I owe this Wednesday Reading Meme a debt of considerable weight!

Back in January of this year, I bought myself a Reading Journal ( Read more... )

So I have to thank this meme and the other people writing their weekly reading to share - it has kept me from disparaging myself and let me realize that I have indeed not been ideal, even when I was tired and a bit overwhelmed by life.


With no further ado and leaving the lily entirely ungilded!

What I've Read
A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland - I had pre-ordered this book because I like everything this author writes, and I was not disappointed! Our main character is a prince with an anxiety disorder who has to figure out a plot against his sister's kingdom, while also proving to himself ( and his deliciously upright and decent bodyguard) that he's not actually a villain or a coward. It's very gay, it will make you feel things about the debasement of currency, there's a little bit of magic and there's a lot of focus on fealty as romance. I adored it. And the author wrote a (spoilers! full of spoilers!) coda on AO3 - what spring does with the cherry trees by Ariaste

The Idiot's Array by Ashcroft_Writes (160K) - Star Wars Clone Wars Era - Cad Bane/Obi-Wan Kenobi - After the Rako Hardeen arc, Cad Bane escapes prison and takes Obi-Wan with him in a bid to fight Dooku and prove to Obi-Wan (and perhaps himself) that he's not wrong when he sees the Jedi's dissatisfaction with his life. This has some exceptional poetry in it , and a card game as a recurring motif in their relationship, and fic is really interested in Cad Bane as a character with an interior life and morals that, while really not normal, are still viable. Also, good sex! I enjoyed the hell out of it. I'm going to read the sequel, Homeworld Elegy.

Like a Hinge, Like a Wing by Ultrageekatlarge -(56K) Batman, focused on Tim Drake - "The problem is that Tim’s spent the past month or so slowly getting murdered." This fic loves watching characters deal with trauma with compassion and realism, I'm here for it!

What I'm Reading

What I'll Read Next

Homeworld Elegy by Ashcroft_Writes
Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage, and Survival by Velma Wallis

I feel like I owe myself a more comprehensive write up about the Hugos, so I might do that once I get a breather on it. I liked most of what I read but my goals were lofty and I am reasonably pleased with what I did accomplish.

What I've Read

I have read so, so much Star Wars: Clone Wars era fanfic this week and particularly while on vacation - it's going to be a bit of a slog to write them all here but I'll try!

Those Who Can by K_R_Closson - I read her always-a-girl underpaid teacher Obi-Wan who goes to teach clones troopers on Kamino - it's brilliant.

Thirty-One Sons, Thirteen Moons by sual - Fairy tale version of Cody has to sleep with Jedi witch Obi Wan to break a curse that spits out a new son of Jango Fett every year. Features 31 sons and some dang fun writing.

A Slow Fall Towards Grace by glimmerglanger - A hard read in places, but a great review of Obi-Wan's expanded universe and Clone Wars history, with the addition of some omegaverse tropes. Obi-Wan just... sincerely believes that he is completely unloveable, in the face to Cody's steadfast adoration. Love this.

Transactional States by glimmerglanger (Archive Restricted) - Jango/Obi-Wan. Sex slave Obi-Wan, and the slow redemption of Jango Fett after Galidraan. Just... excellent depiction of flawed, injured people choosing to be better.

Triple Zero (Republic Commando) by Karen Traviss - more in the same series as Hard Contact. There is a little less clarity of purpose here - Traviss introduces a bunch of new characters and the book gets weirdly heterosexual. I also realized that there's a lack of dialogue tags and characters speak in similar voices, so I often had to double back to figure out who was saying which lines. That said, I'm going to continue in this series.


What I'm Reading Now

Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott – Book Group - Plugging along with this until the next week book clubl.

Make Your Bed (Lie in It) by glimmerglanger

What I'm Reading Next

True Colors by Karen Traviss
Never Say You Can't Survive
Hugo short stories and nonfiction works

What I've Read

Finished The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente - A Hugo Best Novella Nominee- this really stuck the landing. I have bounced off of Space Opera because it was so dense but this was really great and the shorter length really worked for me. Tetley is really kind of fascinating because she lives in the absolute worst possible timeline and yet she's convinced that here world and her life really matter. 

What I'm Reading

The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry - CM Waggoner - book club - I'm just past the halfway point and I'm delighted by how much plot this book has decided to lean into. Delly is making such interesting mistakes! The cast is basically just all women, which I kind of love for an adventure, and the world building is fascinating. My book group had some interesting question about the details of the world building. 

