lycomayflower curls up with a good book in 2015--part 2

Welcome to my second 2015 reading thread! Click here for my intro post. The photo above is of of my TBR shelves . The TBR shelves hold the books that have come into the house recently that I'm most excited about reading and want to keep in one place so I remember about them (yes, this is a problem =p). Those books are a small fraction of my total TBRs.

This first post contains an on-going list of the books I've read this year, with the most recent reads at the top. Click on the book title to go to the book's post within the thread, where you will find a review. Numbers in parentheses are page counts for each book. You can also navigate from here to an on-going accounting of my goals for the year and to my most recent previous challenge thread.

Completed Reads

Key: LB = Library Book; SB = Shelf Book; NB = New Book; SUB = Book from Subscription Service; NEB: New E-Book; NB* = New Book Bought in the Tail End of Last Year; RG = Recent Gift; BB = Borrowed Book; RR = Reread; NUB = Newly Purchased Used Book; AUD = Audiobook

Total Pages: 25,446

107.) SB: Flying Too High (156)
106.) AUD: Yes Please!
105.) NUB: Tonight or Never (394)
104.) NB: Death by Silver (261)
103.) RG: On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World (89)
102.) RG: We Should All Be Feminists (50)
101.) RR: A Christmas Carol (131)
100.) NB: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (260)
99.) NB: Winter Wonderland (203)
98.) SB: Miracle on 34th Street (136)

97.) SB: Leviathan Wakes (561)
96.) NB: In the Bleak Midwinter (308)
95.) NB: Reflections on the Psalms (138)
94.) NEB: A Strong Hand (240)
93.) NUB: This Is Where I Leave You (339)
92.) SUB: Kill Shakespeare, volume 1 (~100)
91.) NB: Dark Space (223)
90.) NB: Special Delivery (300)

89.) NB: When a Scot Ties the Knot (376)
88.) AUD: The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy
87.) NB: Carry the Ocean (284)
86.) NB: The Magpie Lord (204)
85.) AUD, SB: Dumb Witness
84.) NB: Switch (376)
83.) NB: Trade Me (279)
82.) NB: Carry On (522)
81.) NB: Understanding Comics (215)
80.) NB: Arrow volume 2 (~100)
79.) AUD: You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)
78.) NB: Cronin's Key (367)

77.) NB: Arrow volume 1 (~100)
76.) NB: Ms. Marvel: Generation Why (~100)
75.) NB: Between the World and Me (152)
74.) NB: Ms. Marvel: No Normal (~100)
73.) NB: Saga, volume 5 (~100)
72.) NB: Prince's Gambit (404)
71.) LB: Ally Hughes Has Sex Sometimes (278)
70.) NB: Begging for It (341)
69.) NB: Anything Could Happen (281)

68.) AUD: Heroes and Legends
67.) NUB: High Energy (362)
66.) NB: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: Book One (~150)
65.) NB: Browsings (246)
64.) SB: Kindred (280)
63.) NB: The Dark Tide (359)
62.) NB: Death of a Pirate King (246)
61.) NUB: Ritual of Proof (364)
60.) NB: Captive Prince (270)
59.) NB: The Hell You Say (345)
58.) NB: A Dangerous Thing (227)
57.) SB: Mr Timothy (384)
56.) NB: Fatal Shadows (172)

55.) NB: Proxy (379)
54.) LB: In Praise of Reading and Fiction (40)
53.) NB: Asking For It (330)
52.) LB: Sailor Twain (~200)
51.) LB: The Forever King (364)
50.) AUD, SB: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
49.) AUD: King Arthur: History and Legend
48.) SB: The Unvanquished (171)

47.) RR: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (435)
46.) NUB: A Jane Austen Education (255)
45.) NB: Come As You Are (345)
44.) AUD: How to Be a Woman
43.) NB: We Were Liars (225)
42.) AUD: One Summer (~100)
41.) RR: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (341)
40.) LB: A Tale of Two Lovers (370)
39.) NUB: The Professor and the Madman (242)

38.) LB: Doll
37.) RR: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (309)
36.) LB: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (197)
35.) NB: Very Good Lives
34.) LB: The Princess Diaries (238)
33.) NB: Dangerous Books for Girls (188)
32.) SB: Call the Midwife (340)
31.) RG: Harry Potter and History (325)
30.) NB: By the Book (274)
29.) NB: The Rook (482)

28.) NB: The Fallen (262)
27.) NB: Drawn Together (360)
26.) NUB: I Feel Bad About My Neck (137)
25.) AUD: The Partly Cloudy Patriot
24.) BB: Arthur and Guen
23.) NB: Boy Meets Boy (185)
22.) AUD, SB: Persuasion
21.) NB: While We Were Watching Downton Abbey (354)
20.) NB: All the Light We Cannot See (530)

19.) NB: Reading Lolita in Tehran (347)
18.) NB: Shards of Honor (252)
17.) LB: Brown Girl Dreaming (328)
16.) SB: Pure Ducky Goodness (~100)
15.) NB: The Bookstore (334)
14.) LB: The Reading Promise (270)
13.) LB: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (150)
12.) SB: The City & the City (312)

11.) NB: The Prince (407)
10.) NB: The Angel (410)
9.) NB: The Siren (425)
8.) NB: How to Be a Heroine (246)
7.) NB: Factory Man (408)

6.) AUD: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
5.) LB: A Companion to Wolves (302)
4.) NB: Investigating Farscape (236)
3.) NUB: Farscape: House of Cards (199)
2.) SB: Wild Strawberries (275)
1.) NB*: will grayson, will grayson (310)

I can't remember not being "a reader"--I've probably been reading 50+ books a year since I was old enough to do most of my reading on my own. I read (nearly) everything, though I skew strongly to fiction. My first inclination is toward literary fiction and books about books, but I read a fair smattering of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and classics as well. The only things I pretty much steer clear of completely are straight-up horror and nonfiction about politics or economics. (But never say never!) I'm in a book club at my local library (and I'm running it this year!), so some of my reads are marked as being for book club.

This year is my eighth year keeping track of my reading on LibraryThing (and the twenty-fourth year I've kept track of my reading in notebooks--yikes!). I tweak my goals every year, and this year I'm stripping things down to just those goals I think will help me be happy about my reading and curb the habits that annoy me. In a nutshell (lengthier discussions of these appear in my first thread for 2015), my goals are these.

*Read more. Faff about less so there's more time for reading.

*Read from My Shelves. Try to stop ignoring books I was once excited about just because they've been in the house for a while.

*Buy Fewer New Books. Don't go insane in the bookstore.

A book meme what I found on tumblr:

1:What is your favorite book? Pride and Prejudice
2:What was the last book you read? Doll
3:What is the worst book you've ever read? Where the Red Fern Grows
4:Top 7 book characters. Jeeves, Gandalf, Elizabeth Bennet, Hermione Granger, Jane Eyre, Ebeneezer Scrooge, Hobbes (as in, Calvin and)
5:What is your favorite genre? Books about books.
6:Book you cried the hardest reading? Everything Is Illuminated I'm still slightly perplexed by this. (Why this and not other things?) But I sobbed, uncontrollably.
7:Book you laughed the hardest reading? Hark! A Vagrant
8:Which book character(s) do you most relate to? Fitzwilliam Darcy, Briony from Atonement
9:Favorite author(s)? J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Jane Austen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stephen Fry
10:Do you judge books by their covers? Yes. I'm trying to curb the snobby side of this (a cover is an advert, right, saying "pick me up and buy me" to a particular demographic. It can mislead you away from buying just as much as it can mislead you toward buying.) I am helpless in the face of gorgeous covers, though.
11:What is your favorite quote from a book? "But they are only a little people in old songs and children's tales out of the North. Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?" "A man may do both," said Aragorn. "For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!"
12:Which book do you recommend to friends and family most? I don't know. I rec whatever's good I've read recently.
13:Which book is so special to you that you don't share it with others? Right. I'm not saying. >:-/
14:Do you have any signed books? Yes.
15:Have you met any authors? Yes.
16:Buy books new, used, or go to the library? All of these, but mostly I buy new.
17:Where is your favorite place to read? In our sun room. If you lie down on the couch, all you can see out the windows is trees. It's almost like being in a tree house.
18:Prefer books set in the past or the future? Past.
19:What 5 elements would your ideal book have? 1) Grabs me in the first line and never lets up. 2) Plotty plot. 3.) Well developed characters. 4.) Beautiful writing. 5.) Deeply character-driven love story.
20:Do you ever hope to publish your own book? Yes. Though, I already have, once. Just not the kind I dream of publishing.
21:Prefer stand alone or series? Stand alone unless the series is very, very good all the way through.
22:Do you mark/highlight/dog ear your books or keep them in perfect condition? Neither. I do not mark or dog ear and I try to keep the corners, edges, and cover/dust jacket nice, but I don't mind my books looking like someone's read them. (Creased spines, especially of mass market paperbacks, do not bother me at all as long as the book is not falling apart.
23:Hardbacks or paperbacks? Both. Slight preference for paperbacks.
24:Do you watch any booktubers? Only through Bookriot.
25:Do you like twist endings? If they're earned, e.g. if they are only twists because the author successfully made you look the other way at the right moment.
27:Do you reread books? Yes. When I was a kid, about one third of my reading was probably rereading. Now I only reread certain things, but I reread those frequently.
28:E-readers or physical copies of books? Physical.
29:A book that makes you feel comforted? Pride and Prejudice. The Harry Potter series.
30:Would you rather read an ending that makes you feel happy or sad? Generally, happy, but I don't mind sad endings if that's what the book needs.
31:Favorite villain in a book? Drawing a blank here. My favs are more movie villains.
32:Do you like to write reviews when you finish a book? Yes.
33:Do you experience "book hangovers"? Rarely.
34:Favorite book cover(s)? Fangirl. That green! These reprints of Angela Thirkell's books are lovely.
35:Recommend a book. The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

Goal number three is always hard for me. I always find something at used book store, or there are so many places around to get free books. Im always getting yelled at for bringing home strays.

>4 xymon81: I have a harder time with this than just about any other "bad habit." At least this one gets me books?

*squints* Focus, please....I can only read a couple of those titles!

>6 laytonwoman3rd: Hmm, yes, they do seem a bit blurry. I'll get a better picture and update. EVERYTHING was blurry from my eye exam when I took that, see, so I couldn't tell it was actually blurry.

yeah...I'm impressed that you were using the computer at all this afternoon. I don't recover from that process very fast.

Happy new thread!

>6 laytonwoman3rd: New image up in first post. It's still hard to read a lot of them, especially on the bottom. It's the best I can do; I think the photo loses data when I alter it so that it doesn't squeejaw my thread. The image is crystal clear in the original. You'll just have to come look at the shelf in person.

>9 foggidawn: Thanks!

>3 lycomayflower: #3....I just loved Where the Red Fern Grows! In fact, it also became a favorite of my children.

I think most people on LT share similar goals--reading what is already on their shelves and quit going beserk at a bookstore or sale! I suffer from both of those afflictions.

>11 Tess_W: Technically, Where the Red Fern Grows is not the worst book I've read, that is, the book I've read that I objectively think is really bad. I suspect it's actually pretty good, but I had a miserable experience reading it. It was assigned reading in middle school, I was going through some typical adolescent darkness, and the brutal dog deaths upset me terribly. If I'd read it at a different point in my life (or if it had not been an assignment and I could have put it down and come back to it when I was less angsty already), I probably would think differently of it. But as it is, it stands as the ultimate unpleasant reading experience for me.

I'm with you on Where the Red Fern Grows, Laura. Horrible, horrible book (for the reason you mention).

Happy New Thread!

>12 lycomayflower: I can see your point. I grew up on a farm, so life and death were more "normal" to me. We even "ate" our pets (cows, pigs,). I gave my copy to my grandson when he was 12 and he liked it. After he read the book he asked if there was a movie and we got it. It followed the book fairly well, as far as I can remember.

39.) The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester ***1/2

The professor of the title is James Murray, who organized and oversaw the writing of the OED (or much of it anyway, he did not live to see it completed), and the "madman" is W.C. Minor, an American army surgeon incarcerated in an English asylum for the insane, who contributed prodigious research to the OED as it was being written. For me the most fascinating bits of the book (by far) were those about the compiling of the OED itself--of how Murray and co. went about finding words, cataloging them, pinning down earliest usages. I would have happily read in more detail about that and about the difficulties (alluded to by Winchester) that certain words caused. That Minor contributed so thoroughly (the amount of work he did is impressive, but so is the amount of work that anyone did on the OED) while institutionalized, that he could be both so sick (he was most likely what we'd call today schizophrenic) and so productive at the same time, strikes me as a footnote to the story--a fascinating one, certainly, and one worth a few pages to flesh out and bring home the scale of the thing, but a footnote still. I wasn't wowed by Winchester's writing or his telling of the story, so perhaps the issue lies there rather than with the story itself. A disappointing read for me.

*** For Book Club.

>13 scaifea: Always nice to know someone shares your opinion!

>14 Tess_W: Yep, context. If I had had more experience with death of animals I knew, it probably wouldn't have upset me quite as much. But the memory of it still gives me the shudders today, so I'm going to stop thinking about it! :-)

40.) A Tale of Two Lovers, Maya Rodale ****

Lady Julianna Somerset is a young widow supporting herself in 19th century London as a gossip columnist (identity hush-hush, of course). Lord Simon Roxbury is a rake notorious for his skills at seduction. When Roxbury's father issues an ultimatum that his son either marry within a month or be cut off, it unfortunately coincides with a juicy piece of gossip in Lady Somerset's column that shuts the doors of high society firmly in Roxbury's face. Then Julianna and Roxbury quickly engage in a love-hate relationship that was just great fun to watch. A bit predictable in the big picture (not really a criticism of a romance, unless one wants to criticize the whole genre) but often surprising in the particular events. A touch repetitive, but not annoyingly so. Rodale's characters are a hoot (one of my favorite things about this book is that it's believable when the characters (inevitably) turn the corner from loathing to loving. It's not the deepest character study I've ever seen, but the development is there), and the bits of newspaper gossip we get feel deliciously of the time. A mystery about the identity of a rival gossip columnist adds just enough interest beyond the romance between the principles. Delightfully fun.

