Tales from the Loathly Lady

Here we are again! Slowed down a bit this time, for a variety of reasons, and man, my pattern for the year of short books being what I'm in the mood for and enjoying the most certainly seems to be holding true. My poor attention span!

Miss Percy's Pocket Guide (to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons) by Quenby Olson

This one was plenty charming but for some unaccountable reason I struggled to get through it! I love a story about a trod-upon spinster gathering herself and figuring out how to make her life a better one, and this fit the bill, plus there was a dragon! Maybe I was just in the wrong mood for it? I really don't think it's anything Olson did wrong. I'm not sure I'll read the rest of the series, but if you're a fan of Marie Brennan's dragon books these might scratch the same itch.

Radio Romance by Ariella Monti

A very slight novella, lots of time skips, but I really liked it for a. having good lead chemistry, a thing that's bafflingly rare these days and b. showing that the leads were the write people who couldn't ever quite find the right time until the end. There wasn't much to it, but I did like it!

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

I feel like in the hurry-rush of publishing these days, where everyone both self-pub and trad-pub needs to make money so much and stay relevant and in the public eye that they're churning their books out at unsustainable speeds that impact quality, Harrow is that rare writer who gets objectively better with every book. It's not that every book is relevant to my interests (I enjoyed her last one, the Gothic, but I can't say that's really my genre), just that she really seems dedicated to honing her craft. And in this one her craft has been honed AND it's relevant to my interests in that there's a sad bisexual lady knight, a sad storyteller/academic, and time loop/travel fuckery, so I LOVED it. It's not an easy read, but it said a lot of things about the stories people tell and the stories governments tell and also about trauma. Good read for Arthuriana fans who don't want to read another Arthuriana retelling.

A Drowned Maiden's Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz

A middle grade about an orphan who gets adopted by a trio of sisters who are fake mediums at the height of spiritualism and who grapples with wanting a family, with figuring out what ethics are and how to have them, and with a bunch of other things too. This was really lovely! I've read a bit of Schlitz before and enjoyed it but this felt like a cut above. Good read for your preteen relative who liked Anne of Green Gables but wanted something a little darker and less episodic.

The Changeling by Juniper Butterworth

Chose to style this as it was on the cover but Butterworth seems to be a barely-veiled pseudonym, so it's hard to tell if that's the right call sometimes. But anyway! A small weird interesting poly romance. I like when I find a fantasy romance that's a fantasy romance and not a Romantasy, both the dark and cozy sides of the current trends annoy me but sometimes you run across something that is just being itself! I can't say it was super central to my usual vibe, but again, it was itself, I'm not going to turn my nose up at it at ALL. Could have used a bit more meat on it, though. I feel like there's a readalike for the vibe of the fey here but it's not coming to my brain, but it isn't Sarah J. Maas or even Holly Black, if that is important to you in either direction.

The Heart Is a Universe by Sherry Thomas

When I saw that the author of one of my favorite historicals that I've read in the last five years (Ravishing the Heiress) wrote a sci fi romance novella I had to read it, and I've been saving it for ages and decided the time was right. And man, this was a mixed bag? (Which I've discovered is largely true of Thomas for me in general, actually, despite my glowing love of RtH--except for its B-plot about the hero's sister, so even that's a mixed bag I suppose.) On one hand, there was fun worldbuilding, the relationship was developed in interesting ways, and there was ... more of an attempt at dealing in an interesting and kind way with disability than either romance or sci fi is often willing to do, there was some Miraculous Cure shit going on at the end that I didn't love, but like. Romance. The disability was killing the hero. So. Anyway, the disappointment here is that the ending was abrupt, completely changed the scope of the story and then abandoned it largely unresolved, and made it more into a fantasy vibe than a sci fi one--like, sci fi is fantasy, right, just with different trappings? But the trappings got a bit too fantasy for me there. So this was frustrating in that it was nearly exactly what I wanted, but couldn't quite get there.

Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

Got behind on these, hoping to do the next one in the series soon, but man, Vo could write one of these yearly for the foreseeable future and I would eat them up with a spoon. This one wasn't even one of my favorites in the series, it's just that the scale for this series is so good that "less favorite" still means "a gorgeous jewel of a novella, with MAMMOTHS." I think the less favorite was just because until pretty close to the end the storytelling wasn't as much a part of things, at least overtly, as it is in some other books. I loved getting some depth on the neixin, though, that was really cool (and wrenching, in places).

If Not, Winter by Sappho trans. Anne Carson

I read this in college as part of a sequence of courses that surveyed influential Western literature, and this was one of the earliest ones in the sequence and, I think, the one I loved most. I for some reason got rid of my copy at some point, but I stumbled into it at Goodwill and it felt like fate, so I settled in for a reread! Even if Carson takes some liberties, it's just such a beautiful translation (there was one about apples that caught my attention this time that I didn't remember from the college read), and absolutely worth enjoying. I read Carson's Oresteia a few years back, I should read more of her work. There's a real clarity in her prose.

Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory

I'd been saving this one for a while. A sapphic from Guillory? Be still my heart! Anyway, it really was a joy, full of queer events, growing pains in friendships, indulgent outfit descriptions, and, as of course the title implies, flirtation. One character, Avery, is fresh off a breakup with a man and exploring her queerness (bisexual characters!!!) and her need for control, and the other, Taylor, has dated pretty much every queer woman in the region and is discovering that it kind of hurts that some of her friends don't think she's capable of anything deep, and they both go on lovely satisfying journeys, especially Taylor.

Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith

To start, it feels deeply weird referring to this as one book. It's Smith's preferred way these days, so I bow to that, but I was introduced to it as a duology, my copies are a duology, and they really do feel like separate books to me, with separate arcs and stakes and all that. But I shan't gainsay the author! Anyway, I was thinking about that a lot because I think I read the first book/half of the book twice as a teenager, but I read the second ... conservatively twenty? I haven't read either in several years, definitely longer than I've been making these posts and probably longer than that, but there are still large swathes of Court Duel, the second half, that I have memorized, and it's been formative of both my reading and my writing to an extent that I think you can only understand if you read the book and then a bunch of my original fiction, especially my older work. The epistolary romance! The indulgent outfit descriptions (two books in a row apparently)! FAN LANGUAGE. Anyway, this actually does stand the test of time quite well, I think! Lots of fun politics, some world-stage politics happening in ways I didn't pay attention to before (but which makes sense because Smith spends a lot of time on the epic history and politics of her Sartorias-deles world), some interesting bits of worldbuilding, overall a delightful romp and an excellent way to spend the last couple of days.

Okay, I was feeling wordy this time! Anyway, a few standouts here (three from this list made my top ten for the year so far, the Harrow at the very top), and a few more meh ones. We'll hope for my continued decent reading luck to continue! 2026 hasn't been stellar, but it's still been a breath of fresh air after a few rough reading years so far.

First post of the year! It's a better start than some I've had lately, so I will take it.

( Four werewolf mysteries, two sci fi novellas, and a partridge in a pear tree. )

That's all for this time! Hopefully the next batch will be similarly fast.

I've read five books since my last post, not quite as many as I wanted but more than I expected given how socially busy the end of the year has been (and given I reread two of my own books prepping for an edit I started at midnight last night and I don't count my own books to my total). I'll do quick reviews of those, and then I'll do my top ten and reading statistics for the year!

( Last five books of the year! )


And now the top ten! I feel like I said much the same last year (I did, I just checked), but while there were a good amount of books I liked this year, there were not a ton that I loved. I'd say the first six on this list were solid, would have made the top ten in most reading years that weren't exceptional, and the last four were ones I liked plenty but were kind of "the best of the rest."

• Cinder House by Freya Marske
• The West Passage by Jared Pechacek
• The Touchstone Series by Andrea K. Höst
• Murder By Memory by Olivia Waite
• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
• Half-Witch by John Schoffstall
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison
• Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
• The Marquis Who Mustn't by Courtney Milan

Interesting to me how many of those were novellas! Plus the one play, which is rather like a novella, I think, the point is "lots of short things in my top ten."

