|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| unknown
| 3.82
| 11
| 2025
| 2025
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Aug 17, 2024
| ||||||||||||||||||
| 9798814484352
| B09ZCJLF6J
| 4.39
| 18
| unknown
| Apr 30, 2022
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Dec 20, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.66
| 363
| 2024
| 2024
|
2Q24 #PrideMonth ended the quarter better than I'd feared, an average of 287 page views a day on the blog. Twitter did me proud all quarter long repre
2Q24 #PrideMonth ended the quarter better than I'd feared, an average of 287 page views a day on the blog. Twitter did me proud all quarter long representing 68% of referred traffic. My annual goal of 250 blogged reviews is still well within reach. The current 117 is down to June's big push of 27 posts, 26 of them single-title reviews. I've learned that the way to get more eyeballs on a review is to post one at a time even if they're short, and save the gang reviews for the end of the month. Adding up unique views on separate posts on the same day of the week versus ganged reviews showed me 151% more views were made than for the individuals. Message received. There were a lot of surprises this quarter. I just loved Jonathan Corcoran's memoir, No Son of Mine: A Memoir, Library Edition, which was a relief since I really loved The Rope Swing: Stories and would've hated to say lukewarm things about this one. A disappointing surprise was The Ministry of Time, which sold me on one idea and delivered another that I didn't like nearly so well. A happy surprise was Saint Elspeth, new to me author, found via my BookTuber bud Bryce. Its minor flaws in copyediting did not ruin it for me compared to its reasonably hopeful take on postapocalypse US society. A book of poems that I decline to name and a free Atwood story were, as expected, unloved. I'm more than ever aware that I have fewer and fewer eyeblinks ahead, so I need to get better at putting down thoughts on Pearl-Ruled books to give myself a sense of completion. I get niggly little guiltfish in my brain if I just drop a book with no resolution by review. I'm reinforced in my certainty that posting reviews is a lot easier if I make a few notes after I finish a read, then come back to make that a review when its day comes to be posted. Since I average five or six books on the go at one time, waiting until I finish a book then writing its review THAT MINUTE is daunting, so often doesn't get done. My blog's "scheduled" page is scary, full of bits and snips and stuff I really, really hope I don't die before I can clean up or delete. Otherwise there'll be months of nasty mean ugly-spirited whinges popping up at seemingly random moments into 2025. On to Q3 in good spirits, eagerly awaiting #WITMonth in August! (Women In Translation Month, an annual event dreamed up by a woman (!) who was fed up with translators not getting any luuuv.) *** 1Q24. I've had to drop Tumblr from my review-posting because the owner/president/head jerkoff posted transphobic maunderings, then the trans employees said "y'all CTFD he didn't mean it" which well totally relate to needing the gig, but no. THEN announced Tumblr would sell to AI scrapers everything users have posted there...so that, plus their porn ban, means they get axed from me creating anything there, posting or boosting things there. And they don't care, or notice, but I get to keep my own moral high ground. I don't see, or feel, any reason to adjust any of my annual goals. I've posted 51 blog posts in 2024, or on track for 200 annual posts; but that does not account for the heavy months of June and #Booksgiving to come, and there are already eleven reviews banked for those two. Then there was the most wonderful relief of a read, one that very well might be my 6-stars-of-five book for 2024: Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon. Shimmers like fine diamonds mounted in pure gold. What a story, and it's a true one, with such a lovely layered set of meanings. Author Ferdia should have such luck in his second book, too! Also notably good, unsurprisingly, was Natasha Pulley's novel The Mars House. It is, comme d'habitude, a morality play and a quietly subversive indictment of Rightness. Such a wonderful month/quarter! *** 2023's six-stars-of-five read was a gay classic, winner of the National Book Award for Translation, The Words That Remain [image] by Stênio Gardel and translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato. An excellent read. It was the sweetest, most poignant tale of the immense agony that homophobia perpetrates on its victims that I have read. It transported me back to a time in my life where a similar thing happened to me that happened to the boys in the story, and seeing that awfulness perpetrated by others put my own pain into a new perspective. Author Stênio Gardel and Translator Bruna Dantas Lobato deserve all the accolades, and this novel of the sweetness and delight of young love destroyed by the unreasoning hatred of homophobia deserves a place on everyone's shelf. Time to set 2024's goals! A bad year for me health-wise started me on the path of pulling in my horns, making my goals and my ideas about myself and my capacities smaller in the wake of the disaster. That really doesn't work for me, as a person, I found out. I got hugely lucky...I'm walking, talking, reading, and writing, despite the consensus opinion that I wouldn't be doing much of any of those things. And that somehow means I need to rein my ambitions IN?! What kind of dimwitted thinking is that? So I set bigger and bigger goals as 2023 went on. I made them all. That leads me to think his year shouldn't be started with self-limiting smallness. If I reviewed 222 books in 2023, why not go for at least 250 in 2024? So I will. All but 36 of 2023's reviews were from NetGalley and Edelweiss+, the DRC aggregators I use to get my biblioholism fixes. That's 16% of the total actually read and reviewed. In 2024, I think that percentage is just fine to maintain, so I'll settle on 41 reads not from those two sources as my soft goal...I don't much care if I hit it exactly, but I do need to leave room to read and review books I've been gifted over the years! 