Book 49: The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson

I had heard about this book last spring, and I was super excited to read it after having been to Spain for the first time last year. It's set in Granada in the final days of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada before Isabella and Ferdinand ousted the Muslims in 1492. The story follows Fatima, who is a concubine of the Sultan in the Alhambra, and a mapmaker named Hassan, who are both of interest to the Inquisition and flee together. The Bird King refers to a poem they told each other while living in the palace, and which gives their flight direction. They are aided by a djinn, who helps them escape and follow a path to the sea, and a Catholic monk, whose loyalties are always unclear.

I loved Fatima and Hassan's friendship, and the way they interact with each other. I also loved how the book engaged with narratives, and the ways that cultural imperialists not only control the day to day lives of their subjects, but also what they dream of, and the stories they tell each other. It was an interesting book to read after A Memory Called Empire, because of how they each approach this kind of cultural mythology, and how to create a new myth of reality. It made me want to read more of this era of Europe, and to seek out more stories told from the point of view of the Islamic empires, rather than how they were "reconquered." A really lovely read.

Grade: A 

Book 48: Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

This is a book that examines how we use language on the internet, and specifically, how it's different from past usage but not actually as completely all new and original as we'd like to think. It looks at how the internet (and social media in particular) creates a public, informal form of writing that's much closer to how we speak than more formal writing is, but that is actually quite connected to how we've always used written language in more informal settings. It views this through the lens of our internet age, which is both a matter of our literal chronological age, but also involves when in the internet life cycle we became fluent (or didn't) in online writing formats and standards.

I really enjoyed this book because it's one that's written about what I think of as my culture by someone who, to me, actually gets it. The result is a book that feels both extremely familiar and almost intuitive and also deeply satisfying, because it acknowledges a thing that I feel to be true and explains how it happened and why it's true. The overlap with the study of codeswitching, and the way people tailor their language to their audience, often unconsciously, is also really interesting to me, because there never used to be an assumption that how we communicate in one setting needed to be the way we communicate in all settings. The attempt by Facebook and other online corporations to codify people as having one identity, one story about themselves, and most importantly, one way of telling that story, broke down because no one actually behaves like that in any reality. The book was a very nice blend of new information and new ways of looking at things I already knew, sometimes without consciously knowing I knew it.

Grade: A 

Book 47: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Hey so this here book is good!

I read it after having seen the miniseries version of Good Omens over the summer, and I spent the first two episodes attempting and failing to figure out if I had actually read the book back when I was a kid and it was on my brothers' bookshelves, or if it was like the Lord of the Rings: one I had seen so often it felt like I must have read it, but in fact never had. I did determine eventually that I hadn't read it; while a lot of the miniseries felt familiar to me, it was in that cultural osmosis sort of way, and not in the 'oh I read this a long long time ago' way.

It was also familiar in a 'oh, this is like a Douglas Adams book written by a couple of other people' way. There is a sensibility and wackiness in it that is just quintessentially a certain kind of British, where as an American you read about a thing and you can't quite tell if it's a gag in a book or if it's just something that reads that way and is actually thought of as entirely normal in the UK. But anyway! The book reads like the miniseries feels, which makes sense, given Gaiman's involvement in the miniseries. There are a couple of aspects of the book that did not age well at all, and which feel remarkably out of place, since on the whole the book holds up pretty well. But that didn't impact my enjoyment of reading it. Honestly, my main feeling when reading it was thinking over and over again what a successful adaptation it made. But the book itself is still worth reading, even so.

Grade: A 

Book 46: Honestly, We Meant Well by Grant Ginder

So I found out about this book after reading the instant classic twitter thread about a gay dude who, when he was a teenager in the '90s, created a folder of pictures of hot dudes called Beefcake on the family computer and, when asked about it by his dad, blamed his MOM. (His eventual coming out to them was not exactly a surprise.) I went to his bio and when I saw that he was an author I decided to read one of his books, and I enjoyed it!

This is kind of a classic beach read, in some ways - it's light and a bit frothy and there's a whole lot of drama but the stakes of all of the drama is never particularly high. It's about a classics professor and her family, a husband who cheated on her a year ago but has promised he's reformed, and their son, who just graduated from college and is feeling completely unmoored. She gets the chance to go back for the summer to the small island in Greece where she spent a year as a college student herself all those years ago, and when her husband and son join her there, all of them begin to discover their various interwoven secrets.

I really enjoyed this book, even though I found all of the characters to be extremely frustrating at times - this is not a story that allows people's bad behavior to go unchallenged, which is good, but it also at times becomes exhausting that basically no one is without seriously questionable behavior. However, in the end the people you want to succeed the most do, and the people who you most want to see receive their comeuppance do, and all of the characters feel extraordinarily recognizable (which may be why they feel as frustrating as they do - they are exactly as stupid as people are in reality). Sometimes you just want to read a novel where the writer really knows what they're doing, and this is definitely that.

Grade: B

Book 45: Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

I read this book badly. I took too long between sections, and I also ended up having to wait for almost a year for it to come in at the library, and I think that the disjointed way I read it impacted how much I felt the revelations in this third book of the trilogy.

Having said all of that, I really liked this book. It was similar to the first two in that there were things you thought you sort of understood, and then you were given more information or just a different perspective of the same information, and it totally changed how you viewed it. Also, the lighthouse keeper is one of my favorite characters in the entire series, and he made me have a lot of feelings.

I feel like it might be worth it for me to go back and reread the entire trilogy basically in one go at some point, simply because I am certain aspects of the first and second books read completely differently when you have knowledge of where some parts of the plot are going. There are still many things the trilogy doesn't answer in the end, but I don't think that's a flaw of the books; it seems completely intentional and part of the point, really. So yes; my experience of the book was probably a B, but that's because my reading of it was a C.

Grade: A

Book 44: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

This book is basically what you get if you combine a space opera with the bureaucracy of the Byzantium Empire, and use that as a vehicle for examining how we build and tell and internalize the cultural stories of empires. It is full of court intrigue, with missing information in a much more literal sense than we often get from these kinds of stories. Our protagonist is the classic fish out of water, a new ambassador to the City from a small outpost, who is underprepared for this post and also has a secret she's trying to keep while navigating a world she doesn't quite know what to do with. But she's done the homework she's supposed to do; if anything, she's a fan of this empire, and has internalized so much of what it finds valuable. But she still exists outside of it, no matter how well she knows the ancient poetry. I really loved this book and the themes it explores, and how there are no easy answers for any of the questions it poses about culture.

Grade: A

Book 43: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

I liked this book! It's a fairly standard "school for children who are weird in ways that their parents don't understand but that's because it's MAGIC" set-up, but the reason the children are weird is because they've gone through doors to other worlds, lived in those worlds, and then came back to reality. Most of them aren't adjusting well! Most of them desperately want to return to their various fairylands! And meanwhile, people are getting murdered.

I enjoyed the set-up and the characters more than the plot of who the killer is, and finding them. Nancy, who is the new girl at the school and whose point of view we follow as we learn alongside her, is really interesting, and her friendship (and perhaps more) with a trans student named Kade is really lovely. The author doesn't make the fairylands the better versions of reality, either - Kade is rejected by the fairyland for being trans, rather than it being the only place he can be himself.

The book is the first in a series, but it's not one that made me immediately need more, in a good way - I thought this novella stood on its own.

Grade: B

Book 42: Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

The subtitle of this book is "The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle," which gives the reader a pretty good sense of what kind of book it is. But unlike a lot of more classic self-help books, it actually acknowledges and references the systemic oppression and gendered expectations that so often lead to burnout in women (and non-binary people who are viewed by others as women). I read a lot of self-help in my early twenties, and stopped reading it in my late twenties when they didn't seem to make a difference other than to make me feel bad for failing in ways I hadn't even known I was before reading a book. But most self-help starts from the place of Personal Responsibility, the idea that if we just own our own emotions and reactions and so forth, we can overcome anything, no matter what the external obstacles may be. And that's a nice idea, kind of, in a world where we're not in control of the soup of misogyny and racism and homophobia and classism we live in and the way that all of those biases are built into our institutions and expectations of our personal relationships. But it's also gaslighting, and either incredibly naive or extremely manipulative to assert that we shouldn't be impacted by any of that. I found it extraordinarily affirming to have those issues actually addressed as real, and the chapters on the misogyny of burnout and where body image fits into that were both really affecting.

