jethrien

1. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. I had trouble getting into this one - the first couple chapters really lean into the "science so far into magic that we'll deliberate make this borderline incomprehensible". But once the protagonist gets herself haunted by a long-dead war criminal to tap into his strategic brilliance, things pick up significantly.

2. Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur. 3.5. Korean American expat physicist finds herself haunted by her mother's folktales while stationed in Antarctica. Interesting and compelling, although I think I actually would have liked even more fantastic elements.

3. Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente. 4. Deeply weird and nonlinear tale set in a golden age of the silver screen if Jules Verne-style planets had actually been a thing. It's one of those super navel-gazing "what does story mean" kinds of things (with a hyper-meta climax that turns into a musical), so if that's your thing, this is amazing, and if it's not, you're going to pitch it across the room.

4. Aurora Blazing by Jessie Mihalik. 4. Very SF romance - helps to have read the previous book but not 100% necessary. I called Ian's secret back in the last book (it's super obvious) but I'm a sucker for Bianca's hyper-competent woundedness and tragic backstory.

5. Touch by Claire North. 3.5. By itself, this story of a ghost who can possess people by touching them makes a very nice thriller. The problem is, it's nearly the same basic story as her previous book with a different supernatural mechanic, which makes it feel a little too repetitive.

6. A Sweet Mess by Jayci Lee. 3. I loved the premise - a Anthony Bourdain-style celebrity chef (only younger and Asian American and less drug-addicted) gets the stunt cake a small town chef made by request for a six year old and pans her bakery. Then finds out that he destroyed her business over a mistake and tries to make amends. But the hurdles thrown up are all self-imposed (they're immediately ignored when it no longer works for the plot for them to be hurdles) and the characters make some spectacularly bone headed decisions.

7. The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie. 3.5. This is right on the border between actual thriller and total satire of the thriller. The language is so very purple, but generally quite entertainingly so. And why just stop at one femme fatale? (Important note: this was published in 1996 and is VERY much of its time, and I hadn't really checked the date. You'll like it better knowing the political situation and tech level going in.)

8. Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. 4. While Dealing with the Dragons is my favorite, my family still thoroughly enjoyed the adventures of Cimorene, this time from Prince Mendandbar's perspective. Kazul has been dragon-napped!

9. The Clergyman's Wife by Molly Greeley. 5. Pride & Prejudice's Charlotte gets her own story. Sweet and thoughtful and just a little devastating, while (uncommon among P&P inspired stuff) still thoroughly faithful to the original characterizations and historical milieu.

10. City of Shadows by Ariana Franklin. 4. A mystery starting in 1922 Berlin, around a young woman claiming to be Anastasia. Well structured with a couple good twists, but a warning - it continues into the 1930s and if you're already anxious about the recurrence of actual goddamn Nazis in the US, this lands rather differently than it might have when published in May 2006.

11. Clementine by Cherie Priest. 4.5. Brisk and fun, a Southern belle/spy (based on an actual person) is sent after an airship pirate chasing after a mysterious weapon in a stolen vessel.

12. Jade City by Fonda Lee. 4.5. Wuxia meets Godfather in a gangster-family noir full of jade-driven magic set in a fictional city not unlike Hong Kong.

13. Thrilling Adventure Yarns ed. by Robert Greenberger. 3.5. Like many anthologies, a mixed bag. In this case, quite the mix of pulp style detective, romance, war, and sword and sorcery stories, some of which are definitely stronger.

Chuckro wanted to come up with a party idea for my birthday that could be safely done under current circumstances. His idea? Bakery crawl! It's like a pub crawl, only without the public drunkenness, and possible to do with a child in tow and without removing masks inside.

Several friends met up with us, and we took a three hour walk (extremely well-bundled, because it was a high of like 22 degrees today), stopping at a number of different dessert places/bakeries/coffee shops. We'd send one person in to buy one or two things, and then split them so everyone got one or two bites, then headed off to the next place.

So I ended up getting a bite each of: dulce du leche babka, cheesecake horn, chocolate cantucci, golden monkey bread, chocolate cake truffle, chocolate whoopie pie, red velvet cupcake, pecan bar, and escargot à la cannelle (also called a cinnamon snail). It was a delightful way to spend an afternoon, see friends, but stay 95% outside and mostly masked. Chuckro has good ideas.

