Tag Archives: Books

Once More With Feeling

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Please tell me you get this reference? Don’t make me feel old…

I keep trying to do this, and I keep failing, but here we go again. One last time. I swear, if I fail to keep up with the blog this time, I should probably just wave the white flag.

The problem is that the amount of free time I have is very limited (between work, family obligations, and all those stupid grown-up things like house-cleaning and grocery shopping), and I have a LOT of hobbies. I have so far been unable to find a balance that allows me to fit the maximum number of hobbies into my very limited store of free time.

But of course, my main goal has been to write more. If I have only one or two hours of free time all week, and I want to write, I am going to choose fiction writing over blog writing. Just a fact of life. And that actually WORKED(!) for me last year. I wrote more in 2021 than I have ever written in a single year in my life. Over 200,000 words! I finished the first draft of one novel I started in Nov 2020, wrote the entire first draft of a novella, and then about ¾ of the first draft of ANOTHER novel in the second half of the year. So, writing has been going SHOCKINGLY well lately (*knock on wood*) (well, I say that, it HAD been going well until December and I haven’t been able to get back into it the last couple months), and I don’t want to mess that up.

That said, I also read a lot. And I do want to share what I read, and write reviews, and promote the books and authors I really love. I talk a lot about the books I’ve been reading on Twitter, but it’s not the same as writing a full review, and I know it. I want to do that for the authors I think deserve more attention. It’s just so hard to find the time! And yes, I know I could post reviews on Goodreads. But the amount of time it takes to write a semi-decent review is going to be the same whether I post it here or on Goodreads, and frankly, I don’t LIKE Goodreads, so…

In any case, I’d like to try again. I want to make this work. So, here’s my plan. I am going to try to give myself a strict schedule, and block out time specifically for blog writing/posting once a week. And I am going to wait to start posting until I have a few pre-written and ready to go to give myself a bit of a buffer (for instance, I’m writing this in mid-February but I probably won’t post it until I’m ready to get the weekly-schedule going). And am I going to try to keep myself to a weekly post schedule… I’m thinking every Saturday evening, for the moment.

Alright alright alright!

Not every post will be a book review, of course. You’ll notice from my old posts that I did sometimes talk about other things, that will no doubt remain true. But I will be focusing most of my energy on book reviews, both of books I read last year and kept MEANING to review, and of books I’m reading this year. And I suppose… (*grumble grumble grumble*) I could maybe possibly make a new Goodreads account and cross-post reviews there. Maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t like Goodreads interface, or the attitudes of some of the readers/reviewers there, or the weird amount of power Goodreads has acquired over authors… Anyway… not my point, moving on.

So, I guess if I have any readers left (not likely, I realize, but one never knows…), this is your heads-up to start expecting posts from me again.

March New Releases on My Radar

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As I did back in February, I would like to share a quick list of a few of the books that have been released in March that I made note of. These are books that I have not had a chance to read yet, but which caught my attention when I was looking for ARCs to consider for work. They sound interesting and promising, and I will probably read them eventually.

  1. The Unbroken by C.L. Clark —

This debut novel is an epic North African-inspired military fantasy by a queer woman of color, and it sounds AMAZING. The publisher’s blurb reads:

“Touraine is a soldier. Stolen as a child and raised to kill and die for the empire, her only loyalty is to her fellow conscripts. But now, her company has been sent back to her homeland to stop a rebellion, and the ties of blood may be stronger than she thought.
Luca needs a turncoat. Someone desperate enough to tiptoe the bayonet’s edge between treason and orders. Someone who can sway the rebels toward peace, while Luca focuses on what really matters: getting her uncle off her throne.
Through assassinations and massacres, in bedrooms and war rooms, Touraine and Luca will haggle over the price of a nation. But some things aren’t for sale.”

Fun fact: I actually know the author. I don’t know her WELL, but we worked together as instructors one summer at the Duke University Talent Identification Program (a summer program of college-level course work for high-achieving high schoolers), and we’re still “Friends” on Facebook. She probably doesn’t remember me much (I don’t really stand out) but I remember her and she was VERY cool. At the time, she was just out of her MFA program and working on a number of short stories, so I was so excited to see the news when she announced her publishing deal. I WILL be reading this book when I can find more free time.

2. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro —

of course, Kazuo Ishiguro is very famous. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for cryin’ out loud! And this is his first new work SINCE winning the Nobel. What’s exciting is that while Ishiguro is most well-known for his works of realism, he has dipped his toes into speculative fiction a couple times, and this new novel is staunchly in the realm of science fiction. The publisher’s blurb for this one states:

“Klara and the Sun tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her.”

