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Finished my hundredth book of the year on September 1st! Very satisfying. (For comparison, last year I made my tenth book post on October 3rd.) This group was overall quite good, and when they weren't to my taste they were interestingly so, which is really all I could ask for.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

A travel book that I'd been meaning to read for years and finally got around to! I was really here for the octopus communication rather than the near future thriller things, but Nayler's interests were, alas, a bit opposite to mine, and he was the one steering the metaphorical ship, so. It wasn't a bad book by any means, it was an absorbing read on a VERY frustrating day! Just also I wanted even 10% more octopus communication by volume and would happily have subtracted 10% of corporate corruption. (Warning that one of the POV characters in this book has been kidnapped and enslaved on a fishing vessel and that horrors of that are not shied away from.)

Love Galaxy by Sierra Branham

One of those books that gave me a lot of thoughts even if it frequently drove me up the wall (though to be fair it was the last book I read on a 15-hour day of travel). I signed on for the indulgent reality show in space vibes, and, mm. This complaint is going to come back in a minute here, but this book was trying to be too many things. Indulgent reality show fantasy, social commentary sci fi, exciting mystery, romance ... it was trying to do all of them and particularly in the case of the first two, it's hard to do both and have the book feel coherent. And in this case, it didn't really succeed! (Plus, man, why do so many Reality Show Fantasy stories have their main characters not really want to do it and scoff at all the fantasy elements? I get that it's a very lowkey version of, say, an abduction fantasy, but in this case, the heroine was actively uncomfortable with things like the fancy or skimpy outfits and had to be rescued from them by her love interest, so I don't get the point of doing the fantasy at all.) I could see the elements of something good here, but it couldn't quite make them into something that works. Oh! And one more complaint! Obviously the title is positioning this as a take on Love Island and I have seen neither show (I enjoy fics and occasionally books about reality shows, but I do not enjoy the majority of reality shows themselves), but it is still CLEARLY The Bachelor, so the title just felt like "the author thought of something and thought it might pull people in" but it also didn't cohere. ... Rather a microcosm of the book, when I put it like that.

Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser

Mmm, this one. Read it on a rec from my sister, who was kind to think of me, since she knows I like fairy tale retellings. However, I am pretty suspicious these days of Cinderella retellings that do this specific thing (stepmother redemption at the cost of Cinderella's character), and while this one wasn't as disastrous as I feared it might be, it still sure was doing Feminism Tee Em. Yes, hard to be a woman in Nebulous Medieval/Renaissance Nebulous France, the erasing of identity by marriage but also marriage as the only way forward, the way that view puts women in danger from predators and abusers, it's not like any of that was WRONG. Just galling to have it be the stepmother grappling with all of that while Cinderella weeps and refuses to do household chores while her stepfamily does them all so she can keep herself ladylike for marriage and spouts aphorisms. And also the prince is a horrible monstrous predator. Which, ugh, again, there are ways to do it, right? This book just felt like it was trying so hard to say new things about the Cinderella tale and be subversive and feminist while not realizing that all of these elements have been done before, and less aggravatingly. The most credit I'll give it is that there was a fun falconry throughline and that it was an easy read. Also, was the stepfamily called Tremaine in Perrault's version or anything? Because otherwise this author could be cruising for a Disney suing.

The Apple and the Pearl by Rym Kechacha

A chestnut_pod rec, and a delightful one! While this one is just plain conceptually cool (rotating POV of an entire ballet company, including (especially, in fact!) the orchestra and crew, that puts on the same ballet for an audience of terrifying fey every night), what really got me is the real care that's put into the way people think about putting together a piece of art, the way it's both beautiful art and also something mundane and physical and tiring and boring, the way people are petty and annoying and sometimes real pieces of shit to each other but are still all part of something big together. It's the best parts of the Streatfeild Shoes books for adults, some of my favorite parts of Ibbotson's Company of Swans, with some fey bullshit sprinkled on the top. (Also was reminded of Ibbotson for the clear-eyed and not always flattering portrayal of characters who nonetheless are given their due.) I did have to spend like half the book flipping back and forth between the cast list at the start to figure out whose POV I was in at any given time, but I might look out for more from Kechacha.

A King's Trust by S.E. McPherson

Poly fantasy romance with much more plot than I was expecting there to be, which I don't mean as a bad thing, just an expectation shift! Also much darker and more violent than I was expecting in the back third, but again, not a bad thing. I liked this enough that I've got the sequel saved to take out at some point, I just don't have much to say about it!

Forgive-Me-Not by Mari Costa

A sweet little sapphic YA graphic novel, borrowed from a young relative. I liked this one a lot, actually! Very sweet but with some good serious moments in there as well. Graphic novels are often rather light for me, not much story in there, and that's definitely true here, but this one did a pretty good job of being a short story in the pagecount of a novel instead of trying to be an abbreviated novel, which is just about right for the medium, I think.

Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson

Another delightful Ibbotson reread. One I love very much even if it falls apart if one tries to do modern Things Must Make Sense analysis on it, and to some extent because of that. I like when things are ridiculous, especially in middle grade. And I also like that this is middle grade really only on a technicality, since there's only one child character in it and he's only the POV character like 1/8 of the time. Once again did this reread while thinking longingly of the movie adaptation that Could Be. I think Ibbotson is particularly attractive to me for thinking of adaptations because I love the stories but I wouldn't want the adaptations to be extremely faithful, because the stories sure do. need some updating.

The Jellyfish Problem by Tessa Yang

Spotted this in a bookshop in coastal Maine and it's a coastal Maine specfic story, so wanted to give it a shot! Yang's first published novel (she had a short story collection before, I think) and you can definitely see the seams, though there's a lot that's good in here too. I think my biggest problem with it is a similar one that I had with Love Galaxy above: it's pulling in so many directions that it doesn't quite know where it's going. It's general fiction, it's litfic, it's horror, it's maybe even a bit of a thriller, it's a small town mystery with arguably some gothic elements though that's much more tenuous. And it takes rather a masterful writer to get that many genres going well. In this case, I felt like sometimes Yang's ambitions were pulling in different directions to the point that it didn't go as far as I wanted it to into any of them. Also I know the point of the (fictional) jellyfish textbook excerpts and commentary thereon at the start of each chapter, but I don't know if it justified itself well enough to stay. A few times but not every time, I guess. And this review feels unnecessarily mean! I did like it! I just feel like I sit down to write these reviews and I want to prod at the chinks in the armor even for things I liked a lot.

No Shelter But the Stars by Virginia Black

Can't remember where I heard of this one. Skye Kilaen's indie/self-pub queer romance list, maybe? Anyway, it was on my library's ebook service, so I happily read it and enjoyed it heaps! Largely because it happens to be an incredible comp for the sci fi series I'm slowly editing with intent to self-publish at some point, but also for many other reasons. Worldbuilding! Half the book being a survival story when I never see enough of those in the circles I get recs in! Competent enemies to lovers! Maybe not the MOST graceful in the eventual removal of obstacles but I'm not sure I cared, I don't really need my indulgent sapphic sci fi romance to make Political Sense. (My sci fi politics sure don't always.) So, a rec, but definitely for people who want to lean on the romance side of sci fi romance.

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers

It is honestly a miracle that I liked this one! It has so many elements I am generally wary of, some of which I knew about going into the book and some I did not (one of which is kind of a major spoiler though it also didn't have to be? It's not the kind of reveal ruined by knowing in advance but I also have wildly high spoiler tolerance so I'm going to err on the side of not saying it), and they often edged towards versions of them that I don't like, but always avoided alienating me in the end, which was certainly a neat trick! But I can be wary of books that feel like they've read the Supervillain List, books where the narrator is pretty obviously looked down on by most people around them while being fairly unaware of that, Funny Fantasy, and [spoilers], but it managed to cohere! Like, didn't land in my top ten for the year, did skirt too close to dislikes of mine for that, but it's a miracle that I liked it enough that I felt the need to make that qualification and enough to say that I'm going to keep an eye out for Stothers's next outing, which I plan to.

