Good morning and welcome to another reading roundup. It’s been fairly quiet week on the reading front. I’ve been working to finish Mark Lawrence’s The Wheel of Osheim which I finally did. Expect a full review next week. I have also started the audiobook of Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Illuminae. I picked up the sequel, Gemina, at BEA and want to refresh my memory. In terms of audiobooks, Illuminae is superb. It is a full, multi-cast performance and is definitely worth listening to. I have Gemina in hard copy ARC form, but I will certainly be picking up the audiobook if it’s anything like the first in the series. On non book related news, Apple announced its big updates to iOS and OS X (renamed MacOS.) There are a couple of updates in particular about which I’m really excited. First is the integration with VoIP apps (such as Skype) so that they can be handled like normal iPhone calls. My parents live in Scotland and aren’t very comfortable yet with the internet, so I use Skype to landline to call them most of the time. Skype has a nice monthly rate for unlimited calls to UK landlines. It will…
And here we go for the second part of my reading catchup in which I discuss Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson, Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff and Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. [book-info]Shadows of Self is the second in Sanderson’s Wax and Wayne series (or the fifth Mistborn, however you like to look at it) and is set in the same world as the Mistborn trilogy only several hundred years later at a point in which the society is on the cusp of becoming industrialised. It has a deliberate steampunk feel to it. Sanderson is known as a master of worldbuilding, plot, pacing and magic systems and that is certainly borne out in Shadows of Self. The plot is imaginative, the pacing excellent and the magic system/worldbuilding outstanding as always. However, the more (recent) books of his I read, the more I realise I’m not very fond of his writing style. For me, personally, the informal style does not match the setting. It could be this is a deliberate choice by the writer – I know from his work on The Wheel of Time and The Stormlight Archive that he can use a more formal style…