This book kind of splits the difference between being a book that examines the cultural conditions that allow for burnout, and a how-to guide for ways of processing our stress, identifying stressors we can control and ones we can't and formulating an approach to each, and doing the self-care that enables us to heal and live our purpose, not the catchphrase. I found it both really confronting and intuitive, and for once it was written by authors who felt like women I could know (or would want to know). There's a lot that rang true for me in terms of when I've felt the most satisfaction and fulfilled, and what I was doing for myself during those times, and it was also challenging in terms of pointing out that changing certain aspects of my life is long overdue, in both big ways and small. It also made me want to read two of the other books on my current list, Down Girl and Health at Every Size, both of which feel frightening to me for a variety of reasons. This year I've opened myself up to adding additional books to my reading list when I come across books that sound compelling, because I don't view reading as a chore but rather something I chose to do for a variety of reasons. And one of the results is how so many of the books I've read this year have been in communications with each other. This book in some ways is the practical version of How to Do Nothing, but I think it's more that they're approaching the same question of how to live a meaningful life from two very different angles. I recommend them both.

Grade: A 

Book 41: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Ah, the irony of reading this book while feeling completely overwhelmed and like I wanted to do both nothing and everything (and therefore nothing) at once.

This book is about that phenomenon, and specifically the way the attention economy subsists off of our insatiable need to refresh and the reaction cycle of modern life. But it's a broader rumination on what it means to give our attention to something, and what we find there and how. It's a book that's deeply grounded in Oakland and the East Bay. It's not a prescription, or what I would consider to be a self-help book, but it is something of an invitation: an invitation to bring awareness to where we are, physically, and redirecting attention.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time writing about this book. So much of it is actually an examination of art, and public spaces, and the idea that people and societies need both public time and space to be able to live and think and breathe, and that when everything is optimized and each interaction can be viewed as a networking opportunity or a side hustle rather than simply a conversation they lose their actual inherent value of connection. It made me think a lot about why I value fandom and fanfic so much, both because it's a community that is built out of love and not capitalism, but also because when I engage with fandom online, on twitter and elsewhere, I know the context for my interactions. I'm not trying to project a constant all-encompassing expression of myself, the way Facebook wants my public facing posts to do; I'm not trying to tailor my comments for my family and my co-workers and my college friends and my childhood friends and my fandom friends all at once. There's that tweet that goes around asking "is your online self the same as your real life self," and the answer is always, always "well that depends on the context in which we meet in real life." If you saw me at work, probably not. If you saw me at a concert or a hockey game or a con, then almost certainly, because that's the context we know each other in online, too.

I think that's why, to the extent a social media fast or permanent flounce is appealing (and it can be), I've never seriously considered it, and not just because becoming Thoreau and leaving society behind (while still having my laundry delivered) isn't actually a morally just decision, in my opinion. I like the context of my social media, and while I do wish that it was completely non-commercialized, I also feel like my community has colonized the existing space and taken it over, in a way that a site like twitter deserved to have colonized.

What does any of this have to do with doing nothing? Well, it's less of a call to simplify, or retreat, or detox, and more of a call to do nothing by noticing more, by deepening the attention we do give. She describes how that has occurred for her, and what that looks like in her interactions with the world, but it isn't a to do list, which I both value and find frustrating, because of course it would be so much easier if there was just one single solution to any of this. But I found the actual reading of the book itself to be an example of it; I have read many of the books I've read this year while half paying attention to them, and for some of them that's an indication of how engaging I found the book itself, and for some it's me not reading them well. But I had to sit with this book, and grapple with it, and that focus I think, for me, was the point.

Grade: A  

Book 40: Damsel by Elana K. Arnold

This is a fairy tale about the damsel that is rescued in all of the stories, the one who's being held captive by a dragon and needs to be saved by a prince. The first chapter is told from the point of view of the prince, but as soon as he has defeated the dragon, the rest of the story is the damsel's perspective.

The damsel has no name at first. She is given a name (Ama) and clothes and most of all a purpose by her prince. She journeys back to his castle with him, the prerequisite he needed to be crowned king after his father's death. Ama remembers nothing before the moment she woke up in the prince's care, and learns what she needs to know in the castle from the queen mother, who was also a damsel, and her maidservants.

This book is good and interrogates the damsel story really well, and I liked Ama, but man. I just also didn't necessarily need to read another story about what the underlying reality of these sorts of tales are. The sexual violence that occurs in this book isn't gratuitous or without purpose, but I also spent most of the book just desperately reading on, hoping and hoping for Ama's escape and, preferably, vengeance. It satisfied me on that note, but left me feeling like I hadn't really needed to go through that in order to get there. 

Grade: B

Book 39: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Boy I loved this book. I read it for my sci-fi/fantasy book club, and the title alone should give you a sense of what the story is. But honestly it was completely unlike anything I've read before, and yet deeply reflective, and man. I just loved it.

The story has a consistent structure throughout the book: Each chapter focuses on either Red or Blue, two agents on opposite sides of the time war. We start with Red, who has just triumphed and won her latest mission, but there's a letter she finds in the middle of her battlefield, incongruous among all the death. We watch her read the letter, and react, and then the end of the chapter is the text of the letter she's just received from Blue. The next chapter begins this pattern again, only from Blue's point of view. The two of them circle and chase each other throughout time, following each other's paths on the threads they weave and braid together, each of them attempting to accomplish some unnamed ultimate victory for their side of the time war, and delighting in their competition with one another.

All of this alone would be enough to make for an entertaining novella. But the language in this book is so beautiful, and so captivating, that it shouldn't be so surprising when you realize how much you care about Red and Blue, and how little you care about the ultimate victor in the time war itself. I finished reading it and wanted to start over again immediately, just to see how it had been done. A really wonderful read.

Grade: A

Book 38: I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum

This is a collection of essays and profiles written by a television critic, who came to her life as a critic via an abandoned English PhD and being a fan in the early days of internet fandom. She approaches television from the point of view of someone who had absorbed early on that television storytelling wasn't considered to be worthy of analysis and critique, and then pushed back against that. But she also rejects the idea that there is only some television worth analyzing and loving, television that is almost always male-focused and often bleak and cynical and mechanical in its violence: the antihero "not like the other guys" stories that didn't start with The Sopranos but certainly gained a cultural respectability via that show.

I enjoyed her pieces about shows that I watched and often loved (in particular her piece on Hannibal), but I also loved reading her thoughts on shows I haven't seen, because so much of her focus is on what television means to us, and how we can see what stories we're telling ourselves about reality through this particular medium. It wasn't always an easy read, both because there are essays that were written and published before and after the 2016 election, and also before and after Me Too in the fall of 2017, and obviously both of those events are still reverberating in our art and in our daily lives. She also takes a look at what it was to be a young girl who grew up being taught to focus on men, and men's lives, and valuing that perspective, and how it really did take something earth-shattering to fully examine the price that extracts. But at its heart, this is a book that deeply engages both with narrative and also why narratives matter to people, and there is nothing that matters as much to me as that. I really enjoyed this book, end to end.

Grade: A

Book 37: Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova

This is one of those YA urban fantasy books that I think I would have been really happy to read when I was a teenager, but that didn't do much for me beyond being an easy and enjoyable read as an adult. I don't think my opinion of it matters that much, though, simply because of that.

It's a classic YA urban fantasy set up: 16 year old girl is different from everyone else, doesn't want to be because of a secret she's kept since she was young, and in attempting to deny who she really is causes a huge mess and has to figure out how to fix it. The particulars aren't nearly as standard, though: Alex, the protagonist, is Latina, and her entire family has magic, so it's got a very different cultural grounding than most stories. And while there is a love triangle of sorts, Alex is in the middle, and a boy is on one side and a girl is on the other. All of these elements definitely engaged me more than a similar story without them would have, but I've read enough versions of this story before that those aspects of the novel didn't make it fresh enough for me to truly love. It's definitely a book that I'm going to buy a copy or two for my friend's GSA library though.

Grade: B

Book 36: Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Man, this book should be exactly my thing: a romance novel about Alex, the American First Son, falling in love with Henry, the youngest Prince of England, and navigating a new relationship while also trying to make sure his mother wins re-election. It should be a beautiful alternate universe version of current times that makes me wish we lived in that world. And instead, I spent the entire book simultaneously grumpy at how naive and dumb everyone in this version of Washington D.C. is and also outraged on Henry's behalf, since everyone in his life is monstrous and also he seems to have literally no agency whatsoever.