And that's that for this time! This week is starting the busiest 12 weeks of my year, so my next updates will probably be slower, but we'll see how it goes, and what I find next! My bookshelf needs a bit of a refresh, so I have to see what looks tempting to me.

I actually could have posted this a week ago, and I'm 4.5 books into my next post, and you will see why in just a moment. (Well, the 4.5 is because I had a couple long travel days in the last week and change and I do a ton of reading on those. This is relevant to why the last batch was that fast.)

All Of Us Murderers by KJ Charles

I always feel like I ought to read more KJ Charles, and then I never do! However, the stars aligned and I read this one and, shock of shocks, enjoyed it! A largely delightful book that's more gothic than romance (which I don't say as a bad thing, I don't mind that in the least). It's got a little bit of "my main character must have fairly modern sensibilities" going on but in a way that's juuuuust believable enough that I decided to let it get away with it. Didn't love the first death, even if she was a reprehensible person and obviously that was the point of things, but I did enjoy the book overall! Not sure this will actually read more Charles, but who even knows where my whims will take me?

The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins, Murder on the Rockport Limited!, Petals to the Metal, The Crystal Kingdom, The Eleventh Hour, The Suffering Game, and Story and Song by Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, and Travis McElroy, illustrated by Carey Pietsch

And that is why this one was so fast! My brain doesn't do podcasts well, but I've heard such good things about this arc of The Adventure Zone, so when I saw the ebooks were on sale celebrating the release of the last one, I had to give them a read! Now that I'm DMing, it's fun to pick apart what other DMs do, speculate on what was planned and what wasn't. There's a lot of fun foreshadowing in this one! And Griffin McElroy, as a DM, is really good at doing something I'm not, which is having several subquests required for a big one that all make sense and progress along, I tend to have a main quest and a sidequest instead, so it was interesting to get that. However, my overarching feeling about the whole story is that WOW would I be driven up the wall playing at this table. Not shocking to me, but also I simply can't imagine trying to run a game for these players or players like them. Thank goodness for my table.

The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson

Sometimes I just need to reread some Ibbotson, and I suspect you'll see her name some more in the near future, when I get started on a reread of her works I tend to spiral into doing more and more of them. Anyway, charming middle grade that reminded me that if I ever need to divert a kid who's thinking of getting into HP (or more likely, divert parents who are thinking they want to share that particular childhood favorite with their kids), Ibbotson is a perfect substitution for at least the first few. Also, loving her juvenile fantasies and her romances for older readers really makes me wish she'd written some fantasy for older readers too. And, lastly, I am once again wishing that people would do movies of Ibbotson books, they're so ripe for medium faithful low budget movies that I would love passionately and be mildly embarrassed ot rec to people.

Crier's War by Nina Varela

I've had this one on my low-priority list of books I want to read for a while and stumbled on a used copy, so obviously I dived in! A very competent sapphic YA fantasy, first in a duology, and it's one of those ones that I quite enjoyed, but everything I find to say about it sounds rather lukewarm? However I could probably blame that on the fact that it was the first of three books I read on an incredibly long and stressful day of transit. I do feel like this one, published in 2019, skirts a lot of the YA Fantasy Tropes Tee Em that have me avoiding that genre these days, while falling into a few others, but the author was clearly having fun with things, it's fantasy with not-quite-robots, the politics are thematically messy but fun to read, so I'll take it! We'll have to see if I can find the second book in the duology similarly on sale sometime.

And that's it for this time! Given how many I've already got for the next one, probably you'll hear from me again in early September.

Well, that went fast! Helped along by a couple rereads that only took a day each, and by me getting absolutely sucked in by the rest of the Emma M. Lion books, more on that right now.

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Vol. 5-8 by Beth Brower

Actually in positions 1, 4, 6, and 7. So last time I feel like my review of these ones was a bit lukewarm and then I got Absolutely Obsessed probably around the end of the fourth volume? And now I am absolutely languishing and perishing because I don't know when the next one is coming out. I stand by these books not being very book-shaped, but I'm just so endeared by all of these characters, the small mysteries surrounding all of them, the strong friendship between Emma and her three gentlemen, the ridiculous neighborhood shenanigans, the low-key magic. I'm definitely feeling fannish but I don't want to write or read fic so I do not know what to do with the feelings. It's so hard to compare these books to anything, they're so much themselves! But I think I am enjoying them so much because they're hitting me in my love for Eva Ibbotson's romances and Daddy-Long-Legs, so if you're into those you might be into these.

Her Lovely Champion by Mariah Rae Birch

Sweet sapphic fantasy romance. And it is a fantasy romance, not a Romantasy Tee Em, which means it's doing its own things with tropes and such. I like any book with a lady knight, pretty much, Tamora Pierce has done this to me, and I liked a lot about this, and this review sure is lukewarm for how much I enjoyed it! I think this poor book simply has the bad luck of having been a book that I read when I read it because I was making a vain effort to ration Emma Lion. This is my second Birch and I shall most likely read more, though!

Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce

Speaking of lady knight books! Anyway, I had to read this one for fic reference, getting references and voices for some minor characters for this fic, which is why it's just this one and not the full quartet. I was so busy having an eagle eye out for Tobe, Fanche, and the convict soldiers that I don't really have much else to say about the reread! Other than the fact that Neal calls Kel a pet name in this one and My Shipping Is Valid. (Man, I should write more Kel/Neal/Yuki sometime. When I'm done writing weird rarepairs and also probably a Thom/Alex epic.)

Women of the Dawn by Bunny McBride

Wanted to like this more than I did! It's a nonfic (sort of) study of four Wabanaki women, all named Molly, filtering different stages of Wabanaki (largely specifically Penobscot) history (post-Western contact/colonization) through that lens. And these women are undoubtedly interesting, McBride chose her subjects well! It's just that she fictionalizes SO much. These women, particularly the first three, exist in records, and as time goes on in narratives, but until, again, the last, our 20th century Molly, McBride extrapolates from incredibly scanty records and implications and tries to read motivations and small actions and a thousand other things that just can't be supported by the record. And if this were historical fiction I'd be really into that! Historical fiction has its place! But I am wayyyy warier of doing it in a book that purports to be nonfic. There are arguments either way! McBride argues in a note at the end that it was required to make them real to the reader, and I don't dispute that they felt real, and that it's important to tell their stories. I'm glad I know about these women now, but how do we tell their stories truly when records of them have been tossed out or erased or never existed in the first place? Not really my question to answer, but I'm not sure McBride has struck on the right method in this one.

John Rich & the Big Picture by Ngozi Ukazu

Webnovel by the author of the Check, Please! webcomic, which I read because she finished it and also it's leaving the internet in a week. Anyway, this was a fun one! Sweet and nerdy, with feelings about art and comedy and The New Yorker and also the whole premise made me go "... did Ngozi Ukazu read my rarepair Merlin fic?" (I am like 90% certain she didn't, the "this conventionally attractive person is the one person the artist cannot draw right" trope has to be a common trope in artist romance, I just haven't read much artist romance), which is a question I never thought I would have to ask. And there's a truly shocking amount of Garfield! Sometimes hit some serious secondhand embarrassment for me, especially at the climax, and one occasionally wants to shake John Rich a bit (and then feed him cocoa), but overall a fun outing, I'd say.

Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke

90% sure this is a chestnut_pod rec? (Haven't got the HTML in my head to tag users and it's like 12:30 at night so I'm not looking it up, apologies.) Anyway, this was delightful! My exact favorite weight of nonfic, where the writer is a presence but not an intrusion, where I feel neither babied by overexplanation nor overwhelmed by writing for which I am not the audience, and where I come out with interesting thoughts and information about a subject I find interesting but don't know the depths of. If I have any quibble with this book, it's that in her quest not to anthropomorphize, Cooke maybe overemphasizes many animal choices as Genetic Preservation Decisions when I am skeptical that some of the animals she discusses much care about that, but a. Cooke is an expert and I'm not, my anthro instincts are quite likely betraying me here and b. I'd much rather have that take on things than the anthropomorphization, at least in a book like this.

Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas

Back rereading this objectively probably mediocre romance novel again because someday I will figure out how and why it bewitches me so much, especially when I actively skim over pretty much the whole B-plot/setup for the next book in the series. I think, on this reread, that as with most romance novels that stand out to a person, it's about the characters? I don't think Millie and Fitz are for everybody, but I like how deeply practical they are, how their marriage did get built from strangers to uneasy allies to colleagues and friends and only then does romance get added in (from his side. I also appreciate that she was pining through all of that). And I particularly like Millie, how she's quiet and fairly opaque to her husband and willing to grit her teeth and sacrifice when she thinks she must. They feel very fresh, which is odd when many of Thomas's characters feel quite standard-to-genre. Still haven't fully puzzled out all of what I keep finding in this one, but definitely gave the characters their due this time.

And that's all for this time! Looking for the book that will really break the Emma Lion spell so I can give other books more of a fair shot, we'll see if it's one of the ones I've got on my shelves right now.

I can't believe this year is just about half over! The time certainly does fly.

Music

Continuing to keep up my weekly song picks! Though have been listening to a lot of instrumental playlists, I tend to go through those phases. Been listening to a good amount of Annabelle Dinda and really had a phase of listening to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" by Whitney Houston kind of a lot. I just two days ago discovered "Isn't She Strange!" by Barbara and am listening to it on repeat.

Movies

Two whole movies this time! One was just an Agatha Christie adaptation that's a couple decades old, The Secret Adversary, which was fun but not particularly special. However, let's talk about The Testament of Ann Lee, a movie I am still thinking about a solid two months after watching it. It's a musical about the founding of the Shaker religious movement, and it's a lot of things. It's a cult movie that hits all the beats of a cult movie but thinks cults are kind of cool actually, or at least that this particular cult is. It's a movie with FASCINATING choreography and I saw someone on tumblr say this movie really wanted to be an artsy ballet piece and I kind of agree with that. I am an inveterate two-screen kind of person, I almost never watch something all the way through, but I watched this on my laptop and I think I tabbed away twice for a maximum of 30 seconds each. If you think you want to give this movie a try, watch this clip, it gives you a decent idea of the vibe. (But warnings for mental asylums, miscarriage, child death, extremely dubiously consensual sex, religious-based violence, imprisonment.)

TV Shows

Finished up seasons of The Pitt, 9-1-1, 9-1-1: Nashville, Animal Control, and High Potential. Finished watching through all of Elementary. Watched all of Agatha Christie's Marple, feature-length episodes based on the books, all but two of which I'd seen before. Nearly done with season 5 of Murder She Wrote. Nothing terribly exciting to say about any of it! Wasn't brave enough to continue Pluribus, somehow still haven't made it back to Farscape. Brains are weird! I want to be watching more sci fi but my brain won't let me!

Other

Watched the recent season of Make Some Noise on Dropout. Haven't yet managed to start Game Changer but mean to soon! Nothing particularly new or interesting that I've been watching on YouTube. However, did get two theater experiences, one on YouTube and one in person! The YouTube one is I believe still up on the PBS Great Performances channel, and it's Suffs, a musical about Alice Paul and the suffragette movement. Not unlike The Testament of Ann Lee, it's a musical centering around a difficult woman in history. The tone, however, is very different! I really enjoyed this one, and I liked the music more than I have a decent amount of Trendy musicals in the Dear Evan Hansen era.

And then I went to Boston a week or two ago and saw the National Tour of Les Mis! This was a glorious evening even up in the cheap seats, and I am still chewing on all the things they did with set and particularly lighting design, and also WOW did this production have feelings about Grantaire, Gavroche, and the two of them together. Gavroche's death was one of the most affecting moments in the show for me, they staged it all SO perfectly. If the tour is coming to you, can recommend! My only real critique is that most numbers went juuuust a tick too fast for me, it kind of felt like the orchestra wanted to go home (this was most noticeable on "A Little Fall of Rain," which is usually a surefire cry moment for me but went too fast to be impactful in this production). However, the best "Bring Him Home" I've heard, hands down. Absolute masterclass, final note floated out like a perfect dream and felt like it lasted forever. A full twenty seconds of deserved applause after that.

D&D

We always keep ourselves busy! Let's see. There were a good deal of emotions sessions as the characters dealt with the fallout from the Underdark and the insecurity-spouting monsters they met there. Some sessions dealing with long-term plot threads about a spell to save a star. More emotions sessions, this time because the paladin's family was having a difficult time (I'm not going to discuss elf culture in detail, but they were brought up in a commune-style family, multi-generational and with little emphasis on blood and more emphasis on shared interest and values, with something like 8-10 guardians hanging around at any given time, and children and elders on either side) when one of the younger guardians fucked up bad with some of the adolescents, so the adolescents came to stay with the players for a while during that fallout.

There were two bigger adventures, though, and we've just started another! They went to the Elemental Plane of Water to solve a few puzzles in the house of a long-dead author and found a trove that will get them to a plane where some aliens are living (long story, more details about this whole thing in the campaign summary on the AO3). Plus saw a flying fish dance ritual/party! Then they went to another one of the Hells, where they killed a kingfissure worm (Matt Colville's take on a purple worm) and found apprentices for the last practitioner of a dying art. Now they're in their second-to-last hell, where they've been doing good deeds, getting other long-term plot threads tugged on (something's fucked up with the flow of magic across the planes! Also assassins who you forget as soon as you're not looking at them!), and have just found a lake with a possible deity at the bottom.

Upper level D&D is very chaotic and very fun!

Creative Projects

Writing: Continuing to feel consistent and good about my writing output this year! Wrote a 9-1-1 fic for Fandom Trumps Hate, posted two bits of D&D porn, and now I'm most of the way through a Tortall fic for my other FTH fic. Writing for prompts is odd! I like to do it, it's a good creative kickstart, but also sometimes takes some finagling around while I find the places where my prompter's interests and mine align.

Crafting: Last time I wrote I was in the mockup process for a dress whose bodice was defeating me. I did get that dress done (though I need to deal with the armscye seam finishing, still), and it looks pretty killer, but I have never cried about a craft project before and I sure did about this one! The sleeves call for shirring, using elastic thread as your bobbin thread, but neither machine I have access to would do it, so I ended up having to do a different method, and the whole thing was a MASSIVE headache. I also sewed a quilt top for my sister's 40th out of vintage handkerchiefs. Still have to find a backing fabric for that! Really should do that soon.

Things I'm Looking Forward To

Not a ton of media I'm looking forward to this summer! I mean, there are movies and shows that sound interesting, but I'm having a really hard time watching things independently right now, so I'm not really getting my hopes up about any of it. I'm looking forward to more D&D, hopefully wrapping up our Nine Hells plots and getting into some of the plot threads that have been hanging out waiting for us.

Writing-wise, when I finish this Tortall fic (optimistically want it done before I go out of state for the weekend on Thursday but this week is very chaotic so I don't have super high hopes), I want to go one more D&D porn and then take a stab at a novella in my space series, since my last edit went so well. This one doesn't need a ton of structural work, just a few added scenes and clarified characterization, so I'm cautiously optimistic about being able to do it. And then we'll see! I have a few longfics swirling around in my head, and the D&D porn is a ton of fun, so there's a lot to do.

