A delightful little novella about what happens with Queen Elizabeth II stops off at the lending library van near the palace and starts reading novels for the first time in her life. Involves a friendship with a gay servant from the kitchens who gives her reading recommendations and a discovery of what you can learn from books even if you've been everywhere and met everyone as a nation's sovereign. Just extremely enjoyable in the specific gay British way of Bennett.
Grade: A
An absolutely delightful gothic manor house murder mystery with bonus gay love story book! I really, really enjoyed what this story did with the conventions of both genres, and how it both delivered on the promise of those kinds of stories while also deconstructing elements of it. Definitely among my favorites of this author's, who's long been a favorite of mine!
Grade: A
Final book club book of the year! A lovely little novella about a future version of California that has split off from the U.S., and the food service bots who form their own restaurant collective and build their own community of bots and humans. It's very sweet and enjoyable, with some fairly obvious but still effective allegories, and I enjoyed my time with it a lot.
Grade: B
An incredible book. I read this because I wanted to have experienced the book before I saw the movie, and the way the story is told in this medium is just a triumph. Agnes is such a fascinating, compelling character, but everyone we meet is; this is historical fiction that somehow fully conveys how foreign a land the past is while also reminding us of the fact that people have always been people. The slight of hand with the capital S Shakespeare of it all is expertly done, and the fact that I knew going in what would happen didn't affect how it landed for me at all. Just a book that made me remember why books are good, actually.
Grade: A
I confess that this was almost a DNF for me, but I decided that I wanted to know how it would resolve badly enough to stick with it. Do I regret that? A bit, but only because I am trying to become more ruthless in not spending my time with media I don't truly care about, because it turns out there is plenty out there that I genuinely love and why give my life over to things that don't work that well for me. It's a regency m/m romantasy and neither the romance nor the magic nor the setting really worked for me. Oh well!
Grade: C
Note: I know the author socially.
A delightful little novella, about a girl with magic who accidentally uses it in the most cruel way imaginable against her beloved older brother because of her hurt, and has to go on an adventure to the fairyworld to save him, and does so in a remarkable if roundabout way. Bite-sized but has stuck with me and I want to revisit it already.
Grade: A
A book club book! We've got dark oxbridge academia, we've got Dante, we've got two protagonists with Secrets and a Past, we've got a story that is kind of surprise set in the 1980s, we've got chalk logic arguments as a magical system - we've got so much! And yet, for me, this is something less than the sum of its parts. It's not bad, and the book certainly does the thing, and there are elements of the metaphor that really work for me (did you know that surviving grad school is like walking backwards out of hell, etc.). But it didn't really coalesce for me, and I confess that there's a certain level of fatigue for me in reading about a woman who's determined to not be like those other women who only complain about how hard it is to be a successful woman within patriarchy and then realizes that she's not actually immune to all the same bullshit. It's not bad, but I also couldn't stop myself from arguing with both the characters and the story as a whole.
Grade: B
Note: I know the author socially.
A delightful book of short stories, drabbles and visual art in the Temeraire universe! Something like methadone for me as I attempt to recover post-series. I don't have many deep thoughts about any of this other than what a nice time!
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
I have finished the series ;____; this is both great and terrible. As is almost always true of this author, I got to a point in the final part of something she's written and thought how on earth is she going to pull it all together in a satisfying way? And as always, boy did she pull it off. The resolution to the war is incredible, the future that we see glimpses of feels both right and earned, and there's no sense of the rules of the world having to be broken in order to give us this. Laurence and Temeraire remain among my favorite characters I've gotten to spend a whole series with, and finally reading this whole thing this fall was one of the nicest things I did all year.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
So Victory of Eagles gave me the joy of Temeraire thinking that Laurence is dead; this book gave me Temeraire in denial and a Laurence with deep, deep amnesia. I stayed up way too late reading because I simply could not pause until Laurence remembered his dragon again!! Honestly, I need to reread the whole thing because I simply could not appreciate everything as well as I might have because I needed to burn through it so fast.