3. Lost in the Never Woods by Aidan Thomas —

I love a fun twisty retelling of a classic fairy tale or children’s story. Don’t even get me STARTED on Alice in Wonderland retellings! I’m OBSESSED. So of course this book caught my eye! The blurb reads:

“It’s been five years since Wendy and her two brothers went missing in the woods, but when the town’s children start to disappear, the questions surrounding her brothers’ mysterious circumstances are brought back into light. Attempting to flee her past, Wendy almost runs over an unconscious boy lying in the middle of the road, and gets pulled into the mystery haunting the town.
Peter, a boy she thought lived only in her stories, claims that if they don’t do something, the missing children will meet the same fate as her brothers. In order to find them and rescue the missing kids, Wendy must confront what’s waiting for her in the woods.” 

I mean: YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU! This sounds exciting and amazing, and I will definitely be picking this one up eventually!

4. In the Quick by Kate Hope Day —

Something else I am ALWAYS obsessed with is space and astronauts. The cover ALONE of this book had me like WOAH. I mean, LOOK AT THAT COVER! The blurb describes it as:

“June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention, who leaves home to begin a grueling astronaut training program. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station, but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle’s fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when June was twelve years old, and while the rest of the world has forgotten them, June alone has evidence that makes her believe the crew is still alive.
She seeks out James, her uncle’s former protégée, also brilliant, also difficult, who has been trying to discover why Inquiry’s fuel cells failed. James and June forge an intense intellectual bond that becomes an electric attraction. But the love that develops between them as they work to solve the fuel cell’s fatal flaw threatens to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to create–and any chance of bringing the Inquiry crew home alive.
Equal parts gripping narrative of scientific discovery and charged love story, In the Quick is an exploration of the strengths and limits of human ability in the face of hardship and the costs of human ingenuity. At its beating heart are June and James, whose love for each other is eclipsed only by their drive to conquer the challenges of space travel.”

I will absolutely 1000% be reading this one eventually. Women astronauts! Dangerous missions and space exploration! Yes! I am also slightly amused because June is my mother’s name, and she’s always saying it’s a pretty uncommon name that you don’t see in media or pop culture much and I’m like: well here ya go!

Book Review: A Confusion of Princes

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I apologize for the long absence! The last couple months have been…. well, they’ve been a THING. But, I have read a good number of books in the past few weeks that I keep meaning to write reviews for, so hopefully I will have plenty of things to say in the next few weeks (provided I can find the time and energy to get them written up). Some of the book reviews to expect include: Gideon the Ninth (I know I know it took me long enough!), Peaces by Helen Oyoyemi, An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris, and a couple upcoming ARCs. But first! We have a book that’s been out quite awhile that I just now got around to: A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix.

Title: A Confusion of Princes
Author: Garth Nix
Release Date: 2021
Source: owned
Stars: 2.5 out or 5

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love Garth Nix. I first fell in love with his work with Sabriel, and the rest of the Old Kingdom series, but I also own quite a few of his other works including Shade’s Children, Angel Mage, The Left-handed Booksellers of London (his newest book, which I haven’t read yet but is on the list for this year) and a bunch of his short stories. I have been meaning to read this one, A Confusion of Princes, for ages but just never got around to it. But for my 2021 Reading Challenge, this book fit the Space Opera category, and I needed a break from some of the longer/darker books I’d been reading, so I figured now was a good time.

A Confusion of Princes is a bit of a departure for Garth Nix. For one thing, its science fiction rather than fantasy (Shade’s Children is also science fiction, but it’s still not his usual fare). For another thing, the main character is a teenage boy (most, though not all, of Nix’s books tend to feature girls as the main character). It’s also a space opera, which I love, and which is not all that common in the realm of Young Adult fiction.

The basic premise is this: the main character is a young man named Khemri, a prince among hundreds of thousands of princes in an enormous intergalactic empire. The emperor rules the empire by means of the Imperial Mind, a psychic connection to the hundreds of thousands of princes, through which the Emperor makes their will known. The princes themselves (who are all called princes but can be any gender) are not from a hereditary line, but are rather chosen as young children from among the general population, and then genetically and technologically modified and trained to fulfill their roles. And for the most part the Imperial Mind leaves them to their own devices, so long as they adhere to certain rules, and they, therefore, run amok across the universe, commandeering whatever resources they desire and feuding with each other. What makes these princes even more powerful, however, is that they cannot die — or rather, they do not STAY dead: whenever they die (provided they have remained in the good graces of the Emperor) the Imperial Mind downloads their consciousness into a new body, exactly the same as the previous one.

