finished Orwell’s Roses, which explores George Orwell’s context and writings. As someone who was perhaps too influenced by “Politics and the English Language”, I found it really interesting to see how he looked at both the problems as he saw them in the world, but also on the things he found meaningful and joyful. That the future needs to include (as the old suffragette saying went), bread, but also roses.
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I read that book in January and absolutely adored it. It was so good.
(I picked up Animal Farm off the shelf as a 9 year old and was like “dad, what’s totalitarianism?” so I feel you on Orwell as a foundational author)
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Otherlands: Journeys in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems by Thomas Halliday
the world is old y’all, and life has gone through so much change
anyways, if you really want to feel how ancient and how much time and stuff has happened, this is a good book. I’m going to assume the science is decent, the author mostly went with certain ideas and doesn’t discuss which were controversial takes. Dense, I reread many pages (or that might just be my current brain capacity - the words themselves weren’t complicated, and it was clearly written, I just had trouble remembering what my eyes had just gone over).
I liked how it started more recently with a world that looked pretty familiar and then continents and animals started looking odd and eventually completely unrecognizable.
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Catching up on reads…
Picked up Spelunking Through Hell, Seanan McGuire’s newest InCryptid book, at the library and thought it was a fun read. The kickoff event seemed a little farfetched and something that Alice should have picked up on a while back on her own given the hints that kept getting dropped (or possibly the two characters who straight up said ‘yeah, we told you that’), but it’s not like the other books haven’t been clear that she leans towards the obsessive so I can kind of see how that made her influence-able.
Although trying to sort out timeline stuff
It seems like Alice is very familiar with Jorlacs and cuckoos, including how the operate and differ, and has been for quite a while which seems weird since as I recall some (most?) of that didn’t come to the rest of the family until Sarah and company’s trip. So did she get a crash course very recently and then connect it to some ongoing stuff in her life, or has she just not bothered to talk to anyone about anything cuckoo-related in 50 years? Option 2 seems strange with two cuckoos in the family, but maybe it fits.
Also read A Map of Days and Conference of Birds (books 4 and 5 in Ransom Riggs Peculiar Children series), and thanks to whoever pointed out that the series had continued past book 3 because I thought it had ended there. I think this is the only young adult series I’ve kept reading past about book 2 and I like how he’s expanded the work/world
Especially
adding another young American peculiar new to the world and veering away from the whole transferred-love-from-your-grandfather storyline
Thanks to various libraries book 6 from Ransom Riggs is on the way along with a bunch of anthologies to fill in the rest of the short stories in the InCryptid universe (I’ve read everything available on Seanan McGuire’s website but hadn’t gotten around to requesting the various anthologies that contain the ones she can’t put up before) so hoping to have some new stuff in the next couple weeks since I’ve been doing a lot of re-reading lately.
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I just finished the Jasmine Throne which I feel like might be enjoyed by people here. It’s an epic fantasy set in a heavily India-inspired empire, with lots of cool plant-based magic and a slightly steamy romance between the two female main characters. From the cover I was expecting it to be a little YA-ish but it really wasn’t - it’s a little dark, but I really enjoyed it!
It’s first in a trilogy with the second coming out this summer so if you are terrible at unresolved endings like me (it’s not a super cliffhanger-y ending but it does leave a lot open) you may want to wait!
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Ooh, yes please!
Took a break from the cleaning/packing I’m supposed to be doing for some reading. The first couple anthologies with Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid short stories stories not available online in them arrived the other day along with Simon R. Green’s A Matter of Death and Life.
Westward Weird had the meeting of Frances Brown and Jonathan Healy (The Flower of Arizona) and was a fun read…the other stories in the book were quick too, although I’d say they trend more steampunk than anything else and none of them caught my eye to fill in a bingo slot with a new author.
Games Creatures Play had one of Antimony’s stories (Jammed) about an incident from her roller derby days, and it was nice to see a little more of cousin Elsie since I think she’s gotten less time in the books than anyone except Uncle Drew (although now that I think about it, there are now stories about Alice/Thomas and back and also then the Verity/Alex/Antimony generation, but a gap at Kevin and Jane’s generation. Anyway the book also had short stories with characters from Charlaine Harris’ Midnight, Texas series (technically Sookie Stackhouse, too, but I preferred Midnight of the two series) and Mercedes Lackey’s SERRAted Edge books. More fantasy than sci-fi, but one of the authors (Scott Sigler) looks promising so trying a couple of his more sci-fi/technothriller types.
A Matter of Death and Life was…kind of annoying/disappointing. Green tends to lean more on worldbuilding than character building, but in this case
Summary
The world is awfully similar to the Nightside books, the main character and designated love interest are awfully similar to the corresponding characters in said Nightside books, and the two characters with by far the best chemistry in the first book were given almost no scenes together in this one. One of them wrote himself out by basically wandering off (seriously), and the other married a random love interest in Vegas about three days after they met, despite the book doing everything it could up until that point to establish how untrustworthy she is. I’d like to say that Green was trying to set up for a third book in the series, but the way the book concluded I really think that was supposed to be the happy ending. Kind of sad.
