Wrap Up December 2021

I do not think I ever had a wrap up up this late. I debated if I even should still post it and while it’s a bit weird to have a December wrap up go up two days before the January wrap up, I also didn’t want to miss this month because I had a pretty good reading months with three five star reads and only one book I did not really enjoy.

Books I read in December:

I began the month with Just One Night by Lauren Layne (3 out of 5 stars) which was fun but not really all that remarkable. Then I finished the brilliant Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (4.5 out of 5 stars). I am a huge Sally Rooney fan and this book worked for me the same way all her books work for me. I thought it was structurally brilliant with its introspective email chapters and the more aloof third person chapters alternating and give different lenses through which to understand her characters – and her characters are what shine as usual. I didn’t love this as much as Conversations With Friends but more than Normal People I think and I cannot wait to see what she does next, or rather what variation on her theme she dos next. Afterwards I finally finished For The Wolf (Wilderwood #1) by Hannah Whitten (3 out of 5 stars) which took me basically half a year. I adored the beginning with its lush and description heavy writing and its emphasis on atmosphere before all. But after a while I found it indulgent and weirdly vague in what was going on. I also do not love plots that hinge on people just not using their words. The ending intrigues me enough though to want to read the second book in the series. Then I read my first Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking (5 out of 5 stars) which was just as good or even better than I thought it would be. The prose is impeccable, the thoughtful use of repetition and returning to earlier themes and ideas is perfect and the emotional punch is harsh – there is a reason she is counted amongst the best stylists. I want to read as many of her books as possible. Afterwards I finished the very disappointing Fen by Daisy Johnson (2 out of 5 stars) – I was so sure I would love this, as I enjoyed both of her novels but I found this repetitive and sad and weirdly sex negative in its outlook. Then I read another extremely brilliant book: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (5 out of 5 stars). I have not been able to stop thinking about this book but at the same time I have trouble putting my thoughts and feelings into words. This is brilliant. I knew very little going into this book except that I will read anything Emily St. John Mandel writes and as such the book surprised me again and again. It is losely connected to her most recent two novels, Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel, and I love her extended universe so much. She does this better than David Mitchell, whose writing I also adore, and I cannot wait to read whatever comes next. This book is both perfectly structured and compulsively readable, and as always her characterwork is beyond compare. So yes, I loved this. My final book of the year was The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire #1) by Andrea Stewart (4 out of 5 stars) and thankfully one I liked a lot. I thought the premise was excellent and original. There were a couple of really effective reveals as a result of Stewart not being afraid to lean into the creepiness. I did think the book had pacing issues and differently exciting plotlines but I really enjoyed how they all come or did not come together. The cliffhanger really makes me anxious to get to the next book in the series.

Favourite of the Month:

I really had an exceptional reading month. Both The Year of Magical Thinking and Sea o Tranquility surpased my already high expectations. But it is the latter that really blew me away in every possible way. I will have to reread the whole lose trilogy at some point but right now Sea of Tranqulity might be my favourite of the three. It’s better than Station Eleven? Blasphemy but also probably true. She really is on top of her game.

Stats(ish):

I read seven books, all of which were written by women – one memoir, one short story collection, two fantasy novels (both first in a series), two literary fiction, and one romance novel.

Currently Reading:

Wrap Up November 2021

This was a MONTH.

Books I read in November:

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I started the month strong with the incredble Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich (4.5 out of 5 stars) which reminded me exactly why I love short story collections. It is weird and extremely well written, with a strong theme of feminism and motherhood and the stories are the exact perfect length each time (varying from the very short to the slightly longer than most short stories). It did get a bit repetitive but not enough for me to not round the rating up. Then I finished yet another Ilona Andrews book: Sweep With Me (Innkeeper Chronicles #3.5) (4 out of 5 stars) – which I obviously enjoyed. I always love their writing and am slowly making my way through their backlist while I wait for the next books in the two series of theirs I am current with. Afterwards I finished my oldest ARC (let’s just not talk about how long that sat unread on my kindle): Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt (2.5 out of 5 stars). I am conflicted about this because the prose was truly spectacular and I do like the framing device and the way Celt chooses to end her book. I did however not enjoy the pacing at all – it felt a lot longer than the 240 pages it was long and for vast stretches of it I was, indeed, bored. I then finished the absolutely brilliant Abandon Me by Melissa Febos (4.5 out of 5 stars) which broke my heart. Here the whole was better than the sum of its parts and I was right – this is an author whose complete works I want to read. Afterwards, my month went to hell. Which is why I finished a book that was sure to be comforting: Last Guard (Psy-Changeling #20) by Nalini Singh (3.5 out of 5 stars). As always, I enjoyed the worldbuilding and I am excited to see where the series goes next – because I always trust Nalini Singh in her macro plots, but this one didn’t completely work for me. The pacing was off and the central couple not my favourite. The final book I read, I inhaled in a day: The Trouble with Love by Lauren Layne (4 out of 5 stars). This was just what I needed with the perfect mix of funny and angsty. I loved this a whole lot, especially the focus on friendship – I will surely read the rest of this series and the follow up series. I am not often a fan of second chance romances but this worked perfectly because the past storyline never overwhelmed the present storyline (and because what happened in the past was just deliciously angsty without being a dealbreaker – and without them being horrible to each other).

