a vintage year for scoundrels

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler - Susana M. Morris
Look to Windward - Iain M Banks
The Girl with a Thousand Faces - Sunyi Dean
Mira's Last Dance - Lois McMaster Bujold
Where We Stand, Where We Fall: The Politics of Doctor Who - Lizbeth Myles
On the Calculation of Volume I - Solvej Balle trans Barbara J Haveland
A Covenant of Ice - Karin Lowachee
Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood - Maureen Ryan
Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes - Henry Van Dyke
The Shape of Monsters - Tessa Gratton
On the Calculation of Volume II - Solvej Balle trans Barbara J Haveland

Platform Decay - Martha Wells
The Heretic's Apprentice - Ellis Peters
One Message Remains - Premee Mohamed
Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon
The Invisible Parade Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio
Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age - Annalee Newitz
Bridge of Storms - Philip Reeve
Shroud - Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Republic of Memory - Mahmud El Sayed
On the Calculation of Volume III - Solvej Balle trans Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

The Eye of Leviathan - MA Carrick
The Potter's Field - Ellis Peters
Under the Eye of the Big Bird - Hiromi Kawakami trans Asa Yoneda
A Long and Speaking Silence - Nghi Vo
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature - Emily Wilson

Spot the point at which I started writing reams of Shetland fic with my free time instead of reading. 😂 Anyway, lots I liked here, but only a few things I really loved. I did like The Shape of Monsters a whole lot, the new Murderbot was perfectly calibrated to me specifically, and I am really enjoying On the Calculation of Volume. And honorable mention to Shroud, which was a solid 3.5 stars for most of its length and then absolutely NAILED the ending.

Mira's Last Dance (two stars), Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon (four stars)

Mira's Last Dance
I do enjoy these novellas, they're great when you just want to read something that is well written and well constructed, but seriously WHAT is with Bujold setting up premises with huge potential for queerness and then absolutely dodging any possibility of queerness in how they actually play out???? Drives me up the wall. So Penric is a straight cis man who has a demon in his head that has previously only lived in the heads of women, meaning effectively he has a lot of women in his head, several of whom are very happy to express their attraction to men, and apparently he has exactly 0 thoughts or feelings about any of that. And in this book, he cross dresses for plot reasons, in the course of which one of the women essentially takes over and has (off page) sex with a man, and Penric still continues to have 0 feelings about this other than vague concern that he might get found out? Like, fine (and potentially very interesting!) if he still considers himself a straight cis man, that is entirely reasonable, but let him at least THINK about it ever, good grief. (Not to mention the consent issues, but the book isn't interested in those either, so.)

Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon
So ordinarily "Wonder Woman but DARK" is a concept that wouldn't appeal to me that much, but I did really enjoy how well this was handled, Thompson does some excellent work keeping the core of the character despite the changed backstory. It's not going to be in my top Wonder Woman stories ever (and lost a lot of points for making Etta Candy skinny, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy are we still doing this, as well as leaning a bit too hard on Steve Trevor), but I liked it a lot and I'm glad I read it.

Didn't finish:

Sargassa - Sophie Burnham, The Immeasurable Heaven - Casper Geon

Sargassa - Sophie Burnham
This book has a great alternate history premise - what if Rome never fell and just kept on expanding? - that's clearly been thought through, and I did like a lot about what I read of it, but I really wanted it to be a book about grown ups, not young adults on the cusp of maturity, and so we parted ways. (It also lost points for overuse of "frag", which, I'm sorry, just does not work as a swear word.)

The Immeasurable Heaven - Casper Geon
I got halfway through this and realised I didn't really know what was going on, and also wasn't that invested. It had some cool worldbuilding, but the characters were pretty flat, so there was no real hook to make me care.

Yet more Shetland fic! This one is smut, which I have never written before! I still don't know what's happening to me but clearly SOMETHING is!

no time like the present (2491 words) by usuallyhats
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Duncan Hunter/Jimmy Perez
Characters: Duncan Hunter, Jimmy Perez
Additional Tags: Post-Season/Series 07, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Oral Sex
Summary:

And besides, he thinks, looking Jimmy up and down and wondering if he'll notice, there's other things he'd rather do with Jimmy now they've got the evening, if Jimmy's as amenable to them as Duncan's hoping he'll be.

