Unnatural Magic

Unnatural Magic, C.M. Waggoner, 2019. I was told I would like this book and I totally did, thank you recommenders! Second-world fantasy with fun, appealing characters - a math genius wizard girl! a half-troll lady who is very sure she is the "boss" gender in the troll gender system even though her mother disagrees! a sharpshooting soldier dude just trying to get by! There is a plot but there is also just a certain amount of time spent in the world, letting characters be awesome and try to sort out good lives for themselves. Also some nice romance. This might be a slightly funny-sounding "you might like this if", but: Martha Wells' Raksura novels, Howl's Moving Castle, Ursula Vernon in the Clockwork Boys/Swordheart universe. There is another standalone set in the same world and I look forward to reading it too.

a less rare look ahead

So, last year I took a look at what books were ranked as top priority on my giant possibly-read list, here, and I thought it would be fun to revisit that and do it again.

Last year I had seven: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters vol 2, Willowweep Manor, A Desolation Called Peace, Fugitive Telemetry, Alecto the Ninth, The Last Graduate, and Witness for the Dead, of which I read the five that actually came out.

This year I still have MFTIMv2, Alecto the Ninth and also now Nona the Ninth, and have added Sisters of the Forsaken Stars, Lina Rather's followup to Sisters of the Vast Black, and Across a Field of Starlight from Blue Delliquanti. I am not entirely sure why the Rather gets to be a priority 1 and other exciting sequels like the Unspoken Name sequel or Tess of the Road sequel are down in priority 2, but I guess it was just my mood when adding them? (I have like 40-something books in priority 2 so I am not going to list them all, although some of them have been sitting there for a long time and should probably get downgraded.) (In practice I read a lot of priority 3 stuff for reasons of external timing... all my Hugo reading and book club reading gets listed as a 3, since I have other ways of keeping track of it, and then I'll be trying to read 2021 stuff that I might want to nominate until I switch to reading 2022 stuff I might want to nominate, so older stuff just gets perpetually put off...)