Hello, Friday! First Lines Friday is a feature on my blog in which I post the first lines from a book I am interested in reading, either a new release or a backlist title! For the next several Fridays, I will be featuring titles I am going to hopefully read as part of my 12 Decades/12 Months/12 Books challenge (#12decades12books). I read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde when I was sixteen and found an old beat-up copy in a local used bookstore, and I remember being so entranced with it that I still haven’t stopped thinking about it. When I found it in a little free library, I grabbed it and have been waiting for the right moment to read it again. Now that it’s been half my life ago, I want to revisit it and see how I think about it now.
Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. ‘I incline to Cain’s heresy,’ he used to say quaintly; ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’ In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.
What books have you read a decade ago that you still think about today? Why do you think they’ve stuck with you?
In a near future where citizens are subject to the mandatory blood draw, government phlebotomist Willa Wallace witnesses an event that makes her question her whole world.To recover from a cataclysmic war, the Harvest was created to pass blood to those affected by radiation.
But this charitable act has led to a society segregated entirely by blood type. Patriot thanks and rewards your generous gift based on the compatibility of your donation, meaning that whoever can give to the most, gets the most back. While working as a reaper for the draw, Willa chances upon an idea to resurrect an obsolete collection technique that could rebalance the city.
But in her quest to put this in motion, she instead uncovers a secret that threatens her entire foundations…
Chris Panatier’s The Phlebotomist is a wild dystopian ride that took a turn I was not expecting but by which I was completely thrilled. It starts out as a Bladerunner-esque dystopia in which people must sell their blood to Patriot, the government, in order to survive and to help those in the Grey Zone, an area suffering from the aftermath of bombardment. This differs from the usual dystopian fare in that the main character is a grandmother, and I truly love seeing older characters in the spotlight. Yes, the younger ones can be fun, but having the experience of life while also learning that you don’t know as much about the role you play in society is such a refreshing thing for me to see.
If you’re bothered by blood and medical terminology, definitely be aware that this has a lot of it. It’s so well done that even I was feeling a bit squeamish at some of the scenes, but I think that added to the grim reality of selling blood every month to the government for survival. I loved the medical definitions related to blood at the beginning of each chapter that kind of clued into where the story was going. Around a hundred pages in is where the twist happens, and it’s better if you don’t know what it is, because that’s when the puzzle of this future world starts piecing itself together and making its reveal. I went into this only knowing it was about a phlebotomist in a dystopian setting, and that twist got me excited to finish reading this to see how everything ended. All of the characters brought so much life to the story, and the unusual cast was another reason I was hooked, even though I knew no one could possibly be safe.
While this isn’t your typical gritty dystopia, I recognized a lot of throwbacks to dystopian favorites while also being fresh and innovative. There are a lot of WTF moments that pulsed throughout because it’s full of secrets, political intrigue, and class exploration that feels so relevant toward today, especially with COVID, society collapse, and its criticism of governments exacting control over their citizens. Because it blends together elements of so many different genres — thrillers, science fiction, mysteries, and dystopias — I think it’ll appeal to a wide variety of readers. It’s definitely a fun, fast read, and I hope someday there’s another book set in this universe! It reads as a standalone with enough of an open to add more.
Many thanks to Angry Robot for sending me a complimentary review copy! All opinions are my own.
I’m starting a new weekly feature on my blog called Bookends! It’ll be a little reflection on what I’ve read/watched/enjoyed (or not) over the past week, and I’ve seen a few other bloggers do something like this, either as a Wednesday post or a weekend post, and I thought “bookends” was a fitting title! As this is the first one, I’m mostly going to be playing catch up with what I’m currently reading and watching (and buying) and hopefully this will help keep me motivated to read a little bit more instead of just doomscrolling Twitter. Eventually, I want this to morph into a recollection of what I’ve been doing over the past week and eventually look back on it. I really just miss blogging and writing, and this ultimately is brought on by some livejournal-esque nostalgia.
CURRENTLY READING
I have a problem, but I constantly misplace books around my room/the house, usually by stacking other books on top until I forget I started them and then when I find them again, I dive right back in and pick up where I left off usually by rereading the last few pages.
During quarantine, my friend binge read the whole ACOTAR series and raved about it so much that I wanted to do it too, even though I’d never read the third and the novella, and now’s the perfect chance! I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but I am finding more and more that I like romance in a lot of flavors to help with this current climate.
I also want to read more history, so I’m reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States because I feel like I was sheltered from a lot of realities in the history I was taught as a homeschooled kid.
I don’t know how I managed to get approved for Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun, but I am loving it so far, and it has reached the point where it’s picking up and I need to know how everything converges.
I love science fiction stories, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology work is incredible. This is a chonk, so I read a few stories out of it here and there.
I don’t know why I keep putting Into the Drowning Deep aside, but it’s one of the twenty books I set out to read this year for my 20in20 challenge that I’m not adhering very well to. The narrative is picking up where I’ve left off, and I’m excited to see how the mermaids are done.
Deathless has been on my TBR for far too long and is also part of my 20in20 challenge, and I’m really enjoying it so far. Valente’s writing is some of my favorite.