Another Shetland fic! This one is far and away the longest thing I've ever written. I still don't know what's happening to me but I'm enjoying it.

the stream alight with glitter (9832 words) by usuallyhats
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Duncan Hunter/Jimmy Perez, Ruth Calder/Alison McIntosh, Alison McIntosh & Jimmy Perez
Characters: Jimmy Perez, Alison McIntosh, Duncan Hunter, Ruth Calder
Series: Part 2 of sky, water, land
Summary:

In which everyone is having different but intersecting problems, or, Tosh breaks up with Donnie, Ruth isn't having the emotional reaction she expects, Duncan doesn't know where he stands, and everyone thinks Jimmy knows what he's doing (he doesn't).

In another burst of Shetland-related creativity, I... wrote a fic? For the first time in a decade?? I've never written boyslash before??? What is happening. Anyway here it is:

sail your sea, meet your storm (2380 words) by usuallyhats
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Duncan Hunter/Jimmy Perez
Characters: Jimmy Perez, Duncan Hunter
Summary:

"I don't know," Duncan half shouts over the din, "I just want to be out there," and he's gone before Jimmy can say anything more. Without really considering what he's doing, Jimmy follows him out, closing the door behind him in an attempt to keep the storm outside where it belongs.

To Ride a Rising Storm - Moniquill Blackgoose
The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe - Matthew Gabriele, David M Perry
Counterweight - Djuna trans Anton Hur
The Coral Bones - EJ Swift
The Wolf and His King - Finn Longman
Mythica - Emily Hauser
Notes from a Regicide - Isaac Fellman

The End of This Day's Business - Una McCormack
Helm - Sarah Hall
Step Aside, Pops - Kate Beaton
Scarlet Morning - ND Stevenson
Harmattan Season - Tochi Onyebuchi
Rare Birds - LB Hazelthorn
Peri Peri Paprika - Leanne Su
The Impossible Fortune - Richard Osman
The Sheltering Flame - Ruthanna Emrys
Walking a Wounded Land - Andrew Knighton
When There Are Wolves Again - EJ Swift
The Works of Vermin - Hiron Ennes

Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century - Federico Pianzola
Slow Gods - Claire North
The Original - Nell Stephens
The Two Doctors Górski - Isaac Fellman
Emilie and the Hollow World - Martha Wells
The Siege of Burning Grass - Premee Mohamed
The Iron Garden Sutra - AD Sui
She is Here - Nicola Griffith
We Will Rise Again - ed Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz and Malka Older
Thief of Night - Holly Black
Tomb of Brass - Tansy Rayner Roberts
Critical Role: The Chronicles of Exandria - The Mighty Nein Part Two
The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale - CM Waggoner
The Kingdom of Almonds - Ariel Kaplan
What We Are Seeking - Cameron Reed
The Subtle Art of Folding Space - John Chu

The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar - Indra Das
Space Crone - Ursula K Le Guin
City of Others - Jared Poon
The Desert Talon - Karin Lowachee
The Power Fantasy: The Superpowers
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction - Paul Kincaid
Automatic Noodle - Annalee Newitz
They Bloom At Night - Trang Thanh Tran
Seasons of Glass and Iron - Amal El Mohtar
In the Serpent's Wake - Rachel Hartman
The Summer War - Naomi Novik
Luminous - Silvia Park
Among Ghosts - Rachel Hartman

I opened up my draft of this post and discovered there wasn't anything there since February, oh DEAR. So this is mostly just a list of things I have read! I really loved these ones in particular: Notes from a Regicide, When There Are Wolves Again, The Works of Vermin and Slow Gods. I also really liked What We Are Seeking and Luminous. Also yes, I am counting Una McCormack's latest Garak book of Garak in this list, even though it was published on AO3, because I do what I want, Thor.