Statistics! I read 135 books this year, 13 more than last year, which isn't bad given I have still been reading rather ridiculous amounts of firefighters fic on the AO3. Of those books:

• 22 were rereads (more on that in a moment)
• 9 were nonfiction
• 1 was a graphic novel
• 85 were SFF (though 3 are better termed horror)
• 56 were romances or romance-focused
• Either 2 or 5 were mysteries depending on whether you count Addison's Thara Celehar books as mysteries or not
• 32 were for younger readers

I met a few reading goals this year! I read all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, which was one of my major goals, and I got a blackout on my town library's book bingo card (only one bingo on another library's harder book bingo, though I didn't focus much on that one since I'm not eligible for the prizes). I also wanted this to be a year of reading epistolary fiction, and, well ... I had 22 rereads, and a lot of that was epistolary fiction. Overall, I just did a quick count, and I read 11 books I would term epistolary (one more featured some letters but was primarily narrative, and another contained lots of non-fictional letters but didn't get the correspondence vibe right), and I think four of them were new? I keep looking for lists of proper epistolary books and not finding what I want, and I'm not sure if that's because people are bad at writing lists or because there aren't as many epitolary books as I want there to be.

I'm not sure of my reading goals for this year! I think I only have two preorders on my list, which is pretty dire, and I do have a bunch of books on my shelves right now that I'm excited about, but I keep getting my hopes up and having them dashed, so I am really just going to hope that this year has some books that really sweep me away.

Saw the end of the year staring me down and got motivated to clear my shelves a little! And also I'm no longer in the busiest period of my year so I have a little more free brain space to read. I doubt I'll make it another full post before year's end, but we'll see, I still have one book bingo square to go ("sports or leisure activity" my beloathed, I may simply read a hockey romance novel since there are a bunch of them featured on the library ebook service right now thanks to the one show) and there are lots of options for me to enjoy!

( Some very solid reads, and I finally read Tom Stoppard's Arcadia! )

And that's all for this time! Now it's a race to the end of the year!

Took another trip, which meant airport books, and then a few fast reads, so a nice fast post this time, thank goodness! And I even managed to get one into my top ten for the year, which feels pretty miraculous.

( Two Baums, two Marskes, and some scattershot! )

No clue when the next one's coming, but hopefully I'll get another seasonal romance or two in among finishing the Oz series and maybe returning to some epistolary!

Tomorrow's a busy work day, so it's time for one of these again!

( My murder mystery era continues, and also my D&D table is writing so much fic and it's great. )

Okay, that's all! See you again for one of these at the end of the year and hopefully within the next week for a book post!

Slowed down again! Busy part of summer and when I haven't been busy my brain has simply been either Gone or focused on my D&D game, since my whole table is writing D&D porn right now. But I'm through a batch now, anyway!

( A mixed bag this time! )

And that's all for this time! There were some good ones in this batch, but man, so few books are completely whisking me away this year, the two rereads on this list are for sure the best, and it's not even close!

Normally I don't like to do these until the last day of the month they get posted in, but I'm about to go out of town and liable to forget, so I'll post a few days early instead!

( DMing is a Wild Time )

Man, I'm having trouble with paper books right now! Only three paper books in this group, two of which were middle grade (one a reread), and one of which was the one I had to write a whole post about the other day. Hopefully I can get back to paper books, because there are a LOT I want to read on my shelves right now.

( Perhaps not the group I've been most enthused about this year. )

Next time: hopefully some paper books and more Oz!

Another decently fast batch, thanks to one of the reading goals I've had for this year, more on that anon! I am too tired for much of an intro, so here we go.

( Spoiler alert: I'm reading the Oz books! )

That's all this time! Next time, maybe some books not written by L. Frank Baum! And maybe some epistolary, since I rather fell off on that goal.