Favourite of the Month:

Animal Wife was not only my favourit book of the month but my favourite short story collection of the year. Really recommended!

Stats(ish):

I somehow finished 6 books, five of which were written by women and one by a husband and wife team. One romance, two speculative romance, one short story collection, one historical fiction and one memoir.

Currently Reading:

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Wrap Up October 2021

This did not feel like a bad reading month even though I finished very few books. Mostly because I am in fact reading regularly and I am also reading fantasy again which is making me very happy indeed.

Books I read in October:

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The first book I finished in October was an ARC of How High We Go ind the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (4 out of 5 stars). I enjoyed many things about this – it is basically custom-made for me after all. I loved the changing perspectives as we moved further into the future, I loved revisiting people from earlier chapters as side characters in the later chapters, I enjoyed the weirdness Nagamatsu embraced and how unlikable he lets his characters be – but I did not love this book as a whole the way I wanted (and honestly expected) to. Parts are to do with the prose that did not always work for me, parts are definitely the increasingly bleak outlook of the stories. Overall, I found this slightly uneven but in parts genuinely brilliant. The book comes out in January 2022. I then read The Devil You Know (Mercenary Librarians #2) by Kit Rocha (4 out of 5 stars) which gave me exactly what I needed. I cannot wait for the next book in the series because I just love this world and its focus on community so very much.

Favourite of the Month:

I adored The Devil You Kow and I am very upset I will need to wait until next year to be able t read the next book.

Stats(ish):

I finished two books, both of which were speculative in nature. One written by a man and one written by two women.

Currently Reading:

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What I should be getting to next:

Apparently not a lot. I am in the middle of enough books to be occupied for the whole month.

Rachel and I have too many ARCs – a low-key readathon, 2021 edition

As is traditional, Rachel and I have too many ARCs, again – and using the first two weeks in September to try and remedy that, again. The last two times we tried this were fun but not always super productive, but maybe third time’s the charm?! As always, you are very invited to join but it is also really, really low-key, without prompts or reading sprints or even a hashtag.

I have finally stopped requesting ARCs, so nearly all of the ones I have left to read are backlist by now and I would love to be able to finally review a few of those. I would love for my NetGalley ratio to be in the 90s by the time I the two weeks are up but this is probably unlikely – it is at 86% currently and I just calculated it (and unless I did something stupid) I would have to review 11 books to get there. So this is my absolute stretch goal for now.

Currently reading:

No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull (published by Blackstone Publishing, September 7th 2021)

This is incredible so far and I will absolutely keep prioritizing this because I want to be able to shout from the rooftops how much I want everyone to read it. Right now my pitch would be Vita Nostra meets Station Eleven – and if you know me at all, you can guess how giddy this book makes me. It does something very very clever and interesting with perspective, it jumps backwards and forward in time and it is very, very weird. I am in love.

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart (published by Orbit, April 8th 2021)

The kind of fast-paced but worldbuilding heavy fantasy that can work brilliantly for me and so far this absolutely does. I enjoy the sprawling narrative and the different POVs and it is making me realize that I haven’t read enough fantasy this year. With around 500 pages this is at the edge of my tolerance, page count wise, but I get the feeling that the book’s world necessitated the length.

Most excited:

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (published by Bloomsbury, January 18th 2022)

This was the last book I requested, even after having decided to not request books anymore, because I am just so excited for it. I mean, look at this first sentence of the blurb and tell me this wasn’t written especially for me: “For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut is a wildly imaginative, genre-bending work spanning generations across the globe as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a devastating plague.” It is set partly in the Arctic Circle (love that!), deals with father-daughter relationships (love this!), told from connected perspectives (love that!), and it was blurbed by Matt Bell who seems to have my exact taste in literature (I really should check his books out finally).

Might still read and review in time for the publication date

On Freedom by Maggie Nelson (published by Jonathan Cape, September 2nd 2021)

Yes, I know this is unlikely but I can still dream. I adore Nelson’s writing and as such was very happy to receive the ARC. I absolutely want to read this – but the footnotes aren’t linked and I always basically have to scroll to the end of the book to get to them. So I might try to read this without reading the footnotes which doesn’t strike me as the best idea.