(Will I manage to post this before the end of June (it's the 27th May right now) or will there be another paragraph of /o\ below this?) (update, SUCCESS)

To Ride a Rising Storm - Moniquill Blackgoose (four stars), The Wolf and His King - Finn Longman (three stars)

To Ride a Rising Storm
Basically nothing happens in this book until right at the end, it's all worldbuilding explanations and people having conversations about society, politics and their interpersonal relationships. Luckily I do find the world very interesting, and Blackgoose's prose style is very engaging, so I still had a good time, though I could have done with slightly less chemistry-with-AU-element-names.

The Wolf and His King
Retelling of Bisclavret that started strong for me but gradually fell apart as it went on, for a few reasons:

• The king's immediate instinctive connection with and yearning for Bisclavret worked really well, but it never really went anywhere? They have a few interactions before Bisclavret disappears, but there wasn't enough feeling on Bisclavret's side for me to really feel the connection that they apparently have, not to mention
  spoilers

  we don't even get the payoff of the king realising that the wolf is Bisclavret, he has to be told.


• The setting and the characters felt a bit neither fish nor fowl: there are moments of specificity that take them out of the purely archetypal, but not enough for them to really come alive. The latter half of the book sees the king working at diplomacy and trying to avoid becoming entangled in war, but there isn't enough detail for any of it to feel real.
  
• The handling of Bisclavret's treacherous wife gestured at the possibility that she had a motivation beyond just being A Baddie, but never really went anywhere with it, or really addressed the fact that actually, no, it's not OK that Bisclavret married her without telling her he intermittently turns into a wolf! It's the one area where the werewolfism-as-disability metaphor, which mostly worked really well, fell down for me: it is in fact ok to object to your husband turning into a wolf that might want to kill you, and to try to get out of that situation.

I did mostly enjoy reading this book, and really liked what it did with points of view, but overall it didn't work for me like I wanted to. (I do want to read the lai when I am reunited with my copy, though.)

Didn't finish:

Little Thieves - Margaret Owen

Little Thieves - Margaret Owen
First casualty of my attempts to read the Hugo shortlist! This is a very solid YA novel, but it's the first in the trilogy of which the third is the one actually nominated, and I realised I just wasn't quite invested enough to keep going. Once again I was like "maybe THIS YA will work for me", and once again, through no fault of the book itself... not quite.

First of all, from the department of corrections and clarifications: I can't believe I forgot MURDERBOT in my last post, absolutely one of the joys of last year. (I didn't realise until it was happening what a delight it would be to have a show with an aroace autistic lead or how much it would mean. People like me don't get to be the main character!)

It has also occurred to me that most of the Pluribus I have watched was technically THIS year, so it doesn't entirely belong in a 2025 round up, but listen, time is weird, whomst amongst us is not fallible etc etc

I did make a bingo card for this year! I haven't decided yet if I want to share it here, but maybe. It's mostly household things, plus a few creative endeavours - I'm wary of putting too many of those on there in case it turns them into chores, but I'm hoping the bingo card format takes some of the pressure off.

Also, turns out I do want to talk about my year in books a bit. I read 149 books last year, the upper end of average for me, but although I read some absolute BANGERS, I feel like overall I read more books I felt three stars and below about than four stars and above - not necessarily a reflection on their quality, but on how much I personally enjoyed them. I don't do reading goals, because I find the freedom to read whatever whenever more motivating, but I think maybe this year I should DNF more.

I'm also pondering whether I want to do more awards-shortlist reading this year. I nominate and vote in the Hugos, but there's usually at least one or two things on the shortlist I don't end up reading (for 2025 it was Someone You Can Build a Nest In, because a romance where people get eaten is basically my banishing circle, and Alien Clay, because from the reviews I read I couldn't tell whether I'd like it enough to make up for the body horror), and I don't plan to force myself to read stuff I don't, at least on some level, want to. Other awards on my radar:

- The Le Guin! I'd read about half the shortlist when it came out last year, so decided to read the rest; I almost managed it and had a great time - I loved a lot of things on it and didn't regret reading any of them. (The only one I didn't read was because the ebook was FIFTEEN POUNDS and I simply could not. All in favour of authors getting paid, but FIFTEEN POUNDS for an EBOOK, come ON.)

