Book 95: Keeper's Pledge by JL Merrow

This is a sequel to Poacher's Fall which is closer in scope and length to a novel, but isn't quite long enough to manage all of the different elements it contains, in the end.

Four years after the events of Poacher's Fall, Danny has been the groundskeeper for Philip's lands while also continuing to have a relationship with him, basically in the plain sight of all the servants. Philip's cousin, who will inherit his estate at Philip's death, comes to stay for Christmas, bringing along his wife, her sister and his younger brother, who is a fairly obvious fop at Cambridge. Meanwhile, Danny's younger brother is acting out and is quite suspicious of Danny's relationship with Philip.

The book is torn between being a novel of country manners and almost melodrama, with Danny and Philip both misunderstanding each other's intentions multiple times, and a couple of decisions that ignore pragmatism in favor of 'romance' in a way that I found both hard to believe and hard to sympathize with, oddly. I still enjoyed it, but I kept wanting the narrative to zig when it would zag.

Grade: B

Book 94: Poacher's Fall by JL Merrow

Another historical novella set in the post-WWI era, this story has so many things I like: class differences, someone getting injured and being nursed back to health (wrong time period, but it made me think of Austen), a young man drawing another man out of his melancholy shell. Philip had been the withdrawn and unhappy lord of his manor ever since his 'close friend' from Oxford had died of the flu after having survived the war. He's forced to engage with someone beyond his servants when Danny falls out of a tree after poaching rabbits on Philip's estate in order to feed his mother and four siblings.

There isn't a lot to this story beyond the setup, which I actually liked - it's not that complicated, and neither of them need to have long drawn out arcs. They're two people who needed to find one another for very different reasons, and it's lovely to see them make each other happy.

Grade: B

Book 93: To Love a Traitor by JL Merrow

I bought this book because it takes place during the Christmas season, I really liked a contemporary m/m romance by the same author, and it's a post-WWI novel and for some reason that setting is really hitting the spot for me right now. I understand why a lot of people find the parallels between now and various terrible points in history to be frightening, but for me there's something oddly comforting about recognizing the fact that humanity has always been a work in progress.

Anyway! This book is about a young man whose brother was killed on the front in potentially suspicious circumstances, and he rents a room in a house under a fake name because the main person he suspects was at the root of it all lives there. George (real name Roger, although the narration never refers to him as that) had been a conscientious objector before being moved into intelligence work due to his knowledge of German, and his post-war mission gets a bit complicated when he starts to fall for Matthew, who makes it quite clear that he returns his affections.

I loved the developing relationship between George and Matthew, and the world they lived in together, and the grief and underlying tension of George's actual aims built up and then resolved in a very satisfying way. I would have liked a bit more passion and emotion expressed in the actual consummation of their romantic relationship; it didn't quite live up to the emotional connection between the two of them. I felt it could have used perhaps another chapter or two to really settle into the resolution. But overall I enjoyed this book very much.

Grade: B 

Book 92: My True Love Gave To Me by Ava March

Yet another m/m Christmas book, but this one is a Regency! It was fine, although I have to say that I want more Christmas flavor from my holiday-themed romances than this one provided. Thomas and Alexander meet at Oxford and begin a secret affair. It isn't Alexander's first experience with another man, but Thomas is new to it all, and having a hard time coming to terms with his desires for me. Alexander sets up a special night for the two of them at his father's empty hunting lodge, but at the last moment Thomas panics and leaves Alexander there and then flees to New York for four years. Now he's back in London and hoping for a second chance.

This book is fine for what it is, which is basically a long drawn out question of "can Alexander forgive Thomas for hurting him deeply over something that is a rational concern and dilemma for a gay man in the early 19th century?" There's no misunderstanding or explanation that can make it hurt less, or be less understandable in many ways, so it's just a matter of seeing how and why Alexander can forgive him, and whether they've both matured in ways that make a second chance seem plausible. The book mostly succeeds, in that I'm happy enough as a reader to believe that this time these two crazy kids will make it, but the resolution winds up feeling just a bit too easy, in the end.

Grade: B

Book 91: Winter Knights by Harper Fox

This book was like if you took contemporary gay romance and put it into a blender with A Christmas Carol-type ghosts who Teach Someone Important Life Lessons and also Arthurian myth. Given that I'm a fan of all three of those things, I enjoyed it, even though none of the individual themes or plot devices worked quite the way I wanted.

Gavin and his partner Piers had been dating for three years when Gavin decided it was time they spent Christmas together as a couple. But Piers is devoutly Catholic and hadn't reconciled his faith and his sexuality, and when it came time to tell his family he was in love with a man, he instead broke up with Gavin. Gavin took that extremely well and decided to go out into the snow to search for a clue for his thesis on a historical basis for King Arthur while out of his head on migraine medication. He gets rescued by Art and Lance, two hot gay guys who also bear a striking resemblance to the mythical figures Gavin is trying to ground in fact, and well. They teach him a valuable life lesson about himself and also gay sex because why not.

I don't know! I enjoyed this book in the same way I've enjoyed a couple of other books by the same author: while I read the story I'm all in, but as soon as I can take a step back from it I have no idea how or if any of it works. There's a confidence about the writing that just makes it easy to go along with stuff that in the hands of a weaker writer would fall completely flat, which is definitely a compliment, but also Gavin and Piers never really feel like a real couple to me, so their eventual reunion and new appreciation for each other doesn't quite land. But at the end of the day, it was a satisfying gay Christmas romance for me, so it did its job.

Grade: B

Book 90: A Midnight Clear by Emma Barry

I bought this book assuming that it was set in 19th century Britain, and in fact it was set in post-WWII Annapolis. Apparently when I see the words 'naval romance' I jump to conclusions. However, there was a lot I enjoyed about this romance between Frances, the Admiral's daughter, and Joe, a midshipman who flies planes and may be the only man in Maryland who isn't chasing Frances to curry favor with her father.

I don't usually like stories about men who fall in love from a distance and then do everything they can to pursue a woman, even when she says she isn't interested, because she's saying no for the 'wrong' reasons. But this one is written with a very light touch, and Joe is both so likeable and clearly a good match for Frances in a lot of ways, so it grew on me. Unfortunately, the one major problem is that Frances is quite clear from the beginning that she doesn't want to be a Navy wife - she saw what her mother went through living that life, and after her mother died, she ended up performing many of the same duties for her father. Given that Joe is committed to being a naval man, that's a fundamental incompatibility between them in terms of what they want from their lives and what they're willing to sacrifice, and while the book convinced me of their love for each other, it didn't really convince me that Frances didn't end up sacrificing her own desires to accommodate her desire to marry Joe. It felt like the kind of romance novel conflict that just ends up being magically resolved, which is the same thing as saying it wasn't resolved at all, and so either it wasn't truly the dealbreaker the character said it was, or a happily ever after is much harder to believe. I still liked the story, and I want Frances and Joe to have a wonderful marriage, etc., but it felt a bit too pat for me.

Grade: B

Book 89: A Pint of Beer, a Bag of Chips, and Thou by JL Merrow

I bought this book because it's set during Christmas and is by the author of Muscling Through, which I really enjoyed. I wasn't disappointed by the quality of the writing, or by how charming I found all of the characters (including a mom and three aunts who are all busybody matchmakers), but it's much more of a short story than it is even a novella, and what I wanted most from this story was more. It felt like the beginning of a story between the young hot punk busker and his financial district silver fox rather than a complete arc, and I wanted to know where things would take them after their Christmas Eve tryst. Definitely planning on checking out a couple of other books by this same author this month, and hopefully they'll be a bit more satisfying.

Grade: B

Book 88: Due South by Tamsen Parker

This is one of those books that is clearly going to work really well for some readers, but oh boy, it did not work for me. It's about a crazy office affair between two employees who end up stuck working over Christmas, and it involves lots of things I like reading about: voyeurism and exhibitionism! sexual self-discovery! the interplay between fantasy and real life desire! But for me at least, it felt unrealistic while also missing the mark on being pure fantasy, and as a result it didn't work for me. Lucy and Evans are supposed to be having this wild sex adventure together, but they both feel too aware of why having sex in the office kitchen or in the copy room is a terrible plan for me to believe that they would do that. I kept wondering why on earth they didn't just go someplace with a bed and sleep together there.

Add in the fact that I found their backstories fairly uncompelling and this book was a miss for me, unfortunately. I enjoyed a standalone book by this author, but I'm going to give the rest of this series a pass, I think.

Grade: C

A Reboot of Sorts

Hi internet. Since the last time I posted on this blog, some things have happened. Specifically, the thing that I had been afraid of (and had started this whole reading project in response to) actually happened. And as it turns out, I'm very bad at focusing on unknown narratives when it feels like the real world is collapsing around me, so I spent five weeks mostly rereading Dunnett and classic fics from fandoms that felt like they would never hurt me.

