Sci fi Fantasy

Book Read in November 2025

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Sometimes my habit of reading multiple books at once backfires and I don’t make enough progress to finish books. This was also a month of a lot of other things going on, including travel, so I didn’t have as much time for reading. 

I also spent more time watching shows with my husband in the evenings in November, which cut into reading time as well. So I only finished one book in November! 

The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett 

Published 2024

This is a mystery novel. It’s dressed up in fantasy trappings, which are fun, but this is primarily a mystery just set in a fantasy world. 

Din is an engraver who possesses a perfect memory, and he is assistant to an eccentric investigator, Ana. They are called in to investigate when an official is killed by a plant erupting from his body (gross). 

Ana and Din must determine if it is a contagion or a murder (it’s the latter, obviously), and proposed next steps. Their investigation leads them to a border town were they discover more murders of the same type. They must catch the killer before even more deaths occur of the city is destroyed by a leviathan (giant mysterious creatures that attack border towns by the sea). 

Ana and Din have a very Holmes-and-Watson dynamic, and it is clear that there is more to the mystery than first appears. 

If you enjoy fantasy and mysteries, you will probably enjoy this book. The world building is interesting: this is a world of human body-hacking where people can be modified organically to be really good at their jobs. The danger is that this can burn them out, and there is a further danger that plants can be deadly as modifications can get out of hand (or be used as murder weapons). The leviathans too are mysterious and clearly connected in some way to the modifications, a larger mystery that I assume will be unspooled over the course of this series of books. 

Some of the body modifications and descriptions of the murders are kind of gross, so if you have a low tolerance for that, be warned. If you like mysteries but want them set in our world, this will also not be for you. But if you, like me, enjoy both mystery novels and fantasy novels, this is a nice blending of both genres.

The mystery at hand is nicely wrapped up by the end of the book, but Ana and Din are clearly set up for further investigations in future books, so if you enjoyed this one, there is a second installment already out, and I’m not sure how many the author has planned, but our detectives might have many more adventures ahead of them! 

Books Read in August 2025, part 2

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Dissolution, by Nicholas Binge

Published 2025

Maggie is eighty-three years old and her husband, Stanley, is in a memory care facility called Sunrise because he has dementia. Sometimes he remembers Maggie, and sometimes he doesn’t. 

The story opens with Maggie in a strange interview with someone named Hassan who tells her that actually the problem is that Stanley isn’t forgetting things, his memories are being taken from him. Hassan needs some information from Stanley’s mind to help him stop some baddies who are erasing Stanley, and he needs Maggie’s help to get into Stanley’s mind to retrieve the information before it is too late. 

The story unfolds in the present and the past, delving into Stanley’s early life for the seeds of his discoveries about time travel via memories. It also chronicles Stanley and Maggie’s life story and their deep love for one another. But as Maggie goes deeper into her journey through Stanley’s mind, it becomes clear that Stanley is hiding things, even from her. 

Time travel and memory are also a little mind-bending subjects, and this was a fun ride as well as a sweet love story. The stakes do get raised to “oh no this could affect the world in bad ways if we aren’t careful,” but it does not get to the “and now we’re in a complete dystopia” level that it would if this was a Blake Crouch novel. 

That said, if you enjoy Crouch, you will likely enjoy this novel, and it also avoids some of the annoying time travel tropes while making use of some others. It just depends on what annoys you about time travel if you’ve read other books in the genre! 

The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben

Published 2015

Written by a German forest manager, this book is designed to evoke wonder and delight around forests and trees. Wohlleben describes trees in extremely anthropomorphic ways which I found overblown or slightly distracting at times, but I also appreciate the technical knowledge he has about tree communication and the ways that trees compete and cooperate. 

Overall I found the book delightful, and while I imagine I might have been irritated by the ways the author describes some trees as “street kids” and “immigrants,” as a lay person some of the analogies were helpful. 

Trees are pretty amazing, and I appreciate that someone is out there trying to convince people that forests are great and we should allow more forested areas to thrive on their own without our intervention and without trying to make all land “productive” for human purposes (even the language of “productive” and “unproductive” creates a value judgment that isn’t helpful). 

Part of being a good steward as a human is caring for the beautiful planet we call home, not simply stripping it for parts, and living more with nature instead of opposed to it, is an interesting topic of much discussion and debate. I loved learning more about networks of trees that make up a forest, how they coexist with other organisms, and how trees work to create a beautiful ecosystem from which we all benefit.