- The Clarke! I never quite line up with this shortlist like I want to, but I'm always interested in what's on it.

- The Ignytes! I read one thing off the novel shortlist last year and really loved it, would have read a second if it wasn't for the FIFTEEN POUNDS issue mentioned above. I like that this one also has a novella shortlist (I've read three of last year's). And more categories, but I'm less into short fiction, YA and MG, so I'll keep an eye on them, but I'm not committing to reading them.

I haven't run the numbers, but based on vibes I think I am reading more older stuff than I have been (ie more than two years old). This is a good thing for me personally, I think, because when I was struggling to find things I was excited to read a few years ago, part of the way I got myself enthused was by keeping up more with the buzz around what was New! and Exciting!, and while I'm still enjoying that, it's nice to feel like I need it less.

And finally, my top ten books read last year, five published last year, five from earlier (not on purpose, it just worked out that way):

Metal From Heaven - august clarke
Menewood - Nicola Griffith
The City in Glass- Nghi Vo
The West Passage - Jared Pechaček
Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera
The Breath of the Sun - Isaac Fellman
The River Has Roots - Amal El-Mohtar
City of All Seasons - Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley
Some Body Like Me - Lucy Lapinska
The Everlasting - Alix E Harrow

(Honorable mention to Iona Datt Sharma's Wish You Were Here, which came out in 2025 but which I read in 2024, just.)

When They Burned the Butterfly - Wen-yi Lee
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles - Malka Ann Older
Cinder House - Freya Marske
The Fortunate Fall - Cameron Reed
Murder by Memory - Olivia Waite
The Isle in the Silver Sea - Tasha Suri
Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox - Victoria Finlay
The Everlasting - Alix E Harrow
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart - Izzy Wasserstein
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep - HG Parry
A Chorus Rises - Bethany C Morrow

Floating Hotel - Grace Curtis
This Brutal Moon - Bethany Jacobs
Audition for the Fox - Martin Cahill
Or What You Will - Jo Walton
Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age - Eleanor Barraclough
The Confession of Brother Haluin - Ellis Peters
All Is Bright - Llinos Cathryn Thomas
Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame - Neon Yang
Sunward - William Alexander
A Case of Life and Limb - Sally Smith

When They Burned the Butterfly (three stars), Cinder House (four stars), The Fortunate Fall (four stars), The Isle in the Silver Sea (three stars), The Everlasting (five stars), Sunward (four stars)

When They Burned the Butterfly
This was an incredibly frustrating read, because the first few chapters were stunning, and the last few chapters were also really good, but the middle just wasn't a patch on either. It's like the plot kicked in and suddenly all that rich atmosphere and character work just fell away and instead everything just felt so flat and generic, with an annoying tendency to tell us about an emotional revelation a character had had without showing them having it or the journey that got them there. I do wonder if something went awry in the editing process, because it's also a very messy book - plot threads and characters are dropped, it doesn't always make sense on a sentence level, the main character's significant tattoo moves from her breastbone to her collarbone etc.

It also tries to have its cake and eat it with regards to having a lesbian lead in 1970s Singapore - the main character and her girlfriend at one point are given a magazine with quotes from members of Singapore's burgeoning lesbian community, and we're told it's meaningful at least to the girlfriend, but everyone in the book has been so incredibly neutral about the fact of their relationship (including the main character herself, who has absolutely no feelings negative, positive or mixed about the realisation that she's a lesbian) that it just doesn't land.

I will be keeping an eye out for what this author does next, because this book had so much potential and she's still very early in her career, but this book just wasn't it.

