Of the three novels carried over from March, the historical not-actual-murder-mystery of An Honourable Thief has come to a halt, but I finished both the genre books.
The stories in Sidewise in Time (got its title wrong before!) were very much of their time with women largely decorative and/or ineffectual, and I imagine Leinster was paid by the word for a number of them, as the sheer amount of otiose repetition was terrible and I DNF'd one which just dragged on forever, but a couple of very clever stories and a couple of humorous ones meant the anthology was worth reading. I had mixed feelings about The Ten Thousand Doors of January as the voice which intrigued me at the beginning I found a little wearisome after a while, I never bought into the book she reads, and coincidence was rife as a plot device, but it was interesting and had some good touches.
After the excellent post by @williamjm up-thread on Daniel Abraham's Blade of Dreams I decided to ignore my previous decision to avoid it after struggling with the first book, Age of Ash, and I was delighted to find it was far more entertaining than Book 1 -- less world-building (though in retrospect it made a lot of sense, it was far too much for my taste in AoA) and far more interesting characters, both the two main POVs and some incidentals, not least Garreth's captain. I'm now actually looking forward to Book 3!
I also finished two other fantasies this month, Lireal and Abhorsen, books 2 and 3 of the Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix -- likeable and realistic characters despite the very unreal settings, and entertaining while not overtaxing my brain!
