The Lies of Locke Lamora
Red Seas Under Red Skies
The Republic of Thieves
 
By the end of page one, I knew I was in for a treat. By the end of the first chapter, I was completely in love. I shotgunned all three books in two days and they never stopped being propulsively fun. Characters occasionally juggle the idiot ball but I don't care. Locke is fundamentally incapable of being anything but a flashy mad genius. Everyone should have a friend like Jean Tannen. I think I'm going to buy the paperbacks, and I can't believe that it's been ten years since book 3. 5/5

Space Opera
This would've been funny if it was half as long as it actually was. I got pretty sick of the music genres that seemed to have been generated by an AI pretty quick, but I guess I was invested enough to finish. 2/5. 

Spinning Silver
There were a few POV characters with only a few chapters apiece, which I'm not sure was necessary. Executing a key midbook climax from the perspective of the youngest of these POV characters was also not a good choice. Otherwise, I was hooked from the opening chapter. I've never read a book with a moneylender as the protagonist, and her schemes are clever, and despite familiarity with all the fairy tales inspiring this story, I could not guess how it was going to end. 4/5. 

A Memory Called Empire
The protagonist's perspective as a person who wholly loves a neighbouring culture but will never be considered anything but a barbarian was a great choice, as was the Mayan-inspired worldbuilding. I wasn't moved to tears or anything by this book, but it was skillfully and carefully written platonic ideal of space mesoamerican murder mystery with memory-lineages. 4/5. 

A Desolation Called Peace. 
The highs were higher than in A Memory Called Empire. Namely Eight Antidote's tutelage, Three Seagrass's slow realization that she was being kind of racist, and Twenty Cicada's kitten. Yet I had both too much and too little of the translation process - Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" is the gold standard of this, and I think it was a disservice to give the "transformation" to a secondary character very abruptly and offscreen. 3/5.  




Started, couldn't keep going. 
Fonda Lee - Jade City (just kind of grim, but not in a fun way) 
The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin (I just don't care about New York City) 
Saladin Ahmed - Throne of the Crescent Moon (I got a fifth of the way in, but the plot is leaving me cold)
Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon (What is even going on, just give me a bit of handholding or at least make it fun)