2023's #Booksgiving review blast resulted in my blog views for the month being 177% of November's total. So that worked. I only used Twitter for all of November, then for #Booksgiving, added Bluesky and Tumblr. That worked, too. The sadness of my #PrideMonth limp, flaccid performanceless unblast made me realize that, if I'm going to get a big project done, I need to break it down into steps. This is new for me, and a result of the actual limitations that the strokes have imposed on me. Like no longer being able to read handwriting or decode graphics like Wordle, this acquired dyslexia is a limitation I need to acknowledge. Not to say I won't keep pushing against it...but it's real, and planning needs to be based in reality. I hope all y'all have 2024s that brim with good reads, good news, and good love. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Oct 03, 2023
| ||||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.10
| 1,439
| 2023
| 2023
|
it was amazing
|
The rest of 2023 might be better than its first half (with forty-seven reviews posted of all sorts), but I'm officially setting my sights on posting 1
The rest of 2023 might be better than its first half (with forty-seven reviews posted of all sorts), but I'm officially setting my sights on posting 150 reviews on my blog as the total I'll be satisfied with. 4Q23 Fifty-seven reviews posted just in December! It sounds like I had the most amazing month of reading ever! Misleading to go just by numbers. This is the season of #Booksgiving. After the failure of Pride Month's review blast, I realized that I'd have to change the way I operated my what-I-think-you-should-buy guide, and started banking reviews and notes for them in June. So really, while I posted the reviews in November and December, this is reading done in thewhole of the third and fourth quarters. This also means that there's a huge bias towards five-star reviews, since this is the best-of period. I didn't have the best-ever quarter in history despite chucking stars around like confetti. My favorite read that I read in December was In the Name of Desire, a Brazilian gay literature classic finally translated into English last year. I reviewed it on my blog, which is ten years old and 1368 posts and growing. A quarter of good reading left me with this as my brightest memory...a gay kid stuck in a world-view that uses and then abuses him, all in the name of this giant, invisible, silent, fantasy being who, like the bullies it surrounds itself with, doesn't like you for being you. Hopeless yearning, dreamy infatuation, passionate awakening...all there, all beautifully evoked in the question-and-answer format of an interview, like a queer catechism. The best of December's own reading for me. 2023's six-stars-of-five read was another gay classic, winner of the National Book Award for Translation, The Words That Remain [image] by Stênio Gardel and translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato. An excellent read. It was the sweetest, most poignant tale of the immense agony that homophobia perpetrates on its victims that I have read. It transported me back to a time in my life where a similar thing happened to me that happened to the boys in the story, and seeing that awfulness perpetrated by others put my own pain into a new perspective. Author Stênio Gardel and Translator Bruna Dantas Lobato deserve all the accolades, and this novel of the sweetness and delight of young love destroyed by the unreasoning hatred of homophobia deserves a place on everyone's shelf. 3Q23 This quarter was a lot better for my confidence and my number of reviews posted...I got 64 reviews of all types made and posted, so my newly revised annual goal has gone from 100 to 150. The very best read of the year to dateThe Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel; if nothing surpasses it in the last quarter, that'll end up being my 2023 six-stars-of-five read. It is, after all, a Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature! The two translation months, #WomenInTranslation and #NationalTranslationMonth, that fall in this quarter were as usual very richly rewarding in terms of discoveries. Really excellent work is happening in this arena of publishing! Khadija Marouazi's harrowing and beautiful novel of torture and political resistance, History of Ash: A Novel, was memorable, awful, and necessary in the scary political climate of encroaching totalitarianism the US is living through. Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre was a beautiful incantation summoning the passionate honesty and risible venality of its pawns in a chess game of greed. I loved reading them both. 2Q23 The strokes aren't bothering me as much as they could be, thank goodness; I may not be able to read handwriting anymore, or decode geometric graphics like Wordle, but blessedly I can still read, think, and type. But I have a lot less stamina this year. This quarter starts with Pride Month and I've decided to keep my annual tradition of posting on average a blog review a day for that...the first and second ones are going up early to give me a running start. My revised goal for posting reviews this year is "as many as I can." I don't need the stress of an artificial goal, though I very much do want to keep to my one-a-day average for June. 1Q23 If I didn't reach you before now with this news, I had several stokes in mid-January. I was very, very lucky, and while the source of the strokes was a congenital malformation of some cerebral arteries and therefore not susceptible to permanent correction, I'm lucky enough to have recovered far, far more of my abilities than was presumed to be possible early on. I'm still typing one-handed and not for fun, dirty reasons. I'm still weaker and less agile than I was. But I can read, and think, and walk, and talk. All in all, good luck, plus good care, plus being one stubborn old bastard, have all concatenated to leave me far better off than many—even most—who have had similar events. I still managed to read sixteen books, and have reviewed them...even if briefly...all. My goals for 2023 are right out the window, of course, but honestly I'm so glad to be able to be here I just Do.Not.Care! It's time to get my 2023 house in order. 2022 saw me pass out 77 4.5* or higher reviews of 393 total, or 19%. Quite a good year indeed. I think the most amazing part of my reading year was the consistently good quality of my non-fiction reading, from Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America [image] and [image] Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: what China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere through to Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism [image] and [image] High-Risk Homosexual. I read with a slack jaw and a wildly beating heart the beautifully unconventional Before All the World [image] , not one single thing about that read has dimmed a notch in my memory's lantern. I became misty and sad and still uplifted when I read Natasha Pulley's gorgeously wrought [image] The Kingdoms, alternate history that has the one and the only truthful and accurate to my own experience portrayal of non-consensual heterosexual sex where the woman is the rapist. It was stunning. It was freeing to read on a page that someone else knew. I am forever in her debt for this alone, and am always eager for more like 2022's The Half Life of Valery K [image] . There's a peak reading year in those reads alone! So the year starts with clear goals clearly stated, in 2023 my goals are: To post 395 reviews of all sorts here To post at least120 Burgoines here and on my blog of ARCs or DRCs from before 2022 To review at least 50% female or -presenting authors across genres To post a review every day during Pride Month and Women in Translation Month If I've learned nothing else in my *hack*ty-three years, it's to keep the goals from being the focus. It's the achievements I'm after, not the check-box ticking! *** Here we are in November 2022...thinking about 2023...and I'm already getting a weentsy bit anxious about my reading totals. So so many DRCs to review. For 2022 I set a goal of 250 reviews of all sorts written and posted to my blog; blew past it, set 288; blew past it, set 320. I'll get there no sweat at all. So...*gulp*...given that reality, I've got to make next year a challenge as well, so...*gulp*...I'm setting my goal at 350 reviews of all sorts written and posted on my blog. I haven't read that many books in a year since the 1980s when I was doing the school thing. Well, it's my goal so I can always re-set it if I need to. But it does feel ambitious. That's a good thing, right? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jan 03, 2024
not set
|
Jan 03, 2024
Dec 31, 2023
|
Nov 05, 2022
| |||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.08
| 1,305
| 2022
| 2022
|
it was amazing
|
4Q22. It's time to get my 2023 house in order. 2022 saw me pass out 77 4.5* or higher reviews of 393 total, or 19%. Quite a good year indeed. I think
4Q22. It's time to get my 2023 house in order. 2022 saw me pass out 77 4.5* or higher reviews of 393 total, or 19%. Quite a good year indeed. I think the most amazing part of my reading year was the consistently good quality of my non-fiction reading, from Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America
[image]
and
[image]
Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: what China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere through to Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
[image]
and
[image]
High-Risk Homosexual. I read with a slack jaw and a wildly beating heart the beautifully unconventional Before All the World
[image]
, not one single thing about that read has dimmed a notch in my memory's lantern. I became misty and sad and still uplifted when I read Natasha Pulley's gorgeously wrought
[image]
The Kingdoms, alternate history that has the one and the only truthful and accurate to my own experience portrayal of non-consensual heterosexual sex where the woman is the rapist. It was stunning. It was freeing to read on a page that someone else knew. I am forever in her debt for this alone, and am always eager for more like 2022's The Half Life of Valery K
[image]