Prince Khemri has just graduated from his training and is ready to take his place as a full prince within the empire at the opening of the novel. He is naive and arrogant and believes himself above all normal humans and all other princes. He is absolutely certain that he will be chosen as the next emperor when the current Emperor abdicates the throne as expected every 20 years. As he leaves the safety of his training ground and is sent to join the Navy, a common proving ground for new young princes, he quickly discovers that nothing is as he imagined it, the princes are often more like glorified pawns for the Imperial Mind, and someone or something has secret plans for him personally.

If I go much further into the plot than that, I will start to risk any number of spoilers, so we’ll see how well I can dance around them.

Here’s the thing: I tried to like this book. I really REALLY tried to like this book. And I did finish it, so I didn’t HATE it. BUT I nearly gave up and DNF’d it at about the halfway point because I just wasn’t FEELING it. The premise is absolutely fascinating to me, and while the writing is not Nix’s BEST, it’s hardly BAD. And yet… I think I can boil it down to two main problems, for me at least. 

First, the plot felt like there was both too little and too much happening in a relatively short novel. In quick succession we move from Khemri’s intro and training, to his appointment to the Navy and year spent there, to his re-assignment to a secret installation where he trains for several months more (which takes like two chapters?), to being sent on another secret assignment that takes like half a year, to a big event at the Emperor’s main… not sure what to call it, headquarters? Home world? Whatever… and then the final big test/battle thing. A lot happens. Khemri get shuffled around a lot. And yet at the same time there were big sections of the book where I was just kind of bored. I felt that a lot of what happened would have been far more interesting if it had a) been more fleshed out, and b) probably written for an adult audience rather than a YA. And I realize that’s something of a controversial statement, but I have nothing against YA. I read plenty of YA. All of Garth Nix’s other works are YA and I have never had a problem with them before. I just didn’t feel that this particular plot/premise really WORKED as a YA. If it had been written in a more adult style/aesthetic, with a bit less “teenage ridiculousness” and a bit more realism and acknowledgement of the complexities involved, I think it would have been far better. To me it seemed like each of those different sections could almost have been their own “season” of a tv series, for instance.

The second problem for me was Khemri himself. I just could NOT like him. Now, I’m not saying every character needs to be “likable” by which most people mean: I would like this person and be friends with them if I knew them in real life. No. I have no problem with complicated, “unlikable,” amoral, main characters. But if you have a main character through which the entire story is seen/told, particularly in first-person as this one is, the main character has to be at least be TOLERABLE, right? But he just ANNOYED me. He was arrogant, he was whiny, he was insufferable. To be clear, these were obviously all conscious choices for the story, and part of the POINT of the story was to witness his transformation. Essentially, Khemri spends the majority of the novel learning to be HUMAN. I get that. That can make for interesting character development. But this time it just didn’t work for me. He was still just ANNOYING. I wanted to smack him through most of the book. And again, I think if this had been a longer adult novel, with more time spent acknowledging and wrestling with the complexities of the character and the imperialistic system that produced him, it might have worked better. But alas, I did not get that.

One last critique is the ending: I could tell about a third of the way through the novel that it was going to end one of only two ways. There were two very obvious options, and only two. And right on cue, one of those endings peaked around a corner before being like “no, just kidding, it’s the OTHER ending!” It wasn’t a BAD ending. Just very very obvious. And it felt a tad un-earned. For the same reasons stated above, pretty much.

If you are a completist who must read every book by a beloved author (as I often am), then by all means go try it! Maybe the main character will not annoy you as much as he annoyed me. But if you are just looking to try something by Garth Nix, please please please for all that is holy, go read The Old Kingdom series instead! They are beautiful and astounding and complex and wonderful! But every respected author with a lengthy oeuvre is due at least one or two misses, and this might be Nix’s.

Some New Releases, Jan-Feb 2021

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Hello folks! Since I am always scouring publisher catalogues for upcoming releases for work, and finding far more interesting titles and ARCs than I could ever possibly have the time to actually read and review every month, I thought it might be fun to share a list every month or so, of new releases that caught my eye, even if I haven’t actually had a chance to read them yet.