Beyond that beloved, expertly deployed trope, the story of this book is so good, with betrayal and set ups and plotting and doublecrossing and just so much fun military stuff. I haven't really gotten into how good the melding of actual historically based warfare and aerial dragon strength is combined, but it's so impressive. One of my absolute favorites of the series.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
A quietly devastating entry in the series! I simply was not prepared to be fully losing a whole ship and a character who had been so important since the beginning, and it made me extremely stressed out about what might happen in the final two novels of the series. I loved the culture and the world that we see in South America, and the completely different social structure between humans and dragons they find there, and the way Temeraire continues to incorporate it all into his goals and aims for dragon rights. We also get the Granby reveal, which is truly one of my favorite things in the entire series, because the men are so overwhelmed by it and the dragons are just completely nonplussed. A delight!
Grade: A
This past year I read and watched a lot of media about World War I, which is an era that I keep thinking about in part because of what we're currently going through globally. This is a book I got from the library when I decided to just request everything they had that had been written by Ben Macintyre after I read The Spy and the Traitor, and it really knocked me out.
It's structured as a mystery -- who betrayed these four British* soldiers hiding in a French village during WWI -- and while the question of who might have done that and why, and what proof we have one way or another a hundred years later, is certainly key to the narrative of the book, I found so much about the story to be fascinating. In particular, the inability to know and even less to believe what was happening in war just ten miles down the road, the horror when that reality came crashing into a small provincial town, the way the war was the worst elements of modernity obliterating the literal landscape of people's worlds -- all of it is explored and excavated in truly painful and awful ways. A great book that fucked me up and made me want to read so much more about this time.
*One of them was Irish, but technically for the time that meant he was considered to be British, but it still made me twitch every time the author collectively referred to them as such.
Grade: A
What a lovely, kind book about existing in 2025.
This is in many ways a classic chicklit book of the 2000s, but with a contemporary worldview of work and relationships and how being an adult feels in the venture capitalism reality of media. Our protagonist is Cecily, a great podcast producer who got fucked over by her ex-boyfriend and former creative partner and is now letting other people control her career path. Her boss makes her do a podcast that purports to make over her life and find her a boyfriend, essentially, but at the same time she has an incredible meetcute with a man with a giant dog. The process of how she finds her way to herself and to having a relationship with the guy who actually deserves her is just so, so nice, and the conflict is both real and never so stressful that I couldn't enjoy the process. Just does exactly what you want it to, written by someone who clearly knows from the world she's depicting.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
Another travelogue part of this series! This one takes place in Australia, and there's a lot of good stuff in it but it's also a bit harder for me just because Laurence is still taking all of this so hard and also I want the other asshole British dudes to suffer more!!!! But the stuff that works fucking works, and I had a great time reading it!
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
Everything that made the prior book in this series hard makes this book absolutely delicious for me. Laurence and Temeraire accepting the punishment for their absolutely morally righteous decision and then suffering even more because Temeraire thinks Laurence is dead and loses his fucking mind is incredible. The reunion!!! The emotions!! The continued consequences and depression that is only alleviated by the fact that they have each other, the triumph at the end at a moment when all looks lost, just an absolute delight from start to finish. Among my favorites of the whole series.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially
I am fairly certain that I read about half of this book when it first came out, put it aside with the intention of returning to it, and then never did. And honestly, I understand why; it deals with a lot of very heavy stuff! Primarily but not entirely connected to the kidnapping and enslavement of West African people by European and colonial powers, with a whole bunch of dragon plague and death to boot. There's a seriousness and a reality to the narrative, and I both admire it and clearly didn't want to deal with it however many years ago I first tried it.
It's an important book within the larger story of the series, though, and without it I think the series would have been taking the easy way out. The ending also demonstrates the great moral fortitude of both Temeraire and Laurence, especially the way that Laurence allows himself to be guided by his dragon, even when it goes against everything his own society has instilled in him. Very good but on the whole probably the book from this series I'm the least likely to reread outside of a full series reread.
Grade: B
I read this after watching all of the show, and while I was very happy I did purely from a desire to see how books are adapted into television shows or movies, boy does the book suffer in comparison. I don't really think it's the book's fault, though, and I also don't know how the show would have hit me if I had seen it in the 2010's rather than watching it post-Covid, and I don't know how much the book's clear commentary on how 9/11 and the subsequent wars would have hit me differently in a time when I didn't know what was coming in later years. So many elements that probably played out as extreme satire or allegory just read as fact to me, and that's a weird place to be in! It did make me want to read other books by this author, though, who has a view into Gen X suburbia that I think is very interesting.