What I'll Read Next

Far Sector, Master of Djinn, Elder Race - all hugo nominations, all physical library books. 
  Also out from the library, I have the Bedlam Stacks, For the Wold, and Golden Age by Naomi Novik, a Worthy Opponent by Katee Robert (more Captain Hook), the Return of the Thief as an audiobook. 

Work in Progress - I am actually between projects! I finished the Sock Madness round 2 Plaid Pocket - https://www.ravelry.com/projects/kitewithfish/plaid-pocket-socks Since I'm not actually competing this time, I changed the heel and left off the double-knit pockets. I already know how to double knit and I thought plaid was interesting enough to leave it more visible on the leg.

Reading Meme!

What I've Read:
Queen of Attolia & King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner - I re-read both of these as audiobooks, and their praises deserve to be sung! I think these two are my favorites of this series.

Over All the Earth by Alexandra Rowland I think I need to re-read this when I'm in the right frame of mind. I felt a bit let down by the resolution of the main character's fear proving to be just...kind of not scary after all. I liked it as a visit to the continued adventures of Ylfing from Rowland's chant series. Rowland has recently done an interesting

What I'm Reading
A Conspiracy of Kings - Megan Whalen Turner. This is technically a re-read by audiobook, but, as I only read it the one time, I am discovering a whole lot of stuff I had forgotten. In particular, the second half of the story is proving a surprise to me.


Still reading Melusine, Nightmare Alley, King's Dragon

What I'll Read Next

Thicks as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner - the only debate here is, I think I'll need to read it in text form before listening to it via audiobook.
The other books in the Melusine series!
The Four Profound Weaves by RB Lemberg.

I have read almost no fanfic recently and I feel vaguely like I am returning to my childhood of hyper-reading and literally always having a book somewhere around me. 

Work in Progress

Sock Madness 16 continues! Tho I failed to get it in under the wire, I have finished the Engelkristall socks https://www.ravelry.com/projects/kitewithfish/engelkristall annnnnd they don't fit. I'm shopping around for a friend with slightly larger feet than mine.

I'm more than 25% on the first round Ipomoea sock https://www.ravelry.com/projects/kitewithfish/ipomoea-socks - Since I am a cheerleader, I don't have to stick strictly to the pattern, and I plan to start sock 2 with some modifications - mostly, I'm adding moar beads, because I think they look pretty cool and I've gotten good at stringing them.

What I've Read
It's actually been a pretty light week for reading.

I finished In Other Lands, which was delightful to listen to. I had actually first read it back in the days when it was just a fun writing exercise on Sarah Rees Brennan's journal, and I will always have a soft spot for it.

I tried reading the Assassin's Apprentice and it just dragged - I like Robin Hobb but I was just not engaged and found the narrator a bit tiresome.

I also re-read some of Helenish's works - Theft of Assets, Destruction of Property was, as always, a touching vision of recovery. Looking is a new one, Teen Wolf, and also kind of soft and wonderful.

Edit: Just after posting this, the library gave me the audiobook for All Systems Red by Martha Wells, which I adored when I first read it and adore now. Murderbot has the whole Socially Awkward protagonist gift that I so love. I really need to go and read everything by Martha Wells. 

What I'm Reading
It Takes Two to Tumble - Cat Sebastien, read by Joel Leslie. I'm close to finishing this rather delightful little story - a gruff sea captain and a kind clergyman with an unconventional family have great chemistry together and bond over the sea captain's unruly children. Dyslexia! Family secrets! Women side characters who have hopes and dreams for themselves! A rope swing!

Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes - I'm trying to finish this, but it really is YA. It's churlish to resent a book for being in a genre, but by far the elements I like the least of this books are the parts that mark is strongest as YA - the scenes in the high school, and the romance with the two brothers. I'm also not that interested in the mystery - the comparisons to The Westing Game are not, so far, earned. But I'm only halfway and there's plenty of book to read.

What I'll Read Next

I completely forgot about this after downloading it but I waaant it.
Five Times Frederick Wentworth Had the Breath Knocked Out of Him On the Ice (and one time he let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding) by AMarguerite 

I have Good Omens as an audiobook, as well as some Holly Black and Martha Wells and other things. I really need to find a few more audiobooks to have lined up - but I also have a new novella by Alexandra Rowland to read so, lots to get into!

Work in Progress

My current sock project, Scylla in Malabrigo Candome, nears completion - I have picked a fancy slipped stitch form of ribbing to complement the slipped stitch pattern. I'm ignoring the charted instructions with some glee to add extra yarn overs in the rows before the slipped stitches so that the fabric doesn't tug itself out of alignment. While I love the yarn, it's knitting up quite dark and it's a challenge to get the level of contrast I want on the slipped stitches, but I'm very pleased with how soft it is and how well it's knitting up. 

