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: 4/12/21
Finished: 4/17/21
SO GOOD, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this book is a 2021 Hugo nominee! (Just announced.) This has been on my radar since it was published last year, both because she’s great and I’ve loved many of her books and because everyone in the SF community raves about it, and it lived up to the hype.
Started: 4/9/21
Finished: 4/12/21
Another Sarah Gailey recommendation, another good one. It’s a book about a fictional band in LA in the 70s, told in the style of an oral history. Very rock biography/documentary, and very real.
Started: 3/30/21
Finished: 4/3/21
Book 4, I think, in the Maisie Dobbs series. I like the stories, but I’m over my love for them. Maisie needs friends, please! Someone she actually talks to or has fun with, not just clients and employees and sponsors/mentors. She might become more human.
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: 3/16/21
Gave up: 3/16/21
This was Paul Tremblay’s first book, and it shows. There’s a narcoleptic detective, bad at his job, unwilling to change anything to improve, and why should I care about this character? I don’t. I gave up pretty quickly.
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: 3/13/21
Finished: 3/15/21
I tried one of her other books and gave it up fairly quickly, but this one grabbed me right from the beginning. I’m glad to realize it was content (I don’t always have patience for capricious gods on earth stories (that was the other book of hers I tried)) and not style. This one was horrifying and strange and gross and GOOD.
Started: 3/6/21
Finished: 3/13/21
Book 3 in the Maisie Dobbs series. Any pretense that she isn’t somewhat mystical is gone, and since the pretense is gone, I feel like I can relax about it. It does remove a little of my enjoyment of the mystery aspect, though. Still great characters and good stories, so I’m in the for long haul with the series.
Started: 3/3/21
Finished: 3/6/21
I wasn’t sure, using the title as my only clue, if this was going to be about actual killing or not, and I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that this was really good. I have plenty of sympathy for the main character (not total, for reasons), and I both hate and understand her sister. Sort of understand. Enough to understand the main character’s actions. Anyway, it’s good. You should read it.
Started: 2/17/21
Finished: 2/21/21
I heard about this one in a Tor.com article about re-imagined fairy tales. This is a graphic novel with a fairy tale premise and references to ALL the fairy tales. I just finished the first volume, and I’m looking for the next one. It’s telling the back stories of these characters who have moved into Sleeping Beauty’s castle, long after Sleeping Beauty woke up and moved out. What’s appealing is that, so far, these are good people, and they have such nice stories with happy endings.
Started: 2/12/21
Gave up: 2/14/21
Ugh. Retired military, super-capable, gentlemanly know-it-all has to save his town after an EMP takes out all modern amenities. I have read this book before. I have read better versions of this book. This one feels like a non-writer decided to fictionalize his What To Do In Case Of An EMP report, hoping it would get his point across better. It’s all tell, no show, and Mr. Only I Am Making The Right Decisions is going to be proven right. AND it’s the beginning of a series, so he’s probably going to end up saving the world. I’m sitting this one out.
Started: 2/4/21
Finished: 2/8/21
A fiction recommendation by Sarah Gailey (still kind of obsessed). This guy writes horror. Sort of funny horror? He’s VERY good at immersing you in the setting. This is 1980s Charleston, and the 80s is very 80s, and the teenagers are very teenager-y, and the horror is mostly gross. I liked it, but only as much as I ever like horror. There’s one scene I wish I could forget.
Started: 2/3/21
Gave up: 2/4/21
Non-fiction recommendation by Sarah Gailey (I’m kind of obsessed). It’s about fungi. Why would I read (or like) this book? It’s so not me. Except, dude, the author’s name is Merlin Sheldrake. And supposedly, he’s funny in that dry British way. And there are footnotes!
Update: I was promised footnotes! There weren’t any. I must have been thinking of some other book. Also, not that funny. I cannot get excited about fungi, no matter how lyrical prose. Possibly because the lyrical prose.
I gave up.
Started: 1/22/21
Finished: 1/30/21
Book 2 of the Maisie Dobbs series. She’s still mostly perfect, but her detective work has a woo-woo element that I’m not sure I’ll like long-term. I was expecting pure investigation and deductive reasoning, with maybe some insight, but she practically has visions and gets feelings about things. I’m interested, but I’ll have to see where this goes.
Started: 1/23/21
Finished: 1/26/21
I’ve been meaning to read this for years, but I guess better late than never. This book is so good. Young adult can be hard to read. If it’s bad, it’s cringe-y bad, and I’ll usually put it down. This is good. And it’s hard. I cried, I got angry, I felt helpless, I cried some more, and I got angry some more. And then I cried again. I was so emotional, nearly the whole book, that I stopped reading it in bed. I switched to a friendly murder mystery before going to sleep because I’d be more able to wind down and fall asleep. I’m not going to tell you the plot, even the beginning – it’s easy enough for you to find that. And as awful as it is to know what prompted this book to be written, it’s so much worse knowing how much worse things have gotten since this book was published not even four years ago.
Started: 1/19/21
Finished: 1/22/21
I’d heard of this series, but I didn’t start it until Jess recommended it. I LOVED this book by the time I was only 30 pages in, and I raced through it (as much as I can during the work week these days). I’m thrilled there are 15 more books so far. She’s a private investigator of sorts in England in the period between the world wars.
The only thing I’m hoping gets addressed later on is that she’s kind of perfect. Like, she has no flaws, she has lots of useful skills, and everyone loves her. I mean, I love her, but she needs to have SOMEthing to improve on, right? She did one not great thing, but a) we only find out about it at the end of the book, and b) we find out about it as she’s doing something to correct it.
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.
Started: 12/26/20
Finished: 12/27/20
I can’t remember where I heard about this book, but it starts out HARD. A twenty-something black woman babysits for a white family, and one night, the mother calls her unexpectedly to take the toddler out for a little bit so they can deal with an emergency at home. The babysitter tells her she’s not dressed like she normally is (she was out with friends), and the mother says that’s fine, so she takes the toddler down the street to a local expensive grocery store to just kill time. A shopper calls security on her, implying that she kidnapped the little girl, and it’s a REALLY tense scene. It turns out fine, and the rest of the book talks about the aftermath, but in a very anticlimactic way. Well, until the climax. Anyway, it’s about how all these characters see each other and how they react and think about themselves, and it’s pretty funny and enjoyable, which I did NOT expect after that scary beginning.
Started: 12/19/20
Finished: 12/25/20
Book 4 in the Great Library series. The stakes keep getting higher. No, the stakes have always been the same. The tension is ratcheting up.