Grade: B
Note: I know the author socially.
This is the last of this series that I'm certain I've read before, primarily because it involves a character and a location that made me very very happy. This is also the book that I think solidifies the reality that it's a series that will give a resolution to the end of each book, but not necessarily a happy one--it's very stressful and while our main guys are all okay by the end and theoretically on the way home to something familiar and nice, the process of getting there is hard and also it's less and less clear that those who should be on Laurence and Temeraire's side actually are! Very complicated, but still a very fun reread.
Grade: A
This book was mentioned on one of my pop culture podcasts, and historical fiction about a young da Vinci, a Medici and a Cardinal in Rome immediately felt like something for me! This is an era and location of history that I don't know much about, which meant that I had no real sense of where the larger political elements were going, which was pretty exciting. Of the three main stories, the one I was most invested in was da Vinci's, but the broader focus on the world he became the artist he would be in Florence really made that smaller element of the story land for me. One of those books that made me immediately want to read and watch one million more stories about this historical era.
Grade: A
I initially read the titular short story last spring because I wanted to have read it before seeing the movie based on it, and I enjoyed it quite a bit but it lacked something of the knockout punch for me. This fall, after seeing the movie, I reread the short story and then the full collection of twelve stories, and they absolutely floored me. They are all in their own way the most beautifully New England stories, whether they're set in the 21st century or hundreds of years earlier, and the structure of the book and the way pairs of the stories are linked across time, either in terms of location or thematically or because of artifacts that exist in multiple times, deepens the impact of each individual story. The specificity of the worlds and the people within them will stay with me for a long, long time.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
This is when the series turns into a proper travel adventure! The second book in the Temeraire series is when things become more complicated in lots of different ways, and also when it becomes clear that this isn't an alternate history series that's just going to brush past the way that colonialism and chattel slavery shaped the economics and political structures of the world. That makes it less simple fun than the first book, but the expansion of the world and the introduction of the Chinese court in particular is so incredibly compelling. Also, Temeraire makes a lot of good points!
Grade: A
I heard Rick Steves speak about this book on a podcast, and I thought it sounded fascinating - rather than being a memoir of someone looking back on a backpacking trip they took as a twentysomething, it's a slightly revised version of his contemporaneous travel journal, along with all of the film photos he could take along the way.
As someone who has never wanted to take an overland trek from Turkey to India, for a variety of reasons, it was really interesting to read about someone's experience doing that at a time when it was both more possible (Iran was still open to Americans) and less (Eastern Europe was so much less navigable for anyone Western). It made me think a lot about what I hope to get from traveling as a 45 year old white woman, which is quite the accomplishment for a book written by someone who is like the best version of a young white Boomer man. A lovely read and peek into the past.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
This book is just a fucking banger start to finish. It's an incredible concept--what if Napoleonic naval warfare but the ships are giant dragons--executed flawlessly, with a central duo of Laurence and Temeraire that is as good as any book relationship ever written. Their bond is immediate and so incredibly important, and Laurence is such a good man and so exactly of his world, which just expands beyond him at such a rapid rate you would understand how someone might handle it much less well than he does. Which isn't to say he's without flaws; his mistakes are often devastating, but they are never unearned or unexplored, and the conflict within this first novel of the series is exceptional. I decided I wanted to finally read this entire series this fall, and while I could have skipped this one since it's the one of these series I've read many times, I didn't want to deprive myself of the pleasure of reading it once more.
Grade: A
Sometimes I can't tell if a book doesn't totally work for me or if I've just read it badly. I really liked the world of The Folk of the Air series, even if that trilogy didn't quite land the way I wanted it to, so I was hoping that this would recapture my favorite aspects of that series. And while there are things I enjoyed it, I think it was just a bit more YA-focused than I was hoping for? The central character's main conflict never quite hit for me, and I spent most of my read basically waiting for the story to get to the big reveal at the end of it. I'm hoping that the sequel will build from that and end up creating a more satisfying story as a whole for me.
