So when I started getting really sick a few months ago, I discovered Overdrive app and also fell back on my usual favorite thing to do when sick, binge-watch music competition shows and old favorite shows. But because of the Overdrive app and that I wasn’t up to writing or my usual stuff right after losing my grandmother, I also turned to reading. I had just finished the Diving series through the current book and started looking for more. I started rereading the longest series I had, Honor Harrington, which I’d stopped mid-book 9. Now I’ve read the first 11, though At All Costs, but the library didn’t have the last three books and I haven’t coughed up the money yet.

So all that said, here’s some stuff I’ve read lately:

• The Diving Series by Kristine Rusch: very, very good and I want to know everything there is to know about the anacapa drive. I adore Boss, the main character, a woman whose birth name we don’t even know. I fell slowly but surely for Squishy, who is very much a survivor of a terrible past and lives in the aftermath of that throughout the whole series. She’s also a genius scientist with a ruthless side I love. I love Yash Zarlengo, a brilliant engineer with a delightfully strong, no-nonsense personality. I feel fannish. There’s technology that people don’t really understand and that having huge consequences, man out of time, and lots of spaceship and technology porn. Like seriously, someone read these books and love them like I do.
• Honor Harrington Series by David Weber: has issues but was more tolerable the second time through if I skipped the less than convincing love scenes and was properly braced for the deaths and everything political going wrong. It has a serious squick of mine in the later books with the nanotech from Mesa, specifically what it does, but I find that if I can enjoy a Gary Stu space opera, then I can enjoy the level of Mary Sue that Honor sometimes gets to be. It’s good stuff and it’s really the broad cast of secondary characters that make you eternally love so much of the books, like Harkness and Tremaine forever.
• Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells: I got the first book free from Tor and despite the expense went ahead and bought the rest because they are so good. This is everything I love about artificial intelligence and science fiction. There’s just the right amount of tension and suspense, the AI has no desire to be all feely and emotional and human, and there’s a lot of ambivalence in the relationships she’s developing. She’s sarcastic and dry as I could ever hope for. The voice in this series is so hard to get right, but it’s so my thing, and ART is a treasure of an intelligent sentient spaceship. Intelligent sentient spaceships made of metal and rivets is my favorite thing.
• Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie: I fell in love with Leckie when she was writing short stories and had no novels yet and I know they talk a lot about the gender thing which was great, but I was more fascinated by her handling of something I’ve struggled with enough to not write certain stories yet: writing a character’s POV with multiple bodies. Plus, Breq is wonderful and ambivalent and not that interested in being human and feelsy and so good at being the thing she is, and Mercy is the best and sweetest spaceship and that space station is like my favorite AI that decided to learn to be BAMF ever, and I love the twists and turns everything took and how nobody was all good or all bad or had all the right answers. I haven’t read Provenance yet, but I just got it checked out from the library and am looking forward to it.
• Temeraire series by Naomi Novik: I adored the first book ages ago and via Overdrive was able to get the rest. Inhaled it in a few days and like every soapy, iddy moment of it. Everything is better with dragons. I haven’t read Crucible of Gold yet, but went ahead and read the last book since the hold came in first. Just got that one in and will finish the series.
• Ogre Enchanted and the Lost Kingdom of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine: I loved Ella Enchanted and the Two Princesses of Bamarre and was flipping from the new books to the old ones to get everything situated right in my head, and these prequels were perfect, imho.
• Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee: I’ve loved many of Lee’s shorts and yup, this series gets too graphic sometimes but Cheris and Jedao and the Shuos Hexarch are all in my heart now and I adore the servitors, whose sentience has almost gone overlooked and how they love Cheris. I’ve got one more book to go and just got it in from the library.
• The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn: I’ve read two out of three (the third just got in) on a recommendation to check out Mara Jade (years ago, oops), and I love it so far, though there are bits I love less. I suspect fannishness in my near future here.
• A few shorts, like for Divergent, and I wasn’t just imagining Christine/Tobias, wow, and Extracurricular Activities for Jedao. Most of it good, some meh.
• I started reading Sun Knight and haven’t gotten as far as I ought to have, because I’ve been prioritizing reading on when my loan expired. (Already lost Forever Red and will need to re-check out. Bleh.) But it’s on the list of to be read.