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* The Left Handed Booksellers of London - I wasn't familiar with the author, Garth Nix, when I picked this up. He does a lot of books aimed at younger readers. I feel like the start of this book was more serious, and then devolved into whimsy and random exposition. 1980s London, gender fluid character, booksellers who monitor the occult, and a plot that hooked me. I really wanted to like this and should have DNF'd it sooner.
Trying to avoid making a powerpoint presentation on the complexities of YA as a marketing term and how it makes my life harder. I don't want to double check everything to see if it's considered YA and discount it based on that, because a lot of stuff that isn't gets categorized that way. Sarah J Maas' ACOTAR being a prime example.
* Hell Bent - The sequel to Ninth House and the middle book of what will be a trilogy. It sounds like we should heard about the final book soon? Very excited. On one hand, I love the writing and am already looking forward to rereading both books in prep for the final one. On the other hand, the occult elements didn't feel as solid as in the first book. I loved it, but it's not to the bar of the first book. Middle books of trilogies are like that sometimes.
Of course try to look up anything about Ninth House and every website gets even more convinced that I want to see Gideon the Ninth stuff. On Amazon it's listed as The Ninth House Series. I think 'Alex Stern' is used as a alternate name to deal with disambiguation, but that only helps so much. The lesbian necromancers in space are inescapable!
* Blood Trail - I liked it more than expected. I am determined to read this series, but how often I was told to start with the later books was worrying. It drags a bit in places, but also it's an early urban fantasy book so I don't mind.
It is an amazing time capsule of that time in the 90s when technology became more part of our lives, but no google or cell phones yet. People needing to stay in for phone calls, discourse about whether screening calls with an answering machine is anti-social, etc. Also, cities being very gritty and dangerous. Obviously it wasn't intentional, but it's a very dense capsule.
Reading it so soon after a Di Tregarde book was funny because in the Tregarde books, Di is a romance novelist partially to deal with her odd schedule as Guardian, but in Blood Trail the vampire is a romance novelist to deal with his odd schedule. They are both writing similar sounding books involving sea captains. Also, both in cold cities and dealing with the cold winds, etc. There's a lot of notes in common, which may be them both riffing on the same thing or being plugged into the same trends. To be clear, the similar notes are interesting and amusing, not anything else.
Trying to avoid making a powerpoint presentation on the complexities of YA as a marketing term and how it makes my life harder. I don't want to double check everything to see if it's considered YA and discount it based on that, because a lot of stuff that isn't gets categorized that way. Sarah J Maas' ACOTAR being a prime example.
* Hell Bent - The sequel to Ninth House and the middle book of what will be a trilogy. It sounds like we should heard about the final book soon? Very excited. On one hand, I love the writing and am already looking forward to rereading both books in prep for the final one. On the other hand, the occult elements didn't feel as solid as in the first book. I loved it, but it's not to the bar of the first book. Middle books of trilogies are like that sometimes.
Of course try to look up anything about Ninth House and every website gets even more convinced that I want to see Gideon the Ninth stuff. On Amazon it's listed as The Ninth House Series. I think 'Alex Stern' is used as a alternate name to deal with disambiguation, but that only helps so much. The lesbian necromancers in space are inescapable!
* Blood Trail - I liked it more than expected. I am determined to read this series, but how often I was told to start with the later books was worrying. It drags a bit in places, but also it's an early urban fantasy book so I don't mind.
It is an amazing time capsule of that time in the 90s when technology became more part of our lives, but no google or cell phones yet. People needing to stay in for phone calls, discourse about whether screening calls with an answering machine is anti-social, etc. Also, cities being very gritty and dangerous. Obviously it wasn't intentional, but it's a very dense capsule.
Reading it so soon after a Di Tregarde book was funny because in the Tregarde books, Di is a romance novelist partially to deal with her odd schedule as Guardian, but in Blood Trail the vampire is a romance novelist to deal with his odd schedule. They are both writing similar sounding books involving sea captains. Also, both in cold cities and dealing with the cold winds, etc. There's a lot of notes in common, which may be them both riffing on the same thing or being plugged into the same trends. To be clear, the similar notes are interesting and amusing, not anything else.
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Date: 2025-05-21 05:12 am (UTC)From:I'm still really hyped for Ninth House, and I'm sure Hell Bent will get put on the TBR as soon as I get to Ninth House. Though middle books of trilogies are often a bit of a struggle.
I genuinely love books that are that sort of 90s time capsule, because I remember it so well (screening calls! no cell phone! inability to easily look up song lyrics!) but writing 90s things now as a "period piece" is difficult.
It sounds like the similarities to Children of the Night are very amusing.
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Date: 2025-05-22 06:01 pm (UTC)From:Looking forward to your reaction to Ninth House when you get a chance.
It's impossible to make time capsule intentionally, but it also kinda makes sense Urban Fantasy would be a good place for it because you've got authors who used to try to ground people in fantasy worlds trying to ground people into this world, and the most grounded the real stuff is the better the paranormal / fantastical works.
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Date: 2025-05-25 03:40 am (UTC)From:I think I'm about halfway to Ninth House in terms of my TBR. I assigned the books a fairly random order, but tried to sprinkle in the ones I was most excited about at various intervals, in part to keep motivation high, ha.
Urban Fantasy is an excellent genre for time capsule pieces, for sure. The genre really does work best when all the real-world elements feel super grounded, so that the handful of fantastical elements are easier to buy into. As far as speculative fiction genres/subgenres, it's probably one of the most tech-friendly in a lot of ways, too. Horror often feels like it's a few steps behind the times (so many lost cell signals, so many people with no phone flashlights, so many charming personal websites of useful information), while sci-fi is generally more about theoretical technology advancements.
(Though sci-fi can be a charming time capsule in a slightly different way. That cyberpunk novel I read earlier this year was set maybe in the 2030s or so, but was so obviously grounded in a very 90s understanding of technology. Having people with brain implants that let them access the internet as 3D space also waiting in line to use a payphone was very charming, ha.)
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Date: 2025-05-26 02:33 am (UTC)From:Also, visually, flip phones and flashlights and books just look better
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Date: 2025-05-28 04:18 am (UTC)From:If a horror work isn't focused *on* tech as an aspect of the horror itself, it seems to struggle with how to use or get around the presence of "normal" tech. The frequent requirement for the main characters to be isolated makes it hard to have them all using functional smartphones.
I have seen some extremely dated-feeling horror movies that try to lean on social media site clones for plot points, and it's painful! (Sometimes very funny, but often painful!)
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Date: 2025-05-28 10:47 pm (UTC)From:Yeah, agreed, if it's not about the current tech it sometimes struggles. And outside of certain types of parody, checking 'BookingFace' or whatever alt names they use just throws me out of the film.
Did you ever see Deadstream? Fake name for the streaming service, but they nailed what twitchchat can be like.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-05 03:05 am (UTC)From:Yeah... the faux social media/search engine/app names are usually distractingly bad, and instantly break my suspension of disbelief 100x more than whatever the horror plot is. Some do a credible job of creating a site that is just its own thing, and that's often far less terrible than watching a character "boogle" the answer before posting an update to their "instapic" and "snaptalk"ing their friend.
The title sounds super familiar, but looking it up, I don't *think* I've seen Deadstream. It looks like Shudder has it, so if we end up getting a subscription to that for a while I'll have to give it a watch. There are definitely a few films I've seen that do a good job of grasping exactly the disaster that livechats can be.