The Flight: A Monthly Book Sampler (December 2020)

I grabbed Ink and Bone by late author Rachel Caine in May when the Kindle version was on sale because - shocker - I love books about books and this one sounded fascinating. In the world of Caine’s book, the Great Library at Alexandria wasn’t destroyed in the 3rd century; it founded daughter libraries around the world and nearly two millennia later, controls all knowledge, worldwide. By and large, it’s illegal to own original books and book smuggling, while lucrative, is a capital crime. It took me a little while to get into the story, but I ended up really enjoying it. The characters are interesting and there’s a ton of potential in the world Caine created. I’ll definitely be picking up Paper and Fire, the next book in the series.

The Obelisk Gate is the second book in N. K. Jemisin’s trilogy The Broken Earth. I wrote about how captivating The Fifth Season, the first book, is last month and The Obelisk Gate draws you in just as much. The three different timelines in the first book all come together in the final pages, so while the second has two parallel storylines, they’re (mostly) operating in the same time. There’s great character development and the plot is still fascinating. There’s plenty of action and intrigue, along with new conflicts and obstacles. I can’t wait to see how Jemisin wraps it all up in the final book.

When I first read the description of The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, I was intrigued enough to instantly place a hold at my library. I haven’t read any of Haig’s other books, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going in. The book needs to have a trigger/content warning for suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt, but that’s the only caveat to my recommendation. What would you do if, in-between life and death, you could pull a book from a shelf and fall into your life as it would’ve been had you made a different choice at any of 10,000 different points in your life? This is what Nora Seed, the book’s main character, is faced with after an awful day. It takes a bit to really find its stride, but it’s ultimately a beautiful, touching story. 

I wish I knew what to say about The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. I had tried to read one of V. E. Schwab’s books a few years ago and didn’t finish it. But the premise of this book was sufficiently intriguing for me to give Schwab another shot - “a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets...But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.” I’m really glad that I let my curiosity drive me here because the book is exquisite. I loved Schwab’s writing - there were multiple sentences that I reread several times because they were so beautiful. I loved the characters and I loved the way she interwove Addie’s backstory and present. The whole thing is gorgeous and bittersweet.

The Dark Archive is the latest installment of The Invisible Library series from Genevieve Cogman. Perhaps at this point, you’ve noticed that I love good series and am pretty loyal to them? Fortunately for me, even though there are probably a dozen on-going series that I follow, most of the authors, through awe-inspiring feats of wordsmithery, (I need everyone to know that I fully thought I was making that word up, but nary a red squiggle appeared beneath it.), put out a new book every year and they’re fairly evenly distributed throughout the calendar. So I know that until Ms. Cogman decides to wrap the series up, I can look forward to a new tale of Irene, Kai, and Vale’s wonderfully absurd adventures every December. The Dark Archive was fun, delightfully snarky, and answered several longstanding questions while prompting about a dozen more. (If a library operating as an inter-dimensional hub that helps stabilize worlds between the precarious poles of order and chaos, snark, dragons, and faeries operating as fictional archetypes sounds interesting, as of Jan 1, 2021 The Invisible Library, the first book in the series is available on Kindle for $2.99.)

Academ’s Fury was my last book of 2020 and I squeezed it in with about 35 minutes to spare. It’s the second book in Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series and it picks up about two years after the events of Furies of Calderon. There’s even more political intrigue, enemies old and new, some great new characters, and a plot that draws the reader in and makes you root really hard for the protagonists. I may have yelled, “I knew it!”, at the end when something I suspected throughout the first book was confirmed at the very end of this one. I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the series, which ought to see me through the first third of 2021.