Various thoughts on a variety of topics.
Watch the members of the idol group Lemon Angel as they act out a variety of scenarios both adolescent and adult.
A collection of mostly unrelated short stories primarily featuring sexual and/or romantic situations.
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Although Keisuke Saji constantly fantasies about women he hasn’t had any luck finding a girlfriend. Late one night he gets a call from ‘Alice’ who asks to meet up and exchange a gift for sexual services, and overjoyed he heads out to the location… only to discover the call was a prank. He notices that his classmate Akira Koizumi is there as well and soon realizes that she’s the one who made the prank call, resulting in Akira spontaneously deciding to take on the role of ‘Alice’ herself.
A heavy-fanservice romantic comedy with a small streak of personal drama and occasional topless scenes. The humor is a mix of slapstick and ecchi.
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The phoenix, a mythical creature representing eternal life and rebirth whose blood is thought to grant immortality. These are the stories of those both past and future, selfish and selfless, who have crossed its path.
A collection of drama-heavy short stories focused on destiny and cycles of life/death.
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Though the war is over, hostilities between Zeon and the Federation have not ceased. The focus is now planet-side, where research on the Psycho Zaku technology continues and the veterans of the Thunderbolt Sector find themselves in conflict once more.
Mecha action with a not insignificant musical focus. It’s a compilation of the Gundam Thunderbolt web series’ second half and should be watched after the first half.
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After finally recovering the use of her legs following an accident that killed her family, Aiko Tachibana is suddenly confronted by the fact that not only is her body not her own, but that her mother and brother might still be alive. Now she must follow Yuuya Kanzaki and a special forces team deep into the heart of a biological disaster zone in the hopes of reclaiming her family and stopping the expansion of the mindless self-replicating organism responsible for the accident.
An action-drama with an even split between both action and drama, of varieties both personal and political, and a bit of mystery.
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Michelle Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra series is a bit different than most in that rather than a collection of related stories it’s more like one continuous story; the breaks between books are not much different from the breaks between chapters. As a result it can occasionally be somewhat frustrating to read, due to creating the illusion that the character development should be greater than it is.
Cast in Flame isn’t as abstract as the previous book in the series, and I’m immensely thankful for that. That said, the whole ‘heart of the house’ activation scene felt like a copy-paste of the Tiamaris claiming. The follow-up, Cast in Honor, is on the borderline when it comes to abstraction and features some interesting developments regarding both the shadow and Bellusdeo.
Cast in Flight is one of the more stand-alone books, which is to say that its central plotline is relatively self-contained and it doesn’t really leave any major loose-ends behind. It’s a nice change of pace after the previous two entries. The 13th book on the other hand both leaves several major loose ends dangling and starts off badly. Very badly. It’s not until about a third of the way through that events and character behavior become less… grating. But they do indeed get better and I’m definitely looking forward to the continuation.
The Kim Harrison novella Sideswiped, a work meant to introduce you to the world of Peri Reed, is pretty bad. Both in its technical aspects and in the near-total lack of relevance it has to the first main novel in the series.
Which would be The Drafter. After the terrible showing of the previous story (and preview first chapter) I waffled back and forth quite a bit over whether or not to give this a proper chance… and I should have went with my initial plan of ignoring it. While certainly better than Sideswiped it unfortunately has some major characterization and plot-related problems and isn’t very enjoyable in any respect. One interesting thing about it though is how, rather than an agency thriller, it comes off more like a gender equality allegory.
Switching authors now, Seanan McGuire‘s Once Broken Faith is the tenth October Daye novel and does something a bit refreshing. Rather than further escalate matters it decides to take a step horizontally and introduce a number of the other North American Fae rulers while wrapping up both the aftermath of having found the antidote and (with the help of a bonus short story) the Queen of Mists’ situation. It’s a solid balance of humor, action, drama, and world-building.
The concluding novel in Kim Harrison‘s Hollows series makes it fairly clear that the series has been dragged out far beyond its expiration point with power-level creep that’s both ridiculous and inconsistent. Roughly half the book is someone doing something awful, blaming Rachel for it, and having everyone believe them for no apparent reason, while a quarter consists of Rachel beating herself up about ‘holding Trent back’. Only ~25% or so of it is decent-to-good and you wouldn’t lose much by just skipping straight to the epilogue chapter.
Originally R. Scott Bakker’s Aspect-Emperor series was meant to be a trilogy, but after a lengthy delay it ended up becoming a quartet. It’s very fortunate that The Great Ordeal is preceded by a detailed recap of what came before, because after nearly a half-decade gap I doubt many remember previous events at all clearly. It’s also fortunate that the book turns out to feel more like the earlier Prince of Nothing novels. I still don’t like the Esmenet/Kel sections at all though.
The Unholy Consult is a bit different though in that the disparate storylines are mostly merged into a single narrative while the vast majority of the book focuses on one battle. Ultimately I don’t think these two needed to be separate novels, as there are a number of aspects that end up completely superfluous (such as the Sorwheel/Serwa and White Luck subplots) or orphaned (those ‘vile angel’ interludes). The conclusion deserves special mention for being so… random? Though there’s a certain symmetry to the one person not damned being responsible for damnation, the way it happens does not feel natural in the slightest. It’s almost like an after-thought.
While following the trail of the vigilante killer ‘B’, the officers of the Royal Investigation Service become entangled in the machinations of the secret organization Market Maker. They are looking for B for reasons of their own and seek to lure him out of hiding with elaborate crimes, crimes which few besides the eccentric Keith Flick can see the truth of.
Part mystery thriller and part sci-fi action with a moderate streak of comic relief.
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Ilona Andrews’ ninth Kate Daniels novel forces Kate to fully embrace her power and brings the conflict with her father to a head. Presumably the 10th book will be the series finale and this one does a pretty fantastic job of setting the stage while being entertaining in its own right.
There are many short stories in the Kate Daniels series that are scattered about. Several were collected into the Small Magics E-book, and of these the first two are probably the best while the second-to-last gives an interesting glimpse into a pre-shift time. Others have been released as stand-alone E-books, such as Magic Stars (which is decent), Magic Dreams (which is okayish, having originally been released in the anthology Hexed), and Magic Steals (which is similar to Dreams for obvious reasons but works better). All of them help flesh out the world and are worth taking a look at so long as you don’t mind bite-sized episodic stories.
Changing gears we come to The Turn, which is a prequel to the Hollows series that centers on Trent’s parents and how the virus that decimated humanity came into being. While it starts out good, once the plague is loosed and the focus shifts over toward action and demon summoning it does not hold up well at all; the scenes don’t really gel and most of the character behavior goes to shit. Rather than being its own thing it instead transforms into a pale imitation of the main series.
