My next read was supposed to be The Song of Achilles, the last book on my list for the 2022 r/fantasy Book Bingo challenge. I started it, read a few pages. I seems great. Then I saw a snippet of Victoria Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor. That took me to its Amazon page, where I spent the next 2 hours reading the entire free preview. THotE is now my current read; Achilles can wait a bit.

This book is quite a bit different from anything else I've read, and different from what I normally go for. No swords, no real on-screen magic, violence, death, or even really any politics. At its heart, this book is just a group of friends being friends and trying to help out their buddy, who happens to be the Emperor.

I'm about 250 pages in and am only about a quarter through it. This book is massive. Nothing particularly interesting happens. But there's something incredibly charming about it, especially reading in winter with the early nights (even though this isn't a wintry setting) that makes it very hard to put down. It is, in the best way, like reading really good filler episodes of an anime.

I'm hoping the rest of the book keeps on this strongly. I have a feeling it may drag a bit (1000+ pages, how can it not), but reviews are overwhelmingly positive and I'm definitely leaning that way so far. IT might take me a month with how slowly I read these days, but I'll get through it happily and try to remember to cherish the friends I've got, which seems to be getting a little harder as the years go on.