sultrybutdamaged

Haven’t done a book post for a while, so it’s time to play catch up. Since it’s my first book post for 2024 and I’ve read a lot in the last few months, I’m going to do something a little different - I’m going to be positive and only list the books I loved, or at least really liked, since my last post.

( Top 10 Books I Read in 2024 (so far) )

October is usually my best month for reading, since I do a Halloween-themed readathon. I like the accountability that comes from being on a team of readers; keeps me reaching for my books instead of my phone in my free time. Things are still hectic at home and work so I came in a little under where I was last year, but I still finished 17 mostly short books. Luckily I was able to keep to my year goal of only picking books from my (massive) TBR.

( October Reads )

Haven’t posted much lately, so I thought this meme would be fun. Snagged from svgurl

rules: give us the links to your fics with the most hits, most kudos, most comments, most bookmarks, most words, and least words.

Most Hits/Most Kudos:
Bedside Manner (Star Trek: AOS, slight Kirk/Spock but mostly gen, 4001w)
Post ST: Into Darkness. While he recovers from coming back from the dead, Kirk's crew keeps him company.

Star Trek: AOS was a fandom I got into on a whim and ended up having some of the best interactions in. I’m pretty sure this one is my most read fic because of the Spirk tag, even though it’s barely more than friendship at this point. The main thing I remember about this one is that I was trying to let the audience read between the lines and not spell everything out, because that is a problem I have, and I think it worked.


Most Words/Most Comments:
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know (The Magicians, Julia/Penny/Kady, 138kw)
Kady and Penny are Agents of the Library, partners and best friends - until they both end up dating Julia and their friendship turns to competition. But when Julia becomes the target of a dangerous magician, Kady and Penny have to use all their skills to protect her - and maybe deal with their feelings for each other in the process.

This is by far the longest thing I’ve ever finished, counting both fanfic and original work, and on the fic side it is 100k longer than my second longest completed fic. It was written for a big bang and I’m still amazed I finished. It was at the beginning of Covid when my work situation was chaotic, I was writing up until the last minute and my amazing artist, who did truly incredible work, was the third one I had after two dropped out. I had written long original fic before but never tried to balance so many plot lines and POVs and relationships arcs. I’m really, really proud of how it came out.

(I had great commenters too, but the high comment number really came down to one extremely loyal reader who showed up for every single chapter. This person and I have never spoken outside of comments sections on each other’s fics, but I have never appreciated anyone in fandom more. Please never think commenting doesn’t mean anything to writers, it means the world.)

Most Bookmarks:
A Great Blessing (Avatar: The Last Airbender, genfic, 10305w)
Aang knows his friends are keeping a secret. Aang's friends are really, really bad at secrets.

This was an exchange fic and I’m still sort of surprised that people liked it as much as they did. It was a fic where I had a really solid idea of what I wanted to do - a found family holiday story that would be a little bittersweet and deal with loss, personal and cultural, but also have have the kind of humor and lightness that fits ATLA - but I never felt like I got there writing it. I didn’t hit a flow with this one, it was just struggling for words right up until the end, and it felt like it fell short of what I wanted it to be. But the person I wrote it for loved it and it’s probably gotten the most emotional response of anything I’ve written. You don’t know what’s going to resonate with people.

Least Words
A Gift (Star Trek: AOS, Uhura/Gaila, 1825w)

This was a really quick fic that I wrote after rewatching Star Trek 2009, when I realized that the movie implies that Gaila died and I wanted to fix that. (I later learned that the tie-in comics had already fixed this, in… basically the same way, so yay for accidental canon compliance?) I like this ship a lot, but between the length and trying to build a whole character up out of two scenes, this isn’t one of my favorites.

I read 11 books in April. This wasn’t an exciting reading months, but there were a couple that are worth talking about.

Vanity and Valour by Mary Robinette Kowal: Fourth in the Glamourist Histories series. This series has really grown on me. It’s a Regency featuring a married couple and light magical elements. I started out in the first book not liking Jane much as a character and having no investment in her relationship with Vincent, and now I love them both as people and as a pair. Plus, this book has a heist. A thing to know about me is that I will always read/watch something if it is marketed as “X meets Ocean’s Eleven.” A heist hits every time. This heist involves the main couple teaming up with a convent of Italian nuns and Lord Byron, which is really what all heists need.