Grade: C
A story in a genre that already feels like a classic, even though it's really only been a thing for about twenty years at this point. We have two more or less enemies at a magical university, who end up thrown together via an illegal bond, and then they have to go on an adventure together to solve this problem and learn some important things about each other and correct misconceptions!! Is there attraction? You bet? Is there the most obvious set up of conflict and misunderstanding to lead into the sequel? Oh yes! Am I mad about any of this? Absolutely not. I personally like a bit more sexual tension and payoff in stories like this, but the fantasy worldbuilding is solid enough that the balance didn't make me mad, and I liked both of the leads quite a bit. Looking forward to the next one!
Grade: B
What a great book! This is a pop history book detailing how a KGB spy was flipped to be a double agent for the British during the Cold War from the 1960s-1980s, and how he was eventually sniffed out by the Soviets and yet still managed to make it out of Russia in the most over the top, unbelievable spy shit way imaginable. Oleg Gordievsky's work as a spy almost went terribly so many times, and yet he also managed to pass along information to the British (and, through intelligence sharing, the Americans) that was quite important. It's a real reminder that everything that happens in world history etc. depends so much on luck and on random circumstance, for better and for worse, always. A great time and I now have like ten other books by this author on my tbr list.
Grade: A
The final book in the Enlightenment trilogy following Beguiled, it's a very satisfying conclusion to both the relationship and the world we get to live in during the first two books. One of the great narrative demands of historical gay romance novels is creating a resolution that feels both happy enough for our gay protagonists and also doesn't feel like it breaks our understanding of how hard it was for most queer people, and I think this story does a neat job of it while also not relying solely on 'well they're rich enough that it doesn't matter for them.' Their life together feels well earned and they're both finally able to acknowledge what the other means to them. A delight!
Grade: A
The sequel to Provoked, which I enjoyed very much, and hey I liked this one just as much! The two leads have come back together after years of separation, and David gets to be very brave and then suffer and Murdo gets to be the good person he actually is, and it just continues to be a wonderful regency era m/m series that's also interested in unpacking how queer lives could function in that society. A nice time!
Grade: A
A book that beautifully straddles the line between a murder mystery and a romance! This author writes about damaged men finding each other in post-Great War Britain so well, and this one has just a touch of the paranormal to keep it interesting. Joel can essentially see who a person is at their core from their handwriting, and this skill makes him useful for both a socialite checking up on their fiancée and a cop trying to solve a murder. The cop in question is Aaron, a detective who's living a small, closeted life and has to open himself to work with Joel to save themselves and apprehend the crook. And you know what, it just works! It's a nice book with a lovely romance at the center of it, and if the mystery isn't the most complicated one I've ever read, I still really enjoyed my time reading this. It hit the spot.
Grade: A
A book club book! This is one of those books where I get what it's doing, and it's interesting enough, but it didn't quite pull together in the end to be something new or bigger, for me? Part of my reaction to that is definitely related to a fatigue regarding dystopia narratives--I am not completely opposed to them, but it takes a lot more for me to emotionally engage with them at the moment, and I really need to them to go someplace new or profound for the story to stick. This was an interesting parable about censorship and the ways books change us and why that's so dangerous to authoritarians, but it didn't ultimately hit, for me. A perfectly fine read, but not what I was hoping for.
Grade: B
A book club book! This is a sci-fi space allegory about castes and what we tell ourselves when we create processes to lift up those who have been restricted. It's basically got a Snowpiercer vibe but about academia. It read a bit more like an intellectual exercise than a story, but I did enjoy it, and it should be a good discussion starter.
Grade: B
This is, to the best of my recollection, the first book that I've reread that I read for the first time after I had started this blog. So here are my thoughts about it from 2016.
I don't disagree with any of my thoughts or conclusions, although it took me longer this time around to vibe with the ensemble cast nature of the story. I have also actually been to some of the places that inspired this book now, namely Venice and Ravenna and Dubrovnik, as well as Greece, and that along with other books I've read about the region have deepened my appreciation of many of the themes of the book. I still cried, again mostly from relief, but also from recognition and the feeling of being home in this book. I don't think it will ever be my favorite GGK novel, but it's in conversation with so many of them that it exists within those books now, too. It enriches all that came before, and I expect it will do the same for those that come after.