>15 lycomayflower: Too bad the book about the OED wasn't more interesting. I guess the madman aspect was concentrated on to appeal to a wider audience. The real story is sometimes lost when that happens.

41.) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling ***1/2

It's been days (days!) since I finished this, but it has been crazypants around here, so this is the first opportunity I've had to sit down and say anything about it.

I don't know what it is about HP2, but I'm just not into it. (Which is particularly strange, because HP2 is the book that launched my read-all-the-Harry-Potter-OMG summer in 2004. I'd already read HP1 (in 2000, I believe, and when I decided I wanted to give the rest of them a go, I started with Chamber. And then I read straight through Phoenix back to back to back to back. So I must have found something appealing about HP2 then. But I digress.) So many of the bits are annoying to me (Dobby? Just tell him what the problem is! Flying Ford Anglia? Reeeally? Gilderoy Lockhart? *mimes throwing up in a potted plot*) But the plotty stuff with the diary and Riddle is good (sooo much is set up here for way, way later), and some of the world building is aces (natch).

Bullet points of Ein Minuten, Bitte:

--Harry and Ron follow the Hogwarts Express in the flying Ford Anglia by dipping below the clouds and checking its progress. Surely this magical train that departs from a magical-gateway-protected platform is not just visible for any gawping farmer in his fields or airplane passenger to just have a look? It must be invisible or carry some kind of self-perpetuating Obliviate spell or something, right? How can they see it? The "flying to school cause the barrier is shut" plot point here is one of the few (maybe the only one? I'll have to pay attention as I carry on) places where I feel like the seams of the plot are showing and I'm not willing to just say, "Whevs, J.K., the whole thing's brilliant and this is the only way to X, Y, Z, so carry on." I just can't get on board with it. It's annoying from the first moment. Your first thought when you can't get through the barrier is "I know! We'll steal Dad's car and fly there"? Thus breaking so many Hogwarts and Ministry rules that we should have our wands broken for even thinking about it seriously? You don't just, I don't know, wait, like, two minutes to see if Ron's mum and dad come back through? She just doesn't sell it for me. (What is it with me and nitpicking the Hogwarts Express? *pats it* I love you, HogEx!)

--Exams are cancelled at the end of the year because of the Goings On What Were Awful. I'm okay with that (what an awesome school where they cancel exams because you've had enough to worry about already!), but surely the fifth and seventh years had to take theirs? O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s and all that? Did they have to slave away at them while years one through four and six where lazing around? Or was there some kind of special exam session set up a little later in the summer? I'm fine with this not being covered in HP2 (Harry's pov, after all, and it's got naught to do with the plot), but in a giant encyclopedia of Harry Potter stuff, I'd love to hear how this went down.

--Super spoilery, this one! How come the Chamber wasn't sealed off last time? (Okay, we know why: because they didn't catch the right guy and the person they did catch wouldn't have known the first thing about where it even was.) But what was the thinking then, when Hagrid couldn't tell them anything about it? Well, never mind then? I bet there was all kinds of ridiculous bureaucratic nonsense to do with it being obvious Hagrid wasn't at fault but no one being willing to reinstate him as a student because it would mean "errors had been made." I'd love to hear more about that too.

>19 lycomayflower: Now, I completely agree that stealing the car was a bit ridiculous, and waiting for the Weasley parents to come back out would have been the sensible thing, but I don't think the train would necessarily have all that many spells on it -- maybe some simple illusions to make it look like any other train departing from King's Cross once it leaves the platform, but I don't see the necessity for complicated memory charms or anything that would make it impossible for Harry and Ron to follow.

And I'd also like to know what happened with the O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s.

Chamber of Secrets is one of my less-favorite books in the series, as well.

>20 foggidawn: Hmmm. Good point about just some illusions for the Hogwarts Express. But then how did H and R know they were following the right train? (I'm actually less invested in this than I probably sound. ;-) I just find that whole section so weirdly dull (no other bit of HP is dull for me--some parts I don't like, but they aren't dull), that I get suuuper nitpicky about it.) I enjoy some of the later books more, I think, because they stop being quite so much children's books (which is not a criticism--they are children's books, that's fine, I just get a little more invested when they are a little less child-like), and I think the flying car is one of those magicky bits of business that probably appeals to a lot of kids but which I can't quite stop being an adult about. Most of the more childish-wondery magicky bits work just fine for me; that one just doesn't sing.

>18 Familyhistorian: Yeah, I suspect I was largely expecting a book that Winchester just wasn't writing. Not the right audience, I suppose.

42.) One Summer: America, 1927, Bill Bryson ***

*collapses in a heap* Thank god that's over. With apologies to my boy, Billy Bry-Bry. I am usually all over his stuff, but this one was just a slog. I would have said before that Bryson could write the history of the telephone book and make it fascinating, but my interest in his subject here waxed and waned, and after about the halfway point, I didn't even care anymore about the stuff that was interesting at first. Bryson takes as his subject the summer of 1927 in America, in which a lot of really interesting stuff happened (no sarcasm there; I'm with him that this was a really fascinating four or five months), including sensational murder trials (Sacco and Vanzetti; Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray), a smashing baseball season (Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig both were chasing home run records), and important developments in aviation (Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, among other stuff). But by the time he got through it all, my eyes were crossing--well, actually, I was listening to the audiobook, so my ears were, what? flapping? What do ears do when they've had enough? That was part of the problem, I think--listening to the audiobook was probably a mistake. After A Short History of Nearly Everything (probably in my top fifteen enjoyable reads ever, by the way), this is probably Bryson's most factually dense book, and, unlike many of his other books, if you forget (or miss) some of those facts, it's hard to keep up later. (In, for instance, In a Sunburned Country, if you forget exactly which prime minister of Australia is was who vanished without a trace from a beach, it really doesn't matter so much as you carry on.) I snagged the print version of One Summer from the library and read the last one hundred or so pages because I just wasn't opting to listen while I was in the car, and while I was pretty much done at that point and was just reading to finish, I do think I would have enjoyed the whole book better had I been reading from the start. It must be said that Bryson still writes quite well (and I think his reading of this one is spot on), and when he grabs you, he grabs you. When I was interested (baseball!), I was all in. But the subject matter was so wide-ranging, it was hard even for Bryson to make all of it interesting (please may I never hear another fact about early twentieth century aviation). This book is also not as funny as most of his others. I got the impression from the book that that was intentional, but it may also explain why some of the not-interesting-to-you,-personally,-reader bits didn't work as well. Recommended only to Bryson completists, hardcore early twentieth century history buffs, and readers interested in all of Bryson's main topics, or to anyone planning to read only the parts that interest them.

(***For anyone paying attention to my page counts in my top post, I only counted the pages I actually read (rather than listened to on audio) for this book. The book itself is nearly 500 pages long.)

>22 lycomayflower: I have never read anything by Bryson. Maybe I should as history is my thing. Which was your favourite Bryson.

The line in your post that really caught my eye was if you forget exactly which prime minister of Australia is was who vanished without a trace from a beach. I had to Google it because it sounded so intriguing. I hadn't heard about the disappearance of Harold Holt before.

Two things:

1) I agree that the flying car bit is annoying for grown-ups, and I'm irritated at Ron and Harry for thinking it's a good idea. But, I also understand that kids that age sometimes do really stupid things and come up with really dumb rationalizations for doing them, just because it sounds superawesomefun. And I think that's what Rowling is doing here - giving Ron and Harry one of those moments of childhood (I know I certainly had a couple of those at that age).

2) I think I liked that Bryson more that you did, although I did wander in and out of paying attention as I listened. I listened to it while driving back and forth from Indiana, and I tend to me more tolerant of audio books during that drive, for some reason.

>23 Familyhistorian: Hmm. My favorite Brysons are In a Sunburned Country and A Short History of Nearly Everything. Sunburned is all about Australia--what it's like there now, some of the history of its settlement and subsequent development, what kind of animals it has. It's funny and informative. I think it's a good example of Bryson at his best, though it reads more like a travel memoir than history. Short History (which is only comparatively short, by the way), is all about science, scientific discoveries, the history of kinds of science, and biographical bits about scientists. It's not as funny as Sunburned (though it is funny), and it's a lot less tightly focused. I loved it when I read it. It was honsestly a page turner. If neither of those appeal, A Walk in the Woods (also travel memoir-y), about the Appalachian Trail and points on it, is also good. I'd start with Sunburned though. Funny, interesting, has history bits, and is representative of what Bryson does with a book.

>24 scaifea: Oh, absolutely agree that kids often do things with what seem like dumb rationalizations to grown ups. I think one of the reasons HP works so well is that Rowling is really good at portraying that and, in fact, portraying it in such a way that even adult readers see (often probably without even thinking about it) why it was a good idea after all. The more I ponder it, the more I think that the flying car adventure doesn't work for me because it's one of the few moments in the whole HP series where I can't see myself as a kid either 1) doing what the Trio did or 2) wanting to be brave enough to do what the Trio did. Even at twelve, I would have been "Ron, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard. We'll wait here for your parents." It throws me out of the story because it's one of the only times I'm not right there with them. Which, to be fair, is certainly only partly Rowling's fault. (Why have I got to be so gosh-darned sensible?)

I suspect I might have liked this Bryson more on a long drive (it was just my erranding around town drives I was listening on). It may have been easier to get well into it with longer bits at a time.

You might want to bimble over to Darryl's current thread, as he is traveling in the UK, arrived in Edinburgh this morning.

>26 laytonwoman3rd: Bimble, is it?

Well, dash, if you feel it's warranted, then.

43.) We Were Liars, E. Lockhart ***1/2

A YA novel about the teenaged children of an extended, wealthy family who own an island off the coast of Massachusetts, where they summer. During one of those summers, something tragic happens to Cadence, the narrator, and she is found under mysterious circumstances on the beach with no memory of the incident. The book traces her attempts to discover what happened. I liked the writing in We Were Liars well enough, and I thought Lockhart did a good job portraying the setting and these characters, who are wildly privileged and know it but can't quite decide to be either comfortable or uncomfortable with that privilege. Lockhart plays around with fairy tales as ways for Cadence to understand her family, and that had promise. But I felt like I was always just waiting, waiting, waiting for the story to get going. At the reveal near the end (you know there's going to be one from the get-go), I was pretty disappointed. I hadn't figured it out, exactly, but there was a decided sense of "That's it?" Potential here, but it never came together into something that felt like a whole for me.

>29 lycomayflower: Sounds almost like a certain Kennedy story!

44.) How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran, read by the author ****1/2

Moran's autobiographical discussion of feminism and womanhood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is laugh-out-loud funny, scathing, blunt, touching, and important. She reads her own work to perfection. Her views (while I don't agree with all of them) are smart and on-point. The candid way she talks about her own life (particularly her abortion) sometimes feel revolutionary (in that, among other things, someone's talking about them). I may have to go buy a print copy of this, because I'd like to have it on my shelf. I loved it. Recommended.

>30 Tess_W: It reminded me a lot of the Kennedys, though I don't think the author was trying to make any statements about them in particular. The general association was probably unavoidable.

45.) Come As You Are: The Surprising Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, Emily Nagoski ****

Accessible and informative discussion of female sexuality, what the science says about how it works, how it differs from male sexuality, how the brain and the emotions are involved, and what to do if things aren't working as you might like. Fascinating, fascinating science here, and absolutely worth a read whether or not you think your sex life needs transforming (I think some of the cover copy sells the book short, actually; it reads a bit like this is a self-help book, and while it has those aspects, it's also great lay science about sexuality and the way emotions function in human beings). Some of the presentation is a little touchy-feely for me, but the book is highly readable, and the sex-positive, body-positive, woman-positive message is awesome. Recommended. See if you can find an interview online with Nagoski for a taste of what the book's like. She's great in person, and catching a snippet of one was what lead me to pick up the book.

>31 lycomayflower: I keep eyeing this book but then wondering if I'll hate it. Your review has pushed it over into the wishlist pile, though! Thanks!

>33 lycomayflower: And another for the wishlist - sounds amazing! (Also, the part of my brain that resembles an immature teen boy wants to *snork* at your use of "lay science" in this review...)

>34 scaifea: HA! I read that and started to scroll down and bust her for "lay science about sexuality", and there you were, ahead of me in line! (Do you think she did it on purpose?)

>34 scaifea: The only caveat I will give on the Moran is that the language is unabashedly foul, in that way that feels very British where it's kind of raised to the point of trying to out epithet everyone who has ever epitheted before. As you are a fan of Stephen Fry, I'm guessing this won't bother you, but I suspect to some it might be quite shockinng.

>34 scaifea:, >35 laytonwoman3rd: *headdesk* I did not do that on purpose; I was trying to be all grown up and what not. Goes to show. Someone will probably be along to take away my Filthy Old Lady badge any moment.

46.) A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, William Deresiewicz ****

Deresiewicz devotes a chapter to each of Austen's six novels, discussing what he discovered about life in that novel (often after reading it several times). His discussion is part literary criticism and part memoir. He illuminates Austen's work but also illustrates how reading her has changed the way he sees the world and how he moves through it. His discussion is always interesting (though, for me, most so when he was talking about the books I know and like best myself), and the whole book is a lovely testament to the ways in which literature can have real affects on people's lives. Recommended to Austen fans, lovers of books about books, and readers looking for a nudge into Austen's work (Deresiewicz will make you want to read her).

>36 lycomayflower: It takes an awful lot to shock me, so I think I'll likely be fine. I mean, I didn't run screaming from this thread when you slapped us with that 'lay science' bit, did I? Hm?

>38 scaifea: LOL. Fair enough.