Magic Lost, Trouble Found by Lisa Shearin: First in the Raine Benares series. This is a low fantasy/urban fantasy series and it is very tropey - noir-ish detective heroine, sudden power acquisition, love triangle - but fun. It ends with the heroine and her friends infiltrating a fancy dress party, which is another great trope, like a cousin to heists.

Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux: I have loved Phantom of the Opera, the musical, since I was about ten, so I picked this as my classics read for the month. Unfortunately, I was looking for a gothic romance, and instead I got an epistolary… comedy, I think, in places? There were parts that were funny, parts that were eerie (especially the descriptions of the Paris Opera House) and parts that were extended lectures on how optical illusions work. I recommend watching the movie, it’s great.

Second Kiss, Double Exposure and Second Chance by Chelsea M. Cameron: These three make up the Violet Hill series, a sapphic romance novella series set around a small town cafe in Maine. The books are written for fans of coffee shop AUs. Each one is a quick, fluffy romance with just a touch of angst and smut for flavor. To be honest, these books aren’t really my kind of thing, but if you do like this type of story they are done well. I was mostly invested for the coffee shop itself; I like quirky small towns and the idea of one with a whole thriving queer community is just very nice to think about.

Fool’s Gold by Jaye Wells: This is a prequel novella to the Sabina Kane series. A funny thing about these books: I know I read all of them except this one back when I was really into urban fantasy, because my Kindle says I did. And once I picked this one up, I vaguely remembered the premise - half-vampire assassin realizes she’s on the wrong side of a supernatural war. But that is all I remember. I think I just read so many of these types of books back then that they all blurred together. But this one is fun. It’s set in 1979 and has that gritty, 70’s feel that walks the line between moody and showy. Sabina is a young, eager, raw character here and I liked her a lot. I was less crazy about the plot itself - so many pimps and references to “females” - but I’m pretty sure that’s just because of the time frame.

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon: It feels a little silly talking about this book because it got a lot of attention when it came out so another person saying “no, but really, it’s good” is pointless… but I loved it. It’s a stand alone fantasy and it just does all the big fantasy book stuff really well. I think most of the attention it got was for being feminist, which is true, but mostly just in the way the majority of the active characters are women and they are all complex and flawed. It has themes, like how myths get twisted to fit the agendas of the people who tell them, but it felt more like a plot and character book than an ideas book. The characters are diverse, with all kinds of cultures and religious beliefs that aren’t just for flavor, they actually impact the story. There are some good relationships, including a queer one that I didn’t see coming. The book is worth it for that alone since it’s so rare to find queer romances in fantasy that feel organic and not like “now the designated gay pair will kiss.” Also, amazing dragons. Helpful dragons you can ride and evil dragons who blow shit up. Something for everyone.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame Smith (and Jane Austen) I try not to be negative on here, but I hated this book. It started out funny enough, but it was just a joke that went on for way too long. And it felt like the author knew that “Jane Austen, but with random outbreaks of zombie battles” wasn’t enough to sustain the whole book, so he tried to make other jokes, and they just… weren’t funny. I skimmed the last few chapters because there was one incredibly drawn out and horribly ableist bit that kept coming back. I wouldn’t have finished this but I needed the ”monster on the cover” points for Realmathon.

Afrotistic by Kala Allen Oneida: This was for my Autistic Reads book club. It’s an own voices book with a Black, autistic heroine who starts a support group to get leadership points for an academic competition. The writing of this took me a couple chapters to get used to, but it ended up really working; it’s a teenager’s voice stripped of any “writer” flourishes, so it comes across like just unfiltered inner monologue. The strength of the book is in the variety of the characters and the style.

The Cerulean by Amy Ewing: The first half of a fantasy (or possibly a sci-fi-disguised-as-fantasy) duology, about a girl from a city in space who falls to the planet below in what is supposed to be a self-sacrifice to save her people, but instead ends up surviving and being captured by a PT Barnum-type character who wants to display her in his theater. I enjoyed this, but it’s very much the first half of a story. When I went to log it in StoryGraph, I learned that there was apparently some controversy about it, because the city in the sky has an all-female population and a society built around sapphic triad relationships, so readers were expecting a lesbian utopia, but instead the main character goes through a storyline where she comes out as… straight. And yeah, honestly, that part felt a little silly, but it wasn’t that big a deal. There were other queer characters and enough interesting stuff going on that I wasn’t too worried about the one girl having a personal crisis because she saw boys for the first time.

