Bookish Thoughts

In the sixth Incryptid book, Seanan McGuire finally shines the spotlight on the youngest of the Price children, Antimony. I was half-worried going into this book. I love Verity, and the two sisters are huge rivals with very little in common. But McGuire did an excellent job of making Antimony interesting and sympathetic. And the relationship she has with Verity is fascinating now that there are two sides to it. The bulk of this book also takes place at a carnival, which made me really want to go to one. We took Gavin to a few last summer, and it was a lot of fun taking him on the rides and seeing the sights. We knew we wouldn't be able to take him to any this summer, but reading this book made me really sad to be missing that. I hope we're able to go to a few next summer. The next two books are also from Antimony's point of view, and I'm more excited than ever to get to them. I can't wait to read more of her story and see how she deals with all the fallout from ...

This one so obviously comes after The Black Tides of Heaven  I'm not sure why they were initially marketed as "read in any order". Though it could be because they are very different books. While the first charts the twin's journey from childhood to adulthood (from the point of view of Akeha), this is a much more contained story that takes place over just a few days when Mokoya is about 40 years old. As the story opens, Mokoya is still deep in grief due to the death of her daughter four years prior. She has fled from her old life as a Prophet and the wife of the Head Abbot, unable to deal with the pain of her old life. Now she's out in the desert with a small team hunting a naga that seems to be heading for the city where Akeha lives. There's a bunch of action in this book, along with some fun political intrigue. But at it's heart, this is a story about grief and letting go and moving on. It's about taking back control of your life and finding new w...

A neighbor loaned this book to me back before Christmas, right before I received a huge influx of new books I wanted to read (alongside a big backlog of books I wanted to read). With fifty books waiting for me on my shelf, one that I'd never heard of wasn't really a priority. Even if it had won a fancy award. But in keeping with this month's theme, and because I was starting to feel really guilty about not reading it, I finally picked it up. Honestly, this was the most boring book I've slogged through in a really long time. Sure it's clever and meta, which I generally love. But there's no shortage of clever, meta books that are things I'm actually interested in. Less  is essentially about a man having a midlife crisis. And I just couldn't make myself care. The midlife crisis takes the form of a trip around the world. Less has just learned that his boyfriend of nine years is marrying the man he left him for. Not wanting to endure the pity of his frien...

A couple of years ago, JY Yang burst on to the SFF scene, releasing two books in the same day. Though everyone initially said that the two could be read in any order, fans quickly reached the consensus that this one came first. Which makes sense to me. It starts on the day the twins are born and outlines the major events in their lives as they grow. This book actually focuses on Akeha, which took me a bit to figure out. In this world, all children are considered gender neutral, and they choose to become male or female (or neither) as part of their coming of age. Thus, all children are referred to as "they". And in a book told from a third-person limited perspective about twins who are close enough to share a telepathic connection...well I had to do some mental gymnastics to figure out whether any given pronoun referred to Akeha, Mokoya, or the two of them together. But after a few chapters I settled in and the rest of the story was easy to follow. (It became even easier onc...

After I finished Oathbringer , I was having a hard time deciding what to read next. How do you follow up a 1200+ page epic? But then I remembered that it was Pride month and I had this book on my shelf and things spiraled a little bit. So buckle up for a month's worth of LGBTQ+ reads, starting with this queer historical romance. I've read enough London-based historical romance at this point to recognize the trappings. The dukes and marquesses and social expectations, the balls and dinners and chaperones. There's a framework within which all of these romances must operate. And this was a fun twist on it. Charity is masquerading as her deceased employer and friend, Robert Selby in the hopes of helping his younger sister find a husband before anyone realizes that Robert is dead and the dowry disappears. They scrape together enough money to spend a season in London, and Charity exaggerates an old family connection to get her foot in the door with an influential marquess, Al...

Sometimes you manage to pick up a book exactly when you need to read it, and everything clicks in to place for a little bit. I started with the acknowledgements, conveniently located at the beginning of the book. Sanderson ends his multi-page thank you letter with a mantra from the book: "Journey before destination." It was just what I needed to read at that moment. As heavy as this book is, I felt lighter while I was reading it. Like it was carrying some of my burden for me. This series is all about deeply flawed people dealing imperfectly with impossible situations. This book focuses on Dalinar, who has done a number of unspeakably horrible things. As we enter his flashbacks and learn more about his life, his relationship with his first wife, and what finally pushed him to try and become a better person, he's taking that exact same journey. He'd had several of his memories removed, which allowed him to leave in something like peace for several years. But now he...

Rebecca Solnit always makes me feel better about the world at large. Her essays deal with heavy, depressing subjects. These latest are all about various crimes that seem baked into the very DNA of America. But she's also always able to pinpoint how things are getting better, and give me hope that things will continue to get better. The crimes Solnit discusses in this book aren't the sort that are traditionally talked about as crimes. The longest essay by far is called "Death by Gentrification" and it uses a case study to dive in to the ways the historic neighborhoods are being broken up and becoming more dangerous for the minorities who have always lived there, because of a perceived threat on the part of the new, white, wealthy residents and the system that backs them up. She also looks at the ways various voices have been silenced over America's history, the things we choose to celebrate and memorialize. And of course it all comes back to Trump and the backw...