So, without further ado, here are some new and upcoming releases for January and February 2021 that I have not read yet but which I thought sounded cool and which I had considered at some point or another as a possible option for my work at Fox & Wit.

January: 

Persephone Station by Stina Leicht (5 January):  this one is a space opera with a space-western vibe, marketed as being for fans of The Mandalorian and Cowboy Bebop, and it sounds AMAZING

A Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner (12 January): queer historical fantasy about a woman thief who gets a job as a bodyguard for a mysterious rich young woman, and proceeds to fall for her fellow bodyguard (queer women bodyguard romance FTW!)

The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick (19 January): dark political intrigue fantasy from authors Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms (under the pseudonym M.A. Carrick), and the first of a new trilogy

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor (19 January): Nnedi Okorafor is one of the best science fiction/fantasy writers out there right now, she writes Africanfuturism and this new novella about the daughter of death sounds AMAZING

February:

Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell (2 February): this one, from debut author Everina Maxwell, is a queer space opera (can you tell I really love space opera?) about an arranged marriage that leads to love in what the publishers are calling Red, White and Royal Blue in SPACE

History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel (2 February): new novel from Sylvain Neuvel (best known for his Themis Files series), is a alt-history scifi-thriller look at the space race in the 40s, and a first-contact story all in one!

Amid the Crowd of Stars by Stephen Leigh (9 February): oh look! Another space opera! Who would’ve thought!? This novel is a grand scale philosophical examination of the implications of interstellar travel, alien contact, and the evolution of the human species

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard (9 February): a new novella from highly regarded Vietnamese fantasy author Aliette de Bodard gives us a romantic fantasy the publishers call a cross between The Goblin Emperor and Howl’s Moving Castle 

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey (16 February): Sarah Gailey moves away from fantasy for this new tech thriller novel about a woman and her clone, their dead cheater of a husband, and what it means to be a PERSON

Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh (23 February): somewhat of an outlier from the rest of this list, is the new mystery novel from Nalini Singh, I love a good mystery/crime thriller, though I haven’t had a chance to read one in awhile, and this one about a mother everyone thought had stolen half-a-million dollars and disappeared until she suddenly turns up dead, sounds particularly twisty

Book Review: Save Yourself

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Title: Save Yourself
Author: Cameron Esposito
Release date: March 2020
Source: bought audiobook copy
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Save Yourself is a memoir by stand-up comedian Cameron Esposito that I bought on audiobook last March, and then never got around to reading/listening to. The minute I saw the description I knew it would be up my alley though. Cameron Esposito is a “masculine of center” lesbian comedian who was raised in a very devout Italian Catholic family and wanted to be a priest when she was younger. The memoir deals with her childhood not understanding her own sexuality because of the stigma around homosexuality and gender conformity in her family and church, and with her life through college and early in her career as she finally comes to terms with her sexuality and (mostly?) loses her religion.

As a bisexual woman from a devout Cajun Catholic family who didn’t even consider the fact that I might be anything other than straight until I was 20 years old, and didn’t come out until I was 30, I identified VERY strongly with the subject matter. Add to that, the fact that (as I mentioned in a previous book review) I was pretty damn sure I was to become a nun until I was 15 or 16 years old, and then proceeded to become more and more disillusioned and disconnected from the catholic church at just about the same time (and for many of the same reasons) as Cameron Esposito, and well… this book was pretty much written for me.

This is not a long book. I think the audiobook was about 7 hrs long, so if you were reading it in print at a medium pace, you could probably finish it around 4 or 5 hours. I finished it in about a day and half, listening while I was at work. I laughed through pretty much the whole thing. Cameron Esposito’s writing is absolutely hilarious, and the fact that she narrates the audiobook herself helps immensely with the delivery of certain lines and jokes. She is honest and blunt about herself, her family, and her relationships. She talks about place of upper-middle-class white christian privilege she came from as a child, the terrifying experience of discovering your own sexuality and coming out while attending the extremely-NON-gay-friendly Boston College, the rejection of her father who took years to accept her as a gay woman, her very problematic relationships (including being a victim of date rape, and admitting to cheating on several girlfriends), and yet she makes all of these very serious subjects human, relatable, and funny as hell.

(Side note: the cheating stories were particularly difficult for me to sit through because I absolutely cannot abide cheating. I know it happens, I know plenty of otherwise very good people have done it, I know we’re all human and flawed and all that… but I am very sensitive to stories about cheating, so I squirmed through those bits pretty uncomfortably.)