March was a productive reading month for me. I did a low-pressure readathon and ended up finishing 12 books.

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis - a YA story about an autistic teenager trying to win her family a spot on a generation ship after Earth is hit by an asteroid. I loved this one. Duyvis is the creator of the OwnVoices hashtag and she does an incredible job with Denise’s immersive POV. The book is written with a light touch but it has a lot of ideas going on behind the adventure. It’s about who we value as a society and why, and what we owe to the future and to the people still alive now. It’s also one of the most believable depictions I’ve read of a post-apocalyptic world, even with the cool spaceship.

The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden - Second and third in a fantasy trilogy set in 14th century Russia (well, what would eventually be Russia.) This series started out pretty good and got much better by the end - each book was stronger than the last one. I enjoyed the use of Russian folklore and history, which I didn’t know much about. The series also just had a lot of things I like in it: a protagonist who makes a lot of mistakes and learns from then, an unconventional romance, strong sibling relationships, horses.

The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice - After watching Interview with the Vampire last year, I started a very slow reread of Anne Rice’s books, mostly in publication order. This month I finally got to this one, in which a lot of things happen but the most important is that we discover Lestat was a theater kid and that explains everything. I should do a longer post at some point on these books; they were, uh, weirdly formative for me. As far as this one goes, the fandom considers it one of the best, and that’s definitely true, even if I am a bit of a Lestat skeptic.

Mandlebrot the Magnificent by Liz Ziemska This is a novella about a Jewish teenager who saves his family from the Nazis using math-as-magic. I don’t usually enjoy novellas, because I always want them to be longer, but this book is the exact right length for the story it’s telling. It’s a quiet little story about one family set against the backdrop of war and the Holocaust. There is a lot of math in this book, and I am the last person to ask how much of that is based on anything real, but the author explains it all in a way that makes it clear enough.

The Goddess of Buttercups & Daisies by Martin Millar - This was the only book this month I really didn’t like. I had high expectations because the premise sounded great - it’s like Xena-meets-situational-comedy, about the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes trying to get a play produced while various semi-divine figures are battling out for the future of the city around him - but it ended up being kind of blah. The humor didn’t really land for me and it was a book that really needed to be funny to work.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng - This was a really slow read for me. I think I actually started it in January. For some reason, it took me a while to get into it, but once I did I found it very powerful. It’s set in a sort of dystopian version of the present where a fascist set of laws have been passed in the US to prevent “unpatriotic” actions, and follows a young boy trying to track down his mother, a poet who has become the face of a movement calling for an end to the laws. It’s unsettling and ends in a way I didn’t expect at all.

Buffalo Soldier by Marcus Broaddus - Another novella, and this one did feel a bit too short. It’s a steampunk story where Jamaica rose to be a world power on par with the British Empire, and focuses on a secret agent-type character on the run with a young boy who’s being hunted for his unique genes. It’s a very thoughtful book, with a lot to say about politics, justice and violence. Unfortunately I did feel like the plot got a bit muddled at the end. I would really love to see more in this world though.

Wild Card by Lisa Shearin - My third novella (can you tell I was rushing to hit a certain number of books by the end of the month?) This one I picked up to see if I might be interested in the series it’s part of. I thought it was good, not great, but enough that I’ll probably read at least one of the novels. It’s got all the tropes of urban fantasy, with a vaguely noir-ish heroine solving mysteries, but in a more traditional fantasy world. My favorite part was a side character, a pirate who is afraid of magic.

