WRAP UP: November 2020

- Meg

The end of the year while working in retail in the middle of a pandemic is not the best time to try to bring back a blog and instagram with any regular frequency, but HERE I AM. I’m TRYING. And that’s all that we can do, really. I read a little bit more in November than I did in October, but I didn’t really write any posts, so I’m making up for it now.

CURRENTLY READING

I’m still picking at A People’s History of the United States and The Big Book of Science Fiction (because they’re stuck under a stack of books and I’m too lazy to dig them out), and I’m reading a few prose poems a week out of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. They make me think about writing and prose poetry’s space in it all, so I’m enjoying savoring it. I also have a problem with waiting until the last minute to read my digital library loans, so I’m working my way through the next Lady Darby mystery, Mortal Arts. Angry Robot sent me a copy of The Rush’s Edge which I’m enjoying! And Scribner’s rerelease of One Writer’s Beginnings is a perfect winter read about writing.

📚 bookshelf pick  |  📓 physical review copy  |  📱 digital review copy | ⌛️ library/borrowed | 💾 ebook  |  💞 reread

📚 A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn (29%)
📚 The Big Book of Science Fiction – edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (15%)
📚 The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson – edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod (8%)
⌛️ Mortal Arts – Anna Lee Huber (25%)
📓 One Writer’s Beginnings – Eudora Welty (10%)
📓 The Rush’s Edge – Ginger Smith (17%)

FINISHED READING

I read nine books in November! Most were okay, but some felt like a slog to get through. ACOWAR took the longest for me to read, and I feel like up until the 400th page or so, it was just the same cycle of action and inaction, really, that could have been condensed into a much smaller book. Wuthering Heights was one I’ve struggled with for years, and I just decided at the end of the month to read it and be done with it. The atmosphere was great, but I wasn’t expecting that level of emotional and physical violence and also why people consider it a love story. I’ve been in a nonfiction mood because I don’t really have to use my brain power to follow a linear story, and The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs and Time Travel: A History were great science reads.

📚 bookshelf pick  |  📓 physical review copy  |  📱 digital review copy | ⌛️ library/borrowed | 💾 ebook  |  💞 reread

📚 Nooks & Crannies – Jessica Lawson (4/5 stars)
📚 The Breakthrough – Daphne du Maurier (3.5/5 stars)
📚 A Court of Wings and Ruin – Sarah J. Maas (3.5/5 stars)
📚 A Duke of Her Own – Eloisa James (2/5 stars)
⌛️ Flyaway – Kathleen Jennings (3/5 stars)
📚 Lady Bridget’s Diary – Maya Rodale (3/5 stars)
⌛️ The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs – Stephen Brusatte (4/5 stars)
⌛️ Time Travel: A History – James Gleick (4/5 stars)
📚 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (3/5 stars)

ON THE HORIZON

I’m keeping this short and to the point because setting lofty TBR goals has never been one of my strong suits, but I really, really, need to read Real Life, I can’t resist rereading The Princess Diaries after seeing these new covers, and I want to start picking away at my neverending digital galley pile and Ruinsong is calling out to me the most.

📚 bookshelf pick  |  📓 physical review copy  |  📱 digital review copy | ⌛️ library/borrowed | 💾 ebook  |  💞 reread

📚 Real Life – Brandon Taylor
📚 The Princess Diaries – Meg Cabot
📱 Ruinsong – Julia Ember (thank you, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR))

WHAT I ACQUIRED

I am putting myself on a book buying ban from like… now until the end of 2021, because as I was sorting through my shelves this week and weeding a few titles out, I have too many unread books. I will still make a few requests here and there to publishers and check out books from the library, but I have to stop accumulating so much stuff. The first three books in Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive were on a really good deal, and I couldn’t pass them up. I’ve been holding off on starting this series, but I am also kind of in the mood for fantasy like this. Orbit Books had a great ebook sale over Black Friday weekend, so I picked up The Bone Shard Daughter, Nophek Gloss, and We Ride the Storm as they’re all books I’ve been anticipating reading! (And I also need to get back in the habit of reading things on my kindle/phone, so…) From Atria, I received Astrid Seeds All and To Love and to Loathe (I loved Waters’ debut! So I am excited for this one), and from Hachette, I received Culture Warlords. I’ve been following Talia Lavin on Twitter for a while now, and I enjoy her online presence and the work she’s done, so I’m curious to read her book now.

📚 bookshelf pick  |  📓 physical review copy  |  📱 digital review copy | ⌛️ library/borrowed | 💾 ebook  |  💞 reread

📚 The Way of Kings – Brandon Sanderson
📚 Words of Radiance – Brandon Sanderson
📚 Oathbringer – Brandon Sanderson
💾 The Bone Shard Daughter – Andrea Stewart
💾 Nophek Gloss – Essa Hansen
💾 We Ride the Storm – Devin Madson
📓 Astrid Sees All – Natalie Standiford (thank you, Atria Books!)
📓 Culture Warlords – Talia Lavin (thank you, Hachette Books!)
📓 To Love and to Loathe – Martha Waters (thank you, Atria Books!)

