I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

It's been a while! I've been busy with classes; didn't even manage to pick up a Yuletide pinch hit this year, sadly. I've been listening to Kesha on repeat (and Dessa and Taylor Swift with her cat chorus). And I just saw either a very large mouse or a small rat poke its head out of our basement closet, which was very unpleasant. While I wait for the pest control to call me back, have some fiction!

Alix E. Harrow, Starling House: ( southern gothic )
Jason Pargin, Zoey Ashe Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia: ( book three )
Christopher Golden & Amber Benson, Slayers: A Buffyverse Story: Good to hear the familiar voices, but the writing was sadly not good.

Seth Dickinson, Exordia: ( highly recommended )
Alexis Hall, 10 Things that Never Happened: ( romcom )
Martha Wells, System Collapse: ( Murderbot! )
Rebecca Kuang, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023: Isabel J. Kim’s Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist, starring Cool and Sexy Asian Girl, is great. The others were fine but I don't really have anything to say about them.

Terry Pratchett, A Stroke of the Pen: ( non-Discworld )
Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory: ( fascist deradicalization )
John Scalzi, Starter Villain: ( eh )
Tobias S. Buckell, A Stranger in the Citadel: ( banned books )
Richard Kadrey & Cassandra Khaw, The Dead Take the A-Train: ( Wolfram & Hart in NYC )
Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World:( accepting self, gaining empire )
Christopher Rowe, The Navigating Fox: ( oneiric fantasy )
Best of British Science Fiction 2022, Donna Bond, ed.: ( AI & environmental collapse )
Stephen King, Holly: ( Covid horror ) Ben Aaronovitch, Winter's Gifts: ( side quest )

I’m promoting Dropbox again for easy, automatically updating cloud storage. If you use this link to sign up,  I get extra space too, but I’d recommend it anyway; I use it to back up my entire computer, which has made moving between computers ten times easier than it used to be.

Here’s the wikipedia entry for a somewhat timely Asimov story, Franchise.  I was surprised at how many of the Asimov stories from that period I still remembered.  Someday gave me chills as a kid.  (In other tech/politics news, I am also obsessively reading stories about the failure of Romney's Orca.  Successful computer programs are made of people!)

( Genderbending fantasy, book magic, Terry Pratchett does many worlds )

My super-expensive glasses, which I bought specifically because they were touted as extra strong, just snapped in half while I was cleaning the lenses. Grr!

Quick Iron Man rec: The City of Los Angeles v. Iron Man

( Reviews: YA Pratchett, Vande Velde, Snicket )

I couldn't resist getting Z. to make this icon, now that I have 100 to play with. Nip/Tuck snippetage is in progress; I'm still thinking about how to pull off the XF and SV prompts.

( fiction: Marshall, Novik, Pratchett, Thomas, Butler, Jones )

How I love the Style Invitational. A recent contest was to update lines from literature with product placement. As is often the case, I found the first runner up much funnier than the winner: "And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the amazing Ginsu knife to slay his son, and the angel of the Lord called out, 'But wait, there's more!'"

Not done with the new Laurell Hamilton, Incubus Dreams (shut up, you know you want to), but I had to write now and say: ( minor spoilers; also the new Terry Pratchett )