Thankfully, not all the stories she writes about are serious topics. Some of them are downright delightful: like making her from wanting to be a priest, to studying social work, to getting hired to several improv groups with shocking ease, and finally ending up in stand-up comedy; or (my favorite) joining a small alt-indie circus for a summer!

All in all, this was a delightful, funny memoir from a person I could identify with quite a lot (I’m not particularly butch or “masculine of center” as she describes herself, but that was one of a very small number of major differences). The writing is sharp and witty and deeply human. Her narration is perfect (not surprisingly, since that’s kind of what stand-up comedy is anyway). And it was a really fun way to spend a couple afternoons at work.

Book Review: The Councillor

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Title: The Councillor
Author: E.J. Beaton
Release Date: 2 March 2021
Source: ARC provided by publisher
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I had meant to get this review written and posted nearly a week ago, but alas, life… But anyway, here we go, and OH BOY, folks! I am so excited about this new release novel! It is already a strong contender for my favorite book of the year! (Yes, I know, it’s only January and I have a lot of books to read this year, but it’ll definitely be making the shortlist at least!) The Councillor is from debut author E.J. Beaton. It’s being marketed by the publisher as “machiavellian fantasy” which is a very good description actually. It is political intrigue fantasy at its best; it gives Game of Thrones a run for its money. This debut author is arriving on the science fiction/fantasy with a bang, and we love to see it! They pack more world-building and suspense into this book than you could possibly hope for, and it’s fantastic!

So here’s the basic premise: the story takes place in a country that seems somewhat vaguely inspired by medieval Italy called Elira, where Queen Sarelin Bray rules over a country that is separated into five city-states (Axium, Rhime, Valderos, Pyrrha, and Lyria), each with its own city-ruler. The country is in a state of uneasy peace, some twenty years after an enormous war against the White Queen, leader of a group of people with magical abilities called Elementals. Having defeated the White Queen, Sarelin made Elementals illegal and routinely executes them; people are not even allowed to speak of them. Our main character is Lysande, an orphan, a scholar, and the handpicked protege of the warrior-queen Sarelin. When Sarelin is assassinated leaving no heirs, an ancient tradition dictates that the queen’s appointed Councillor choose a new king or queen from among the city-rulers.  When Lysande, a commoner rather than nobility, is shockingly assigned the role of Councillor, and given the task of choosing a new ruler from among the nobility of the surrounding city-states, she is thrust into a world of political machinations, alliances, betrayals, and death she feels woefully unprepared for. Add in the fact that the White Queen, long-thought dead, may be returning to conquer the realm, and Lysande’s secret drug addiction, and it seems things could not get more complicated. Until they do. 

This novel delights in thwarting reader expectations, seeming to be one kind of story before transforming into another about a third of the way through. You go in thinking the whole plot will be about Lysande trying to decide who is the best ruler from among the city-rulers, but then it flips on its head and becomes another thing entirely. There is a large cast of characters, each with distinct developed and fascinating personalities and motives. The various city-rulers are all amazing in different ways, and the various people who support Lysande throughout the story are complex and fantastic! 

Lysander herself is wonderfully complex and flawed. She worships the memory of Sarelin and must struggle with the fact that her glorious queen’s treatment of Elementals was oppressive, cruel, and unjust. She has developed a growing addiction to an illegal drug made from chimera scales, a drug that keeps her calm and numb and helps her deal with the stress (and downright terror) of being the Councillor, but is having increasingly painful side-effects. She, like the readers, cannot determine who is to be trusted in the labyrinthine machinations of court politics and continuously trips up as she tries to navigate the diplomacy necessary. She also begins to grow a taste for the power that comes with her new position. At the same time, however, she is brilliant and studious and brave, and desperately wants to do the right thing both for herself and for the entire population of the country she loves. In addition to all of this, Lysande is like the DEFINITION of “disaster bi,” and she harbors long suppressed BDSM leanings that slowly emerge in various relationships throughout the novel. She has several different possible love-interests over the course of the novel, and there are a handful of sex scenes, though they are not explicit (in case you’re the kind of person who is concerned about that kind of thing).

 It is so full of well-plotted, but shocking plot twists that you will not be able to catch your breath from beginning to end. I was routinely completely shocked by various developments and revelations, in the best way possible. I am trying to talk around several absolutely STUNNING revelations because I really don’t want to ruin them for potential readers. The whole last third of the novel, in particular, had me breathlessly sitting on the edge of my seat, trying to figure out who was betraying who and how the hell it was going to end! While the ending was satisfying, it absolutely left plenty of room for a sequel, and I really need everyone to go buy this book (pre-order it even!) so that the author and publishers feel compelled to give me a sequel as quickly as humanly possible, please and thanks!