Dinner Party: A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin (published by Pushkin Press, September 16th 2021)

This was blurbed as for fans of Kate Atkinson and Anne Enright – so I took the plunge. This sounds like the kind of book that’ll either blow my mind or be too boring for me to make it through, all depending on the prose style and the structural choices. I am excited though, especially for this part of the blurb: “As the past catches up with the present, Kate learns why, despite everything, we can’t help returning home.”

High priority

I really, really suck at reading tbrs, obviously. Even trying to get to ARCs can lead to a reading slump. But for now these are the books that most excite me.

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If I even get to a single of these books in addition to the other books I am planning to read, I will count myself very lucky. Some of these have been on my shelf for longer than they should have been, some of those sound so like my kind of book that it’s a shame I haven’t gotten to them, some, like Empire of Sand, are somehow both of these things.

Need to finally decide if I really, actually, really want to read these books

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These books’ publication dates came and went a while ago. I have read bits and pieces of most of them and for some reason or other I am never in the mood for any of them when I am looking for something new to read. If you have read any of these, can you help me make up my mind? Otherwise I will try and finally do a “read a chapter” kind of post to decide if I want to keep these books on my TBR.

Wrap Up June 2021

I will just have to stop complaining that my reading month was awful. There is no way this state of affairs will change, especially now that I am back at work and really, really need to finish my PhD – as I just accepted a PostDoc job starting in August (I am super excited about the job and think I can do it very well but at some point this next year I will need to have the title for it).

This does mean a couple of things for my blog though: I cannot even attempt to write reviews for everything I read (which I have not been doing for about two years anyways) and this will be the part of my hobbies that is least likely to survive. I will for now change the way I do my wrap ups to include mini impressions of the books I read and hopefully will be able to write at least this post each month.

Books I read in June:

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I began the month strong by finishing the absolutely incredible Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe (5 out of 5 stars): an impeccable researched and structured deep dive into the Sackler family (of OxyContin “fame) – my main takeaway is, as usual, capitalism is the worst and regulation is indeed not the enemy. The audiobook is read by the author himself which is always something I adore. Afterwards I listened to my chaotic buddy read: Brood by Jackie Polzin (4.5 out of 5 stars) – which has stuck and grown on me. It is a surprisingly gruesome story about a griefing woman and her chicken – and I loved her so much. She is prickly and sad and so sure of some things (and probably very wrong about them!) while being very anxious and unsure about other things. She is a near perfect character. Afterwards I fell even deeper into my reading slump, as I went back to work and got just hammered with things to do. Thankfully, I still have some Ilona Andrews’ books to read, which is what I did. I inhaled the first two books in their Innkepper Chronicles Clean Sweep (4 out of 5 stars) and Sweep in Peace (3.5 out of 5 stars) – they are just my “break in case of reading slump” authors. At least once a year they manage to ignite my love for reading anew. This is technically the third series of theirs that I am reading and while it is not my favourite, it has all the things I love about their work: great world building, brilliant characters with wonderful interactions, main characters that are just my kind of overly powerful women – and an emotional core that hits me as a surprise again and again. I also finally DNFed A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion which had been sitting at 62% read on my Kindle for six months. This is not a bad book by any means but I found it unfocussed and for me at least the mix between coming-of-age and thriller did not work. I thought the coming-of-age elements, even if they followed expected story beats (the skinny dipping scene, the awkward first kiss, the falling out with friends, the fights with sisters), worked beautifully due to how expertly the main character is drawn. The thriller-y elements on the other hand did neither work for me nor kept me interested enough to keep reading.

Favourite of the Month:

Empire of Pain was as brilliant as I expected it to be.

Stats(ish):

I finished four books, three written by women and one by a man. One book was non fiction, one fiction and two can broadly be categorized as Urban Fantasy (albeit with scifi explanations).

Currently Reading:

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What I should be getting to next:

I should be trying to finally finish some of the books I have been reading for literal months – and stop adding more and more books to my currently reading shelf. 10 books is just ridiculous!

The Mid Year Freak Out Book Tag 2021

As every year, I am surprised that the year is already half way over. I have had a pretty bad reading year so far but not doing this tag felt too sad.

Question 1 – The best book you’ve read so far in 2021

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By far the two best books I read were by authors whose previous books I also five-starred (I am sure there is a lesson here that I will, as always, forget as soon as I post this). Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain is near perfect: its structure is clever, his use of repetition makes it easy to follow without becoming boring, and his research is impeccable. The Sacklers are the worst though – it took me a while to settle on a least favourite Sackler but I think I got there in the end (It’s Richard). Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is just a perfect book, no word is wasted, no idea left unexplored. I so wish for it to win the Women’s Prize.