Dragon Heart by Cecelia Holland - I don’t even know what to say about this one. The official description is something like “a mute teenage girl bonds with a dragon,” which does happen in the first 20%, but then the book turns into something else entirely. It’s a weird mix of high fantasy and horror, it’s got incredibly beautiful, moody and atmospheric prose, the magic system is bizarre, the characters and their relationships are all wonderful… and it’s got the most disappointing ending I can remember reading recently. If it weren’t for the last chapter, it would have been my favorite book of the month easily. I’m still going to go read everything else Cecelia Holland has written.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West - My classics read for the month, not the one I was planning, because I ran out of time and needed something shorter. This one is a beautifully written character study about a soldier who returns from WWI with amnesia and the women in his life who have to decide if they are going to force him to remember the truth or let him go on in the happy fantasy he believes is his life. It was incredibly depressing, and the soldier’s story was only the beginning of why. I was impressed by it but I’m sure not going to read it again.

Last fall I set a goal of reading more. I used to be a big reader. Especially during the break I took from fandom, reading was my main hobby. But I fell off a few years ago (other than fanfic) and I’ve been wanting to get back to it. Partially because I miss it and partially because even when I wasn’t reading, I was still amassing a ridiculous TBR and I need to get through some of it before I drown in books.

In February I finished 8 books, which seems to be about my average. March may be a little higher since I’m doing a themed readathon. This is what I read:

Dark Moon by Meredith Ann Pierce - This is the second in a series that started with Birth of the Firebringer. It’s fantasy and I think classified as YA. It feels more like the YA fantasy I remember from being a kid, by which I mean it’s like someone took a kid’s book and wrote it for an older audience rather than taking an adult book and writing it for a younger one. If that makes sense. Anyway, it has a mythological feel to it I really like. The main characters are all animals (unicorns mostly) and there’s a lot about culture clashes and how history can be warped to tell the story a society wants to believe about itself.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf - This is for a classics challenge I’m doing, 12 classics in 12 months. I hadn’t read Woolf in years and this scratched the English major part of my brain that’s been asleep for a while. It’s about a person who is born as a man in 16th century England and then lives into the 20th century, along the way becoming a writer and a woman (that part goes completely unexplained but not unaddressed.) It has interesting things to say about gender and a lot to say about writing, both as a vocation and as a career. It was inspired by Vita Sackville-West, who was Woolf’s lover and a writer herself. Knowing this made the book extremely funny because if Orlando is meant to be VSW, it’s an affectionate but definitely not completely positive portrayal. I’m reading a novel by VSW next month to compare. (And by then I will hopefully have stopped referring to her in my head as Vita Sackville-Baggins.)

and Falling, Fly and In Dreams Begin by Skylar White - This is an erotic fantasy duology collectively called The Harrowing. The books have different characters and plots but are connected through the lore of the world. One is about a fallen angel/vampire who gets involved with a neuroscientist who doesn’t believe in the supernatural and wants to cure her with drugs and the other is about a woman who dreams her way into the life of WB Yeats and his muse, Maud Gonne. (This one is great if you went through an Irish history hyperfixation like I did, because the fantasy elements mean Yeats and Gonne’s weird relationship makes more sense than it did in reality.) They’re interesting books; I liked them even though there’s a lot in them I wouldn’t usually enjoy. They are the type of fantasy where things happen more because they fit the themes of the book than because they, strictly speaking, make sense, and the kind of romances where you aren’t ever sure what the couple see in each other and sexual passion is the most transcendent possible human experience, which ace me has issues with. But they have a fascinating world, a lot of brain-tingling ideas and themes sitting side by side with the romance and magic, and really, really beautiful writing. I wish there were more books in this series.

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - This is a stand-alone modern fantasy set in Mexico. The plot reminded me of The Craft, but this isn’t a horror story. It has neat magic, but at the same time, the fantasy elements are almost incidental to the story, which is really more about the relationships between the characters and about the idea of returning home. There are two timelines: one in the 1980s, where three teenagers figure out how to use magic and things go wrong, and one in 2009 where the main character, Meche, returns to Mexico City to bury her father and meets up with the friends she hasn’t talked to in twenty years. The best thing about this book is how strongly it resists the urge to glamorize or soften its characters. The teenage characters in the 1980s storyline are real kids: awkward, emotional, prone to questionable decision making. And Meche, the main character, is abrasive and intense and bad at personal relationships at any age. You root for her because you’re in her head but you’re also kind of amazed that everyone else isn’t writing her off. This is another one where I really liked the writing style.