ON SCREEN

GAMING: I just hit 60 in Shadowlands on my main, and I think I’m going to give tanking a try with the new Death Knight I rolled on the Alliance side.

TV: I finished The Golden Girls, and I kind of don’t know what to watch next. I’m still keeping up with The Mandalorian, and I’m enjoying where that series is going!

MOVIES: Disney’s live-action Mulan was entertaining but it fell flat in a lot of places for me. I also rewatched Trainwreck because it’s one of those movies I watch to cheer myself up.

PERSONAL

Life has been busy with work, adjusting to new policies and enforcing them with customers, and just carrying on with life when it’s so… weird and all up in the air. I know it won’t immediately get better in 2021, but for the first time in a long time, I have hope.

TOP TEN TUESDAY: Books I Want to Read Again

- Meg 6 Comments

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 “Books I Want to Read Again” and even though there are so many new books to read, sometimes it’s a joy to revisit something you’ve read before and find something new in it (and be comforted because these are almost all comfort reads to some degree).

  • Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine – This is one of my favorite books of all time, and I try to read it about once a year. I don’t actually remember the last time I read it, so it’s definitely time for a revisit.
  • Emma by Jane Austen – Even though this is on my 2020 reads list and a challenge I’m not likely to finish any time soon, I’ve been wanting to revisit this ever since the movie came out earlier this year.
  • Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett – I last read this forever ago and meant to revisit after the TV series, but I’m in the mood for something funny and this should do the trick.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien – I used to read this once a year in the fall but I haven’t done that in about five years or more. With the release of these new covers, I’m ready to dive back into Middle Earth.
  • The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot – I didn’t realize any of these were getting rereleased for their TWENTIETH anniversary, but I ate these like candy when I was younger and I’m happy to see them out in print again.
  • The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald – If you don’t read Fitzgerald in the 2020s, who are you? The parallels of the two decades are interesting, and I’m curious to revisit this after seven years according to my Goodreads!
  • The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien – I last read this sometime in the midst of the film trilogy’s release and I remember nothing about it. With the extended universe series coming out at some point, I want to revisit this (and with the shiny new cover).
  • Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas – I am working on finishing series that I started, bought the books, and never finished. But I don’t really remember what happened in the first five books to truly pick up the most recent one I haven’t read. I remember these being fast, fun reads though!
  • Truthwitch by Susan Dennard – This is another one of those series where I read the first book, continued to buy the next installments in hardcover on release, and then just never read them. The next one comes out in the near future, so I want to get caught up!
  • Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – I told myself I wouldn’t read the second book in this trilogy until the third book was announced, and the third book came out this year, so it’s time to dive back into this brilliant view of the Tudors.

What are you looking forward to rereading?

 

FIRST LINES FRIDAY: Cemetery Boys, by Aidan Thomas

- Meg

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 rest of the year, I’m going to feature books by non-white writers, partially because I just did a whole list of classics by a majority of white writers and partially because I am continually focusing on purchasing and reading books by non-white writers for a whole list of reasons. The books featured will range from “classics” to adult fiction to YA/middle grade fiction, and these are all I’ve had on my shelf for a bit that I want to read by the end of this year or within the first few months of 2021! I can’t believe it’s basically the middle of November already, but time flies when you’re in the middle of a stress-bomb called COVID-19. Stay safe, stay home, wear a mask!

Yadriel wasn’t technically trespassing because he’d lived in the cemetery his whole life. But breaking into the church was definitely crossing the moral-ambiguity line.

Still, if he was going to finally prove he was a brujo, he had to perform the rite in front of Lady Death.

And she was waiting for him inside the church.

The black Hydro Flask full of chicken blood thumped against Yadriel’s hip as he snuck past his family’s small house at the front of the cemetery. The rest of the supplies for the ceremony were tucked away inside his backpack. He and his cousin Maritza ducked under the front windows, careful not to bump their heads on the sills. Silhouettes of the brujx celebrating inside danced across the curtains. Their laughter and the sound of music filtered through the graveyard. Yadriel paused, crouching in the shadows to check the coast was clear before he jumped from the porch and took off. Maritza followed close behind, her footsteps echoing in tandem with Yadriel’s as they ran down stone paths and through puddles.

Adrian Thomas’s Cemetery Boys has been buzzy in my neck of the book internet, and the premise intrigued me from the get-go. Thankfully my store got copies on release day so I could buy it, and I wanted to read it around Halloween but life took a different turn than I was expecting with the death of my cat and work getting busier/more stressful. But after reading the first few pages in preparation for this post, I definitely am bumping it up to the top of my TBR because it already sounds so good and perfectly spooky.

WAITING ON WEDNESDAY: October-December 2020 Reads

- Meg

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine (though it seems as though it’s been a while since she updated that particular blog, so if you know of the current host, if there is one, please let me know) that highlights upcoming releases that we’re impatiently waiting for. This week I’m featuring October-December 2020 review copies or purchased books that I have either in physical form or digital form that I can’t wait to dive into! But now that it’s the middle of November, I really need to get in gear and get these read! The release dates are listed but are always subject to change.

