February 2024 Reading Wrap Up
I finished off my reading challenge with time to spare! So let's talk about the books I've read this month. I'm making this up before the end of the month, because I don't foresee myself finishing up my current book in the next few days.
Religious Text
None applicable.
1/10 - Why Did They Publish This?
A Book of Pagan Prayer | Ceisiwr Serith
This book sucked ass. Fucking Robert Graves in the bibliography, treating any "non-Abrahamic" (meaning not Christian, Catholic, or Jewish in this context) as Pagan-with-a-capital-P, a baffling usage of Zoroastrianism, using "Indian" instead of "Indigenous"/"Native American", misusing "shaman", the baffling choice to have a prayer that you need to use to prepare yourself to pray, sloppy editing, self-contradiction without realizing the author did that, and, dare I say, an overly-Wiccan syncretic approach.
I genuinely have no idea how it got published.
Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current | Andrieh Vitimus
I damn near threw this one across the room within the first nine pages. Why are you citing a WHITE WOMAN when talking about hoodoo? Why is J K Rowling's Harry Potter book in the bibliography? Why does the bibliography suck overall?
2/10 - Trash
None applicable.
3/10 - Meh
None applicable.
4 to 6/10 - Mid-Tier
Witchcraft For Everyone: A No-Nonstense Guide to Creating Your Own Magical Practice | Sam Wise
I wrote my thoughts on this one in a separate post.
7 to 8/10 - Good With Caveats
From Sanctity to Sorcery: An Author’s Guide to Building Belief Structures and Magic Systems | Angeline Trevena
This is a perfectly passable book talking about religion and magic systems. But I still prefer Timothy Hickson's "On Writing and Worldbuilding" books and YouTube series (under the YouTuber name Hello Future Me).
Zendikar: In The Teeth Of Akoum | Robert Wintermute [reading challenge]
I'll admit, this one was a dredge to get through. I much prefer the short-and-sweet version of the story found through the WOTC website (or, even better, MTGLore.com). But hey, Nissa at least gets time to shine! She deserves something nice.
Memories & Memoirs: Essays, Poems, Stories, Letters by Contemporary Missouri Authors | Sharon Kinney-Hanson
This wasn't for a reading challenge, but rather, it was my book club book for this month (our theme was "biography"). I chose memoirs instead of an actual biography because I genuinely don't care about a lot of people who have biographies written about them.
But there was something...nice about this. It was nice, reading stuff by people like you in the place you live (admittedly 24 years ago). It's an experience I don't often get - not a lot of people set their stories in Missouri, and even less are from Missouri themselves. The best we usually get is traveling characters stopping to appreciate the St Louis Arch. So it was nice to be...seen.
Diadem: Worlds of Magic: Book of Names | John Peel [reading challenge]
This book has been on my TBR list for ten years, and I've finally read it. And it's pretty good! You can definitely tell that it's made for a particularly young audience (probably preteen at most, as the main protagonists are 12-ish) and is a product of its time (the mid-1990s). Baby (cough, preteen) Jasper would have gone hogwild over this, if they had bothered actually reading it when they got it. But to Current Jasper, it doesn't hit how they would have liked.
9/10 - Very Very Good
Snow White with the Red Hair, volumes 13-20 | Sorata Akiduki
Volumes 13 to 19 were 9/10, and volume 20 hit 10/10, but I'll just bundle them all together here. Snow White with the Red Hair is an ongoing manga series about a romance in a fantasy world (though notably, one that doesn't seem to actually have magic, merely fantastical creatures and plants). The main romance is a woman on the run from her home kingdom after her prince became obsessed with her due to her red hair, and the second prince of the neighboring kingdom, though neither really know each other when they meet. At this point in the story, they're fairly dedicated to seeing each other despite the woman working hard to be a proper royal herbalist (following her dreams) and the prince dealing with the politics of his older brother (who recently became king) and his land along with a dedicated loyalty to the woman.
It's surprisingly sappy and adorable, despite the fact that I don't typically read romance. These two characters and their friends have wormed their way into my heart.
Hide | Kiersten White [reading challenge]
Kiersten White is an author I recently started reading, and I absolutely adore her writing. In Hide, she captures the exact feeling of being a broke queer person in a conservative small-town and the danger that comes with it. Along with a more supernatural danger.
Can't Spell Treason Without Tea | Rebecca Thorne [reading challenge]
This is a damn fine story with damn fine characters, a loving and already-established relationship (where there's no "will they break up" drama), and a fascinating set of magic systems. My only real complaint here is that the stakes are much higher than what I expected from something marketed as "cozy fantasy". The settings and vibes often were more cozy, but there were higher stakes than what I expected, what with the dragons and the queen and- Well, it was a good book. It was inspired by Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, but don't expect the two to be the same.
10/10 - Unironically Recommend To Everyone
Well, everyone who's into the genre these fall under, at least.
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe | John Boswell
This is an incredibly in-depth look at exactly what it says it is - same-sex unions in premodern Europe (stretching back to ancient Greece and Rome) with comparisons to opposite-sex unions of the times. If you're interested in one or both sides of those, pick it up. Just be ready for the long haul; this book is 464 pages long and has multiple appendices.
