City of Last Chances

 City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 500 pages,

Pressure builds in the city of Ilmar as it sits uneasily under occupation by the Palleseen Empire, who seek to bring "perfection" to the whole world. But the City of Bad Decisions has never taken easily to perfection, and factions all through the city are being brought near the boiling point, a tension that is pushed over the edge when a Palleseen official is killed in The Anchorwood, the mysterious and mythic passage to other worlds.

This book is structured in a very interesting way that I feel really furthers its premise. Each chapter is told from a new perspective, giving the reader an extremely thorough view of the city as a whole. Eventually six or seven characters emerge as really significant recurrent characters we come back to repeatedly, which allowed me to really invest in individual characters in addition to the plot and the city. The whole cast of criminals, activists, zealots, priests, foreigners, and everyday people was very engaging to me, and despite being a longer book with a broad focus I never found myself bored. This is the second book by Adrian Tchaikovsky I've read, and I've been extremely impressed by the craft of both so I definitely plan to read more by this author.

Invisible Cities

 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 165 pages.

This book is difficult to describe. The frame device is famous explorer Marco Polo describing the cities he has seen to Kublai Khan. The actual book is mostly dozens of vignettes no more than a few pages long about the fantastical cities that he has seen. But really it is a meditation on the possible ways that cities could be, and what that means on a human scale. The book is extremely philosophically compelling, and once I managed to stop taking it so literally I thoroughly enjoyed it. My ebook copy is very full of bookmarks. The short chapters (and short overall page count) make it very easy to casually pick up this book. A great book to read at a leisurely pace, I thoroughly recommend it.

Three Parts Dead

 Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone, 336 pages.

Tara Abernathy is thrown right into the deep end at the start of her probationary hiring with the necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao when she is immediately tasked to assist with the resurrection of a god. Not just any god, but Kos, one of the greatest of the survivors of the God Wars whose fires are a staple of the global economy. As if that wasn't a big enough tasks, the details of Kos' death keep not adding up, and it seems like there are people who are desperate for Tara not to learn more.

This was a really fantastic book! It was the kind of many threaded plot that actually managed to all come together for an exceptionally satisfying resolution, aided by some excellently cinematic pacing. The setting is also very interesting. It seems that we have skyscrapers and steam generators, but not guns or ink pens. The whole world comes together into something that feels exceptionally unique, and I felt like I kept getting surprising world building details up through the end of the book. There are four more books set in this same world (although I think they mostly follow different characters in different locations) and I'm really excited to read more of them.