Just the other week, we picked up a nice stack of books for our summer holiday from, among other places, SF Bokhandeln in Gothenburg. We hope to make up for not having had time to read as much as we’ve wanted to over the last months by indulging in a few reading marathons over summer. No doubt, others have similar plans, and so we thought we’d share some of our ideas for good summer reads.
Kushiel’s Scion
The fourth book in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series is the first installment in a new trilogy with prince Imriel, son of the beautiful and dangerous Melisande, as the narrator. His inheritance as a scion of Kushiel and the scars inflicted upon his mind and body have made him a conflicted young man who has to struggle to find his own way in life, out of the shadow of both his parents and his foster-parents. This, of course, can only lead to trouble, but also to quite some adventures—both in and out of bed!
The Lies of Locke Lamora
We haven’t had time to read this one yet ourselves, but it comes highly recommended, not the least by GRRM.
Temeraire
Whereas the UK publishers have so far only released the first book (called Temeraire there) in Naomi Novik’s alternate history with dragons in the Napoleonic era, Ballantine has already put out the first three installments in the US. This made the decision of which edition to go with pretty easy for us, since we’ve been waiting for a while to get a chance to read these.
The Tamir Triad
The final book in Lynn Flewelling’s The Tamir Triad is finally due out this summer, and it will hopefully prove to be a satisfying conclusion to very interesting story. The setting is fairly standard as fantasy goes, but the moral ambiguities dealt with in the first two installments have lent the trilogy an unusual depth and made its character’s feel real and alive.
The Tears of Artamon
Another trilogy completed recently is Sarah Ash’s The Tears of Artamon. As with The Tamir Triad, the story centering on Gavril Nagarian is not a neatly black-and-white tale where its readily apparent who’s right and who’s wrong. For a fantasy, the setting is a fair bit later than the norm, with gun-powder and other advancements available, and it has a distinctly Northern and Eastern European flavour, which makes for a refreshing change from the more commonly used periods and places.
First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age
Anthologies are great for the summer, not the least for the beach, and this is a very good collection featuring authors such as Judith Tarr, Poul Anderson and Harry Turtledove. As the title suggests, the common theme is the Bronze Age, with some of the stories being straight historicals and some having smaller or greater touches of the fantastic.
Age of Bronze
Continuing on the theme of the Bronze Age, but moving away from books, we would again like to suggest Eric Shanower’s much-acclaimed Age of Bronze, an ambitious, award-winning adaptation of the Iliad to the medium of sequential art. Considered to be one of, if not the, best writer-artists in the business, his thorough research, his painstaking attention to detail, and his writing brings humanity and life to the world’s oldest surviving epic.