1. Ship of Magic

By Robin Hobb (809 pp) I intended to read way more books in the pile before starting back into big fat Robin Hobb books. But I tried and could not get into anything. Like many people I found I kept getting stuck in these doom spirals of clicking around the Internet and my concentration was shot and nothing could hold my interest. Most of my giant backlog of books is electronic. So I went back to my pile of dead tree books and had to pick this one. Same world as Assassin's Apprentice but different geographical area. In this world families go into great debt to purchase a liveship -- which, like it sounds, is a ship that is alive. Complicated politics and economic turmoil shapes what people do and care about (but aren't boring). Everybody does things you don't want them to do. Really good. Already started the next 800+ tome.