I am probably going to need to retreat to old fandom favorites a lot in the foreseeable future, and I'm definitely planning on spending a lot of the Christmas seasons rereading my favorite Merlin and Harry Potter holiday fics, along with the annual Yuletide bounty. But this past week, I also wanted to read a bunch of Christmas romance novels, and so I did, and that reminded me that as much as I want to keep diving into fic for narrative comfort, I also want to read new stories about new characters, too. And I don't want to track my reading in exactly the way I did for most of this year, not least because at the moment I don't have the same kind of naive faith that at some point in the future Everything Will Be Okay if I can just distract myself until we get to some arbitrary date. Which I think is actually a good thing, overall, and not because I'm now convinced that the future holds nothing but pain and suffering and everything is pointless. It's more that life has always been some level of bad, and it will continue to be some level of bad, and the only thing I can do is work for the things I believe in with my time and money and energy, while also enjoying the things I love and making life at least a bit better for the people in my life, to the best of my ability. And part of that is reading books and learning and discovering new things, because for me that's one of the best parts of being alive. I don't want to try to use reading as a means of counting down to a potential moment in the future again; I just want to focus more on doing what I can each individual day, and less on what might or might not happen later, for better or for worse.

Having said all that, another thing that I love is having a goal, and I also really love numbers and tracking things. So I am maintaining one key aspect of this blog: I'm still keeping track of how many books I'm reading, and I still have an overall goal -- two, actually. The first goal is to read 100 books by the end of 2016, and my second goal is to read 104 books in 2017 and to be all caught up with books I own by that point as well. I currently have 48 books left on my to-read list, and I'll probably get at least 4 books as Christmas presents, which means that in 2017 I can also buy a new book a week and still potentially reach both the 104 books read goal and be completely caught up by 2017. And an average of 2 new books a week is both far more reasonable in general and also means that I'll have enough time to reread old favorites when I want to. This plan also makes it easier to dive into reading some of my remaining 48 books that are the start of series, because now if I read the first book and am then desperate to read the next one, I can without feeling like I'm messing up the plan by adding new books to the list!!! Most importantly, I feel excited about reading again, and like I have a project that's just about doing a thing I love. 

So! I've read five Christmas novels/novellas/short stories this week, and posts about them will go up later today. I have enough time off over the next two weeks that I should be able to read eight more books by the end of 2016, and then I can start 2017 with a much more reasonable goal of reading two books per week. Here we go. 

Book 87: Totally Killer by Greg Olear

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

Man, this book inspired a whole lot of conflicting feelings for me, which isn't that surprising, given that it's a bit of a mishmash in terms of genre. It's a novel about events that take place in New York City in the fall of 1991, and a big part of the experience of reading it for me was the feeling of nostalgia and just recognition of that point in time. It's a deliberate period piece, with references to specific brands and cultural touchstones and political events in practically every sentence, and it's a look back on Gen X culture when they were the twenty-somethings discovering the world. I am either the youngest of Gen Xers or the oldest of Millennials, depending on which cutoff date you use, and so Gen X culture is baked into my experience of life and how I view the world, even though it was also something adult and unreachable for me. I learned what it was to be adult by watching Gen Xers though, and this book really drove home a lot of those unconscious lessons. 

But what is the book actually about, you ask. Well, that's part of where my conflicted feelings come in. The story is about a girl, Taylor Schmidt, who moves to New York in the fall of 1991 and is murdered about a month later. The book's POV is her roommate, who's kind of obsessed with her and who reads her diaries and in general I found pretty unsympathetic, especially since we know from the first chapter (possibly even the first page) that Taylor is beautiful and young and perfect and also dies, and I am not actually that interested in stories about women with that plot trajectory, especially when told by a male protagonist. That's not my kind of thriller. However, the story is also a satire, and the story of why and how Taylor gets murdered involves an employment agency that has a secret method of getting its clients new jobs: there are too many baby boomers holding onto positions, so the only way for Gen Xers to get their foot in the door is to kill them off. I still wasn't totally sold while Taylor was shocked and horrified by how she got her job, but then she killed her first mark and loved it and suddenly Taylor became a character I cared about.

So basically: I don't care about beautiful young women who are killed and are viewed as objects before their death by POV characters, but I care a lot about a woman who decides that murder is the way to go. The end of the book holds together better than I thought it would, even if the twist made be a bit grumpy for similar reasons, but it was also remarkable reading this book, which was written in the late 2000's about the early '90's, and reflecting on the fact that the '90's will not die, politically or otherwise. Also it reaffirmed something I've been feeling a lot during this reading project, which is boy do I not give a fuck about what men think of women. So this book did well for me to get past that reaction at all, but I probably wouldn't have finished it if I didn't know the author. I'm glad I did, though. It was better than the setup suggested.

Grade: B

Book 86: Bound by Blood and Sand by Becky Allen

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

I have been looking forward to reading this book for years, and oh man, it did not disappoint.

The setting of this story is a magical desert world in which the wells are running dry. Our heroine is Jae, a member of the Closest caste, people who were cursed and enslaved by the Avowed in the aftermath of a long ago war. She discovers that she has the magic needed to restore the power to the Well and therefore save the world, but she must figure out how to do so while also freeing herself and her people from slavery.

One of the things that I love about this book is that while it deals with massive, overarching themes and stakes (oppressive power systems and how to overthrow them without destroying your own humanity!), it does so by focusing on the lives and experiences of individual characters and pulls you through the narrative that way. Jae is such a recognizable and yet specifically drawn character; she is the heart at the center of this story, but she can't do it alone, and she makes choices that result in consequences she couldn't have predicted, and those consequences matter in real and irreversible ways. She goes from having no control at all as a slave, to having a power so strong she must to struggle to learn how to control it.

Part of what's so satisfying about her journey is that it's a classic hero arc, both in the superhero "with great power comes great responsibility" mold and also within high fantasy world building and storytelling. Each step of her story feels inevitable and right at the moment it happens but not a second before, because the story builds both on each of the choices made within the narrative and on the greater fantasy traditions of how magic and power work. I couldn't have told you how this book would end at the halfway point or even with two or three chapters left, but once we arrived there it all slotted together like a puzzle. It's a magical system that makes sense intuitively as each piece of it is revealed and discovered, and the specific terms within the world (the Closest, the Avowed) become natural and anchor the reader to the larger history of the universe.

BBB&S is the first in a two book series, and the end of it does feel like the reader has just enough time to catch their breath. The hard work has only just begun for Jae, but I have no doubt at all that she's up for the challenge ahead.

Grade: A

Book 85: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

This book is the first in a four book series exploring a lifelong friendship between two women living in post-war Napoli. Elena, the narrator, is constantly in the shadow of Lila, her closest friend who at times depends on Elena more than anyone else in her life and at other times deliberately and sometimes cruelly pushes her aside. But they never seem to stop circling around each other.

The book's framing is that of an older Elena looking back on their relationship through the years after Lila has deliberately made herself disappear. It focus on their childhood and teenage years, on their experiences in school together and romances and adventures. By the end of the book it feels startlingly clear that they are each other's great loves, and whether that would express itself in a sexual and romantic relationship in another place or time seems like an open (and obvious) question. It is the sort of close friendship between women that instinctively leads to the "do I want to be her or be with her" question, and I'm curious to see how that question will evolve (or not) in future books.

The writing is exceptional in its simplicity; the translation from the Italian feels so natural and easy, and reading it takes no effort at all, except for when it digs into feelings that are so sharp they almost hurt. It's very much an experiential novel, where what happens is less important at times then how it's told.

One other fundamental aspect about this book is what it is to be a girl and then a woman in this world, and the implied reflection on those realities from a distance. Part of this is surely down to the political environment of being a woman living through the 2016 U.S. Presidential race, but I found myself getting so angry on behalf of these girls so frequently, simply because their experiences feel so truthful to me. Sometimes I feel like the real struggle of this year is watching all of the euphemisms we've relied on to soften reality get torn away, and while I think it's important for reality and pain to be exposed and dealt with honestly, at times it's hard to see that through the rage I feel.

Grade: A   

Book 84: Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

This book was sold to me as being similar to Game of Thrones, only the main contenders are teenaged girls who happen to be sisters. And this book (the first in a two book series) isn't not that, but it's both better and more frustrating than that summary, for me.

