I realized a couple of things this week. Because I finished Endgames, the 12th book in the Imager Portfolio over the weekend, I discovered that I really, really want to read the first three books in the series again. Not just because it’s been 10 years since I read them, but because Endgames is the end of the middle sequence in the world chronology. The series as a whole started at what is now the endpoint of that chronology. I’m really curious to see how what we know now matches up with what the author wrote then.

I also figured out that now that I’ve stopped depressing myself by listening to the news on the radio, I have about 5 extra hours of audiobook listening every week. Plenty of time to run through a whole lot of books! So I grabbed the first three Imager books in audio. I think I must have listened to one or more books in the series at some point, so I’m looking forward to hearing the reader again – and hearing how some of the more tongue-twisting names are actually pronounced!

For Review:
The Cliff House by RaeAnne Thayne
Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev
Warrior of the World (Chronicles of Dasnaria #3) by Jeffe Kennedy

Purchased from Amazon/Audible:
Imager (Imager Portfolio #1) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Imager’s Challenge (Imager Portfolio #2) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Imager’s Intrigue (Imager Portfolio #3) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
Seasons of Sorcery by Amanda Bouchet, Grace Draven, Jennifer Estep and Jeffe Kennedy (preorder)

This was going to be another teeny-tiny stack – until Macmillan did a dump into Edelweiss and suddenly I have books! I’ve already started reading Endgames. I’ve loved that series for ten years, and always gobble up the new one as soon as I get my hands on the ARC. I have to wait until February to post the review, but I couldn’t let my treat remain unread for another second.

For Review:
The Best of Us (Sullivan’s Crossing #4) by Robyn Carr
Connections in Death (In Death #48) by J.D. Robb
Death of an Eye (Eye of Isis #1) by Dana Stabenow
Endgames (Imager Portfolio #12) by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
The Flimflam Affair (Carpenter and Quincannon #7) by Bill Pronzini
For the Killing of Kings by Howard Andrew Jones
Miss Violet and the Great War (Strangely Beautiful #3) by Leanna Renee Hieber

Purchased from Amazon/Audible:
Shattered (Iron Druid Chronicles #7) by Kevin Hearne (audiobook)

This stack is extremely short.  So short that I actually looked for books to buy so this cupboard didn’t look quite so bare. Which is really weird, since the towering TBR pile, while virtual, looms very, very large indeed.

I think it’s also an issue that things just didn’t look good to me – not that there isn’t plenty out there. But the political situation in the US has become so depressing that I’m not able to be absorbed in books the way that I normally am. I’m bouncing off a lot of things because I just can’t get my head to stop whirling – with all the nausea that accompanies the whirls. Any recommendations for books that are so absorbing that they make the world go away would be much appreciated!

For Review:
Mission: Her Rescue (Team 52 #2) by Anna Hackett
Robots vs. Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien
The Victory Garden by Rhys Bowen

Purchased from Amazon:
Death Shall Come (Ishmael Jones #4) by Simon R. Green
Into the Thinnest of Air (Ishmael Jones #5) by Simon R. Green
Mycroft and Sherlock by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse (preorder)

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Not a big stack this week. Particularly since several of the books are preorders, so they really don’t add to the virtually towering TBR pile – at least not yet. The audiobook of The Consuming Fire is so far preorder that I don’t actually know who the narrator is. I’m hoping it’s Wil Wheaton, because he did such a fantastic job with the previous book in the series, The Collapsing Empire. (And also Ready Player One, but that’s not directly relevant). I’m hoping it will be enough like The Collapsing Empire that it makes me laugh out loud on the treadmill. It’s always fun to keep my workout buddies guessing!