47.) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling ****

One of the best Potters. My ranking looks something like this: HP7 is ultimate (literally) and singular and holds kind of a default, honorary top position; HP6, HP4, and HP3 are my favorites for pure reading enjoyment, though if pressed I might say HP6 pulls very slightly ahead; HP1 I love for starting it all and for having the strongest sense of "children's book magic," though it is never my favorite to read; HP2 and HP5 are my least favorites, with HP5 usually taking the last spot because while I think it is all necessary and is brilliant in its own way, it is so often so annoying and infuriating and it goes on being annoying and infuriating for so long. HP3 does stand out to me as being different from the others in a lot of ways (even though it's basic formula works just as the others' does), and my first few bullet points deal with those.

Bullet Points o' Things: (spoilery for the whole series below)

--If you look at the HP series as one long story, HP3 sort of marks the end of the prologue (or, I suppose, the moment in HP4 where Harry and Cedric touch the portkey ends the prologue, but if we're going by book, HP3). While they certainly have big plots going on in the present, the first three books are all concerned primarily with the past (HP1 is all about Harry discovering who he is, what really happened to his parents, who Voldemort is--he's learning his personal history and the history of his new world; HP2 is driven by the decades-old secret of the Chamber, what happened the last time it was opened, and a decades-old fragment of a not-present-in-the-present villain; HP3's big reveal is a truth about events that happened twelve years ago--it carries on the work of HP1 in establishing the recent history of Harry's family). When we get to the end of HP3, we have the information we need to get into the meat of the present-day story, beginning with Voldemort's return in HP4. From HP4 on, the primary concern is with the present (with a major return to interest in the past in HP6, of course).

--The Big Reveal in HP3 feels different from those in all the other books in that it's not about someone filling in all the gaps Harry missed because he was looking the wrong way all year. Sure, we get a lot of explaining from Black and Lupin in the Shrieking Shack and Dumbledore explains some things later, but I feel like Harry gets there on his own much more in this book than in any of the others. The other books involve Harry getting through some crisis by his wits, then losing his wits in some way (getting knocked unconscious, passing out, etc), then waking up to have someone (i.e. Dumbledore) explain what's really been going on. In HP3, we get that basic set up (stuff happens, there's an element of "Whaaa?", Harry loses consciousness, Dumbledore tells him things when he wakes up), but the questions in the plotty stuff are mostly sorted before Harry loses consciousness (there's a lot of plot after he awakes, but it's resolution; we know the big answers before then) and he finds the answers to the big questions based on information given to him rather than acting entirely on instinct and then having the big answers told to him. Even though we return to the previous pattern with HP4, that moment in the Shrieking Shack where Harry comes to his own (correct) conclusions (and out-adults all the adults in the room, by the way) feels like a first step into adulthood for Harry.

--This is the only book in which Voldemort does not appear in any form. He's very much present in that Black was supposed to have been his first lieutenant, his right-hand man, but Voldemort himself is not here. Even in Harry's dementor-induced memories of the night his parents died, we don't really see Voldemort, just the effects of his presence (the green light from the Killing Curse) and his laughter. I'm not sure what to do with this fact, except to say that it's pretty clear that a lot of evil can go down even without someone like Voldemort: a good deal of miscarriage of justice occurs in HP3 through intimidation, prejudice, and hubris. No Dark Lord needed.

--How did Harry intend to kill Black in the Shrieking Shack? There's a moment when he's telling himself "This is it. You have to do it now." But what was he going to do? He doesn't know any killing spells at this point. Presumably he could have tried the magical equivalent of beating him to death, but I wonder what he was goading himself on to do.

--The Hogwarts Express always leaves on 1 September, and classes always seem to start the next day. And the Hogwarts schedule seems to observe a two-day weekend. So, what about the years when 1 September is a Friday or a Saturday? And does that mean term starts on a different day of the week every year? I actually like that the HE always leaves on 1 September; there's something quite nice about the consistency. But it does bring up a question about dates and days of the week. I poked the internet, and it appears that Rowling's days of the week are not consistent with dates in the years the story seems to be set. I think most people agree that Harry was born in 1980 and first goes to Hogwarts in 1991 because in HP2 Nearly Headless Nick celebrates his 500th Deathday and the cake marks his deathday as 31 October 1492. (But might the switch to the Gregorian calendar make this not a straight-forward calculation? I don't know enough about the switch to know.) However, if the story does take place in the nineties, there are sometimes technological anachronisms in the Muggle world. I have wondered since the first time I picked up that the school year in HP2 was necessarily taking place in 1992-1993 if Rowling was writing specifically with a mind to those years. It does put Voldemort's childhood in the WWII era, which seems appropriate somehow. Fascinating discussion of dates in HP here.

--How did Fred and George first figure out how to work the Marauder's Map? "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" doesn't strike me as the kind of thing you just stumble upon when you're trying to sort out what this bit of parchment does. There's some suggestion that the map might be a bit aware, so maybe it recognized F and G as worthy keepers of the map and helped them along?

--"The Boggart in the Wardrobe" is a brilliant little treatise on fear.

--I still think boggarts as presented here are a nod to quantum mechanics. We only know what they look like when someone's looking at them and looking at them changes what they look like? Wave function collapse?

--There seems to be some revision wonk going on in Chapter Eight. In the hardcover I read this time when Harry and Lupin are discussing why Lupin wouldn't let Harry confront the boggart, Harry has this line: "'But then,' said Harry honestly. 'I--I remembered those dementors.'" (p. 155) It doesn't make sense in context. What is the "but" negating? And the dialogue punctuation is wrong in any case (should be a comma after "honestly"). My paperback copy says, "'I didn't think of Voldemort,' said Harry honestly. 'I--I remembered those dementors'" (p. 155). That's a lot better--no illogical "but," no strange punctuation. But I think really it ought to be a combination of the two: "I did think of Voldemort," said Harry honestly. "But then I--I remembered those dementors." Because he does think of Voldemort during the lesson with the boggarts before he remembers the dementors (p.136). Anyone have an edition with something more like that combination?

--I bet J.K. Rowling gives the best presents. Because her characters what give good presents (rather than obviously horrible presents like what the Dursleys pass off as gifts), give amazing presents--something the receiver will love, something they (for whatever reason, be it affordability or something else) probably wouldn't get for themselves, and something which leaves the preferences of the giver out of the equation. Look at Hermione's birthday gift to Harry at the beginning of HP3. He thinks it'll be some giant book--because that's what Hermione would like as a present--but Hermione is a good gift-giver; she knows what Harry would like--a Broomstick Servicing Kit--and gets him that despite the fact she couldn't be less excited about such a thing herself. It's not a hard concept--a true gift is what will make the receiver happy--but anyone who's ever heard "But this is just a list of books! You have books. Books aren't Christmas presents. What do you really want?" in response to their Christmas list knows that not everyone gets that. Not that I need a lot of convincing to love Hermione, but that moment when Harry opens that present from her makes me want to squish her every time.

I love reading through your HP thoughts - so fun and clever. I've often wondered about Fred and George and the map, myself, and I like your idea of the map helping them discover it.

I'm glad I stumbled onto your HP post- I've been rewatching the movies and just finished Prisoner of Azkaban. This point you made made me wonder too, but for a different reason:

"--There seems to be some revision wonk going on in Chapter Eight. In the hardcover I read this time when Harry and Lupin are discussing why Lupin wouldn't let Harry confront the boggart, Harry has this line: "'But then,' said Harry honestly. 'I--I remembered those dementors.'" (p. 155) It doesn't make sense in context. What is the "but" negating? And the dialogue punctuation is wrong in any case (should be a comma after "honestly"). My paperback copy says, "'I didn't think of Voldemort,' said Harry honestly. 'I--I remembered those dementors'" (p. 155). That's a lot better--no illogical "but," no strange punctuation. But I think really it ought to be a combination of the two: "I did think of Voldemort," said Harry honestly. "But then I--I remembered those dementors." Because he does think of Voldemort during the lesson with the boggarts before he remembers the dementors (p.136). Anyone have an edition with something more like that combination?"

The movie actually does use what you suggest: "I did think of Voldemort," said Harry honestly. "But then I--I remembered those dementors." Lupin stops him because he thinks the boggart will take the shape of Voldemort.

My question about that part was just wondering how the person facing the boggart could control what the boggart was. Harry changed his mind and the boggart "knew" and changed forms. It wasn't just in Harry's mind, because the other students were laughing and reacting when the boggart changed with the spell. I'm going off the movie here so I might have to revisit the book.

The third movie also felt more adult/grown up compared to the first two. I was surprised at how much the kids had grown up from the second to third movies. I think they switched directors and they did little things like not having them wear robes to class, etc. It felt different. Teenagers and not kids! :-)

I love your analysis of the series as a whole! I've never thought of it too much in that way.

I enjoyed reading your HP thoughts as well. My hardcover (first American edition, third printing) has the same text as your paperback edition.

I agree with the idea that the map helped Fred and George along a bit. And I've wondered about the September 1 issue as well.

48.) The Unvanquished, William Faulkner ****

One of the more accessible of Faulkner's novels I've read, but still requiring a good deal of retracing passages and allowing the narrative to teach you how to read it. Which is some of the most fun of reading Faulkner, I often think. My favorite part about The Unvanquished was the way Faulkner puts the setting and the time period on the page. I felt very immersed in the rural Civil War south while reading and in the end thought maybe I understood something a little that I wouldn't have before.

***For Book Club

>41 scaifea: Glad you enjoyed my ramblings, Amber!

>42 jennyifer24: I thought I had remembered that the movie did it much as I hypothesized. Cool!

My take on the boggarts is that the person doesn't control what it turns into but rather the boggart knows what the person is most afraid of so that person needs to be aware of what they are most afraid of so they can prepare to face the boggart. So if Harry hadn't realized that he was most afraid of the Dementors, he would have prepared to face Voldemort but would have gotten a Dementor anyway. I haven't seen the movie in a while, so I don't know if anything there contradicts that theory.

Glad you enjoyed my thoughts on it!

>43 foggidawn: Glad you enjoyed! Also happy I'm not the only one sitting there mulling over the dates while I read!

49.) The Great Courses: King Arthur: History and Legend, Professor Dorsey Armstrong

My most recent audio "book" was this Great Courses series of lectures on King Arthur. I'm reasonably knowledgeable about King Arthur, both because I've always been a fan and read a lot of Arthurian retellings and because I took an intense course on Arthur in college. So this series was a great combination of review and new material for me. I was especially interested in Armstrong's discussion of archaeological finds that are connected (or sometimes purported to be connected) to Arthur or other figures in the legends. Armstrong is really good at presenting this material (at first I thought she sounded a bit like she was talking (down) to seven year olds, but eventually I decided she was just trying to be personable in a situation that calls for that but is anything but (i.e. talking into a microphone)) and I was really into her little jokes and ways of talking in the end. My interest in Arthur waxes and wanes but pretty reliably sparks at least once a year (often in the summer, probably because I spent one memorable June in high school working through the mammoth Mists of Avalon), and listening to these lectures has really gotten my interest up again. I recommend them to anyone interested in the Arthur legends or the medieval period (most discussion is about medieval works, though we do get lectures on the 19th, 20th, and 21st century interpretations as well as discussions of Arthurian films and artwork (tapestries etc) other than texts). Fascinating, well presented, and easy to follow.

June round-up! (Finally.)

June:

Books read: 9
Books bought: 14?
New books read: 3
Shelf books read: 1
Book Club book: The Professor and the Madman
British Authors Challenge book: Uh uh.

Content Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 1
POC: 2
CNMO*: 1
Disabilities: 0
Mental Illness: 1

Author Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 0
POC: 0
CNMO*: 1
Male: 3
Female: 6
N=/=BCD**: 0

*Culture/Subculture Not My Own
**Nationality Not of British Colonial Descent, e.g. not USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, or Australia unless from a distinct native, aboriginal, or ethnic group

Active Reads Book Pile:

>47 lycomayflower:: I have the whole Otherland series, it is on my long to do list. My wife seemed to like book 1 a great deal.

I need to read The Mists of Avalon at some point...

50.) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie, read by Hugh Fraser

Our car "read" on the drive to and from Delaware this past weekend. I knew the solution to this one (I feel like I've always known, even before ever seeing a movie of it or anything--someone must have spoiled it at some point in the ether of time), and it was great fun to listen to it knowing how it comes out and trying to see how things fit together in light of that knowledge. Very enjoyable story and very well done. Hugh Fraser also did an excellent job reading it (though husbeast and I did have to keep reminding ourselves that the first-person narrator was not Hastings, who Fraser played in the Suchet Poirot series. After a bit, I forgot it was "Hastings" reading, though, as Fraser really was very good at voices and narration.). I look forward to reading this one in print sometime too, to see even better how Christie did it. Recommended.

Hmmm...I'm not sure I know how it comes out. I must. Do I? Hmmmm....

>51 laytonwoman3rd: If you don't, absolutely don't spoil yourself, and go read the thing.

>48 xymon81: I'm enjoying it so far, but I am a bit daunted by the scope of the whole series.

>49 scaifea: I loooooved it when I was seventeen. I haven't been able to reread it since then (tried twice), but I don't know if that is just the "magic" of it won't strike twice. I wasn't put off either of the times I tried to reread--I just couldn't make myself keep going in the face of other things lying around I'd never read before.

<49 Yeah, I tried it recently, and got about half way through, I think. I was enjoying it, but that much of it satisfied whatever itch it was scratching.

>49 scaifea: at the time I read *Mists* it was probably my first experience with a retelling of something familiar, from a woman's perspective. That's what made it exciting for me, and it changed the way I look at myth, legend, and history. It was eye opening, but if one's eyes have already been opened in that regard, I'm not sure what sort of impact it would have.

>47 lycomayflower: Well at 4-5 hundred pages a piece at least for each volume, and there are four it is a large commitment to get through the whole series.

