Smorgasbord Fantasia

 With her first foray into Epic Fantasy, Rebecca Roanhorse has jumped straight up to the top pantheon of my go-to writers for anything fantasy. I was already a fan of her writing, having devoured the urban fantasy books, The Trail of Lightning and The Storm of Locusts . And now, with this stunning towering feat of imagination inspired by Pre Columbian civilisations, The Black Sun, she just blew my expectations away.  The Black Sun is set in a time and place, possibly inspired by the early pre-columbian civilisations that dates back to the times before America was discovered by Columbus. Myths, magic, Gods and faiths rule the society. There are class divides, painfully evident in both the history and the present of this world on the edge of a cataclysmic event - that of the Winter Solstice and an impending solar eclipse. Now we know the Sun God has been a chief deity worshipped during such times but Rebecca's fertile imagination weaves up multiple 'clans' in this society ...

It's that time of the year again, gentle friends. When we look back, at perhaps one of the longest year we've had in all our lives combined. [ Thank you for that Theory of Relativity, Mr. Einstein] For all that time spent at home, pretending to work and also working my ass off on 14-hour workdays where the lines blur, I managed to smash my reading goals for the year. Already at 58 books and looking good to hit a couple more. And amidst this 58, found a few gems - Some series endings, a series starter, a couple of mid-series bridges that I thought definitely are amongst my top books I read this year [ published this year in 2020 ]  A few call-outs, before I get onto my top 5.  1. Was the year I discovered Martha Wells and that endearing fellow called MurderBot in the first four novellas, starting with All Systems Red. while the novel-length story of the MurderBot series came out this year ( Network Effect ) I unfortunately, didn't get around to reading it this year.  2. ...

After the blood-soaked finale to the Godblind series that saw Anna Stephens firmly being entrenched on to my pantheon of go-to-authors, for any thing fantasy (grim, dark and brutal) - I never thought she could top that with anything better. After all, this was the culmination of a tale , three books in the making with rogue gods and blood-thirsty gods meddling in the human affairs, a story crafted, honed and polished over a full series ending in a wholly satisfying manner. This time, she has turned her sights onto the Central American myths and blended all of that into her own vision of a terrifying epic of clashing faiths, warring humans and monstrous blood-thirsty Gods in this new book, called The Stone Knife , first in the series,  Songs of the Drowned .  The forests of Ixachipan have been clashing with the sounds of battle, forever now. The Pecha empire wants to awaken the world-spirit by conquering the lands of Ixachipan and the only deterrent against this mighty ambitio...