And crafting-wise, I would like to finish that quilt, but also I just got myself some linen to make a dress out of, copying the self-made dress I wear most often (with a few tweaks). Turns out a comfortable linen dress with blousy sleeves is a great all-seasons piece to have, only the very hottest and very coldest days don't work for it! I'm a bit worried I'll wear my previous one out, so want to have another one to swap around with it.

And that's that for this season! We'll see what the summer brings besides heat waves, ugh.

It's that time again!

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Vol. 1-4 by Beth Brower

These take up four different positions on my list (1, 4, 6, and 10), but I don't have enough to say about them to write about each volume apart! Plus, mm, I quite like these, I find Emma and the people around her very charming, but they're not really very book-shaped books? Each volume is a two-month chunk of the daily journal of a young Victorian woman in London and her shenanigans and her weird neighborhood and her attempts to keep herself afloat, and while events come up and are resolved, there's not what I'd call a plot, per se. I feel like I should be getting a week of entries at a time in an email newsletter a la Dracula Daily, reading them in books is very strange. Still, quite fun and undemanding, but enough depth to keep from being irritatingly frivolous, especially as one goes on. Also Emma has 3-5 clear Possible Love Interests and with the main three at this point I rather think she should just date all of them and they should also date each other. And she's not even thinking of them as love interests yet!

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Finally read the new Murderbot! And, unshockingly, it was good. I like that Wells tries out some slightly different action genres to keep things fresh, and this "on the run with civilians to protect" plot was fun and moved at a good clip. I will say this one connected with me less than a lot of previous outings in the series, unfortunately, and I'm not sure if that was my fault or the book's. I was delighted to see a little development for Three, though! And I missed ART, ART's featured presence in a Murderbot book automatically makes me love it twice as much.

I Think I'm in Love with an Alien by Ann Aguirre

The second alien romance I've read by Aguirre now! She really puts thought into her alien worldbuilding and bodybuilding, including the sex, it's not Ice Barbarian vibes, and I really appreciate that! This was a fun romp of a book largely set at an alien convention, with characters I enjoyed and interesting conflicts and just a generally good time. However, the very big caveat is the ending, which is abrupt and left a lot of things open! I think Aguirre was leaving some sequel bait, but I don't know if those sequels will ever appear, so the fact that both some plot and character things were left hanging was very sad for me. Still, up until the point where there should have been an extra chapter or two, this was a delightful romp if you want to give alien romance a try.

And Shall Machines Surrender by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Continuing my good luck with sci fi novellas this year! This is an odd and fun read that I'd rec for readers of Aliette de Bodard, or who liked the concept of Malka Older's "women solving mysteries in space in novella format" books but found them rather bloodless. I will say I liked the first half, with tense exes solving a mystery togther, better than the second half, where everything got very high-stakes and ... well, can't say the exact twist I wish hadn't been there even if it earned itself (it was fine! Just a narrative thing less to my taste), but there was a twist I wasn't hugely into. Still, this is apparently a series, so I may keep an eye out for more Sriduangkaew in the future.

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino trans. William Weaver

There's a certain irony to reading this book in translation, to start, given much of it hinges around a Rogue Translator. However! Read this one because a friend remembered it being formally interesting from high school and then another friend read it and said "yeah, it hasn't aged gracefully but it is formally interesting," so then I had to give it a read! And, uh, oh boy, it sure hasn't aged gracefully, I will say that, I was wincing over the treatment of women and then close to the end there's one particular section that appalled me just SO badly. However, the interesting form and the strangeness of it did make it worth the read for me! I'm definitely at a point in my reading and writing where I like to read interesting forms and POVs, less so I can steal them and more so I know what's possible, and this one did get my brain working.

The Moth Keeper by K. O'Neill

Graphic novel I ran across and read in one indulgent gulp! This one was really lovely, the soft art, the worldbuilding, the beats of quiet that showed daily life, the characters. It feels at this point like the trite thing to say that something "cozy" reminded you of Miyazaki, but in this specific case, it's less the plot and more the way the narrative makes space and beats to show the characters existing in and enjoying the scenery, or other quiet moments that aren't part of the action. A soft read on a summer's afternoon.

The Paris Match by Kate Clayborn

I always forget how competent Clayborn is until I'm reading her! She gets such Romcom covers, especially this one, but she's a proper romance novelist, and that feels tragically rare these days. For a minute I was going "sigh, are we doing a grumpy/sunshine thing" but no, we weren't! We were getting two adults with scars who felt like fully realized people stumbling into something good! With a side bonus of a respectful portrayal of disability and chronic pain! Was this book perfect? Nah. Was the setup particularly to my taste? No, to the extent that I almost didn't read it in the first place. But did I end up enjoying it perhaps more than any romance I've read so far this year? I did!

And that's all for this time! Next up: more catching up on Emma M. Lion, and who knows what else, summer's a great time to indulge in reading.

I did some traveling and had a couple work days with a lot of presence but not a lot of activity, so this one went very fast!

To Cage a Wild Bird by Brooke Fast

Gift from a friend, who I think has a friend of a friend of a friend kind of relationship to the author. It was ... fine? Dystopian new adult book about a world where prisoners are hunted for sport. There's a mysterious guard who keeps helping our heroine out, our heroine got herself thrown into prison because her brother was put there unfairly and she wanted to protect him, it pretty much hits all the expected beats. Likely would not have finished if it were not a travel book, to be honest. It's somebody's book but it's not really mine.

The Gentleman and the Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide

I did like this, but based on the cover copy it did bring up the question "is this actually a gothic, or is it set in a house?" I think by the end there were enough gothic elements to justify the mention on the cover copy, but I'd call it more of a country house murder mystery (was just discussing with friends the other day that those genres tend to involve similar tropes and set-ups but have different protagonists). It also is set in a magical version of England, and that's fine, I respect it, but society and history were just different enough that I started feeling annoyed Ide hadn't just built a new world, but just the same enough that I think I would have felt annoyed if Ide HAD built a new world. I think, all being as it was, given the point of doing magical historical England is the buttoned-up and confining social structures, I'd rather have had a whole new world so I didn't have to figure out how and why everything got so queer-normative. (Also an artifact of this: this book starts out being about marriage settlements between two parties, where because the gentleman is queer with no interest in women it becomes a matter of discussion how to provide stud services, but ALSO he's an attractive matrimonial prospect because he's quite magical and the upper classes rather breed for that? Which there's a brief mention of, but it should be a huge deal! Why isn't it a huge deal!!) There was a lot of good in this, and I think I'd try more Ide, I'd just love to see her stop straddling lines (gothic/not, our world/other world) and really dig into something.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman trans. Ros Schwartz

A weird book that I enjoyed a whole lot, actually. Surreal and sad and quiet, not interested in giving answers to people who want them. I don't have much of anything to say about it, but I like reading earlier specfic by women writers, especially who might not have conceptualized it as specfic. It's not like LeGuin, but I think if you like LeGuin you might like this.

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

It seems to me like I really like Shaffer's ideas, but I don't really like her executions. There were a lot of good things about this, characters I liked, an interesting concept for a story, but it could never quite get its tone right. It's a portal fantasy, but the setting and the setup don't quite match the fantasy world, which is slightly justified by the text but I'm not sure is justified enough by the text, if that makes sense? And there's a narrative intrusion throughout from a storyteller, but it was clumsily done and by far the worst offender on the tone thing. One of those books that made me just itch to rewrite it. As with the Fast above, this must be someone's book, but as it's written, not quite mine. I liked The Wishing Game much better, it still had the concept-execution gap for me, but the gap was at least smaller.