. There's a peak reading year in those reads alone! HOWSOMEVER.... It's my annual six-stars-of-five read! [image] Kibogo (my book review), a beautiful tale of colonial-era Catholicism meeting, battling, and suffering defeat at the hands of Kibogo, the Rwandan folk-religion's organizing spirit. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Literature in Translation. It was the most unforgettable book I read in a year chock-a-block with wonderful reading. It explored the many ways colonialism tries to destroy the colonized, insidious personal invasions that are masked by pious mouthings and cold, cruel hearts crossdressing to seem unthreatening. And it still told a fine and exciting tale! So the year starts with clear goals clearly stated: ➢to post 250 288 reviews on my blog Most important to me again this year is to report on DRCs I don't care enough about to review at my usual level. I still don't want to keep just leaving them unacknowledged! There are publishers who want to see a solid, positive relationship between DRCs granted and reviews posted, and I do not blame them a bit. (I need to do more to sync the data on my reads between my blog, Goodreads, and LT this year for real.) 2021's five-star or damn-near five-star reviews totaled 28, a marked decrease from last year's 46. Fewer authors saw their book launches rescheduled, but publishers still had to cancel many of their tours and events because COVID-19. The inflationary pressure that supply-chain issues are exerting causes a lot of economic drag on the market, though there is as of yet a lot less trouble than I expected getting tree-book copies of things so far. I've long Pearl Ruled books I'm not enjoying, but making notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read has been less successful. I gave up. I just didn't care about this goal, but I need to learn to because I *re*Pearl-Ruled five books after not remembering picking them up in the first place. I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to really track my Pearl Rules! And now that I've gotten into Burgoineing as a habit, I'm going to make a monthly blog-only post with my that-month's Burgoined books. It will appear the last Sunday of each month. I'll post your notice of it as a General Comment. 3Q22. Eighty-four reviews posted; the read I loved the best was The Sleeping Car Porter [image] by Suzette Mayr, up for Canada's highly prestigious Giller Prize. I really hope it wins, the announcement's due on 7 November 2022. I reset my blog reviews-written and -posted goal to 288 from 250, and I'm still handily ahead of that pace. I've adjusted my overall goal from 275 to 320, and feel really good about hitting that one, too. On to #Spooktober, #Noirvember, and the annual fun of #Booksgiving! 2Q22. Ninety-seven reviews this quarter; the best, no question, was Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir [image] by Rajiv Mohabir. Looks like the total annualized could end up at 358! I'm not at all confident that will happen. I'm not sure I even want it to...fifty reviews blog-posted this month was exhausting. 1Q22. Good lawsy me. EIGHTY-TWO reads this quarter. (This book is in my GR stats for some reason and I can't get it out, despite its not being marked "Read.") That would be 328 reads for 2022 if the pace keeps up...which I suspect it won't. Quite a quarter for good non-fiction: The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream, The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice, Against the Ice: The Classic Arctic Survival Story, Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: what China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere, all got high recommendations. The fiction side was perfectly fine, Briarley being my absolute favorite of them this quarter. I love seeing myself in romance fiction! Not just gay me, but OLD gay me. A true treat, like watching the over-40 love affair between Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet on Our Flag Means Death. Angering disappointments were few. I refuse to read psychologically damaging abuse presented as BDSM, so that was probably the most scalding one. I wasn't as excited as I had expected to be about the very informatively, but uninvolvingly, written Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness. Had it possessed some style, it would've been my top rec for the quarter because the topic...our careless way of "diagnosing" strangers with mental illnesses is a symptom of minimizing, misunderstanding, and mistreating (in all its senses) the *actually* mentally ill...is hugely important. I was slogging where I, the exact target audience for the topic, should've been fanning the pages. Ah well...it still tells an important story and should end up on your nightstand this year. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 23, 2021
|
Dec 30, 2022
|
Sep 23, 2021
| |||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.16
| 1,402
| 2021
| 2021
|
it was amazing
|
4Q21. I'll start with: MY TOP 5 READS OF 2021 1. Cove [image] by Cynan Jones — this was the book I wanted The Old Man and the Sea to be, but it 4Q21. I'll start with: MY TOP 5 READS OF 2021 1. Cove [image] by Cynan Jones — this was the book I wanted The Old Man and the Sea to be, but it wasn't. 2. [image] The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine — beautiful book about Love When One is Old. Gorgeous writing, as expected. 3. Hench [image] by Natalie Zina Walschots — sheer perfection for the superhero-weary story-obsessed pop culturist. 4. [image] Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby — bitter the tears of a father who can no longer make it right with his dead, gay son. 5. Briarley [image] by Aster Glenn Gray — splendid reimagining of Beauty and the Beast that confronts the extreme damage homophobia does. 2021's five-star or damn-near five-star reviews totaled 28, a marked decrease from last year's 46. Fewer authors saw their book launches rescheduled, but publishers still had to cancel many of their tours and events because COVID-19. The inflationary pressure that supply-chain issues are exerting causes a lot of economic drag on the market, though there is as of yet a lot less trouble than I expected getting tree-book copies of things. My annual six-stars-of-five read is Cove (see above), a perfect, spare, evocative story of the pain of existing when you genuinely can't process what is happening to you, around you, despite your best and most well-practiced efforts there is just no righting the boat. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2022. I can not forget this read. I refer to it in my head, I think about its stark, vividly limned images. I am so deeply glad Author Cynan wrote it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearl Rules! 3Q21. Forty-four new reads with reviews done this quarter. Very ~meh~ quantity-wise. Appleseed [image] and [image] Afterparties were the best reads of the quarter, and I'll recommend them both to y'all without hesitation. Kinda worried, though, there hasn't been a six-stars candidate yet. I'm due. I'm ready. I'm downright eager. 2Q21. Forty-eight new reads with reviews done in this quarter, not far off a book and review every other day as a pace. Clearly not awful. My favorite read of May was Nationalist Love, a truly scary and very moving, brash, garish, over-the-top story of two men falling in love and suffering the consequences for it in deeply homophobic and hag-ridden by right-wing stupidity Poland. But by far my favorite read of 2Q21 was Natalie Zina Walschots's amazing and vibrant and brimming with the propulsive power of indignation supervillain tale, Hench. No other read came close. 1Q21. Sixty-two reads completed. Three of them are excellent, the kind of read I want to find more of: Cove (this is the story I hoped The Old Man and the Sea would be, but wasn't), The Stone Wētā (when the Revolution comes, women will be leading it), and Shuggie Bain (the Booker and I agree for the first time in years). Most of the rest were just fine, nothing wrong with 'em. A few stank. Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex was a badly needed educational turbocharge for me on the topics of gender and sexual minorities' experiences of oppression. And it's a subject that increases in importance as the years march on. 2020's five-star or damn-near five-star reviews totaled 46. Almost half were short stories and/or series reads. While a lot of authors saw their book launches rescheduled, publishers canceled their tours, and everyone was hugely distracted by the nightmare of COVID-19 (I had it, you do not want it), no one can fault the astoundingly wonderful literature we got this year. My own annual six-stars-of-five read was Zaina Arafat's extraordinary debut novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH (review lives here), a thirtysomething Palestinian woman telling me my life, my family, my very experience of relationships of all sorts. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2021. A sixtysomething man is here, in your email/feed, saying: This is the power. This is the glory. The writing I look for, the read I long to find, and all of it delivered in a young woman's debut novel. This is as good an omen for the Great Conjunction's power being bent to the positive outcomes as any I've seen. In 2020, I posted over 180 reviews here. In 2021, my goals are: –to post 150 reviews on my blog –to post at least 99 three-sentence Burgoines –to complete at least 190 total reviews Most important to me is to report on DRCs I don't care enough about to review at my usual level. I don't want to keep just leaving them unacknowledged. There are publishers who want to see a solid, positive relationship between DRCs granted and reviews posted, and I do not blame them a bit. Ask and ye shall receive! Nathan Burgoine's Twitter account hath taught me. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 22, 2020
|
Dec 30, 2021
|
Dec 03, 2020
| |||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.05
| 1,567
| 2020
| 2020
|
it was amazing
|
In 2020, I wanted to post 10 book reviews a month on my blog. I already read a book every other day, as this year's total of 175 reads shows; so it's
In 2020, I wanted to post 10 book reviews a month on my blog. I already read a book every other day, as this year's total of 175 reads shows; so it's doable, and I've done better than that in the past. Not this Plague Year, I fear. I still Pearl Rule books I'm not enjoying, but the notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read aren't happening. If I don't care to finish it, what's to say? ...and that's me done. My reports will continue to be quarterly, the day after the end of the quarter. A week early. I've already written the reviews I planned to for 2020, so now is the hour. 4Q20. I have to give this Christ-awful year credit for one thing. While a lot of authors saw their book launches rescheduled, publishers canceled their tours, and everyone was hugely distracted by the nightmare of COVID-19 (I had it, you do not want it), no one can fault the astoundingly wonderful literature we got this year. My own annual six-stars-of-five read was Zaina Arafat's extraordinary debut novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH (review lives here), a thirtysomething Palestinian woman telling me my life, my family, my very experience of relationships of all sorts. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2021. A sixtysomething man is here, in your email/feed, saying: This is the power. This is the glory. The writing I look for, the read I long to find, and all of it delivered in a young woman's debut novel. This is as good an omen for the Great Conjunction's power being bent to the positive outcomes as any I've seen. I read fifty-seven books this quarter. That's nowhere near a personal best, but it's a lot more than I would've read if I hadn't had the bump that Burgoineing has given me! Liberation from the demands of making a deep dive into a book, instead being allowed by my own inner demons to enjoy then describe why I did that this vastly simpler and handily codified technique showed me. The reads were in the main first reads or review-induced second reads. The re-reads, mostly of old Agatha Christie stories or novels that I could blow through quickly because they're already familiar. At my age, I don't really want to