June 2025 Wrap Up

I had hoped for more books read in June, but we topped out at 5. I mentioned the first 2 in my mid-month wrap up. Here are the other three.

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey - This was huge and it took about a hundred years to read. It was a good yarn, if you can just read the space words without knowing exactly what they mean. It is told from the perspectives of two men, Miller and Jim Holden. Miller is a detective with what passes for a police force on a station. Jim is a second in command on a water hauler. The hauler gets a distress call from somewhere in the deep dark reaches of space and when they answer it, they are blown up. Jim and his crew of 4 were on a research ship that had gone to the distress ship when the mother ship got merced. Holden is a full idiot and decided to announce to the whole universe that the transmitter they found on the deserted ship had a Martian manufacturing stamp, which started a massive war between Mars, Earth, and the Belt (which is basically everyone else.) It gets hella weird because Miller and Holden nearly die several times each and Miller starts hallucinating a dead girl is talking to him. The ending is satisfactory, which is really all you can ask.

The Worst Ronin by Maggie Tokuda-Hall - This little graphic novel took almost no time to read. Tatsuo was the first woman allowed to enter the famous samurai school. Now she's mostly drunk and taking mercenary jobs to fund her alcoholism. Chihiro is a 16 year old girl who idolizes Tatsuo and has been training with her father, a revered samurai. He is called to kill a demon that is terrorizing a village, but he's too old, so Chihiro goes in his place. She hires Tatsuo to go with her, except the village the are going to is Tatsuo's home town, where she hasn't responded to her mother's texts for years. She clearly has some baggage to deal with there. What could go wrong? It was cute and not a waste of the 2 hours it took to read it.

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki - Shizuka was a feted professional violinist. She sold her soul for applause, but then when the time came, she didn't play and didn't get the applause. In return for her soul, and the ability to play again, she had to acquire 7 souls. She has since sent 6 fantastic violinists to hell. She just needs one more, but she is looking for the perfect violinist. She finds her in Katrina, a transgender, 16 year old, runaway, who is playing a cheap Chinese violin. She taught herself to play violin by watching YouTube videos and she plays mainly anime and video game music. She also prostitutes herself and makes live porn to make money. Then there is Lan. She is a captain from an alien galaxy that is falling to a plague. She brought her family here and took over the Starrgate Donut shop. This is weird. Lan's daughter Shirley is a holographic copy of the baby that was stillborn, but she's an adult now, and really helpful with code. There is a lot going on here, but the end was fantastic.

And that's it. That's the last of the books I read in June. 1,957 pages. That doesn't seem like a lot, but I guess that's relative.

Anyway, here's hoping for a more productive July.