dwindling

I don't really post a lot besides book reviews at this point. It's a little sad. I don't really have the energy, honestly.

The quick round-up:
- SSRIs put me in the ER with chest pains, after a ramp up of increasing panic attacks. Then had to wait for two more weeks of panic attacks for it to clear my system.
- Yes, yes, I started therapy. Early to know whether it's particularly effective.
- Yes, yes, I'm looking for a new job. It sucks.
- Chuck has COVID. He's mostly ok, but isolating in hopes ARR and I don't get it (we don't have it yet). So I'm single-parenting for the most part at the moment. This also very much puts our plans next week to attend a wedding and then go on the first real vacation in two and a half years in jeopardy. This also sucks.
- These things really put a nice big focus on the stuff that was already making me depressed and anxious. Thanks, universe.

Books

54. Monster in My Closet by R.L. Naquin. 3.5. Points for urban fantasy where the heroine isn't hard-bitten or ass-kicking. Extra point for some less obvious monsters instead of the overdone vampires/werewolves/elves. Subtract points for the part where she's a total moron about what's going on with her best friend when it's painfully obvious.

55. How to Marry a Werewolf by Gail Carriger. 4. She's a disgraced bluestocking sent to make a good match, he's a grumpy furry government agent, they unite to put their tragic pasts behind them and also humiliate her asshole parents.

56. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang. 5. Romance featuring an autistic heroine written by an actual autistic woman, so this smart, sweet romance feels nuanced and authentic and doesn't leave you with that icky feeling that maybe the author is exploiting someone else's story. Also, really hot sex scenes.

57. The 5th Gender by G.L. Carriger. 4. Fizzy SF mystery with a lot of alien sex in it. Yes, it's a weird place, genre-wise.

58. Moby Dick by Herman Melville. 3...5...? I dunno how to even rate this thing. Foundational, deeply weird classic. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes amazing action scenes, with an experimental post-modern thing going half a century too early and infamously too much detail about whales. Some of it hilariously incorrect. The second time I've read this thing, took longer than the first. (In my defense, I started it, got halfway through, slid into a depression that has nothing to do with poor Ishmael, and really haven't been in the headspace to deal with this and limped through the second half this time.)

59. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle. 5. An alternative take on Lovecraft's "Horror at Red Hook" but largely from the perspective of a Black musician/con artist, written by a Black author. Actually addressing the crimes of racism at the time, this is significantly more nuanced, terrifying, evocative, and interesting story than the original it's based on.

60. Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade. 5. Real person Game of Thrones Jaime fanfic with the serial numbers filed off wait no come back it's great I promise. He's a star in a smash hit fantasy TV series with terrible showrunners that outpaced the book, she's a fat scientist who writes fanfiction, oh wait but HE SECRETLY ALSO WRITES FANFICTION ABOUT HIS CHARACTER and he totally starts dating her but doesn't tell her they're actually friends online and really, I promise, it's great.

61. Empire State by Adam Christopher. 2.5. Christopher really wants you to question what's really going on, but to the point that I just couldn't care about most of the twists by the end. When all our information about what will or will not happen when the maguffin maguffins comes from people who have repeatedly lied and who you can't figure out whose side they're on, it's hard to tell if you want the hero to succeed or not...or whether they succeeded in the end. Anyway, Prohibition, private eyes, superheroes, pocket universes, doppelgangers, shadowy conspiracies blah blah blah. Stylish but too convoluted.

62. Naamah's Blessing by Jacqueline Carey. 4. At this point, Carey's clearly tired of the kinky-sex-and-convoluted-politics she built this series on, because this one's almost straight adventure. But it's cool Renaissance-in-the-Americas, with magic and real gods and oh, someone manages to cure smallpox so the Spanish-analogues fail to topple the Aztec-analogues. And the creepiest use of ants ever.

63.The Devil's Delilah by Loretta Chase. 2.5. The plot, revolving around a stolen manuscript changing hands, is dizzy enough to irritate but not dizzy enough to rise to the farce it wants to be. I really, really wanted to like the sweet, bookish hero. But while he struggles to break free of the old school alpha male role, he keeps falling back in because the author doesn't seem to be able to think of a hero as sexy unless he's lost control with lust or is secretly masterminding while refusing to give the heroine useful information. Which means that the poor dude keeps breaking his own character.