Tag Archives: 2021 Reading Challenge

Book Review: A Confusion of Princes

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I apologize for the long absence! The last couple months have been…. well, they’ve been a THING. But, I have read a good number of books in the past few weeks that I keep meaning to write reviews for, so hopefully I will have plenty of things to say in the next few weeks (provided I can find the time and energy to get them written up). Some of the book reviews to expect include: Gideon the Ninth (I know I know it took me long enough!), Peaces by Helen Oyoyemi, An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris, and a couple upcoming ARCs. But first! We have a book that’s been out quite awhile that I just now got around to: A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix.

Title: A Confusion of Princes
Author: Garth Nix
Release Date: 2021
Source: owned
Stars: 2.5 out or 5

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love Garth Nix. I first fell in love with his work with Sabriel, and the rest of the Old Kingdom series, but I also own quite a few of his other works including Shade’s Children, Angel Mage, The Left-handed Booksellers of London (his newest book, which I haven’t read yet but is on the list for this year) and a bunch of his short stories. I have been meaning to read this one, A Confusion of Princes, for ages but just never got around to it. But for my 2021 Reading Challenge, this book fit the Space Opera category, and I needed a break from some of the longer/darker books I’d been reading, so I figured now was a good time.

A Confusion of Princes is a bit of a departure for Garth Nix. For one thing, its science fiction rather than fantasy (Shade’s Children is also science fiction, but it’s still not his usual fare). For another thing, the main character is a teenage boy (most, though not all, of Nix’s books tend to feature girls as the main character). It’s also a space opera, which I love, and which is not all that common in the realm of Young Adult fiction.

The basic premise is this: the main character is a young man named Khemri, a prince among hundreds of thousands of princes in an enormous intergalactic empire. The emperor rules the empire by means of the Imperial Mind, a psychic connection to the hundreds of thousands of princes, through which the Emperor makes their will known. The princes themselves (who are all called princes but can be any gender) are not from a hereditary line, but are rather chosen as young children from among the general population, and then genetically and technologically modified and trained to fulfill their roles. And for the most part the Imperial Mind leaves them to their own devices, so long as they adhere to certain rules, and they, therefore, run amok across the universe, commandeering whatever resources they desire and feuding with each other. What makes these princes even more powerful, however, is that they cannot die — or rather, they do not STAY dead: whenever they die (provided they have remained in the good graces of the Emperor) the Imperial Mind downloads their consciousness into a new body, exactly the same as the previous one.

Prince Khemri has just graduated from his training and is ready to take his place as a full prince within the empire at the opening of the novel. He is naive and arrogant and believes himself above all normal humans and all other princes. He is absolutely certain that he will be chosen as the next emperor when the current Emperor abdicates the throne as expected every 20 years. As he leaves the safety of his training ground and is sent to join the Navy, a common proving ground for new young princes, he quickly discovers that nothing is as he imagined it, the princes are often more like glorified pawns for the Imperial Mind, and someone or something has secret plans for him personally.

If I go much further into the plot than that, I will start to risk any number of spoilers, so we’ll see how well I can dance around them.

Here’s the thing: I tried to like this book. I really REALLY tried to like this book. And I did finish it, so I didn’t HATE it. BUT I nearly gave up and DNF’d it at about the halfway point because I just wasn’t FEELING it. The premise is absolutely fascinating to me, and while the writing is not Nix’s BEST, it’s hardly BAD. And yet… I think I can boil it down to two main problems, for me at least. 

