Ploughed through the latest John Smith: Mediator urban fantasy, which is good enough that it would have been a solid midlist title in the 90s but since midlist doesn’t exist anymore, has been banished to self-publishing.

one of the all-time greats, and an annual re-read for me.

Stanistaw Lem’s Fiasco. It’s a depressing read but really solid, and easier than many of his other works.

The first one, Little Fuzzy, is one of my favorite books of all time. The rest are less good? but still decent? Steer clear of Scalzi’s “remake” though, it’s trash.

It starts off good but gets really bogged down in its own waste after a while, IMO.

Alan Dean Foster wrote a series with basically the same premise in the 90s, where evil mind control telepath aliens were waging a war against a bunch of free alien species, and the free alien species were hampered by the fact that very few aliens were capable of fighting at all, let alone effectively, but the evil telepath aliens could mind control their conquered subjects into fighting anyway. And then the losing free aliens find humans, who are basically xenomorphs crossed with hannibal lecter compared to the aliens and conveniently immune to telepathy, and they realize that humans will fight to the death for dumb shit like precious metals.

True fact, I made out with and fell half in love with Robin Hobb’s daughter at a wedding once. She’s actually more famous than her mom to a certain generation, but my lips are sealed as to her true identity.

Last week I polished off the eleven books in the King’s Watch series by Mark Hayden, as well as the cozy mystery spinoff by the author’s sister with the excellent title Murder Within Tent, and the… what do you call the relationship between two spinoffs of the same show? Cousins? As well as the two modern UK procedurals in a cousin series (the Tom Morton books), and a couple of so-so novellas in yet another spinoff series featuring a minor set of characters from the King’s Watch books by someone else entirely.

This week I banged through a few books in a really quite decent urban fantasy series, the Lost Fall books by Chris Underwood, a quick, fun, not especially complex action thriller set in a Mexican border town called Cryptid Slayer, and the latest Prof Croft urban fantasy book which is really a dollar store Dresden Files that I’m only still reading out of inertia, really. Today I read the first Rev Parata Occult Mysteries book, a fun lovecraft-flavored noir set in 1984, and I’m about 75% through the second one which I’m not enjoying as much because the author made the decision to lampshade the solution to the mystery less than a quarter of the way through, and I’m not sure if he intended to turn the book into a howcatchem instead of a whodunit or he just thinks I’m a moron. I expect I’ll finish that off before bed.

Kindle Unlimited is a real mixed bag in terms of quality, but it’s one flat fee every month for a huge library and every now and then you find a gem amidst the mediocrity.

I liked John Dies at the End, and the movie adaptation was… different, but also fun!