Books, Brownies, and Notes

I finished "Of Dawn & Darkness: Second Sea" by Will Wight. The alternate novel of the second set of books in his "Elder Empire" series that's essentially ninjas vs pirates in a world with Lovecraftian horrors, it's the second book telling the story of ship captain Calder Marten as he struggles through murky politics, maneuverings of Elder Gods, and a dance around his counterpart, the Consultant Shera (from "Of Dawn & Darkness: Second Shadow"... yes, I know I said it was called "Of Darkness & Dawn" before. I drink before I write blog posts, okay?).

It was a short, but thoroughly-enjoyable story of Marten, his dangerous wife, Jerri, and his madcap crew of misfits as he strives to become the next Emperor of the Empire.

You just have to love a sea captain with a mini-Cthulhu on ship instead of a parrot.

Wight does a creative job splitting his stories between the two main point-of-view protagonists: Calder Marten and Shera. His world is clever and quite disturbing.

Of the two books, I have to say I probably lean more towards enjoying Shera's stories than Calder's. My college roommate read the first pair of books and had the opposite reaction. Not terribly surprising. I've always been more of a ninja-leaning sort.

Now I'm briefly on to four Amazon suggestions. The first is "The Path of Flames" by Phil Tucker. The opening is a bit weird, but doesn't suck. Good BART fodder.

After that, I've got "Dark Run" by Mike Brooks (sci-fi), then "The Troven" by Eric Buffington (fantasy), and finally "Keeper of the Eye" by Mark Shane (again, fantasy).

I may burn through the fantasy novels before switching to sci-fi.

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Made brownies. Not sure why I made brownies. One moment, I had no dessert in my house. The next, I had a batch of Scharffenberger-chocolate brownies.

I've already eaten four.

I need to get these goddamn things out of my apartment.

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I'm back to pouring through Java. I took this evening to give myself a little refresher and clean up my notes before I tackle Inheritance. Already some things are clearer now.

Of course, I took a break and had a little whiskey. That's kind of finished me off for the night. Oh well, it's all good.