107. The Silence of Bones by June Hur. 4. Historical mystery set in 1800s Korea. Most of the noir tropes hit in a very different way (a good way!) with a female protagonist and a wildly different culture from the typical noir setting.

108/109. Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis. 3.5. They're two different books, but really, it's just one split in half. Time traveling historians stuck in WWII is a great hook, and a bunch of this is fantastic. But at the same time, a lot is really repetitive and the number of problems that could be solved by a simple conversation is far, far too high. I realize that the author is going for certain themes in the repetition and the number of near-misses and coincidences has a point...but I can't help but feel like the same effect could have been accomplished with a third less total book.

110. What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon. 3.5. Painful but thoughtful discussion of how Americans view fatness and fat people, and exactly how messed up that all is. I'm not sure how much was entirely new to me, but it was worth challenging some of my own assumptions.

111. Innate Magic by Shannon Fay. 3.5. This is interestingly set in a magic-filled alternate London right after WWII, but somehow feels more like the more typical magic-filled Victorian London. Maybe because of a similar pre-occupation with the peerage and social events that I associate with Regency and Victorian settings (that may well be perfectly suited to the time, I'm afraid I'm hopelessly American). The cloth magic the protagonist openly practices is not well exploited but the innate magic he hides is intriguing.

112. Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart. 2.5. Shteyngart is clever, very clever, but he's so delighted with his own cleverness that the first chapter becomes wearying. This is probably one of the first serious literary books out that wrestles with the events of 2020, mostly through a tiresome author and his eccentric-into-irritating friends. Some of the prose is lovely (but I can't help but find the number of hallucinatory dream sequences at the end exhausting). Many of the characters are finely drawn (but I can't help but wonder if this is a person who actually likes even his own friends).

113. Daughter of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts. 5. Ignore the hilariously dated cover art. This is competence porn at its finest, as a younger daughter of a noble house unexpectedly inherits and then goes about overcoming all kinds of difficulties in ridiculously clever ways. From marrying a bitter enemy and cleverly turning things to her own benefit to walking into a house party that's entirely intended as an assassination, Mara is endlessly resourceful. So much fun.

114. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. 5. Thoughtful, brilliant, devastating, and hopeful. A city sits on the edge of twilight on a tidally locked planet. Two women who do not fit at all into its draconian social order take to the deadly open road. The imaginative societies and the strange ways they interlock are gorgeous and inventive and true and sad. Honestly, this is what I'd want out of literary fiction - I can see why people are comparing Anders to Le Guin.

93. Ambush or Adore by Gail Carriger. 4. The interstitial backstory of two characters who have haunted the Parasol Protectorate universe. Absolutely delightful if you've read the rest of series, likely to be baffling otherwise.

94. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. 5. This is the definition of Not For Everyone. A drug addict reconstructs the notes of a dead blind man obsessed with a documentary that didn't exist about a family whose house has an interdimensional portal. The entire book is a puzzle box. It's for people who loved The Eleventh Hour as kids but want more code-breaking; people who thought the dream atmosphere of Sleep No More didn't go quite far enough. Pretentious as hell. Loved it.

95. Elements of Style by Wendy Wasserstein. 3.5. Comedy of manners set among asshole socialites in late 2001 New York City. Loved some of the biting satire, but it nearly develops heart towards the end and then shies away. I suppose "awful rich people stay awful" is a realistic turn of events, but it felt a bit like the author lost her nerve. Whether that's by starting to make characters learn or not letting them complete that, I'm not sure.

96. The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault. 4. Elegaic coming of age set in Socrates' Athens.

97. Defy or Defend by Gail Carriger. 4. Cold Comfort Farm, with vampires. Charming and delightful.

98. Redoubt by Mercedes Lackey. 3. It's kind of a retread of a quarter of By the Sword. Not her strongest work, but kind of a cozy return for Valdemar fans.

99. Bastion by Mercedes Lackey. 3. Honestly, Mags' cousin is probably a far more interesting story, but we're probably not going to get it. More of the same, if that's what you're on board or.