Cinder House
Really great Cinderella-meets-the-Gothic-novel novella. I wish it had been just a hair longer, to flesh out two important secondary characters and their relationship more, and to tie off a dangling plot thread, but otherwise, loved it.

The Fortunate Fall
Absolutely fantastic. This is a mid-nineties cyberpunk novel, recently reissued, and while it has unavoidably dated in parts, it still feels so fresh and alive. Its two main strengths for me were its sense of humour (I feel like a lot of its contemporaries were a bit po-faced, this isn't) and the ending: it eschews a more superficial happy ending in order to stick to and fully crystallise its central theme, that people matter more than ideas, in a way that ultimately felt more true and more hopeful than the alternative.

The author has a second novel coming out next year, I'm very excited for it.

The Isle in the Silver Sea
Sadly this was a bit of a mess. It was very readable, and it has some great ideas, but overall I was left with the sense that it hadn't quite figured out what it wanted to be, or how to get there - there's a moment towards the end where it makes an explicit thesis statement, and I could see a lot of things in the rest of the book that could back that statement up, but there was also a lot in there that wasn't doing anything at all: it wasn't so much a crystalisation of what had gone before, but more a sort of "yeah, ok, I suppose so" moment.

I originally wrote here that I thought the romance hurt it, but actually I think the romance suffered from the same problem as the rest of the book: lots of potential, but the narrative continually seemed to be pulled away from the interesting and the specific towards something more generic. With the romance, it felt like it took a situation with a lot of potential for conflict and interest (they've known they were fated to fall in love since before they met, how do they feel about the fact that they seem to be falling in love for real? What does "for real" even mean in this context?) and then just... didn't really dig into that at all. The whole book just felt like it kept gesturing at some really interesting stuff, but then it would swerve away to some easily overcome plot obstacle instead of getting into anything that could be in any way meaty or difficult.

It also had a bit of a case of not caring about anyone who wasn't a named character - part of the tale that Simran and Vina are fated to play out involves Vina laying waste to the countryside, burning villages and presumably killing a lot of people, but neither she nor the book seem to have any feelings about that at all. And when we're told that destroying a tale destroys part of the Isle, no one seems to be in any way concerned about the people who were living there, and none of this factors into how Simran and Vina feel about either giving into or resisting their story.

The setting was potentially really interesting - a sort of perpetual Elizabethan present under the Queen Undying, but with deliberate anachronisms - but again, the lack of development meant it was just "vaguely Tudor but showers and same-sex marriage exist" (the book wasn't clear on whether it was a queernorm world or whether being queer meant you were marginalised). It also had a lot of different magical elements thrown in, between the tales themselves, witches, cunning people, fae, misc other powers etc, but without any sense of whether and how it all interacted.

It was just all so frustrating. There was a really good book under there, but it needed a lot more tightening up, pruning and refocusing.

(Some time after writing this it occurred to me that the Arthuriana aspects might have made me more judgy than I would otherwise have been? Like, I am judgy and mean about books sometimes, this is a known fact and because of the love I bear them, but I have particularly high standards for Arthuriana.)

The Everlasting
Time loops! Lady knights! The danger and power of a simplified version of history being told as truth! What does freedom really mean! This was an absolute banger and I loved every minute of it.

Sunward
I've bounced off a lot of the cosy books I've tried (eg Murder by Memory in November), but this one really worked for me and I can't quite work out what's different. I think it managed a good balance of the stakes being personal (and comparatively small scale compared to what else was going on in the world) whilst also really mattering, both to the main character and in terms of the possible implications of the world at large. The book's about a space courier who also fosters baby artificial intelligences who haven't quite settled yet, and it does a great job of making the baby bots idiosyncratic without being self consciously cutesy, which really worked for me. (Her current foster named herself Agatha Panza von Sparkles, so I did have concerns going in.) Anyway, I liked this a lot, would be interested in more in this universe or from this author.

