Books
Currently reading: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie 📚
Reading in advance of watching the Branagh film.
Finished reading: Season of Love by Helena Greer 📚
I love it so much. Sweet, hot but closed doors, I really do wish Carrigan’s was a real place, that Noelle and Miriam were real and I could be friends with them. Highly recommend.
🔖📚 Read …and a partridge in a pear tree (19913 words) by strangehunger.
This is a beautiful and perfect Gideon the Ninth mall employee AU. Gideon works at Spencer Gifts. Harrow works at Hot Topic. And my boy Palamedes works at B&N, of course.
Currently reading: Season of Love by Helena Greer 📚
I’ve read 141 pages in this book since I picked it up yesterday afternoon.
📚 I’m sure there are a lot of things I’ll want to tell you about Season of Love but the first is that there’s a Veronica Mars reference and a shout-out to the coolest member of the Babysitters Club on the same page.
Finished reading: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko 📚
Finished this in 2 or 3 days. I was drawn to it because of the cover & buzz. I stayed in it because of the magic of connection & my love of kind teen girls with a sense of justice. Gorgeous, evocative writing, highly recommend.
Currently reading: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko 📚
Finished reading: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo 📚
I loved it so much. I know Leigh Bardugo is done with the Grishaverse for a while but I hope not for always.
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“None of this had been fated; none of it foretold… They were just the people who had shown up and managed to survive.
But maybe that was the trick of it: to survive, to dare to stay alive, to forge your own hope when all hope had run out.” Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves
Woodland Goth: The Goblins of Labyrinth by Brian Froud 📚
Yep, I created a whole Woodland Goth bookshelf. Goblins of Labyrinth is a collectible. I don’t want it to get lost in my massive want-to-read list.
Currently reading: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo 📚
Kind of resent that I have to do anything besides read this book, even though I love a lot of the other stuff I do.
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“I am most interested in confessional writing when it allows us to move into the personal as a way to go beyond it. In all my work I invoke the personal as a prelude.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
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“I had been so well socialized by graduate school that I was torn between which writing path to pursue, agonizing over whether I could write from various standpoints in various genres.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
Finished reading: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl 📚
Read this because it’s on Austin Kleon’s list of books about motherhood & art. But it held extra delight for me because it’s also about the theater.
“Perhaps having children makes one increasingly distrust the symbolic world. Because suddenly nothing is as important as the very real particular.” Sara Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write
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Want to read: Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose 📚
Trying to figure out if I can make a crow cane head work on my adjustable cane so I can walk the streets of Amsterdam pretending it’s Ketterdam and I’m Kaz Brekker… 📚
My whole family and I are moving to Tom Bombadil’s house. He and Goldberry are such gracious hosts and we will be relaxed there. (Please note: we cannot actually do this.) 📚
My Reading Year, 2022 📚
Everybody is doing their year-end stuff, so I thought I’d do mine.
I read 46 books this year including comics/graphic novels and poetry. About 12 of those were graphic novels or poetry and another 2 or 3 were short story or novella collections. This puts me right about where my usual average for longer works is, around 30 books. I don’t set quantitative reading goals anymore besides reading one more book than I’ve read so far in a given year.
My reading this year was heavily influenced by the microgenres/aesthetics of cozy fantasy, adventurecore, and woodland goth.
I sought out cozy fantasy and adventurecore in particular because I wanted my reading to comfort me.
I joined the Atlas Obscura book club on Literati, because Austin Kleon stopped running his book club. I only finished two of the 5 books I got, but I look forward to finishing the ones I didn’t. I love the curation but the monthly format doesn’t really work for me and I wasn’t making the kinds of connections to other readers that I’d hoped to.
I started to list my favorite books I’ve read this year but the list got too long. I loved the Hildafolk series and The Bloody Chamber.
I began the year with the intention to get caught up on Leigh Bardugo’s backlist, and I only have one book to go, The Rule of Wolves. I started that this week, so I hope to finish before the year is out and be caught up just in time for the release of the new Alex Stern book.
I think that’s all I have to share about my reading this year. How did your reading year go?
Wonderful things 🥳:
- My kid fell asleep before 9:30 for the first time this week. 😴
- I ❤️ Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, & Andy Serkis singing as both of them. 📚
- Tomorrow I get to watch Neverafter. 🧙♀️
- My friend Little Willow rescued a kitty & sent me many pictures. 🐱
Finished reading: The Lives of Saints by Leigh Bardugo 📚
I love that Leigh Bardugo wrote this and The Language of Thorns to give us the immersion of reading the same stories that the characters in the Grishaverse read.
💬📚 “I don’t remember my own story… I remember only how I fell into books, never to rise from their pages, how I was never truly awake until I began to dream of other worlds.” Leigh Bardugo, The Lives of Saints ❤️ Saint of the Book
Finished reading: Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 📚
I loved it so much. And I’m still pretty confused but that’s okay. 💀
💬📚 “We give the people we mother our bodies, and what they will recall is our presence and heat, our animal closeness.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change
💬📚 “I don’t believe care work has to wreck us. This labor can be shared, social, collective—and transformative.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change