy to choose from that I rarely reread things any longer. In particular, after 1997 I became deeply invested in A Song of Ice and Fire and it took up a lot of my time as a reader and as a fan.

Additionally, now that I have matured as a reader I can see that the writing in The Wars of Light and Shadow is fairly challenging. Its lush, detail-rich (some would say flowery and I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing) and sometimes quite opaque. It reminds me, now that I have the whole picture, of both Dorothy Dunnett and Stephen R. Donaldson. You do not want to rush your reading, it is so easy to miss vital details. And, at the same time, the plot and the desire to know what happens may drive you to want to do so. That was certainly a dilemma for me, even during in this reread, especially during Arch III.

Because yes, right before we went on vacation I decided that I simply had to know how this story ended. And no, I wasn’t just going to read summaries on a wiki, which meant diving right back in at the beginning with The Curse of the Mistwraith to reread the books I had read before and then going on to read the rest of the series.

This is more of an overview of my impression of each book and the series as a whole rather than a review, but there are definitely spoilers.

My reading pace for 2024 looked good at the start, but then it slowed down markedly as I filled my schedule with way too many dog trainings and dog shows. Those re-reads I didn’t finish last year are still hanging around, though I certainly made room in my schedule for Mark Lawrence’s The Book that Broke the World, which will get its own post eventually. I also ended up picking up a Kindle reader when my Surface Go decided to die on me, so I’ve had a bit of an adjustment period. Its definitely much nicer to read on, though its not great for browsing for new books.

Some of the books I want to comment on I finished before the end of last year, but I might as well get properly caught up. I don’t remember the precise order, but lets start with The Tainted Cup, first in a new series by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Bennett has previously written two fantasy trilogies which definitely fall into the category of avoiding the classic fantasy mold. The Divine Cities features a society that one could call late 19th- or early 20th-century, though the world is in no way our own. A nation that once was the leading power thanks to its gods, has been reduced to a colonial outpost of the new world order following the death of said gods. Except, maybe not all of them are dead.  And in The Founders Trilogy Bennett creates a world where magic is a powerful technology. The scope of this trilogy feels smaller at first but quickly grows into a world-changing epic. Again, its a relatively “modern” society by standard fantasy measures, yet with strong fantastical elements.

The Tainted Cup, first in the Shadow of the Leviathan series, also features a setting that one might compare to the late 19th century, especially as it also draws a fair bit of inspiration from the literary partnership of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It starts out as a murder mystery in a distinctly alien setting, and then the plot expands to hint at the larger threats to the world. I’ve seen it described as Sherlock Holmes meets Attack on Titan and while I had to quiz Elio about Attack on Titan, that does seem like a pretty good description.

As in his previous books, Bennett crafts a very alien world that you will definitely be intrigued by if you like unusual world-building. He also has a great sense of pacing and crafts interesting characters that aren’t your typical fantasy protagonists. The latter can be both good and bad in my book, since some authors try too hard to be different and sometimes you want that feeling of recognition, but the way Bennett does it works well for me.

Someone who (for me, anyway) falls into the category of trying a little too hard to make the characters stand out from the fantasy norms (unfortunately, I could almost see the author ticking off various “woke” checkboxes) is Hannah Kaner in Godkiller and its sequel Sunbringer. I first tried an excerpt of the first book and was intrigued but not entirely hooked. As I hit my reading binge earlier in the year, I went back to it and found myself sticking with it despite not really warming up to the initial protagonist. The premise of the world, a medieval-inspired setting where gods have been outlawed and are being hunted and killed, and the core plot of the story was enough to keep me invested. And after a while, a young girl with an intriguing companion is introduced, which makes for a nice change in the character dynamics. 

The ending includes some interesting plot twists and after finishing I went straight into the second book in the series, Sunbringer. It does a fine job of broadening the scope of the story and weaving together various plot strands featuring the different protagonists, as well as complicating the picture of the relationship between gods and men in the setting. I am certainly looking forward to the final book.

In a completely different wheelhouse altogether, and happily playing with all kinds of tropes, is Empire of the Damned, the second book in Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire series. Just like the first book it is lush and bloody, with purposefully baroque prose (drinking blood seems to have the side effect of making you speak in ‘thees’ and ‘thous’) and plenty of over-the-top characters. Gabriel de León continues to tell his story to his vampire captors, though partway through the telling a new narrator enters the picture and the two strands of the story are slowly woven together to reveal the fate of Dior LaChance, the Holy Grail.

Getting too attached to characters continues to be a terrible idea, as Gabriel is bad news for almost everyone that gets close to him, in one way or another. But even expecting that things will go badly, Kristoff still manages to twist the knife an extra turn or two on quite a few occasions. There are also some twists revealed in regards to world-building and the occult elements at the heart of the story that I quite delighted in; they felt like just the sort of twists you’d get in a gothic horror story. I am both dreading and looking forward to the final volume, the setup at the end promises more twists (and more heartache).

There’s a lot of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance out there these days, genres that I am not very keen on. And while I like some romance in my fantasy, today there’s a lot of formulaic stuff that is more romance with a touch of fantasy (aka the cringingly named “Romantasy” genre). I feel like in the last decade or two, fantasy has drifted towards either more romantic or more grimdark, losing the middle ground that I used to enjoy.

Add to that an increasing number of books that appear designed to tick as many woke checkboxes as possible and be so sensitive and scared of possibly causing offense that they become utterly bland.

That said, the rereading spree that I started in 2021 with Robert Jordan and Stephen R. Donaldson did a lot to get me back on track with my reading, if not my reviewing. Maybe 2024 will be the year for that?

As you might guess from this, and from my opinion of the later seasons of Game of Thrones, I am a nitpicky book purist. However, I will make an attempt to discuss the first three episodes of The Wheel of Time both as an adaptation and as “just” a TV show. But it is always an impossible task to completely separate an adaptation from its source material, because the very fact that it is an adaptation is an integral part of its existence.

It began with an unintended reread of the first two of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant chronicles. I was going to look something up in Lord Foul’s Bane and ended up reading it and the rest of the first chronicle in short order. And then I figured I might as well read the second chronicle too, since I had never read them all in close succession. It made for a great reading experience and gave me a much clearer understanding of the development of Covenants dilemma(s) and why he made different choices at the end of each chronicle. I had planned to continue to the last chronicle as well, but I needed a little breather and during that some other books snuck in and said “hey, read us!”. So, we’ll see when I get to it given the lost momentum.

I do want to heartily recommend giving the Covenant books a try. There may be a dark lord and various other well-known fantasy elements, but the writing is nothing like any other fantasy out there. And if you can’t stand Covenant because you think he’s a horrible person, then you have no empathy whatsoever. The mental agony that he is in is crushing. I do very much understand if someone can’t stand being in his head because of that, because you’re basically in the head of a drowning person that is utterly convinced that if he grabs the rope tossed to him things will actually get much, much worse.

But, if Donaldson is a little too dark and dreary for you, I’ve got some more cheerful recommendations too.

Then I happened to catch part of an episode of said show, being rerun during the day. Something caught my attention and I felt like maybe we should try watching it, but it took a while before I suggested it to Elio. After all, we’d laughed about how silly it must be. But eventually we swallowed our pride and gave it a go.

That show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and ever since then we’ve been huge fans of Joss Whedon. So when we first heard of The Nevers we were thrilled that there’d be a new Whedon show.