Wrap Up May 2021

I had such hopes for this month – but my reading was erratic at best and I have not finished a single fantasy book – even though I planned to prioritize them.

Books I read in May:

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1. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: 2.5 out of 5 stars
2. Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh: 3 out of 5 stars
3. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters: 4 out of 5 stars

Favourite of the Month:

The best book I finished was definitely Detransition, Baby – I adored many things about it and I am a bit miffed that it didn’t make the Women’s Prize shortlist. I loved its exploration of gender and motherhood, Reese is such a wonderfully realized character that made my heart hurt – it is not perfectly structured and sometimes a bit too sprawling for me, but what an excellent, excellent cast of characters.

Stats(ish):

I finished three books, all of them fiction written by women.

Currently Reading:

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What I should be getting to next:

I do not even know how to get my reading mojo back – and I will be going back to work in two weeks and my tiny reading time will probably disappear completely. The only thing I reliably get to is audiobook listening, so I will probably be switching near completely to that format.

One thing I do know, however, and that is that I will be reading Brood by Jackie Polzin with the possibly most chaotic group chat I will ever be part of. I am excited! (and the audiobook is only about 5 hours long, so I should manage to actually read the book in June.)

May 2021 TBR: It’s Wyrd and Wonder!

IMAGE CREDITS: images by Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com

May is Wyrd and Wonder month – and I have at least tried to participate for the last three years and I am very excited to be part of it again. Wyrd and Wonder is a month long fantasy readathon hosted by Lisa of Dear Geek Place, imyril of There’s Always Room for One More, and Jorie of Jorie Loves a Story. I particularly like the sense of community this event gives me and that I find new people to follow every year.

I am famously not great at following TBRs and my mood reading often leads me down different paths than I anticipated but I am very excited about fantasy at the moment and hope this’ll keep for this month at least. I have some super exciting books I could potentially read and I genuinely hope to be more active this year. My daughter will maybe start day care soon (depending on how the covid cases in my hometown develop), so I might be able to sit down and blog at least a few times this month. I might also be able to read an actual physical book with pages and everything.

I am currently in the middle of three fantasy books which I am going to prioritize. I am enjoying all three of them but especially For The Wolf which is just as good as the blurb made it sound and at the moment on track to be a five star read for me. Dead Witch Walking is fun and the first in a long series – and I would love to get stuck in a longer series again, filling the Kate Daniels and Psy-Changeling shaped holes in my heart. Big Bad Wolf is a lot darker than I anticipated but I am loving the world building if sadly not the romance.

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Below is an additional list of books I am excited about that I could potentially read this month. Looking at these books makes me wonder why I ever read anything else but fantasy. I will probably prioritize The Bone Shard Daughther by Andrea Stewart as it is the group read and Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse – have no excuse to not have already read that and I am certain I will adore it.

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Wrap Up April 2021

Apparently I will now forever only finish two books a month. I exaggerate but it does feel this way.

Books I read in April:

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1. Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough: 4.5 out of 5 stars
2. Eat The Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza: 4 out of 5 stars

Favourite of the Month:

Before the Twitter Thing, I would probably have said Leaving Isn’t The Hardest Thing – but that was a very unpleasant experience and I cannot divorce my feelings from that. I thought Eat The Mouth that Feeds You was an excellent collection, let down by a couple of stories that didn’t work for me.

Stats(ish):

I read two books, both by women. One non-fiction title and short story collection.

Currently Reading:

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What I should be getting to next:

I should focus on the books I am already reading an try to finally finish one of the eleven (!) books I am in the middle of. May is Wyrd and Wonder though and I am planning on prioritizing fantasy accordingly. I also hope to make some progress in the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlisted books I am planning on reading. Let’s hope my reading pace picks up!

Wrap Up March 2021

Was this my worst reading month since I started my blog? Absolutely. I could not get myself to read when I found the time to do so and I did not have much time to read to begin with.

Books I read in March:

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1. Real Estate by Deborah Levy: 4 out of 5 stars
2. Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan: 3.5 out of 5 stars (review)

I also DNF-ed two books (Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron and The Conductors by Nicole Glover)- I read so little I really could not make myself continue with books I wasn’t enjoying a lot.

Favourite of the Month:

I guess Real Estate by default. I read the whole Living Autobiography sequence this year and found the experience really rewarding – but haven’t quite yet found the words to talk about the books yet.

Stats(ish):

I read two books, both by women. One non-fiction title and one fiction novel.

Currently Reading:

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What I should be getting to next:

I should definitely not be getting to anything new but rather work on finally finishing the books I am already reading. This is not my best reading mode – as I have talked about before, four books is my sweet spot.