devote a lot of time to rereading because, in the ~170-ish months I can expect to live, writers won't stop writing and publishers won't stop publishing. I see wonderful things,to paraphrase Howard Carter as he took in Tutankhamen's tomb goods. I failed miserably at my goal of publishing an average of ten reviews a month in 2020. Months without reviews came largely because I was pretty miserable after I got this rotten COVID-19, and there are some long-term effects I'm not happy about but don't cause day-to-day killing fatigue and wretched headaches. I'm going to set the 2021 bar at fifteen reviews average per month...an ambitious one hundred eighty, more than I've managed since the earliest days of reposting reviews in the "Pages" to save them from being deleted (back in 2013, I had only Goodreads and LibraryThing as my review venues, and each had its issues). I'm a little bit anxious about that lofty goal, which is how it should be. Challenges, a little fear, and a whole new chance to make the 2020s rock instead of having them stone us. 3Q20. Forty reads completed and reported for the quarter; two five-star novels read (The Long Dry and The Mercy Seat), and I five-starred I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf because really? How could I not with that title and subject matter? I re-read two five-star stories, I Stand Here Ironing and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. They are both still exemplars of excellent observation and elucidation, domestic and societal by turns, each making its quiet way down into the core of one's ongoing reading experience. I find their echoes in so many "new" or new-to-me voices. I have two book reviews on submission, so I won't count them as reads until they're either rejected and I put them on my blog, or accepted. I had to abandon a tree-book read, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini's Italy, because in a month I was able to read 47pp of 528pp. I asked for a Kindle file and was informed no such accommodation would be made...not so long ago, before the latest round of gout-crystal formation, I asked and asked for tree books and was offered Kindle files! Crazy times. Many very good reads, like Dr. Mary Trump's book about her nightmare family, were simply not tippy-tippy-top quality writing or storytelling. I am not about to dis anyone for needing less challenging reading, considering how much of it I hoovered up. But I was stalled in many superior reads because the world today is for stepped-in dog crap, and I was not prepared to do any heavy thinking. EXCEPT my two five-star novels, one about capital punishment and one about the slow, sad decline of Life into cold lifelessness. I urge you to read those books, read my reviews to see why I think you should, and to support a world where art is possible by voting on 3 November 2020. 2Q20. Forty-five books read this quarter; I started and finished with five-star reads, lucky me! Sharks in the Time of Saviors was a beautifully made Hawai'ian family Bildungsroman. (Can one have a group Bildungsroman? it's not a family saga but a map of the coming-to-consciousness of a family...well, debate as you will, Imma call it that.) A great way to start the new quarter, with a new author's first book that belted the ball out of the park. The end-of-quarter delight is You Exist Too Much, the fumbling attempts of a queer Palestinian woman to fix the damage done by a borderline-personality-disordered mother and an ineffectual, uninterested father. Like I could relate much? So much of the story felt like me wandering destructively through my 20s and 30s that the next events felt foreseen, if not predictable. This quarter also brought my dote, Murderbot, in Network Effect, its first-ever full novel appearance. Oh Murderbot *swoon* you're so dreamy Anyway, Murderbot did not disappoint (as if!) and Author Martha Wells maintains her standing as my go-to AI-story spinner of webs. Author Kai Ashante Wilson wrote The Devil in America six years ago, but I just got around to reading it. I loved the bitter tang of the story's search for escape from a curse. It's inevitable that the search ended in defeat because curse. I find the curse-breaking triumphalist fiction so very prevalent today savorless and silly and really quite dangerous. But anyway, Author Wilson (A Taste of Honey, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps) earns my approbation by placing Black queerness at the heart of his fiction. His is a point of view we need to see more of to break free from the curse (!) of Othering in ficiton. And a different five stars entirely for the coda of a series set in 19th-century London and Scotland, The Bequest: David and Murdo's Epilogue. It's a short piece that ties a neat little bow on the fanny (US sense) of three historical novels featuring lawyer David and aristocrat Murdo as they negotiate the pitfalls of queer love in their world. It's not a recommended-read-now five because it will make no sense whatever if one hasn't read the previous three books. Squeamish straight people should not attempt to summit this mountain, there is significant steamy sex and y'all pretty much lose y'all's shit when gay sex is presented at anything like the frequency or graphicness of straight sex. Plenty of four-and-a-half star reads and four-star reads. And the heinous ones. Oh my. The Fear Hunter was severely mistitled. Elise Sax wrote a forgettable and pretty pointless rom-com with a few gestures towards mystery. AWFUL. Penny Serenade barely lifted its dreary stringy mop of dirt-colored hair off that book's place on the basement floor because a film was made of it that was at least pretty to look at. The story was not good reading. I suspect I wasn't in the mood for The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography so I won't excoriate it for having AN ENTIRE PAGE OF NUMERALS in a comma-separated-value list. I was recovering from my mild dose of COVID-19 so I'll assume it was me being fussy not the author being a complete putz. And that, my olds, is a very good quarter's reading. 