March Wrap Up 

The Tainted Cup sounds really fun. I liked the Divine Cities trilogy well enough and am curious to try more by him.

loved the tainted cup can't wait for the sequel

Tainted Cup and Too Like the Lightning are two I'm definitely going to pick up at some point. Who knows when though, the life of a mood reader ain't easy ⚙️

⚙⚙ I am so glad we decided to have an unofficial readalong for the Terra Ignota series because it made the series so much fun to read. And it has left me in such a sci fi mood.

Glad to hear Too Like the Lightning is good, I've owned it for ages but haven't read it yet 😅

Ooooh I am starting The Tainted Cup tomorrow and I am so excited! Will also have to get to Too Like the Lightning asap, that series is finished, right? Happy reading!!

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Terra Ignota only gets better (to me). The writing gets even more playful and interesting. Seven Surrenders is mostly just setup, which I could see frustrating some people, but it's oh so payed off.

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Into the Riverlands was fun, but not nearly as strong as the other books in the series. Mammoths at the Gates was almost as good as the first book for me. Completely agreed about the romance in Wonder Engine. In general, I find I don't like the way Kingfisher writes romance (always a bit unhealthy for my taste), so I best enjoy her books that have no romance.

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I loved Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders but fell out hard with the third book to the point it actively annoyed me. I think what I found was that the juxtaposition between Enlightenment philosophy with a future near Utopia hasn't paid off and I think the problem is that we don't get to see any of the real social issues in the world -- they are hinted at but not explored. Instead, we only get to see the world from the POV of the like 12 characters who seem to run everything while they make rather bizarre, petty, and inconsistent decisions. As such, a lot of the philosophy falls flat because so much of it is grandiose statements about humanity without us ever seeing beyond the upper elites and it ends up feeling deeply class-unconscious and more about Enlightenment aesthetics than anything else. Like, I feel like there should be at least one character expressing the fact (and rightfully so IMO) that all the characters should be going to the guillotine but we don't get that. An example of the class-unconscious: a large faction of humanity prefers to live under Empire via the Masons and we never really get to explore the implications of that or what Empire entails if it doesn't come with all the bad stuff. Also, the pretentiousness of it started to be less cute. At the start, the fourth-wall breaking nods to all the silliness the reader is asked to buy into alleviated this but that trick stopped working for me -- Mycroft can only go into hysterics so many times because someone said something with gravitas before it becomes exhausting. There is a point where the narrator basically says 'You my reader must find this silly by now' and I was like 'Yep'.

Waitwaitwait, the detective in The Tainted Cup, would you say they are more like Holmes or Poirot? Meaning, do they deduce stuff by noticing tiny details and knowing a lot of stuff _or_ are they an expert in human emotions and work via figuring out how people are connected and what motives them? 👀 As soon as I heard Holmes & Watson comparison by other reviewers, I dismissed it as a possible read as I dislike both Holmes as a character (I have always found him to be an uninteresting and unlikable jerk, tbh 😂) as well as his approach to solving mysteries. But now you mention Christie, which, in my head at least, means a more humane approach to solving mysteries, so now I am intrigued and need to know more 👀👀

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