Glamour in Glass and Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal - These are the second and third in the Glamourist Histories series, which are Regency books with light magical elements. I was on the fence about continuing this series after the first one (it made me question whether I even like Regencies) but these are quick reads so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try more. (I hate leaving a series unfinished unless I hated it and this one I was just lukewarm on.) I’m glad I did because the second book was an improvement and the third one I really liked. These are solid alternate histories; they weave the story around the real historical events of the period very well. The magic is fun. And while I didn’t like the main characters to begin with, they’ve grown on me. I appreciate that the series focuses on one couple rather than doing the typical romance series thing of introducing a new pair for each book because you get to see their relationship over time and their character growth within that context.

Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde - This was a book club pick for a group I joined that’s doing a monthly read of books with autistic protagonists either written by autistic writers or that have good reviews from within the community. It was a reread for me and it was light and fun. It’s about a group of friends at a fandom convention and it captured that feeling very well, even though it seriously glosses over how much time these characters should have spent just walking from place to place or standing in lines. The rep (not only autistic but also mental health rep, racial diversity and queer rep) was very prominent in a way that still felt natural, not like an Issues Book.

I also started Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, but I didn’t get very far so that one will be finished this month. And I caught up on the Vox Machina origins comic series (I’ve been reading them as they get released collected.)

I posted my fic for an upcoming event a few days ago. It won’t be revealed until Friday, so we can still do edits, and I’ve been resisting the urge to just rewrite the whole thing. I’m mostly happy with it but I always get the feeling of “oh I missed what this fic was actually about” right after I post.

So for distraction… gay stuff.

I finally watched the Harley Quinn Valentine’s Day special (my reward for finishing the fic) and I loved the HarlIvy parts. I really like how the show always goes back to Harley and Ivy’s bad romantic histories and compares them to what they have now. Plus we got to see Arkham!era Ivy again. I have so many feelings about Ivy and Joker both claiming they saw Harley though the Harleen persona, but when Joker says it he means the Harley he created, and when Ivy says it she means the person Harley became.

I do wish the rest of this show more consistently lived up to the Harley and Ivy parts. Bane deserved a better plotline and Clayface… doesn’t, probably, but I deserved not to watch that.

I did like the little interview things they did with other characters. I will even accept the character assassination that is Clark Kent being a sports reporter.

I also finished Willow. I was very meh on it in the beginning but it won me over by the end and now I hope they get a second season. It’s an odd kind of show, because it’s framed as high fantasy, but it doesn’t fit with the other kinds of high fantasy being made right now. There’s not much effort in the worldbuilding and it doesn’t take itself too seriously in the plot. But it’s also not just a comedy, because it takes the emotions of the story extremely seriously. It’s very earnest and sincere. It’s also really heavily riding on the charm and chemistry of the cast, which is fine because they are all perfect and I would die for them.

I like Elora, even though she’s hitting every Chosen One trope hard. The actress sells it. I love Boorman. He’s played by Amar Chadha-Patel, who was supposed to be Ingtar on Wheel of Time (they renamed his character when he left the show to do this one), and honestly, it was the right decision. Boorman is mostly comic relief and he’s so good at it, WoT would have wasted him in a serious part. Oh, and Graydon, I love him too. Always got to like the nerd character.

But my favorite is Kit. I wish there were more Kits in fantasy. She thinks she’s the badass Strong Female Character but she’s actually just… kind of a mess? She’s not as good of a fighter as she thinks, she’s grumpy all the time, she has an inferiority complex, her love life is mostly a disaster. She’s very gay. Her whole motivation is saving her brother, and I’m a sucker for sibling relationships so that was nice. She’s perfect and her arc made me so happy this season.

Thank you so much in advance for my gift! I am really looking forward to what you write.

( Read more... )

A few days ago I did a post comparing the Old Guard movie to the first volume of the comics (the movie was better.) Today I finished reading the second volume, and since that will probably the main source for the sequel movie (which is absolutely happening, I will not accept anything else), I have some thoughts about how an adaptation could work.

( Read more... )

Dear Yuletide Author,

Thank you in advance for my present! I am really excited to see what you create.

I have some specific ideas for each fandom listed below. I tried to give you enough guidance, but please feel free to expand or go in a different direction if that suits you.

( Read more... )