51.) The Forever King, Molly Cochran and Warren Murphy ***1/2

One of those rare books about which I was enthused at first but then slowly fell out of love with as I went on. By the last sixty pages or so, I had to force myself to carry on to the end. The idea is that King Arthur has been reborn as a ten- year-old boy in contemporary times; Galahad is a washed-up FBI agent. Merlin is flitting about (I won't spoil plot points here), and a villain known to them all from the Middle Ages is plotting plots. The Holy Grail is involved. I was intrigued at first and really enjoying seeing how Cochran and Murphy were slotting things together. But by the time things started to come to a head, the intrigue had fallen out of the bottom of the thing. This is possibly partly due to the habit (common among thriller writers, I find, and that's fine) of the writers dwelling on and wallowing in the gruesome details of violence and death, especially of characters who have been made interesting to you just a paragraph before only in order to then be killed horribly. I despise this. /tangent about my idiosyncratic personal preferences in fiction. The more compelling reason I probably stopped caring about the story so much was that it stopped feeling relevant to a better, fuller, or more entertaining understanding of the Arthur legends. While the first half of the book felt invested in reinventing and retelling Arthuriana, by the end the bits felt a little tacked on. There also wasn't much in the way of exploring what it would mean to be King Arthur in the twentieth century, which is what I was most excited about seeing. Ah well.

Don't you mean "Och, weel"?

>58 laytonwoman3rd: I always mean "Och, weel," though I don't think they say that in Cornwall or Wales.

Probably not...but Arthur's Seat being in Edinburgh, it would still seem appropriate.

52.) Sailor Twain, Or The Mermaid in the Hudson, Mark Siegel ****

Somehow I tripped along since I first put this on my wishlist thinking this graphic novel was about Mark Twain. Negative, Batman. A 19th century riverboat captain (you see?) rescues a wounded mermaid and becomes infatuated with her while keeping her a secret from everyone else on board. Meanwhile, the French owner of the riverboat (who lives on board) is acting mighty strangely. The artwork here is at turns stunning and comical (landscapes and cityscapes are done in a realistic style; people slightly more cartoonily--all in gorgeous charcoal), and I enjoyed the story, though it does lose a little coherency in the last section. Recommended for the artwork (I may, in fact, have to scare up a copy for myself for keepsies, as this one came from the library).

Wrong river entirely...should have tipped you off.

53.) Asking For It, Lilah Pace ****

An erotic romance between two people with compatible kinky desires who agree to remain strangers to each other in order to allow their fantasies to play out more intensely. Developing feelings between them and old wounds from their pasts complicate matters. A well-done story with believable characters and plot development that feels mostly plausible. Most remarkable for its treatment of rape fantasies, clear demarcation between fantasy and reality, and discussion of and portrayal of consent (*side-eye at Fifty Shades of Grey*). Some points off for being another story that gives kinky protags deeply disturbing abusive pasts and suggests a connection between them and their adult sexuality. A couple points grudgingly given back because it's clear here that while these characters are dealing with thorny issues of emotional well-being, past abuse, and current desire, interest in non-vanilla sex itself =/= psychological distress (*further side-eye at FSofG*). Recommended if you're interested in the development of the portrayal of BDSM in mainstream erotic romance or portrayals of consent or if you just like this kind of thing, with the HUGE CAVEAT LECTOR: please, please heed the trigger warnings.

>60 laytonwoman3rd: I have never understood the whole "oh, aye, Camelot was tucked in under Arthur's Seat, hence the name" thing. King Arthur in Edinburgh? Where does that come from? I need to research the origins of that bit of legend because it's all wrong geographically from anything else I know about Arthur.

>62 laytonwoman3rd: Yeah, yeah. If I had been paying attention for half a second I'da prolly put that together.

>64 lycomayflower: See Finding Arthur: The True Origins of the Once and Future King by Adam Ardrey. Not sure I believe any of it, but it was an interesting book.

>65 drneutron: Ooo, interesting. Thanks, Jim!

54.) In Praise of Reading and Fiction: The Nobel Lecture, Mario Vargas Llosa ****

The text of Vargas Llosa's 2010 Nobel speech. Probably I would have appreciated this a little more if I'd known more about him, but there's some lovely discussion of the importance of storytelling and how it raises us above the mere quest for survival. He employs wonderful imagery as well. I need to read some of Vargas Llosa's fiction one of these days.

55.) Proxy, Alex London ****

A YA dystopian novel about a (post unknown-cataclysmic American) society wherein the difference between the monied and the poor is almost unfathomably vast, everyone lives on one extreme or the other, and the rich can buy the debt of the poor in exchange for the poor receiving any punishment the rich incur. Technology and capitalism have taken over to the point where individuals are inundated with highly personalized advertising at all times (sounds kind of scarily plausible, doesn't it?). There's an underground movement to erase all debt and rebuild society, and Syd, our protag, is somehow important to them (why is much of the plot--spoilers). Decent adventure and world building, some good adolescent coming-to-terms-with-the-world-you-were-born-into stuff, brilliant illustration of privilege (without any preaching), and points for diversity in YA for a gay POC protag. Dragged a wee bit in the middle for me, but dystopian fic is not my thing, so YMMV, especially if you do like dystopias in your reading.

56.) Fatal Shadows, Josh Lanyon ****1/2

Books I love generally fall into two categories: 1) books I love for what they're doing with sentences or form or genre or 2) books I love for the stories they tell. Mrs Dalloway is a good example of the first; Outlander is a good example of the second; At Swim, Two Boys and The Lord of the Rings are good examples of the rare beauty what falls into both categories. Category one tends to fire up the old brain pan, while category two makes me grin stupidly, get the warm fuzzies, and entertain notions that the author somehow magically wrote a book just for me. I think the kinds of books that land in category one generally tend to be held above those in category two, but I'm much more excited these days to find these category two loves. Probably because I spent so long (grad school) immersed in very little but litfic, finding joy in story, even ones that employ (*gasp*) formulaic genre tropes, feels really fresh and wonderful. (This is a lesson I apparently need to relearn over and over: see anything I've ever written about my experience reading the Harry Potter series for the first time). Fatal Shadows was a category two, warm fuzzy, grin like an idiot, loved it read.

It's a murder mystery, and the mystery bits are entertaining and just mysterious enough (I did figure it out, but it took me to the two-thirds point), I love the characters, the writing is solid, and the romancy subplots work out (delightfully) as they should. I'm super excited that there's a handful more in this series and that Lanyon has written lots else besides. Looks like I may have a new go-to author for when I want something fun, fast, entertaining, and good. Woot!

>69 lycomayflower: That first paragraph is almost *exactly* how I feel about the books I enjoy.

>70 scaifea: Most excellent! I am not surprised, somehow. ;-)

>69 lycomayflower: Very well said...currently wallowing in a category 2 read: Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell. I dare to speculate that she and Bob Parker would have been buds.

July round-up!

Books read: 8
Books bought: ? Several? Many?
New books read: 2
Shelf books read: 2
Book Club book: The Unvanquished

Content Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 1
POC: 3
CNMO*: 2
Disabilities: 0
Mental Illness: 1

Author Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 0
POC: 1
CNMO*: 1
Male: 5
Female: 4
N=/=BCD**: 1

*Culture/Subculture Not My Own
**Nationality Not of British Colonial Descent, e.g. not USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, or Australia unless from a distinct native, aboriginal, or ethnic group

Active Reads Book Pile:

57.) Mr Timothy, Louis Bayard ****1/2

Mr Timothy is Tiny Tim of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. At twenty-three, he's a bit lost--both parents are dead, he has regular contact with only one of his siblings, and he is haunted by the memory of his father. He is ambivalent about continuing to take the still happily offered money from his "Uncle N" but can't seem to find enough direction to be able to support himself fully without it. When he happens upon the body of a dead girl with a brand on her arm and then encounters another girl who seems of a kind to the dead one, he sets out to discover what is going on. What follows is part character study, part murder mystery/thriller, part continuation of A Christmas Carol.

I loved this book (and in a reversal of the usual, the other members of my book club were at best lukewarm about it). I was on board with Tim's story from the beginning and was wrapped up in the language and neo-Victorian-ness of it. Bayard does a particularly good job with setting (London felt very real in his descriptions), and there are all kinds of little references to other Dickens works, which are fun to spot. The mystery itself is entertaining (if gruesome), though I was most interested in the exploration of the character of Tim, Bayard's endeavor to imagine the Cratchitts (some of the least well realized of Dickens's characters, I think) more fully, and the illustration of the ways in which the socio-economic conditions of the time made it impossible for one rich man to lift even one family fully out of the poverty they started in. Good stuff. Recommended.

***For Book Club

>72 laytonwoman3rd: Thankee.

BOB Parker, is it? You know him very good, I suppose?

>75 lycomayflower: If only...

58.) A Dangerous Thing, Josh Lanyon ****

**The following is spoilery for character reveals from book one and discusses character development stuff from book two. I don't reveal anything about the resolutions to either book's mystery.**

The second in the Adrien English mystery series. Not quite as good as the first, but mostly in that way most second books aren't as good as the first--simply because they aren't the start of something. The mystery in this one felt a little less meaty, but that's mostly made up for in that we get lots of relationship stuff between Adrien and Jake. I'm not sure what to do with Jake, though.

I had him pegged as closeted and probably conflicted from almost his first appearance in book one, and part of me was watching to see how Lanyon developed him as the story went along. And it all felt pretty spot-on. In book two it turns out that Jake is not just closeted and conflicted, he's, like, suuuuuper conflicted. Like, hates himself for being attracted to men, plans on marrying a woman and having kids, can hardly bring himself to to have dinner with Adrien conflicted. Which is fine. Big old bundles of contradictions make for interesting stories. But Jake's confliction is confusing in its expression, almost to the point of feeling inconsistent at times. At the start of the story, he can't even kiss Adrien because kissing a man feels too weird, despite having been a regular at S&M clubs for some time. The suggestion being that Jake can handle sex with men if it's with strangers and is impersonal, but in the scene where he can't kiss Adrien, his reluctance is painted as a reaction to markers of Adrien's maleness (five o'clock shadow, the scent of aftershave) not as a reaction to trying to have smexy times with someone he cares about. Later he seems to be over the kissing issue with no further concern. He is sometimes incredibly tender and protective of Adrien (in private) but also makes really withering comments about Adrien's sexuality. That all of these traits could exist in one man at one time is something I can absolutely buy, but I sometimes felt like Lanyon wasn't quite selling it. That being said, some of this is the result of the point of view (first person Adrien), and given that Jake is an uncommunicative lug (in the grand tradition, natch), that Jake's actions and attitudes would seem a bit unexplained is to be expected (because they are, because we only know what Adrien knows, and Jake isn't telling him what's going on in his head). Further more, important characterizing scenes between Adrien and Jake always feel like there's all kinds of stuff going on under the surface (which is precisely how I think important characterizing scenes should feel). So, I'm back to "I'm not sure what to do with Jake." In all honesty, this is probably fifteen percent "more could have been done to make Jake's characterization consistent" and eighty-five percent "I couldn't turn off my editor brain while reading for fun." In any case, recommended for the writing, characters, wit, and decent mystery.

59.) The Hell You Say, Josh Lanyon ****

In the third Adrien English mystery, Adrien ends up investigating the Los Angeles occult scene when his part-time employee is arrested on suspicion of being involved in a series of murders that appear to be related to Satanism. Jake is part of the team investigating the murders (of course), and Adrien's refusal to stop nosing about where he shouldn't coupled with Jake's fear that Adrien's proximity to the case will out Jake puts more strain on their already rickety not-exactly-a-relationship. Jake continues to be a jerk (and drops some inevitable but seriously jerky bombshells), and Adrien stumbles wittily through his investigation. Another solid entry in the series, with the highlights continuing to be the wit and the relationships. Adrien's mother announces she's about to marry in this one, so we get to watch some fun interactions between Adrien and his soon-to-be step-father and step-sisters (of which there are three. He's bewildered by the adult ones but seems to hit a brotherly/avuncular chord with the youngest (twelve), which I hope we get to see develop in books four and five). The inevitable love-interest-who-isn't-Jake in this one is more fleshed out than the previous ones, and there's a hint that he might return in the next book. Plus side, he's not a jerk. Minus side, he's not Jake. Still enjoying these, but getting a little impatient for Jake to sort his shit. I'm not holding my breath for a Jake/Adrien HEA (though I'd be about it), but if Jake doesn't get a full emotional arc that lands him some place where he's happier with himself, I'm going to be peeved.

... aaaand with this book I sail on past last year's total books read. *chuffed*

"if Jake doesn't get a full emotional arc that lands him some place where he's happier with himself, I'm going to be peeved." Same issue I've had with Jesse Stone...except that if he conquers his demons he'll just be Spenser, and what will there be to write about?

60.) Captive Prince, C.S. Pacat ****1/2

When the brother of Prince Damianos of Akielos makes a successful play for the throne, he gifts Damianos (Damen) to Prince Laurent of Vere as a pleasure slave while putting it out in Akielos that Damen is dead. This move is designed to humiliate Damen and cement ties with Vere. Warrior prince Damen is out of place in hyper-political Vere and must learn to follow the treachery, deceit, and maneuverings of the Vere nobility if he is to keep his true identity secret and cultivate a chance to escape, return to Akielos, and wrest the throne back from his half-brother, Kastor. Laurent has no intention of using Damen as a pleasure slave, as he hates all Akielons for the death on the battlefield of his brother and would not debase himself by seeking pleasure with one (though he's happy to humiliate Damen whenever he can). The story focuses on Damen's attempt to learn the ways of Vere and find a way to escape, the political situation in Vere, and Laurent and Damen's (very slow) journey toward possibly, maybe, respecting one another. The world building is interesting (if sharply focused only on politics and sexual mores, though that is what the story needs), the depiction of political maneuverings is impressive, the characterizations are compelling, and the writing is very good (Pacat sent me to the dictionary four or five times, and every time I came back from looking up a definition going, "Yep, that's exactly the word she needed.")

