Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth 1) by N. K. Jemisin. The biggest take-away to reading this book a second time right after finishing book 3 was how much plot happened from the very first page. Multiple times I had to check and make sure I was really in book 1, because so much big plot stuff was happening. And by the 50% point I was sure the plot stuff was actually from the third book.

It's funny, but even though I knew how the book ended, I still stayed up too late reading the last two chapters.

Really enjoyable second read. I was tempted to start at the beginning again and read it for a third time, but forced myself to move on to something new.

The Shapeshifter Chronicles by assorted authors. Anthologies so rarely work for me, but I got this one for one story: Good Hunting, by Ken Liu. There's an anthology animated show called Love Death + Robots, and they animate various short scifi/horror/fantasy stories. Good Hunting was beautifully animated and is in most viewers' top three favorite episodes.

Sometimes stories LD+R do are quite different than the text story an episode is based on, but in the case of Good Hunting, it was the same beat for beat. A steampunk-ish story set in ancient China, a demon hunter's son ends up befriending a fox demon's daughter. The world is changing though, the British government is stomping its way across China and building a railroad which ends up destroying the nation's magic. The two of them have to survive (on their own, though at the end of the story meet again).

Like most anthologies in my experience, this one had good stories first, second, and last (Good Hunting was last). I tried reading all the middle ones, but DNFed them anywhere from a few pages in to halfway through.

My biggest issue was calling these "shapeshifter" stories. The majority of them really don't fit that description even if you squint hard.

DNF #181: The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy. The best thing about this book was the beautiful cover. A "talking animal" book, but not only were the cats basically human, they were also all psychic.

The cats said things like this about their psychic connection chat group: "I'll get back on the link later. Keep the airwaves clear." I have a hard time believing a wild/feral cat would use "airwaves" about psychic communication, it's more a human technology term.

The listing on Amazon described this as "a love paean to cats", but I'd bet a good deal of money that the author has never owned a cat before.

Beraal used her fluffy tail to cushion her belly against the rough bark of the tree.

Does the author think cats lay on their tails? Also, the diet of an indoor cat seems to only be "fish-flavored milk" in the book.

DNFed it pretty quickly.