Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week. Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!
Skin Game by Jim Butcher
(published May 27, 2014)
We got out of Karrin’s little SUV and headed toward the creepy old slaughterhouse full of dangerous beings. Which … pretty much tells you what kind of day I was having, right there.
Par for the course, if you’re a certain Chicago wizard.
Because Nicodemus is a murderous murdering murder.
He sure knows how to pick his enemies!
But they were doughnuts of darkness. Evil, damned doughnuts, tainted by the spawn of darkness…
… which could obviously be redeemed only by passing through the fiery, cleansing inferno of a wizardly digestive tract.
Harry Dresden is back! Man, have I missed his smart-ass comments about all things supernatural, deadly, or just plain weird.
What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!
If you’d like to participate in Thursday Quotables, it’s really simple:
Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now. And please be sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com), if you’d be so kind!
Leave your link in the comments — or, if you have a quote to share but not a blog post, you can leave your quote in the comments too!
Visit other linked blogs to view their Thursday Quotables, and have fun!
There’s nothing like a Wednesday for thinking about the books we want to read! My Wishing & Waiting on Wednesday post is linking up with two fabulous book memes, Wishlist Wednesday (hosted by Pen to Paper) and Waiting on Wednesday (hosted by Breaking the Spine).
For my first wishlist post of 2014, I’ve picked the upcoming new installment in a favorite series:
Skin Game by Jim Butcher (to be released May 27, 2014)
Synopsis via Goodreads:
Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, is about to have a very bad day….
Because as Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Harry never knows what the scheming Mab might want him to do. Usually, it’s something awful.
He doesn’t know the half of it….
Mab has just traded Harry’s skills to pay off one of her debts. And now he must help a group of supernatural villains—led by one of Harry’s most dreaded and despised enemies, Nicodemus Archleone—to break into the highest-security vault in town so that they can then access the highest-security vault in the Nevernever.
It’s a smash-and-grab job to recover the literal Holy Grail from the vaults of the greatest treasure hoard in the supernatural world—which belongs to the one and only Hades, Lord of the freaking Underworld and generally unpleasant character. Worse, Dresden suspects that there is another game afoot that no one is talking about. And he’s dead certain that Nicodemus has no intention of allowing any of his crew to survive the experience. Especially Harry.
Dresden’s always been tricky, but he’s going to have to up his backstabbing game to survive this mess—assuming his own allies don’t end up killing him before his enemies get the chance….
I was so excited to see that the next Dresden Files book has a cover and a release date! At 15 books and counting, this series hasn’t lost a bit of steam. The last book, Cold Days, had a major game-changing cliffhanger of an ending. I can’t wait to see what happens next!
What are you wishing for this Wednesday?
Looking for some bookish fun on Thursdays and Fridays? Come join me for my regular weekly features, Thursday Quotables and Flashback Friday! You can find out more here — come share the book love!
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Do you host a book blog meme? Do you participate in a meme that you really, really love? I’m building a Book Blog Meme Directory, and need your help! If you know of a great meme to include — or if you host one yourself — please drop me a note on my Contact page and I’ll be sure to add your info!
Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight — and you’re invited to join in!
Here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:
Has to be something you’ve read yourself
Has to still be available, preferably still in print
Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago
Other than that, the sky’s the limit! Join me, please, and let us all know: what are the books you’ve read that you always rave about? What books from your past do you wish EVERYONE would read? Pick something from five years ago, or go all the way back to the Canterbury Tales if you want. It’s Flashback Friday time!
My pick for this week’s Flashback Friday:
Furies of Calderon
(Codex Alera, book 1)
by Jim Butcher
(published 2004)
Synopsis (Goodreads):
In the realm of Alera, where people bond with the furies — elementals of earth, air, fire, water and metal, fifteen-year-old Tavi struggles with his lack of furycrafting. But when his homeland erupts in chaos — when rebels war with loyalists and furies clash with furies — Tavi’s simple courage will turn the tides of war.
From Publishers Weekly:
At the start of Butcher’s absorbing fantasy, the first in a new series, the barbarians are at the gates of the land of Alera, which has a distinct flavor of the Roman Empire (its ruler is named Quintus Sextus and its soldiers are organized in legions). Fortunately, Alera has magical defenses, involving the furies or elementals of water, earth, air, fire and metal, that protect against foes both internal and external. Amara, a young female spy, and her companion, Odiana, go into some of the land’s remoter territories to discover if military commander Atticus Quentin is a traitor—another classic trope from ancient Rome. She encounters a troubled young man, Tavi, who has hitherto been concerned mostly with the vividly depicted predatory “herdbanes” that threaten his sheep as well as with his adolescent sexual urges (handled tastefully). Thinking that Amara is an escaping slave, Tavi decides to help her and is immediately sucked in over his head into a morass of intrigues, military, magical and otherwise. Butcher (Storm Front, etc.) does a thorough job of world building, to say nothing of developing his action scenes with an abundance of convincing detail.