Each queen of the realm gives birth to three daughters, who all usually have one unique power. They are separated from each other when young and raised within the city that celebrates that power. The poisoners have been in power for many generations now and are determined to keep it, but Katharine, the poisoner heir, has never shown any aptitude for her power. Neither has Arsinoe, a naturalist who should have an animal familiar and a gift for the hunt. Only Mirabella, the elemental heir, has demonstrated her power of controlling the four elements. But of the three, she's the least enthusiastic about what is demanded of her: to kill her two sisters, or to be killed, for much like Highlander, there can be only one.

I liked a lot of stuff about this book - the different kinds of magic were really interesting, and the three heirs pulled me along in their story and made me root for each of them. But that was also part of what's odd about the universe for me: even beyond the three heirs, the society is nominally matriarchal, with goddesses and priestesses and men who are seeking to be the eventual queen's consort with no expectations for any power of his own. And yet the three heirs are controlled and ruled by everyone and all of the constructs of the universe, even while having vast overwhelming powers. I get that part of the point of the story is to examine the paradox of the most powerful people having the least power, but it just made me mad. And there are a couple of plotlines involving romantic partners that also frustrated me, for similar reasons.

Still, it was a compelling and engaging read, and I'm curious enough about how the author will (presumably) upend the universe in the sequel that I'll definitely buy it, but mostly it's a book that I enjoyed but always wished was just a little different.

Grade: B

Challenge update!

Well, four weeks ago I was very optimistic about how I was doing. At that point I had 50 books left to read in about eight weeks, which was pretty crazy but still felt at least theoretically possible to me. And then I got sick for about a week, and work blew up, and I got sick again, and most of all the election cycle got to a point where I basically found it impossible to focus on reading. So now it's 26 days until the election (THANK GOD), but I actually have 53 books to read, because I'm in a book club and so have added a few titles to the list, and clearly I am not going to manage to read two books a day for the next three and a half weeks.

So! I have revised my goals. The short-term goal is to reach triple digits in books by Election Day, which means reading a minimum of 17 books in the next three and a half weeks - ambitious, but doable, especially since I'm halfway through two books currently. I think it's especially achievable since the other thing I realized this past week is that I basically can't try to read anything that's too dark or sad or deals with certain subjects in realistic subjects until after I know that we've all done our civic duty and saved the republic. So like, I'm not reading the novels set during WWI or WWII, or that I know end badly and instead am focusing on the lighter books still on my list for the next four weeks. I am saving all of the darker for after the election, a time when hopefully I will be able to breathe a bit easier and live inside a fictional or historical hellscape without triggering nightmares in my reality.

Once I hit 100 books, I'll still have 36 books left to read, and at that point my goal will be to finish all of those by Christmas, so that I can receive books as Christmas presents on a clean slate. The numbers work out so that I need to read approximately 5 books a week until Christmas, which is obviously quite ambitious, and will require me to find my focus again. But I think I can do it, and it certainly would be helpful for me to spend less time on twitter and more time reading especially right now. So let's see how I do :D

Book 83: If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo

I finished this book about two and a half weeks ago, and I've been putting off writing a post about it since then because I'm still so frustrated by it. I wanted to be able to write a positive post about it, and recommend it to people, because what's good about this book is worth reading and valuable and important to be out there. But the bad stuff is so bad that it colors my entire experience of the book, and that's just a shame.

If I Was Your Girl is a YA novel about a trans girl written by a trans woman. Amanda, the main character, had been living with her mother before her transition, and moves to another town to live with her father after she transitions in order to start a new life. I really like the character of Amanda, and a lot of how the story is told; it alternates between her present life in her new town and her past experiences as a child and as a teenager before her transition, including a suicide attempt and an attack in her old town that is part of why she left to live with her father. The book is set in the South, and the descriptions and depictions of life resonate and feel authentic to me, as do Amanda's experiences in a support group for young trans people.

When she moves to live with her dad, she finds friends and also a boyfriend, because while in a lot of ways this book is a deliberate examination of how terrible things can be for trans youth, it's also wish fulfillment and fantasy. Amanda passes easily in a town where no one knows here, and she's beautiful and smart and can draw, and she attracts a nice boy and a good group of female friends and a weirdo friend who was in her art class, and that's where the whole book falls apart. Because her weirdo art class friend is bisexual, and Amanda confides in her, and the bisexual friend both falls in love with her and then betrays her, because that's what bisexuals do. And so even within this narrative that is giving a life and depth to a trans character that we don't often get in books, we see the most cliched, the most hackneyed, and the most damaging stereotype of bisexuals played out in a way that's both narratively lazy and offensive. I am so fucking frustrated that a book that could be so valuable is instead so hurtful; I find it incredible that no one in the entire process of publishing a book like this didn't sit back and say hey, this doesn't need to happen this way. We don't need to give the world yet another evil bisexual character in order to give our heroine a compelling storyline. This book was already attempting to do something quite tricky, namely create a trans character who simultaneously is unbelievably privileged and lucky but who also suffers from essentially every single one of the Worst Nightmares that a queer character can undergo (rejection, public outing, threat of violence, threat of sexual violence, suicide attempt). Having the plot turn on Bisexual Betrayal on top of all of that made the entire story collapse, and as much as I genuinely do want to be able to excuse it, I can't. We need more books about trans characters, written by trans authors. But this one sadly doesn't cut it.

Grade: C

Book 82: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I have no idea which class I bought this book for, or why I never read it in high school or college. It has been one of those books that I've moved from apartment to apartment for all of my adult life and yet had never gotten around to reading until now. 

This book is about a man named Okonkwo, a leader in a Nigeria village during the period of British colonization in the late 19th century. I found it to be a really hard book to read, both because of the depiction of the missionaries taking over and dividing the people of his village, and also because the treatment of women within the community really upset me as well. It felt completely devoid of hope, and was very much one of those books that I came out of understanding its importance and significance without having enjoyed the experience of reading it very much. I know that not all literature is intended to leave the reader feeling good, but this isn't the kind of novel I'm particularly interested in reading at the moment, given the state of things. Another book I think I read too late, or at least at the wrong time. 

Grade: B  

Book 81: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

I bought this book five or so years ago after seeing the movie based on it, The Eagle, which is a movie that literally makes no sense if the two male leads aren't in love with each other. I had heard from others who had both seen the movie and read the book that the book is differently gay from the movie, but still pretty gay. I am here to report that this is indeed correct.

The Eagle of the Ninth is about Marcus, a Roman soldier in Roman Britain whose father had also been a centurion in Britain. His father went north of Hadrian's wall with his legion (the Ninth) and never returned, losing the standard of his legion (the Eagle) in the process. After Marcus is injured and discharged from duty, he goes to live with his uncle and decides he needs to buy Esca, a British gladiator, to be his body slave. When he finds out that there are rumors of the Eagle being seen north of the wall, he decides he has to go get it himself.

I think the most interesting part of this book is seeing exactly what the movie changed about the story, and what it does to the narrative. The biggest change is that movie!Marcus is significantly dumber than book!Marcus. Book!Marcus is concerned with his family's honor, and he goes on a quest that is fairly foolish, but he has a plan, and before they leave he frees Esca and the two of them are genuinely friends for the entire hunt, which makes the entire journey significantly less dumb. Marcus is also much more a part of Britain in the book; he has friends and connections with people beyond Esca, and he understands British people and also falls in love with a girl who he wants to marry after they return from the north (spoilers!).

On the whole, I enjoyed reading it, although I don't think I would have stuck with it at all if I hadn't already seen the movie. I do wonder what I would have thought of it if I had read it as a child, though, since it's a children's story.

Grade: B

Book 80: Welcome to My World by Johnny Weir

Some autobiographies you read because you don't know much about the subject. Others you read because you're so fond of the subject that you want to read everything about them. For me, this book is squarely in the second category.

Johnny Weir is a figure skater who has had a 'love him or hate him' career. He refused to conform to many of the unspoken standards of his sport, didn't play nice with judges and officials, and had a self-destructive streak a mile wide at times. He was also an incredibly beautiful and accomplished skater who routinely got fucked over in a sport that fundamentally lacks the objectivity of many others.

My sister-in-law gave this book to me for my birthday almost five years ago, and one of the really interesting things about it is how out of date it is as a result. It was written when Johnny had no idea what his post-Olympics life would be like, and so the narrative feels a bit incomplete. That's also because while Johnny did have his triumphs in his career, it wasn't by winning the Olympic medal (or medals) that we're used to judging skaters by. But it's also nice to read his autobiography when it's a bit out of date, because I know how his life has grown and changed in the public eye.

More than anything else, reading this now made me reflect on how much more him he seems now, and how things have changed for him as an openly gay man. Figure skating (and sports in general) still have a long way to go in terms of accepting LGBT athletes, but it's also very easy to see the progress, and to note the shift that has been made in culture.