  • A Golden Fury – Samathan Cohoe :: It’s about a fantasy Oxford with alchemists and curses and the looming French Revolution. I’ve been in the MOOD for historical fantasies of all flavors, and I’m really thinking I’ll enjoy this one. Releases October 13, 2020.
  • Ruinsong – Julia Ember :: Sapphic YA fantasy with kingdoms and queens and underground rebellions?? YES. And that cover?? I love it already. Releases November 24, 2020.
  • The Hollow Places – T. Kingfisher :: Up until this year, I have not been one for much horror, but after reading a few stories and Mexican Gothic, I think I can handle a little bit more. 2020 was originally going to be about broadening my own horizons, especially with different genres, so when I saw this available for download, I thought I’d give it a go. Releases October 6, 2020.
  • The Thirty Names of Night – Zeyn Joukhadar :: I loved their debut title The Map of Salt and Stars and Atria was kind enough to send me a finished copy of the novel! I’m excited to see where this goes, and I have a feeling I’ll be so moved by it. Releases November 24, 2020.
  • White Ivy – Susie Yang :: I’m kind of loving that dark academia is becoming a thing in recent releases, and this one caught my attention when I saw it on the ARC shelf at work. Releases November 3, 2020.
  • Any Rogue Will Do – Bethany Bennett :: To be honest, this is a total cover buy, but LOOK AT IT. It’s so gaussian blurry and beautiful. I don’t think it’s Christmasy, but it looks very Christmasy, so I had to have it. This also looks like it’s the first title by this author? I’m definitely into this era of regency romance, and I like that the names of these characters are pretty traditional sounding for the era in which this book is set. And it’s definitely not a list like this without some romance added to it anymore. Releases October 13, 2020.
  • How to Catch a Queen – Alyssa Cole :: I’m at risk of becoming an Alyssa Cole fanblog but THAT’S OKAY. And you should read her stuff, it’s great. I’m looking forward to this new contemporary series! Releases December 1, 2020.
  • One Writer’s Beginnings – Eudora Welty :: I don’t remember requesting this from Scribner so it came as a complete surprise in my mailbox! But I do enjoy reading about writing because I feel like it helps with so much of my own writing and enjoyment of reading. Releases November 3, 2020.
  • Plain Bad Heroines – Emily M. Danforth :: Gilded Age gothic fiction set in a SCHOOL and it’s got LESBIANS? It sounds like everything I love in a book, and it’s a chonker so I’ve been waiting for a good few days off to start reading this because I have a feeling I won’t want to put it down. Releases October 20, 2020.
  • The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 – ed. John Joseph Adams and Diana Gabaldon :: I love love love anthologies because I get a flavor of a lot of different writers’ abilities and stories and I get to add more books to my TBR after making discoveries of writers I might not have heard of before! I don’t remember if I bought 2019’s (and I need to check because I have the others), but this series (and any anthologies put out by John Joseph Adams) has consistently been great. I also love 2020’s covers across all the Best American series; they’re incredibly striking! Releases November 3, 2020.

Are any of these on your to-read list? What one would you read first?

FIRST LINES FRIDAY: When No One is Watching, by Alyssa Cole

- Meg

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 rest of the year, I’m going to feature books by non-white writers, partially because I just did a whole list of classics by a majority of white writers and partially because I am continually focusing on purchasing and reading books by non-white writers for a whole list of reasons. The books featured will range from “classics” to adult fiction to YA/middle grade fiction, and these are all I’ve had on my shelf for a bit that I want to read by the end of this year or within the first few months of 2021! I can’t believe it’s basically the middle of November already, but time flies when you’re in the middle of a stress-bomb called COVID-19. Stay safe, stay home, wear a mask!

History is fucking wild.

Last fall, on a night when my ass was getting well acquainted with the uncomfortable guest chair in Mommy’s hospital room, I’d numbly tapped and swiped my way to an article about a place called Black America. Not the label politicians use to place our concerns into a neat box full of worries they don’t have to attend to immediately or ever, but an actual, tangible place — a slavery theme park that’d opened in Brooklyn at the end of the nineteenth century.

Slavery. Fucking. Theme park.

Black America, the theme park, was billed as “an opportunity to become familiar with plantation life for those of the North who belong to a generation to which the word slavery has but an indefinite and hazy meaning.” This was, like, twenty years after slavery ended, mind you. I mean, I too get nostalgic when an eighties jam starts playing on the radio, but these motherfuckers really needed to reminisce about owning humans?

I am so excited to read this. The back blurb says it’s Rear Window meets Get Out, and I’m so excited to read a thriller by Alyssa Cole because I’ve loved all of the romances I’ve read by her so far. In the last year and a half she’s become one of my autobuy authors with her romance books, and I can’t wait to see what she does with thrillers.