In addition to enjoying the story very much, this book got me thinking about genre a lot. Captive Prince is being sold as romance, and that billing perplexes me somewhat. This is the first of a trilogy and I'm guessing the principles are going to end up in a relationship eventually, but boy howdy, are they not there by the end of this book. (I'm not complaining; I read enough about the book before committing to know that it was going to stretch genre boundaries. But I wonder if some people are going to be annoyed when the book doesn't hit the romance genre story beats on cue.) I could make an argument for shelving this in sci-fi/fantasy or literature/fiction, and I wonder what prompted the decision (by the publisher--it's labeled romance on the back of the book) to call this romance. The explicit sex? It's erotica-level explicit when it's there, but neither the sex nor the not-yet-a-romance is the focus of the story. The suspicion that it would miss its demographic if it were in sci-fi/fantasy? But I bet Jacqueline Carey and Mercedes Lackey fans would be all over this. Same issue in literature/fiction? But surely romance readers wander into the lit/fic aisles a lot? All the "chick lit" is over there, and there must be a fair amount of cross-readership. Romance readers probably find it anyway and then readers who wouldn't normally wander into the romance section could find it too. And Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy (probably the closest relative I can think of for Pacat's work, though Pacat's is waaaay better) is shelved in literature/fiction. I've read more romance this year than I probably have in all the rest of my life (partly because I'm trying to diversify my reading in all kinds of ways and partly because I'm getting over myself (are those actually the same reasons?) and partly because I discovered it's fun), so I want to be clear that I'm not saying that there's something wrong with romances or that this book deserves better or something. I just truly wonder how the decision was made. Genre sections are there in bookstores to make money help readers find what they're looking for (and I'm sure we've all had days when we wished they'd drill down even further on those sections--someday I'm going to go to the Customer Service desk and ask them to point me to the Exquisitely Written, Strongly Plotted Literary Fiction Set in the Scottish Highlands with Slow-Burn, Character-Driven Romance between Men Interested in Word Play and Popular Music section. Or the Contemporary Gothic Fiction Set in Cornwall in an Old Spooky House with a Spiral Staircase and a Secret Passage and the Story's to Do with Old Books and Twins area. Just to see their faces.), and fair enough. But how often is that impulse working against itself?

>79 laytonwoman3rd: See, I think Lanyon has pretty much said he's not writing any more of these (there's two more I haven't read yet). I don't know if they "end" at the end of book five, but if they do, I'm cool with character resolution. If you're going to carry on, resolving the main issue with a character does create a problem, as you say.

"Or the Contemporary Gothic Fiction Set in Cornwall in an Old Spooky House with a Spiral Staircase and a Secret Passage and the Story's to Do with Old Books and Twins area." Ok, you'd better just write that one, because I definitely want to read one of those now.

>50 lycomayflower: I figured it out...I put a post-it note at page 130 or so with my thought, and it turned out I was right. Didn't get all the picky little details, of course, as to how, but I was pretty sure who and why. I forget how much fun it is to read Poirot.

>83 laytonwoman3rd: Whooo, Junior Detective League! ;-) Glad you enjoyed it.

61.) Ritual of Proof, Dara Joy ****

A cracking good read for me, though I suspect it's not for everyone. This is a genderflipped Regency romance in space. Yes. (Yeesss.) A thousand years before the story begins, a ship crewed by women landed on Forus and set up a society in which the initially genetically manipulated test-tube-born men are the "weaker" sex--protected, oppressed, and expected to obey their mothers and then wives in all things, including remaining virginal until marriage. Jorlan (oh, lord, the names are, to a one, soooo bad) is a sheltered, highly sought after young aristocrat with no intention of ever agreeing to marry. Green is a well-respected politician and landowner with no intention of seeking to marry. When Green gets wind of villainy afoot with regards to Jorlan's future, she maneuvers them into a marriage, at which point Jorlan and Green must negotiate their personalities, conflicting ideologies (Jorlan is determined (single-handedly?) to bring equality to men), and further villainy as they make a life together. The plot is a bit predictable and the story has some flaws (the vague workings of the matriarchal society, the occasional wooby nature stuff, the silly names), but the world building, characterization, and writing are surprisingly good. There's also some very neat play with traditionally gendered language in the sex scenes. Recommended if you like this sort of thing.

62.) Death of a Pirate King, Josh Lanyon ****

The fourth Adrien English book offers a decently entertaining mystery entwined with a more-than-decently entertaining love story. The mystery this time involves members of the Hollywood scene. The romance is still about Jake, who reappears in Adrien's life two years after he last saw him with a bundle of new revelations that throws Adrien for a loop. The climax to this one is almost as hard-hitting as that in the first story, after dropping off a bit in two and three. Another solid entry in the series, though I'm starting to feel like those pesky murder investigations are getting in the way of the real story between Adrien and Jake. YMMV.

...and now I've surpassed last year's pages read count. ONWARDS!

63.) The Dark Tide, Josh Lanyon ****1/2

This last Adrien English mystery rises back to the enjoyment of the first for me. The mystery is well integrated with what's going on in Adrien's personal life, and things between Adrien and Jake finally come to a head. Lanyon handles the high emotion of these two characters extremely well (there's a couple of perfect, devastating, lovely scenes here), and both Jake and Adrien have changed in ways that feel entirely within character. The final scenes of this book are pretty perfect in the way that the conclusion to the mystery and the conclusion to the emotional arcs for Adrien and Jake intertwine. (I almost wish there had been an epilogue where we get to see things a little more calmed down, but I dunno. It might be that that would have ruined things a bit.) If this is really the end of the series (it feels like an end), it is a worthy end. Recommended.

*facepalm* EDITOR!!!

>88 laytonwoman3rd: You wanna try being a little more specific there, Sparky?

double entendres...all over the place.

>90 laytonwoman3rd: Oh, well, now. That was on purpose, Mims.

I'm sure.

Can't decide which of these to read next. *drums fingers*

I think you throw the stack down some stairs. Read the one that sails the farthest.

Or wait! Drop them in your swimming pool and read the one that floats.

>94 weird_O: LOL. Poor books.

64.) Kindred, Octavia Butler ****1/2

Wow. Butler's story of a twentieth-century woman who is "called" back in time by her white southern ancestor whenever he's in mortal danger is a harrowing, masterfully written exploration of slavery, race, gender, and history. Butler never lets anything remain simple, and reader expectations are constantly being disrupted. The bad slave owner is sometimes sympathetic, the good twentieth-century white man is implicated in the history of his nation, the free twentieth-century woman begins to think like a slave. And part of what makes the story so good is that all these characters are multiple contradictory things at once and none of them resolve into a tidy package that can ultimately be "understood." One almost must hold the whole novel in mind at once and in that way gain some insight into of all the tangled, messy issues with which it deals without coming to any conclusions, necessarily, about any of them. Highly recommended.

***For Book Club

>96 lycomayflower: Is that the copy I had here, or do I still have it? I meant to read it a while ago, as I recall...but maybe I gave it back to you because the club was reading it?

>97 laytonwoman3rd: Pretty sure this is my copy.

OK, my catalog says I have a copy of it in a box, ...I thought I had yours.

>99 laytonwoman3rd: Ah. I thought you were asking if I had yours. You definitely don't have mine. Cause it's here. See.

65.) Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books, Michael Dirda ***1/2

A collection of a year's worth of columns about book life that Dirda wrote for The American Scholar website. Such things are always best when they feature things the reader is also interested in or recommendations the reader finds pleasing. Dirda hit the latter for me a lot here, and I wrote down a number of titles I want to check out. The former was more often a miss, and that made the collection feel a tiny bit like a slog some of the time. Obviously, that will vary for each and every reader of this collection. Dirda's writing style is pleasing and highly readable, and I enjoyed many of his columns about attending various conferences and meetings of literary societies. On the whole, a good read, just not as good as I might have liked.

66.) The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: Book One, Bill Watterson *****

I've been working my way through this first volume of the complete set of Calvin and Hobbes for a few months now. What fun it is to revisit all these strips, in order, in such a beautiful presentation. Reading them in this book, with the dates for all the strips clearly printed underneath them, makes me wonder to what extent I ever actually read these in the newspaper. I have vivid memories of reading the individual collections as a kid, but looking at the dates of the strips I realized that it was unlikely I was looking at the paper when these were printed--the first ones anyway. I was only four years old when the strip started. That is a bit of a startlement--Calvin and Hobbes was so much a part of my childhood, it feels odd that the whole thing began so long before I could have had any appreciation of it at all. But in any case, this is a lovely collection (I have the boxed set of the complete paperback edition) with a nice introduction by Watterson and all the "additional" artwork from the individual collections. Recommended.

67.) High Energy, Dara Joy ***

Eh. Points for a fun hero and heroine, for a pleasant atmosphere, and for humor. Points off for a complete lack of obstacles to the romance plot and for a ho-hum plot otherwise. It's not that nothing happened but that I never once wondered how things were going to work out. A disappointment after Ritual of Proof.

>102 lycomayflower: I blame Watterson for not having any good pictures of my son during his elementary and middle school years. Of course, it could have been my fault for letting him read my Calvin and Hobbes collections. :)

>104 drneutron: Ha! I bet a lot of kids have gotten some pretty good terrible, awful ideas from Calvin!

68.) Heroes and Legends: The Most Influential Characters of Literature, Thomas A. Shippey ****

A Great Courses series of lectures I've been listening to as my audio"book" lately. Shippey discusses (wait for it) heroes and legends from Odysseus to Harry Potter. Fascinating listening, and well done (though I do sometimes disagree with his assessments--one of the most fun bits of listening to this sort of thing, actually). I've been having great luck with the Great Courses offerings through Audible so far. I would recommend this one.

August round-up! (Laaaate.)

Books read: 13
Books bought: *sheepish ignorance*
New books read: 10
Shelf books read: 2
Audiobooks read: 1
Book Club book: Kindred

Content Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 6
POC: 3
CNMO*: 0
Disabilities: 1
Mental Illness: 1

Author Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 0
POC: 1
CNMO*: )
Male: 9
Female: 4
N=/=BCD**: 0

*Culture/Subculture Not My Own
**Nationality Not of British Colonial Descent, e.g. not USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, or Australia unless from a distinct native, aboriginal, or ethnic group

Weirdly, I'm only actively reading one book right now (and I'm almost finished with it), so I'm skipping the active reads pile and giving you the Books I'm Thinking of Reading Soon Maybe Pile:



Am also stupid behind on reviews, so those are coming... soon.

Book haul from the AAUW used book sale this weekend. The Poldark novels are aaaall for LW3.

>108 lycomayflower: LW3 thinks you're a peach!

69.) Anything Could Happen, Will Walton ****

Anything Could Happen follows fifteen-year-old Tretch Farm over the course of Winter Break during his freshman year. Tretch has known he is gay for a while but struggles with when, how, and whether to tell his family. He's also fallen in love with his straight best friend and can't decide what to do about that. While Tretch's crush on his friend provides the story some narrative thrust, the book is less about that than it is about Tretch figuring out who he is, how he wants to relate to the people in his life, and what friendship is. Lovely, well-written LGBTQ-positive YA. Recommended.

70.) Begging for It, Lilah Pace ****

This sequel to Asking for It carries on with Vivienne and Jonah and their exploration of acting out mutually consensual rape fantasies. While the first book was mostly about the characters exploring what their fantasies meant for them, the second book brings in the realities of the outside world more fully when their community is plagued by a serial rapist and an ex-girlfriend suggests to the police that they should suspect Jonah. Having to deal with those suspicions brings up new complexities in Vivienne and Jonah's relationship. The strength of Asking for It was in the ways it portrayed and explored consent; while Begging for It still deals with consent well, it's most compelling when it explores what happens when a passionate, loving couple hits a point in their relationship where they have mutually exclusive sexual desires and limits. Recommended but, as with the first book, trigger warnings: heed them.

71.) Ally Hughes Has Sex Sometimes, Jules Moulin ****

Thirty-one-year-old professor and single mom Ally Hughes has a beautiful, loving weekend-long affair with twenty-one-year-old ex-student Jake Bean while her daughter is away with a relative. Ten years later, her now-grown daughter announces that she's bringing famous actor Noah Bean home for dinner, and pop-culture-challenged Ally has no idea that this means her past lover is about to walk back into her life. The story alternates between the present and that weekend affair, so we see those stories unfold in parallel. The relationship between Ally and Jake is both sexy and incredibly sweet without being either crude or saccharine. Watching them trying to figure out what they mean to each other and what to do about it was a treat. The book also deals with pressures on women to do with beauty, youth, and sex in a light hearted but interesting way. The book is perhaps a bit uneven--the end is a little abrupt and while the dialogue is awesome, Moulin sometimes errs on the side of the sparse in terms of the scenes in which the dialogue happens--but I loved it. Recommended.

72.) Prince's Gambit, C.S. Pacat ****1/2

The sequel to Captive Prince and picks up right where that one left off. Captive was all about court intrigue and how Damen had to learn how to understand the politics and maneuverings in a society that values things and works differently than what he's used to. Gambit moves to training fields and battlefields, and in some ways is even better than the first book because both Damen and Laurent seem a bit more at home in this setting. The slow, slow burn between the two of them continues, and we get lots of really delicious character development (and escapades--like escaping villains through chases across rooftops. I'm in). Scenes between these two are almost always the sort where there's just enough happening on the surface that you know something really important is going on beneath the surface and you have to parse things closely to figure out what. And even then, things are not always clear. Love. it. Almost threw the book across the room, though, at the cliffhanger in sheer frustration (not that I didn't know beforehand, mind you) that it'll be four-plus months before book three comes out. If this is the kind of book you like, this is the kind of book that is perfect.

Huh. I've been assuming that my numbers are so high (I just finished book 72; my highest number of books read in a year to date is 78) this year because I've listened to a lot of audiobooks (I've always counted audiobooks in my list, but usually they've only accounted for one to three reads in a year; this year I'm already at seven) and because I seem to be reading a lot of short books (excluding audio titles (they skew the numbers too much because no pages), my average number of pages per book so far this year is 277). But I just did some back-of-the-envelope math comparing this year to 2012, which is the closest year in terms of situation (I wasn't working that year; I am working this year, but only about 2.5 weeks per month. We didn't do anything ginormous like buy a house that year; we haven't done anything like that this year) for which I have the appropriate data. To date in 2015, I have read 65 (non-audio) books; in 2012, I had read 53 by now. The average number of pages per book for the whole year in 2012 (I can't be arsed to add up page counts to get an accurate one for mid-September) was 309. So, longer books. But if you use this year's page average (277, remember), it would be charitable to adjust that 2012 number to 55. Meaning I'm still at least ten books ahead of 2012. Definitely reading more. Given that my hypothesis is basically nope (the audiobooks and shorter books aren't appreciably accounting for why I'm spitting distance away from 75 in September when I usually struggle to get there by the end of the year), I'm kind of at a loss to explain these high numbers. But I will take it. /dubious math nerdery

Dubious, fer shure.

