Current Reads : Sally Mann, Mark Lawrence, and Ava Reid
Weekly Stacks Issue #024 - Attempting to move through my Cosmere book hangover with Hold Still, The Broken Empire, and Juniper & Thorn.
Hey friends!
Welcome back to the Weekly Stacks! ☕📚 Grab your favorite beverage, find a comfy spot, and let's get OWTT and explore some Other Worlds Than These!
“I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
Book hangovers are real.
Especially after finishing(for now) the amazing journey through a series like the Cosmere and it’s 26(and counting) different stories. Yet, there are so many amazing stories to be explored and sometimes the only thing to be done about a hangover is to just work through it.
My approach this time has been to sample a few different things in a few different mediums and ease into things to see what grabs my attention, let’s get to it!
As a quick reminder - I’m not reviewing any of these books here today, it’s just a check in to share what I’ve been enjoying and also selfishly so that I can look back in the future and remember what I was enjoying reading in this moment of my life!
Recent Reads Recap:
As you surely have guessed, since last week found me with nothing under the in progress category, this week I have zero books finished to discuss. I needed a breather after my Cosmere journey. I find myself in a strange place as I know Stormlight Archive 5 is coming in early December, which makes me hesitant to really jump into a new series right now for some reason. I guess I’m just trying to hold on to the Cosmere vibes so that jumping into Wind and Truth will feel like I haven’t missed a beat, instead of shifting gears into a new series and then shifting back to Cosmere for a book, then back to whatever else I start.
I know, probably doesn’t make any sense at all… such is my brain.
In Progress
Fear not my fellow explorers, I did dip my toes in a few different worlds that I can share with you here!
I started with a non-fiction read called Hold Still : A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann. It’s always interesting to learn more about the people behind the lens and while I’m not very far into this one, whoa nellie, it’s been wild.
As in “in-laws didn’t approve of her marriage to their son and said they’d buy them a car so they should just go buy it and then they’d give them the money to pay them back, only to laugh in their faces and exclaim how they can’t believe they thought they would really buy them a car. Only to find out some years later that the in laws(father in law was a doctor) had been illegally obtaining large amounts of prescription drugs and selling them because they were secretly in massive debt, and oh yeah, they found out about all this AFTER the mother in law used a shotgun to shoot her husband in the head while he slept before swallowing the barrel herself in a murder suicide” kind of wild.
I’m hoping we get a little more into the art, photography, and creative life side of things as we go, but so far this is interesting — if slow. I enjoy non-fiction reads like this but ultimately have trouble sticking with them because they never suck me in like a good fantasy or sci-fi story can, so we’ll see.
Just for those who are interested, I’m reading Hold Still in physical book format.
As I neared the end of my Cosmere journey you may recall that I had stopped listening to audiobooks or reading anything outside of my Cosmere reads in order to best focus on those last couple stories.
I dipped back in with an audiobook called Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire #1) by Mark Lawrence.
This one took me a bit to really get into it, not sure if that was due to a slow start by the book or my book hangover, but by the halfway point I was hooked. This is the debut novel from the author and it does have a little of that “debut novel roughness” here and there, but overall it’s been very good. The only thing I can’t quite figure out is where this book takes place. It reads very much like a fictional fantasy world, with monsters, gods, magic, swords and action. However, it also will reference things like Rome and the Greek language, things that indicate it’s set here on Earth.
From Goodreads:
Mark Lawrence's debut novel tells a tale of blood and treachery, magic and brotherhood and paints a compelling and brutal, and sometimes beautiful, picture of an exceptional boy on his journey toward manhood and the throne.
This is one I’ll definitely be working through the entire trilogy for.
As a cool side-note, in addition to being an award winning author, Mark Lawrence has also run the annual SPFBO competition in an effort to bring more attention to the works of self published fantasy authors that are putting out amazing work. SPFBO stands for “Self Published Fantasy Blog Off” and the premise is that he distributes around 300 novels to 10 different judges/blogs and from there they each work through their choices until a winner is crowned. To read more about it you can visit the Wiki here.
Lastly, I sat one evening scrolling through my Kindle library at all the books I’ve picked up on sale over the years but never read. Man there is a lot of horror genre in there, something I’m not overly eager to read these days for whatever reason.
But I did find Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid hiding on the shelves.
I admit, I’m haven’t even finished the first chapter yet and so don’t have a real clear feel for what this is even about at this point. But I did enjoy Reid’s other novel, The Wolf and the Woodsman when I read that last December, so I’m hopeful I’ll enjoy this. If it’s anything like The Wolf and the Woodsmen it will have a blend of folklore feel and fantasy adventure with plenty of emotional weight behind it.
All I really can say so far is that the story is told from the point of view of one of three sisters, her father is a wizard that is cursed with never being satisfied, the two sisters are apparently stunning in the looks department while our narrator/main character feels she is decidedly not, they have a weird garden with odd creatures and plants — such as glass apples and the dangerous Juniper berries, and the three sisters are sneaking out of the house to go into town for something.
Like I said, I’m not through the first chapter yet as I was just dipping my toes into it before bed the other night. I’m going only off my enjoyment of The Wolf and the Woodsman to keep me feeling hopeful that I’ll enjoy this tale as well!
On Deck
Aside from my continued slow read-through of Hold Still, which I have a feeling will be one of those “read a chapter here and there and keep chipping away at it until I finish it eventually”, the only thing I can say with any certainty is that I will be moving on with Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Empire trilogy and book two called “King of Thorns”.
I’m still thinking hard about a few ideas for the newsletter here. One being the planning of my next 12 reads, which I was inspired by reading the post over on the
newsletter that I shared last week. The other being the desire to relaunch a podcast version of this weekly newsletter in some form, including some sort of “Buddy Read” or “Read Along” book club style aspect in which we cover a book or a series of books in full spoilery detail each week discussing whatever section I’ve read since the last “episode”.We’ll see, I guess it depends a bit on if you would have any interest in joining me for that or if this weekly letter is more than enough for you!
Until next time, happy reading!
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Let me know what you think of "The Wolf and the Woodsman" and "The Prince of Thorns". I haven't read either, but they sound interesting! (Thanks for the mention btw 🧙♂️)