At last, a month where I feel like I read enough! The trick, clearly, was to pick up graphic novels and other very short things. Will this trend continue in November? Almost certainly not.
Followers might have seen my review for The Dollmakers by Lynn Buchanan last week but that's not actually my top read of the month. That honour goes to Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, which I got as an ARC from work, told myself I wouldn't read just yet, then promptly picked up after The Dollmakers and all but burned through. It's about the female authors we know Austen read and why they were bestsellers in their day but are barely known now, with all sorts of publishing and book industry history thrown in, along with a dose of memoir. Needless to say, I was the target audience and I've added a good handful of classics to my TBR. (It's out in February, in case you're interested.)
The rest of my top reads are there for just being solidly good. The Disappearing Spoon gave me all the fun science history I wanted. The Angel of Indian Lake gave me a good horror trilogy ending. The Tropic of Serpents gave me more Lady Trent adventures. And so on. I only really had two misses: The Aeronaut's Windlass, which felt very by-the-books epic fantasy without pushing boundaries, and Wordhunter, which I'm actively recommending people don't read. It was utterly average and kind of trying too hard to be edgy, and then it needlessly introduced sexual violence against women and children and handled both badly. How a book that lets a pedophile off with a warning got published in 2024, I will never understand.
In happier news, my book haul! Two books this month: Sorcery and Small Magics, sent by the publisher, and another volume of The Unwritten, meaning I only need to find one and I've got the full run. Hurray! (If you ever spot Vol. 9, folks, lemme know.)
All that reading means that I haven't done much writing. I need to get back to that, but at least I know what was blocking me and am working to rectify the situation. I am, however, starting to get seriously envious of authors who were able to write during the pandemic and are now getting those novels published. I stopped writing entirely for a year and a half, for various reasons, and now I feel like I've fallen behind.
Someday I might return to the Not-Quite-Urban Fantasy but I'm still too raw to handle the edits even now.
Oh, the worlds of might-have-been!
And now I've gone and left this on a down note. There'll be more positivity next month, I promise. In the meantime, here’s my list of everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf - Rebecca Romney
A rare book dealer explores the literary histories of Austen’s favourite female authors, and how they didn’t make the English canon the way Austen did. Out in February.
8/10
reading copy
The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean
An entertaining history of chemistry, atomic physics, and the elements of the periodic table.
8/10
library ebook
The Tropic of Serpents - Marie Brennan
Isabella Camherst travels south to Bayembe to study savannah dragons, but finds herself caught in politics and sent on a mission to the swamp of Mouleen.
7.5/10
African-coded secondary characters, 🏳️🌈 secondary character (asexual)
library book
The Dollmakers - Lynn Buchanan
When Shean of Pearl receives, and refuses, an artisan dollmaker license, she sets off for a remote village to prove she and her dolls have what it takes to be guards against the Shod. If this means luring the monsters in, so be it.
7.5/10
reading copy
The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones
Jade Daniels, now Proofrock’s history teacher, has put slasher cycles behind her. Except it’s looking like another one’s started anyway.
7.5/10
Blackfoot protagonist, 🏳️🌈 protagonist (sapphic), Black secondary characters
warning: blood, gore, death, murder
reading copy
Reluctant Immortals - Gwendolyn Kiste
Lucy Westrena and Bee Rochester are trying to get through the days in 1967 LA when their exes return in San Fransisco.
7/10
🏳️🌈 secondary characters (sapphic), Jamaican-British secondary character
warning: abusive relationships
reading copy
Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle
After Misha refuses to kill off his queer leads for the season finale, he finds himself stalked by horror villains he created.
Ms. Marvel, Vol. 7 - G. Willow Wilson with Mirka Andolfo (Illustrator), Takeshi Miyazawa (Illustrator)
Kamala Khan faces two difficult foes: gerrymandering and a sentient computer virus.
6.5/10
Pakistani-American protagonist, Muslim protagonist, Pakistani-American secondary characters, Muslim secondary characters, 🏳️🌈 secondary character (sapphic), Black secondary character, secondary character with limb damage and a cane, Muslim author
warning: outing
off my TBR
Paladin’s Grace - T. Kingfisher
Stephen is a paladin whose god has died. Grace is a perfumer trying to keep her past buried. Witnesses to a failed assassination, they now must work together to navigate a world of intrigue, poisoners, and zealots. It’s a good thing they like each other.
6.5/10
off my TBR/ebook
Plain Jane and the Mermaid - Vera Brosgol
When Jane’s potential fiancé is kidnapped by a mermaid, she descends into the depths to rescue him even though she can never hope to compete with true waifish beauty.
7.5/10
warning: body shaming
library book
Sorcery and Small Magics - Maiga Doocy
Leovander Loveage and Sebastian Grimm get along like oil and water—which makes it all the worse when Leo's hit with an illegal curse and they must work together to break it.
6.8/10
🏳️🌈 protagonist (achillean), 🏳️🌈 secondary character (achillean), 🏳️🌈 minor character (ungendered), minor character with dark skin, minor character who uses a cane
gifted by publisher
Dictionary of Fine Distinctions - Eli Bernstein
Illuminating and illustrated definitions of commonly confused words.
7/10
library book
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa
When Takako finds herself adrift in life, she accepts a room in her estranged uncle’s bookshop.
7/10
Japanese cast, Japanese author
library book
Wordhunter - Stella Sands
A spiky forensic linguistics student is tapped by her local PD to help find a kidnapped teen, but that brings up a missing person’s case from her own past. Too close, too soon.
2/10
Black secondary character
warning: drug use, alcohol abuse, rape and an odd attitude towards its aftermath, pedophiles given a pass
library book
Picture books
All the Books - Hayley Rocco
Piper loves books so much she takes her whole collection everywhere, but when her wagons tip over in the rain she discovers … the library!