All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan

By all rights, I should not enjoy these books as much as I do. I don't really like most of the subgenres this series pays homage to, nor do I like tongue-in-cheek takes on subgenre homage in general. However, Brennan is very good at what she does, and there's enough of an intense and blistering emotional core here to fight through things that a lesser author wouldn't be balancing well enough to keep me involved. This series has, for me, the Pratchett ability to deeply love something and also want to very much make fun of it: Evil Book Boyfriends, dark fantasy, fandom and self-insertion into fiction. However, it leans more towards homage than parody, even while it manages to be funny. Hm, reading this review, I feel like it pairs well with The Locked Tomb? They're very different writers, but there's something about that balancing on the knife's edge of funny and gutting. I'm nervous about how Brennan will bring this home, but I trust her, so I'm willing to give it a go despite the ominous title announcement that the trilogy will conclude with Kill Your Darlings.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Found it on an epistolary rec list! This one was a joy, funny and clever and just poignant enough to make up for the fact that it's extremely aware of its own cleverness. Also a bit of a parable on living under an authoritarian state that didn't feel too real in the LEAST, why would you ask. Apparently somebody made a musical out of this and I desperately need to know more.

A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

The second Mandanna I've read, and I officially enjoy her! A cut above many of the current trend for witchy romcoms, especially this one, which I found better than the debut, I liked the romance better and the stakes felt high and the worldbuilding interesting. The background zany characters who get themselves involved in everything are much like Crusie at her height, though with significantly less of Crusie's humor. I look forward to more from Mandanna!

The Fall That Saved Us by Tamara Jerée

I saw this cover copy and I went "hmm, this is someone who cares deeply about Good Omens" and then I read a chapter and I went "Ah! I was mistaken! They care deeply about Good Omens and ALSO Supernatural." And then, to Jerée's credit, after a few chapters I went "Ah, someone who cares deeply about both of those canons and also has some Problems with them." Angels-and-demons fantasy is never my favorite kind, but as it goes, I did end up liking this one a lot, especially when it was about breaking free of your abusive family even if they're on the Side Of The Light. Not sure I'll read the sequel if and when that comes, though, so let that temper the review!

The Name Game by Beth O'Leary

Spoilers within for this one in particular!

O'Leary's one of the more interesting writers in the contemporary romance/romcom space right now, but hers are sometimes hit or miss for me. This one, unfortunately, was a miss, and it was because she sort of hoist herself by her own petard! See, O'Leary likes playing around with expectations by doing things with timelines and POV and any number of other things, so when we had two Charlie Joneses writing in their respective journals and then also 3rd-person POVs from a Charlie and a Jones as they respectively go by, each of those sections narrating a failed or failing relationship with an Aspen and an Oliver, I went "ah, I know what's going on here. Even in 3rd-person POV, we have unreliable narrators, and what's happening here is that they are exes who are pretending and staying VERY much in character pretending that they don't know each other, neither of them is named Charlie Jones." And I was half right, neither of them was named Charlie Jones! It's just that the 3rd-person POVs WERE a Charlie and a Jones. And while it did make more sense in retrospect, I was so charmed by the PG kink of "pretending I don't know my ex because we're both lying about our identities even to the point of pretending in my diary" that I was disappointed when it didn't turn out to be that. It would have been very, as the kids on tumblr and sometimes the AO3 would say, freak4freak. Anyway, if I hadn't been looking for The O'Leary Twist I might have liked it better, but I was so I didn't.

Island Summer by Hazel Wilson

A little children's book from 1949 to fulfill a bingo category for my town's bingo, about a family from Colorado spending a summer on a Maine island. I spent a lot of this book thinking about how I miss episodic fiction! There were some little threads that added up to an exciting episode, and the main character grew up a bit, and that's really all the book needed, mostly it was just snapshots of a summer. Also can tell Wilson has spent some time in Maine because there were times with the Local Characters I could hear my grandparents talking in the way Wilson wrote dialect, which was lovely and nostalgic for me. Not a great book, perhaps, but it will absolutely do for "20th century Maine fiction."

And that's all for this time! Right now I'm struggling through an ebook that's just good enough that I'd feel guilty abandoning it, but maybe I should take the fact that I'm even having that debate at all as a sign and read something more compelling instead.

It's that time again! Had some good ones and some medium ones and some forgettable ones, as usual.

Sunward by William Alexander

A really interesting sci fi novella that I wanted more of when it was done! A spaceship courier who raises AIs (the current LLM kind of "AI" is briefly referenced but these AIs are the more traditional sci fi sort, I'm continuing to be fascinated by the ways AI in sci fi is going to change and bend around the general distaste by authors for LLMs, someone's going to be able to write a banger dissertation on this shift in a few years) loses one, and goes on a tour of the previous ones she's raised to try to bring her back when it's thought to be impossible, and also AIs are being shut down or effectively lobotomized due to plot events. I liked this a lot! Still chewing over it.

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

I've seen this mentioned around, and it is a good history of textiles for the layperson! The chapters could sometimes lose focus, but that's a small quibble. I learned things about fiber, I learned things about history, I learned things about fiber history! I feel like this review is coming off like I didn't like it, when I really did! I just don't have anything to say about it, it's an oft-recced work for people who are interested in fibercrafts and their history, and I can see why.

Gnomon by Luchia Dertien

So, I loved this Les Mis fic back in the day! Dark and fun and angsty and thrilling. And everything that was in the fic is in the origfic version! But, uh. Everything that was in the fic is in the origfic version. There were, I think, two flashbacks inserted into this book, and I think Eponine and Courfeyrac were conflated into one character, and a few character backstory details were changed, but other than that ... the character names were changed. But unfortunately, that just made it a reread of a beloved fic no longer available on the AO3 where I had to go the annoying extra step of find-replacing everybody's names in my head. The thing with publishing fanfic is that you have to go in and add more character depth, because when the love interest in this story is Enjolras, one has the depth of canon and fanon to add to him and understand him better, but when the love interest is Delaurier, there's less of that softening sympathy so I was screaming at "Renaire" to get out in a way I wasn't in the fic. And also when you are publishing specifically Les Mis fanfic, you have GOT to condense your Amis. When writing fic they have to be there, if you're just missing Bossuet or Feuilly people will wonder why, but in a supposedly original work? They have GOT to be combined, or it's just a bunch of barely-there characters. Anyway, there were a lot of small changes that could have been made to make this stand alone better, and I'm sad that the distraction of this made it both an unsatisfying fic reread and an unsatisfying novel read.

An Admirer by Megan Derr

One of Derr's early and indulgent works, and thus one I enjoyed more than some of her more serious recent ones! Overworked mage student starts getting secret admirer gifts and also interacting with a warrior student who he's having some sparks with, and there's a little twist on the expected beat that made me do a surprise grin. I could have dealt with it being longer, but that was just because I read this on a sleepy day and I wanted more indulgence!

The Crystal Tree by Louise Platt Hauck

A family member's got a fondness for novels of this era (1935), so I grabbed this for her in a vintage shop and read it myself. If you've got a high tolerance for things that are Products Of Their Time, I did have fun with this, but I do know that's a MASSIVE caveat. Particularly there's one black character who sure is written in dialect Badly, and also some very serious ableism going on (in a mid-book twist, our heroine is a sole support of a family who her father's bad investments ruined, including their young lady daughter who is painted as having a disability that's essentially learned helplessness, and who is spoiled, vain, and manipulative. It's not great). However, I was also rather charmed by the fact that this is in many ways a found family story well before one thinks of that as a thing! Young woman wishes to rent a house but can't afford it, is advised to advertise for roommates, finds another young lady and two young men and an older lady to chaperone them, nesting and drama ensues. I am fairly sure I have read this fanfiction before, and if I haven't, I might have to write it if I can find the right fandom.