How the World Made the West - Josephine Quinn
The Incandescent - Emily Tesh
A Song of Legends Lost - MH Ayinde
The Maid and the Crocodile - Jordan Ifueko
Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera
The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley
Heavenly Tyrant - Xiran Jay Zhao
The Tusks of Extinction - Ray Nayler
The Breath of the Sun - Isaac Fellman
Vox Machina: Stories Untold
Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Forest of a Thousand Eyes - Frances Hardinge
The Rose Rent - Ellis Peters
Motherland: A Journey Through 500,000 years of African Culture and Identity - Luke Pepera
The River Has Roots - Amal El-Mohtar
The Mercy Makers - Tessa Gratton

Death of the Author - Nnedi Okorafor
City of All Seasons - Oliver K Langmead and Aliya Whiteley
The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects - Bee Wilson
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain - Victoria Mackenzie
Some Body Like Me - Lucy Lapinska
The Death of Mountains - Jordan Kurella
The Dragonfly Gambit - AD Sui
Pluralities - Avi Silver
I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman trans Ros Schwartz
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel
Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops - Tim Robey
The Deep Dark - Molly Ostertag
Wheel of the Infinite - Martha Wells
Remember You Will Die - Eden Robins
Pagans - James Alistair Henry
Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones

Witch Week - Diana Wynne Jones
Archer's Goon - Diana Wynne Jones
The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
The Night Parade of 100 Demons - Marie Brennan
Penric's Mission - Lois McMaster Bujold
We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain - Lanre Bakare
The Memory Hunters - Mia Tsai
All Systems Red - Martha Wells
Artificial Condition - Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol - Martha Wells
Exit Strategy - Martha Wells
Network Effect - Martha Wells
Fugitive Telemetry - Martha Wells

This is a three month round up because August happened to me so much. But! It did also feature me discovering that I could reread Murderbot, so I had a great time with that. (Still not sure I've recovered my ability to reread in general, but nice to add in something else I can handle rereading.)

I read a lot of things that I loved these last few months, but the words for most of them are not coming, so here we are. I do want to try and get back in the habit of writing stuff up as I go along, and maybe even actually posting monthly again - we shall see if I manage it.

The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley (four stars), Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky (three stars)

The Ministry of Time
I wasn't sure as I was reading this whether or not I liked it, but I blazed through it at a rate of knots and I think I've come down on the side of yes. It's near-future sf about a woman who becomes the liaison to a time-displaced polar explorer (and also makes a lot of bad choices, just so many, I loved her so much and had such a low opinion of her decision making skills), but it's also a thriller and a romance and has a lot of stuff about climate change and the experience of being an immigrant... and yet it somehow manages to make all of that work together incredibly well. And it's very funny, and the characters are all beautifully drawn - yeah, I think I loved it.

Service Model - Adrian Tchaikovsky
I would have liked this a lot more if it had been shorter. It's a satire on the dangers of letting automation take over from humanity, and it makes its points well, but it makes all of them over and over and over again and it gets quite frustrating. I was invested enough in the main characters and their relationship to finish it, and I did like that it resisted the trope of the robot who inevitably becomes human, but it really needed to be half the length.

Didn't finish:

A Palace Near the Wind - Ai Jiang, When the Tides Held the Moon - Venessa Vida Kelley

A Palace Near the Wind - Ai Jiang
I've really enjoyed some of Jiang's shorter fiction, but this one really wasn't coming together: it was just deeply unclear all the time how anything in its world actually worked ("the trees are people!" "all of them? How tree-y are they? How TALL are they?"), and while shorter fiction in particular can often get away with worldbuilding on vibes, the fact that I was questioning it suggested that the writing wasn't fully taking me with it. It did also feel like it was tipping from "protecting the environment is important" into "we should live in the woods, eschew all technology and eat only plants" in places.

When the Tides Held the Moon - Venessa Vida Kelley
As we know romance is more miss than hit for me, but I was intrigued by the setting of this one. I started off quite enjoying it, but the pace was so slow that it gave me time to notice that the characters and world were on the thin side, and ultimately I got bored and wandered off about halfway through. I did love the illustrations, though, and I think if the pace had been tightened up a bit I would probably have finished and liked it.