So, get thee hence! Go order a copy! You can find it at all the usual places: indiebound.org, bookshop.org, barnesandnoble.com, and your local indie bookstore!

Goals for 2021

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Hello all, and welcome to my first blog post of the new year! We are now nearly a week into 2021 and, unsurprisingly, it mostly just feels like more of the same. I don’t really DO New Year’s resolutions, per se, but I do have a few goals in mind, most of them book-related, of course!

I first wanted to share my overall reading progress for 2020! I had a goal to read 50 books in the year. I didn’t quite make it, but I read 46 which is still very good (for me at least! I have a friend who routinely reads between 175-200 every single year, but we won’t go there…) I keep a log of my total reading hours in my bullet journal, color-coded for format (print, audiobook, ebook, comic/graphic novel, and fanfiction). My total reading hours was 458 hrs, which is approximately 19 days! My highest total hours per format was, unsurprisingly, audiobook at 294 hours. Most of my reading is done by audiobook these days — and for the record, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with this, or that it is substantively different from print reading in any way! Still, I am hoping to work a bit more print-reading into my schedule this year. I think I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but I USED to read voraciously, and severe depression killed my ability to read for nearly a decade. Audiobooks saved my life, but I am hoping to work my way back up to something at least resembling my old reading habit. It’s slow progress, but it is progress…

For 2021, my goal is once again to read 50 books. And 30 of those will, of course, be for the reading challenge I set up for myself: Amanda’s Very Idiosyncratic 2021 Reading Challenge.

I am also going to continue on with the “Finish the Series” Reading Challenge I joined last year. For last year I finished three series that I had previously started: the Artemis Fowl series, the Old Kingdom Series, and the Wayward Children series (at least until the new one comes out later this month!)

For this year, I am going to try to finish the Percy Jackson series, which I started last year (so this year it counts as “previously-started”!), and possibly the Redwall series. I want to do a massive Redwall re-read, and I own and read MOST of the series — having read them all during the HEIGHT of my reading days in high school and the first couple years of college — but as I got more and more busy with college and part-time jobs, I lost track and never finished the last five books in the series: High Rhulain, Eulalia!, Doomwyte, The Sable Quean, The Rogue Crew. I could, of course, just read those five and have done with it. But I think it would be fun, if a tad ambitious, to try to do a re-read of the whole series from the beginning (and yes, I prefer to read in publication order, don’t @ me).

I also intend to continue trucking along on my way through the Dresden Files books, though I have little illusion of finishing the whole series this year… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also have several writing goals, of course. Last year I continued work on one novel, and started a second, while also tinkering with planning/outlining for a novella and (possibly) a screenplay. I participated in both Camp Nanos in April and July, and actual Nano in November, though I didn’t “win” them. All told, between all projects (and the blog) I wrote 123,132 words! I would like to have a similar total word count for 2021, and better if possible. I am hoping to finish the one novel (Holes in Your Coffin) and make significant progress on the second (Onyx Seal), and I would REALLY like to have one short story or novella done. I am INFAMOUSLY bad at writing SHORT and CONCISE, but I think it would be good practice for me, and might also give me a (albeit very small) chance to maybe get something published while I continue to try to finish a whole novel. But who knows…

I have other goals as well, of course: saving money, continuing to improve my exercise routine, that sort of stuff, but that’s boring so we won’t get into that here.

I’d love to hear about your goals for 2021! Books to read, things to write or make or do! Please share in the comments!

Last Book Review of 2020: The Arrest

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Hello and welcome to my final book review for the year 2020! I finally finished this book at nearly the last possible minute. I started it in October, got about halfway through it, and then one thing led to another and it kept getting pushed to the back of the line, and I didn’t finally pick it up to finish it until two days ago. This completes my reading for the year. I officially read 46 books this year. My goal was 50, but I’m still very happy with what I managed. And so, without further ado, my last book review of 2020!

Title: The Arrest
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Release Date: 10 Nov 2020
Source: ARC provided by publisher
Rating: 3.5 stars

Well let me start by saying I’m still unsure about the rating. I keep going back and forth between 3.5 and 4 stars. I LIKED this book. I generally love Jonathan Lethem. This book is WEIRD, and I can’t decide how I feel about it. I went in kind of knowing what to expect, having read plenty of other Lethem books. His first two books – Gun, With Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon – are still my favorites, and lord knows THOSE are weird-as-shit books. And yet… this book did not go in any direction I was prepared for and I’m just not sure how I feel.