Grade: B

Book 79: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

One of the challenging aspects of attempting to read a certain number of books per week is that some books are obviously going to take much more time than that. This book is one of them. 

I've read a number of other books by Bryson; his books on travel are delightful and well-known for a reason, and I really enjoyed his short biography on Shakespeare, as well. This book is ambitious on a whole other level. It's a book that manages to be both an overview of a wide number of scientific concepts and also the history of science: how we know what we do (and what we don't know). The focus on how we discovered and expanded upon (and also were proven completely wrong) scientific knowledge gives a context to many scientific principles that I hadn't thought about since I was in high school. His writing is crisp and clear and entertaining, and he is extremely good at telling the story rather than listing dry facts. 

The book was unsurprisingly a combination of a review of things I had once known and a completely new exploration of other topics that I had never learned (or had forgotten completely). Beyond the big names like Newton and Darwin and Einstein, I was fairly unfamiliar with the biographies of many of the scientists who were so influential. One aspect about those biographies that I loved was the revelation of how much we know as a result of longstanding feuds between individuals who were driven by little more than spite. On the other hand, I found myself newly enraged at the constant dismissal of women scientists by their peers and the institutions and organizations of their disciplines for centuries. Bryson certainly doesn't skip over this reality, but it made me want to read a book just like this one that only focused on the contributions of women to scientific discovery that have been neglected and ignored and deliberately hidden for far too long. 

I bought this book almost ten years ago while I was in Germany, but somehow never got around to reading it until now. I'm glad I finally did. 

Grade: A

Book 78: The History Boys by Alan Bennett

I saw this play almost exactly ten years ago on the closing night of its Broadway run. I bought the play soon after, and I also own the movie version (with the same cast), although I've never watched it. It's a play that has stayed with me for a decade, and I was really curious (and a little apprehensive) about what it would be like to read it after so long.

It's amazing how indelible certain performances can be. I can still hear Samuel Barnett saying almost all of Posner's lines, but the rhythm of the words on the page is so crystal clear for all of the characters that most of the time I'm not hearing specific actors' choices, I'm hearing the talent of a playwright who can capture a character in two or three words. The play is about education, and class, and when narrative and surprise is more important (or at least attention-getting) than the truth, and while all of those issues were important and vital twelve years ago when it was written, it feels frighteningly relevant for right now. And yet it's not a play that's about the virtue of truth verses the sham of fiction; none of the characters are without flaws, and some of the most sympathetic characters are in fact the most morally suspect. The only real exception is Mrs Lintott, who is the only woman in the play and also has the least power and influence. This isn't a coincidence.

It's a play and a story that makes me feel a bit like my heart has been scooped out of my chest. It's about being known, and seeing your reflection in the writing of someone else, someone whose words have made it to you across time and without specific direction, but which have hit a bull's eye nonetheless. I think in some ways reading it at the age of 36 hit me even harder than seeing it at 26 did.

The other great thing about reading it is the foreward; Bennett discusses how and why he wrote it, and what was behind it, and while sometimes that can be dangerous, in this case it just deepened my appreciation for it, and for the collaboration and creative process of theater. It made me miss being a part of that very very much.

I also find it fascinating that The History Boys was on Broadway the same year Spring Awakening debuted on off-Broadway and then transferred to Broadway shortly thereafter. They were developed and created completely separately, but there are so many common themes between them, beyond the setting of a classroom. They both make my heart ache.

Grade: A

Book 77: Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

Man, what a great book. This book basically has so much of what I love: a girl who wants to become a knight and so dresses up as a boy in order to become one, plus secrets and friendships and danger and noble self-sacrifice and magic. Also there are twins who switch places because they know better than their father does and I am always here for that sort of Parent Trap nonsense, even though the end result will clearly be very very different. 

This is another YA novel that I really wonder how I would have responded to it if I had read it when I was actually a young adult. Because it's great and incredibly satisfying as an adult, but I'm sure it would have blown my mind if I had read it at 11 or 12. Regardless, I'm super glad I've read it now, and I am definitely looking forward to finishing the series once I complete this challenge.

Grade: A

Book 76: Batman Under the Cowl by Grant Morrison et al.

About six years ago, I started to think that maybe I should get into comics. I watched Batman: The Animated Series when I was a kid, and I liked it fine, but the comics had always been something that my brothers were into and I wasn't. But comics were always something that other creators of things I liked tended to like, and so I thought I would give them a shot. So I bought this because I knew of one of the writers of one of the comics in it, without realizing that it was a comics sampler, more or less.

This means that while there are six issues in this trade, they're all from different runs and involve different Batmans and villains and Robins and all that. Each of them is fine on its own, and I have enough knowledge of the Batman backstories to follow them, but so far what I have found with comics is that every time I attempt to read them, I encounter tropes I love (noble self-sacrifice, secrets, amnesia), but they're rarely the narratives I want about them. It's like the fun house mirror version of all of my favorite things. So like. This trade is fine for what it is, but thus far there's no there there for me in comics. But if I decide to try out comics again in the future, I'm definitely asking my comics-loving friends for specific recommendations on which runs to read, because I know that makes a huge difference, too. I think it's okay to also acknowledge that it just might not be my thing, though.

Grade: B 

Book 75: McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective by James McLevy

This book is essentially a memoir of detective stories, written by an Edinburgh policeman a few years before Arthur Conan Doyle began his medical studies in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century. He was one of the first writers of the true crime genre, and all of his stories are of his own experiences catching thieves at their own game.

I can't claim to be a huge crime writer, and all of these stories are more like vignettes than full proper stories, without a lot of suspense about whodunnit or any of that. The writing is thick and quite a bit denser than modern prose, but it definitely paints a picture of Edinburgh back in the day, and the narrator's pov is clear and distinct. Like a lot of short story collections, some of the stories are stronger than others, but the best of this bunch are really compelling and capture the era for the modern reader. I've been reading a lot of historical fiction written well after the fact, so it was nice to get to read something historical that was written during the time.

Grade: B 

Book 74: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

My grandparents gave me this book when I was ten, and somehow I never read it. I have no idea why I didn't; it's exactly the sort of book I ate up as a child, historical fiction about a girl all alone in the world having to find her way. It's especially perplexing to me since I'm sure part of why they gave me the book is that it's set in a town very close to where they lived, and I loved visiting their house. What gives, ten year old me? It's a mystery.

The good news is that I got to read it now, and I really enjoyed it. It takes place in the mid-17th century and focuses on a 16-year-old girl named Kit, who was raised on Barbados by her grandfather after both of her parents died when she was young. After his death, she leaves Barbados for Connecticut, where her mother's sister and her family live. She discovers that the life of puritans in the colonies is very different than what she had experienced on the island, and is met with suspicion from the outset. This suspicion isn't helped when she befriends Hannah Tupper, the Quaker woman who lives on Blackbird Pond and is shunned by the town.

Even though it's a children's book and therefore I assumed it had to end happily, I actually found a lot of this book quite stressful. Part of that is because I dislike The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter so much, and so any story involving the same issues is going to make me unhappy on some level, even if things end well. Once I got to the end of the story I was then able to reflect on what I really liked about it, and enjoy what it was. I don't know; I think that I would have been better off reading this when I had been younger, because my experience with narratives wouldn't have colored how I read this book. And that's not the book's fault, that's all on me.

Grade: A

Book 73: Creating Flow with Omnifocus by Kourosh Dini

Omnifocus is a task management program that is based on the Getting Things Done system by David Allen. A good friend of mine swears by Omnifocus, and I had read GTD a while ago, and it seemed like it made a lot of sense but would be better for me as a digital program rather than a paper-based one. I bought the Omnifocus program and iPhone app a while ago, but it's the sort of system that is really only useful if you fully commit to putting your entire life into it. I bought this book with the intention of seeing if I was ready for that sort of commitment, and it sat unread on my phone for three or four years until now.

The book does a fairly good job of highlighting both the benefits and the drawbacks of the system. The main innovation of both GTD and Omnifocus is the idea that in addition to breaking down projects into specific individual tasks or actions, each task should be categorized and organized by a context, or what kind of task it is (and what it requires to be done). So you sort all of your phone calls, or everything that needs to be done in a specific place, or all emails, and that way you're making progress on small pieces of multiple projects, without having to switch gears task by task. Basically, it's intended to make easier to accomplish things, by minimizing distractions in moving from one task to the next.

This makes a ton of sense to me instinctively, and I love the idea of having everything written down and organized in one complete system. But I had stopped using the app and had hoped that the book would provide the sort of lightbulb moment that would make me trust it would be worth the initial effort of inputting everything in my life, essentially.

