Started: 10/26/21
Gave up: 10/27/21
I really liked the short story I read of his last year set in Cairo with a possessed tram car, and there’s a whole series there I’m excited to read, so I was bummed when I couldn’t get into this one. Mashing up Jim Crow and Klansmen with Lovecraftian monsters is a brilliant idea, but I’m a little leery of Lovecraft-related stories, and this one didn’t land for me.
Started: 10/25/21
Finished: 10/26/21
Recommended to me as fantasy and manners, in a series called Regency Faerie Tales, and how could I not love it?
Started: 10/20/21
Finished: 10/24/21
Slow start, but that’s based more on the formatting than the story/writing. It’s not .mobi, so the formatting isn’t perfect. Annoying!
SO EASY to get past the formatting after just a bit. Really good story, totally sucked me in, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.
Started: 9/30/21
Finished: 10/16/21
New fantasy series! It took me a little bit to get into it, then I was hooked, then I wasn’t sure I was going to finish it, and then I got hooked again. I can’t say whether this was just about my frame of mind or about slow parts in the book. Could be either, but the vast majority of it had my full attention, and I’m still thinking about it, and I’m excited about the next book, which – ugh – isn’t out yet.
Started: 9/9/21
Finished: 9/19/21
I LOVE Naomi Novik. There’s only one book of hers I haven’t read that’s out right now, and I haven’t read it for the same reason I haven’t read that one last book of Robin McKinley’s: I don’t want to have read everything she has written.
That said, I almost quit on A Deadly Education. Wizard school (yay!) by an author I love (double yay!), but it started out so…unpleasant. So hard to understand. So not your typical wizard school book. I didn’t quit (because Naomi Novik has earned my trust), which is great because this totally weird book turned out to be awfully wonderful and I loved it and I can’t wait for the next one.
Started: 8/29/21
Finished: 9/5/21
Recommended by an author I like, this was a surprisingly well-written very silly start of a series about a retired demon-hunter-turned-suburban-mom who has to, surprise!, fight demons again. It was both predictable and not – some of my guesses were right and some were wrong. It’s a nice palate cleanser.
Started: 7/10/21
Finished: 7/22/21
Katherine Addison’s first book*, The Goblin Emperor, is one of my new favorites. I loved it. Picking this one up was a no-brainer, and now that I have put it down, I want more. It’s a strange book – it’s Holmes and Watson, but with different names. It’s familiar mysteries, but with unfamiliar resolutions. There are familiar characters, but with supernatural twists. I wasn’t sure if I really liked it, although I enjoyed it, but I love the main friendship and I want to read more of it. So yeah, I really liked it.
*Not really her first book. Katherine Addison is a pen name for Sarah Monette, who has written other stuff. I just learned that. I have not read Sarah Monette. I will.
Started: 7/3/21
Finished: 7/5/21
It’s a fantasy, it’s a mystery, it’s a contemplation of a lonely life, and it’s a really nice book.
Started: 6/21/21
Finished: 7/3/21
This series comes up whenever anyone is talking about supernatural detectives, and people seem to like it, so I figured I’d give it a try. I liked it, and I’ll probably give it another book or two, but the main character doesn’t have much of an internal life. He gets thrown into this supernatural world, out of nowhere, and he doesn’t seem to have much reaction to it. So maybe that will improve…? Also, he (or the series) has some sexist tendencies, so if that doesn’t get better, I’m out. The mystery and story were interesting, though.
Started: 6/11/21
Gave up: 6/21/21
REALLY really good, except for one interlude that slowed the whole book down, and then the last quarter, which had both too much information and not enough information. I would still recommend it. I liked it.
Started: 6/1/21
Gave up: 6/2/21
I like my fiction weird, and I’m happy to be dropped into an unexplained or unexplainable situation right off the bat, but this was incomprehensible to me. Two seemingly normal people dropped into a situation that immediately got super-weird, and they’re barely questioning it. Certainly not panicking like anyone else would. Am I supposed to be reading into it? Probably. Did I have the patience? I did not.
Started: 5/25/21
Finished: 5/29/21
Love T. Kingfisher. This is horror, just scary enough in the beginning and the middle that I refused to read it at night, but it got less scary after that. Very weird. In a good way.
Started: 4/17/21
Finished: 4/26/21
I liked, but didn’t love, her first novel, but I had heard really good things about this one. Of course, then it took me a while to get into this, but once I did, I was completely hooked. Cried twice. Good stuff, and better than her first book.
Started: 4/3/21
Finished: 4/9/21
Book 17 in The Dresden Files, which I have been re-reading via audiobook for the last year or so. I probably should have been listing the last several as new books for me, but I’ve been lazy about it. Anyway, I’m enjoying these books more than ever, particularly the later ones, at least partly because he really dialed back the low-key sexist descriptions of women THANK GOD.
Also, something in this latest book made me cry, and there was a bonus short story at the end that made me SOB. Jim Butcher has made me yell in annoyance, shout at unexpected events, laugh many times, but he’s never made me cry before.
Started: 3/16/21
Finished: 3/30/21
This was a Sarah Gailey recommendation. It has battles and intrigue and inventions and the exploitation of the underclasses. It started a little slow for me, but I was totally hooked after a while, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.
Started: 3/14/21
Finished: 3/16/21
Volume 2 of a graphic novel full of NICE fairy tale mashups. I really really hope there’s a 3rd volume.
Started: 2/27/21
Gave up: 3/3/21
People LOVE Diana Wynne Jones, but it appears I am not people. I tried one a while back – it was okay. I tried this one about British witches saving the world in the early 1990s – what’s not to like? But I feel very meh about it, so I gave up. She wrote Howl’s Moving Castle, and it’s supposed to be amazing, so I will try that sometime, but if I don’t like that one, I think I might have to be done with her.
Started: 2/8/21
Finished: 2/12/21
T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon when she’s writing kids’ books) is one of the guests of honor at this convention I’m (virtually) attending this weekend, so I figured I’d read her next to most recent book before then. I’ve read three before this and loved them, and I love this. I love it when I find a new favorite.
Started: 1/30/21
Finished: 2/3/21
I love Sarah Gailey and everything they’ve written. This is their first YA book – it’s about friends with magic, and it starts dark. The main character is pretty insecure ways that feel real even though they’re not how any of my insecurities work. I’m not totally crazy about how the magic works. I mean, it’s not explained and I don’t think it has to be, but the friends seem to be so convinced that this one thing will work, and I don’t know why they would think that. Except it’s likely they are trying to convince themselves it’ll work. Anyway, I liked it, I enjoyed it, and a lot of things about it were really good. I’m just not sure it’s really good.
Started: 1/3/21
Finished: 1/11/21
Last in the Great Library series. It ends well, but there’s a magical element that feels…not shoehorned in exactly, but maybe not as well-developed as everything else. These books have a lot going on, and I think the series could have ended without it. BUT I liked them very much, and I’m planning to read some of the author’s other stuff.