Book 11: The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang

A bookclub book! Specifically a novella, and it's the sort of space scifi mystery type story that I'm so glad is the length that it is. This is both because it involves lots of different species and translation and beings moving through space in ways that my brain simply will not picture while I'm reading, and so there was a lot of me just letting certain descriptive elements wash over me rather than stressing about it all. And I'm glad I did, because boy does it eventually pack a real emotional punch. 

The very short narrative logline for this story is that there's this alien Ro who's a linguist, and his species has the ability to jump into a different species and observe their language and report back. He's kind of an anthropologist, and they're trying to figure out how to help this other species, and so he jumps and learns much more than he was expecting to, in a variety of ways. I don't actually want to say much more because, well, that's the story, but in many way it's more of a morality play than a full story, which made it an ideal bookclub book to discuss and the read itself went by fast enough and gave me a lot to think about. Not my favorite kind of book but very compelling! 

Grade: B

Book 8: Benefit by Siobhan Phillips

A book that made me realize how much a story set in the 2000s really is a period piece now. Which is fine! It's nice to know that I'm not alone in looking back at the decade of my twenties and reflecting on how it has shaped, oh, all of current American society. This one is also about the false promise of academia, which is a topic many many books out there tackle at the moment for obvious reasons, and about what it means to be a part of the elite culture and what it's built on. The chapters on the history and present day realities of sugar production really took my breath away, and the specific depiction of the main character's lesbian friend Greta and her marriage and child-rearing felt almost unbearably recognizable. It's extremely first novel-y, in that you can feel how many of the chapters could have been short stories, and they're explicitly playing with form and structure and tone so you're always aware of the shift, but I don't mean that in a pejorative way, especially because it fits the themes of the novel so well. I haven't been reading a ton of literary fiction these days, but this is one of the good ones. 

Grade: B

Book 6: Fall Into You by Dylan Morrison

Time for some vacation reads at a house in the woods! The first one is this extremely classic gay romance about a guy named Will who fled his parents' farm when he was 18 and never looked back, until his father died and left him a farm. When he returns, he meets Casey, who had been taking care of the apple farm for the final 6 years of Will's dad's life, and sparks fly! Is selling the farm to the real estate developer the right move? Was Will ever really happy living in the big city? I bet you know the answers to those questions, and as always, the fun is in the telling of it. I would have liked a bit more development of the romance between Will and Casey, but overall I really liked this story of someone finding the right version of home for them. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Sheep Calm and Merry On by Ashlyn Kane

This is a perfectly adequate Christmas romance novella in which two retired hockey players end up in a bit of a Canadian shack situation and realize that maybe they're meant to be together! It's cute but doesn't do anything more than what's on the tin, and even at a novella length still had to invent a reason for a second location/is he going to call me bit of drama. It's fine!

Grade: B

Book 4: The Larks Still Bravely Singing by Aster Glenn Gray

Set in the dying days of World War I, two former public school boy friends find each other again while convalescing from the front. One has lost a leg, the other an arm, and they begin to rekindle the romance that never quite bloomed while they were at school together. 

I really loved so much of this - it's an era that I keep going back to, in part because the brutality of that war destroyed so much and never quite got dealt with. That's a bit of an issue with this novel, for me. I appreciated the lack of a quick fix for either of them, but I also wanted an ending and a resolution that presented at least a clearer way forward, if not a complete emotional and mental recovery for both of them. I don't entirely know how to do that beyond a magical cure for PTSD before anyone really knew what that was, but I felt more off-balance by the ending than I had hoped.

Grade: B

Reread: A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay

The last of my GGK rereads before I finally read his most recent two novels! This book is such a curious one - it takes place only fifty years prior to the events of Children of Earth and Sky, and it connects to them but in the kind of way where as soon as I finished this one I wanted to reread that one again, so I could better slot it all in. It's also curious in that it's deliberately to the side of major world events - the fall of Sarantium (aka Constantinople) and the remaking of the world's order, is out of focus while the almost petty citystate wars of Batiara (aka Italy) take center stage. This book takes a long time to fully immerse myself in the stakes of the story, and as soon as it does everyone is hit from the side by much more important developments. Which I suppose is reflective of living through the world in real time; I can formulate many reasons why a Canadian author might have written this in the aftermath of Trump's first election. It does however mean that it's the least sticky of all of GGK's novels for me, and while I had a lovely time becoming reacquainted with these characters, none of them burrowed deep into my chest as others have. It was still a remarkable book to finish while visiting Istanbul for the first time, however. 

Grade: B

Book 2: Honeytrap by Aster Glenn Gray

This is a gay romance novel that spans multiple decades and follows the romance of a soviet spy and an American spy who are partnered to solve a mystery of sorts and embark on a roadtrip across late 1950s America. It's both a charming romance in which both of them are hiding a secret (Gennady is supposed to be honey trapping Daniel, and Daniel has been demoted for having a gay affair with another FBI agent), and a look at how the closet hurts people's lives over many decades. I expected something different from this novel--less of a historical examination and more of a classic romance novel in which two characters decide their love requires them to risk it all--and it took me a bit to come around to the slower, more agonized love depicted. But maybe we need a slightly more honest version of this story right now. 

Grade: B

Book 43: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

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

Book 39: Katabasis by RF Kuang

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 

Book 30: Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik

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  

Book 29: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

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 

Book 24: Sorcery and Small Magics by Maiga Doocy

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

Book 19: The Book Censor's Library by Burthaina Al Eissa

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

Book 18: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

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

Book 16: A Gentleman's Gentleman by TJ Alexander

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

Book 15: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

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

Book 13: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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

Book 11: The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

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  

Book 10: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

The sequel to The Mimicking of Known Successes, this book picks up where that one left off, with our intrepid duo stumbling on a new mystery to solve on the rings of Jupiter! This one is in many ways an examination of why people within a society will contrive to create an "imposition of unnecessary obstacles" simply because they need to see themselves as living off the land or being good enough or having the ability to pull up those bootstraps that others can't, etc. And for obvious reasons, I found that pretty topical! Don't break things that are working but flawed because you're bored or because they're not perfect!!! Ahem. 

I will say that the relationship at the core of these books still isn't exactly my jam - there's too much hesitation and doubt for me, without an actual issue to give their relationship any real conflict. It's not the scifi novella series I'd most recommend, but if space colonization is your thing, it's fun!

Grade: B

Book 8: Saint by Sierra Simone

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