For Review:
The Love that Saved Him by Sophie Barnes
Storm of Locusts (Sixth World #2) by Rebecca Roanhorse
Untouchable (Cutler, Sutter & Salinas #3) by Jayne Ann Krentz

Purchased from Amazon:
The Consuming Fire (Interdependency #2) by John Scalzi (audiobook preorder)
Infomocracy (Centenal Cycle #1) by Malka Older
Null States (Centenal Cycle #2) by Malka Older
Embrace the Passion (Pets in Space #3) by S.E. Smith, Anna Hackett, Ruby Lionsdrake, Veronica Scott, Pauline Baird Jones, E.D. Walker, Tiffany Roberts, Carol Van Natta, Alexis Glynn Latner, J.C. Hay, Kyndra Hatch (preorder)
Snowed in with the Cowboy (Gold Valley #3.5) by Maisey Yates

Definitely a mixed bag this week, from all sorts of places. Some stuff I got from one or the other committee that I’m on. Dark Queen Rising came from a forthcoming mysteries webinar. Amazon actually managed to guess right with one of their “since you looked at these books you might like these other books” and I was enticed into the Montague and Strong series. I love a good urban fantasy, and there just aren’t as many of those as there used to be. And then there’s the upcoming books from a couple of my faves – the next Uncharted Realms from Jeffe Kennedy, and Anna Hackett’s entry into this year’s Pets in Space collection. If you haven’t seen the Pets in Space collections before, they are always marvelous – and only available for a limited time. Grab yours while they’re available. (Mine’s on pre-order) I almost said “get ’em while they’re hot”, but they are ALWAYS hot! Also warm and fuzzy.

Wait a minute, that didn’t sound quite right, did it?

For Review:
The Arrows of the Heart (Uncharted Realms #4) by Jeffe Kennedy
The Black God’s Drums by P. Djeli Clark
Dark Queen Rising (Margaret Beaufort #1) by Paul Doherty
The Descent of Monsters (Tensorate #3) by JY Yang
Desert Hunter (Galactic Gladiators) by Anna Hackett from Pets in Space 3
The Power Game (Monsarrat #3) by Meg Keneally and Thomas Keneally
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Time Was by Ian McDonald
Winter at the Beach (Moonlight Harbor #2) by Sheila Roberts
Zero Sum Game (Russell’s Attic #1) by S.L. Huang

Purchased from Amazon:
The Date (Montague & Strong #2.5) by Orlando A. Sanchez
No God is Safe (Montague & Strong #0.5) by Orlando A. Sanchez
Tombyards & Butterflies (Montague & Strong #1) by Orlando A. Sanchez
The War Mage (Montague & Strong #0.1) by Orlando A. Sanchez

Borrowed from the Library:
The Common Good by Robert Reich

Another relatively short stack this week – and a stack fairly evenly divided between stuff I HAVE to read and stuff I WANT to read. All stuff I’ll have plenty of time to read if we get the edge of Hurricane Florence here in Atlanta. It won’t be a hurricane by the time it reaches us – we’re blissfully too far inland for that. But we might get rained on – a lot. This is the first place we’ve lived in the Atlanta metro area with a basement – so we’ll see how THAT goes, too. We’re not expected to get much, but as a great writer once said, “Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you GET.”

For Review:
California Girls by Susan Mallery
The Chef’s Secret by Crystal King
Cherry by Nico Walker
A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
Educated by Tara Westover
Facism: a Warning by Madeleine Albright
Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward
In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum
The Mortal Word (Invisible Library #5) by Genevieve Cogman
Rebel Hard (Hard Play #2) by Nalini Singh
State Tectonics (Centenal Cycle #3) by Malka Older

A blissfully short stack this week. And I managed to resist the temptation to buy anything!

We are now post-Labor Day, and even though summer doesn’t officially end for a couple of weeks, and it’s still well into the 80s here temperature-wise, it is starting to feel like the year is winding down. I think it’s just that the days getting shorter signals winter – even if nothing else does.

For Review:
Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear
Cat Chase the Moon (Joe Grey #21) by Shirley Rousseau Murphy
The City of Lost Fortunes (Crescent City #1) by Bryan Camp
Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry
Nightchaser (Endeavor #1) by Amanda Bouchet

Borrowed from the Library:
The Only Story by Julian Barnes
You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld

I’m so glad that this week’s list is considerably shorter than last week’s mad pandemonium. Or whatever you want to call that towering TBR pile. I would say something about too many books and too little time, but there can never be too many books. Too little time, on the other hand, is all too possible.

