Just finished Naomi Novik's The Golden Enclaves , the third (and final) Scholomance book.
This was the FIFTH book I've read from Naomi Novik this year. I really really liked the first one, and thought the second was decent for a middle book, and the third was... fine. It started out pretty strong and added some twists that put the earlier books in new contexts that make you go "ooooh, that makes sense"... But it just moving along the plot, it doesn't really didn't get me to care about the characters or the plot like the first one did. The first book just had a great balance of character angst and sympathy for the lead, a ticking clock for the end of the school year and a cursed prophecy and just had me fully invested in El almost immediatley... and the second and third books just didn't hold the same tension and suspense, they were just more of "and here's the fallout from the previous books." Not bad, but only good, while the first one had been GREAT.
I didn't care much for Uprooted or Spinning Silver. They were both fine, not bad, but they just didn't grab me. Ater that really strong first outing of A Deadly Education I was excited to have found a new author I really liked but I think I might be done with her. I've already bought the first book of the Temaire series but that's 9 volumes long so it better be good from the getgo.
Also read Heaven's River by Dennis E Taylor, the fourth Bobiverse book. I thought I was done with Bobiverse after the first three but after a couple iffy books in a row I wanted to go back to one I was confident I'd at least like a little... and Heaven's River breaks the format of the first 3 bobiverse books where its more just one continuous story instead of 10 different little anthologies, and it worked a lot better. This one actually impressed me, and now I'm going to hunt down some more from Dan Simmons.
I also tried
Iron Widow-Xiran Kay Zhao
A Fire Upon the Deep- Vernor Vinge
Hyperion- Dan Simmons
none of which were my personal cup of tea. Again, not bad, but not really for me. lot of them had strong openings but then had issues like the narrator voice I just didn't care for. Iron Widow is described as "Pacific Rim meets a Handmaid's Tale" and yeah.... that's 100% accurate. The Handmaid's Tale aspect made it really hard to read. I couldn't like basically ANY of the male characters... and the narrator hating all men did not help.
(Hypeion was canterbury tales, Iron Widow was a man hater, Fire Upon the Deep had parts from an alien POV that waas weird.) Ah well. Tried new things. Hyperion was especially disappointing since its hyped up as one of the BIG sci-fi classics, its regularly in top 30 lists.
I think it's time I jumped back on the Brando Sando train. Alcatraz 6 is out and I still need to read all four of the Skyward books. Plus Stormlight 4 which I've been holding off on because I needed to get ahold of the novella between 3 and 4 and I was waiting for the paperback. Need to clear those off before the Secret Projects start showing up in January!
Also been reading some other things like Pachinko by Min Jin Lee which was decent, but this isn't really the thread for it.
I still need to finish off The Black Prism (Lightbringer 1) by Brent Weeks, and get going on Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay... , and at some point take a stab at Malazan since the first volume has been on my shelf for almost a year now... Too much to read!