Take Back Magic by Casey Blair

Blair can be a bit uneven for me--I'd say her writing skill is always about the same, to be clear, it's just that sometimes she writes things I'm super into and sometimes she writes things I'm meh about, and her writing isn't good enough to change my mind on the things I'm less into (though it's still good! Just takes particularly good writing to make me have patience for subgenres I don't often do). So, this was urban-ish fantasy, which isn't always my jam, though the portal fantasy aspects DID work for me. I'm likely to read the rest of the series, but not super quickly or anything, just as I think of it.

The Sacred Space Between by Kalie Reid

A fantasy romance that, thank goodness, did not read as Romantasy. It is a bit patchy, though! Things I liked: the ~vibe, the romance between the hero and the heroine, the reveals of things as they came out, the concepts around the religion (thanks to my D&D game I'm a huge sucker for Sainthood Shit). Things I liked less: worldbuilding not really gone into in any depth, some reveals that felt a bit cheap, massive powerful cultural structural force dismantled by one (1) act of arson and the death of one (1) bad guy. Also, oh boy, there sure were some anachronisms. This was clearly meant to be a Medieval fantasy, but it was one where the narrative used a metaphor about a time bomb, with indoor plumbing including hot water, and where organs and I think even pianos existed. Removing any of those would not have taken much effort and would not have thrown me out of the story! Overall I'll be looking out for more from Reid, though, I suspect she's the sort who might improve with more seasoning as opposed to get worse now that she's not a debut author and doesn't have time to iterate extra drafts of things. (Truly it's a hard balance to strike.)

Taji From Beyond the Rings by R. Cooper

I always mean to read more Cooper, and when I discovered that they had a sci fi romance, I had to dive in! This one was a lot of fun, very tropey, some worldbuliding, some politics, some Romance, overall a good time if you like your sci fi romances rather indulgent and with a good amount of Action on the side. I will say that throughout I was deeply stressed by the way our viewpoint character kept processing through high-stakes political and linguistic problems just ... in public. In front of enemies. And getting accusatory about it quite often. It was a character choice by Cooper, and the character was only embassy staff because he was dragged into it when the previous staff was killed, but damn, nobody gave this man even a LITTLE bit of political training, including his boss who he's theoretically assisting but mostly actually hampering for most of this book. However, the difficulties of translation of cultural concepts in this book were SO fun for me.

The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel

Sci fi novella about a group of people who want to be the first to see rain on Mars. This one was interesting! I enjoyed the format (long-form article/essay by one of the people on the trip, interspersing narrative of the trip with the narratives of a few people and why they chose to come along), and some review on the cover said it felt Chaucer-ian and it's not too far off the vibe, really. I will say that a few of the backstories felt samey in kind of a weird way for such a short novella? But maybe the point of that is a bit that "the kind of person who wants to go on this kind of mad expedition is likely to be a burnout from a previous life with some trauma around drugs, family, and/or religion," so I might be being unkind to Kressel there. Anyway, I had some food poisoning and a stressful day yesterday and this was the perfect evening antidote to it.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End by Kanehito Yamada illus. Tsukasa Abe

Manga (actually the first I've read!), and a gift from a friend who knows I'm into D&D! This was quiet and sweet, and I like stories that deal in various ways with elvish lifespans and this is all about that, which is cool! I don't have a ton to say about it, because a volume of manga can be lovely but also because of the illustrations doesn't take a ton of time to get through. I'm always hesitant to buy graphic novels and manga because they take me so little time to read in comparison to the money one spends on them, but I do hear this one's being released as an anime so maybe I ought to check it out?

That's all for this time! I've got some travel upcoming, so probably there will be some airplane books coming up soon.

I think six of these books have been read in the past week and a half? I went through something of a stuck spot for a while there, but I'm back in the habit again, at least somewhat! Having an easier time with ebooks than paper ones at present, maybe because I keep having reading time when I'm away from my bookshelves and haven't been reading paper books that fit in my purse.

The Husband Gambit by L.A. Witt

This one was a contemporary queer marriage of convenience story that was pretty good! A bit of a Cinderella story, to some extent, dealing with the "prince" in the situation's shitty family (including his horrible homophobic father who is trying to move from a Hollywood producing career into politics, and that didn't hit home at all!). It had enough going on that it didn't quite use all of it to the extent I could have wished, but I did enjoy the ensemble even if they weren't used super effectively at times. Not one I'll remember long, but not one I regret reading either.

Earth Earls Are Easy by Catherine Stein

One suspects Stein may have thought of the title first and based not just this book but what seems to be the setup for a series on it. But for all that, I had a good deal of fun with this one! I have run across, now, a few books in this wildly specific genre of "societal structures etc. are old-fashioned but it's set on Mars" (a book that was basically Chalet School only on Mars, this one, and one I haven't yet read that seems to be like WWII evacuees in Britain on Mars), and frankly I love it? More of this? This was basically a Victorian (I wouldn't say Regency, I'd say pretty solidly mid-to-late Victorian) romance novel, just set on Mars, and without the pretty historical costumes. A bit of an action romance, think more the type where there are spies and shit than just social dramas. Not always as graceful or deft as perhaps it could have been, but frankly I had a great time with this one so I don't really care.

A Legionnaire's Guide to Love and Peace by Emily Skrutskie

I really enjoyed this one! This was a fantasy romance that did a lot of things I really enjoyed with worldbuilding (cool magic system that had some implications and myth stuff I'd have loved to see more of), shockingly well-researched battle tactics (using the Roman century model), had a whole plot point about building a road, and above all else for me, is about the aftermath of defeating the Great Evil and mopping up the smaller evils in its wake and seeing what will get built in its place. The romance was sweet, but really not the part of things that I enjoyed most--not that it was in the least bad! I was just too busy enjoying the other aspects to really get swept in by it too much. (Which can also sometimes be a danger of a friends to lovers situation for me where all of the moments of building trust and affection happened off-screen before the story began.)

The Connection by Kate Simpson-Shaw

A little bit of sapphic contemporary fluff that I picked up when it was either quite on sale or free recently. It was sweet, not much to say about it! There was a minute there when I thought we were going to go WAY more gothic than the bright pink cover implied and do some sapphic incest business involving one of the love interest's sisters romantically pining for her, but that didn't end up happening (even if it would have made more sense, weirdly, than where Simpson-Shaw tried to take things). Not that I mind it being exactly what it said on the tin, but that was my thought process while I was reading!

The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer

I really liked this! Books about books, you know? Eccentric author of a children's book series who hasn't published one in a while has written a draft and has summoned four people to take part in a contest for ownership of the draft, all four being adults who while children ran away to his private island that's a mirror of the one from his book series. Our heroine desperately needs the money to adopt a small boy she's bonded with, and our hero is the illustrator of the author's books. It's maybe not the deepest or most gorgeously written version of this story, but I just really liked it! A sweet thing to read right before a really stressful week!

The Great Balance Series (A Lady of Vision, A Scholar of Beauty, A Thief of Treason) by Jen Lynning

Reviewing these all together, because I've read them all in the past week, though with a book in between books two and three! Read an introductory novella to this world a year or two ago, and saw this was either on sale or free at some point so I picked it up! I keep wanting to be more excited about indie fantasy romance the way I was a few years back before it got Super Trendy and thus picked up a lot of Tropes That Have To Be There, and I liked this a lot more than I've liked a lot of what I've run across recently--I mean, obviously, to the extent that I finished the series! Mostly I like the worldbuilding mechanics in this, that there are prayer-magics that can be invoked to create certain effects but that have to be balanced by equal and opposite effects (for instance, a minor character in the second book traded the beauty of her lovely singing voice to become physically beautiful, but there are also technological uses, the second book is the most fun for those). I liked the middle best, though the romance was a slightly hard sell for me, but overall, if not exactly groundbreaking, I was just glad to have some fantasy romance that's its own thing without doing the trends too hard. Also, the novella in this series is pretty much required reading, FYI, it's not in this bundle but I think it's free on the author's website?