So, here’s the rundown: The Arrest is a genre-defying post-apocalyptic novel of a kind only Jonathan Lethem could write. It takes us to a United States we would almost, but not quite, recognize, where Sandy Duplessis, aka “Journeyman,” and his sister, Maddie, have become stranded in a sleepy New England town after an unknown catastrophic event causes all technology to fail. With cars dead, communication evaporated, and roads disintegrating, cities and towns across America have become separate isolated city-states. Maddie has adapted, becoming a farmer and respected town citizen. Journeyman has floundered, once a prominent tv writer, now an ersatz delivery man. And then something even stranger than the initial catastrophe happens: a charismatic man named Peter Todbaum from Journeyman’s past appears from nowhere, with seemingly the only car left in the world that actually works. He claims to have driven from California to the East Coast across an America gone wild and savage. And the changes he brings with him could upend the fragile peace the town has built.

Todbaum was a producer before the cataclysmic event they call “The Arrest.” Friends from college, Journeyman and Todbaum had worked together on many scripts for tv and movies, but Todbaum’s main obsession was a dystopian/post-apocalyptic film he could never finish or get into production. In addition, he has remained obsessed with Journeyman’s sister after a brief encounter more than 10 years previously, though she hates him and refuses to speak to him. In his giant nuclear-powered former-drilling-machine vehicle, Todbaum brings unrest and violence into the sleepy New England town, along with the first espresso any has seen in three years, and his increasingly grandiose, fragmented far-fetched stories of driving across America.

Meanwhile, Journeyman is a frankly, spineless man who walks through the whole story nearly mindless and asleep. He does whatever any tells him to do, including the increasingly deranged Todbaum. He never asks questions, objects to anything happening to or around him, or tries to act on anything he thinks or feels. He was frustrating as hell, honestly. I’m pretty sure that was part of the point, but what do I know?

The prose, as anything Lethem writes, is wry and sharp and funny in an unsettling kind of way. Lethem creates colorful images of this world gone insane with spare well placed detail. The main characters are complex and the large cast of side characters are painted with careful brush strokes that highlight the oddities that help them live in the face of this new version of the world. 

This novel is strange, oddly-funny, and dream-like: a cross between post-apocalyptic tale and magical realism, with a healthy dose of philosophical rumination and a treatise on the inherent weirdness of the human condition. There are no straight answers here. Lethem loves his non-ending endings, and this one is right up there with the best of them! You will get little closure or resolution from this novel. But the questions will leave you thinking, often grumbling and occasionally laughing, far past the final page.

Favorite Reads of 2020

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Well, it’s that time of year again! Everyone is sharing their “Best Of” lists for all sorts of things: movies, albums, books, etc. I barely saw any movies this year (gee, who’s surprised?) and I didn’t listen to a bunch of NEW music this year (I seemed to mostly stick to the same five or six playlists and dozen or so artists I know I love this year — comfort listening is a thing!). BUT I did read a decent number of books, both new releases for 2020 and older releases. And so I figured I could share my favorite reads for the year. I have two “top 3” lists: one for 2020 new releases, and one for books that were released in previous years but I read for the first time this year.

So, without further ado, here are my FAVORITE READS OF 2020!

New Releases:

House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune: If you read my full book review (found here) for this book, then this will come as no surprise to you. If you know me on Twitter, it won’t be a surprise to you either. I love this book so much I cannot express it with words! I have now read it three times in a span of two months! It’s slightly embarrassing, but that’s ok! I love what I love, and I love this book with all my heart and soul and sinew and bone and atom of my being.

Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott: Again, if you read my full book review of this one (found here), you aren’t remotely surprised by this. I was pretty sure that this was going to be TOP favorite of the year before I ended up reading House in the Cerulean Sea, and being forced to revise that assumption. But it is definitely a very close second. I like a good space opera, but it had been quite awhile since I’d read one, and after reading THIS one, it kicked off a renewed need to read ALL THE SPACE OPERAS. I cannot wait for the sequel to this book!

The Body in the Garden by Katherine Schellman: This was such a great historical mystery book from a debut author who is also a delight on social media. I loved the main character, I loved the side characters, I was kept guessing through the whole book, and it was just so much FUN. (You can find the review for this one here.) I love mystery novels so much, and this one is pretty high up the list of my overall favorites now. I am so excited for the sequel coming out in July!