Grade: A
Sometimes you just need a classic gay regency romance to get through the day, and boy did this do the trick. We've got an upstanding lawyer who desperately wants to resist his desires, and a lord who is desperate to convince him not to. Add in some early 1820s political radicalism and social tensions and you've got a great first book in a trilogy. It's closer in length to a novella than to a novel, and for me that was perfect for the amount of plot and tension and longing. Also, the sex is extremely good regency gay sex. Looking forward to reading the next two!
Grade: A
This was recommended by someone I follow on bluesky, and at first glance it looked like a standard (and delightful!) m/m regency romance novel. And while it certainly is that, it's got a bit more going on as well.
Christopher is a reclusive lord who doesn't want to be an active part of Society because he's got a secret: he's trans. But in order to secure his family seat and inheritance, he must marry before he turns 25. Which means he has to go to London, and no gentleman would travel without his valet, the titular gentleman's gentleman. And that is how he meets James Harding, who is far better at being a valet than Christopher is at being a lord.
About 85% of the way through the novel I got a bit worried about how the various conflicts and romances would be resolved, but I shouldn't have been concerned. The book manages to pave the way to a future that felt both of the time and like it would actually make all parties involved happy. The romance at the center didn't have quite enough longing and suspense to be an all-timer for me, but I had a lovely time reading this.
Grade: B
Sometimes there's a book that does something intentionally and you know why it did it conceptually and you're still like yes but please give this to me???? And that is how I feel about this book and the lack of a map at the front.
Every other book that GGK has written has a map at the start. It grounds you in this shared universe that he's created, which is essentially a fictional Europe and Middle East and North Africa that he can play with freely. And this book is about the version of Britain and the Vikings in 9th century or so, and I understand why the lack of a map reflects the mists and unknown glens and so on and so forth, but I would like to have my narrative bearing!!!
Anyway. I love this book very much; many of Kay's books are about fathers and sons, and legacy, and above all else how chance encounters and timing changes the course of history, but this one has some of the most affecting scenes and develops those themes in ways that continue to stay with me. It's a book I reread hoping that I've misremembered some things about, so I don't have to experience that pain again, but by the end I'm so happy with where the story goes that I've accepted going through that pain. And there's a lot of hope in that.
Grade: A
I got stalled in this reread about 75% of the way through - I got to the point when it all begins to fall apart in the way that it simply has to fall apart, and weirdly I found it tough to experience this time around!! But I finally did, and it was as devastating and ultimately satisfying as it ever is.
This book was the reason I specifically traveled to Ravenna to see some mosaics in person, which was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It gave me some of the language to explain why art and storytelling matter so much, even when (especially when) the world around us feels like it's imploding. And I find it comforting to know that humans have always just been trying to live our ordinary lives while greater machinations happen around us, and that there's still joy to be found in moments even during so much cruelty and terror.
Grade: A
A book club book! This is a charming fable that felt like it was an old fairy tale that I had somehow never heard of before. There's a river that has two giant willows on either side of it, and a land called Arcadia north of those willows, and two sisters who are part of the family that has sung to the willows that enables the roots to create and build grammar. It's a bit metaphorical! The first twenty pages of this novella are basically entirely without characters and plot! But once it gets going, I found the story really lovely, and the liminal spaces it explored to be deeply meaningful. I did wonder whether this was a story that began as a short story and then got filled out a bit, because it felt like there was a lot that went unsaid, and I couldn't entirely tell whether that was a story choice and whether that was a function of the size of the story. But all in all, I enjoyed this quite a bit!
Grade: B
A book club book! Although I've read it well in advance for once.
I think I may have gone into this book with expectations that were too high--there's a lot about this time travel book to like, and I had a really nice time reading it. But I kept expecting either the relationships in the book to really wow me, or for the structure and worldbuilding of this specific time travel project to hit me harder, and instead it was just nice! I liked what it did with the historical event of the HMS Terror and what happened to the men searching for the Northwest Passage, but it never quite clicked into place with the current day story for me, and I never fell in love with the romance the way I was supposed to.
