Taste

Empyrean, book three. Finished. I knew the ending was coming and still didn't clock how deep Xaden was in, or that a proposal could go quite so sideways. The light-and-dark thing has stopped being one character's problem and become the whole architecture — every level, no cure on offer. So book four isn't really a merge; it's whether you can love someone despite all their fatal flaws, or you can't. I'm reading it as a redemption arc shaped like an addiction — the dark as a drug you don't get clean from, only loved through. Which is why I think it ends fatally: a heart that stops beating, or one that breaks. Him gone and her in Dunne's convent, or the Romeo-and-Juliet version where she follows. September can't come fast enough.

Polyphonic memory-theatre. Finished. The structure did the thing the cover couldn't; the love story underneath turned out more desert than river.

Polyphonic too, but where Spear is memory-theatre this is closer to fantasy ensemble. A third in. The Reproach — the ghost district that doesn't know it's a ghost district — is the part I keep wanting to go back to.

Sequel to Fourth Wing. A quarter in and increasingly sure I read this last year. The quandary: donate it and pick up the next one in the sequel — another chunky wonder — or push on and find out where the déjà-vu stops. I'm certainly not bringing both to Costa Rica. No Kindle either — half the point of a book this thick is the satisfaction of closing it.

Three days with the co-founders. The canvas that came out steers the business now. The book doesn't cover the hard part — knowing when to keep the canvas, and when to tear it up because the market is telling you to get lost.

An operating manual disguised as a book. The parts that fit stuck (zero inbox, action management). RAPID didn't take with the cofounders. Reread when I forget that pace is a feature.

Four playthroughs. Forty endings, give or take. The last big game I had time for. Geralt of Rivia, bathtub, rubber duck, scars, regret — if there was ever a leading man who made me forget what time it was, it was him.

Loved it until they killed Marshall and stuck me with his son. Threw the controller. Continuity is a contract. They broke it. Have not been able to play the sequel.

Fifteen minutes between stops. Small accusations, elimination logic. Not for fun — to swap the brain from "other day job" to "the other other day job" before I get to the desk.