First, the plot felt like there was both too little and too much happening in a relatively short novel. In quick succession we move from Khemri’s intro and training, to his appointment to the Navy and year spent there, to his re-assignment to a secret installation where he trains for several months more (which takes like two chapters?), to being sent on another secret assignment that takes like half a year, to a big event at the Emperor’s main… not sure what to call it, headquarters? Home world? Whatever… and then the final big test/battle thing. A lot happens. Khemri get shuffled around a lot. And yet at the same time there were big sections of the book where I was just kind of bored. I felt that a lot of what happened would have been far more interesting if it had a) been more fleshed out, and b) probably written for an adult audience rather than a YA. And I realize that’s something of a controversial statement, but I have nothing against YA. I read plenty of YA. All of Garth Nix’s other works are YA and I have never had a problem with them before. I just didn’t feel that this particular plot/premise really WORKED as a YA. If it had been written in a more adult style/aesthetic, with a bit less “teenage ridiculousness” and a bit more realism and acknowledgement of the complexities involved, I think it would have been far better. To me it seemed like each of those different sections could almost have been their own “season” of a tv series, for instance.

The second problem for me was Khemri himself. I just could NOT like him. Now, I’m not saying every character needs to be “likable” by which most people mean: I would like this person and be friends with them if I knew them in real life. No. I have no problem with complicated, “unlikable,” amoral, main characters. But if you have a main character through which the entire story is seen/told, particularly in first-person as this one is, the main character has to be at least be TOLERABLE, right? But he just ANNOYED me. He was arrogant, he was whiny, he was insufferable. To be clear, these were obviously all conscious choices for the story, and part of the POINT of the story was to witness his transformation. Essentially, Khemri spends the majority of the novel learning to be HUMAN. I get that. That can make for interesting character development. But this time it just didn’t work for me. He was still just ANNOYING. I wanted to smack him through most of the book. And again, I think if this had been a longer adult novel, with more time spent acknowledging and wrestling with the complexities of the character and the imperialistic system that produced him, it might have worked better. But alas, I did not get that.

One last critique is the ending: I could tell about a third of the way through the novel that it was going to end one of only two ways. There were two very obvious options, and only two. And right on cue, one of those endings peaked around a corner before being like “no, just kidding, it’s the OTHER ending!” It wasn’t a BAD ending. Just very very obvious. And it felt a tad un-earned. For the same reasons stated above, pretty much.

If you are a completist who must read every book by a beloved author (as I often am), then by all means go try it! Maybe the main character will not annoy you as much as he annoyed me. But if you are just looking to try something by Garth Nix, please please please for all that is holy, go read The Old Kingdom series instead! They are beautiful and astounding and complex and wonderful! But every respected author with a lengthy oeuvre is due at least one or two misses, and this might be Nix’s.

Book Review: Sisters of the Vast Black

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Title: Sisters of the Vast Black
Author: Lina Rather
Release Date: 29 Oct 2019
Source: bought 
Rating: 5 stars

I bought this book not long after it was released, sometime in late 2019, and then never got around to reading it, even though the premise was very exciting to me. Just one of those things, of course. But now I have finally taken the time to sit down and read it (it’s a novella, it only took about three hours once I finally just SAT DOWN), and wow was it great! (This also happens to be the first book of the year to fulfill a spot on my 2021 Reading Challenge!)

Sisters of the Vast Black is a novella by Lina Rather that manages to pack all the punch of a vast epic space opera into a very small 155-page package. It follows the space-faring convent of Sisters from the Order of Saint Rita, on board their living-ship called the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. The sisters are out in the far reaches of space, in the “third system” of planets away from Earth, several decades after a disastrous and bloody war between Earth and its rebelling colonies. Most of the sisters have never even SEEN Earth, having been born and raised on space stations or other planets and moons. They administer to the sick and spread the word of God, though they feel that proselytizing is the least important of their duties. At the beginning of the story, they are going to a small moon to bless a brand new colony and perform marriage and baptisms for several colonists. But aboard the ship, many of the sisters harbor deep secrets.

The Mother Superior of their convent took a vow of silence forty years ago, and speaks using sign language, but is the REASON for her vow of silence that she has kept a closely-guarded secret for decades. Another sister is hiding the fact that she joined the convent under false pretenses. And a third sister has been keeping up a secret correspondence that could have a huge impact on her faith and her choices.

