This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. It is now being hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. To participate, choose a random book from your GoodReads TBR and show it off. Which sounds easy enough until you have to decide how to choose that book! I think I will use a different way each week, like picking a color or number of pages. I will let you know each week how I chose the book and then something interesting about it, like how it ended up on the list or why I want to read it. Got it? Okay let’s get started.
Happy Monday everyone! I hope you survived the weekend. I am really looking forward to Christmas this week, it is always so much fun to spend the holidays with family and friends. Whatever you are celebrating this week, I hope you have a lovely time.
For this week’s post I am picking another book that is being published in 2025. It is by an author whose books I have enjoyed in the past so I am sure this will be just a wonderful. It is a science fiction story and is being described as part first contact story, part dark comedy, and part bizarre love triangle. How could I say no to that?
Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton
Publication Date: February 25, 2025
Summary from Goodreads:
Dalton Greaves is a hero. He’s one of humankind’s first representatives to Unity, a pan-species confederation working to bring all sentient life into a single benevolent brotherhood.
That’s what they told him, anyway. The only actual members of Unity that he’s ever met are Boreau, a giant snail who seems more interested in plunder than spreading love and harmony, and Boreau’s human sidekick, Neera, who Dalton strongly suspects roped him into this gig so that she wouldn’t become the next one of Boreau’s crew to get eaten by locals while prospecting.
Funny thing, though—turns out there actually is a benevolent confederation out there, working for the good of all life. They call themselves the Assembly, and they really don’t like Unity. More to the point, they really, really don’t like Unity’s new human minions.
When an encounter between Boreau’s scout ship and an Assembly cruiser over a newly discovered world ends badly for both parties, Dalton finds himself marooned, caught between a stickman, one of the Assembly’s nightmarish shock troops, the planet’s natives, who aren’t winning any congeniality prizes themselves, and Neera, who might actually be the most dangerous of the three. To survive, he’ll need to navigate palace intrigue, alien morality, and a proposal that he literally cannot refuse, all while making sure Neera doesn’t come to the conclusion that he’s worth more to her dead than alive.
How can you say no to a book with a giant sentient snail? I certainly can’t, if it was a slug, sure no problem saying no to that. But snails are cute! Anyways. I have the ARC for this one and am really looking forward to reading it next year.
Until next time…
Confessions of a Serial Reader 