Obviously I am in the minority on all of this! It is extremely popular, and so clearly lots of people got something from this story that didn't work for me. But the whole book feels like it exists in too many alternate universes for it to really land anywhere for me at all. The England felt so completely fake to me, and I couldn't understand what this America even is: one where a divorced white woman whose children are half-Mexican American could be the President, and yet her son experiences his personal revelation about his sexuality in a way that felt much closer to 2008 than 2020. Obviously not everyone knows their sexual identity by the time they're 22, no matter how liberal their family or community is. But I didn't believe in the character of Alex at all. He's smart and charismatic and wants to change the world, but he also seems to have exactly one friend in his life and thinks of a guy from Harvard as being hopelessly privileged while attending Georgetown and being the son of a Senator and the fucking President. He's a classic romance novel character, but he's not grounded for me at all. I fundamentally did not believe his isolation or how little he considered how his behavior would impact his mother and himself. I ALSO didn't believe the specific kind of meltdown people had about the relationship once it was revealed. I am fine with secret romance, and obviously the relationship being gay would be more complicated and all that, but everyone treated it as being both far more serious and far less serious than a relationship between two non-elected officials would necessarily be.

(Also, the political machinations going on in the background were fucking nonsense and the sort of pretend version of politics that I might have had more time for four years ago but can tolerate even less now, sorry. Also also, the plot point involving the independent gay senator's past felt extremely bad to me!)

Henry is great! Henry and Alex is great! I believe the chemistry between the two of them! But I did not believe the version of England at all, and the fact that Alex's life just matters more, even though he is at this point only the 22 year old son of a politician and not a public figure in his own right, in the same way Henry is. You can either have a monarchy not really matter at all, in which case there's just no real conflict, or you have to actually examine how it does, and examine the stakes. Also, I'm not suggesting that the current day real life British monarch would be thrilled to have a gay prince. But he's not in line for the throne!!! There is no succession issue here. The only real issue Henry has is that everyone in his family is a fucking monster except for his sister, but not for any real REASON.

And finally, if you're going to write a romance novel about two dudes, can we have some actual sex scenes. This book attempts to fade to black without actually fading to black, so it's quite clear that they're fucking or exchanging blowjobs, but the sex is always talked around rather than shown, and it drove me crazy. Obviously different romance novels have different levels of explicitness, and that's fine, but it felt pretty out of character with how the sex scenes tended to begin. 

So yeah! Great set up, easy enough to read, some really decent side characters, but on the whole, a book that I like the idea of much much more than I enjoyed the actual book itself, sorry to say.

Grade: C

Book 35: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I read this book for my book club, but it had already been on my list because necromancer lesbians in space just sounded like something that I should read. And I enjoyed it, for the most part, but it didn't click for me the way it seems to have clicked for a lot of people, and I've been trying to figure out why that is since I finished it.

The basic set up is that there are these nine houses, and the leaders of each of them get called to solve a task in order to be chosen to ascend and serve the big high god, and if that sounds a bit vague it's because that's how a lot of the worldbuilding actually felt to me, like there was this huge system that I was supposed to be able to figure out but that felt extremely opaque. I may have needed to be a better reader, genuinely, but so much of it ended up being handwaved for me, because the only real point is our protagonist, Gideon, who is the champion for the leader from the Ninth House, Harrow. Gideon isn't supposed to be her champion; she's an indentured servant for the House who is in the middle of attempting to escape once again when Harrow essentially strong-arms her into being her champion and fighting for her while Harrow does the necromancy work.

I did really enjoy the dynamic between Gideon and Harrow, and the ending was satisfying and caught me by surprise and made a bunch of the build up worth it to me. But everyone from all of the other houses blended together for me, and the result was that the entire race/puzzle/challenge/mystery they were trying to solve just felt like a horror film where I knew that everyone except for the people who truly mattered would die, and none of those deaths really landed for me. I've seen some fan theories about where the series will go, and I think that I probably will end up reading the next book, because the character it focuses on is pretty interesting to me, but it didn't hook me the way I had hoped it would.

Also, I did find that Gideon's persona was more enjoyable as a lesbian than it would have been as a male character, where her chauvinism would have simply been standard and fairly boring. But I had been hoping for more, both in terms of more queerness (and what that even meant in this universe) and more originality as a character.

Grade: B 

Book 34: Fen by Daisy Johnson

I felt similarly about this book of short stories as I did about this one: well written, with a lot of interesting ideas, but nothing I ever felt like I could fully hook into. I like magical realism a lot, and the themes of many of the stories are compelling and ones I'm really interested in reading about, but I kept waiting and waiting to experience an emotional response, but it never really came. I wish very much that I liked this book more than I did.

Grade: C

Book 33: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

I went into this book expecting to like it, but man, it really left me reeling emotionally. I had read one of the essays in the book before I started it, a piece about growing up in Houston and attending a megachurch and the connection between the divine and the euphoria of club drug use, and it was extremely good and well written, but it also didn't feel all that relatable to my personal experience. It was a window into someone else's life, which I enjoyed, but was also able to maintain an emotional distance from. And boy was that not the case of every essay in this book!

The first one, about how we exist online and how that affects basically everything, was disconcertingly relevant to my experience, in part because it reflects the experience of the internet and blogs and even twitter as being something that for me, personally, I still consider to be a net positive, even as I view it as a net negative for basically everyone as a whole. That contradiction is basically impossible to resolve, and the essay doesn't try to, or at least doesn't succeed, but it's such a familiar exploration, only about ten times as insightful as I usually feel when I'm arguing with myself in the shower.

The essay that punched me in the face, though, was the one about why the best heroines in novels are always girls, or at most, on the very cusp of womanhood. It was such a familiar and wrenching look at what is possible fictionally for (white, straight) girls, and what immediately becomes impossible as soon as they're old enough to be married and become mothers. The thruline from that essay to her piece on women's constant optimization, via the right salad and the right exercise and clean living rather than dieting, continues on through a piece on me too and straight through until the end, in a piece on wedding culture that I thought wouldn't affect me nearly as much as it did. I don't know. Each individual essay is worth reading, but it truly is greater as a whole, because each piece feeds into the next one and reflects back what you were thinking about an essay you had read two hours prior.

There's a feeling of constantly, desperately trying to explain where we are and why as a culture, like if we can only articulate it well enough we can fix it, and I don't actually believe that anymore, but the relief of reading someone else's brilliant efforts at the same task made me want to believe in it again.

Grade: A

Book 32: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

When I first read about this book, I knew that it sounded extremely familiar, and in fact it had originally been posted as an original work on Ao3 sometime in the last couple of years. It's a really lovely story incorporating the Green Man myth, someone who has survived in a Wood for centuries and is part of the forest himself. This particular telling also involves two gay love stories, one old and one new, and a fetching stranger who may know more than he initially lets on, and wood sprites and a secret and a reveal and final confrontation that I'm not entirely sure I completely understood, but I enjoyed it regardless. It is a quick read, something nice for a fall weekend afternoon in a cozy chair.

Grade: B 

Book 31: Range by David Epstein

This book absolutely blew me away. I first heard about it when the author was interviewed on the Longform Podcast, which interviews nonfiction writers about their careers and process and all that, and it's essentially taking a look at the argument for being a generalist vs. being a specialist.

The intro looks at and then kind of dismisses the ten thousand hours explanation of genius, where Tiger Woods is a brilliant golfer because he got in the necessary number of hours of practice in specialized, repeated drills when he was very young. The counterargument is Roger Federer, who played lots of different kinds of sports when he was a kid, and didn't focus on tennis to the exclusion of others until he was a teenager. But the broader, more applicable lesson is that broad, flexible learning is the thing that human brains are actually exceptionally good at, when compared with computers, and attempting to become experts via drills and rote learning actually just results in us being not very good robots instead of exceptional humans.

Every chapter explores this concept of breadth having a much greater value than people want to believe to be the case in a variety of settings, and I found the book to be both fascinating and extremely challenging and also a bit scary, because of how much the central argument of the book feels almost impossible to implement in academia or scientific research or policy development, to say nothing of individual lives. Also, the chapter on the women musicians of 17th and 18th century Venice alone is well worth reading. Just thinking about this book makes me want to re-read it.

Grade: A  

Book 30: Circe by Madeline Miller

Man, I loved this book. I read it for one of my book clubs, and it took a while for it to grow on me -- I found myself frustrated by the protagonist for the first hundred or so pages, and then once it hooked me I was really and truly hooked.

The central concept of the book is a retelling of various ancient Greek myths from the perspective of Circe, who is a minor character in The Odyssey and now takes central billing in this re-centering. I have never read The Odyssey, and most of my knowledge of Greek myths feels at best second-hand, although there is the argument that all knowledge of the myths don't exist from primary sources. But it meant that I have very little sense of exactly how transformative the book is or is not; my impression is that it's quite a leap, but I truly don't know. I loved what this journey is, though, and the way it made me think about the plays and poems I've read, and how many of them are translated and interpreted by men, and prioritize the male experience to the exclusion of basically everyone else.