Requesting Andy Weir’s latest was a COMPLETE long shot that I was like 80% sure I’d get denied for, but when I got the email for the arc approval, I squeaked and immediately dropped everything else I was reading to get started on this. I didn’t like Artemis as much as I liked The Martian, and it’s safe to say that Project Hail Mary evokes a similar kind of enjoyment I had with The Martian!
I… am a bad classics reader and I have only read three of Jane Austen’s works, so I’m fixing that this year by starting Mansfield Park. I was in the mood to read something classic, and this one was in easy reach.
📚 A Court of Mists and Fury – Sarah J. Maas (4%)
📚 A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn (29%)
📱 Black Sun – Rebecca Roanhorse (66%)
📚 The Big Book of Science Fiction – edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (15%)
📚 Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant (28%)
📚 Deathless – Catherynne M. Valente (63%)
📱 Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir (61%)
📚 Mansfield Park – Jane Austen (9%)
FINISHED READING
For as many books as I’m currently reading, I definitely need to pick up the pace a little bit more. These are the books I’ve finished in the last two weeks, and hopefully I will get my current reads under control and have a better list next week!
I didn’t like Hamnet as much as I wanted to. I liked the prose itself, but the story seemed too vague?? I still need to think about it before I write a review.
Chris Panatier’s The Phlebotomist hit my radar earlier this year when I saw the cover, and it lived up to my expectations and surprised me! A review for this is coming this week.
Dan Hanks’s Captain Moxley was a fun Indiana Jones-esque, pulpy romp! A review is linked below!
Fable is the latest release from Adrienne Young, and I enjoyed it a lot! I wrote a review about it that’s linked below.
I have a few review copies to write posts about, and a few more review copies to read. This is what I’m looking forward to reading in the very near future.This translation of Beowulf is one I’ve been waiting to read ever since it was announced (I loved The Mere Wife), and this took a while to arrive to my store. I’m glad to have it now, and I’m going to take one of my days off this week and really sit down with it and enjoy it. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life has been on my radar ever since it was announced (and he’s a delight on Twitter), so I put the preorder in for the UK edition because this cover speaks to me so much more. I’m so excited to be working with Angry Robot, so I want to read these and get my thoughts up about them as soon as possible! I was also delighted to have the opportunity to read She Come By It Natural and Stranger in the Shogun’s City sent by Scribner as both seem incredibly interesting! Both of Hester Fox’s previous books have been delightfully atmospheric, and I was so happy to be approved for her third novel! Between this release and Mexican Gothic‘s stunning success, I hope that gothic fiction in these veins make a big comeback as that genre is one of my absolute favorites.
📚 Beowulf – trans. Maria Dahvana Headley
📚 Real Life – Brandon Taylor
📓 Red Noise – John P. Murphy (thank you, Angry Robot!)
📓 She Come By It Natural – Sarah Smarsh (thank you, Scribner!)
📓 Stranger in the Shogun’s City – Amy Stanley (thank you, Scribner!)
📱 The Orphan of Cemetery Hill – Hester Fox (thank you, HQN/Graydon House!)
WHAT I ACQUIRED
Let me just preface this by the fact that I work in a bookstore, so I am privileged enough to have access to physical arcs this way and through direct working relationships with publishers, and I have the employee discount perk so I do tend to buy a lot of books that catch my eye. I need to spend less on books, overall, but I enjoy supporting my store and the authors. I also find it entirely too easy to buy ebooks during those daily deals, I also went thrift shopping, and bought some romance lots off of eBay… Since this is the first week, I won’t list off everything, but here’s a list of ten that I brought into my place this week!
The Cadfael series has been on my radar for a bit, and when this was a daily deal, I grabbed it! They were all on Kindle Unlimited at some point, but I obviously missed that.
Craven Manor, and other Darcy Coates titles, popped up on KU when I last checked, so I downloaded this one to give this author a shot!
Eva Evergreen‘s cover gives me Studio Ghibli vibes, and I was happy to find this on the shelves at the library!
I haven’t liked the first two titles in this Twisted Tales series, but with this being a different author and only 99c, I thought I’d give this series another chance.
Such a Fun Age popped up as a decent deal, and I’ve heard lots of good things about it! I’ve read a lot of the Reese’s Book Club picks, and this was one I hadn’t yet started.
The Duke I Tempted was going around on romance Twitter a few days ago, so… I got curious and had to download it.
I go through phases of wanting to read nothing but nonfiction, and my main interests in science reads are physics, space, nature, and dinosaurs. I’ve been eyeballing this one by Brusatte ever since it came out, and I’m excited to read it!
The Sea Around Us is also on KU, and it looked interesting while I was browsing through the available titles.
I found The Tethered Mage half off at the thrift store the other day (a dangerous venture for me), and since I’ve had the e-arc of this for too long, I’m going to read the physical copy!
James Gleick’s Time Travel has also been on my radar since it popped up on store shelves, and I was happy to find it at the library as well!
