𝖑𝖚𝖐𝖊 𝖇𝖔𝖓𝖉

But getting to the truth of who the company are is cool, and how the series ends with Water Sleeps

From there it could be a good point to consider if you'll bother from there. It's a long road to get up to speed and I'm not going to promise that your complaints will go away. Some of those books are great and some are a slog, depending who's the annalist.

Thank you for your review! Re what Cook does with Shed, he does something similar in The Silver Spike 😬
The castle thing was super cool.
I hope you enjoy The White Rose. I thought it was particularly good.

Every time I have to deal with the python ecosystem in a nontrivial way I have bad time and feel like I leave my system in a messy state 😭

cc @bayoublastbeats.bsky.social

Immolation (the band) have been in my feed a lot lately. I don't know them as I'm more of a black metal guy than death metal. They're supporting at a gig I'm going to next week.
What Immolation album should I check out before I see them?

Today is my last day at InfluxData after 6 years. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and I learned and grew a lot. They're a caring and empathetic company to work for and I will miss my amazing colleagues.
On Monday I'll be starting a new role at @restate.dev doing cloud and infra stuff, and Rust!

Something's come up in Glen Cook's Port of Shadows (a "lost annals" interquel that took place between books early in the series) that I cannot believe Croaker wouldn't have mentioned, especially with the whole "booboo" thing. I hope he doesn't get an R2D2 memory wipe at the end, that would be lame

Thinking of making a DnD campaign about cybersecurity and calling it critical vuln

Ed Milliband standing in front of a sign "a better plan. A better future" with some clever and witty amendments scrawled upon it by yours truly

I noticed a few mistakes so I fixed them

How'd we end up with a far right home secretary 😭

Just discovered she's on Bluesky. @kitkerr.bsky.social thank you for one of my all time favourites series ❤️

Go read it!! I'm going to start book two as soon as possible. I'm sorry that I don't have anything negative to say about it. I cried a lot I suppose but that's hardly a negative thing.

END

I don't know why this series doesn't get spoken about very much. I would say the same for Wars of Light and Shadow by Janny Wurts. I think these two series deserve a place alongside the masters (that's Hobb & Erikson, obviously).

The audiobook is narrated with a Welsh accent for the characters (although I think she's Scottish), and it's absolutely delightful. Ruth Urquhart deserves a prize for it, I could listen to her all day.

Kerr is American but she's chosen Welsh and Wales as the inspiration for her fantasy world. The names have that same charming bundle of consonants that Welsh does. The book has a pronunciation guide. How would *you* pronounce Wmmglaedd?

If you want to read more about the magical and reincarnation stuff from western esotericism that she's drawing from but staying in fictional form, I recommend The Secrets of Dr Taverner and The Sea Priestess, both by Dion Fortune. These are light, fun, quick reads.

But this treatment of magic (called "dweomer") always has the right liminal tone, serves the narrative and doesn't become a distraction or a focus. Chef's kiss. This is how it should be done (looking at you, Sanderson!).

The magic system is one of the highlights for me. I say system but it's not hard, it's liminal, the only good way to do it IMO. It's lifted unchanged from the pages of western esotericism: the astral plane, etheric plane, scrying and the akashic records are all here. Pentagrams & hexagrams & such.

This emotional depth and tragedy reminds me of Robin Hobb and also Janny Wurts. Both masters of the subject who also do not shy away from giving their characters absolute hell and despair.

Themes include love, betrayal, redemption, compassion, forgiveness, incest (is that a theme?), being free vs trapped whether that be internally or externally caused. Familial ties are used to great effect to heighten the tragedy and the triumph. It's an emotional rollercoaster.

Just as emotional as the tragedy is when a character makes the right decisions, always with great pain weighing up impossible choices, and overcomes their Wyrd, or parts of it. Again bring your tissues.
All this is witnessed by one character whose life spans the whole 400y period.

The initial events 400 years ago are utterly tragic. They deal with dark and uncomfortable themes that are expertly handled by Kerr. Outrageous as the events would sound if told, they play out absolutely believably. Bring your tissues.

Their successive lives play out in similar patterns, so while they're different people you feel you know them, at least how they're going to react when they inevitably meet again and things come to a head.

This unique device allows the author to structure the narrative interestingly, but even better: the depth of character and relationship development that can be achieved across lifetimes is very powerful.

The wyrds of these individuals are also tied to greater things than themselves, it becomes hinted at. You might need a spreadsheet to remember who's who in each life.

The premise is that the tragic events surrounding 4 ppl in a love quadrangle have set them on a course through several incarnations to untangle the karmic consequences (called "wyrd" here) of their actions. The narrative jumps back to various past incarnations to give context to the events of today.

I figured that out recently, re-bought the paperbacks and added the series to my 2026 to-read list. I now know the reasons why they stuck with me in that strange way, but they're not things I want to go into here.

I read this book about 30y ago, in my teens, during a period in which I devoured every decent-looking fantasy book my local library had. I forgot about it but remembered bits that stuck with me in a weird way (not simply that I liked them), not knowing which series they were from.

More unsolicited fantasy book reviews! This time Daggerspell by Katharine Kerr, the first book in the now 16 book Deverry Cycle. I listened to the audiobook which impacts my take on characters somewhat. Warning: this is very gushing.