Part of what I loved about this book was how the passage of time was experienced by a goddess, and how that contrasted with all mortals, and what that means for all the myths about the gods and their disputes. I came away from this book wanting to read Emily Miller's translation of The Odyssey, and to go back and reread the Greek plays and poems I read and only barely understood in college. If the story of a goddess who's framed as a witch in a story about a man but is centered as the protagonist in in this novel appeals to you, I would definitely recommend reading this.

Grade: A 

Book 29: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Another book club book! And another book that feels like it's in conversation with other stories I've consumed recently - The Raven Tower and Hadestown. This story of mythmaking and gods and the underworld takes place in Jazz Age Mexico, and focuses on the journey a young woman named Casiopea takes with Hun-Kame, a Mayan god of death, in order to free him from his brother's bindings. She is coerced into helping him when she opens the trunk her terrible grandfather kept locked in his bedroom and discovers his bones inside.

It's a story that is incredibly readable and that flows, even while exploring a cultural tradition and foundational myths that I knew very little of going into the story. I kept finding parallels to polytheistic traditions I have more familiarity with, but it also feels incredibly grounded in the specific time and place of the story. It made me want to learn more about both pre- and post-colonial Mexican history, but the book holds up on its own, even without a deeper knowledge. I really enjoyed both the POV of Casiopea and the authorial voice.

Grade: B  

Book 28: Paul takes the form of a mortal girl by Andrea Lawlor

I read this right after finishing Just Kids, and while none of the book takes place in New York City, the entire book is informed by the title character's experience there in the early nineties, just after Robert Mapplethorpe's death and the end of that memoir. It was a clear thruline, although not intended, and Patti Smith is mentioned often, and so are so many other aspects of culture referenced throughout that memoir.

This book isn't a memoir, and can't be, really--Paul is a shapeshifter, whose primary form is that of a young gay man, but who shifts into the body of a lesbian in order to go to Michigan with his best friend, a dyke named Jane, and often shifts into whichever queer body he needs to inhabit to explore both himself and the world. The book takes us from Iowa to Michigan to his hometown in upstate New York to Provincetown in the winter and finally, of course, to San Francisco, with flashbacks to his time at Pride in New York City. And it takes us to every single version of queer identity and culture and sex that existed in 1993 America, with a clarity and knowledge that made me laugh out loud multiple times and marvel at things I had once known but forgotten, and yet could not hope to remember how I had learned of it for the first time. I haven't felt so known by a piece of queer culture since first hearing the song "Ring of Keys" (and now that I write that, it's obvious to me that how I know of so much of the culture depicted in this book is from Dykes to Watch Out For), and the book just hit a part of my heart that I didn't know I needed to have pinged: what it was to be queer through the nineties, even if the character Paul is about ten years older than I am.

Paul's gender identity and sexual behaviors are both fluid, as is his exploration of what kind of queer he's going to be, regardless of how he presents. It's such a fascinating use of magical realism, this depiction of someone who truly lives between worlds and genders and identities, always the outsider, always finding his way through a porous barrier. The sex is frequent and explicit and the sort that I almost can't believe is still shocking, except that of course it is, and every cultural reference (with the exception of one that is so egregious an error I almost have to believe that it's me misremembering rather than it being something that made it through editing, except that I know it's wrong) is so pitch perfect it felt almost disorienting to look up from the pages and still be in 2019. I don't miss the early nineties; I was in my early teens, and even beyond that, queer life in America is better now, no matter how rosy the glasses of nostalgia are. But in the same way that the music of your youth always sounds good to you in a way that music from no other era ever will, this book thrums a very specific chord that I will always respond to.

Grade: A

Book 27: Just Kids by Patti Smith

This is a classic book of the past couple of years, in that I borrowed it to read for one of my book clubs, wasn't able to attend the meeting, but still finished the book after the meeting had already happened. Patti Smith is a musician and poet I knew of, but didn't actually know the work of; this book is a memoir of her lifelong relationship and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work I was familiar with but whose life I knew little about.

The two of them met in the late sixties in a park in New York, and spent the next five years together living in artistic poverty together, first in Brooklyn (in my old neighborhood) and then in the village at the Chelsea Hotel and then a loft space, back when loft living in New York was actually how young and mostly broke artists lived. They were romantically and sexually involved during these years, even as Mapplethorpe's awareness and understanding of his sexuality came into focus, until they each found new partners and their relationship shifted into friendship and collaboration. 

I read this right after City of Girls, and it felt in so many ways like a continuation of the New York that was explored in that book, with neighborhoods and cultures that felt familiar but also completely cut off from my own experience. Both books have key scenes and moments that take place a block or two from places I go to frequently, and yet. There has been a serendipity in the order I've read books this past month, where one seems to inform the next one. I think of Mapplethorpe as being such a quintessentially queer artist that it was almost confronting to have his life told through the perspective of a straight person, even someone who by any reckoning was as close to him as anyone else during his adult life. But it was also a really fascinating exploration of how the counterculture of that era ran in opposition to so many norms, and on a purely personal level, it reaffirmed for me how extremely poorly I would have done as a starving artist in any era. 

Grade: A

Book 26: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

I borrowed this book because the author of it was on a podcast discussing the research she did for it and that was interesting enough to me to want to read the novel. Her research was about how single women in the mid 20th century had sex and held jobs and in general led lives that are not at all what we think of when we imagine American women during and after WWII. The main character isn't a show girl, but Vivian's a Vassar drop out who doesn't want the life her WASP parents want for her, and so when she gets the chance to move to New York with her aunt who runs a not very impressive theatre in Hell's Kitchen, she takes it. Her skills as a seamstress serve her well, as do her good looks and willingness to do just about anything, and even when she pushes that envelope too far and almost has her reputation ruined by the tabloids, she bounces back.

The frame of the story is essentially How I Met Your Father -- Vivian is now in her 80's and is explaining to a woman named Angela "who your father was to me." So there's that mystery leading you through the narrative, the desire to find out who he is, while also wondering how a woman who moves to New York City in the fall of 1940 will make it through such world-shattering times. It took long enough for that reveal to happen that I began to wonder if the book would land for me as anything other than a very readable and light exploration of the theatre world and life in New York in general. But when it does land, it's quite a shift, and it gave the book some emotional weight it hadn't had for much of it. So much of it was deliberately light and insubstantial, and to suddenly have a real foundation made the lightness matter more.

Grade: A

Book 25: Educated by Tara Westover

I read this book because both of my parents read it for their book clubs, and I had seen it mentioned all over as well. It definitely affected me more than I had anticipated; I started reading it thinking it would be a bit of a throwback to the dominant memoir genre of the mid-2000's (compellingly written memoir about the author's abusive/unique/uniquely abusive childhood, and how they recovered), and while it is that, what's lasted for me about the book goes far deeper.

The author grew up in a fundamentalist, survivalist Mormon home in Idaho in the nineties, and was homeschooled until she was accepted at Brigham Young University. She wasn't actually homeschooled, though--there was almost no actual formal teaching, and most of her time was spent either helping her father in his wrecking yard, or her mother as a midwife and naturopath. Her parents were abusive primarily via neglect; she was injured repeatedly because of her father's unwillingness to take any basic precautions with her safety, and any kind of medical treatment from outside the home was viewed as rejecting God's help and therefore evil. But she suffered more deliberate abuse at the hands of one of her older brothers, and I think the biggest shock about this book for me is that everyone in her immediate family actually survived.

The break from her family that she finally achieves via BYU and then eventually Cambridge and Harvard isn't as neat and as clean as I wanted it to be, nor is her anger at them as fully expressed as I desired it to be on her behalf. But her analysis of how her family existed within Mormonism and America is so cutting and much more nuanced than the instinctive blame I have of the structure of her family's faith for her young life--the Mormon church was also what got her out of her family's abuse, via education and a world outside of her mountain. She wrote a dissertation about how Mormonism fit into American culture as a whole in the 19th century, and I genuinely hope that eventually it is released as a popular history book, because this book made me want her perspective on the topic within an academic context. Her story of academic success is extraordinary for its uniqueness, but I think there's so much more that can be learned from her work than merely the ultimate 'overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve something' life lesson.

Grade: A   

Book 24: The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

I read this book because both my brother and a friend who understands my taste very well both recommended that I read it, and they both also declined to tell me much of anything about it going in. So I'm going to put the rest of this entry under a cut, in case you would like to also remain in the dark.

Book 23: A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Fifteen or twenty years ago I read a lot of literary fiction. At some point I stopped, mostly because I was tired of reading books about bad things happening to characters I either liked very much and didn't want to see hurt, or didn't care about and so therefore there was little meaning to it. This book isn't exactly that. But it's closer to gay literary fiction than most of the books about queer relationships that I tend to gravitate toward, but with a strange and at times vaguely out of place villain that didn't always fit the rest of the story. Having said all that, I still enjoyed it quite a lot.