The Crown of Dalemark - Diana Wynne Jones
Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right - Jordan S. Carroll
City of Bones - Martha Wells
Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie
The Just City - Jo Walton
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins: Caduceus Clay
The Labyrinth's Archivist - Day Al-Mohamed

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door - HG Parry
Star Trek: Lower Decks - Warp Your Own Way
Kindling - Traci Chee
Track Changes: Selected Reviews - Abigail Nussbaum
King of Dead Things - Nevin Holness
The Nightward - RSA Garcia
The Orb of Cairado - Katherine Addison
The Sea Eternal - Emery Robin
Water Logic - Laurie J Marks

City of Bones (three stars), Elephants Can Remember (three stars), The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door (four stars), King of Dead Things (four stars), The Orb of Cairado (four stars)

City of Bones
This definitely reads like an early work - there's some stuff around sex and relationships in particular that is not amazing - but it's still a solidly enjoyable read. It's clear that Wells hasn't yet reached the heights that she's going to, but there's still some great characterisation and worldbuilding and some really solid prose. I liked it a lot and will be picking up the other early works that Tor are reissuing.

(content notes: some non-explicit sex scenes that aren't definitively assault but also aren't definitively not)

Elephants Can Remember
The premise of this one was great: older lady helps Poirot solve a fifteen year old case by nosing around talking to people, on the grounds that eventually the patchwork of what they remember will add up to something Significant. The execution was a bit lacklustre, though; I'd love to read something with a similar premise but more spark. (Also extremely wild to me to read a Poirot set in the seventies; while I've definitely read at least one more from that decade, as well as one from the sixties, it was when I was young enough not to register when they were set. (I had a big Poirot phase as a child, for reasons I do not entirely understand.))

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door
I'm not hugely familiar with dark academia as a genre, but I know enough to know this was using a lot of familiar tropes. Which is absolutely fine because it really nailed the execution: it's a really satisfying read because of how well constructed it is. All the character work is great, it knows what it wants to do with its themes, the worldbuilding hangs together nicely. I enjoyed it a whole lot.

King of Dead Things
YA urban fantasy about four black teenagers doing magic in London, and if any of that sounds appealing to you, you should get it because it's great. I feel like there were a few first-book type wobbles here and there, but overall I liked it a whole lot and am excited to read more in the series.

(content note: the parent of one character has memory loss, analogous to but not Alzheimer's)

The Orb of Cairado
Novella set just after The Goblin Emperor; the protagonist is the best friend of the Wisdom of Choharo's pilot. This definitely feels at times like a novel with the complications taken out, rather than a true novella, and there were definitely things I wanted more development of, but Addison's a good enough writer that it's still a fun read, and I absolutely loved the ending.

Winter's Dawn - Arden Powell
The Masquerades of Spring - Ben Aaronovitch
Dishoom: From Bombay with Love - Kavi Thakrar, Naved Nasirm Shamil Thakrar
This Sceptred Isle: 55BC-1901 - Christopher Lee
The Valley of Fear - Arthur Conan Doyle
Foundryside - Robert Jackson Bennett
Very Good, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse
The Raven in the Foregate - Ellis Peters
The Legacy of Arniston House - TL Huchu
Rebel Blade - Davinia Evans
You Are Here: Nine More Stories - Iona Datt Sharma
The Word for World is Forest - Ursula K Le Guin
North Continent Ribbon - Ursula Whitcher

Metal From Heaven - august clarke
Menewood - Nicola Griffith
Hammajang Luck - Makana Yamamoto
Sheine Lende - Darcie Little Badger
The Last Hour Between Worlds - Melissa Caruso
The Fox Wife - Yangsze Choo
The Mountain Crown - Karin Lowachee
Breath, Warmth and Dream - Zig Zag Claybourne
Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild
A Sweet Sting of Salt - Rose Sutherland
Thunder City - Philip Reeve
When the Dust Settles: Searching for Hope After Disaster - Lucy Easthope
Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins: Beauregard Lionett
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Katherine Rundell
The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q - Felicia Davin
Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones
Eight Days of Luke - Diana Wynne Jones
Cart and Cwidder - Diana Wynne Jones
Drowned Ammet - Diana Wynne Jones
The Spellcoats - Diana Wynne Jones
The Lives of Christopher Chant - Diana Wynne Jones

