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sorcyressOur power is out! And now it is time for a medialog! I might skip doing formatting, because I am writing this entry on my phone and it's more of a pain in the ass to get all the html brackets. But we'll see!
Editor's note: I wrote the above, and much of the below last night. The power was restored about an hour later, and I had time to finish the post today.
Finished Reading Recently:
I visited Ruthie and the toddler for dinner, and got to read aloud Heckety Peg by Audry Wood (with illustrations by Don Wood. It's a faerie tale! Not one I've ever heard, and I'm not totally sure if it's just from a tradition I don't know or if it's an original tale "in the style of" but I had a nice convo with Ruth about the fact that I grew up consuming a voracious number of faerie tales and retellings, and so could very much appreciate how much this one hit almost all the right beats.
(About the only one it missed was an extremely short "and then the evil witch perished" at the end, which really ought've had some terrible descriptive torture for her. Where are my red hot dancing shoes and getting your beard caught in the chasm you stomped into the ground and barrels studded full of nails.)
As mentioned, I spent most of the month working on Kristin Cashore's Graceling. Fantastic premise (look, it's Xanth but with a little more likely to be useful powers and also when powerful dudes are into ten year old girls that's framed as Bad, so actually, not very Xanth at all) and a quite compelling main character. Most of the book was quite good, and then the last sixth or so was extremely unevenly paced and kept oscillating a little too rapidly between "HAPPILY EVER AFTER" and "OH NO HOW WILL OUR HEROES GET OUT OF THIS ONE?!". There are several sequels, and I look forward to trying them as well.
More recently, I dove headfirst into Django Wexler's How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, which I really enjoyed. Davi is funny as hell, and doing a pretty good job of being a good person while trying to be the quintessential bad guy dark lord. The last eighth took a bit of a sudden turn, but I'm not mad about the questions it raised...I am cranky that I didn't realize quite how much it's framed as "part one" of a duology, especially given that the second doesn't come out until May. This is a peril-or-maybe-advantage of ereaders, that you never know quite when the end is coming. Even when you keep an eye out on the "page 420 of 496" or whatever, sometimes there's like fifty pages of "coming soon" and "excerpt from the sequel" and "interview with the author" crammed back there to throw off your sense.
But with that one exception, it was a heartily fun fantasy, and a nice sendup of many of the classic tropes. I especially enjoy that Davi gets to be super horny, and very bisexually so --while I haven't heard her use the b-word, there are on-the-page (well, fade to black but...) tumbles with both male and female characters.
Currently Reading
I did get out Michael Schur's How to be Perfec and was startled to find myself actually enjoying a nonfiction book about philosophy, a field I mostly don't care about. I was trucking along and making quite good progress, except for the part where I kept trying to read it while walking out and about in the world....and it has footnotes. So many footnotes. _so many_. My ereader very intentionally has physical buttons so I can use it while wearing the clunky gloves, but footnotes require touching the screen with actual fingers, so it has not actually been a good choice for the cold. Luckily/un, my hold on it expired and I'm back on the waitlist at like...24 weeks or something. I am really interested to find out if my highlighting and notes make it through the have-lose-have process (I hope they do!)
I also started this evening The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon (yes that one). It is...
it is fine? Maybe it's less than fine? I don't think I'm enjoying it at all, which is a shame, because it's trying really hard to be a book I would be into and honestly it's just...trying too hard. It feels like a ~lol random~ twelve year old and to be fair, maybe if I was twelve I would be grooving on this. But wow am I bouncing hard. It's all too much and not clever enough.
I swear there is children's literature that I have read and enjoyed! I loved the Clementine books when I came across those a few years ago. Rachel Hartman's stuff is older YA and I thought it was intense and good and interesting. The first Percy Jackson book was goofy and full of dumb silly kid ideas in the same way as this, but felt much more fun and cohesive. So it's not that I'm too old for all kids' books, it's just that some of them have the je ne sais quoi, and this one...doesn't. I might DNF, but it's short enough that I'm already halfway through after just a couple hours of reading.