100. The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman. 4. The prequel to Practical Magic, this is lovely and a bit haunting. Three witch-children growing up in 1960s New York City.

101. The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik. 5. Novik has the good sense to shake up the social order and the rules of the Hogwarts-but-malicious school in book 2, and I can't wait to see what she does with book 3. Especially because this ends on a hell of a cliffhanger.

102. Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune. Klune excels at softening unlikeable protagonists. A jerk of a lawyer dies and finds himself trapped in an unconventional tea shop.

103. The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. 2.5. Loosely joined short stories about six people, strung together into the guise of a novel about a book club. Parts are charming, but the inconsistent voice is pretentious and the whole thing doesn't really hang together thematically.

104. Star Mother by Charlie N. Holmberg. 3. A young woman is chosen by a god to basically be a sacrifice but survives. Most of the book is her faffing about in the woods with a godling, though. On one hand, I did it engaging and bonus points for the end not quite going where I expected with the love triangle. But I kind of felt like the parts of the story I was most interested in were off happening elsewhere.

105. Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake by Alexis Hall. 5. This is basically Great British Bake-Off fanfiction and I am HERE for it. Laugh-out-loud funny, nuanced take on romance. The warning for sexual assault at the beginning is wise, though (not graphic and sensitively handled).

106. Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots. 5. Bitter but clever send-up of superheroes and capitalism, from the perspective of a henchwoman betrayed by supervillain HR after being injured by a hero.

In case you don't see on Facebook - I wrote a book! And you can buy it!

https://www.caitlinrozakis.com/as-catherine-beck

Leah's Perfect Christmas is available for pre-order, launching Nov 6.

Sometimes the true meaning of Christmas...is Chinese food dinner with your family on Long Island.

74. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder, trans. by Paulette Moller. 2. So this is a YA intro to the history of philosophy, with a super-meta framing story. Which makes this sound so much better than it is. Its pretentious, faux-naïve writing style features deeply unlikeable characters and is incredibly condescending to anyone who's mature enough to actually follow the arguments.

75. Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot by Vera Tobin. 3. Apparently I read this last year and completely forgot, which is extremely uncharacteristic of me. While 2020 was fairly traumatizing, I'm not sure it says great things about this poor book. Tobin delves into both literary and psychological theory as to why we like surprise in our fiction, and how these surprises can be accomplished, which is interesting. But it just doesn't seem to quite stick for me.

76. The Grift by Debra Ginsberg. 4.5. Tangled and engrossing story of a charlatan fortune teller who actually develops psychic powers, accidentally ensnaring several of her clients in a California town. Right on the border of literary fiction and speculative, in the best way.

77. The Campaign for Domestic Happiness by Isabella Beeton. 4. Man, being a Victorian would have sucked. I still like flipping through this classic household management guide with its bonkers recipes, though.

78. Intrigues by Mercedes Lackey. 3.5. Look, I'm not going to say that the later books in the long-running Valdemar series are ground-breaking. But they have a certain kind of angst that I find deeply nostalgic and makes for great comfort reads.

79. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. 4.5. A woman on the edge of death gets to keep returning to key points of her life and seeing how making a different choice would play out. It kind of goes where you think it will, but not exactly, and that's perfect.

80. Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories from History—Without the Fairy-Tale Endings by Linda Rodríguez McRobbie. 3.5. Bathroom-reader style book—lots of 2-3 page stories about various princesses through history. You wouldn't want to sit down and read straight through, but they're great for picking up, reading a couple pages, and then putting down to pick up again days or weeks later. A number of cool stories, many of which I hadn't already heard.

81. Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. 4.5. Hogwarts noir. Private detective without magic investigates a murder at the magic school her sister teaches at. Plenty twisty. Note that the protagonist admits right off the bat to having made some shitty decisions, and then proceeds to make some shitty decisions for emotional reasons. If you're going to throw the book at the wall when the protagonist is stupid and self-destructive, this ain't the book for you, but she's at least self-aware about blowing up chunks of her own life.