Part of that is that the narrator felt a bit too opaque and naive for my liking, and while some of that is because of various reveals that occur in the final third of the book, that only compounded what didn't entirely work for me about her. It was all fine! But I had been hoping for something that made me swoon, and unfortunately it didn't.
Grade: B
Look, sometimes you need to end March with a gay Christmas romance novel, okay?
This one has a lot to recommend for it - it's got a baker named Christopher who lives in a quaint Welsh village. He gets snowed in with the famous actor Nash Nadeau there under a fake name who was supposed to stay at Christopher's apartment while he went home for Christmas. They clash! There's only one bed! They have to figure out how to work together to help the village! Christopher hides that he knows who Nash is!
This book is extremely cozy, and it's lovely to have a lead character who's trans and not have that be the big message of the book. But for me, the balance of small village pre-Christmas stuff to romance wasn't quite what I was looking for - the two leads didn't have the kind of chemistry I was hoping for, and while they each had personal obstacles they had to get past, it didn't feel like they found the answers in each other. Plus, and this is just a particular pet peeve for me, Nash never sounded like an American (or a Canadian who moved to LA when he was a teenager) to me. I'm sure that the reverse happens for British readers all the time, but I wish his dialogue and internal monologue had been more carefully written to be that of a non-British person.
Grade: C
One of my best friends got married a few months ago, and she gave a selection of books to each person in her bridal party based on their tastes. This is one of mine, and I definitely know why I got it: a female knight! an inventive narrative structure! lesbian subtext! and a whole bunch of twists and turns and prophecies and betrayals. It's a novella that feels like it could be the launching pad to a full novel or series, because there's so much more of the world left unexplored and it ends at a place that is clearly kicking off something new.
The titular fireborne blade is in the lair of a dragon named the White Lady, who can't be killed by a (male) knight. So following in the footsteps of Eowyn, the knight Maddileh is determined to force the other male knights to allow her to also be a knight by killing the White Lady and bringing back the blade. She has a squire who's fairly incompetent and the support of a couple of mages (official and hidden), and then the whole thing takes a turn! I read this in one sitting and it was just a very nice way to send an evening.
Grade: B
So I put a hold on this book in the library when I read the following quote from it:
"There's no instruction manual for falling in love with your best friend's little brother. And there's no manual for falling back in love with him when he's a monk."
Up until the final three words it's just pretty standard gay romance novel fare, and then it suddenly takes a turn!! And that turn is why I picked up the book and it's why this book has the charms it does.
The monk is Aiden, who had been a millionaire playboy with underlying trauma that he decides to deal with by breaking up with his hot boyfriend Elijah and becoming a monk (but like a cool monk, in a cool monastery that's fine with his queerness etc.). But then Elijah comes by because he's writing a big magazine piece on monastery breweries, and also he's engaged now to another man, and Aiden loses his mind and the chastity cage he's been wearing under his robes no longer controls his desires.
The whole vibe of this story is giving these two men in contemporary life a reason why they can't be together that's also extremely hot, and the enforced celibacy of Catholic priests/monks/nuns is a perfect fit for it. It also begins to sag a bit at a certain point, because there's only one way out of this (Aiden leaves his monastery) and also we find out what his Big Secret was for leaving Elijah and entering a monastery the next day, and frankly it doesn't hit as well as it should. But the sexual tension and denial is extremely good, and the way they roleplay with the actual restrictions they're breaking is incredible. I was sad to discover that most of this author's books are either straight Catholic versions of this, which I'm less interested in, or fake modern politics based on Camelot, which unfortunately I simply cannot deal with right now. But this was a great winter read.
Grade: B
I finally made it to the sequel of Dark Rise! And it was both exactly what I'd hoped for/expect while somehow being a bit less than the sum of its parts, unfortunately.
The whole book is built around the tension that Will knows who he is deep down but none of his friends do, and if they did know, they'd immediately turn against him. And that's a pretty good central tension to a story, but either I've simply read too many of these kinds of stories at this point or the book didn't quite hold the tension as well as I'd like it to, because the moment of his reveal didn't quite hit for me. This is partly because James is on his own journey that's separate from Will's path, but it's one that's less about discovering who Will is and more Will continuing to somehow always be a step ahead of him in terms of accepting their intermingled destiny. I don't know! I get why Will is like oh noes he only loves me because he thinks I'm NOT the big bad and/or because he doesn't realize that the collar is linking him to me because I'm that guy, but I thought by the end of this book we might actually get to the next stage of it. I wanted more actual juice in the central relationship of the story.
