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I tore through the Ryira Revelations pretty quickly, enjoying them clear through, but they fully satiated the comfort food jag I had been on since shortly pre-lockdown.
Casting around for something with a little more bite, I saw Max Gladstone put out another Craft Sequence book last year, so that was an easy call. I'm almost done with Ruin of Angels, which is mostly a heist/caper, and like the other books, the city where it takes place is as much a character as the people (and other sentients). Cindy Day's reading is for the most part stellar, with great character voices, pacing and intonation. She does cover a wider dynamic range than most, which sometimes made it hard to find a comfortable volume where everything was intelligible and nothing was shouted.
It does feel more like Gladstone is zeroing in on a formula in this volume, and this city struck me as less allegorical, more grounded in his world than a riff on ours. The earlier books were clearly alt-NYC, alt-LA and alt-Honolulu, and this one is probably alt-San Francisco, and it's not like any of them were full-tilt allegory, but this city, Agdel Lex, seems the least tied to its counterpart in our world. Maybe I just don't know enough about San Francisco.
I'm also listening to a Great Courses lecture series from the Audible sale, How Great Science Fiction Works. I'm 3 or 4 lectures deep, and the one I heard tonight, about the intersection of historical fiction and SF, did a number on my TBR list. I suspect there will be more of that, going forward.
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