82. The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker by Leanna Renee Hieber. 2. Overwritten in a faux-Victorian way, this features a colorless (in every possible sense of the word) protagonist and a too-stubbornly-stupid-to-live swoony problematically older love interest. Melodramatic with a useless heroine, who can't even remember her one moment of glory.

83. Stick Dog Slurps Spaghetti by Tom Watson. 4. This is a kid's book you won't mind reading to your kid. Stick Dog's companions are hilarious stupid, and Stick Dog is subversively smart.

64. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. 3. Revisiting this as an adult. Plus points for engrossing descriptions of stuff like how to build a cabin, dig a well, make a rocking chair. I loved this stuff as a kid, it's still cool. Minus points for Pa being an autocratic asshole with his head up his butt (let's drag tiny children through incredibly dangerous situations because the woods are "too crowded" and not give your wife any say at all in her own life!) and general horrifying racism (you're stealing their land and you're all butt-hurt that the indigenous folk dare get too close to your cabin?) Even for the time, these were not great people.

65. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde. 4. This is more than just a gathering of trickster myths from across the continents - it's a deep dive into the psychology of why we need them and how they play out in art and history, with more than a smattering of the author's own reminiscing. Difficult to classify, but deeply interesting.

66. Westside by W.M. Akers. 4.5. Weird fantasy set in a Prohibition New York where half the city has been taken over by the shadows and one young private detective finds herself trying to avoid solving her father's murder. Vivid, compelling, and original.

67. Hyberbole and a Half by Allie Brosch. 5. Re-read. Still a little horrifying, still hilarious.

68. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosch. 5. Re-read. Still both sad and horrifying, still hilarious.

69. Brother's Ruin by Emma Newman. 3. Swift little steampunk coming of age. Has some charming bits, but suffers from being completely predictable. By the third chapter, I knew exactly what was going to happen and I'm pretty sure I've figured out all the big plot twists for the rest of the series from here.

70.The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. Brilliant spin on the time travel novel, in which a secret society endlessly repeats their own lives. Get yourself into a sticky situation? Suicide's an easy way out, but that means you're doomed to another tedious fifteen years or so of childhood before you can manage anything interesting again. Want to pass a message on to the future or the past? Find someone whose life overlaps with yours but is either born significantly before or after you. And then someone starts making sure the repeaters are never born...

71. The Luckiest Lady in London by Sherry Thomas. 3.5. The first half of this is an absolute delight, a sparky battle of wits and wills between a a bachelor who's convinced everyone he's the Perfect Gentleman and a debutante who plays a perfect demure ingenue. They recognize each other's lies, and things sizzle. But he's got his head a little too far up his ass in the back half, and the climax doesn't totally make up for his idiocy. It kind of peters out. Which is how actual conflicts in real life do end, as people kind of forgive each other and move on, but it makes for a less exciting final chapter or two.

72. The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez. 3. Another sparky, snarky romance, this one a contemporary. Begins delightfully. Really fun characters. But veers into the Cool Girl trope seriously a good 7 years after Gillian Flynn demolished it so effectively, keeps moving through the characters refusing to have a five minute conversation a quarter novel length more than excusable, and includes an infertility plot that the author makes sure to note she modeled after the real life of a friend of hers, which is necessary because it would probably make anyone struggling with infertility throw the book at the wall.

73. The Doctor's Discretion by E.E. Ottoman. 4. You'd think a m/m romance about two doctors in 1830s New York - one cis and Black, one white, trans, and disabled - trying to spring another trans guy from the hospital before he gets put on display like a circus animal might be preachy. But this one is actually very sweet, while dealing with the many, many obstacles this relationship faces even before the citywide manhunt starts.

Went shopping last weekend. Clothes I bought range from a size 4 to a size 10. How is this helpful?

Finally managed to get ARR back to the allergist today. The milk allergy is continuing to fade - we're officially cautiously trying him on ice cream, yogurt, and Nutella (partially for the hazelnut exposure). So he got to have his first store-bought ice cream this evening (spread over 40 minutes, a couple spoonfuls at a time.) Woohoo!

Still leaving the almond allergy alone for the moment. But the hope is to do a liquid milk trial near the end of the year.