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lady_ragnell) wrote2025-11-25 05:36 pm
lady_ragnell) wrote2025-11-25 05:36 pm
2025 Books, Post 12
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.
Sorcery & Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevernmer
A reread for my epistolary reading! That did fall rather by the wayside, but I did want to get this one in. It's a formative read, the reason I did several letter games with a friend in middle and early high school, and I'm still terribly fond of it. Nothing much to say, but if you like epistolary, Regency with magic, and romances where the people involved exasperate each other to no end, it's a very fun read. I was never as fond of the sequels, I think there's even one I haven't read.
Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The last of Baum's Oz books! And he went out as weird as he arrived. There was some fun problem solving, some weird tangents, Baum's ever-present fondness for disregarding his worldbuilding when it's convenient and continually saying nobody in Oz is evil and then scrambling for villains, generally just a very Oz-y Oz book to end on, and also early on made me screencap something for my collection of Reasons Dorothy And Ozma Are Super Straight Together. (Mostly that's been illustrations, this might be the only text screencap I made.)
Rough Around the Hedges by Lish McBride
The second in a series that I'm continuing to enjoy! A good balance of sweet and angsty for what I'm in the mood for these days, with found family I can largely actually buy and some fun magic worldbuilding. If you are often disappointed in witch romance as I am but want to keep trying it, might be worth a shot! This is friends to lovers and our heroine grappling with her emotionally abusive father who she is never required by the narrative to forgive, there are some misunderstandings and missteps but none that felt overblown or like relationship breakers to me, just generally a solid outing. I'll be looking out for more in this series!
Hold Me by Courtney Milan
Milan also really knows how to write a romance that gets me! This had a delightful You've Got Mail-esque plot, and the hero was a very hard sell for me for a while but did end up winning me over, and once again, the misunderstandings and missteps got solved in a way that felt real and right to me and like this could work out long-term, which is good! It's amazing how often that doesn't happen, especially in enemies to lovers, where so often I end up going "you two are going to fuck hard for six months and then break up." So overall, good, and not at all shocking given I know Milan knows what she's doing!
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The yearly Dracula Daily reread has ended! As ever, very enjoyable, and truly a pinnacle of the epistolary/found document style of book, I want a thousand more like it and not like what it's become in the cultural conversation.
The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong
This is a cut above a good amount of the cozy fantasy I've tried and either abandoned or finished out of obligation! It still has some problems (the invention of the fortune cookie was a bit much), but this one found the midpoint between modern cozy fantasy trends (small business, found family) and older light-hearted fantasy trends (episodic adventursome romps) pretty well overall, I think. Didn't super grab me, but not one I'm sorry to have read, either, and had some fun elements I enjoyed a lot--often the more serious ones, alas, that I wish it could have leaned into! The biggest disappointment is quite spoilery, unfortunately, but when your heroine spends the book on the run from a shadowy organization that presses people into service ... maybe you should let them be as shitty as that implies instead of trying some kind of last minute turnaround into This Has Nuance Actually. A book that was good moment-to-moment but where the implied geopolitics and larger goings-on were Messy.
The Secret Life of the Universe by Nathalie A. Cabrol
A survey of potential astrobiology, exoplanets, and the general state of SETI! I've got a fondness for SETI research thanks to Carl Sagan's Contact, and thus I was interested in the survey, even if I am dubious about most of the possibilities put forward. But who knows! Either way, it was an interesting read, and a worthy survey to put together when I feel like most people's ideas of SETI are very different from what they actually seem to be doing these days. Some of the speculations towards the end about transhumanism and other similar things getting invoked did turn me off hard since I associate them so much with tech bros these days, but the earlier chapters were cool, anyway.
Pas de Don't by Chloe Angyal
This is a contemporary romance that cares deeply about Australia, particularly Sydney and its environs, and cares even more deeply about the beauty and pain of the ballet, and even more deeply than THAT about how fucked up the culture in and around ballet can be and is. With all of that, it cares rather less about the romance, where the principals largely care about each other ... because she walked in on him in the changing room, I guess? I liked the characters and the people around them, but the romance pretty much just made me shrug, and the writing wasn't good enough to stop me skimming the sex scenes. I see that Angyal's written some nonfic about ballet, and this was her first fiction, which might explain some of it? But I'm not sure if I'll read the other two books she's written in this series to see if her fiction writing has grown since this one.
Earls Trip by Jenny Holiday
Well this ... wasn't terribly good. I skimmed large portions of it. It's really a pity, I liked Holiday's rather Hallmark-inspired contemporary romance series, but I won't be continuing this one! Contemporary romance authors really need a crash course in why you can't just project modern attitudes back into history. By which I mean I am SO sick of "wow, this 1821 heroine is soooo modern, she doesn't wear stays if she can help it." And also there was a whole thing in this one where the heroine was vegetarian-verging-on-vegan and it's just very hard to buy that in any kind of real way. Any genuinely interesting element of the story was largely ignored or moved on from way too quickly.
I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin
Another one I skimmed a decent portion of. I was afraid this one would be rather woo, but at least it largely wasn't that. However, it was covering a HUGE amount of material, aspects of music and health that are incredibly broad, with incredibly broad kinds of studies and implications, and as a result the whole thing felt rather scattershot and unfocused. Still, if you want an overview and don't mind a bit of name-dropping and lack of focus, it's not a bad option. If you're going to read one book about musical science, though, it can't beat out Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia.
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.
