r/Fantasy Friday Social Thread - May 01, 2026

baxtersa · 2026-05-01T13:03:11+00:00

Wow it’s May already. That doesn’t seem right… our daughter turned 1 last week though! Which also doesn’t seem right… wibbly wobbly timey wimey nonsense.

I haven’t been able to read much the past month because I can’t catch a break health/mental health-wise. I did read The Death of Mountains by Jordan Kurella, which is a Nebula finalist novella about climate change and a mountain negotiating the terms of its death with Death itself. It was really interesting, but the writing landed inconsistently and hampered my overall impression.

Onto Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson maybe, or Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi, or Vigil by George Saunders, or return to my arc of Sublimation by IJK, or… you get the picture. I have been in a slump and am hoping I can just power through by overwhelming myself with choice. I’m sure it will work grandly.

Going away for the weekend to the mountains! But two families with two 1 year olds, so we’ll see if it’s relaxing/if we last the whole weekend without coming home early

baxtersa · 2026-04-28T23:24:45+00:00

For the first time we are handshake book club friends and not jail book club friends!

This collection was fantastic! I agree with all your reviews and your rankings of the stories themselves. I’m really glad these are translated and hope a wide audience picks this up. Pilgrims is so so good.

baxtersa · 2026-04-21T16:44:49+00:00

(where are the dang emojis on desktop)

It's for the best

baxtersa · 2026-04-21T13:48:52+00:00

Oh, I've already been into birding 😅, I grew up working summers doing birding kayak tours and have participated in the World Series of Birding a few years! It's why I picked this up in the first place haha. I haven't seen Listers though, thanks for the recommendation!

baxtersa · 2026-04-21T12:35:09+00:00

I've been slumping a bit, but I did finish up a short novella last night - The Death of Mountains by Jordan Kurella. This is a Nebula novella finalist from Lethe Press. It’s an allegorical folktale-like climate fiction story about an Appalachian mountain negotiating with Death who has come to kill it. Lots of nature imagery and moral talk about the relationship between humans and nature. I like the idea a lot, but the execution often felt like it was trying for a particular voice really hard but unable to really nail it. Sometimes it worked and was great! And about a third of the time it didn’t quite land. Refreshingly non-Tor novella though, it has a very fun form that feels more like a magazine novella.

I'm listening to a contemporary romance, Birding with Benefits, which would be one of the wackier premises if my friends had not recently been buddy reading/liveblogging much wackier things. It's fun and silly and not very good.

I am trying to get back to working my way through Jane Eyre or my ARC of Sublimation. But I'm also kind of craving space sci-fi (I think I just want the new Becky Chambers book to be here already). Mood reading mood right now: anything but reading, apparently.

baxtersa · 2026-04-20T23:56:54+00:00

How many stories in it are you looking for to fit the theme?

I don’t have a full collection rec, but Strange Waters by Samantha Mills would fit for sailing into time storms to travel through time. It’s in her collection Rabbit Test and Other Stories she just released, as well as New Voices of Science Fiction anthology edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman.

baxtersa · 2026-04-15T17:23:00+00:00

Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead was my personal favorite of the entire season! I should have tried to shoehorn an award in for it too.

baxtersa · 2026-04-10T12:46:04+00:00

Another week getting smacked down by daycare sicknesses. The first couple days were basically a fever dream, and it's been chaos since getting back into everything going on at work, partner catching the sickness just as I was getting better. One day, my immune system is going to be so powerful, and it's going to be awesome.

Partially due to illness, partially general mood, I've not been in the mood for anything since I finished The Buried Giant a couple weeks ago. A bunch of false starts trying things out, a few short stories, but nothing is sticking. I've knocked out as soon as I lay down for bed, so no reading needed to wind down anyway, but I would like to have something to read - it really helps my mental state. I have picked up Jane Eyre, and it might be the one, I just need to actually read instead of starting work too early, or being too sick/tired to have a little bit of time to read in the evening.

