Monthly Archives: May 2022

Since the question has been raised…

I haven’t yet set a date for a chapter-by-chapter blogging of Fair Trade. The current plan is “a few weeks to a month before Trade Lanes comes out, whenever that turns out to be”.

This, you will have noticed, is a departure from the way I’ve been doing things.

The thing is, when I started this blog, it was all about re-reading the Liaden novels chapter-by-chapter, finding new things in old favourites and giving old not-favourites a chance to change my mind. Then eventually I ran out of Liaden novels I’d already read, but there were new ones coming out, and I was feeling so enthusiastic I decided to just keep on reading Liaden novels and blogging them chapter-by-chapter. But I’ve been increasingly feeling that this isn’t sustainable and has been injuring my ability to enjoy the new novels in the way they’re meant to be enjoyed. (Accepting the Lance, in particular, wasn’t done any favours by being chopped into a hundred pieces and spread over three months, and I’ve regretted that I didn’t give it a fair shake on its own terms.) On the other hand, I do enjoy revisiting the novels and finding details that I didn’t notice before.

So what I’m going to try is a return to this being a re-reading blog. I’m going to read Fair Trade by myself, at whatever speed it wants to go. And then, in the lead-up to Trade Lanes, I’m going to re-read it and do the chapter-by-chapter blog then.

There’s a certain symmetry to the new Jethri books being the ones where I try out this plan: one of the reasons I started this blog when I did was to give myself an excuse to re-read Balance of Trade in the lead-up to Trade Secret coming out.