It didn't quite do that; most of the advice and insight on how to use it either seemed totally self-explanatory or was so advanced and complicated that I couldn't for a second imagine myself doing that. I came away still feeling like Omnifocus is probably a great system, but may not be worth it for me. I love lists, but maybe I don't actually need one centralized macro list of my lists. I tend to have a good grasp on what I need to be doing; my issue tends to be less that I forget what I have on my plate and more that I don't always do those things because something else seems more interesting.

Having said that, in the four days since I finished this book, I have been thinking a lot more about the system, and when I think of things I need to do (or want to do), my brain immediately slots them into place within the Omnifocus system. So maybe I'll give it another try after all. If nothing else, this book reminded me of exactly why I found Omnifocus intriguing when I first heard about it, so it did its job.

Grade: B

State of the Union: Ten Weeks Out

Including today and Election Day, I have exactly ten weeks left to complete this challenge. The good news is that I have read 72 books so far! The slightly less good news is that I still have 60 books to go, or six books per week, which would require me to double my current reading pace. That's...not great.

However! There are a couple of factors in my favor. One of the biggest is the fact that I have completed the Lymond Chronicles. All six of those books required much more reading time per book than the vast majority of the other books I read. While I have other dense books remaining on my to-be-read list, I don't expect any of them to be as time-consuming (in part because I don't think that any of them will emotionally destroy me in the same way). In addition, for six weeks this summer I was very busy in my leisure time with watching the Euros and the Olympics, so fitting in enough reading time was even more difficult. While I have no doubt that this fall will be busy, there's no big event like either of those tournaments that should disrupt my reading schedule in that way. Also, the closer I get to actually meeting my goal, the more motivated I will be to keep reading!

My plan at this point is to obviously read an average of six books a week. What that actually looks like is that I have 14 books which I expect to take me a week of reading a bit every day, 30 books I expect to be able to read over two days (while also reading some of the weekly books), and 16 books I expect to be able to read in one day (while also reading some of the weekly books, but not while reading any of the two day books). In terms of hours, I figure I'll have to read about 3-4 hours every day to have a shot at making this happen. My slamdunk goal is to hit 100 books by the election, which would be at the same pace I've been reading all year so far. If I can get to 120, I should be able to complete this challenge by the beginning of December, at least. And if everything goes right, maybe just maybe I'll actually be able to read sixty books in 70 days. LET'S GO. 

Book 72: Our Endangered Values by Jimmy Carter

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wrote this book in 2005 in response to the Religious Right and neoconservatives taking over the government post-9/11 and destroying our moral standing in the world, both home and abroad. It was a fascinating book to read right now, because it's easy in 2016 to think of Donald Trump as being a nightmare unlike any we've ever faced before. While I do think that's true, it's not like GWB and Cheney were good guys, and we shouldn't forget that fact.

It was also really interesting because Carter and I have similar views on most major issues, but we approach them from different angles. A lot of this book deals with how his religious beliefs as a born again Evangelical Christian inform and shape his political views, and it's a remarkably sharp retort to all those who insist that deeply held religious faith is incompatible with liberal politics. If anything, he makes a compelling argument that liberal policies are the natural result of religious moral values, with the emphasis on helping the poor and caring for our earth. His path to those political views doesn't match mine, but it's still instructive to see how different people can arrive at the same conclusion for different reasons.

The other thing that this book reminded me of is why it has taken so much work and effort to repair what was damaged during the GWB years, and exactly why it's so important to keep pressing forward and to do what we can to ensure that government is actually functional and works for people and their lives. I'm happy to have read this book now rather than back in 2005, but I'm also incredibly aware that we're at another huge juncture in our country's history.

Grade: A

Book 71: Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

I keep waiting to read the Southern Gothic urban fantasy YA novel that's going to really knock my socks off. I thought that maybe it would be this one! But nope.

It starts off well enough: Lena is the new girl in Gatlin, South Carolina, and the niece of the notorious recluse - the town's very own Boo Radley. Ethan, a basketball player who's desperate to escape this town after graduation, is immediately drawn to her. Weird stuff keeps happening around Lena: massive thunderstorms out of nowhere, shattered windows, and then it becomes clear that Lena is the same girl he's been seeing in a reoccurring dream for ages and also they can hear each other in their minds. Obviously, it's love.

There's a lot of stuff here that I like, mostly related to the two of them attempting to figure out what their connection is and piecing together their families' histories. Lena's uncle has lots of secrets, as does Ethan's grandmother and great-aunts. I was bored by a lot of the high school drama though, and much of the suspense of the book came from characters deliberately keeping information from each other, and while that was always for Reasons I was frequently unconvinced by them. And then we got to the final climax, and I found it both underwhelming and also frustrating, because of course this was another first book to a series, rather than a complete story. I get why people want to read series of books, and why they're so common in YA in particular. But sometimes I just wish that a story could be done in one book.

Grade: C

Book 70: The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.

It feels like it should be right up my alley: a story about Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White working together to thwart evil and rescue Cinderella's prince. But for whatever reason the writing never grabbed me, and the characters felt flat. I'm not sure if this is an example of a YA novel that just really isn't for me; it's totally possible that I would have loved it if I had read it when I was thirteen. But unfortunately it didn't leave an impression on me as an adult.

Grade: C

Book 69: The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

What a delightful book.

Somehow I made it to this point in my life without reading any Heyer, and it was clearly time to remedy that. I went into this book knowing that it was a foundational text in terms of regency romance tropes and plots and characters, and it was so lovely reading it and seeing exactly how and why it works so well, now and then.

The titular Sophy returns to England from many years on the Continent to stay with her aunt's family while her father travels to Brazil. Her mother died many years ago and she had been on her own, more or less, from a young age, and has the desire to break lots of rules and the charm and intelligence to pull it off. She completely takes over the household and manages to break some engagements and create others, and by the end of the book everyone is happier and better off for it. She is a truly wonderful character.

The one caveat about this book is that it was written in 1950 and is set during 1816, and it includes a plot point involving a Jewish moneylender which is historically accurate in terms of characters' views at the time but which also took me aback. I wouldn't recommend not reading it because of it, but there is definitely no softening or omission of antisemitism in England during the Regency in this book. Even with that plot point, I enjoyed this book immensely though. It was the perfect vacation read.

Grade: A 

Book 68: Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin

I have no idea what this book is trying to be, or what story it thinks it's telling, but what I do know is that it didn't work for me at all.

Our protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl named Jill, who basically turns into a werewolf for four days every month right before her period, only instead of becoming a beast she becomes a boy named Jack. At first the transformation was only physical, but over time Jack develops his own agency and cognitive individuality. So of course what Jill and her mom (and, to a lesser extend, her dad who lives a secret weirdo life in their basement) decide to do is lock Jill up when she becomes Jack and then hypnotize herself when she becomes Jill again so she doesn't remember being Jack at all. "Problem" solved!

In case it's not clear from the above, the gender identity politics and concepts of this story are a fucking mess. What I could never really tell is whether the book is away of this fact, and is planning on addressing them and delivering some message about all of us being a combination of male and female identities and so forth. It became even less clear to me when Jill's crush turns out to be bi, and she flips out about it, and also Jack is obsessed with Jill's best friend and actually seduces and sleeps with her without her knowing that Jack is also Jill. As if all of this wasn't questionable enough, the book is of course the first of two, so while by the end of the book Jill's boyfriend and best friend both know that Jill has a secret, it's totally up in the air about whether the author will stick the landing, or even what landing that would be. And I'm certainly not going to waste my time reading the next book just to find out.

Grade: D

Book 67: Almost a Scandal by Elizabeth Essex

Man, this book is basically everything I want from a regency romance, start to finish.

Sally Kent is the only daughter in a family of naval officers who grew up on her father's ship. When her younger brother Richard refuses to report as a midshipman and runs away to be a pastor, she impersonates him and joins the crew herself. Her plans to remain on the ship and serve as a midshipman undetected are complicated by the presence of one of the lieutenants on the ship, Mr. Colyear, who is a dear friend of her older brothers and seems quite suspicious of 'Richard Kent.'

The setup is fantastic and would always draw me in, but the development of the story and the characters are absolutely wonderful. Sally is an incredible heroine, and the progression of her relationship with Col is pitch perfect. There's a depth to the depiction of life on a ship during the height of England's naval powers that made it easy to be swept away by the story. And characters, both major and minor, are much smarter and more perceptive than they can be in stories involving cross-dressing and deception, and as a result the entire plot feels much more realistic and satisfying than it might otherwise. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and will definitely be reading more by this author in the future.