The story focuses on Harry Cane, an Englishman in the late Nineteenth Century, who marries and has a child and comes from wealth and so doesn't need anything as common as employment. His life just seems to meander along until he meets a man who sees something in him that he didn't quite know himself. They begin sleeping together, and Harry is almost charmingly naive about the entire thing, not really recognizing how dangerous his behavior is until it's discovered and someone tries to blackmail him. He decides to leave the country in order to spare his family the shame, with little protest from his wife, and moves to Canada to become a homesteader in the wide prairie.

I found the transformation of a man who never had to work at all, and certainly never had to do manual labor to survive, into a farmer to be fascinating. The book did a really wonderful job of making that transition feel believable while never skating over just how monumental a change it was. He eventually makes a claim that's next to a farm settled by a brother and sister, and the slow build between him and the brother is quite lovely, as is the life they establish together. What happens to the three of them during the 1910's isn't exactly unrealistic or too harsh or anything like that, but it still wasn't what I wanted, and it felt like something the author had decided had to happen, rather than the inevitable outcome. I don't feel like the book was better for the tragedy, even if there is a happy ending of sorts for Harry. I wish it had been a bit more of a romance novel, essentially. There are plenty of aspects of Harry's life in the novel as is that defy expectations; I wouldn't have minded one or two additional ones that spared him (and me) some pain.

Grade: B

Book 22: A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay

I finished reading this book about 3 or 4 months ago, and have been putting off writing about it, mainly because I don't know how to write about works by GGK at this point. I ran into this same problem three years ago when I wrote about the last book he published, and both times it forced me to look at who I'm writing this blog for, and for what purpose. In general I've kept up with this blog because it both allows me to write about books at greater length than twitter does, and in a place where I can actually find my posts again, and because I like systems and inventories and all that. But am I here to review books? To recommend them, or steer people clear? There are times when I definitely do that--I've read books that I don't think are worth anyone else's time, and I try to make that clear. Or is this more of a reflection of how books make me, and only me, feel? Because the thing about GGK at this point is that he's writing exactly the book he wants to write, and I love them, because the themes that drive his writing are the themes I seek out in almost all of my fiction. But I also feel like if you're going to read this book, it's because you read all of his books, and not in a bad way--it's just impossible for me to think of them as individual works at this point. I think a reader absolutely could enter his novels via this one, but I don't really know why you would (although now that I've thought about that, I would love to hear someone's reactions to this story, if it's your first GGK).

I think my main takeaway from this book is that in many ways it's as explicitly a GGK novel as any I've ever read. He's always explored themes of legacy and how identity and history go together, in the creation and loss of cultures and empires and art, and the moments he chooses to tell us about are always clearly just one perspective out of many possible ones. In this one the framing of the story is from a first person POV, an older man telling the reader about his youth, and it's so self-conscious in its structure that I love it more for it. This is especially true because the story takes place about fifty years prior to the last book he wrote, and while there are those classic callback moments that are really a hallmark of GGK's work at this point, in his quarter turn historical fiction, there are fewer than I expected. It is about actions that are both much more important than any one individual expects they will be, while the actual earth-shattering change is happening hundreds of miles away from the place the story is set. 

The story is a slow burn, in part because it's about looking at the small, petty, all-consuming local issues societies obsess over until or unless something greater than all of that refocuses everything. Sometimes that great event is truly massive and wide-reaching, and sometimes it's something so intensely personal that nonetheless changes how a person behaves in their public life such that it becomes part of a city or country's history. I want to read all of his novels set in this universe again, leading up to here, because I want to see how his scope and scale and ambiguity or lack thereof shifts depending on the smaller narratives within each novel he's telling.

Also, this is by far the most bisexual book he's ever written, and his examination of sexuality in this era is, to me, pleasingly casual, where some people sleep with women and some people sleep with men and some sleep with both and whether or not they do is affected by so many cultural constraints and expectations in addition to desire and love. So that, for me, is fantastic, but I live in hope that I will finally get the FULLY GAY GGK book of my dreams in the future, or that I will eventually figure out how to write my own version of one.

Grade: A  

Book 21: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

This is a charming and beautifully drawn graphic novel about a prince who actually would rather wear dresses, and the dressmaker who designs them. It's very much 'it is what it says on the tin,' but that's not a complaint or a criticism -- the story hits all of the beats you might expect it to, but so satisfyingly, and the characters really land exactly how you want them to. There's secrecy and budding romantic feelings and a split caused by secrecy not being acceptable, followed by the grand revelation of just about everything all at once. The story floats through a fairy tale Paris that appears to be whatever era it needs to be to support the desired fashion from scene to scene, but the fact that the story doesn't attempt to exist in a real past, but rather the idea of what royalty and the aristocracy used to be, makes the story even easier to drop inside of. A really enjoyable read right before bed.

Grade: B

Book 20: Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris

The subtitle of this book is "Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," which gives a pretty good sense of the thrust of the argument made in this book. It purports to be a book intent on explaining why Millennials are the way they are, using facts and macroeconomic analysis, but it is also very much a philosophical point of view desperately seeking factual support, rather than a conclusion being discovered via research. The entire thing feels reverse engineered, which may be satisfying to read if you agree with the arguments being made, but doesn't exactly make it well supported or especially illuminating.

Harris's essential argument boils down to the theory that millennials were born into a world in which there was ever greater competition for even fewer spots, that the middle class had ceased to have opportunities that the Boomers had enjoyed, and that millennials have become so accustomed to needing to go the extra mile in order to achieve anything that they've fundamentally and permanently undervalued their own labor. He gets some credit for actually understanding that, at the time of writing his book, millennials were anywhere from 20 to 35 years old, but he still fell prey to the impulse to equate millennial with young whenever convenient. He spends a short amount of the book acknowledging that our view of who a millennial is makes a bunch of assumptions about whose lives we mean when we reference generations: American, largely white, largely "middle class," largely suburban. He also acknowledges that many of the shifts from Gen X to millennial have causes beyond the economic hollowing out of the American middle class, but is fairly uninterested in exploring any of them. It is a book that is almost instantaneously dated; it was written mostly during 2016 but came out in 2017, and he makes no bones about the fact that in his view the entire world is now permanently fucked and that there's no way out for anyone, and in fact there hasn't been any way out since these beaten down millennials refused to collectively rise up and overthrow capitalism during the Occupy movement or at the very least by electing Bernie Sanders as president. It is a fundamentally short-sighted view of history that feels so entirely male and white even while it attempts to demonstrate that it recognizes women and people of color I cannot take it seriously. There are plenty of reasons for pessimism in this world, and millennials have in fact been dealt a shitty hand compared with their Boomer parents--but that shitty hand is only especially remarkable if you are one of the white male college educated millennials who thought things would be better for you, specifically. His afterward, in which he describes what he predicts the future will be, only made me shake my head at how limited and limiting his imagination truly is. Things are bad, and finding a path forward is and will be hard. But there is something too close to a celebratory tone of how fucked we all are in his analysis, and a condescending sympathy for those who don't acknowledge this permanent condition, and I stopped talking to dicks like that back when I was in college. I wish this book had actually been what I think a book on this topic really could be.

Grade: C 

Book 19: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

I have no idea why this book caught my eye; it's not my usual genre (psychological thriller), and it's a story that ostensibly about a woman but told from the POV of a man and written by a man, which I find really suspect at the best of times (which 2019 is, quite clearly, not). But I put it on hold at the library and then had a firm deadline once I got it, since there are a million holds on every copy of the book in the system and so it's impossible to renew it. That deadline meant that I did in fact make myself read it before it was due, and I'm really glad I did.

The setup is that there's a woman named Alicia Berenson who's a successful painter who murdered her husband, and then simply stopped talking. She's found not guilty by means of insanity (or whatever the equivalent legal situation is in the UK, which is where the story is set), and now lives in a mental hospital run by the state. Our POV character is Theo Faber, a psychologist who's obsessed with figuring her out: why did she stop talking? Why did she kill him? What did the self-portrait she painted after her husband was murdered mean? The narrative cuts back and forth between Alicia's journal entries in the month leading up to the murder, and Theo's POV as he uses progressively more dubious means to attempt to unravel who Alicia was before she murdered her husband, including visiting her relatives and the relatives of her dead husband. I knew that there was something I was missing, some connection that the narrative wasn't giving me quite enough information to put together, until suddenly it all hit at once. I didn't have the time to reread the book from the beginning, but I did think that much like Gone Girl, it's the sort of story that would read extremely differently the second time through. If this sounds remotely intriguing, I really recommend it.