Previously-Released Books:

Artemis Fowl: Atlantis Complex by Eoin Colfer: Oh man, what can I say about this book?! I love the Artemis Fowl books, but I hadn’t ever finished the series the first time around, so one of my goals for this year was to finish reading all the Artemis Fowl books. And this one, book seven of eight, is DEFINITELY my favorite. I could not stop laughing through the whole thing! It was just too hilarious for words! I loved it so much, and Nathaniel Parker’s narration in the audiobook is just too perfect! For my full rant about the Artemis Fowl series, check out this post: “Fowl By Name, Foul By Nature.”

Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson: I didn’t read as many nonfiction books I had initially planned on this year, but I read a decent handful that I absolutely LOVED. (Including Disney’s Land by Richard Snow and Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt), but this one was definitely my favorite nonfiction book of the year. I love a really in-depth history book, and I am endlessly fascinated by the story of T.E. Lawrence and the movie Lawrence of Arabia. This book was SHOCKINGLY good, and filled with so much fascinating history that I would never have learned otherwise.

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire: This book came out in 2019 and I had started last year but ended up putting it aside because I was so busy with other things. It took me quite awhile to get back to it but I’m so glad I did! I already knew I loved Seanan McGuire because of her Wayward Children novella series, but this book is just NEXT LEVEL. (I wrote a review here!) I am still enormously upset that it didn’t win the Hugo Award this year. It was so phenomenal and heart-wrenching and intense and beautiful! Just UGH! GO READ IT NOW! (She is reportedly working on a sequel but there are no details yet, and just… *flails*)

Amanda’s Very Idiosyncratic 2021 Reading Challenge

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As we come to the end of the year, I am taking stock of the books I read and the many many books I did NOT read. I made myself (and a handful of friends) a reading challenge for 2020 that amounted to 21 books: 7 categories, 3 books per category. I finished that challenge, just barely in time, last week! Now, I have devised a new reading challenge for next year.

First, I thought I’d share all the books I read for each category for this year’s challenge. Keep in mind that these are, of course, not the only books I read this year, just the ones that fit the challenge. I’m not going to share my TOTAL book count for the year yet, because I still have a couple weeks left to try to top it off! But here’s the books I read for the 2020 “Storm the Castle” Reading Challenge:

Challenge 1: “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!” – a book that was gifted or recommended to you
a. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
b. Death Masks by Jim Butcher
c. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Challenge 2: Receive advice from an ancient hermit in the woods – a book that’s been in your TBR pile the longest
a. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
b. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
c. Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones

Challenge 3: Consult the tomes of wisdom and knowledge at the Great Library – a nonfiction book on science, history, etc
a. Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson
b. Disney’s Land by Richard Snow
c. Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt

Challenge 4: Battle ghosts in a haunted castle – a book you intended to read in 2019 but didn’t get around to
a. Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
b. Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor
c. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Challenge 5: Witness the birth of a baby unicorn – a book newly released in 2020
a. The Body in the Garden by Katharine Schellman
b. Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho
c. Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott

Challenge 6: Recover a long-lost mythical treasure – a book you started but never finished
a. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
b. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
c. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

Challenge 7: Storm the villain’s castle – a book in the epic fantasy genre
a. Clariel by Garth Nix
b. Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
c. Hall of Smoke by H.M. Long

So there you have it! My 2020 Reading Challenge. And now, on to next year. For 2021 I am ditching the cutesy category “themes” and I am expanding from 7 categories to 10 categories, keeping it to 3 books per category. If that goes well, I may expand to 12 categories in 2022, but we’ll see. As the title of this post declares, these categories are pretty idiosyncratic and specific to my own interests and things I want to read. If anyone would like to join me in this challenge, please feel free! If you do, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. But this is not a formally organized thing, and there are no prizes. This is literally just for myself. So, without further ado, here’s my 2021 Reading Challenge:

10 Categories, 3 Books Each, 30 Books Total:

  1. Space Opera
  2. Award-Winning Books (can be any recognized award including but not limited to Hugo, Nebula, Booker, National Book Award, Goodreads Choice Awards, Nobel, etc)
  3. Books In Translation
  4. Romance Novels
  5. Books Bought in 2020
  6. Mystery Novels
  7. Nonfiction: history/science/biography
  8. Poetry Collection Books
  9. Historical Fantasy
  10. Books You’ve Been Meaning to Re-Read