Grade: A

Book 66: The Cowboy's Christmas by Carolyn Brown

I finally hit a book I would not finish! I bought this last fall because any romance novel that involves a secret baby and an internet romance finally becoming real life and Christmas is going to be worth a shot for me. Cowboy romance isn't a surefire trope for me, but I like it well enough. However, none of the conflict made any sense, I didn't really like any of the characters, and overall it just didn't work for me. And then the main character was gross about what would be appropriate for her baby boy to do when he was nine or ten years old (certainly not write in a journal, since that's just for girls!) and I was done. I'm sure there's an audience for this book, but I am not it. 

Grade: DNF

Book 65: Cut & Run by Madeleine Urban & Abigail Roux

After finishing the Lymond Chronicles, I needed to read something completely different. A contemporary m/m romance between FBI agents who get thrown together to catch a serial killer and hate each other while also feeling an uncontrollable attraction fit the bill nicely.

This was the sort of romance that was almost comforting in its predictability. There's the one agent who seems super uptight and like he would never break rules, but he has a secret tragic past! And the other agent is unpredictable and blase, but actually he's great at his job! The case itself is both hopelessly convoluted and also incredibly obvious; while I don't mind being able to solve a mystery in a book long before the characters do, it makes it a bit harder to believe that they're actually competent at all. There's a bunch of hurt/comfort and the sex is fine, but the POV shifts mid-chapter happened a bit too frequently and without any real pattern, and the entire thing could have been tightened up and shortened without losing anything. Nothing to write home about, but fine for what it is.

Grade: C

Book 64: Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett

Before I started reading this book, my friend who's responsible for me reading this entire series told me that Checkmate reads like Part 4 of The Game of Kings, i.e., the final free fall on a massive roller coaster of emotions. I thought I was prepared for this experience; I was not.

Checkmate was an absolute marvel of tropes and plotting and payoff; there were so many revelations and confrontations and plot twists and acts of noble self-sacrifice and decisions that would have been unforgivably cruel and awful if they hadn't been chosen out of the deepest love. I (and a couple of other friends) have attempted to explain the plots of the first three books in the series to a good friend who will never actually read them, but when I attempt to imagine doing that for Checkmate my brain breaks a little. There's so much that happens, but even more than that, I am still overwhelmed by my feelings about this book, and I finished reading it almost two weeks ago. The delay in writing this post is mostly due to having gone on vacation almost immediately after finishing it, but it was also caused by a near inability to express how I feel about this book.

Part of that is because so many of the events of the book could be absolutely wretched and unforgivable if handled by a lesser writer. Dunnett never shied away from writing about terrible, emotionally gutting things earlier in this series, of course, but in Checkmate she really went all out, and committed to both the tropes of high romance and also the logical and devastating endpoints of plot threads she had put in place three or four or sometimes five books prior. And yet there's so much power and beauty and understanding and love in how she captured everything that all I was left with was a sense of wonder that it was possible to tell a story like this the way she did. She managed to write a novel that makes the characters and also the reader work for every victory, and forces the reader to truly feel every single setback and tragedy, while also giving both the characters and the reader enough time and space for those moments to land. Everything happens at a breakneck pace, and yet nothing happens before it's the right moment. It feels like a weird thing to say, but I spent so much of this series genuinely angry at her brilliance, at her craft and her talent and above all else the joy with which she told this story. She wrote the book she wanted to be able to read, and that comes across in every word of the story.

It isn't just that she told a difficult story well, though. It's that the writing in this book, and in particular its depiction of many different kinds of love, is so heartwrenchingly beautiful it would often make it hard for me to breathe. In general, I don't read books first and foremost for the beauty or poetry of language; I often prefer the simple facts stated plainly. But with Dunnett, it's impossible to separate the two. It's her use of language and her mastery of so many different kinds of storytelling techniques that enabled her to tell such a difficult story and make it all seem inevitable. This is a book that seems headed for disaster and like there's no escape route possible (or at least visible to the reader), until at the very last second when we all discover it was on a road we hadn't known existed in the first place.

I have never been so grateful and relieved to finish a book and so utterly bereft by the realization that I'll never read it for the first time again. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and more.

Grade: A    

Book 63: The Ringed Castle by Dorothy Dunnett

Once again I can't actually write anything about this book that isn't in some way a spoiler, so under the cut it all goes!

Book 62: Secrets of a Summer Night by Lisa Kleypas

The setup for this romance novel set in Victorian England is pretty standard: a beautiful woman from a good family watches her marriage prospects disappear after her father dies and their wealth vanishes. Annabelle is a very likable protagonist, especially since she makes friends with three other women who also can't catch a husband, and their friendship is delightful. The four of them make a pact to work together during Annabelle's last season to make an advantageous match and help her snag the peer she's always wanted. If she doesn't, she will be forced to become a rich man's mistress, something that has already happened to her mother, who would do anything to save her daughter from that same indignity.

Annabelle finds the right sort of peer to trap into marriage, but she's draw to Simon, the son of a butcher who's made a fortune in the financial markets. Will her attraction to this gorgeous specimen of a man overrule her desire for a better social standing? I think it shall.

I found this book very readable, but it's not exactly my kind of romance novel; I spent a lot of it just feeling very frustrated with how dumb the class system was, given that Simon's wealth would secure Annabelle's future and the future of her mother and younger brother as well. He was also supposed to be unsuitable by virtue of being a scoundrel, but he wasn't particularly convincing in that role, and it was impossible to imagine that he was ever going to seriously try to sell Annabelle on being his mistress rather than just proposing to her. I really liked the dynamic between Simon and Annabelle, but I never really believed in the social constraints keeping them apart.

Grade: B

Book 61: Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

This is a biography of Shakespeare that was written as part of a collection of short biographies of historical figures--it is just under two hundred pages long. It might seem odd that such a short work about the most famous playwright in the world could be satisfying or even remotely complete, but of course what we don't know about Shakespeare's life far outweighs what we actually do.

As a result, this book is as much a history of the time period Shakespeare lived during, the methods various historians have used to discover and verify what we do know about Shakespeare the man (and the methods many frauds used), and the history of theatres in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Bill Bryson is a writer ideally suited to this kind of work; he brings the same wit and clarity and beautiful turn of phrase ("Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context": I don't know if I've ever read a better summation of what we know and don't know about Shakespeare) to Shakespeare that he's brought to travel and science in his other books. This manages to be a book that would be incredibly readable and informative for someone who doesn't know much about Shakespeare while also being immensely satisfying for someone with a deeper knowledge of his background and works.

This was just one of those books that I enjoyed reading so much, from beginning to end, and it's another one of those books that I've owned for so long I don't even remember when or how I acquired it. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it now as a result of this challenge. Also, it was pretty interesting to read it while in the middle of reading the Lymond Chronicles, since those are set about ten or twenty years before Shakespeare was born. Having a lot of unexpected feelings about the 16th Century right now.

Grade: A

Book 60: Listen to the Moon by Rose Lerner

This is the third book in Lerner's Lively St. Lemeston, and it's the first one that focuses mostly on what happens in a couple's relationship after they get married. Sukey Grimes and John Toogood are both servants whose livelihoods are affected when Phoebe, Sukey's former mistress, and Nick Dymond, John's former master, get married and no longer have the means to keep them on. John had been happy with his life as a valet, but when a position as a butler for a local vicar is suddenly available for only a married man, he decides to take a chance on their chemistry and asks Sukey to marry him.

I enjoyed a lot of aspects of this book, especially the focus on the working class (although it suffered a bit through no fault of its own in comparison with KJ Charles's excellent book featuring a valet finding love). I especially liked seeing how John and Sukey grew to love each other in a marriage borne out of necessity and a desire for a good living rather than an immediate love match. A bit too much of the conflict or tension in the book could have been resolved much faster if either one of them were actually able to communication with (or listen) to the other; I know that development is part of how their relationship is supposed to grow, but I didn't see enough change, and by the end of the book I felt like they were rehashing the same arguments over and over again, even with the happy ending. I liked both of them, but I wanted to feel more confident in their marriage than I did.

Grade: B 

Book 59: True Pretenses by Rose Lerner

My suspicions were correct: I did in fact enjoy this book much more than the first one in the series.

A large reason why is that the tropes in this one are like catnip for me. Two orphan brothers who have stuck together and survived in the world by running cons? Check. A dark secret from their past that threatens to tear them apart? Check. One last con involving a young woman with a fortune who's in the market to pull her own con of sorts? CHECK.

And on top of that, the specifics of the brothers' background are also really interesting, since they're two Jewish men in a very unwelcoming early 19th century England. Ash, the older brother who's been responsible for his brother Rafe since Ash was 9, originally views Lydia Reeve as a perfect mark for his brother to marry, thereby finally gaining a respectable life. But Rafe doesn't actually want that life, and Ash finds himself draw to Lydia. Meanwhile, after her father's death, Lydia has no access to her fortune until she marries, and when Rafe confesses their plans she finds herself more intrigued than horrified--especially if she can marry Ash instead of Rafe. And from there we have a wonderful marriage of convenience, with both parties denying that there's anything more than that brewing under the surface, and I just liked all of these characters and their imperfections so much. The final conflict and resolution didn't quite land the way I wanted it to, but on the whole I really liked this book.