Reading in the Future:
Finishing Millicent Quibb (and How to be Perfec when it bounces back to me) means I will have zero library books or holds for the first time in a long while. So I think it's probably time to start trying to go through my Actual Physical Books and reading some of those. I know I have Christmas presents from my seester this year, and certainly have a couple backlogged books from Shan and Lexi as well. (The Three Body Problem! Yellowface! That epic Max Gladstone one!).
Also I just checked and that was a lie --in addition to Perfec, I have holds out on Richard Osman's We Solve Murders and a cooking/lifestyle book called An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler that I _think_ someone on Bluesky recommended as a "thinking about food" book. But both of those are slow-moving on long waitlists, so we'll see.
Writing the above about Heckety Peg is kinda making me want to go reread my book of Grimm's Tales, in all its falling apart glory. (I wonder if I even have the whole thing or if a handful of pages are missing forever).
I have the next Vorkosigan book on my ereader, and a bunch of Prachett for when I'm ready to Actually Read Discworld, Damnit. There are sequels to Graceling that I'm excited about, and those might actually churn through my ereader pretty quickly. I've got at least two Queer Horror books on pre-order from Porter Square Books (Moonflow, by Bitter Karella and Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle) and I should go ahead and see what else in the genre I own (besides like, my unread copy of Manhunt, which I should totally get to sooner rather than later). And part of why I'm never sure which of the LB books I've bought is that I've read some of them online from Patreon, and some in person, and some not at all so it might be fun to try and actually get organized about reading through those.
Most immediately though, Ethan of Athos, the next Vorkosigan book. I need something on my ereader that doesn't require clicking through for footnotes!
~Sor
MOOP!
Editor's note: I wrote the above, and much of the below last night. The power was restored about an hour later, and I had time to finish the post today.
Finished Reading Recently:
I visited Ruthie and the toddler for dinner, and got to read aloud Heckety Peg by Audry Wood (with illustrations by Don Wood. It's a faerie tale! Not one I've ever heard, and I'm not totally sure if it's just from a tradition I don't know or if it's an original tale "in the style of" but I had a nice convo with Ruth about the fact that I grew up consuming a voracious number of faerie tales and retellings, and so could very much appreciate how much this one hit almost all the right beats.
(About the only one it missed was an extremely short "and then the evil witch perished" at the end, which really ought've had some terrible descriptive torture for her. Where are my red hot dancing shoes and getting your beard caught in the chasm you stomped into the ground and barrels studded full of nails.)
As mentioned, I spent most of the month working on Kristin Cashore's Graceling. Fantastic premise (look, it's Xanth but with a little more likely to be useful powers and also when powerful dudes are into ten year old girls that's framed as Bad, so actually, not very Xanth at all) and a quite compelling main character. Most of the book was quite good, and then the last sixth or so was extremely unevenly paced and kept oscillating a little too rapidly between "HAPPILY EVER AFTER" and "OH NO HOW WILL OUR HEROES GET OUT OF THIS ONE?!". There are several sequels, and I look forward to trying them as well.
More recently, I dove headfirst into Django Wexler's How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, which I really enjoyed. Davi is funny as hell, and doing a pretty good job of being a good person while trying to be the quintessential bad guy dark lord. The last eighth took a bit of a sudden turn, but I'm not mad about the questions it raised...I am cranky that I didn't realize quite how much it's framed as "part one" of a duology, especially given that the second doesn't come out until May. This is a peril-or-maybe-advantage of ereaders, that you never know quite when the end is coming. Even when you keep an eye out on the "page 420 of 496" or whatever, sometimes there's like fifty pages of "coming soon" and "excerpt from the sequel" and "interview with the author" crammed back there to throw off your sense.
But with that one exception, it was a heartily fun fantasy, and a nice sendup of many of the classic tropes. I especially enjoy that Davi gets to be super horny, and very bisexually so --while I haven't heard her use the b-word, there are on-the-page (well, fade to black but...) tumbles with both male and female characters.