Grade: A

Book 18: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

This was another sci-fi/fantasy book club read. It's a novella rather than a novel, which is definitely a good thing, I think, for the size of the narrative. I could imagine a longer version of this story, but I think the limitation of where the story started and finished made it stronger and more interesting.

The book takes place in an apocalyptic future, where people moved underground in the far north after climate change destroyed people's abilities to survive further south. It's also a universe in which people could have body modifications, like animal tentacles or legs, that changed their physical capabilities, and there's constant real time monitoring of their physical well being via nanobots. The main people who have these modifications are the plague babies, who initially survived the epidemics and fled the surface, and are now returning to attempt to restore the earth and build a new kind of society. The protagonist, Minh, is one of those plague babies, who is frustrated by how developing technology is interested in traveling back in time as a means of escape and entertainment, rather than as a means of obtaining the necessary knowledge to rebuild their habitat.

She gets the opportunity to go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia and do research on the river basin. But of course the trip doesn't go exactly as planned, due to her travel partners being interested in slightly different things than she is, and to the chaos of time travel. It's not my usual kind of story, but I found it really compelling and unpredictable--even when I thought I could guess where the narrative would go wrong for Minh, what that eventually meant for her was completely different than what I expected. There's also a parallel story that's told at the beginning of each chapter that feels unrelated to the main narrative, and when those two paths finally come together it's really satisfying and also fairly shocking. I wouldn't have read this outside of my book club, but I'm really glad I did.

Grade: B

Book 17: Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden

I have a whole subcategory of books on my to-read list that are books I heard about on the longform podcast and decided I needed to pick up. This one made the list because I loved the author's interview, and the concept of actually analyzing which kinds of physical recovery techniques make a measurable difference and which ones don't really intrigued me. I am not an athlete, but I am a fan of many sports and someone who is becoming more and more aware of how my body is changing as I get older, and so I read it both with the aim of potentially discovering better ways of living and seeing which tried and true methods are at best placebo effects and at worst actively hinder people.

The answer to the first part of that inquiry is basically that getting a sufficient amount of quality sleep is the most important aspect of any kind of physical recovery, and the aspect other methods of recovery are the least good at mimicking or replacing. Our bodies are simultaneously incredibly adaptable--she goes through a whole section demonstrating that basically as long as our bodies get some kind of food within an incredibly wide period of time post-exertion, our bodies will generally extract the fuel it needs from anything--and also incredibly finicky and demanding, and what it really comes down to is that every body is different, and if you truly believe that something you're doing is making a difference, it probably will, because we're creatures of habit and the placebo effect is real. Most of the things we believe (dehydration kills performance, icing and ibuprofen after exertion and/or injury helps, eating protein within an hour of weight training is vital for gaining muscle) are either probably not true and based on studies funded by industries that only publish the studies that benefit them (and are unconfirmed by independent studies), or are the result of confirmation bias/survivorship bias: we look at how the best athletes in the world train, and assume that their performance is due to their training methods, rather than them being exceptionally talented individuals who would succeed no matter what within a fairly broad framework of methods and techniques, so long as they believed their methods helped. But that's not something that can be marketed, so instead we are told (and believe, no matter how much we tell ourselves we're too smart for this) that Michael Jordan is MJ because he drank Gatorade, and not because he's an exceptionally talented individual.

I actually found the fact that there's no magic pill (aside from sleep) to be extremely reassuring and helpful. It turns out I didn't miss out on a secret that would have made me a natural athlete; bodies are simply different, and the best thing that I can do is actually listen to what my body is telling me it wants or needs, and do my best to provide that. Easier said than done, but at least I won't need to start sitting in ice baths.

Grade: A

Book 16: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

So this was a read that was a classic 'man I wish I actually liked this book as much as I wanted to' book. I read it for my sci-fi/fantasy book club, and the premise of it is really interesting: a meteor strikes the earth in the early 1950's, and in addition to causing initial chaos and upheaval and all that, scientists are also able to calculate that within ten or so years the earth will warm to a degree that will not sustain life. So there is a push for the space program to work to set up a colony in space for the survival of the species, and of course any kind of successful long term colony would require that both men and women become astronauts.

Elma York, who was a female pilot during WWII and is married to a scientist in the space program, is a natural candidate for women to be included in this colony. But the entire book after the initial aftermath to the meteor strike is just two steps forward and one step back repeated ad nauseam, as she's confronted over and over again with sexist roadblocks and red tape, and also learns the same valuable life lessons about how no matter how difficult it's been for her, it's even harder for black women, a truth that she never actually seems to remember that she's learned before. A friend of mine mentioned that the bureaucratic nonsense that she deals with felt very true to life in terms of how government works, but something being realistic doesn't necessarily make it a good or compelling narrative, and I just found myself getting so impatient for the actual story to start. And of course it's actually the first book in a series, and so the story in fact barely does start even by the end of the book.

I actually found the first part of the story to be the most interesting, when the world is dealing with the ramifications of a major meteor strike only seven years after the end of WWII. But the book itself is only interested in that major world event to the extent that it's a good catalyst for the space program to be both fast tracked and forced to include women, and the narrative wasn't compelling enough for me to stop myself from pulling on the thread of how else such a major event would have changed everything. This book has been lauded by many and clearly must work for other people in a way it simply didn't for me, but I felt at many points of the story that I would have enjoyed reading the historical and scientific works that the author read as part of her research far more than I did the narrative result.

Grade: C 

Book 15: Any Old Diamonds by KJ Charles

I had a bad couple of days in terms of migraines this past week, when I didn't feel well enough to do anything while medicated but also desperately needed to keep my brain happy and calm and engaged. This book was exactly what I needed, and I was very grateful to it.

This story and setup feature the kind of characters who in my opinion Charles does best: people who are fundamentally good but have a moral ambiguity to them, whether because of their occupation or general motives of behavior. Given that one of the main characters is a jewel thief and the other is the man who hires him to rob his father and stepfather at a celebration of their marriage anniversary, moral ambiguity may seem too positive a view of them. But her scoundrels manage to be both law-breakers and extremely sympathetic.

In this particular situation, Alec Pyne has hired two jewel thieves to steal the most closely guarded necklace in the country outside of the crown jewels--namely, the one his father the Duke of Ilvar is about to give to his wife at their twentieth anniversary party. There is a slow, drawn out reveal of exactly why Alec would want to do this, with him confessing his family's past to Jerry Crozier, one of the thieves, as Jerry instructs him in how to deceive his family to achieve his goal. Naturally, one of the methods of his teaching is in sexual rewards, which is so compellingly written it makes the entire story work, in my opinion.

I truly did not know how they were going to succeed in the robbery, or what Jerry's grand plan or any of that was until it happened. Part of that is due to a sleight of hand in how the tale is written, and what is omitted to the reader; I didn't have a problem with how it was constructed, but I can see why it might not work as well for everyone. I was expecting a twist of some kind, and I was reasonably satisfied with the one we got. And the ending was just about everything I'm ever looking for at the end of a good heist story.

This isn't a direct sequel to any of her other books, but a couple of characters from a previous trilogy make appearances, which I enjoyed more than I expected to. All in all, I really liked both the main couple and the overall setup of this book a lot.

Grade: A 

Book 14: Band Sinister by KJ Charles

What a delightful romp! This is a slightly different flavor of the regency romance novels Charles is so good at: it's a gothic novel which knows that it's a gothic novel, and so it's almost like a backstage story or something of the like. A big house full of scandalous people and the two vulnerable young people who are trapped there for weeks and discover that perhaps their outside perceptions are wrong. But it's not precisely a "everything that's assumed about the villains is actually wrong" story, more of a "look closely and perhaps it's society itself that's villainous" tale.

Our story begins when Amanda Frisby falls from her horse and badly breaks her leg while riding too close to the estate of the treacherous Philip Rookwood. This would be difficult for her and her brother Guy under the best of circumstances, but for reasons both within and without her control, Amanda's reputation is extremely fragile, and Rookwood Hall is about the worst place for her to be unaccompanied. So Guy goes to the house, learns that she cannot be moved for weeks without potentially endangering herself, and has to sit and watch as she nearly dies from fever. On top of all of this, Rookwood has numerous guests staying at his home, including a notorious lord, all of whom Amanda wrote a thinly veiled novel about anonymously. Things get increasingly complicated, especially Guy's emotions when he discovers that not only is Rockwood much less evil than he had always presumed, he's also captivating and not at all a threat to Amanda's virtue, but his own.