9/10
DNF
The Aeronaut’s Windlass - Jim Butcher
The cold war between Spires Albion and Aurora is heating up, and something uncanny is showing itself. Caught in it all are Captain Grimm, late of the Predator, a handful of trainee guards, and a prince of cats.
library ebook
Currently reading
The Price of the Stars - Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald
When Beka’s politician mother is assassinated, her father gives her his warship in exchange for her tracking the assassins down. But when someone has it in for your family, sometimes one must take drastic measures.
off my TBR
The Empress Letters - Linda Rogers
A mother in the 1920s writes her life story in a series of letters to the daughter she’s searching for in China.
🇨🇦, Chinese secondary characters
warning: fetal remains, anti-Chinese racism
off my TBR
Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century - Richard Taruskin
A history of early written European music, in its social and political contexts.
The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Victorian detective stories
disabled POV character (limb injury), occasional Indian secondary characters
warning: racism, colonialism
Monthly total: 14 + 1
Yearly total: 106
Queer books: 3
Authors of colour: 2
Books by women: 9
Authors outside the binary: 0
Canadian authors: 0
Classics: 0
Off the TBR shelves: 3
Books hauled: 2
ARCs acquired: 3
ARCs unhauled: 4
DNFs: 1
January February March April May June July August September
Eloise's Bridgerton book is SO BAD like it's as bad as everyone-with-a-brain told you and it seems like it won't be at first because you zip through the early chapters but the later ones are SUCH a slog. You think Phillip is maybe ok I mean it's kinda cool he's a botanist and I feel for his childhood trauma etc. but then he's a sexist-even-by-Regency-standards negging piece of shit who keeps dumping on his dead first wife for having depression and mentions the fact that he once raped her the way other people talk about a bad past argument they wish they could take back (sidenote I'm not sure that Julia Quinn recognized this was rape. Between this and That Scene in The Duke and I, I'm not sure she understands what consent is) and he just keeps sucking harder and harder and being so unnecessarily pissy toward Eloise for stuff that isn't even that bad or even is charming!
but ANYWAY
Apparently this shit is really popular among the terminally-heterosexual posters on the main Bridgerton subreddit (according to @peterdyckmancampbell yes the same people currently pooping their pants that a character they never liked in the first place which is also indicative of bad taste because he's one of the better dudes in these books was made into a woman, and acting like a dude fucking another dude means any future romance he has with women is illegitimate because lol what is bisexuality) I came here because the predominant feeling I had reading that piece of shit especially in Eloise-perspective moments is how I wish I could like, transfer her into the scenario of a Garashir fanfiction in Julian's place or something. Because so much of it is people and especially the man who supposedly loves her, being so mean to her just for being talkative! And she's not being annoying or rude about it most of the time. Most of the time she's saying stuff that very much needs to be said that her husband thinks can just be avoided until she Gets Over It because she's just a silly women in her silly wimminz fee-fees lol what can you do amirite? And her speaking up outright saves children's lives multiple times! And as a talkative-ass bitch like Julian and Eloise who always loves those parts of Garashir fics where Julian is accepted by him for that (which is straight out of CANON!) it just made me rage so much to see the opposite and her learning to suppress this perfectly respectable, outright positive at times trait about herself! Fuck that!
So anyway I think I've figured out what will save the Bridgerton fandom homophobes. What will fix what's wrong with them. I think they need to be strapped to a chair à la Alex in A Clockwork Orange and forced to read Garashir fanfics. Yeah it's gay, yeah it involves aliens but if you are forced to get over that I think you will get that it is what you are searching for that you are WRONGLY thinking this nonsense suffices for but it doesn't! And here is proof that if you just open your mind a tad you can have it so much better. Like it's really clear a lot of these women see themselves in Eloise and I just think. Why think that someone like you needs to be suppressed when you could instead be embraced and celebrated, why limit yourself to the sad half-love that heteronormativity offers when there is a whole world of real love out there and men who will give it to you! And this is why straight women reading gay fanfiction is in fact not a "bad" thing to fix but is perhaps, instead, something that more straight women should be doing. Something that the straight women who are not doing would be better for if they were! We joke on here about fanfiction therapists but maybe it needs to happen
I do NOT recommend any of Dag Solstad’s works. He’s an old white man who only writes about white men who hate their wives and cheat on them because they’ve ”aged” and look ”ugly”.. all the protagonists in his books only complain and have weird mid-life crises in which they behave like small children while thinking they’re important geniuses. The critics in Norway love him, but don’t be fooled, his books are mind-numbingly boring.. I even met the man twice and 0/10 would not recommend👎🏻
Hahahaha that sounds awful!!! Thank you for the non-recommendation 😂 I am curious though as to how you came to meet him twice??
never read narrow road to the deep north by richard flanagan I had to listen to it on like. x8 speed on audible bc I put off reading it for so long and I totally failed my exam lol. I just don't think people should be allowed to call you a good writer if you can't write women!!!
Okay this one is actually useful because that sounds like something I might have read but nope, not anymore!
DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES READ “a beautiful composition of broken” by r.h Sin!!!! It is the worst book I have ever read. I read a lot of books of poetry and I have never seen such self absorbed, flat, and preachy poetry as is in this book. And the author has many books of poetry but i after this one i refuse to read another. He uses no analogy, symbolism, or metaphor AT ALL! 200 pages of crap with maybe one or two okay poems. HORRIBLE READ -1000/10
God, I hate preachy literature so much!! At the moment I'm reading The alchemist by Paulo Coelho and it's not going well on the preachy-scale so far. So thank you for the warning 😂