💾 A Morbid Taste for Bones – Ellis Peters
💾 Craven Manor – Darcy Coates (KU)
⌛️ Eva Evergreen: Semi-Magical Witch – Julie Abe
💾 Reflection – Elizabeth Lim
💾 Such a Fun Age – Kiley Reid
💾 The Duke I Tempted – Scarlett Peckham
⌛️ The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs – Steve Brusatte
💾 The Sea Around Us – Rachel Carson
📚 The Tethered Mage – Melissa Caruso
⌛️ Time Travel – James Gleick
ON SCREEN
GAMING: I have not played Animal Crossing in about a month and a half, and I don’t have any explanation for it except that I probably burnt myself out on it. I am pumped for World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, Shadowlands, so I have been catching up on some achievements and things to wrap up before Battle for Azeroth ends.
TV: I have only really been watching The Golden Girls while I play video games or before I fall asleep.
MOVIES: I saw The New Mutants (3/10) and The Personal History of David Copperfield (7.5/10).
There are a few movies and shows on Netflix I want to watch, and I need to make a list so I stop forgetting what they are. If you have any recommendations, let me know!
PERSONAL
I found a cat food my cat Broccoli will eat without feeling like I have to sit there and encourage her to eat. Her teeth need to be removed and she has bad kidneys, so I want her to gain some weight and show the vet that she’s doing all right even with the current pain medication to moderate the pain her teeth are causing her. It’s only a few more weeks until I have saved enough money for her procedure, but there’s a lot of anxiety I have surrounding that as well. With my other cat, I really didn’t have the money to afford the care I wanted to give her, so I’m making sure I do whatever I possibly can to feel like I’ve done everything, but I am hopeful and optimistic about this procedure as I think it will really help with Broccoli’s long-term care. I am about halfway to my goal, and I’m glad I get paid weekly because that really helps with budgeting. I’m also listing things for sale on eBay this week to also help offset the cost (and get rid of the HP merch and other various things I no longer want in my life).
I am also working on a few personal writing projects that are slow going, but a little progress is better than none at all. It’s just difficult having ideas for three different novel-length projects and barely having the energy to write a full blog post. This current one has been a week in the works. But now that I have a format that I like, it’ll be easy to copy and paste and fill in the new stuff!
Hello, Friday! First Lines Friday is a feature on my blog in which I post the first lines from a book I am interested in reading, either a new release or a backlist title! For the next several Fridays, I will be featuring titles I am going to hopefully read as part of my 12 Decades/12 Months/12 Books challenge (#12decades12books). The ScarletLetter is one of my favorite classics, and I first fell in love with it when I was like thirteen when I had to read it for a co-op Literature class. This is the other more well known Hawthorne title, and I had it on my shelf already!
Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns, stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon-street; the house is the old Pyncheon-house; and an elm-tree of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon-elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom fail to turn down Pyncheon-street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities; the great elm-tree, and the weather-beaten edifice.
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the races not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes, that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the story would include a chain of events, extending over the better part of two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England, during a similar period.
How to you feel about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work? Do you enjoy it or is it something you’ve passed on?
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly discussion hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl (and formerly hosted by The Broke and the Bookish), and this week’s topic is “Cover Freebie” so I decided to look up some books I’ve been hearing about recently and books I’ve been waiting a while for their release and collected all of the covers!
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik – I have actually never read anything by Naomi Novik (yet!!), but I love magical schools and this seems to be right up my alley.
In the Quick by Kate Hope Day – This is compared to The Martian and is about a female astronaut’s life and a love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew, and I’m intrigued? The cover of this is interesting, too!
The Gilded Ones by Naima Forna – I think the date of this one got pushed back, but a young woman who prays for her blood to be a certain color and fate intervening looks like it will be something I’ll like!
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab – This seems like it’s on everyone’s lists this fall, but I’ve enjoyed every book of hers I’ve read, and this one looks to be one of her more ambitious endeavors.
The Mask Falling, by Samantha Shannon – I’m a book behind in this series, but I’m looking forward to a reread of all of them soon as I got an arc of this! I love binging series, I’ve noticed, so the more I can read at once, the better.
Malice, by Heather Walter – This comes out like two weeks before my birthday next year and it’s a f/f retelling of Sleeping Beauty, one of my favorite fairy tales, and I just want this in my hands now.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers – Becky Chambers writes amazingly wholesome and heartfelt science fiction, and I’m very happy to see they’re continuing the Wayfarers series.
The Heiress Gets a Duke by Harper St. George – I love stuff set in the Gilded Age? Like give me all the things.
The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec – A banished witch who falls in love with Loki??? I love ancient myth retellings, and this one popped up on my radar the other day and stuck.
Wild Women and the Blues, by Denny S. Bryce – This ties together a film student in 2015 and a chorus girl in 1925 in Chicago, and I’m looking forward to reading a lot of jazz age books this decade.
Are any of these on your radar? What are you looking forward to reading most?
Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. ‘I incline to Cain’s heresy,’ he used to say quaintly; ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’ In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.
Title: 
Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns, stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon-street; the house is the old Pyncheon-house; and an elm-tree of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon-elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom fail to turn down Pyncheon-street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities; the great elm-tree, and the weather-beaten edifice.