Grade: B

Project Update: What to do When You’re Not Reading

I created this blog and this project because I wanted something concrete and completely unrelated to national politics to focus on in the ramp up to the election in November, something that I was in control of and had a direct say over. But in 100 days, the U.S. will have either chosen Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump as President, and there are some simple, straightforward steps I wanted to lay out that we can each take to ensure that we elect Hillary Clinton.

1. Register to Vote.

This is the “make sure you put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others” step. Now is the time to either register to vote or to check that you are registered to vote at your current address, and to confirm your polling location. If you may not be in your city or town on Election Day, take a look at what your state’s requirements are for voting by absentee ballot if your state doesn’t allow early voting for everyone. Have a plan for when you’ll vote on Election Day (before/after work or school), and check to see if you live in a state with new voting restrictions in place—17 states have new restrictions that were not in place in 2012, and while we’ve been fighting back against them in many states, being informed about possible changes now will help you be prepared to exercise your right to vote.

2. Donate your time or money (or both!) to the Clinton Campaign.

Once you’ve double-checked that you’re registered to vote for Clinton in November, the next step is donating to the campaign. If you can afford to donate money, that is obviously incredibly helpful and important, because running an effective Get Out The Vote (GOTV) organization in fifty states isn’t cheap. But not everyone can afford to do that, and many people who are able to donate money also want to volunteer their time. And here’s one of the secrets about volunteering your time for a campaign: not only are you directly helping to elect your candidate, it’s also much harder to get lost in the anxiety about an election when you’re out there doing the work. It takes you out of the echo chamber of the media’s horse race and puts you in touch with the nuts and bolts of the organization’s work. Plus, once we hit the fall, the main focus of the GOTV drive is to get in touch with voters who are democrats and therefore likely voters to support them in getting to the polls. This means you’ll get to have conversations with people who are already on our team, rather than attempting to convince swing voters or people who have previously voted Republican. It’s you doing your part to help everyone we can check off Step 1 of this post so they can go out and vote in November.

3. Have conversations with the people in your life who aren’t firm Clinton supporters.

Does having conversations with people who supported Sanders in the primaries and aren’t fully on board yet, or Republicans and Independents who don’t like Trump but aren’t sure if they can vote for Clinton, sound like fun to you? Great! This is also an extremely important step, in both swing states and in safe blue states, because the margins of her victory also matter (especially when it comes to down ballot races—more on that in a bit). I confess that this particular point is one I don’t have a ton of experience with, because I live in a very blue state and my family is full of Democrats. But having in-person conversations with people you love about why it matters beyond Democrats vs. Republicans that we not elect Donald Trump is incredibly important. I would recommend looking at President Obama’s speech at the DNC to get a sense of how to frame a conversation like this: it’s not about the differences between the parties, it’s about competing visions of who we are and what we want this country to be. And frankly, this weekend Trump has done an exceptional job of making that difference as stark as possible.

4. Support Democrats in down ballot races.

There are two levels of victory we can achieve this fall. The first is to elect Hillary Clinton as president, which will protect us from a Donald Trump presidency and strengthen the progressive wing of the Supreme Court. That is vital, but as an isolated achievement it’s also a fairly defensive-minded victory: it protects the advancements of President Obama’s administration and prevents the damage of a Trump presidency, but that’s not all we’re fighting for. And in order for Hillary Clinton to be able to put her plans into action, we need to take back the Senate and increase our numbers in the House.

One of the most satisfying things about supporting either Senate or House candidates is that a little goes a long way, especially in comparison with Presidential campaigns. One great resource for identifying candidates you want to support is Emily’s List, which works to get pro-choice Democratic women elected to office. Electing women candidates changes the composition and functioning of government in many ways, not least of which by making a representative government truly more representative of the country it serves. And you can get even more bang for your buck by supporting women candidates for office in swing states, because they will support and coordinate with Clinton’s campaign in winning the state up and down the ballot.

5. Do the work you can, and otherwise focus on your own life.

This piece of advice will probably come as no surprise, given that it’s the basis of this blog, but there is a very big difference between doing something about this election, and simply worrying about it. I am as guilty as anyone of going down a politics spiral, but unless you work in politics or are volunteering full-time for a campaign, compartmentalize your engagement in this election as much as you can. Give it your full attention when you are volunteering for a campaign or researching which down ballot candidates you wish to give money to or engaging in a good faith conversation with someone you know about voting for Clinton. But try to minimize the amount of time you spend following what shameful thing Trump has said or done on any given day, or chasing new poll numbers for swing states. No matter how much the media wants you to follow the election minute by minute, you don’t need to spend your time doing that, and it won’t change the result of the election if you follow every twist and turn. Take action in the ways that you can, and otherwise shut it off. I recommend reading a book (or 132 of them). Trump is a nightmare, but you don’t owe it to anyone to let him increase your anxiety or stress, beyond doing what you can to elect Clinton and defeat him.

Okay, enough with the politics! Time for me to get reading :) 

Book 58: Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett

We have hit the point in this series where I genuinely have no idea how to discuss anything at all about this book without it being chockful of spoilers, so everything is under the cut!

Book 57: Sweet Disorder by Rose Lerner

More regency romance! This time we're focusing on Phoebe, a full-figured widow who doesn't want to get married again until she needs money in order to help her younger sister. The local political organizations are willing to make it worth her while to either marry a Whig or a Tory for the votes, but she ends up feeling very strongly for Nick Dymond, the brother of the Whig candidate who has withdrawn from society since he returned from the war. However, he's not an option for her, so she reluctantly allows two other gentlemen to court her and tries to imagine giving up her love of writing for a loveless marriage.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. I thought the writing itself was fairly solid, but the characters never quite landed for me. I've already started reading the next book in the series and I think the central relationship/conflict is going to be more to my taste, so it may just be that this book isn't for me. I will say that the final part of the book during which everything is revealed and there are secrets and betrayals and lots of other exciting things was really fun to read, and the physical chemistry between Phoebe and Nick was very well written; it just didn't hit me emotionally. Hoping the next one is more to my liking!

Grade: C

Book 56: Timepiece by Heather Albano

This is a very enjoyable Regency-era time travel book! It opens at the Battle of Waterloo, where Wellington's troops are faltering as they wait for the Prussian reinforcements. Wellington orders that their secret troops be brought out, who are Frankenstein men that have been created to defeat Napoleon. This will lead to tragic consequences in the future for the United Kingdom and beyond, if a group of time travelers can't put things right (that once went wrong).

Our main heroes are Elizabeth and William, two neighbors who travel into the late 19th century courtesy of a mysterious watch Elizabeth receives in the post. William is a former soldier whose right arm was seriously injured in battle, and Elizabeth is a young lady who is desperate to escape the staid life awaiting her. I enjoy both of them very much, and the burgeoning relationship between them develops in a very satisfying way.

The book occasionally focuses too long on characters who never quite hit home with me the way Elizabeth and William do, and I often felt I was just a step ahead of the narrative in terms of understanding what was happening, which sometimes meant the pacing dragged a bit. However, the biggest issue I had with the book was the very late discovery that it was, in fact, the first book of a trilogy. It ends on a fairly big cliffhanger, and because I thought it was a standalone, that cliffhanger just made me annoyed rather than eager to read the next one. The third book is coming out next year, though so if I am still interested in what happens next at that point, I'll pick up both the second and third books and finish it.

Grade: B 

Book 55: Nation by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is one of those authors who was hugely influential for so many of my friends, and somehow he completely passed me by until now. This is the first book of his I've read, and it's the sort of book that is very very well written but also doesn't feel like it's my kind of book, really.

Part of it is just that it's a post-apocalyptic, stranded on a desert island story, which are never my favorite kind of stories, even when they're told as well as this one is. It takes place on a world that's very much like our own in the not too terribly distant past, and it starts with a massive wave destroying everything on a chain of islands in an ocean like the South Pacific except for one boy named Mau. He had been off becoming a man, but because the wave destroys his home before he can be accepted back by his people as a man, he is now permanently stuck in a place in between, spiritually. He's not completely alone, however, because a ship from England carrying, among other people, an English girl named Daphne, is shipwrecked on his island, and Daphne (and a parrot) is the only survivor. And then things go from there.

