Book 14: We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

Man, Cat Sebastian has really found her wheelhouse in writing gay romances set in mid-20th century America. This one takes place in New York and is between a Brooklyn-born Italian-American who scrapes through and becomes a newspaper reporter, and the son of the publisher who joins the reporting desk in order to learn the business before he takes over. The New York of it all is super well crafted and made me want to go wander around different neighborhoods in my city, which is about the biggest compliment I can give it. The love story is really beautiful and the depiction of how gay people lived in a pre-Stonewall era just felt really nice to read: a reminder that we've always been here. 

Grade: A

Book 13: Time to Shine by Rachel Reid

A charming hockey romance about a goalie in the minors who gets called up to the NHL and finds both his confidence and true love! This is a lovely and extremely readable story featuring one taciturn loner and the bubbly yet anxious star player whose love he can't quite trust. However, it's a romance novel, so you know he will eventually! I also enjoyed this one more than others because while we've got a lot of archetypes here, they map less cleanly onto real life players than some hockey romances do, which makes it easier for me to lose myself in the story and not argue with it.

Grade: B

Book 12: Flux by Jinwoo Chong

A book club book! This is a first novel that feels it, in both really positive and slightly tiring ways. It's stuffed to the brim with ideas, and they don't all quite come together to make a cohesive whole. It's very timey-wimey but also has some of the best engagement in what it means to be a person who's deeply connected to a piece of media, and manages to depict that in a way that feels extremely accurate but also not instantly dated - I can't datestamp the author as being on tumblr in precisely 2014-2015 or whatnot. Overall I enjoyed it enough to be very excited about his next book, which is a great landing place for a first novel. 

Grade: B

Book 11: The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman

Another great entry in this mystery series! I'm really enjoying the way each story builds on the last, and how the friendships deepen through the process of solving various crimes. Elizabeth continues to be the greatest, and I accept my place as the Joyce of a group. I'm taking a break after this one because I know the fourth one is a bit sad, and I'm not quite ready for it yet.

Grade: A

Reread: Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay

There are some books that I'll always remember where and who I was when I first read it, and this one I read during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, while I was on campus for a arts festival. It made me convinced that I was actually going to become a historian, even though I had none of the background or really drive that would make that possible, because this version of the Byzantium empire was so captivating for me that I projected my love of this book onto the idea of studying the time period. I read both this and its sequel (which had just come out) in quick succession, and they've stayed with me on a deep level for the past 24 years. 

Grade: A

GGK Reread Continues! The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

It took me a long time to get back to this book, which doesn't entirely surprise me given the themes involved. 

Kay's sixth novel, and his first that is significantly less high fantasy and more historical fiction with the serial numbers filed off, is set in a world that draws heavily on the Iberian Peninsula in the time of El Cid and the reconquista. He is deeply interested in conflicts of faith and how people of different faiths and cultures either manage to bridge those divides or fail, and the consequences of those relationships can have for both individual lives and nation states and society as a whole.

The analogues for Christianity, Islam and Judaism are extremely clearly drawn, and there's a love triangle in the middle of this novel that in another author's hands could be extremely trite and obvious. But it's so beautifully developed and drawn out, and the tragedy of the end is the utter impossibility of a future that doesn't destroy something that will be mourned. I couldn't quite get through this book again in the fall of 2023, but I finally did this winter, and rediscovered all over again that I cannot read this book without crying, even 25 years after the first time I read it. 

Grade: A   

Book 10: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

This book has been on my radar since it was published in 2019, but I only just now decided I was in the right headspace to read a book about all of the ways that global warming will destroy the fragile equilibrium that enables humans to survive on our planet. I don't know that I actually was in the right headspace for that, frankly, but one of the other interesting elements of reading this book now is that all of the science is at least 5 years out of date. And when it comes to climate science and, more importantly to the thesis of this book, climate projections of how warm it will get by when and even more crucially, what that will have done to various systems, none of the predictions contained in this book had the presumably desired impact of shocking me out of complacency. If anything the timeframes presented in the book feel almost naïve from here, to say nothing of the chapter on the impact a warmer planet has on the likelihood of future pandemics. I don't say any of this because I'm a climate doomer, or think there's nothing that can be done, or even that we're on exactly the same bad trajectory we were five years ago. I just think this book was actually not meant for me, at this time. Also, the book was written during the middle of the Trump presidency, and the despair present from that in the writing did remind me of how that felt to live under every day, and I would really like to not return to that. 

Grade: C