All of these things come to head in the climax of the story, when a distress signal calls them back to the colony they had just blessed weeks before. When they arrive, they must face many things: the consequences of their actions, the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church, and the renewed strength of the Earth Central Government.

To understand why I loved this little book so much, you’ll need a tiny bit of personal background info. I was raised in a very devout Catholic family until the age of thirteen, when my mother had an enormous crisis of faith and left the church. She became agnostic, and finally atheist, while I lingered in the faith for a very long time. Up until about the age of sixteen, I was pretty sure I was going to become a nun later in life. Even in college, by which point I had started to learn doubt and become angry with the hypocrisies of the Church, I still minored in theology. Nowadays, I don’t know what I would classify myself as, religiously-speaking: spiritual but not religious, uncertain and ambivalent and more than a little angry? But I still hold a deep fascination with and love for the saints, and my Patron Saint is, in fact, Saint Rita. 

Because of all this, Sisters of the Vast Black speaks to me on quite a few levels. First of all: I love a good space opera, and this is definitely a good space opera despite its small size. The science fiction elements are precise and well-written, and the ending was satisfying. But more importantly, the way the story deals with faith and doubt, with the contradictions of believing in God and messages of the Catholic faith while acknowledging and despising the evils of the Catholic Church, and with the inevitable blending between the Church and imperialist governments… all of this punched my right in the gut. All of the sisters were deeply sympathetic and complex characters that I could recognize and identify with myself or family and friends.

I do believe that anyone who enjoys a good space opera, or the compactness of a well-executed novella will like this book. But I think it will be ESPECIALLY potent for people who come from religious backgrounds in general, and the Catholic Church specifically. It will likely speak to you on a deep, perhaps even existential level. And if so, I hope you will share your thoughts with me sometime!

Goals for 2021

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Hello all, and welcome to my first blog post of the new year! We are now nearly a week into 2021 and, unsurprisingly, it mostly just feels like more of the same. I don’t really DO New Year’s resolutions, per se, but I do have a few goals in mind, most of them book-related, of course!

I first wanted to share my overall reading progress for 2020! I had a goal to read 50 books in the year. I didn’t quite make it, but I read 46 which is still very good (for me at least! I have a friend who routinely reads between 175-200 every single year, but we won’t go there…) I keep a log of my total reading hours in my bullet journal, color-coded for format (print, audiobook, ebook, comic/graphic novel, and fanfiction). My total reading hours was 458 hrs, which is approximately 19 days! My highest total hours per format was, unsurprisingly, audiobook at 294 hours. Most of my reading is done by audiobook these days — and for the record, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with this, or that it is substantively different from print reading in any way! Still, I am hoping to work a bit more print-reading into my schedule this year. I think I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but I USED to read voraciously, and severe depression killed my ability to read for nearly a decade. Audiobooks saved my life, but I am hoping to work my way back up to something at least resembling my old reading habit. It’s slow progress, but it is progress…

For 2021, my goal is once again to read 50 books. And 30 of those will, of course, be for the reading challenge I set up for myself: Amanda’s Very Idiosyncratic 2021 Reading Challenge.

I am also going to continue on with the “Finish the Series” Reading Challenge I joined last year. For last year I finished three series that I had previously started: the Artemis Fowl series, the Old Kingdom Series, and the Wayward Children series (at least until the new one comes out later this month!)

For this year, I am going to try to finish the Percy Jackson series, which I started last year (so this year it counts as “previously-started”!), and possibly the Redwall series. I want to do a massive Redwall re-read, and I own and read MOST of the series — having read them all during the HEIGHT of my reading days in high school and the first couple years of college — but as I got more and more busy with college and part-time jobs, I lost track and never finished the last five books in the series: High Rhulain, Eulalia!, Doomwyte, The Sable Quean, The Rogue Crew. I could, of course, just read those five and have done with it. But I think it would be fun, if a tad ambitious, to try to do a re-read of the whole series from the beginning (and yes, I prefer to read in publication order, don’t @ me).