Want to understand the vibe of The Codex Alera series? Think Dresden Files thrown into a blender with Game of Thrones. Kind of.
Jim Butcher, known for the ongoing (and totally awesome) Dresden Files series, here creates a fantasy world full of magical powers, human and non-human races, and heavy doses of military adventures and escapades. His characters come with family legacies, inherited struggles and feuds, and secrets galore. There’s a ton of scheming, ruthless manipulation and political maneuvering, and scenes of magical occurrences that practically beg to be filmed and loaded with CGI.
Tavi is a terrific main character, immensely likeable, funny and brave, with the smart-ass attitude we’ve come to expect from Butcher’s heroes. The supporting characters are strong and well-defined, and the action never flags. Plus — romance! Secret identities! Evil forces! Potential destruction of the world!
I love that I was able to read the entire series (six books) straight through, so I could really live in the world of Alera for a sustained reading experience and get to feel that I truly knew the characters, understood the stakes, and was invested in the outcomes.
By the way, Codex Alera has an amazing (and very funny) origin story, which Jim Butcher explains in this clip from 2008’s Comic-con:
Happy Friday, and enjoy your flashbacks!
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Do you host a book blog meme? Do you participate in a meme that you really, really love? I’m building a Book Blog Meme Directory, and need your help! If you know of a great meme to include — or if you host one yourself — please drop me a note on my Contact page and I’ll be sure to add your info!
Harry Dresden is back! And — dare I say it? — better than ever.
(Spoilers for earlier Dresden books ahead, so proceed at your own risk.)
In this 14th novel of the Dresden Files, Harry is back from the quasi-dead, but there’s no time to rest and recuperate. As the new Winter Knight, Harry has to survive Queen Mab’s rather deadly version of physical therapy before setting out to obey Mab’s commands, reunite with his friends, avoid menacing fairies, and – oh, yeah – save Chicago and perhaps the world from a looming apocalypse.
Every time I pick up a Dresden Files book, I’m reminded all over again of how much I enjoy this series, what a way with words Jim Butcher has, and just what a bad-ass Harry Dresden really is. Some series linger on way past their expiration date (I’m looking at you, Sookie), when clearly there’s really not much else to do or say with the characters. Not so in the Dresden Files. Cold Days continues the ongoing story and enriches it, drawing on past stories and mythology, adding layer upon layer of complexity to the challenges facing Harry, and moving the story in some creative and unexpected directions.
Cold Days deals very much with Harry’s new role in the Winter Court, but to understand the action, it’s important to have read the previous books. Familiarity with book 4, Summer Knight, is especially helpful. Harry’s strongest allies, including his brother Thomas, apprentice Molly, will-they-or-won’t-they love interest Karrin Murphy, and big doggie Mouse are all back at his side, fighting against new super-scary villains and fighting in alliance with some surprising new partners.
I really won’t say too much more about the plot, a) because it goes a mile a minute and covers a tremendous amount of ground in the course of 500 pages, and b) because you’re really better off experiencing it on your own.
I wasn’t really sold on the previous volume in the series, Ghost Story, but the one before that, Changes, was blow-your-socks-off great. To a large extent, the events of Changes are much more important to the on-going narrative than those of Ghost Story, and lead nicely into the central action of Cold Days. I would rate Cold Days as among the best in the Dresden Files series. By the end of Cold Days, Jim Butcher has set some new players into action, rearranged the power structures, given new roles to familiar characters, and left Harry facing a potential threat to his own well-being, a looming menace to the world at large, and some weighty decisions to make concerning his personal life.
If you’re a fan of the series, you will absolutely want to read Cold Days. If you’ve read bits and pieces of The Dresden Files, or maybe only watched the sadly short-lived TV series, let me tell you that it’s worth continuing with the books to get to the really stellar volumes such as Changes and Cold Days.
And if you’ve never read any of the Dresden Files books? Well, what are you waiting for? Jump in, start at the beginning, and enjoy! But clear any other books off your reading calendar — once you start The Dresden Files, you won’t want to stop.
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