Currently Reading
I did get out Michael Schur's How to be Perfec and was startled to find myself actually enjoying a nonfiction book about philosophy, a field I mostly don't care about. I was trucking along and making quite good progress, except for the part where I kept trying to read it while walking out and about in the world....and it has footnotes. So many footnotes. _so many_. My ereader very intentionally has physical buttons so I can use it while wearing the clunky gloves, but footnotes require touching the screen with actual fingers, so it has not actually been a good choice for the cold. Luckily/un, my hold on it expired and I'm back on the waitlist at like...24 weeks or something. I am really interested to find out if my highlighting and notes make it through the have-lose-have process (I hope they do!)
I also started this evening The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon (yes that one). It is...
it is fine? Maybe it's less than fine? I don't think I'm enjoying it at all, which is a shame, because it's trying really hard to be a book I would be into and honestly it's just...trying too hard. It feels like a ~lol random~ twelve year old and to be fair, maybe if I was twelve I would be grooving on this. But wow am I bouncing hard. It's all too much and not clever enough.
I swear there is children's literature that I have read and enjoyed! I loved the Clementine books when I came across those a few years ago. Rachel Hartman's stuff is older YA and I thought it was intense and good and interesting. The first Percy Jackson book was goofy and full of dumb silly kid ideas in the same way as this, but felt much more fun and cohesive. So it's not that I'm too old for all kids' books, it's just that some of them have the je ne sais quoi, and this one...doesn't. I might DNF, but it's short enough that I'm already halfway through after just a couple hours of reading.
Reading in the Future:
Finishing Millicent Quibb (and How to be Perfec when it bounces back to me) means I will have zero library books or holds for the first time in a long while. So I think it's probably time to start trying to go through my Actual Physical Books and reading some of those. I know I have Christmas presents from my seester this year, and certainly have a couple backlogged books from Shan and Lexi as well. (The Three Body Problem! Yellowface! That epic Max Gladstone one!).
Also I just checked and that was a lie --in addition to Perfec, I have holds out on Richard Osman's We Solve Murders and a cooking/lifestyle book called An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler that I _think_ someone on Bluesky recommended as a "thinking about food" book. But both of those are slow-moving on long waitlists, so we'll see.
Writing the above about Heckety Peg is kinda making me want to go reread my book of Grimm's Tales, in all its falling apart glory. (I wonder if I even have the whole thing or if a handful of pages are missing forever).
I have the next Vorkosigan book on my ereader, and a bunch of Prachett for when I'm ready to Actually Read Discworld, Damnit. There are sequels to Graceling that I'm excited about, and those might actually churn through my ereader pretty quickly. I've got at least two Queer Horror books on pre-order from Porter Square Books (Moonflow, by Bitter Karella and Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle) and I should go ahead and see what else in the genre I own (besides like, my unread copy of Manhunt, which I should totally get to sooner rather than later). And part of why I'm never sure which of the LB books I've bought is that I've read some of them online from Patreon, and some in person, and some not at all so it might be fun to try and actually get organized about reading through those.
Most immediately though, Ethan of Athos, the next Vorkosigan book. I need something on my ereader that doesn't require clicking through for footnotes!
~Sor
MOOP!
no subject
on 2025-01-28 08:46 pm (UTC)I hadn't realized Chuck Tingle had another one out - I enjoyed Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays.
no subject
on 2025-01-28 08:58 pm (UTC)I can confirm that Millicent Quibb is tremendous fun when you are reading it outloud to a very smart 10-yr-old and doing *allllllll* the voices. In fact, I think this one is definitely better read outloud than to yourself. It needs that narrator quality. We are looking forward to the next book in the Fall. (And I love that my 10-yr-old will still let me read books to her in between the doorstoppers she reads herself. But I have to be choosy in what I pick for that purpose.)