books!

http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/290678.html
2008 was a good year for my book reading.But this next year is going to be awesome. I'm friggin ecstatic about the upcomming year.

Elizabeth Bear is putting the finishing touches to the sequel to Dust, which was itself packed with about as much awesome as anything I've read in the last year (It has a strong aspect of homage to both Amber and Universe, though with more skill than Universe and a tone and thematic underlayer that blows Amber out of the water. Don't get me wrong. I love me some Amber, but EB's best works are among the best things being written these days) (Dust is why All the Windwracked Stars wasn't my favorite book of the year.)

The next book in the Ravarin series by Kelly McCullough is due out next year. (It also has a strong aspect of Amber Homage to it. This has been my year for reading books by people who grew up reading the authors I grew up reading.)

Butcher's Dresden 11 is due out in 09. So I like Bear's writing better, but Harry Dresden is my Hero. (Sorry Matthew) As much as I enjoy the Caldorn series, I will be glad when it is concluded so that (hopefully) the Dresden books come out faster.

Tammy Pierce's Beka Cooper series gets a new entry, Bloodhound. I've got friends who complain that she is uneven in her writing. I have to admit to having not read everything she's written yet, but I agree that there have been some highs and lows in what I've read. That said, Terrier was some of the best writing that I've read by her. Which is saying a lot.

Scott Lynch's 3rd Locke Lamorra book is due out. Wherein, hopefully, both our Hero and our Protagonist find a way out of the dire predicament that he left them at the end of Red Seas over Read Skies. (I liked The Lies of Locke Lamorra better, but "not quite as good as TLoLL" is something that most authors should strive to achieve.

Diane Duane's A wizard of Mars should be out in 2009. She has shown a very uncommon talent for maintaining tension in a setting where characters gain in skill and talent as the books progress without having to ratchet up the scale of the consequences of failure. (While characters have had to save the entirety of reality in at least one of the books, the book after it wasn't a letdown even though the scope of the conflict was much much smaller.) (There are a bunch of genre cliches that she managed to avoid in the early books that made me incredibly happy.)

In theory, Martin's A Dance With Dragons is due out next year. I wouldn't hold my breath. Alas, this one will probably have even more PoV time dedicated to fucking Daenerys Targaryen, my least favorite character still living.

I know I'm missing books, things that I didn't even think to look to see if they were due out.