Sorcery & Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevernmer
A reread for my epistolary reading! That did fall rather by the wayside, but I did want to get this one in. It's a formative read, the reason I did several letter games with a friend in middle and early high school, and I'm still terribly fond of it. Nothing much to say, but if you like epistolary, Regency with magic, and romances where the people involved exasperate each other to no end, it's a very fun read. I was never as fond of the sequels, I think there's even one I haven't read.
Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The last of Baum's Oz books! And he went out as weird as he arrived. There was some fun problem solving, some weird tangents, Baum's ever-present fondness for disregarding his worldbuilding when it's convenient and continually saying nobody in Oz is evil and then scrambling for villains, generally just a very Oz-y Oz book to end on, and also early on made me screencap something for my collection of Reasons Dorothy And Ozma Are Super Straight Together. (Mostly that's been illustrations, this might be the only text screencap I made.)
Rough Around the Hedges by Lish McBride
The second in a series that I'm continuing to enjoy! A good balance of sweet and angsty for what I'm in the mood for these days, with found family I can largely actually buy and some fun magic worldbuilding. If you are often disappointed in witch romance as I am but want to keep trying it, might be worth a shot! This is friends to lovers and our heroine grappling with her emotionally abusive father who she is never required by the narrative to forgive, there are some misunderstandings and missteps but none that felt overblown or like relationship breakers to me, just generally a solid outing. I'll be looking out for more in this series!
Hold Me by Courtney Milan
Milan also really knows how to write a romance that gets me! This had a delightful You've Got Mail-esque plot, and the hero was a very hard sell for me for a while but did end up winning me over, and once again, the misunderstandings and missteps got solved in a way that felt real and right to me and like this could work out long-term, which is good! It's amazing how often that doesn't happen, especially in enemies to lovers, where so often I end up going "you two are going to fuck hard for six months and then break up." So overall, good, and not at all shocking given I know Milan knows what she's doing!
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The yearly Dracula Daily reread has ended! As ever, very enjoyable, and truly a pinnacle of the epistolary/found document style of book, I want a thousand more like it and not like what it's become in the cultural conversation.
The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong
This is a cut above a good amount of the cozy fantasy I've tried and either abandoned or finished out of obligation! It still has some problems (the invention of the fortune cookie was a bit much), but this one found the midpoint between modern cozy fantasy trends (small business, found family) and older light-hearted fantasy trends (episodic adventursome romps) pretty well overall, I think. Didn't super grab me, but not one I'm sorry to have read, either, and had some fun elements I enjoyed a lot--often the more serious ones, alas, that I wish it could have leaned into! The biggest disappointment is quite spoilery, unfortunately, but when your heroine spends the book on the run from a shadowy organization that presses people into service ... maybe you should let them be as shitty as that implies instead of trying some kind of last minute turnaround into This Has Nuance Actually. A book that was good moment-to-moment but where the implied geopolitics and larger goings-on were Messy.
The Secret Life of the Universe by Nathalie A. Cabrol
A survey of potential astrobiology, exoplanets, and the general state of SETI! I've got a fondness for SETI research thanks to Carl Sagan's Contact, and thus I was interested in the survey, even if I am dubious about most of the possibilities put forward. But who knows! Either way, it was an interesting read, and a worthy survey to put together when I feel like most people's ideas of SETI are very different from what they actually seem to be doing these days. Some of the speculations towards the end about transhumanism and other similar things getting invoked did turn me off hard since I associate them so much with tech bros these days, but the earlier chapters were cool, anyway.
Pas de Don't by Chloe Angyal
This is a contemporary romance that cares deeply about Australia, particularly Sydney and its environs, and cares even more deeply about the beauty and pain of the ballet, and even more deeply than THAT about how fucked up the culture in and around ballet can be and is. With all of that, it cares rather less about the romance, where the principals largely care about each other ... because she walked in on him in the changing room, I guess? I liked the characters and the people around them, but the romance pretty much just made me shrug, and the writing wasn't good enough to stop me skimming the sex scenes. I see that Angyal's written some nonfic about ballet, and this was her first fiction, which might explain some of it? But I'm not sure if I'll read the other two books she's written in this series to see if her fiction writing has grown since this one.
Earls Trip by Jenny Holiday
Well this ... wasn't terribly good. I skimmed large portions of it. It's really a pity, I liked Holiday's rather Hallmark-inspired contemporary romance series, but I won't be continuing this one! Contemporary romance authors really need a crash course in why you can't just project modern attitudes back into history. By which I mean I am SO sick of "wow, this 1821 heroine is soooo modern, she doesn't wear stays if she can help it." And also there was a whole thing in this one where the heroine was vegetarian-verging-on-vegan and it's just very hard to buy that in any kind of real way. Any genuinely interesting element of the story was largely ignored or moved on from way too quickly.
I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin
Another one I skimmed a decent portion of. I was afraid this one would be rather woo, but at least it largely wasn't that. However, it was covering a HUGE amount of material, aspects of music and health that are incredibly broad, with incredibly broad kinds of studies and implications, and as a result the whole thing felt rather scattershot and unfocused. Still, if you want an overview and don't mind a bit of name-dropping and lack of focus, it's not a bad option. If you're going to read one book about musical science, though, it can't beat out Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia.
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.
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Garden-related rec which I think you might like: Anna-Marie McLemore's Wild Beauty, if you haven't already read it.
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I have read the McLemore! Absolutely gorgeous writing in that one, I should really read more from the author at some point.
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