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The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
Last Exit by Max Gladstone
Spoilers for all three
all about hidden worlds
weird how so many books atm have the big tech startup founder as the antagonist eh?
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Just read and enjoyed “The Last Thing He Told Me” by Laura Dave. I will look up her other books as this is the first thing I’ve read of hers.
I’m late to this - but I finally picked up the Kiss Quotient last week, and now I’ve devoured all three Helen Hoang’s novels and my house is a disaster with piles of laundry to do because I’ve abandoned everything else.
No regrets.
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This has been on my to-read list for ages. I should really get around to it.
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Just finished the Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels - by India Holton and I think it would be right up some folks’ alleys. A society of lady witch pirates does battle against an evil male pirate who wants to take over England and force all women to be homemakers and nothing more. Along the way our plucky heroine falls in love. Reminds me a lot of the Veronica Speedwell books but way kookier. I could see a cover blurb calling it a rollicking good time.
https://bookshop.org/books/the-wisteria-society-of-lady-scoundrels/9780593200162
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The Queens jubilee book list has come out, I havent read any from the last decade, and havent read most of the list
So may add some to my future reading lists
The God of Small Things to Shuggie Bain: the Queen’s jubilee book list | Books | The Guardian
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The good:
Cal Flynn - Islands of Abandonment: Life in a Post Human Landscape, didn’t go where I thought it would, would love to talk with others about it or hear some good podcasts on the topic.
Jordan Ifueko, Raybearer - YA, enjoyable & challenging
Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop, by the same person who wrote Red, White and Royal Blue, a paranormal adjacent f-f romance, super sweet in an alternate NYC 2020
The fine
Michael Hyatt, Your Best Year Ever - not very good, but had the interesting pattern of each section starting off really badly, and getting better towards the end. Similarly, the final few chapters were better than the first few, which is very unusual. I made many notes, I disagreed with a lot, but it made me think
The bland
Daniel Lamarre, Balancing Acts - by a guy who ran Cirque du Soleil for the last two decades, interesting but a bit too self aggrandizing, even when admitting mistakes
Andrew Hallam, Balance - I know lots of people really like Hallam, and I think he’s good as a podcast guest, but the book was lacking, and I wish half of it wasn’t recapping FIRE 101
The bad
Michael Clinton, Roar: Into the second half of your life (before it’s too late) - this one is actively bad and I hate finished it. Very self aggrandizing. No thoughts provoked beyond annoyance.
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Good reporting style, @plainjane!
Excellent:
Catherine Guildner - Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery. I listened to the audio book version, and it was great. The stories are blunt, but the people are uplifting, and the prose/narration is great. I was rapt.
Terrible:
Bill Perkins - Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life. I don’t actually object to the concept of balancing savings with life experiences. It’s a great idea. It’s more that I hated how Perkin emphasis on always centering oneself above all others, the consumerism that ran rampant in the narrative, and the self aggrandizement of his examples on when to spend.
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I haven’t read how to die… And I don’t plan on it, but I have played around with the idea behind it, from a different slant. If I will die at X age and want to live at a certain level until then, but don’t need anything after, what’s the minimum income and savings I need? Kind of establishing a floor to keep me fed and housed and bountifully entertained until I don’t need those things any more.
In theory I could then donate all the excess, but that makes my brain twitchy. I need a good buffer or I spiral and am sure I’ll die, alone and in a ditch.
It’s a different approach than the 4% rule, and gets me useful numbers and a good way of thinking about stuff.
I’m still not reading the book.
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Will try to catch up on the other library books sometime, but finished a couple more anthologies that include short stories from Seanan McGuire’s Incryptid Universe–
Press Start to Play is a collection of short stories based around video games and had an Antimony story Survival Horror that included a decent amount of Artie which was nice to see (although the whole thing kicked off with Artie being an idiot about online privacy which seems like a thing that wouldn’t happen). There were some other good short stories in this one, too, Roguelike (Marc Laidlaw) was kind of hilarious (pov character killed by vending machine is not the most ridiculous thing that happens, nor is it permanent, nor are either of those things spoilers), and I’ll probably try to pick up a couple more of his books and see if the humor carries into full novels.
Glitter and Mayhem is a collection based on…parties, and sex, I think? For the most part, anyway; the Seanan McGuire story was Bad Dream Girl and about Antimony and her time in roller derby, and it’s probably my favorite of the Antimony short stories thus far, but most of the other stories weren’t to my taste. A lot of LGBTQ+ characters which was nice, but since I’m the person who pointed out once upon a time that Sex Across the Prairie (more correctly known as Jean M. Auel’s Plains of Passage) would have been a good novella if they’d stopped having sex every three pages, I’m really not the right audience for a book where every other story includes light erotica.
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I just finished By The Book by Jasmine Guillory. I have enjoyed all of her books.
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Really liking Miriam Toews’ Women Talking. Lots to consider re: forgiveness, community, honor.