I was so taken with N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, the first in her Broken Earth series, I launched right into the second book, The Obelisk Gate. The book picks up right where the first left off. It seems likely to me that Jemisin planned the continuation of the story from the beginning because the transition was seamless. The story begins with Essun, the main character carried over from book one,

After Finishing Penny Dreadful (see my Watching for this month) and after years of being familiar with the Dorean Gray character but not having read it, I finally decided to get a copy of the Oscar Wilde novel. I'm not quite through it, so I'll share my thoughts on this classic next time. Until then...It's not horror or connected to Halloween, but Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries #3, Rogue Protocol,

Reading:A bit of a throwback, but a short read and a solid, creepy choice to kick off one's Halloween lead-up: Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan.The story was disjoint, following several different characters in a few different places and jumping time. I found the telling of the story similar to Bram Stoker's Dracula, drawing from several sources to compile one storyline. I enjoyed the book, and as

Someone recently compared my writing to that of David Mitchell. It's always flattering to be classified with a mainstream and successful author. However, I was only familiar with Mitchell to the extent of the movie adaptation of his novel, Cloud Atlas. Thus I decided to start there to acquaint myself better. It was a good choice.Cloud Atlas interweaves six storylines, each from a different period spanning

I read Martha Wells' All Systems Red last summer. I've had the second novella in her Murderbot Diaries series, Artificial Condition, in my "to read" pile since them. I finally picked it up last weekend. In short, it was a fun read.As with the first in the series, it was an entertaining story. This book gets a little more personal with the main character, an A.I. security unit, and delves deeper into

Since I write fiction, most of the time I post reviews about fiction, but I'm a big advocate of reading a wide variety of genres and subjects in order to cultivate a multifaceted and unique sphere of influence on oneself. Thus, I certainly pick up non-fiction from time to time. Lately, I haven't written about those titles much because they've seemed to lean toward topics relating to being a self-published