>115 laytonwoman3rd: You dispute sommat here, Mims?

I would never.

>117 laytonwoman3rd: I think you would and, in fact, did.

73.) Saga volume 5, Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughn *****

This comic books series continues to be really excellent, with compelling artwork, intriguing storylines, and complex characters. I don't really have anything more to say except that the whole series is absolutely worth checking out.

(Touchstones are wonky for this title. Ender's Game? Twilight?)

74.) Ms. Marvel: No Normal, G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona *****

The first volume (collecting #1-5) of the latest Ms. Marvel comic book. The new Ms. Marvel is a sixteen year-old Pakistani-American Muslim girl named Kamala Kahn. I can't speak to how the new comic fits into the Marvel universe or how it retells or retools elements of previous Ms. Marvels because this is my first experience with Ms. Marvel, but I loved this. Kamala is immediately vibrant and interesting, her relationship with her family is compelling, and her attempts to figure out who she is--simply as a teenager growing up, as a member of an immigrant family, and as a newly "born" superhero--is fascinating reading. The story is great, and the artwork is wonderful (the jokes in the background are awesome--a fire extinguisher behind a store counter has a label that reads "Die Fire Die," a sign listing the hours a store is open reads "All of them," one of Kamala's textbooks is titled "All Sorts of Math"). Exciting artwork, good story, and a diverse heroine? I'm in.

***Pssst** There's a "c" missing, Miss Editor.

I just guess where it is, then?

Looks like you found it.

Thhsbbbbt. Pointing out errors without actually pointing them out is just picking.

It's what I do.

75.) Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates ****

Coates's long essay takes the form of a letter to his son and explores the experience of living in a black body in the US. Powerful, harrowing stuff, to which I do not feel ready to respond in any way other than to say, "This is important. Read it."

>126 lycomayflower: Woot! That's 75. I must hustle.

Thanks!

Don't think you need to hustle. You should roll past 75 sometime in November, at the rate you're going now.

76.) Ms. Marvel: Generation Why, G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, and Jacob Wyatt

Second Ms. Marvel collection (#6-11). Carries on being awesome.

Congrats on 75!

Thanks!

Congrats on reaching 75! Is that ahead of previous years? (Sorry got caught up in the dubious math nerdery.)

>133 Familyhistorian: Thanks! It is very ahead of previous years. My "best" is 78 in a year.

77.) Arrow, volume 1, Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg ***1/2

Comic book collecting eighteen individual issues of tie-ins to the first season of the Arrow TV show. Each issue is a little vignette that either fills in something we knew about but didn't get to see from the show or just provides an extra little adventure. A bit meh for me, mostly because the nature of the thing is episodic and not terribly meaty. A few of the vignettes were pretty interesting, but on the whole, my attention wandered. The attention here is more on the action and adventure where my interest in Arrow leans way more toward character, so, you know, YMMV. I do find (through reading this and other comics and graphic novels I've read recently) that I really enjoy this kind of visual narrative.

**I know this volume is in LT because I have it cataloged, but I can't get the touchstone to work no how. Just "Arrow" grabs To Kill a Mockingbird (!) and "Arrow, volume 1" snags Treasure Island. Mmyeah.

78.) Cronin's Key, N.R. Walker ***1/2

M/M romance/adventure story with vampires and a plot to end the world. Characters are fun, humor is great, world building is interesting, plot is a little rushed. A fun, quick read.

>126 lycomayflower: Wow. You've done vera vera good. Seventy-five.

>137 weird_O: Thanks!

September round-up! (Better late than... whatever.)

Books read: 9
Books bought: I've just given up paying attention to this, honestly.
New books read: 8
Shelf books read: 0
Audiobooks read: 0
Book Club book: DNFed The Tenth Parallel because it was both difficult content and boring. Which is pretty much the definition of "Just can't" for me right now.

Content Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 2
POC: 5
CNMO*: 2
Disabilities: 0
Mental Illness: 0

Author Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 0
POC: 3
CNMO*: 2
Male: 6
Female: 6
N=/=BCD**: 0

*Culture/Subculture Not My Own
**Nationality Not of British Colonial Descent, e.g. not USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, or Australia unless from a distinct native, aboriginal, or ethnic group

Active Reads Pile:

79.) You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), Felicia Day, read by the author ****

Felicia Day's memoir of her childhood and how the internet has played a role in both her career and her emotional life was mostly fun and fascinating. She reads her work excellently--though I'll admit that the half-ironic ALL CAPS enthusiastic internet speech in subheadings and asides started to wear a little bit thin before the book was over. In fact, I was getting a little "done with this" at about the, mmm, three-quarters mark until Day starting discussing depression, self-pressure, perfectionism, and the treatment of women on the internet (and how many of these things often function together), and then I was all in again. I enjoyed the whole book and laughed and nodded a lot at the beginning and appreciated the behind-the-scenes stuff about the making of The Guild, but the more serious stuff toward the end really catapulted this from a mostly enjoyable read I'd probably mostly forget to something I was really, really glad I read and might return to some day. Recommended to Felicia Day fans and all varieties of internet participatory fandom geeks. If you don't know who Day is and you don't participate in some kind of internet geekery, there is undoubtedly stuff here worth your while, but you may find getting to it tedious.

***And with this book, I break my record for most books read in a calendar year. I'm going for one hundred, baby!

>140 lycomayflower: Lots of time left to hit 100! You go girl!

80.) Arrow, volume 2, Marc Guggenheim et al. ***1/2

More of the same kind of thing as in volume 1. Still does not pull up my socks much. It's a lot of "Oliver! There's bad shit over here!" "Let us go fix it!" *goes to fix it* *"witty" ending line to the chapter.* It's just not my cuppa. I thought a handful of the chapters were really excellent, and--no one is surprised--those were the ones less concerned with a straight-up adventure we didn't get to see on the show and more with characterization or filling in backstory. YMMV. Still digging on this manner (comics, visual art) of telling a story.

>141 Familyhistorian: Thanks! I'm really pulling for it this year!

WooHoo for record-breaking reading!!

*grumble, grumble, grumble I hit 100 once grumble, grumble, grumble* Congratulations! You're on a roll.

>144 scaifea: Thanks, Amber!

>145 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks! I kind of don't expect to ever do it again (if I manage it this time).

Half-price day at the library book sale! $9. Score.



Bottom three on the right for LW3.

You are da best.

Oooh, lovely haul!

>147 lycomayflower: Nice haul.

>149 scaifea:, >150 thornton37814: Thanks!

81.) Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud, ****

Published in the early nineties, McCloud's discussion of comics takes the form of a comic itself, and both the discussion and the use of the form to enhance that discussion are brilliant. He defines comics, explores the language of comics, and illustrates how comics work, including the ways they suggest and manipulate movement and time. McCloud also explores briefly the history of comics, both as the average American might perceive them (think comic books) and as we might identify them as an art form stretching back thousands of years. The discussion of how modern comics have developed differently in the west and in Japan is especially interesting. Anyone who has ever read a comic book or even the funny papers probably has some understanding of how comics work, but this book does an excellent job taking the form apart and pinpointing exactly what is going on narratively, visually, and artistically when we read them. Recommended for anyone, really, but especially to anyone interested in comics, visual art, or narrative.

82.) Carry On, Rainbow Rowell ****1/2

Rainbow Rowell's previous novel Fangirl is about a girl who writes very popular fan fiction of the (fictional) Simon Snow books. Fangirl contained both excerpts from the Simon Snow books and from the fanfic the main character wrote about them. So many readers of Fangirl were so intrigued by the characters from the Simon Snow universe that Rowell decided to write, as she says in the Author Note to Carry On, "the story [she] felt [she] owed them [the characters]." Carry On is that story.

Carry On makes no reference, either in the narrative itself or in the jacket copy, to Fangirl, and I think it can probably be read without having read Fangirl first (though having read the previous book would almost certainly enhance the experience of Carry On). In Carry On, Simon Snow is in his final (eighth) year at the magickal school Watford. He is "the Chosen One," but he's bad at it, having more magic than anyone in living memory but also having little control over it. The Insidious Humdrum, a mysterious force that sucks all the magic out of any place it appears, seems to be gaining power, and a war is brewing between the Mage, the leader of the magickal people of Britain, and the old families, who do not like his interfering "new" ways of doing things. Meanwhile, Simon has split up with his long-time girlfriend and is increasingly obsessed with the well-being of his long-time enemy and roommate, Baz. From there, the story is an adventure/mystery (why didn't Baz show up for the beginning of term? where did the Humdrum come from? who were Simon's parents?) and a love story. (I won't spoil that love story, but if you've read Fangirl, you know. Also: slowest of slow burns. If you like that thing fanfic can be so good at where it spools out an inevitable pairing with exquisite character and developmental detail, Carry On is for you.)

I loved pretty much everything about this book (maaaybe the resolution to the actually plotty plot bits was a little bit thin), but the thing that surprised me was how fascinating the indirect commentary on fantasy stories about "chosen ones" was. Harry Potter is the most direct parallel, and watching how Rowell stirs up the HP elements and often (lovingly) criticizes them was an unexpected treat. You thought Harry was a little too well adjusted given his background and treatment? Simon is messed up. It's ridiculous to think that wizards and witches would have no clue how to use muggle technology? Mages use both technology and magic, and eschew "unnecessary" magic. The list goes on. The details of Rowell's world building are brilliant and self-consistent, but many of them tweak the workings of other stories of this ilk, too. (Possibly the most lovely, magnificent piece of world building here is that the spells are clichés that have gained power through repeated popular use. ("As you were" returns things to their previous state, "Come out, come out, wherever you are" is a revealing spell.) The words have gained the power to do things. Mmmm, speech act theory.) The meta aspect of the story is part of what made it such a wonderful read for me (though it was a squeeful, grin-like-a-silly-thing, clutch-the-book-to-my-chest read for other reasons too).

I hoped (without really thinking it would happen) that Rowell would write exactly this book when I read Fangirl, and I've been waiting for it with great anticipation ever since it was announced. Expectations: met.

Or, you might say, "Mischief: managed"??

>154 laytonwoman3rd: Ha! You might, indeed.

>153 lycomayflower: Excellent review! You put your finger on a lot of the things I really liked about the book.

>156 foggidawn: Thanks!

83.) Trade Me, Courtney Milan ****1/2

Tina Chen immigrated to San Fransisco from China with her parents when she was six, and now she's working through college, determined to become a doctor so her parents will never have to think about money again. Blake Reynolds is the son of the billionaire head of a major tech company, and he is suffocating under his father's expectations that he will give up college and take over the company. When they end up in a heated disagreement about social safety nets in a class, Tina says Blake wouldn't last two weeks in her shoes. Blake later suggests that they change places for the rest of the semester, mostly because he hopes it will serve as an escape for him. They do. Then there are feelings.

I loved this book. Both of the main characters feel vibrant and real on the page, I wanted to know what would happen to them, and I felt pulled into their world. All that was wonderful--and pretty much a set of prerequisites for liking a romance novel-- but Trade Me surprised me at every turn. It rings so many of my "yay! diverse humans and diverse human situations" bells (poc heroine, hero with an eating disorder, transgender minor character (who will be the heroine of book two, yay!), a minor character whose domestic situation reads potentially non-heteronormative), and the treatment of the class and economic issues that arise between Tina and Blake are handled well. The realities of Tina's poverty feel accurate and scary, and her fears about becoming distracted by Blake are sharply realized. Both Tina and Blake love their parents deeply but have significant issues with them, and the resolutions to those plot threads are extremely affecting.

The book is not perfect--there's maybe a bit of hand-waving about some of the principles' concerns about being in a relationship in the end, though things feel emotionally wrapped up and the hand-waving can maybe be excused by the constraints of the genre (got to get to the HEA), especially since we're likely to see some of their relationship again in subsequent books. I also thought it was a little odd that we didn't see more of Tina in Blake's lavish apartment when they switched places. Some more details about how that felt (weird? luxurious? bizarre?) would have been great. But Trade Me was a solid, affecting, satisfying read. Recommended.

84.) Switch, Megan Hart ***

Paige has a new divorce and a new job. Misdirected notes start showing up in her apartment mailbox, and she reads them before passing them on to the right mailbox. The notes contain commands, some sexual and some not. Paige follows the commands even though they aren't meant for her and through doing so discovers things about herself. Meanwhile, she has a difficult boss she begins to understand, a handsome neighbor she may be falling for, and an ex-husband who seems to want back into her life.

Meh. This fairly compelling premise fails to deliver because the story focuses in all the wrong places. The boss thread belonged in a different story (and probably a different kind of story) altogether--it always felt like it was taking me away from the real story and also never got the attention it needed to develop fully. Giving a romantic heroine two love interests (here, the neighbor and the ex) is always tricky because it risks readers liking the "wrong" one more than the one she ends up with (and you have to divide character development time between the two, thus potentially giving the development of one too little attention). In Switch, I absolutely was routing for the guy Paige doesn't end up with (and I felt really, really bad for him when she, realizing he is a sub to whom all those notes were addressed, "takes over" as his mistress without telling him (never mind how), and then, when she decides to get back with the ex, just drops him BY LETTER when he is expecting to meet his mistress in person for the first time. Consent issues aside--not that they can really be aside-- WT-everloving-F? Seriously?) Furthermore, I never warmed to Paige. In pretty much any other genre, this would not be a problem as long as she was interesting and did interesting things, but in a romance novel, it kind of takes the fun out of the whole thing. Flern.

