Yep! You probably found it pretty easily in my somewhat minimalistic shelving scheme. :) I’ve only shelved the books I’ve read since I started tracking my reading in late 2013, though.

Your highest marks are on ones I've enjoyed or ones I haven't tried, so I'm going to have to try all of those!

Awesome, I hope you enjoy them! I really look forward to seeing your reviews if/when you do read some of them. Even if you hate them. :)

I was excited when I first saw on my dashboard that you were reading that. :) That series shows up on my feed just often enough to remind me that I *really* need to read it…

The odd thing is I tend not to like either historical fiction or wartime fiction; this is both, and I am /loving/ it! My sister has another recommendation: metal dragons that work with magic, but a similar conceit. (So similar she thought I was reading the Have Mercy series by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett;)

I'm trying my hardest to get to the whole series before July! Eeek!

Sometimes those kinds of books end up being the most fun and memorable – the ones you didn’t expect to like but ended up loving.

Speaking of Naomi Novik, I’m just now realizing I should have mentioned Uprooted as a suggestion for a great standalone fantasy….! Although I guess that one gets plenty of buzz already. So many good fantasy books. :)

Fair. Got that one for her to sign, too!

I’m happy to meet another Carol Berg fan! I always feel like she doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. And thank you very much for the 'Song of the Beast' recommendation. I hadn't decided yet on what my next Berg read would be, so I very well may go with that one once I decide it's time to read her work again.

Thanks! I prefer epic fantasy, but I really haven’t read all that much urban fantasy. There are a few UF series I’m interested in trying eventually, so maybe I’ll warm up to it more once I’ve had more exposure to it.

My limited experience with it so far has been some combination of these three things: 1) it’s often more romance-heavy than I would like, 2) reading it makes me feel like I’m on drugs, and/or 3) it’s a ginormous series that’s still being written which leads to my picking something else to read instead.

Fascinating to read your take on the genre! I'm thinking over my 'Penny White' series and thinking that I'm probably guilty on two counts. I'll have to ask my readers if they felt they were on drugs whilst reading it!

Just to be a contrarian and because it's true, sometimes the books that have a twist or aspect that makes me feel like I'm on drugs are some of my favorites. I've seen it done both very poorly and very well, and that makes the difference for me.

I suppose the fact that I've never wanted to feel so out of control that I've never even smoked pot helps in a way: I can live vicariously through those books if they're written well!

Ha, I suppose I should have given a little more detail behind my “drugs” comment! I’m not sure exactly how to explain it properly, though. In UF, I seem to more frequently run across a different approach to world-building than what I prefer. (Again with the caveat that I really haven't read much UF.) I like it when an author builds a logical, coherent, and internally-consistent world, block-by-block, and then slowly reveals the finished product to the reader. The type of world-building I have trouble with is when the author just picks up a handful of blocks that may or may not fit together and throws them in the reader’s face to sort out however they want. This author may toss in every mythological creature they can think of and they might go on for paragraphs describing random weird stuff the main character is seeing. When that happens, I feel like I’m seeing the world through the eyes of somebody who’s on drugs and is hallucinating lots of random, weird stuff.

They aren’t all like that, of course, and I wish I could give a good example of one that is to explain what I mean. Several of my UF attempts were from before I started tracking my book reads, and I think the drug effect helped blur my memory of those books. :) The closest one I can think of is “Butcher Bird” by Richard Kadrey which I did enjoy fairly well, so I guess I only felt like I was on mild drugs. I remember thinking most of it was pretty coherent, but there were times when the drugs kicked in. Actually, I see that I attempted to explain the drug effect in my review for that book. :)

On the other hand, I loved “War for the Oaks” by Emma Bull which I believe would be considered Urban Fantasy. It did have the romance aspect, but it worked for me in that book and I enjoyed it. I also recently read “John Dies at the End” and its sequel “This Book is Full of Spiders”. I looked at those more as horror, but they could probably qualify as UF. They had chaos, but it was a sort of ordered chaos that made sense. The books were crude and immature, so I’d be afraid to recommend them to anybody, but I really had fun with them.

Thanks Charlton! :) I haven’t read Conclave of Shadows yet. I read (or inhaled, maybe) all the books he’d published at the time I first discovered him, which was in the very early 2000's. I think that was just before the first Conclave book was published. I really want to read the rest of the series eventually, and start back over from the beginning to see how it’s held up for me now that I have more fantasy under my belt. Of the ones I read, I loved the earliest books (Riftwar Saga and Empire Trilogy) the best.