I am still not finished with Rhythm of War but I enjoyed Dawnshard quite a bit
I am in the middle of one of my periodic rereadings of Heaney’s exquisite translation of Beowulf.
(I love the fact that it’s an English translation of…English! 
)
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If you’re interested in Old English, and I do hope that you are, here’s a great version of Pumped Up Kicks sung in our ancestral, pre-Norman tongue. 
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My A Level English Language teacher used to have a great reading voice for Old and Middle English
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When we ran out of maths curriculum at the end of Year Twelve my maths teacher read us the translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that he had made for his second PhD.
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I am patronising Jon Zeigler on Patreon¹, and as a result I got to read his novella A Prince of Tanûr before any publishers. The prose was fine, but the plot was pretty insubstantial, and the homages to old planetary romance were a bit fan-servicey or even lurid for my taste.
¹ It seems strange that I am paying cash money to peer-review his new star system generation book for him. I must examine my motives.
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Of all the people whom I would find it worth paying to review my (entirely hypothetical) star system generation book, you would be very high on the list.
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Thank you. I feel gratified that you say so.
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I’m interested in linguistics, but Anglo-Saxon’s not high on my list. I’ve started working through a book on classical Greek (it looks better than the textbook I had in 1970) and need to get back to it, and I’ve had a little exposure to Japanese and Sanskrit and need to relearn their scripts (in Japanese, I got as far as hiragana and maybe a couple of kanji), but they’re a lower priority, though I really like how different Japanese grammar is from English or French or Greek.
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Just finished another one - End of Empires (Captain Smith series, book 5) by Toby Frost. Very much along the lines of the others, so if you liked those you probably will, and if not, not.
Personally I’d like to see a team-up of Frost’s Smith & co with Jody Lynn Nye’s Imperium series…
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Ooh! Yeah, they shouldn’t be wildly incompatible…
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Finished The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell last night. That is a superb book. A first contact sci-fi novel examining a lot of big questions around theology, humanity, love, despair. It’s got moments of such tenderness mixed with some grim darkness. If you haven’t read it, I’d say definitely stick it on your TBR.
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Just finished Fallout by Lesley Blume, following listening to The Bomb (a podcast by the BBC). Highly recommended. Just started The Sound and the Glory about the Seattle Sounders (yes, we do have “football” over here and the Sounders average more home attendees than over half of the premier league). Next up is The Man Who Ran Washington and The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid.
Well, it has been a while, but at last I finished The Empire of Grass, which took me quite some time. Second book of Tad Williams new trilogy, I have found it at times a bit of a drag, but I think it has been more due to personal reasons than the book itself, although I recognize that it is quite a dense novel. The Witchwood Crown (first novel of the new trilogy based in Osten Ard) I had in hardback version, and the print size was way bigger, which did help to read it faster.
Now, to something lighter, the final book of the Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell, Sword of Kings. These books are always like a breeze for me, and I hope his one does not disappoint, cannot wait to see what Uthred of Bebbanburg is up to these days.
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So, I finished reading Beowulf today. It’s… probably the worst example of Old English poetry from 1,200 years ago I’ve ever read.
It is also, coincidentally, the best example of Old English poetry from 1,200 years ago that I’ve ever read.
I wonder if this is a case of “we study it because there are no other options”, or because it happens to be better than the other options available (the mind shudders to think), but yeah. Not my bag at all. I listened to an oral version in the original Old English while I was reading the last 20 pages, and it sounded like a slam-poetry session by the Swedish Chef.
Today we have our first lecture on it, and I will admit that I am fascinated to hear what my professor will say.
I have also read the first… third?.. of Casanova, the graphic novel that Quinns recommended in the Supporter Newsletter video from a while back. It’s interesting. I don’t think it’s really hit its stride yet, but I remain cautiously optimistic that it will be really interesting when it does. A bit too much Deus Ex Machina for my tastes at this point, but I can see the glimmer of something potentially really clever.
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Finished the Legends of the First Empire series by Michael Sullivan - a prequel to the Riyria series. I like them. Nearly excellent, but better than Riyria. Then I stopped reading through the COVID year.
Now, I have picked up Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson for my birthday. Will have a read soon.
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This reminds me, I finished Sword of Kings (the latest Uthred of Bebbanburg novel by Bernard Cornwell) on Sunday night, and it did not disappoint. Fast, it held me by the throat so I read and read. And I really enjoyed that, it has not been a great year for reading, but achieving a 380 pages book in a week or so gives me back a bit of my confidence. It must not be all me, it must be also a bit of what I read that is to blame. Not that I really need blame-placing.
Now with The Trouble with Peace, the second book from Joe Abercrombie’s latest trilogy, The Age of Madness. So far, I just read two chapters (I love books with short chapters), and it is very promising.
I have two or three books lined up from my favourite writers, and I think that makes a difference.
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I really enjoyed Why Nations Fail. Difficult to tell how much is widely accepted or not, but really interesting throughout.
I want to read more about the Argentina’s economic history, but there’s so little out there beyond long form articles. Picked up a Forgotten Continent: The History of the New Latin America by Michael Reid in hopes there’s a little in there. And Capital & Ideology by Picketty, because I’m a glutton for punishment.
As good as, if not better than the first imho
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I’ve heard very positive reviews, and from his previous work, all the second or middle books from his cycles have been very good. (Before They Are Hanged, The Heroes or Half a World come to mind).