Reading Meme!

What I've Read

I've finished House of Leaves! (Mark Danielewski) This book was a TOME, but a fascinating read. I think it has some fame for being just a very weird book, which it is, and I felt like the ending was more of a fizzle than a bang, but that might be because I read a lot of the Appendices and the Whalestoe Letters as they became relevant to the book, rather than at the end. I really enjoyed it as a deeply impressive act of typesetting - which sounds like faint praise but it's really not. This book weaves the physical reality of the book into the narrative, in some straightforward ways and in some deeply strange ones. It's definitely horror - it left me with a somewhat abiding sense of unease and distrust towards reality around me - and it's a book that cries out for annotation. I really enjoyed watching the book talk to itself and then commenting on that in the extremely large margins. 

I suppose I have a bit of personal myth built around this book.  I have an emailed library notice from 2009 that confirms I ordered it from a public library for pick-up, which means I specifically requested it. I think that I found it first in my college library, but I just can't be sure - the only edition that I have ever seen was published in 2000, and I definitely did not encounter it before high school.   I have tried to pick it up and read it so many times that I eventually bought the book because I knew I would never get thru it in the timeframe of a library check-out. But it's still been ten years and I have a vivid and enduring memory of getting to a very early part of the novel, where the main characters measure a home's interior wall over and over with greater tools and increasing precision, only to confirm again and again that they are encountering an impossible thing - the interior wall is larger than the exterior wall, the house is not interested in the limits of physical space, and they are encountering something that is uninterested in conforming to human perception. And every time! I would get to that part and bail! It was too much!

I suspect that the last calendar year's focus on horror films has really helped me get into the headspace where I could pick this book up and actually finish it. 

I have also finished the much briefer but extremely creepy   Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a graphic novel that showed up at my house without me ordering it! I have no idea where this came from, though I recognize some of the comics, especially "His Face All Red" from its rounds on Tumblr. The book is excellent and deeply weird. I highly recommend it, but maybe not late at night. 

What I'm Reading

I started and then put down Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. The premise is quite charming - aging rockers in a fantasy world where a 'band' is not a group of musicians but a team of fighters, and the main character, Clay, is legitimately charming. But I keep bouncing off the random casually misogynists asides. They are not bad as, say, Jim Butcher and his weird fetish for sexy teens, but just... it's very clear that this is a man with no interest in women as characters trying to write his female side characters in a not sexist way, and landing flat. And he's included a fair number of women side characters! He definitely thinks that having his main characters robbed by a team of unsexy women is a plus! 

I'm still delighted by the tone and the concept - it's got an 'inspired by Terry Pratchett' vibe in terms of really exploring the edges of what it means to do "battle of the bands but they have swords" reality, so I'm going to go back to it! But, oof, those little grace notes about ugly prostitutes or pretty women being sell outs are just... not my vibe, my dude. 

I have picked up The Missing Page by Cat Sebastien, I am about 20 pages in and it's already delightful and making me want to read the previous novel again for the sheer joy of being in an excellently written mystery. Also, I love the fact that we immediately get to revisit the Cottage Lesbians from the previous book - it's a soft and gentle comfort to think that in every era of history, we have always found each other. 

I'm also reading a Temeraire novel-length fanfic "Terror in War, Ornament in Peace" by WerewolvesAreReal, in which William Laurence makes some different decisions after the end of the canonical events of Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik, and we see a lot more of Napoleon Bonaparte. 



What I'll Read Next
I'm going to finish Light from Uncommon Stars after this book club meeting (I hate to read ahead)
Finishing The Missing Page
Some By Virtue Fall will be out next week!
Need to do more SPN Queer Rewatch Reading - TV Horror chapters 3-4
I bought Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men because I adored reading Epistemology of the Closet 
I'm vaguely interested to see what Mark Danielewski has done since House of Leaves - there are some interesting ebooks of his floating around.
Might hunt down more of Emily Carroll's digital works because her wikipedia pages suggests that some of them are interactive in a way that can't be booked.  

What I've Read

Neon Yang's The Descent of Monsters (Tensorate #3) & The Ascent to Godhood (Tensorate #4)
These quite short novellas are both the most experimental entries in the Tensorate series.  Monsters is a great epistolary detective story with a new character who is outside the central band of rebels established in the previous two novels. Chuwan is an investigator for the Protectorate who's been assigned to discover when went wrong at a site for secret experimental magic, and gradual discovers that she's being asked to hide something. It's just as fucked up as the rest of these books would suggest. Bonus Rider!