So at the end of January I a) got really into a Diana Wynne Jones podcast (Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones! It's great!) and then b) got covid, hence all the DWJ rereads. I hadn't read most of them in over twenty years and they really hold up - some aspects of them are definitely Of Their Time (casual fatphobia and casual racism of the sort that was very standard for white authors of children's books in the UK in the 70s; also what if more than one girl per book got to be both sympathetic and active, what then etc), but underneath and around all that they really are fantastic.

You Are Here (five stars), North Continent Ribbon (four stars), Menewood (five stars), Sheine Lende (four stars), The Last Hour Between Worlds (four stars)

You Are Here
Really excellent collection. I'd read most of the stories before, but the two new ones (one a novella!) were a real treat, and reading them together pulled out the thematic throughline between them in a way that only enhanced my enjoyment.

As the title and the introduction make clear, the theme is "You Are Here": this is the situation you are in; it may not be what you wanted or planned for, but it's where you are: what are you going to do now? It's full of people being forced to take an honest look at where they are and deal with it as it is, and how that process clarifies something about who they are. But it never runs the risk of becoming samey, because every situation and person is so specific, so grounded in their realities, and all the worlds are so varied - Cornish smugglers, a spaceship with a Romance Problem, a near future care home, a fantasy world with dragons (who WILL break your heart, but also put it back together again).

The people and worlds in this collection feel so real, partly because of all the excellent detail that makes the worlds of the stories feel vivid and lived in, and partly because they're never only one thing: a lot of the situations are sad and hard, but also people are kind and funny and complicated, and it's wonderful. I cannot recommend this collection enough tbh.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC in return for an honest review, also the author is a friend.

North Continent Ribbon
Another excellent collection! This one is a set of linked stories set in the same world: each stands alone, but together they build up a picture of the world and its concerns through the stories of a variety of very different people in very different corners of society. I enjoyed it very much.

Menewood
Sequel to Hild, which I also loved (lo these many years ago). This volume finds our heroine struggling desperately to build something and hold onto the things and people she loves in the midst of political turmoil and danger from all sides. It's ultimately hopeful despite some of the really terrible things that happen, and is really richly and vividly imagined with some excellent minor characters. I loved it.

Content notes: sexual assault and rape (I think all off page?), violence,

spoiler

infant loss

Sheine Lende
Prequel to Elatsoe, in which Ellie's grandmother Shane has to track down her mother and a local boy who have gone missing, maybe together, maybe separately. It felt very much like an old school children's/young adult book in a way that I really enjoyed (partly due to the 70s setting).

The Last Hour Between Worlds
Kembral Thorne is out on her own for the first time since her daughter was born and she just wants to have a nice time at a fancy party, but unfortunately: time loops, monsters, the machinations of eldritch beings etc. Also her ex-friend/ex-maybe love interest is there and she may be one of the only people she can trust. The beginning of this book is a little on the slow side, but once it's up and rolling the momentum just builds and builds. I particularly enjoyed how well constructed it was: every loop adds something and the twists and revelations are extremely well paced without seeming contrived. I really just had a great time with it and I'm glad there are going to be more (which makes sense given the strong urban fantasy but secondary world vibes).

Didn't finish:

Blood of the Old Kings - Sung-Il Kim trans. Anton Hur, The Chatelaine - Kate Heartfield

Blood of the Old Kings - Sung-Il Kim trans. Anton Hur
This was a perfectly good fantasy novel, but I have so many things I'm really excited to read that perfectly good wasn't quite enough to keep me reading.

The Chatelaine - Kate Heartfield
This was v good, but the revenants were more zombie adjacent than I could handle, alas!