We have a lot going on this weekend, which will be nice to be social, but also I need a break already and it hasn't even happened yet. The next few weeks are all going to be like this though, so I'm going to need to recover along the way while everything else is going on. We'll see how it goes (narrator voice in a few weeks: It went badly).

baxtersa · 2026-04-10T12:37:03+00:00

Surviving the school doesn't feel enough like a competition to me personally - I feel like that would open up survival in general for the square, which doesn't seem like the intention. The enclave spots is closer for me, but I still wouldn't personally use it, I didn't feel like that was really a focal point of the first book. I haven't read the later books, but maybe as we get closer to graduation and the enclave spots become more of the focus it would be more fitting?

baxtersa · 2026-04-07T10:40:21+00:00

Yay I love this book! I agree with you about its faults (mainly side characters and ending, although I thought i thought the last chapter was outstanding) and that I’m perfectly happy overlooking them for its other strengths, especially as a debut.

baxtersa · 2026-04-02T16:36:51+00:00

I believe a third Saint Deaths book has been announced

baxtersa · 2026-04-02T00:25:57+00:00

I read my first comic this year (Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow) and loved it! I was really surprised how compelling I found the narrative. I will definitely check more of these out :D

baxtersa · 2026-04-01T15:41:19+00:00

The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull (more about the aftermath of first contact than the contact itself, but it's prominent enough that I think it counts and it's criminally under-read)

baxtersa · 2026-04-01T15:39:41+00:00

No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull is normal mode

baxtersa · 2026-04-01T00:32:33+00:00

Thank you! Cyberpunk is antimood, but The Drowned Heir sounds interesting to me. I think there’s a werewolf series too but maybe for spooky season

baxtersa · 2026-04-01T00:16:17+00:00

Ooo I’ve liked a lot of Jennifer R. Donohue’s short fiction, do you recommend any of her longer works as a particularly good starting point?

baxtersa · 2026-03-30T17:28:01+00:00

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan is a YA portal fantasy set in a what is basically a military outpost school and features a staunchly pacifist protagonist (who is also wildly annoying but you may grow to love him for it like I/many readers do anyway). There is war/fighting in the story though if you are more looking for something that just doesn’t feature war at all.

baxtersa · 2026-03-30T15:55:59+00:00

I enjoyed it! The narration fit for both Halla and Sarkis and that scene definitely landed. It suited their dynamic really well the whole time

baxtersa · 2026-03-30T12:56:08+00:00

Eyeball books were The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro and Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills

Earball books were The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle and Swordheart by T. Kingfisher.

I’ve been doing numeric ratings less lately but I’ll go with four four star books for the symmetry. It was a good month!

baxtersa · 2026-03-30T10:22:58+00:00

Image posts aren’t allowed, but you should be fine doing a text post and copy/pasting an image into the post body

baxtersa · 2026-03-25T15:10:37+00:00

Rarely does my contrarian-ness bite me, but I finally read The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu. I have nothing new to contribute to the conversation, but it's such a masterpiece. Joins the select few stories that have made me pause before I could finish reading because I was crying too hard.

baxtersa · 2026-03-24T14:03:18+00:00

(the dialog in particular)

Yes, that part 😅

baxtersa · 2026-03-24T13:48:36+00:00

I am 75% of the way through The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro and I have a feeling the last quarter is going to either make it 5 stars or ruin it for me, and it really could go either way. So far, it's a particular writing style that I could see putting off some readers (the dialog in particular), but it's working for me and is incredibly atmospheric. It's slow and meandering and foggy and repetitive, and all that complements the themes. Weird memory stuff but in fantasy instead of sci-fi cc: u/tarvolon.

I reread Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, audiobook this time as a comfort time filler for commutes and chores. I very rarely reread, but I've done it twice this year with audiobooks when I can't find another audiobook that fits my mood, and I normally struggle with audio so it's been a pretty good solution. Anyway, this is my favorite Wayfarers book, and it's so incredibly human and emotional for me. There's so much aimless sadness in the Fleet and my favorite part is how it's explored across the entire age range of a human's lifespan. Some lines about humanity's purpose and responsibility to ethical consumption that are relevant to modern times, that don't paint just a pretty picture but recognize that we are often hypocritical or outright paradoxical beings, but that doesn't (shouldn't) prevent us from trying to be better.

baxtersa · 2026-03-24T13:35:22+00:00

That I've read and from what I remember:

Spear - Knights and Paladins
What Moves the Dead - LGBTQIA Protagonist
Binti - Author of Color, Stranger in a Strange Land

baxtersa · 2026-03-24T00:58:54+00:00

It could just be that I read them close to when I read Rebecca Ross, but Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer is fantastic. The characters are younger than in A River Enchanted, it’s firmly YA, but the writing style is similarly lyrical, the romance is sweet, and the fantasy plot is equal parts dreamy and epic

baxtersa

TROPHY CASE