Okay, I maaaaay have a $40 credit for kindle books!

[conuly]

Any good recs?

Also, this is a fanfic rec, and you've probably seen it a billion times today alone, but:

Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach

Enjoy! (Edit: If you're a stickler for accuracy, siderea calls it "arguably the best representation of doing therapy from the therapist's point of view, in all fiction. By a lot" and I think she should know.)

Comments

[chelseagirl]

Well, *cough*, my novel Courting Anna is only $3.99 on Kindle. May not be your thing (historical fiction masquerading as historical romance), but anyway.

[rmc28]

Everything by Ann Leckie if you haven't already read it (the Ancillary trilogy is amazing space opera about empire and also about AI and identity - the sections told from the povs of the multibodied AI are amazing; Provenance is a heist novel that also about authenticity; The Raven Tower is a fantasy/murder mystery told by a powerful rock, partly in first person and partly in second, and is also very Hamlet-influenced, although I didn't spot the latter until someone else mentioned it).

A Memory of Empire by Arkady Martine, which I just finished and was absolutely brilliant.

[conuly]

I have read all those, so I'll counterrec The Goblin Emperor at you.

[rmc28]

Read it earlier this year!

Uh ok. There's five out of six of the Hugo finalists this year that I liked: https://rmc28.dreamwidth.org/1294564.html plus the other books-in-series for Yoon Ha Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rebecca Roanhorse & Becky Chambers. JY Yang's Tensorate series (I haven't yet read book 4 but the other 3 were great).

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard, and A Study in Honor by Claire O'Dell, which are very different Sherlock Holmes retellings.

Bryony and Roses by Ursula Vernon as T. Kingfisher, and Roses in Amber by C.E. Murphy, which are different retellings of Beauty and the Beast. Although I've not gone wrong with anything by Ursula Vernon in either name, or C.E. Murphy.

[conuly]

I think this may be a moment where our tastes are perhaps a bit too similar to be useful.

[kareina]

I love the Apennia books by my friend Heather Rose Jones. The are also available on kindle, but here is the link to the series on her web page_ https://www.alpennia.com/books/alpennia-series-bundle-1-3

[oracne]

I enjoyed that one, too.

[conuly]

I think this comment got lost!

[the_siobhan]

I love that fic so much. I cried through so many parts of about neglected kids because woah, way too close to the bone. But the ending is just so wonderful.

[elf]

Kindle books I have enjoyed recently:

An Excess Male - Maggie Shen King, $6.99
China’s One Child Policy and its cultural preference for male heirs have created a society overrun by 40 million unmarriageable men. By the year 2030, more than twenty-five percent of men in their late thirties will not have a family of their own. An Excess Male is one such leftover man’s quest for love and family under a State that seeks to glorify its past mistakes and impose order through authoritarian measures, reinvigorated Communist ideals, and social engineering.

Wei-guo holds fast to the belief that as long as he continues to improve himself, his small business, and in turn, his country, his chance at love will come. He finally saves up the dowry required to enter matchmaking talks at the lowest rung as a third husband—the maximum allowed by law.

The Sol Majestic - Ferret Steinmetz, $9.99 (which I would not have paid if I didn't love his previous books)
Kenna, an aspirational teen guru, wanders destitute across the stars as he tries to achieve his parents' ambition to advise the celestial elite.

Everything changes when Kenna wins a free dinner at The Sol Majestic, the galaxy's most renowned restaurant, giving him access to the cosmos's one-percent. His dream is jeopardized, however, when he learns his highly-publicized "free meal" risks putting The Sol Majestic into financial ruin.

Indexing - Seanan McGuire, $4.99
For most people, the story of their lives is just that: the accumulation of time, encounters, and actions into a cohesive whole. But for an unfortunate few, that day-to-day existence is affected—perhaps infected is a better word—by memetic incursion: where fairy tale narratives become reality, often with disastrous results.

That's where the ATI Management Bureau steps in, an organization tasked with protecting the world from fairy tales, even while most of their agents are struggling to keep their own fantastic archetypes from taking over their lives.

The Forward Collection, short stories, various authors, I think $2 each (I've been reading them as free Prime books), especially Emergency Skin - N.K. Jemisin
An explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet’s finest, fled centuries ago. The mission comes with a warning: a graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind—hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out ages ago. After all this time, there’s no telling how they’ve devolved. Steel yourself, soldier. Get in. Get out. And try not to stare.

My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult, $8.99
Sara and Brian Fitzgerald's life with their young son and their two-year-old daughter, Kate, is forever altered when they learn that Kate has leukemia. The parents' only hope is to conceive another child, specifically intended to save Kate's life. For some, such genetic engineering would raise both moral and ethical questions; for the Fitzgeralds, Sara in particular, there is no choice but to do whatever it takes to keep Kate alive. And what it takes is Anna.

[readerjane]

All Systems Red by Martha Wells! First in a series of four novellas, with a novel coming next year

[conuly]

They just changed the release date for the novel, and I hate when that happens.

[spikethemuffin]

How are your dietary restrictions? I just discovered the recipe book Fearless Baking, and I love it and it's my go-to gift this year. It's like Cook's Illustrated but with less lumpy, bland prose -- not only many-many top-notch recipes, but copious discussion of the why behind the how and how to create your own recipes. My elevator pitch for it is, "If you like STEM and you also kind of wanted to make the recipes from Sunshine..."

[spikethemuffin]

If you have someone who has an Amazon Prime account (I know, I know, but I'm a spoonie with a lot of medical debt who started making a living wage for the first time in ten years one year ago but still medical debt), it's available for checkout for free.

[conuly]

I do not get cookbooks on kindle.

[spikethemuffin]

Oh! I apologize.

[conuly]

I'm just too messy a cook for that to ever work :)

[spikethemuffin]

Which is funny to me because I have largely given up on paper cookbooks because they get too spattered, and I can put my laptop in a cabinet at eye level and wipe it off later (or print off screenshots at work, an abuse encouraged by my superiors)... I'm not being prescriptive, I'm amused that the same problem presents such exactly-opposite solutions.