85.) Dumb Witness, Agatha Christie, read by Hugh Fraser ****

Husbeast and I listened to this audiobook on a long drive this past weekend. Was familiar with the story from the Suchet TV show (though that TV adaptation of this one did some very odd things to characterization and some smaller plot points), but hearing how Christie actually put the story together was entertaining anyway. There's some really funny social commentary (send-ups of various English village types, mostly) and the characterization of a dog who is important to the plot is a delight, perhaps mostly because of Hugh Fraser's reading--which was wonderful all around.

86.) The Magpie Lord, KJ Charles ****

The first in the A Charm of Magpies series, The Magpie Lord sees Lord Crane suffering under some kind of malevolent spell and Stephen Day, the magician brought in to help him, conflicted by the treatment of his father by Lord Crane's family. They work together to sort out the nasty goings-on haunting the Crane estate (and they are nasty--the world building here is impressive, with the magic ringing frighteningly plausible) and start to fall for one another (natch). Could have been a little more fleshed out, perhaps, especially as far as the resolution to the plot went (and the romance, actually, could have had a little more meat to it (sorry, not sorry)), but a very entertaining story anyway.

>160 lycomayflower: Hmm, I don't remember that one. Maybe it's been long enough since I read Christie that I could do a reread!

87.) Carry the Ocean, Heidi Cullinan ****1/2

Jeremey is a recent high school graduate who's been dealing with untreated and worsening clinical depression most of his life. His new neighbor, Emmet, has Autism Spectrum Disorder, majors in physics at university, and thinks Jeremey would make an excellent boyfriend. The book follows the two as they get to know one another, grow to understand how to relate to each other, and navigate treatment for Jeremey.

I want to wrap this book in a blanket and snuggle with it forever. The narrative alternates between Emmet's and Jeremey's points of view, so we get inside each of their heads and see how they experience the world. The attention to detail is exquisite, and the mental illness and neurodiversity representation rings all my bells. The story is also compelling, intense, and affecting. Recommended.

>162 foggidawn: I find that I get the bits of solutions to Christie's mixed up, so I can often reread/rewatch the books/episodes and still enjoy them!

88.) The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy, Sam Maggs, read by Holly Conrad and Jessica Almasy ****

Maggs talks about what a fangirl is, identifies some of the major fandoms and what they're about, defines some fandom vocab, offers tips for staying safe online, and gives comprehensive guidance for attending fan conventions. This was a mix for me--a lot of it was stuff I already knew (but most of that was entertaining to listen to) and some of it (the stuff about attending a convention) was good, useful info. I almost bought this a number of times when it first came out but passed on it every time thinking "amusing, probs, but probably not a lot of content I don't know." True, for much of the book, but it's always nice to be able to nod along with something, too. If I ever decide that the promised awesome of a con probably will outweigh the awful (travel, crowds, lines, sore feet, lines, crowds), I will probably snag a print copy of this for the con info. It struck me as that helpful. The audiobook was pretty well put together, but the format here would likely work better in print--there are a lot of lists (and a lot of URLs), and that was sometimes a little hard to follow on audio.

89.) When a Scot Ties the Knot, Tessa Dare ****

Painfully shy, academically inclined Madeline Gracechurch dreads her first season, so she invents a Scotsman she "met" while at finishing school in Brighton and who subsequently proposed to her. She uses the existence of this suitor, Captain Logan MacKenzie, to convince her parents that she needn't attend the season and keeps up the fiction of MacKenzie by writing him letters and pretending she's receiving letters from him from the front in France for years. Eventually she claims he's been killed, goes into mourning, and retires to a castle in Scotland gifted to her by her godfather to pursue a quiet life as an illustrator. But one day, a real Scotsman named Captain Logan MacKenzie shows up, determined that they will marry. The story then follows Maddie and Logan as they navigate their desires for their lives and begin to fall in love. Fun, funny, and sweet.

90.) Special Delivery, Heidi Cullinan ***1/2

Nursing student Sam has a crappy home life. He has a brief fling with Mitch, a truck driver passing though his town, but there's something there. When Sam's aunt finds out about the fling and blows up, Sam takes Mitch up on his offer to let Sam ride along on his next long haul out west. Over the course of their trip, Sam learns a lot about himself, about sexuality, and about life. Nice characterization, smart about the ways sex can be complicated and tangled, and with an ending that made me grin. A little light substantively compared to Cullinan's Carry the Ocean, what I just read the other week, though.

91.) Dark Space, Lisa Henry ****

In my haphazard attempt to diversify my reading, I've been looking for science fiction novels featuring LGBTQ characters. Dark Space turned up in my Googling (among other things, some of which are perched near the top of my TBR now). This is really a romance novel with a sci-fi setting rather than a sci-fi novel, so the focus was a little less on the sci-fi-ery than I was hoping, but the book was very good.

Earth has been under threat from a vastly superior alien race called the Faceless and has built a series of space stations orbiting the planet for defense. The stations are crewed entirely by men, because the Faceless are interested in wiping out humanity and would thus target the space stations simply because women were on board (in other words, humans able to give birth are a target; don't put a target on the defense perimeter).

Four years before the story begins, the Faceless attacked a small Earth ship, killing all but one member of the crew, Cameron Rushton, who was captured and thus became the only human ever to survive a Faceless attack. Now Rushton has arrived at one of the stations, unconscious, in some kind of stasis pod clearly of Faceless design. The story is narrated by nineteen-year-old recruit Brady Garrett, who, through an accident born of ignorance of Faceless technology, becomes linked to Cameron as the station officers try to get him out of the stasis pod. Brady and Cameron share a telepathic link, and Brady's heartbeat and metabolism help regulate Cameron's. Never mind why. (This is one of the moments when I wished the story had been a little more "sci-fi novel" and a little less (or along with) "romance"--in a sci-fi novel, we would have gotten the whys of this; since this is a romance, we don't (because the why is "so Cameron and Brady can be attached at the hip and fall in love.") This is not a criticism of the book; no matter how much you'd like to have a knife, you can't be mad at a spoon for lacking a serrated edge.) And then they fall in love. Slowly. With a lot of angst. And the Faceless are out there, almost certainly coming, soon.

The tension is constantly high, both between Brady and Cameron and among all the characters as they await an unknown fate from the Faceless. The world building is impressive and feels complete (even if we don't always get to see it fully). The relationship between Brady and Cameron is well developed, and the exploration of what it would mean to have someone else in your brain all the time is fascinating and given ample space. I thought the story dragged just a bit in the middle (this is where I could have done with some more plot development re: the Faceless), but ultimately the novel comes to a satisfying conclusion. This is one of those books where I actually closed the cover after the last page and said, "Huh. That was really good."

October Round-Up.

Books read: 12
New books read: 9
Shelf books read: 1
Audiobooks read: 3
Book Club book: DNFed The Inheritance of Loss because it wasn't grabbing me in the first fifty pages and I just didn't have time to give it a better chance. :-/

Content Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 4
POC: 3
CNMO*: 0
Disabilities: 0
Mental Illness: 2

Author Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 0
POC: 0
CNMO*: 0
Male: 2
Female: 10
N=/=BCD**: 0

*Culture/Subculture Not My Own
**Nationality Not of British Colonial Descent, e.g. not USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, or Australia unless from a distinct native, aboriginal, or ethnic group

Active Reads Pile:

Are the bookmarks representative of where you actually are in each book? And if so, apparently you've made a decent start on In the Bleak Midwinter....so whaddya think of it so far?

>170 laytonwoman3rd: They are.

I like it. I am not bowled over, but I'm enjoying it. Everyone's favorite pompous poot, ol' Clive Staples, has kind of been monopolizing my attention the last few days, but I'm probably diving more thoroughly back into Midwinter shortly.

>168 lycomayflower: novels featuring LGBTQ characters.

One of the bookish podcasts I follow is hosted by a British man who founded The Green Carnation Prize, a literary prize for LGBTQ authors. I have good intentions about becoming more acquainted with the nominees & winners, but have yet to do so. Also not sure if there are any sci-fi authors among them. But thought I'd mention it as a source to support your diversification goals.

>172 lauralkeet: Cool! I'll check that out. Thanks!

92.) Kill Shakespeare, volume 1, Conor McCreery, Anthony Del Col, and Andy Belanger ***1/2

The premise of this comic is that all of Shakespeare's characters inhabit a world that is controlled somehow by the wizard Will Shakespeare. Some of the characters seem to worship him while others are planning his downfall. Hamlet gets caught up between the two sides (of course he does) and has to figure out who to trust and what to do.

I *love* the premise, and for the first issue or so I was really into this. But then it started to drag, and by the time I was done with the volume, I wasn't so enthused any more. There's a lot of fighting and betraying, and I think it just wasn't my bag. YMMV.

93.) This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper, ****

Judd Foxman has recently discovered his wife cheating on him, and now his father has not only died but his dying wish was that his family sit shiva for him. Thus Judd finds himself trapped in his childhood home with his mother, three siblings, their significant others, and a handful of nieces and nephews. They all love each other, but no one really gets along. From there, the plot pretty much unfolds as you might expect: minor family secrets are revealed, old grudges fester and eventually surface, chance encounters with old acquaintances cast fresh light on characters' lives. The book is entertaining, the characters are interesting, and some passages are quite funny. The kind of book I enjoyed very much (and couldn't really put down--I read the whole thing in one day), but I don't know that much of it will stick with me.

94.) A Strong Hand, Catt Ford ***

An erotic romance that just didn't quite work for me. The characters were appealing but never quite became real to me, and I never really got invested in the story, that is the bits in between the sex that should make me care. Written well, and the sex writing is decent, so YMMV.

95.) Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis ****

I enjoy Lewis's religious writings immensely--something which I always find a bit perplexing since I do not consider myself religious and often have very little or no real understanding of the doctrine or scriptures he is discussing. But he writes about difficult concepts well, and I usually leave his books with some sense that I've understood something I didn't before. Often I get insight into the world from his musings, too (in this book, chapter five sparked some useful thinking about the rampant commercialism of Christmas). There's no doubt that Lewis sometimes comes off super pompous and I often want to smack him upside the head and remind him that not everyone is a white, male, educated, protestant from Britain, but there's worth to be found here if you can accept and see past the fact that he will always sound very much like he's only talking to other people just like him.

>177 lycomayflower: Amen. *sits down*

96.) In the Bleak Midwinter, Julia Spencer-Fleming ****

A murder mystery taking place in a small Adirondack town and told from the points of view of the police chief (Russ) and the new priest at the Episcopalian church (Clare). The story starts with a baby abandoned at the doorstep of the church, with things eventually escalating to murder. I really enjoyed the set-up of this novel with the police chief and the priest and their differing goals and the methods they bring to trying to help people and find the truth. I was intrigued by the mystery itself, although I did get a little tired of it before it got resolved (especially during the penultimate "action" bit in the woods). There's a slow burn between Russ and Clare (that's not really a spoiler--it's pretty obvious things are going that way very early) which is interesting and brings up some intriguing moral issues (Russ being married). I'll probably read the next one some day.

*** For Book Club.

***And with this book I break my record for most pages read (from completed reads) in a calendar year.

97.) Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey ****

Space opera, and pretty good space opera at that. I enjoyed the characters, and the plot kept me dialed in for most of the nearly 600 pages. (I got a little impatient at the end, but that's more likely my own tendency to get antsy when a book takes me more than four or five days to get through than anything to do with the story itself--I also find that now that I'm done, I miss the world of the book). There's a good deal of "what is going on," and I was intrigued to find those answers. The way Corey explores the ethical dilemmas that arise in the story through his two main characters was also compelling. While this is the first book in a series, Levithan Wakes doesn't cliffhanger you (which I appreciate). I imagine I'll carry on with the series, but not just yet.

98.) Miracle on 34th Street, Valentine Davies ***

I gather from the paratextual material included in the book that the idea for Miracle on 34th Street was Davies's, that he wrote the story, and that this book was written as a tie-in promotional tool for the original release of the film. I quite enjoy the movie (though it's not really one of my favorite Christmas movies), but the book left me pretty cold. It's a fairly pedestrian telling of the story, and as I read I was constantly thinking of the little moments or bits of business in the movie that the book just doesn't capture. A few minor details of the plot are slightly different (the inciting "violent outburst" by Kris that lands him in Bellevue is different in the book, for instance) and were mildly interesting as insights into how the vision for the story changed (presumably) as the film was made. On the whole, doesn't really add anything to the experience of this tale, and I'd just as soon watch the movie again as read this.

>181 lycomayflower: Sounds like you're being a bit generous with your stars, then. I always think it isn't one of my favorite movies either, but if I get caught up in watching it, I find many moments quite delightful.

>182 laytonwoman3rd: Yeah, I had already decided to revise down to three stars, but you beat me here!

99.) Winter Wonderland, Heidi Cullinan ****

Thirty-eight-year-old Paul Jansen wants love, and a relationship, and a happily every after. But he doesn't want to leave his small Minnesota hometown, and all the other gay men nearby are already in a relationship or don't want one. Twenty-five- year-old Kyle Parks has had a crush on Paul since he was thirteen, and now he's starting to think they might actually make a good couple. But he can't get Paul (or anyone else in town) to see him as anything but a kid. With a little help from Paul's friends, Kyle sets out to show Paul what he's really like.

I enjoyed this story a lot, despite its feeling uneven in places. The characters are all wonderful, and I kind of want to move to a small town in Minnesota after reading this book. Paul hauls a lot of emotional baggage around with him (his family is the actual worst), and Cullinan does an excellent job making his pain real and affecting. Kyle's twin sister has Down's Syndrome, and the characterization of her is just lovely. (Are you waiting for me to say something about diversity and my bells? Well, there ya go.) The cozy holiday-ness of the story hits just the right notes without being saccharine. Cullinan illuminates and busts up some sterotypes (Paul looks like a bear but is a subby bottom, and Kyle looks and acts like a twink but is a dommy top, and Paul almost puts the kibosh on the relationship before it even starts because he can't wrap his head around the idea that the "twink" kid will be compatible with him in bed), and I love that.