This book was just fun, and the romance between Guy and Rockwood is really satisfying. It feels both classic and fresh: Guy is a tentative virgin who's never even been kissed before, and Rockwood does introduce him to all sorts of things, but the dynamic doesn't feel rote or boring, because it's so specific to these two characters. The inevitable third act conflict and drama is a touch by the numbers, if only because the potential solution is fairly evident, but it's still really lovely to see them get there, and to watch Guy and Amanda and Philip all grow and figure out themselves. It was just a good read from start to finish.

Grade: A 

Book 13: Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

You know those books that have been on your bookshelf (or, in this case, on my e-reader) for so long that you have no idea how or why they got there in the first place? This is one of those books.

It's a short novel set at the turn of the twentieth century, right in the period of The Music Man, and it has a similar sensibility. It's about a woman who manages a farm in New England with her brother, but once he starts writing and publishing books he has less and less time (or interest) in keeping up his half of the bargain of running a farm. So when a traveling salesman comes by with a horse-pulled bookstore (the titular Parnassus) and tells her he's looking to sell the whole business, she buys it with her savings to prevent her brother from doing the same once he returns. And then she goes off and has some adventures, to the consternation of her brother, and the salesman, while not the scam artist I kept expecting him to be, sticks around for a variety of reasons as well.

It is a charming enough read, one I thought (correctly) was written in that era, rather than being a historical novel; it's just a novel. There wasn't a ton of suspense or intrigue, but enough to keep me happily reading it on my commute, which is about all I can ask of that sort of story. I still don't know why or how I obtained that book in the first place, but I don't regret reading it.

Grade: B 

Book 12: The Wicked King by Holly Black

This is the second book in a trilogy that started with The Cruel Prince, which I loved. That book ended with Jude's machinations having succeeded, and she now has some of the power she had worked so hard to obtain, even if it doesn't look exactly the way she would have most liked. But now that she has that, she has to figure out what to do with it, even while being quite limited still as a mortal within Faerie. There are betrayals and mysteries and conflicting loyalties and aims, and on top of all of this, she's still both repelled by and attracted to Cardan, who seems no better now that he at least has the appearance of power that he lacked in the first book. It takes the book a while to really ramp up into the full plot of this book, but once it did I found it extremely compelling and readable and I definitely wanted to know what would happen and how.

I enjoyed The Wicked King quite a bit, and I am very excited for the third book of the trilogy, slated to come out next year. But it is very much the middle book of a trilogy, that spends a ton of time on set up and conflict and lands at the very end on something that feels like it could be a great resolution, except that it's the end of the second book and so you KNOW a rug is about to be pulled out from under you even if you don't know where you'll land as a result. And that rug was pulled, and it's a GREAT rug pull, but I am also desperate for a variety of things to happen which I know can only come to pass in book three of a trilogy. So I'm glad to have read it but also I am now even more impatient for book three to finally come out because MAN. Much like the first book, this is a pretty perfectly plotted middle book of a trilogy, and hits all of the beats you want and expect, but not in ways that make the characters feel predictable or dumb. But it definitely reminded me of why I try not to read series that haven't been completed yet, because I want that resolution now rather than in a year. Oh well! One book I already know I'll be adding to my master list for 2020.

Grade: B 

Book 11: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Listen. Does a story about a being called a murderbot sound like a good time to you? If so, you should read this novella. It is such a charming (and vaguely-Stargate Atlantis-esque) story, with the most delightful POV, and I honestly don't want to write much more about it because part of the fun is discovering who and what this being is, and I don't know. It reads very quickly and DID I MENTION HOW CHARMING because seriously, it is a delight. I am not always the biggest fan of space sci-fi, it's not my standard go-to genre in books, but I just liked this so much. Go read it in an hour and then come back and talk to me.

Grade: A

Book 10: A Kiss for Midwinter by Courtney Milan

I had an odd time with this novella! It's a Christmas-themed story set in the universe of the Brothers Sinister series, which I love, and I am a giant sucker for stories set during the festive period, so it should be exactly up my alley. And I definitely enjoyed it, and felt happy enough with the resolution, but something about it didn't quite click for me.

Part of it may just be that the setup and circumstances of the story felt simultaneously too big for a novella while the conflict between the two characters felt too slight. Dr. Jonas Grantham first meets Lydia Charingford when she's an unwed teenager who has gotten pregnant by a married man who deceived her into believing they were engaged. He is apprenticing for a doctor who is extremely severe with Lydia, and prescribes her a poison that could have killed her and almost certainly caused her to miscarry. Her pregnancy is never widely known and so her reputation isn't ruined, so when they meet again five years later, the main conflict there is that Jonas is the one man who could still ruin her by spreading the gossip. But he would never want to do that, and is falling in love with her, but she doesn't trust men (for good reason) and doesn't want to feel the anger she should at both the man who deceived her and the doctor who judged her, and I don't know. Jonas is very gruff and then makes her a bet so that they have to see each other when he does his rounds with patients at their homes and she brings Christmas baskets, and you can see the developing interest between the two of them, but everything is simultaneously too easy and not easy enough. There's a lot of interesting historical discussion about medicine and women not being trusted to know what's happening with their own bodies and so forth, but I didn't always believe them as characters.

And yet, it's a Courtney Milan book, so it's extremely readable, and I was very happy when they got together in the end, so if you've read the rest of the Brothers Sinister books and just need one more taste of it, I would definitely recommend reading it. It's just not quite up to the same standard, for me.

Grade: B

Book 9: A Scot's Seduction by Lily Maxton

So listen. I was sick all weekend and after I got done reading a Cat Sebastian book this was a recommended title that was similar, and I will read about Scots being seduced! And I am here to tell you that this was not a good book precisely, but it did certainly pass the time, and there was in fact a Scotsman who got seduced and a happy ending, as well as a literal cat burglar who was a relevant plot point, so it was worth the buck or so I spent on it. Most of the subplot about five strangers who had to stay at a castle because of a flood and then a sprained ankle was nonsense that never got developed well enough to make me care about any of it, but again, there was actual burglarizing done by an actual cat, so really anything else is gravy. Buy this if you need to pass the afternoon while sick, but aside from that situation you can safely skip it.

Grade: C

Book 8: A Gentleman Never Keeps Score by Cat Sebastian

So this book is a sequel to It Takes Two to Tumble, and it focuses on Ben Sedgwick's younger brother Hartley and his misadventures in London. At the end of the first book, we had discovered that a Sir Humphrey Easterbrook had left his home to Hartley Sedgwick, his godson, instead of to his son Martin. In revenge, Martin published letters that suggested that Hartley had actually been sleeping with Easterbrook (which he had been) and that his father had disinherited him in favor of his kept boy. Hartley had done all of that because the instability of his home with his bohemian father and four brothers had convinced him that he really needed to become rich and join the upper classes, but Martin ruined his reputation so at the start of the sequel all Hartley really has is his money, not his status.

There's a lot happening even before this book begins! And some of it, if I'm frank, is a bit ridiculous! I never quite believe that Hartley actually wants to be part of the aristocracy, although I definitely believe that he wants a kind of stability he never had as a child. But anyway! That is his backstory, and it's all falling apart (servants are leaving his employ, he never goes out and sees anyone, etc.), when Sam Fox shows up in his life.

Sam is the owner of a public house and a former boxer. The bar used to belong to his father, who was also a boxer, and it's also something of a meeting place for Black London, where black people can meet and get a good meal cooked by Sam's brother, and if they're having a rough time Sam won't always charge them. His path intersects with Hartley when his brother's fiancee Kate tells Sam that she won't marry his brother because of a nude painting she sat for when she had no money--she doesn't want that to be out there in the future. And of course, the man who requested the painting was Easterbrook, so Sam goes to his house to see if he can find it and get it back.

There's a fair amount of plot in this book, as they attempt to figure out where Easterbrook's collection of exploitative paintings are now, and Sam attempts to keep the public house afloat and avoid catching the notice of the terrible neighborhood constable, and Hartley takes in basically two urchins who are his servants now and gets worse and worse at being an aristocrat. But really it's just a lovely little story about two people finding each other, and I really love the depiction of Sam's London, and while there's definitely a bit of the too convenient in the ending, I still like the two of them as a couple enough to go with it all. Hartley's logistical conflicts never quite landed for me, but his emotional ones did, and I really enjoyed where the story goes with him and Sam together.

Grade: B

Book 7: Wanted, an Author by KJ Charles

This is a lovely little epilogue to Wanted, A Gentleman, which I enjoyed quite a bit. The story takes place the morning after Parliament voted to stop the transatlantic slave trade. Martin is still sleeping off the celebrations from the prior evening when Theo discovers another gentleman in the kitchen, who's actually looking to hire Theo to do a bit more writing of dirty books. Only the book he specifically wants to commission is one that involves the actual implied sexual encounters in gothic novels that is usually merely hinted at (especially when it involves two men, no matter how wicked they are).

