Raven's Shadow - Patricia Briggs

2004, Ace, 334 pages

ISBN: 978-0-41-01187-2

Read:  October 2025,  age 47

 

Raven Duology, book 1

 

Decent fantasy, kind of fluffy.  Nice to see a non-whiny teenage adventurer for a change.  It didn't really make me want to read more non-Mercy stuff, though.

 

Rating: 3 

Barryar - Lois McMaster Bujold (Audiobook)

Blackstone Audio, 2009, 11.7 hours

Original copyright 1991 

Read by Grover Gardner

Listened to: September 2025, age 47

 

Vorkosigan Saga, book 3 

 

I didn't realize that it had won a Hugo.  It was a good book, but I didn't think that it was that good.  

 

Rating: 4- 

The Hot Kid - Elmore Leonard

Harper Collins, 2005, 312 pages

ISBN: 0-06-072422-6

Read: September 2025, age 47 

 

A period piece - set in South in the 30's - it was an okay story about a US Marshal tracking down a bad guy.  The prose was very nice, and the plotting a bit meandering and slow, and there was really no character growth.  It was good, felt very cinematic.

 

Rating: 3+ 

Virtual Light - William Gibson

Seal, 1993, 350 pages

ISBN: 0-7704-2614-X 

Read September 2025, age 47

  

Bridge Trilogy, book 1

 

First of a trilogy, but no need to read the second.  The world was interesting, and the characters were fun, but the title tech was just a MacGuffin that could have been a piece of paper.  Fun, but nothing spectacular.  The feel was very much Snow Crash, but without all the infodumps, and just surface level.

 

Rating: 3 

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Anchor, 1998, 311 pages 

Original Copyright 1985

ISBN: 9780385490818

Read: September 2025, age 47

 

Beautiful, haunting, terrifying, and boring as all get-out.  It was a good book to have read, but doesn't make me want to go find more like it.

 

Rating: 4 

More Than a Little Warped - Annette Marie & Rob Jacobsen (Audiobook)

Tantor Audio, 2023, 2.6 hours

Read by Iggy Toma

Listened to: August 2025, age 47

 

The Guild Codex: Warped book 3.5 

 

I liked this one better than the last Demonized book, but it was similar - I already knew how it all worked out, so there wasn't the suspense that there could have been.  I still think that a super-group trilogy would have worked better.

 

Rating: 4
 

Delivering Evil for Experts - Annette Marie

Tantor Audio, 2021,  9.6 hours

Read by: Cris Dukehart and Teddy Hamilton

Listened to: September 2025, age 47 

 

The Guild Codex: Demonized book 4 

 

This was a real let-down after the fantastic end to the Spellbound thread.  Most of the book was playing catch-up, showing the same events of  Damned Souls and a Sangria through different eyes.  From here, it seems like Damned Souls, Delivering Evil, and the next Kit Morris book should have been wrapped together in an 'Avengers'-style trilogy, interweaving all three threads within one narrative.  Basically by here, none of it would make that much sense without the other threads anyway - might as well lean into it.  It would have smoothed out some of the redundancy as well.

 

I was happy when this book was over - enough flogging the horse, it died last book.  Not that this one was bad, but the structure made it anticlimactic.

 

Rating: 3