Books

45. The Sword and the Stone by T.H. White. 4. We did this one as a family readaloud, and it's absolutely critical to realize that White substantially revised it when he rolled it into The Once and Future King. Parts of this were as delightful as I'd remembered, parts were a little slower, and there were a couple cringily racist bits (some of which I managed to skip over verbally and a chapter with Robin Hood where the majority of the chapter is the kind of racist that will hopefully go over his head but is still pretty bad). Doing the voices is definitely a major factor. King Pellinore, I will always love you.

46. Enchanted by Alethea Kontis. 2. The combination of the author's desire to cram every fairy tale into this unnecessarily and the muddled tone that can't decide if it wants to be breezy Fractured Fairy Tales or a phantasmagorical musing on the nature of memory kind of put me off this one. Also, a number of plot points are just plain confusing.

47. The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle. 3.5. There are a lot of Elizabethan fantasies out there, but this one adds some New World not-elves that actually do have enough differences from typical elves as to be worth it. There's a very confusing plot point involving multiple murders over a long period of time (where it took me a while to realize that there were two murders a generation apart instead of one time-traveling murder) but overall points for some clever originality.

48. The Stormbringer by Isabel Cooper. 3.5. Kind of generic fantasy, but with a great little twist on the romantic triangle - guy 1's been frozen in time for generations, she's freed him, guy 2 was guy 1's lover pre-frozen in time but is now a magical sword who talks in her head. Talk about awkward!

49. All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai. 5. Time traveler messes up, causes dystopian hellscape, has to put it back. The twist? The dystopian hellscape he's trapped in is our current timeline.

More books

50. Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey. 4. As opposed to some of the other ADHD books I've been reading, this one is intended mostly for people who actually have ADHD instead of people trying to parent people with ADHD. It's showing a bit of its age, but still has a lot of insightful information. Including a number of passages that I ended up taking photos of and texting to my husband with "umm, sweetie, this sounds a lot like what you've been saying about yourself for years..."

51. Star Wars: Bloodline by Claudia Gray. 4. How Leia ended up founding the Resistance. I don't love how you basically need to read the novels to make the most recent three movies make much sense, but Gray does a good job of bridging some of the gaps. And I really appreciate both her take on Leia as an elder statesman and her rival/colleague Costerfo. As well as hints of how Leia and Han could both deeply love each other and still be starting to drift apart.

52. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen. 3. Mildly amusing collection of personal essays that I snagged off someone's "Free" pile on their stoop, and will probably end up on my stoop with a "Free" sign.

53. The Disappeared by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. 4.5. Fascinating police/legal thriller about a future in which treaties get people turned over to alien legal systems for all kinds of accidental infractions.

54. In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire. 3.5. I continue to find the Wayward Children follow-ups to be interesting but not feel...necessary? The first one was so enthralling, and the rest seem to be mostly filling in gaps it was more interesting left unfilled. Lundy's story is entertaining, and very sad (as one might guess), but I don't feel like in the end I've learned that much more than what I got from her description in the first book. But it's still beautifully written.

55. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamad. 5. Fascinating deep dive into the economic underpinnings of the Great Depression, which is somehow much more personal and dramatic than dense text about reparations and the gold standard has any right to be.

56. Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny. 4. Gentle dramedy about a woman whose choices never quite seem to be made by her, as she realizes that the compromises she made with sadness may have added up to something happy after all. Points off for dramatically over and underestimating second graders at the same time.