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I am not an email newsletter person (I mostly find them annoying), but I absolutely love the Tor.com newsletter. They do a great job of covering all speculative fiction interests (mostly books, but also movies and TV and some comics), not just stuff they themselves publish. And in almost every edition, there's at least one thing I want to read. Sometimes it's Jo Walton's list of the books she read that month, sometimes it's a celebration of a Robin McKinley book I haven't read since I was a teenager (there was recently one about The Door in the Hedge that inspired me to reread it, sometimes it's about queer representation or the ways that black characters are always sidekicks and never heroes of their own stories in the specfic world. I originally signed up because they send you out a free ebook link once a month, but I'm so glad I did because it's such a rich resource.

Yesterday's edition just happened to have an article about Martha Wells' Books of the Raksura series, the first book of which, The Cloud Roads, I recently read. That in itself was a serendipitous delight, but I really enjoyed the content of the article! "You Can’t Eat Something That Talks: People and Cultures in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura" is a celebration of the marvelous, exciting world-building in the series and sums up the characters in the book with: None of them are human. All of them are people. Which I think is just perfect.

Also, if you like short fiction (I am not so much a short fiction person, but I know a lot of you are!), there is always at least one piece of short original fiction in the newsletter. If you are into speculative fiction at all, I really recommend going to Tor.com and subscribing!

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Just tried to read a romance novel whose characters and plot I was intrigued by but whose prose made me want to bash my head in.

Most romance novel prose that bothers me is irritating because it's too casual, it's too...contemporary. This book, however, had the opposite problem: the writer never, ever used a simple word when an obscure, multi-syllabic, or archaic one could be forced into the sentence. It was incredibly frustrating because other than that, I think the writer was very good! But when every single sentence feels forced like that, I just can't keep reading!

The prose was the epitome of trying too hard. Did the people of the Regency era use more complicated syntax and a different vocabulary than we did? Of course they did! But when I read actual Regency prose written by actual Regency writers, it is easier and more enjoyable to read than this writer's slavish attempts to emulate it! And her editor should be fired for not saving her from this trap!

As is typical when I read a book I dislike, I scrolled through the Goodreads reviews looking for people who agree with me. Unfortunately, no one seems to! The book was very highly rated and no one complained about the prose!

Maybe I am too picky? And maybe I should just read Georgette Heyer instead of trying to find good recently-written romance novels?