I wanted to indulge myself and support my budding crossword puzzle hobby. I wanted to solve puzzles in the hopes of getting better at making them. I wanted a breezy collection of puzzles to solve while I watched mindless reality TV. I thought I was buying a book that would fill those wants. Instead, I…
Continue reading ➞ Diagramless Crosswords: Joy, Pain, And Discovery
Happy New Year! 2025 is here, there are new books coming out, and everyone is looking outwards to where fantasy and science fiction will go this year. Now is the perfect time to review the fourth book in a beloved and established series that people already have their minds made up about. Over the winter…
For a while now, I've been stewing on a project—a deep dive into post-apocalyptic sci-fi futures. The categories I am diving into will be pretty broad, but let this next review give you a sneak peek at what I have been thinking about in these concerning times. The Ancients, by John Larison, is a meditation…
I have good and bad news. The good news is, it’s only nine days into 2025, and I am holding myself to a goal I set in our QTL reflection. This year, I decided to DNF any book that I wasn’t enjoying at the 50% mark. So here’s the bad news. My first review of…
Yeah, the cat’s already out of the bag. House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky, was The Quill to Live’s book of the year. But what the hell does that even mean? What makes the sequel so damn good? Well, strap in, it’s going to get messy. The Pallaseen’s march to dominate the world continues,…
Continue reading ➞ House of Open Wounds – A Festering Greatness
While we don’t often review novellas for The Quill to Live, we thought we would do an end-of-year wrap-up of some stand-out shorts that we collectively read in 2024. We did not read enough of a sample of novellas to definitively plant a flag in the ground and say these are the best, but they…
How much mileage can Stephen King get out of a scary town with a crazy, powerful monster lurking in the sewers? A whole, whole lot. It is a beefy book packed with horrific moments, worst fears, and a myriad of stories that all sit in the center of an interconnected web. Derry, Maine is not…
Welcome back to another Quill to Live year-end book roundup. Nine years we have been doing this, so please get excited for our ten-year anniversary this coming March! 2024 has been an interesting year for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. This year, the QTL team decided to slow down a bit. We diversified our reads,…
This year I have read a lot of books that feature revolutions. Adrian Tchaikovsky is no slouch when it comes to exploring this topic, but delivers a bigger punch than usual with his latest, Alien Clay. I immediately latched onto its premise, seeing it as a spiritual successor to Cage of Souls, a book that…
When I attended Holly Black’s book tour earlier this year, she shared that Wren, her main character in The Prisoner’s Throne series, was hard to write because she wouldn’t “protag.” Meaning that Wren did not want to participate in the events unfolding around her, which made her a very interesting character to follow. Well, I…
Continue reading ➞ The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt – Dig It