I also intend to continue trucking along on my way through the Dresden Files books, though I have little illusion of finishing the whole series this year… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also have several writing goals, of course. Last year I continued work on one novel, and started a second, while also tinkering with planning/outlining for a novella and (possibly) a screenplay. I participated in both Camp Nanos in April and July, and actual Nano in November, though I didn’t “win” them. All told, between all projects (and the blog) I wrote 123,132 words! I would like to have a similar total word count for 2021, and better if possible. I am hoping to finish the one novel (Holes in Your Coffin) and make significant progress on the second (Onyx Seal), and I would REALLY like to have one short story or novella done. I am INFAMOUSLY bad at writing SHORT and CONCISE, but I think it would be good practice for me, and might also give me a (albeit very small) chance to maybe get something published while I continue to try to finish a whole novel. But who knows…

I have other goals as well, of course: saving money, continuing to improve my exercise routine, that sort of stuff, but that’s boring so we won’t get into that here.

I’d love to hear about your goals for 2021! Books to read, things to write or make or do! Please share in the comments!

Amanda’s Very Idiosyncratic 2021 Reading Challenge

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Photo by Laura Kapfer on Unsplash

As we come to the end of the year, I am taking stock of the books I read and the many many books I did NOT read. I made myself (and a handful of friends) a reading challenge for 2020 that amounted to 21 books: 7 categories, 3 books per category. I finished that challenge, just barely in time, last week! Now, I have devised a new reading challenge for next year.

First, I thought I’d share all the books I read for each category for this year’s challenge. Keep in mind that these are, of course, not the only books I read this year, just the ones that fit the challenge. I’m not going to share my TOTAL book count for the year yet, because I still have a couple weeks left to try to top it off! But here’s the books I read for the 2020 “Storm the Castle” Reading Challenge:

Challenge 1: “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!” – a book that was gifted or recommended to you
a. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
b. Death Masks by Jim Butcher
c. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Challenge 2: Receive advice from an ancient hermit in the woods – a book that’s been in your TBR pile the longest
a. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
b. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
c. Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones

Challenge 3: Consult the tomes of wisdom and knowledge at the Great Library – a nonfiction book on science, history, etc
a. Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson
b. Disney’s Land by Richard Snow
c. Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt

Challenge 4: Battle ghosts in a haunted castle – a book you intended to read in 2019 but didn’t get around to
a. Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
b. Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor
c. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Challenge 5: Witness the birth of a baby unicorn – a book newly released in 2020
a. The Body in the Garden by Katharine Schellman
b. Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho
c. Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott

Challenge 6: Recover a long-lost mythical treasure – a book you started but never finished
a. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
b. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
c. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

Challenge 7: Storm the villain’s castle – a book in the epic fantasy genre
a. Clariel by Garth Nix
b. Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
c. Hall of Smoke by H.M. Long

So there you have it! My 2020 Reading Challenge. And now, on to next year. For 2021 I am ditching the cutesy category “themes” and I am expanding from 7 categories to 10 categories, keeping it to 3 books per category. If that goes well, I may expand to 12 categories in 2022, but we’ll see. As the title of this post declares, these categories are pretty idiosyncratic and specific to my own interests and things I want to read. If anyone would like to join me in this challenge, please feel free! If you do, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. But this is not a formally organized thing, and there are no prizes. This is literally just for myself. So, without further ado, here’s my 2021 Reading Challenge:

10 Categories, 3 Books Each, 30 Books Total:

  1. Space Opera
  2. Award-Winning Books (can be any recognized award including but not limited to Hugo, Nebula, Booker, National Book Award, Goodreads Choice Awards, Nobel, etc)
  3. Books In Translation
  4. Romance Novels
  5. Books Bought in 2020
  6. Mystery Novels
  7. Nonfiction: history/science/biography
  8. Poetry Collection Books
  9. Historical Fantasy
  10. Books You’ve Been Meaning to Re-Read