The Kate Daniels series is fantasy in a near-future setting, the Sirantha Jax ones are sci fi, with spaces pirates and whatnot. The Kate Daniels series is still ongoing, but has maintained high quality for 7 books or so now, while Sirantha is a completed series.

Have you tried the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, or Sirantha Jax by AA Aguirre? Both are heavy on the action, have fun characters, and interesting world development. The first one is sort of urban fantasy, set in a near-future fantasy setting, the second is sci fi.

If I bothered to try, I think mine would be jellyfish or amoebae also.

I like Sanderson, but he's not an "insta-buy" author for me, so every time I think to check in on him I'm 2 or 3 books behind. Might try and pick up Bands of Mourning from the library over the holidays. With any other author, I'd get worried about the ever-increasing scope of the Mistborn books (it was a trilogy,…

I was really impressed with Windup Girl, but it was a fairly brutal story, I thought. Lots of human ugliness in it, and the author excels at making various environmental disaster-related futures seem pretty plausible, which can get depressing if you read too many of his things in a row I could barely get through his…

I can't read new books if I'm too tired or stressed, so my reading dropped off dramatically after I had a baby and started a new business. I'm starting to find more time to read, but when things get busy it's back to comfort reads. And, I couldn't read anything but rereads and romances for a while after the…

I had mixed feelings about Jemisins's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy, so I haven't gotten around to Fifth Season yet, but it got a lot of really good reviews and whatnot, so it's on my list (just not at the top of it). I really liked her characters in the first book, but her magically sighted blind painter in the…

Right now, I'm reading A Tyranny of Petticoats, a short story anthology where all the stories are historical fiction set in North America with female protagonists (with an emphasis on having diverse heroines). I really enjoyed the first few stories.

You know, for the longest time I thought that that was what they kept in snuff boxes, but it turns out snuff=tobacco, not cocaine. I think I just assumed that it was some drug that people snort, so that's where my mind went.

So were they trying to coordinate the timing for this thing with the Gilmore Girls revival?

I have seen someone drink from a flask, but it was in college, where people have more trouble identifying and avoiding bad ideas.

I think maybe? Not robins specifically, but songbirds - I know that that symbolism showed up in Oscar Wilde's work, and someone else here was mentioning Dickens and Browning had similar motifs.

Doesn't promotional material usually come with some indication of what it's promoting? Have you guys considered getting the police to take a look at that eye, maybe check the packaging for prints?

Oh, I was sort of surprised by the number of people who mentioned reading The Sparrow this year - that might explain it somewhat.

I haven't gotten to Shepherd's Crown yet. There are plenty of other Discworld books I haven't read, because I skip around in those a lot, but that's the last book of his that I was really anticipating, and I've been subconsciously putting off reading it. Maybe over the holidays though.

I think the Wheel of Time style of epic fantasy isn't really my thing. When you start getting too many points of view that are too separate I almost always end up skipping big chunks to try and get back to whatever character I care about. It's pretty rare for a book of that style to keep my attention for all of the…

I get why Rand appeals to so many teenagers, but I don't understand how people can grow out of teenage selfishness and self-absorption and still be rabid fans of Rand. It just seems toxic to me, telling people that their worst impulses are laudable.

Not yet, but they're on my radar.

It's was a very central metaphor to a short story Oscar Wilde wrote in 1888 (The Happy Prince), so it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me. The story became a pretty popular fairy tale at the time.

I'd argue that the juxtaposition of the imagery with the messages is pretty strange. Having a dead robin (particularly if it's supposed to symbolize children freezing and starving to death) above a message wishing someone a joyous holiday either seems extremely passive aggressive or shows some extreme cognitive…