Not Another Family Wedding by Jackie Lau

Contemporary romance I don't have a ton to say about! I always appreciate a romance where the couple explicitly does not want to have children, plus there's an abortion in the heroine's past, which is VANISHINGLY rare. However, I was a little irked by both the hero and heroine clearly not wanting to have kids and having been friends for a long time but them not telling each other that being pretty much the main thing keeping them from committing for 2/3-3/4 of the book. People don't always communicate perfectly, obviously, and if they did it would make for boring books, but that miscommunication didn't work so much for me. Mostly I was really invested in the heroine and her family as she and her sister struggle through something and as she assimilates the failure of her parents' marriage and the ways they failed her when her sister was born.

The Painted Crown by Megan Derr

I'm going to say: I think I discovered Derr's earlier work first, maybe, and was charmed by the inexpert indulgence in it, and keep reading her newer work when I want the sheer indulgence and not quite finding it as much as I wish I could. Is this objectively better than some of the earlier works by her that I read? It very much is! There's fun politics going on, some sharpshooter rescue mission stuff happening, this and The Engineered Throne are both actually really solid fantasy romances. It's just that I picked it up hoping for Absolute Fluff and I shouldn't have, Derr's recent work has too much range for that! I should keep her in mind for fantasy romance cravings that don't succumb to the Trends I mentioned above instead of Absolute Indulgent Fluff now. (Though I do need to find a new supplier of Absolute Indulgent Fluff, apparently.)

That's all for this time! With a work break coming up week after next, I'm hoping I'll be back with another one of these sooner rather than later.

Here we are again! Normally I would do this tomorrow, but tomorrow is looking like a busy day, so here we are!

Music

Keeping up with my weekly song recs with my sister! "It Gets Funkier" by Vulfpeck has been on my brain a lot, as well as "Caledonia" as sung by the New York Vocal Collective. Plus, thanks to a "guess the musical theater song" blog on tumblr, "Du maste finnas" as sung by Helen Sjoholm.

Movies

I watched part of one singular movie, the 2003 live action Cat in the Hat. Mike Myers was absolutely dreadful, attempting to be Robin Williams and failing utterly at having his charm. Painful to view. I was guiltily glad when my babysitting evening ended before we could get more than halfway. But yeah, there are movies I want to watch but my brain hasn't been doing them. Someday!

TV Shows

Much longer list! Keeping up with The Pitt, 9-1-1, 9-1-1: Nashville, Animal Control, and High Potential. Watched the rest of season one of Farscape but haven't continued it, for no good reason, my brain just hasn't gone for it. Only eight episodes from finishing Elementary. I watched season one of Heated Rivalry (enjoyed it but am slightly baffled what people are writing so much fic about when it felt like a really complete story to me), season four of Bridgerton (much better than s3, which I think was the weakest outing so far), season six of All Creatures Great and Small, and Seven Dials on Netflix because I love a Christie adaptation. Oh, and I've watched two episodes of Pluribus, which is amazingly well done but A Lot, which is why I've only seen two episodes. Phew! Lots of shows!

ETA right before posting: Antiques Roadshow!!! How could I forget?

Other

Not a ton here! Keeping up with Make Some Noise on Dropout but haven't done much of their other programming lately (I'd love to have the brain to watch some of the Dimension 20 I desperately want to watch, but those episodes are So Long). Keeping up with the usual YouTube channels but not a ton of nw ones. Playing a bunch of internet games, which I don't think I've talked about in this section before? But at this point I've picked up an impressive roster of puzzles that I play most days: Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, Connections, Squaredle, Raddle, and recently cluesbysam. Got to keep my brain busy through the horrors, I guess!

I also saw two pieces of theater over the past couple of months! I saw the National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa, which was fun and bright and colorful and fast-paced and a bit overacted for my taste in a lot of places (it was fun! They were doing it on purpose! It was a directorial choice and they played it to perfection! Just not the choices I would have made), but the Aunt Augusta was PERFECT. I will say that I always forget the brother reveal at the end and it sure does make queering this show awkward, at least they leaned more on the women for that. The other was a local production of a lesser-known play (not going to say what it is, sorry, no idea how many places put this show on in a given year and don't really want to doxx myself), which was a really fun night and a deeper show than I expected it to be from the summary! Some really cool staging and a fun set in a black-box-esque theater, and a show that tried to say some things and succeeded like 75-80% on it.

D&D

God, what was I even up to in D&D three months ago. Wait, I can answer this! I literally posted a recap like two weeks ago! Our paladin got some gender-affirming care, that happened early on. And our warlock decoded a language that implies people are living on the Ethereal Plane, which was previously considered sterile. Then we did another hell, which was Bad Thing On Bad Thing (investigating a weird abandoned cult town! Preventing new gods from being created by the cult town's energy! Fighting a scary extraplanar creature! Finding a baby on a mountainside! Relationship struggles!). Following that, there was some courtship and some quicker things and the discovery that a guy they've met before in fact is one of the people from the Ethereal Plane.

And then they went to the Underdark, and with my players' full consent, I violated one of the strictest and most beloved rules of D&D and I scripted a bunch of scenes! They were going to visit the party's boyfriend's family, and he has a large and complicated family and they really wanted to lean into the drama so I just ... wrote a play? And we all took a few characters and acted it out and had a marvelous time! And then back in improv-land they had to find a missing teenager who was being preyed upon by monsters that force you to listen to your deepest insecurities, so it was very fun to throw that emotions bomb onto the players, we're still dealing with some fallout from that.

Creative Projects

I have been doing very well with writing and medium well with other things!

Writing: I started off my year with an edit of one of my original works. You know, if you follow these posts, that I spent a good chunk of last year, and a bit of the year before if I recall correctly, absolutely miserably struggling with an edit that didn't want to happen. And then I got to this one and it practically edited itself in six weeks into a much stronger book. I don't know what possessed me but I would fucking LOVE for it to happen again, holy shit. Then once that was done I had a D&D play to write, see above, and I've done a bit of fic since then (D&D summary, accidentally wrote a 9-1-1 episode tag, currently writing some D&D porn). Overall, feeling consistent and good about my writing so far this year!

Crafting: Less consistent on this so far, since I've been sinking all my attention into D&D and an edit. However, the big news is that I finally finished the Tortall map! I'm really pleased with how it came out, I'm not always the most precise of stitchers but I'm really glad I put the time and energy into this. Now I'm in the slow process of mocking up a new dress pattern, and I need to move into higher gear for that because the past few years I've had a new me-made dress for me to wear for my birthday in early May and I would LOVE to make that happen. Right now the bust is giving me conniption fits, got to figure out how to fit that better. Also, I'm missing having an embroidery project on the go! Got to think about what to do next.

Things I'm Looking Forward To

Media-wise, I'm looking forward to the ends of the seasons of the shows I'm watching, for sure, including Pluribus when I'm feeling brave! I really want to have some movie energy, I want to watch last year's Superman movie and The Testament of Ann Lee seems really interesting and stranger and I want to watch it VERY badly.

For creativity, I've got two Fandom Trumps Hate fics to write and I'm looking forward to getting to those (well, the first one, second person hasn't prompted me yet), and then I'll see where the wind takes me! More D&D porn, probably, but still interested in more Tortall and 9-1-1 fics, and the first edit this year went so well that I'm looking ahead in the series ...