Despite all that good stuff to love (and it is a nice pile of good stuff), I felt like I kept waiting for threads to get properly woven in that didn't quite. The book feels like it's going to be about stereotyping in the beginning, and while it is, that theme drops off a bit once Paul and Kyle get together. The sex scenes in the first half of the book get a lot of space on the page, but in the back half (while they don't feel rushed or anything) they get much less. Paul makes an important connection with his niece, but there's no further reference to her when he (apparently) splits with his family entirely in the end. The end of the book feels rushed--though I think it was meant to mimic cheesy holiday romance movies (which Paul loves), which I gather--my new love of romances novels hasn't extended to watching any cheesy holiday romance movies--end quickly with miraculous HEAs, and I give props to Cullinan for that idea for structure, even if I did feel a bit "Ein Minuten, bitte, it's over?" when I got to the last page.

On the whole, the wonderful outweighed the uneven. I just wish the book had been, I dunno, twenty pages longer, with those twenty pages just fleshing out the story that was already there. In any case, that will not be keeping me from going back and reading the first two books in this series of holiday romances. The only question is whether I will be making myself save them for next year.

>181 lycomayflower: The movie was on AMC today. I just happened to notice as I was trying to find something to watch. It was the best thing on, but I opted to turn the TV off instead. I have the DVD and can watch it whenever I wish.

100.) Dash & Lily's Book of Dares, Rachel Cohn and David Levithan ***1/2

Teenagers Dash and Lily end up communicating through a red notebook they leave around New York City for one another (often through relatives). They share secrets and thoughts with one another and dare each other to do things (brave things, mostly, not stupid things). They each think maybe they are falling in love through the notebook but can't be sure. They are sure that the exercise is making them learn things about themselves. Quirky and fun, but never quite settled in to hitting all the right notes for me. *shrug* Pleasant, and I liked it well enough that someday I'll probably try one of the other books Cohn and Levithan wrote together.

101.) A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens *****

Annual reread. Never not wonderful.

>187 lycomayflower: I gave Kathi McC one of those fake leather covered editions of A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures by Dickens for her birthday. She seemed thrilled. She said she watches some version of the movie every year, and was just thinking she didn't remember if she ever read it. I love when that happens.

>188 laytonwoman3rd: That is cool. What version does she like best?

Husbeast and I are spending a nice quiet day at home. We slept in, had packages, and are now settling in for an afternoon of lazing about, reading, and watching all the basketball... and waiting to see if the weather will ever clear so we can play with our present to each other: a telescope. We are both super excited about it, and of course, it's meant to rain for days.

Various friends and relatives (and my 75ers LT swap person) were generous and kind with the books, as well:

>189 lycomayflower: George C. Scott...go figure.

>191 laytonwoman3rd: Whaaat? Has she seen the Alistair Sim one?

>192 lycomayflower: Oh, yes. She likes that one too...I think she likes them all, actually. We did not find the Muppets version here anywhere. We watched Emmet Otter last night and A Christmas Story tonight. Your Grandmother pronounced them both "cute", as you might imagine.

>193 laytonwoman3rd: It goes: Sim, Caine, Stewart, full stop. But I guess one gets a pass if one likes them ALL.

"Cute," said while emerging from a deep sleep?

102.) We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ****

Slim (adapted from a TED Talk) discussion of feminism. An excellent distillation of what ought to be self-evident about women in the world but isn't. I especially enjoyed her points about why we should think about gender, about why saying things like, "but I don't think about gender at all" is not helpful.

>194 lycomayflower: I'm not sure she did fall asleep this time. She might have been zoning out a little, but not full chinonchest.

103.) On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World, Elizabeth Kadetsky ***1/2

A novella about a single mother and her son who spend a summer on Malta looking for a way to start over. I loved the characterizations and the descriptions of Malta, but the end left me going "And?" in that way that short literary fiction often does. It seems complete in a way that even years of creative writing study hasn't given me a way to describe, but it doesn't feel satisfying.

>196 laytonwoman3rd: Maybe you should let her pick the movie. Perhaps you'd get introduced to something new and exciting. ;-)

>198 lycomayflower: She would simply refuse to do it..."whatever you guys want" is one of her mantras, you know.

You really did spend the day reading, didn't you? Not bad work if you can get it!

>199 laytonwoman3rd: Well, the afternoon, anyway. Very short books, too. But it was pretty nice!

104.) Death by Silver, Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold ****

A mystery novel set in an alternate Victorian England where magic is a normal part of life. Metaphysicians study magic and offer their services to the populace to do things like enchant a gate to unlock only for members of the household or ensure that the family silver isn't cursed. Fledging metaphysician Ned Mathey has been hired to ensure just that by the father of a schoolmate who tormented him at school. Ned takes the job, certifies the silver curse- free, and is stunned to learn the next day that his client has been killed by a piece of cursed family silver. He enlists the aid of another old school friend (and sometimes lover)--Julian Lynes, a private detective--to try to discover what happened.

I love these "little bit of this, little bit of that" stories, where you get elements of different genres. This is a little bit fantasy, a little bit romance, and a lot mystery. The elements of the murder case, Ned's discomfort with the family who hired him (one of the sons treated both Ned and Julian appallingly at school--the extent of which is a plot thread, so I won't expound on it here), and Ned and Julian's relationship all come together nicely as the story unfolds. The world building is slight but satisfying and complete. I know there's a sequel, and I hope this will become an ongoing series, as I would happily return to this world and these characters again and again.

Here's a bit of something you probably ought to know about: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum.

>202 laytonwoman3rd: I saw that in the bookstore the other day, but I didn't have a chance to check it out at all. Who knew?

November Round-Up:

Books read: 8
New books read: 6
Shelf books read: 1
Audiobooks read: 0
Book Club book: In the Bleak Midwinter

Content Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 4
POC: 1
CNMO*: 0
Disabilities: 0
Mental Illness: 0

Author Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 0
POC: 0
CNMO*: 0
Male: 7
Female: 4
N=/=BCD**: 0

*Culture/Subculture Not My Own
**Nationality Not of British Colonial Descent, e.g. not USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, or Australia unless from a distinct native, aboriginal, or ethnic group

A couple more reviews, December round-up, and year-end round-up all coming soon before I start up a 2016 thread.

>202 laytonwoman3rd: The link is to lauralkeet's review of it, btw, in case you didn't click on it.

105.) Tonight Or Never, Dara Joy ***1/2

A romance set in England during the French Revolution. Chloe and John have known each other since childhood. John is now the most notorious rake in England and Chloe is finally grown up and has returned from a trip to France. She's determined that they belong together and decides to seduce him and convince him of the same. They marry for convenience (never mind why), and then Chloe enacts her plan. Meanwhile, everyone is speculating about the identity of the Black Rose, a master of disguise who is saving French aristocrats from the the guillotine and bringing them to England. When a lot of those saved aristocrats start showing up at Chloe and John's estate, John suspects that the Black Rose is one of their many house guests, and he and Chloe try to spy out his identity.

Dara Joy is quite good at writing suuuper ridiculous and over-the-top plots and keeping them fun. This is no different. The interplay between Chloe and John gets just a smidge unbelievable (they are both trying to keep the fact that they love and adore each other from one another, and it's a little hard to believe that they can't see this about each other--I mean, they are beyond wooby), and the second half of the book (which is mostly about discovering the Black Rose) feels a bit like a different book than the first half, but, honestly, it's all fun. My only real complaint is the absurd use of euphemisms for the bits of ladies and gents. (A "women's portal" is, like, the entrance to a communal time machine in a sci-fi novel about a segregated society, okay? Not a piece of anatomy.) I can never decide if Joy is doing this tongue-in-cheek or not, but the use doesn't feel coy, so it's not bad enough to ruin the read.

>202 laytonwoman3rd: Ah. I hadn't. I have now. Sounds really cool.

106.) Yes Please, Amy Poehler, read (mostly) by the author ****

Amy Poehler is one of those people about whom I am aware but whose work I really don't know. (I've never watched SNL, I can't seem to get into Parks and Recreation (the mockumentary style usually just annoys me--I'm willing to be convinced to keep trying though. Amber?)) But I've heard so many good things about this book that I wanted to try it anyway. I loved it.

There's a fair amount about Poehler's work, and that's probably more interesting to people who are familiar with it, but the whole book is really about being a woman, being a professional women, being a mother, being a human being and not really about Poehler's career, specifically. There's a lot here that's wise, a lot that's very funny, and a lot that's pleasantly honest. Great fun to listen to, and I feel like it gave me things to think about, too.

107.) Flying too High, Kerry Greenwood ****

The second installment of the Phryne Fisher mystery series. A decent mystery coupled with a daring rescue (as a result of a second mystery) plus all the fun that is Phryne. Fun, entertaining, and enjoyable. As I'm reading this after having watched the first season and a bit of the TV show, it's hard not to draw comparisons though. (More Jack! Where's Hugh?) I will be reading more of these.

December Round-Up:

Books read: 10
New books read: 5
Shelf books read: 1
Audiobooks read: 1
Book Club book: still working on The Language of Food for our January meeting (we meet on the first Tuesday of the month, so the book on the round-up is usually for the next month).

Content Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 2
POC: 1
CNMO*: 1
Disabilities: 1
Mental Illness: 0

Author Diversity:
QUILTBAG: 2
POC: 1
CNMO*: 0
Male: 3
Female: 9
N=/=BCD**: 0

*Culture/Subculture Not My Own
**Nationality Not of British Colonial Descent, e.g. not USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, New Zealand, or Australia unless from a distinct native, aboriginal, or ethnic group

Right! That's all she read.

Round-up post for the year!

(If you don't want to read all this, page down to the "TL;DR" for a quick summary and a link to my 2016 thread.)

*Total Books Completed: 107 (last year: 58; best year: 78)
*Total Number of Pages Read (from complete reads): 25,446 (last year: 15,145; best year: 23,024)

*Top Five First-Time Reads of 2015:
Carry the Ocean
Carry On
Prince's Gambit
Come As You Are
Ms. Marvel: No Normal

*Worst First-Time Reads of 2015 (chosen from completed reads only) :
Switch
The Forever King
Miracle on 34th Street

*Longest Read of 2015:
Leviathan Wakes (561)

*Books Purchased New: 228 (last year: 52)
*of those, read: 53 (23%) (last year: 16, 31%); abandoned: 9 (last year: 14)

*Books Acquired: 67 (last year: 41)

*Shelf Reads: 13 (last year: 12)
*Library Books: 11 (last year: 13)

*Average Number of Pages in Books Completed: 238; minus audiobooks: 268 (last year: 261)

*Reads Broken Down By Category: (in parentheses = last year)

(I rather fell down on tracking a lot of this this year (husbeast helped me make a spreadsheet for next year: booya!), so some of this is guesswork/done by memory.)

Fiction: 76, 71% (43--74%)
Nonfiction: 31, 29% (15--26%)
Male Writers: 47, 44% (20--34%)
Female Writers: 77, 72% (34--59%)
British Writers: 19, 18% (9--16%)
American Writers: 80, 75% (43--74%)
Canadian Writers: 0 (1--2%)
Writers =/= US, UK, Irish, Canadian: 2, 2% (0)
Diverse Content: 48--POC: 15, LGBTQ: 27, Disabilities: 6 (15--POC: 7; LGBT: 7; Disabilities: 1)
Rereads: 4 (8)
Contemporary Literature: 4 (8)
Classics: 3 (3)
History/Biography: 3 (1)
Autobiography/Memoir: 9 (3)
Literary Criticism: 10 (5)
Young Adult: 13 (9)
Romance: 27 (3)
Mystery/Thriller/Ghost: 9 (5)
Science Fiction: 11 (4)
Fantasy: 14 (7)
Historical Fiction: 6 (2)
Graphic Novels (and comics): 10 (5)

*Accounting of Goals:

*Read more

Accomplished! And how.

--No faffing on internet: Better, I think. In any case, I read more. Though I think this is more to do with less watching television than less aimless interneting. Consciously looking for the times in my day (not just when I’m in the car) when I could be listening to an audiobook really helped me read more too.

--Read intentionally before bed: Ish. I do this sometimes, and it does help. Even if I only sit up for twenty minutes before actually getting into bed (and reading and falling asleep almost immediately), I get some more reading in.

*Read from My Shelves

--Twenty-four shelf books: Nope. 13. Which, hey, okay, especially as I completely failed to try consciously for this one.
--Gifted books: I kind of forgot about this goal to read at least three books gifted to me. I don’t think I did.

*Buy Fewer New Books/Only Buy Books New If I'm Going to Read Them Straight Away/Don't Buy Five New Books All At Once

Fail/Fail/Fail. Although! I did read a lot of the books I bought. Win?

--Ideally (this will never happen, but call it my golden ratio, as it were), my reading year will look something like this: (it is to laugh)

--Read ~25 books from my shelves: actually, 13
--Read ~25 "set" books (from my book club and the British authors challenge): actually, 9
--Read ~25 books that are new or from the library: actually, 64

*TL;DR
I read 107 (one hundred and seven—whaaat?) books this year. My previous best was 78. My pages read is also about 2000 pages above my previous best. No matter how you slice it, I read more in 2015 than I ever have before. I went up in nearly every genre category (contemporary/literary fiction is a notable exception), and I found out that I like a lot of things I never really considered before (comics, romance). I had a great reading year in that I loved my reading and my progress (though I’m surprised to note that while I read very few things I didn’t like (my worst reads list is short), I also didn’t have a whole ton of “extra” things I wished I could make room for on my best reads list). I didn’t really read much from my shelves (next year?), and I did avoid long reads because I was so stoked about hitting one hundred (it’s cool. I did it. Next year I’ll try not to avoid them for numbers reasons). I failed at not buying books. (I’m a little *shrug* at this these days. If we can afford it, why not? *whispers* Because space, that’s why.

I’m looking forward to more great reading and more discoveries in 2016. Come join me at my new thread here!

That's all for me for 2015! Come see me at my 2016 thread here!

>208 lycomayflower: Oh, yes do give Parks and Rec a go - it's great! And I also recommend following Amy's Smart Girls page on Facebook. She's a pretty amazing lady.