This may also be because so many of the other characters felt sidelined to me. This is a classic second book/movie in the trilogy issue, where the main crew gets sent off on their own journeys before finally coming back together at the end, but as a result I felt cut off from Violet and the whole Lions plotline and Elizabeth dealing with Visander.
Having said all that, I think it was a much more coherent book than the first one, and I am still looking forward to the final book of the trilogy because I do think it'll probably land the plane pretty well. I think I just wanted a bit more tropey nonsense from these books and less lore.
Grade: B
As is probably obvious from the title of this Christmas romance novel, it's a take on It's a Wonderful Life. But instead of an actual angel, we have a group of drag queens who need to get the wings of their costume, and the small town has a sad lesbian who never got to leave the town to go out and experience the world because her dad died her senior year of high school, and the love interest is the girl who got away from high school who's just moved back.
There's a lot in this that's cute, but the central conceit really falls apart in this version of it. We're supposed to think that by the end Bailey George (yes, really) will of course be happier if she stays in Lanford Falls and never leaves or moves to a different town (let alone city or country like her dream was), and that literally the entire town will fall apart and stop thriving if she leaves. And you can kind of buy it in the movie version, that a small town banker really could be the thing to keep an entire town and family together. But the book doesn't actually want to get as dark and sad as the movie does, and as a result both the low point and the catharsis fall flat. I have read this kind of movie romance novel adaptation many times, and this one unfortunately both misses the emotional impact of the movie and also doesn't give us new characters who make me feel anything different. Bah.
Grade: C
I picked up this collection of essays about the holidays after watching and enjoying a Hallmark Christmas movie that the author had also written. It is a fun, light read of stories about a variety of aspects of holiday remembrances: our experiences as children vs. adults, the sometimes bizarre people who get thrown into our lives around Christmas, how important the Scholastic book fair was to many of us who were born in the '70s and '80s, and the way end of year celebrations often make us melancholy and think of people who are no longer in our lives for many reasons. A well-timed read for right after the season has ended.
Grade: B
We're still within the Twelve Days of Christmas, so I'm still reading Christmas books and watching Christmas movies! This one is a festive mystery novella in a series I haven't read any of the other books in, but I've heard very good things about the main books, and based on my experience with this, I'm not surprised!
This is a very meta mystery series, with a detective/protagonist who knows that he's playing that role in his 'real life' and so comments on elements of it within the story. In this case he discusses the specific aspects of a Christmas special, where the mystery is lighter and the story as a whole doesn't include every reoccurring character and plot element that you would expect from the main story. It's a festive story in which five days before Christmas, his ex-wife's current partner is murdered, and she's the main suspect, so he travels to help her clear her name. It's also about a magician and stagecraft hijinks and also includes commentary on how celebrity charity works, with a satisfying ending that I in no way predicted but that did all come together when he laid it out, and I could see how I could have put it all together if I was that kind of mystery reader. A very pleasant way to spend New Year's Day!
Grade: A
Somehow it is 2025, and this will be my tenth year of maintaining this book blog. I truly do not know how the time has passed, but that's the nature of the game, I guess.
Last year I read the fewest books since 2017, when I somehow only managed to read 12 books all year. I would like to do better than that this year, and better than the 26 I read in 2024, although I do have a good sense of why I didn't have a ton of time or focus for reading. Last year I watched many many movies, and a fair amount of television, and also I got distracted by events of the world, for better or for worse. And this year I would like to at least try to find the pleasure in reading again, and in building out a TBR pile that makes me excited and doesn't make me feel burdened. I think I have a good handle on that right now, but we'll see. As is my standard, I have more books to start this year than I did at the beginning of 2024, but let's see how I can do. I'd like to read more books I love this year, which probably means I need to be more ruthless about giving up on a book when I know it won't be one I love. I would also like to reread more books this year as well. Here's hoping.
2025 list is below!