Both Mau and Daphne are delightful, and much of the book is compulsively readable, because what Pratchett does with both language and narrative tropes is so inventive. But it's just not my kind of story, overall, and I feel like at the end he tries to have his cake and eat it too, which I understand and appreciate but which also felt a bit like cheating to me. I don't know. I feel like I'm damning it with faint praise to say that it's very good if you like that sort of thing, but that's where I'm at.

Grade: B

Book 54: Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy

Obviously one of the best kinds of books to read during turbulent times is an historical account of two weeks when the world danced with disaster. I'm being only somewhat sarcastic by saying that, honestly; in a lot of ways I find it deeply reassuring in a certain fatalistic way to remember that the world has always been on a knife's edge, and ever thinking that it's not is the dream. However, October 1962 certainly was a crucial time in the history and even sheer existence of humanity.

The construction of this book is fascinating. The central document itself was written as a memoir by RFK four or five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it is a fairly straightforward narrative of how JFK made the decisions he did and the rationale behind those choices. He also really drives home that in the moment, none of them knew that they would succeed in averting nuclear war. It's so easy to examine history through the lens of what we know will happen, and to forget that of course no result or outcome is actually inevitable.

In addition to RFK's writings and the relevant primary sources (including the correspondence between JFK and Khrushchev), there is both a foreward written in the late 1990s by a RFK biographer, and an analysis of RFK's writings from the early 1970s. The shift in our understanding and interpretation of the actions taken, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declassification of certain documents, is readily apparent in the two commentaries on RFK's memoirs. I'm glad I read this book both because it expanded my understanding of the U.S.'s relationship with and to the USSR (a topic which feels more relevant to the future by the day) and because it's a compelling reminder that history is constantly being revised, for better and for worse.

Grade: A  

Book 53: A Margin of Promise by Emma Lanner

Note: I know the author of this book socially.

This is yet another m/m regency romance that I've owned for years but somehow never got around to actually reading. The story revolves around Isaac, who has come for his first Season before attending Cambridge. He is staying with his patron Lord Edmund Bancroft, whose dearest friend Gideon is a fairly indiscreet molly boy. Edmund has promised Isaac's father that he will help Isaac find a bride, but that isn't the life Isaac envisions for himself.

One of the more unusual aspects of this book is that I genuinely had no idea what the final pairing (or pairings) would be most of the way through the book. At the beginning of the story, Gideon has been holding a torch for his old friend Edmund for many years, but he's also quite taken with Isaac from their first meeting. Isaac idolizes Edmund while finding Gideon rather intriguing. And Edmund is a bit of a mess, emotionally, and seeks out other male partners while avoiding anything close to real intimacy for as long as he can.

Eventually that resistance has to break, and when it does (and how) results in a fairly madcap final act that includes kidnappings and false marriages and even a Lady Catherine de Bourgh-esque appearance. I would have liked the emotional arcs for the main characters to be a bit clearer, and I wasn't sure exactly how much of a fantasy version of the regency the setting was intended to be, but in the end I felt that the right couple got their happy ending.

Grade: B

Book 52: Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk

This is one of those books that I've owned for years and yet for some reason never actually got around to reading, and because it had sat there unread for so long my brain had concluded that there was a reason I hadn't read it. Well, my brain is clearly not to be trusted, because I enjoyed it a lot! Another point in favor of this crazy challenge.

Widdershins is a fictional New England town with a dark past. Percy Whyborne is an expert in languages at the local museum who is hired by a private detective named Griffin Flaherty to decode the diary of a local murdered man. They quickly discover that the secrets lurking under the surface of this prosperous town go far deeper than one murder, and with the help of Christine, an Egyptologist at Whyborne's museum and his only true friend, they find more than they had bargained for.

The relationship between Whyborne and Griffin is really satisfying. Whyborne has no expectation of being loved or desired, so he has a very hard time believing that Griffin could want to be with him. But Griffin has his own personal demons and insecurity, so the romance never feels imbalanced, or like Whyborne is being either disingenuous or silly. They're a partnership in which each of them is better at their jobs and at their lives because of the influence of the other person, and they balance out their weaknesses. I really loved that.

This book is the first in a series, and I will definitely be picking up more of them after I finish this challenge.

Grade: B

Book 51: The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett

This book was the next on the list as I continue to make my way through Harriet's favorite books, and you guys. I loved the first two books of the Lymond Chronicles. LOVED them. But this book was genuinely so much more than I was expecting. I thought I was prepared. I WAS NOT.

Where do I even start with this post. Probably I should put everything behind a cut, because let me tell you something: you do not want to be spoiled before reading this book. That has been true for every book of the series so far, but I think it's actually even more true for this one than it is for the first one.

Book 50: Winter Wonderland by Heidi Cullinan

The final book in the Christmas Bears Trilogy, this one focuses on Paul, who's the last of the three best friends to still be single, even though he's the one who's wanted a relationship the most. This is partly because his family doesn't approve of his interest in men, so he's always wanted to create his own found family.

He initially dismisses the romantic overtures of Kyle, a nurse at the assisted living facility in town, because Kyle is 25 and Paul is in his late thirties. But it's really because he's not sure if he deserves love.

This was the weakest of the three stories for me. I like Paul, but of the three best friends in the group, he has always felt like the one who had the thinnest back story. It's obvious from the beginning that he and Arthur should never be together in the long run, but it's never clear where they are emotionally - was Paul in love with him? Were they both just settling? If so, why did Paul suddenly want more? The longer the series goes on, the less believable the relationships end up feeling, because they just don't actually behave like real people do. I wanted a happily ever after for Paul, but Kyle feels like the obvious option only because he's the last single gay guy in a town that's quite small but seems to be the next Provincetown. The book does acknowledge that, at least, and there are a bunch of small town initiatives that reminded me a lot of the Harvest Festival in Parks & Recreation, which I enjoyed. But unfortunately the central romance doesn't quite land.

Grade: C 

Book 49: Sleigh Ride by Heidi Cullinan

The second book in the Christmas Bears Trilogy, Sleigh Ride focuses on Arthur. After Paul moves out because Arthur refuses to commit to being in a real relationship with him, Arthur is suddenly alone for the first time in ten years. He's convinced that he's fine on his own, but his mother is determined to see him partnered up, and throws him in the path of the town librarian, Gabriel.

Gabriel is everything you'd imagine a small town librarian to be: prim and a bit proper and wonderful with children. But underneath that slightly prudish exterior, he's always wanted a boyfriend who would take him apart, both physically and emotionally. He doesn't like Gabriel at first, but could that dislike be hiding a burning attraction?

I'll be honest, the first sex scene between the two of them is just on the edge of being too rough, too soon for me. And I think that the author knows that, because the sex scene stops in the middle of it so they can have a discussion about consent that feels like it's there for the benefit of the reader, rather than because it's something the characters would actually do in the moment. Even stranger though is that once they actually start dating properly, and have established enough trust and knowledge of each other that the kind of rough BDSM scene play they engaged in right off the bat could be hot AND safe, they suddenly don't actually have very much kinky sex at all. Things fade to black, or are discussed but then not actually done, and so as a reader it didn't really deliver on its promise. If part of what makes them work as a couple is their sexual compatibility regarding kink, I want to actually see that successfully kinky sex. I want negotiated kink, but the talking and the action seemed to occur in the wrong order in this book. I wanted it to work better for me than it actually did.

Grade: C 

Book 48: Let It Snow by Heidi Cullinan

I had been planning on saving the next three books for November, both because they're Christmas themed and also because I knew they'd be fairly light and easy reads and I figured I'd need those a week before the election. But then my weekend ended up being more stressful than I had anticipated, and I needed some Christmas in July to take my mind off real life.

What I've come to think of as the Christmas Bears Trilogy starts with a blizzard that results in a lost traveler from out of town staying in a cabin with strangers and discovering love. Frankie is a stylist from the Twin Cities who ends up stranded in a small town near the Canadian border. He first sees three burly loggers in a town diner and assumes they're all prejudiced rednecks who would never accept a swishy guy like him, no matter how much they look like a lot of gay men's fantasies. But when he finds shelter in their well-stocked cabin outside of town after he drives off the road to avoid hitting a moose, he discovers that Marcus, Arthur and Paul are exactly that fantasy.

Arthur and Paul are in a tempestuous fuck buddy relationship, but Marcus is single after discovering that his boyfriend of three years had been cheating on him. He returned home to Logan, the small town where all three of them grew up, to lick his wounds and spend time with his mother, whose health is declining. Marcus is gruff with Frankie, but shockingly it's not because he dislikes him, it's because he reminds him of his ex!

This book has one too many moments of people doing dumb things because they're afraid of love, and in general people often behaved in certain ways seemingly only because the plot required them to so, but I did really like Marcus and Frankie together, and it was definitely the kind of book I needed to read this weekend.

Grade: B