And Murderbot is every single bit as good as everyone says it is.

For Review:
Ask Me No Questions (Lady Dunbridge #1) by Shelley Noble
The Lady Travelers Guide to Deception with an Unlikely Earl (Lady Travelers Society #3) by Victoria Alexander
Not the Duke’s Darling (Greycourt #1) by Elizabeth Hoyt
Roar of Sky (Blood of Earth #3) by Beth Cato
Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar
Undetected (Treasure Hunter Security #8) by Anna Hackett

Purchased from Amazon:
All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1) by Martha Wells
Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol (Murderbot Diaries #3) by Martha Wells
Trail of Lightning (Sixth World #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse

This is the post-Worldcon, OMG all the books they were talking about sounded marvelous and 2 weeks of NetGalley and Edelweiss stack. I fully recognize it’s ginormous. And it could have been worse. There was one panel I was listening to where I was starting to buy everything, eventually realized that was insane, and started a list instead. But all the books just sounded SO GOOD!

And to answer the inevitable question about when I’m going to find time to read all these books, there’s the answer that I usually give. In the fullness of time, in the end, I will read about half of the books on this list. The problem from this end is that I don’t know which half. But eventually half will get read. I have an absolutely terrible fear of running out of books to read. And while it is impossible to run out of books that I might read, there have certainly been plenty of times where I don’t seem to have a book I actually want to read at that moment.

Let’s not talk about tsundoku…but at least with ebooks they aren’t physically piling up – or the house would sink.

For Review:
Aladdin: a New Translation translated by Yasmine Seale edited by Paulo Lemos Horta
The Bartered Brides (Elemental Masters #13) by Mercedes Lackey
Chasing Shadows (First Wives #3) by Catherine Bybee
A Dangerous Duet by Karen Odden
Diamond Fire (Hidden Legacy #3.5) by Ilona Andrews
Exit Strategy (Murderbot Diaries #4) by Martha Wells
The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico by David Bowles
The Gown by Jennifer Robson
The Librarians and the Pot of Gold (Librarians #3) by Greg Cox
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter by Hazel Gaynor
Make Me a City by Jonathan Carr
The Paris Diversion by Chris Pavone
Putting the Science in Fiction edited by Dan Koboldt
Restless Lightning (Breaker of Empires #2) by Richard Baker
The Silver Shoes by Jill G. Hall
Sugar (Cake #2, Whiskey Sharp #3.5) by Lauren Dane
Time’s Children (Islevale #1) by D.B. Jackson
Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman
Wasn’t That a Time by Jesse Jarnow
The Woman in the Lake by Nicola Cornick

Purchased from Amazon:
Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman (Dwarven Rifleman #1) by Michael Tinker Pearce and Linda S. Pearce
The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Horizon (Horizon #1) by Tabitha Lord
Infinity (Horizon #2) by Tabitha Lord
Mutineer (Kris Longknife #1) by Mike Shepherd
What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton
Yaqteenya by Yasser Bahjatt

I’m prepping this post very far ahead. And noting with irony that there is not much in the way of science fiction or any of its related genres in this particular stack.

As you read this, I am at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon76) in San Jose. I should be much, much too busy going to panels and hearing some of my favorite authors, as well as discovering new-to-me books and authors. Alternatively I’ll be collapsing from sheer exhaustion after days of having done the con from end to end.

This will be GRAND!

For Review:
The Black Ascot (Inspector Ian Rutledge #21) by Charles Todd
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
Her Fugitive Heart (Ravi PI #3) by Adi Tantimedh
Murder in the Dark (Ishmael Jones #6) by Simon R. Green
Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Jane Sherron de Hart
Search Image (Web Shifter’s Library #1) by Julie E. Czerneda
Someone to Trust (Westcott #5) by Mary Balogh