And that's all for now! What should I watch to replace Elementary when I finish that? I like to have a show with a decent amount of episodes to default to when nothing else is new or interesting. I do have a couple seasons of Murder She Wrote sitting around, at least, but I'm feeling uninspired about it. Usually I'm doing those default-y shows with my mother, and our tastes don't overlap on much but murder mysteries and Leverage, but if you've got a genius idea, lay it on me!

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.

Reading fairly speedily! Definitely fell off a little on having quite so many that are relevant to my interests as the first post, but I'm also doing really well at taking control of my TBR shelves after I got very overwhelmed by them.

If the Boot Fits by Rebekah Weatherspoon

I like Weatherspoon, I always forget that and then I read one of hers! This was a fun little Hollywood Cinderella retelling, nothing very deep, but an enjoyable winter read if you're into that kind of thing. Though really the Cinderella of it all is done within the first couple chapters and then it's just a man being very besotted and the woman being unsure if it's a good idea. Weatherspoon has such an interesting tendency to have minor characters that feel like she's setting up other romances or checking in on past romances that then don't exist--the love interest's brothers have books about them, but there are at least two other couples in the book where I was baffled to find that she hadn't written books about them nor did she seem to intend to.

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

A reread, though from long ago! Someone from work very kindly gifted me a copy, so I reread it, of course, and I really do enjoy it a lot! There's a lot of fun worldbuilding, I love it when stories have music in them intimately, and everything is allowed to be a lot messier than I feel like YA can sometimes trend to (which sounds wrong, YA is very messy as a genre, I just can't phrase it better than that right now). Anyway, this has made me want to read more Hartman, especially since I hear good things about Tess of the Road, so I'll look out for more from her!

The Djinn Waits A Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan

I think I read this after reading someone's review of it here on DW? Anyway, I can be hit or miss on books that swap back and forth between timelines (which is annoying because it's So Fucking Common), but I did like this! I think it carried it off with more grace than they sometimes can. Overall, this book wasn't centered on my loves and interests, but it was interesting, and I like reading books set in warm places during the cold of the winter. This sounds lukewarm, maybe because I read it on a day I was really sleep deprived, but I did like it a lot!

Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin

Continuing my periodic goal to read more LeGuin! This one's a quiet story, as LeGuin is so good at, a coming of age with LeGuin's usual really solid worldbuilding. This is one where I don't have much to say, it's just a solid read! You've got to go into it remembering LeGuin doesn't care to do things at the Genre Standard (which seems obvious to say but somehow I find it strange every time even if I like it) about pacing and density of plot, but it's worth it.

Isn't It Bromantic? by Lyssa Kay Adams

Contemporary romance. It was ... fine? I appreciate when writers take a stab at a contemporary marriage of convenience, but that was really most of what it had going for it. To be fair, it might have been unfairly contrasted with the watch I'd done of Heated Rivalry just a few days before? But really it just felt like it was trying to do Jennifer Crusie, with the zany ensemble and idiosyncratic bits (and maybe Crusie in her co-writer era due to the random action plot it spawned at the end), and just got nowhere close to her charm.

At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard

I have to be in the right mood for Goddard (mostly a mood where I am willing to deal with the author having Two Special Boys Who She Loves Very Much And Everyone Loves Them And Says How Cool They Are), but I was in the right mood and I was having a stressful week and needed some self-care, so I went cozy. It was the right choice! Goddard's books, at least in this particular sub-series, are very long and incredibly indulgent, but they rarely feel long while I'm reading them. Sometimes I end up rolling my eyes when once again it gets hammered home how little self-esteem Cliopher has vs. how much other people esteem him, less because it's not realistic (I know many people this is true of) and more because even when I'm in the mood for The Author's Special Boys there are limits, but overall, it was the right book at the right moment for me. (One note from me on this series: the variable timelines and time stuff drive me NUTS. It's a useful tool for an author but it keeps disorienting me rather than bringing me deeper into the world.)

Swept Away by Beth O'Leary

I like O'Leary a lot! And I like this book a lot, I always forget that I love Survival Stories until I'm in the middle of having a heap of fun watching people problem-solve in emergency situations. Some of the family drama stuff in this one worked less well for me, but the overall concept and relationship development? A joy to me. Also, I want an AU on this vague concept in literally every fandom I"m in, thanks.

Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

I wish I could remember where I'd run across this rec. I picked it up because my library ebook service had it and I'd seen it on a list at some point. It's a YA fantasy, must have been published when Gail Carson Levine was trendy just judging from the marketing of it. It had its good points! Some interesting worldbuilding, and it really was a coming-of-age story. I kept being torn, because on one hand the heroine was fat and that's wonderful and novel, but on the other hand there was so much focus on it, and she did get starved somewhat at some point so she was Still Sturdy But Less Fat, and just overall how that whole thread was handled was uneven for me. Like, product of its time, but still. The worst aspect of this was the romance! No build-up, shortcuts with dream stuff, hard to believe for me. Like, I knew as soon as he was mentioned that he'd be the love interest, but it was done with no grace whatsoever. The whole romance could have been cut from the book and it would have been stronger for it.

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

This is someone's book for SURE, but it's not my book. I took it for a spin because there's a dinosaur-riding cowboy in my D&D game, so the dinosaur rodeo of it all here was a fun concept, but this was only like 30% dinosaur, and then 70% backstories for rodeo characters and explaining this dystopian late-20th-century world. If I'd known going in that the dinosaurs were a time travel thing (with Strict Rules) rather than an alternate history thing or a bioengineering thing, I might not have tried it, for some reason that made the whole thing way less fun for me. But it no doubt makes it more fun for someone!

Mistakes We Never Made by Hannah Brown

I skimmed this one hard and frankly only finished it because I knew I was almost done with a book post and wanted to get one out. The concept was interesting to me (two people who have almost been something many times over the years end up on a road trip together hunting down their friend who might be becoming a runaway bride), but I found both the characters incredibly unlikeable, especially our narrator. I don't think I'll be reading any more from this author.

That's all for this time! Next time, maybe I finally get to the most recent Alix Harrow?

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.

Wrapping up the three traditional New Year's Day posts with my favorite, where I get to look back on what I made this year and how it all went for me! I made more than I could have, especially given how awful this year was at times, so I'll absolutely take that, and happily.

( Not a bad year for any of it overall, though original writing did suffer a bit! )

2025 sure was a hell of a year (derogatory), but here's to making things despite it!

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.

Here we are again with the end of the year! As ever, don't really do any year-long trends with these, and the writing and crafting wrapup for the year will be in its own post, probably sometime later today.

( My usual, with a digression about a major subtitle fail on the PBS Great Performances Twelfth Night. )

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!

A bit over a month this time, but since it was my busiest month of the year I don't think that's too bad. Phew! Also, finally back down to only 20 books in my possession that are unread, and I'm hoping to take a chunk out of more in December (as well as hopefully getting a blackout in my town's book bingo despite a couple categories I'm unenthused about, I do not really want to read a book about gardens or gardening, nor am I thrilled by the category "sports or leisure activity") so if and when I get more books over the holidays I won't feel overwhelmed.

( Finished the Baum Oz books at last! A couple good romances and a bunch of eh stuff. )

And that's all for this time! Nothing terribly wonderful, but given the busyness of my life over the last month, I don't really mind.

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!

Up to 100 books at last! This group went at a decent speed, anyway, and maybe I can keep that momentum up. I'd really like to, anyway! This is quite a mixed group, and it includes two Oz books and my second sci fi novel in verse of the year.

( Someday I'll get a new book into my top ten for the year )

And that's all for this time! Hopefully you will see me again before November.

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!

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Tales from the Loathly Lady

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