1Q20. Twenty-six reads done, three posted on my blog, or 10% of the goal I set myself. Bad performance. Really bad. I re-read the four Murderbot novellas by Martha Wells, and loved them just as much as when I first read them. Because Network Effect is coming in May, YAY!!, it felt like time at last to put down some thoughts about them on my poor, neglected blog. Murderbot is a delightfully antisocial being and I am honestly more impressed by Author Wells's beautiful and deft worldbuilding than I am by the lit'ry stylings of many a crowed-over Next Big Thing. But this quarter's surprise and joy is reserved for a Smashwords COVID-19 sale find, a freebie I completely accidentally stumbled upon: A Justified State by Iain Kelly, a Scottish television editor about whom I had not heard a peep and from whom I expected not a lot. He overdelivered on my expectations. This could be a six-stars-of-five read; I have a long way to go, so no decisions yet, but this medium-term futuristic dystopian thriller set in a nightmarish Soylent Green-ish Glasgow is $2.99 and cheap at twice the price. Do your distracted self a favor and get sucked in to Author Kelly's hellish world...ours seems paradisical! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 30, 2019
|
Dec 22, 2020
|
Dec 30, 2019
| |||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.18
| 1,208
| 2019
| 2019
|
it was amazing
|
My 2019 goal is to post 200 reviews {30 Sep edit: Never gonna happen now!} on my blog. My updates are quarterly, at the end of the quarter, so 1Q19 wi
My 2019 goal is to post 200 reviews {30 Sep edit: Never gonna happen now!} on my blog. My updates are quarterly, at the end of the quarter, so 1Q19 will show up 1 April, etc. 4Q19. This was a *stellar* reading year! For the first time ever, I have two six-stars-of-five reads this year: Black Light, a debut story collection that gave me so much pleasure I read it twice (ever rarer occurence that), and the wrenching, gutting agony of Heart Berries, a memoir of such honesty and such vulnerability that I was a wreck after I finished it. I went back and forth a dozen times, first Author Parsons was the sixer, then Author Mailhot; neither book could possibly "win" for long because I couldn't get either book out of my mind. I handed out 34 5- or damn-near-5-star reviews out of 155 reviewed books; that's 22% and that is a LOT. Many, even most of these (10+) were for short stories, for end-of-beloved-series novels, or for story collections. But hold on to something heavy: TWO, yes that's t-w-o dos due deux zwei два were...POETRY COLLECTIONS. Sarah Tolmie's The Art of Dying and the late Frank Stanford's collected poems, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. Both were peak reading experiences. Another was cultural monadnock George Takei's graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, which could not be more important for young people today to absorb. What a beautiful year it was, to bring so many delights to my door. I hope, greedy thing that I am, that 2020 will repeat this performance. For all of us, really...honest! I didn't just add that on the end of this summing-up to make it sound less solipsistic. 3Q19. I am not going to finish another book today...might get really close with Amatka, but most likely not before midnight...so I'll call it a very, very good quarter indeed. A second contender for my annual six-stars-of-five place appeared: Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons, an extraordinarily strong debut story collection, damned near all the stories being top-of-the-trees jawdroppers. It's gonna be close.... Five-star reads were surprisingly abundant: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was outstanding at its best, and never less than good; Lot by Bryan Washington was uneven but at its best was far above the field; Maggie Brown & Others: Stories by Peter Orner was another uneven, but at its best outstanding, collection. Lie With Me, a récit being marketed as a novel by Philippe Besson and translated from the French by Molly Ringwald in her debut in this role, was the best novel I read this quarter. It's truly extraordinary. The other five-star read was They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, a graphic memoir that was beautifully served by artist Harmony Becker's simple and elegant panels. It is superb, it is powerfully told, and it is vital that as many as possible read its personal recollections of the heinous crime of interning innocent people because they are Not Like You. A truly delightful quarter of reading. 2Q19. The quarter started well. My first reviewed read was Alice Payne Arrives by the estimable Kate Heartfield. My 4.5* review is as heartfelt (!) a tribute to a skilled practitioner of a difficult literary art as they come. A good quarter was in the auguries...I got Hope for the Best, tenth Chronicle of St Mary's. I note with sorrow the misuse of "pouring" for "poring" throughout the book, a colossal editing error. The rest of the read was *stellar* as expected. Much to love in series read-land, as I also picked up more Miss Silver mysteries by Patricia Wentworth; nowhere near the pinnacle of excitement that St Mary's offers, but solid entertainments. I also perved out on poetry. It is perverse to me, anyway. Poetry is the pit-sniffing cliquish stuff that the insufferably self-important and far-too-sure of their own erudition invent shedloads of words to dissect. (Amusingly, it is almost always true of these