This was quite clearly written as a little link to her newish book Band Sinister, which I have just started reading, but it was very nice to see both Theo and Martin, and I'm hoping they'll appear in that book as more than just a cameo as well.

Grade: B 

Books 5 and 6: Elegy and Swansong (The Magpie Ballads) by Vale Aida

I have decided to write about both of these books in one entry, since they're essentially one complete story told over two halves and I read both of them within the course of three days. The central character is Savonn Andalle, aka Silvertongue, whose father was the governor of Cassarah. Elegy, the first book, starts with the funeral of his father, who was killed by bandits...or was he? And his son is both the captain of the guard and also a former actor and, we learn, spy, whose loyalties and true motives are constantly at question.

There is also a mysterious and devastatingly handsome stranger named Dervain Teraille (who often goes by the names Red or the Empath), who has a very complicated past relationship with Savonn, two pairs of siblings who are tied up with both of them, a queen and her estranged sister who also has a secret, and lots of murder and intrigue. In short, it is a fairly classic historical fantasy with chapters ending on cliffhangers and misdirection about who is actually responsible for which death and why, but with the added (and welcome) intrigue that both of the main romances in the book are gay, and the intense friendship between two male characters while one is more or less exiled from his home is textually romantic rather than just heavily implied (and then handwaved away in the final act).

There's so much in these two books for me to like, and yet at the end of the day they didn't quite land for me as solidly as I wanted them to. Aspects of the plot felt referenced rather than developed for me; there were deaths that I knew should affect me greatly, but I hadn't had enough time to really care about the characters to actually feel anything. I liked being thrown right into the world and expected to keep up, but instead of working hard to piece everything together I found it all a bit predictable.

Grade: B

Book 4: In Case of Emergency by Keira Andrews

This is one of those romance novellas that has like four different tropes that I'm into and yet never fully commits to any of them and leaves me feeling more grumpy than anything else at the end of it.

One of those tropes is Christmas stories, which I love, even in January! Daniel is the solid, slightly boring dude who after years of being single is trying to shake things up this Christmas season by renting a chalet with his workplace hookup. This plan is complicated by the appearance of his former step-brother Cole (trope number two!) who Daniel hasn't seen in like ten years but had put Daniel's name down on his emergency contact when Cole started grad school in Daniel's city. So okay, Cole has a concussion and therefore can't be left alone and needs to come with Daniel to this chalet (so they can hit trope number three and get snowed in together).

The setup for all of this is fine, an unexpected meet cute/reunion from their past that has the added intrigue of former-pseudo incest. But the novella never really wants to get into the wrong-but-hot aspect of that stepbrother situation, and instead of the two of them being snowed in alone, first we have to deal with the workplace hookup being inexplicably terrible and inviting like five other people to this romantic chalet and only ever hooking up with Daniel in the first place as part of a bet (trope number four!). It's just this dumb conflict we have to wade through before getting to the actual romance between Cole and Daniel, that's delayed even further so Daniel can discuss his damage from his big relationship in college, and man. By the time the workplace hookup finally leaves and the two of them can just have Christmas together, it's hard to remember why the whole setup is even supposed to be compelling. I can deal with a lot of nonsense to get my Christmas romance novel happy ending, but this was the wrong kind of nonsense, for me.

Grade: C

Book 3: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

This is a book that is simultaneously very, very well written and is culturally specific about details that I didn't even know would or could resonant with me as strongly as they would, while also not being the kind of story that I personally need or even especially want to read right now. I feel very conflicted!

The story is set in Montana in the early '90s, and begins just after Cameron's parents are killed in a car accident. One of her first reactions to this news is relief, because the big secret she's carrying around is that she and her female best friend have kissed, and now her parents will never know, and thank god. Cameron is three years older than I was during those years, and while I grew up in a very different area of the country, I definitely grew up in the same culture, both in terms of how her queerness interacted with the world and how she learned about what it meant to be a lesbian, and also in terms of what it generally felt like to be a teenager at that time, queer or straight. She has a summer girlfriend who's on a rival swim team, and that girlfriend teaches her about the specific counterculture that came out of the pacific northwest, and all I could think about was my personal equivalent of that girlfriend and how painfully real the whole thing felt.

"Painfully real" is probably a good way to describe the entire book, for me, even the second half which goes in a very different direction than my own life did (or that I expected the book to go; I essentially got spoiled for the second half by an article describing the movie version of this story, which impacted my reading of it quite a bit). I spent most of the book bracing myself for what might happen to her next, betrayal or violence or intense loneliness or loss of self. I don't want to get too deep into the plot, but I found the ending to be both deeply affecting and beautiful and right, and yet also not enough: it stops at precisely the correct moment for this coming of age story to end, but I was desperate to know how her life continues. I could only read it as an adult needing to know how she turned out, and in some ways I know too much about the specific ways things were hard for queer youth in the '90s to content myself with the idea that it would simply get better for her. I think it could--it did for me and many of my friends--but I really wanted the narrative to tell me how, and that's not an answer this novel was going to provide. It's the right ending for this story, but not for me, I think.

Grade: B

Book 2: Mr. Winterbourne's Christmas by Joanna Chambers

This is the sequel to Introducing Mr. Winterbourne, and it's the reason I read both of the books, and man I wish that this Christmas novella had hit the spot for me more!

The story picks up more or less where we left off, in that it's eighteen months later and Lysander has been living with and working for Adam during that whole time. But neither of them are certain of the other's feelings, Lysander because he doesn't know if Adam just likes having him work there and Adam because he doesn't know if Lysander feels obligated because he's technically his employer. The Earl invites Adam to join the Winterbourne family for the holidays, theoretically because he's the brother of the Earl's son-in-law but actually because he needs more money from him and wants Lysander to return home to manage the Winterbourne estate instead of the Freeman family. Add to this an old friend of Lysander who may have felt more for Lysander than he ever realized and some ill-advised kissing in the garden and there's a whole lot of plot but not very much in the way of stakes, because literally everything can be neatly solved by just having a conversation or two (and by being far less self-destructive and/or dumb when it comes to being obvious about your gay love affair). I still like Adam and Lysander quite a bit, and there's a clear next couple being lined up for any sequels, but I was hoping for more on the conflict front than 'I don't know how he feels because I refuse to have any conversation about feelings whatsoever.'

Grade: C

Book 1: Introducing Mr. Winterbourne by Joanna Chambers

The first book I read this year was really more of a novella, which I read entirely so that I could read its sequel, which is Christmas-themed. (Yes, I know it's January. I got very behind on all of my holiday-related tasks last year.) It is a sweet enough story on its own, though!

The titular Mr. Winterbourne is Lysander, the youngest son of an earl who has mismanaged the family estate and is now deeply in debt. Lysander's sister is engaged to the son of a wealthy mill owner, who can settle the family debts but is also not of their class. His father instructs Lysander to show Adam Freeman, the older brother of Lysander's sister's fiance, around London and essentially placate him.

Lysander is a delightful fop with secret depth, and Adam is a very nice rich man who nevertheless is constantly disrespected and so he doesn't attempt to hide his disdain for the aristocracy in turn. There's a delightful fencing bout between the two of them, and the resolution of Lysander becoming Adam's estate manager after his father refuses to allow Lysander to manage the Winterbourne estate is both satisfying and reasonably believable, in terms of giving them a permanent happy ending. A very nice little romance if you're not in the mood for much drama or angst.

Grade: B

2019 Master List

Hey, look at this! I'm posting my master list for the year and it's still January. Progress!

Last year I read 41 books, which didn't come close to the 96 books I had on my list, but was far more than the 12 I read in 2017. And this year I have 77 books on the to read list, so I am slowly but surely chipping away at this pile. My goal for this year is to read all of them, or about two books per week, with the understanding that I will inevitably acquire new books I also want to read and my book club should start up again in a couple of months and so getting that number up to 104 is pretty realistic. Especially since I already have 29 books in my 'want to read' tab on iBooks, which I haven't included in this list because I don't actually have those books yet. There's a lot out there to read! I also want to do three (possibly four) deliberate rereads: it's been almost three years (!) since I read the Lymond Chronicles for the first time, so I want to do that, and I want to reread all of Guy Gavriel Kay's books (especially since his new one is coming out in May), and I want to reread the Graceling series, and I possibly want to finish the Anne of Green Gables series and read her other books, too. Oh and I want to reread Uprooted and Spinning Silver. Depending on how fast I actually manage to read this year, those rereads may count toward the 104 or they may not. But below the cut are the new to me books I intend to read this year, with some of them becoming an annual tradition at this point.