Godhood takes off from the end of Monsters, and it looks forwards and backwards at the same time. The scheme that Chuwan uncovered in the last novella has come to fruition but it's in the background of this book - it focuses instead of the rise of the Protector Sanao Hekate and her vicious reform of the crumbling empire she inherited, as viewed by the servant she molded to her service. It's got excellent vibes about mourning someone who betrayed you.

Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi, Vol.1
Ok, this is just a fun book, with goofy characters and a brisk plot and lot and lots of tropey fun. I definitely enjoyed this more than The Untamed on the level of handling the flashbacks. The Untamed seems to have run all the flashbacks together into a 30+ episode story inside their main present-day plot, but that just felt absurdly ponderous to me. This books drops the flashbacks into the present plot in much more engaging small chunks.

The Untamed also suffered for cutting out the overt gayness of the characters in Grandmaster - there are times when characters act and react in ways that only make sense if they are open about the fact that at least one character is overtly gay - leaving that information out makes some interactions incomprehensible. There's a gay hole (heh) in the center of the Untamed, and this book filled it (hehehe!). I really wish I had been able to snag a copy of the unofficial translation before it was taken down. 


What I'm Reading
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
I've picked this book up again - I'm feeling the academic tone of the text, and this is one book that just BEGS you to write in the margins as you read it. Narrative layers on top of layers that just make the whole thing fascinating and interwoven and direly creepy. I am definitely jumping around in the text to read the stuff in the Appendices as they become relevant. 

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
For book club - I have just barely started this but people were very enthused with this choice so I'm going to hope for the best.

TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen by Stacey Abbott, Lorna Jowett
For the Great Queer Supernatural Rewatch project - this is more an overview text on how horror TV has evolved over time. Not super engaging, but important background!


What I'll Read Next
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll - I received this book from Amazon without a note -  I didn't order it! And it just arrived one day! Graphic novel. 
Sweet Disorder by Rose Lerner (recommended via tiktok's Fat Girls in Fiction reading club) 
The Missing Page by Cat Sebastian (comes out 1/18/2022)
Some by Virtue Fall by Alexandra Rowland (comes out 1/25/2022)

(A computer crash ate the last attempt to put this all down and that is something I am trying to avoid this time!)

So, I have been thinking about doing a reading notebook this year - I kind of want to be a bit more deliberate about writing down what I have read, and what I thought about it.

I fell down a rabbit hole last night on Youtube, watching videos made by bullet journal influencers (a thing that exists!) about their own book journals and the elaborate art projects and data collection that they are planning on using to set lofty goals for their reading in the new year. Bullet journalling seems to have turned into art journals in the last few years, as far as I can tell? There is watercolors and scrapbooking and lots and lots of washi tape. I last checked in to the bullet journal system in about January of 2020 bc I did want to be a little more thoughtful about things, and I've modified it enough that it's hardly like the minimalist lists that were part of the initial structure. It is quite useful to have some mechanisms to check out what you're working on and if it's working out for you.

That said, I have some clear thoughts about what I do NOT want in a reading journal:
- Annuality - I am not making a reading journal for 2022, I am just setting up a journal to write down what I am reading and how I think about it, it will not turn over in 2023 automatically.
-Star based rating systems - I might use one as a joke, but I think they are a bit dumb.
-Goals - I am not trying to hit 50 books or whatever. I might count things up at the end of the year, I might not, it hardly matters. I have Storygraph for stats if I really want them.

Things I do want:
-A Ravelry-like vibe - On Ravelry, you're working on your version of a project, with your needles and yarn, and while I see lots of people's other projects based on a similar pattern, it's not about a competition or making the socks for an audience. It's for me to wear them. The reading journal is for me, an aide memoire.
-A way to track publishing - I am going to count fic over 50K as a book, so fic v. self published v. traditional publishing is something I want to track.
-A To Be Read section - I keep buying books and forgetting to read them or getting distracted. I want some structure there to keep hold of things.
-Books are entered as they are started - I want to record what books I start and don't finish or set aside. Those are also interesting.
-Short book reviews - maybe a few sentences, very simple and breezy, about books that I do finish and want to talk about.
-genre - some way of tracking that

There is a part of me that is honestly just as interested in writing up all the media I enjoy in a similar way - not just which books I have read, but which movies and tv series and when I watched them and what I think of them. That seems like it might be a big goal to enter into all at once, tho, so I am going to put a hold on that for now.