Okay. So after a series of misadventures where I got excited that the library had a copy of Shards of Honor but then realized it was an audiobook (no.) but then it turned out the person I was complaining to, in close physical proximity, just so happened to have a copy of the anthology sitting in their car (
) I have gotten my wish and read the first? book in the Vorkosigan Saga.
It was astonishingly good, huh. Been a minute since I got my fins on a really solid adventure-romance fantasy/scifi kinda book, and usually I resort to fanfic for that. I really liked it though as demonstrated by shotgunning it in one sitting. And I want to read Barrayar next but that waits for tomorrow AKA more hours remaining in a day.
- Audiobooks are a media type I respect deeply and with tremendous passion. I will fight for your right to enjoy them and bite any naysayers in the shins. I just personally would rather be waterboarded than have someone read a book TO me.
- "First" in this case means I politely asked Wikipedia what the hell the chronology is here and started with the first full-size novel that sounded like I could probably get as a standalone book, featuring characters relevant to the subsequent stories. Not that I'm disinterested in the preceding two but if it's sent a century or two before the other stuff, that sounds like quasi-standalones to me.
- Adventure-romance as a genre is discerned from regular romance-genre books by a markedly higher count in explosions, high-speed chases, near-death scenarios and other stuff Michael Bay would approve of.
- I'll admit part of why I prefer adventure-romance is that the author is forced to spend page space on the action sequences and is thus less likely to do stupid shit to drag out the romance bits. This is a great way to prevent many gross romance story tropes that I had no patience for when I was thirteeen, let alone now.
- Disclaimer that they barely even hold hands in the text. There is one (1) kissing scene which is about four sentences in length, of which the most heavy-handed adjective applied is describing the kiss as "long". I will nevertheless defend this book as eyebrow-raisingly steamy, it's just way more into the emotional/interior aspects.