very souls that they criticize slang they don't use and scientific jargon for being obfuscatory.) Two collections, The Art of Dying and What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, made my heart leap and my eyes widen this quarter. Excellent, excellent stuff. May 31st was Walt Whitman's 200th birthday as well as the kickoff of Pride Month for us QUILTBAGgers. This also marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Fancy retronyms like "Uprising" are not for me. It was a riot, a disorderly and rage-fueled fuck-you fight against the cops by the faggots they'd felt comfortable abusing for basically ever. In Whitman's "yeah, so?" spirit, if you ask me...and I got the joy of With Walt Whitman, Himself this quarter. It was a LibraryThing Early Readers giveaway, and I am so delighted that I received it from Circling Rivers. This wasn't a biography, perish forbid, or worse yet "a life" (someone please explain what genre this trendy term describes, I am frankly at a loss with this one); it's a guided ambling tour of the world and the wonders of the places Walt Whitman lived, the times he lived in, and the people he knew. It's beautifully illustrated. It's a great read. But this year's 6-stars-of-five read will be, barring miracles, the short, violent, unbearably sad and breathtakingly beautiful Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. Agony to read. Gloriously messy life served in angry bites of beautiful word-pastry. Sherman Alexie praised and mentored Author Mailhot and she, to my admiring surprise, does not use this as a #MeToo moment. Her love for and praise of the many damaging men in her life was a surprising undercurrent in the story of her life. I was fully prepared for her to shout her rage at the world; she does so in a musical wolf's-howl, a screamed incantation of lonely outraged bereftness. But it's so very honest and so utterly pure, a Fragonard écorché whose flesh was flensed while the victim was still living. It was agony to read, as it was and is to live; reading it is necessary. 1Q19. Well, that didn't go according to plan. I spent four weeks very, very sick with viral pneumonia. My best reads were antiques...The Reluctant Widow and The Unknown Ajax, both Georgette Heyer confections...while Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series still offers me pleasures and delights. But nothing has risen before me swathed in cloth of gold and illuminated by follow-spots as A Peak Read. Second quarter ho! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jan 2019
Jan 2019
|
Dec 31, 2019
not set
|
Jan 01, 2019
| |||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.16
| 1,277
| 2018
| 2018
|
it was amazing
|
4Q18. The six-stars-of-five winner is Circe, though. What a glorious read. Author Madeline Miller's lush prose; her deep well of Classical knowledge;
4Q18. The six-stars-of-five winner is Circe, though. What a glorious read. Author Madeline Miller's lush prose; her deep well of Classical knowledge; her desire to look into the unswept corners where Dead White Men didn't think to go, all unite once again to produce a beautiful book about An Other. I don't even mind that it took most of a decade to get this book after The Song Of Achilles. That is a big fat lie, I mind like all get-out, but can't see a practical way to make her work faster that's both legal and ethical while remaining effective. My goodness. Author Amos Jasper Wright IV Southerned all over me. His stories are terrific. They grasped my attention and made me want to give him access to my brain's feeling centers. Author Kurt Baumeister also grabbed me, just lower down in the Funny Zone. His Pax Americana made the disgust our public servants evoked in me less completely infuriating because I could laugh (if bitterly and angrily) at it all. This year's horror read to end all reads was 2017's Human Trees by Matthew Revert. He's Australian. There's something about that demonym that gives rise to horror's strangest, most unsettling imaginations. Leave the lights on after reading this book. 3Q18. FINALLY a candidate for my 6-stars -of-five read for this year: The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox. Wonderful prose. Inventive, at times harrowing and at others hilarious; always tinged with the sadness that the certainty you have seen perfection carries with it. I needed the memory of a perfect moment to carry me through an increasingly dark year. This book, with its loving and passionate relationship between an angel and a man, reminded me of that gleaming day from which all others are a let-down. Which, I suppose, could be read as a bad thing; but to have had one, just that one, perfect day is a huge blessing in a passage of my life that has neither sight nor sign of those heights. The world of today doesn't really bring forth the necessary happiness for there to be an even greater height. No other reads came close. 2Q18. Saturday, the 30th of June, and a hot summer day. The second quarter of the year presented me with health challenges on top of mental health challenges. Very little top-quality reading...none, if I'm honest...not even a single dark horse candidate for six-stars-of-five wowzer read of 2018. Trundling along, status quo, is a dull thing to report but in my case a soothing thing to experience. My outrage circuits are on eternal existential overload. Now, honestly, numbness is welcome. 1Q18. Today is both Easter and April Fool's Day, which I find humorous and apt. Out of some 70 reads this quarter, I didn't find something I thought was even a candidate for my annual 6-stars-of-five read. Lots of MM romantic stuff this quarter due to 1) my Young Gentleman Caller being generous enough to give me lots of Kindlebooks and b) my unwillingness to stay in this reality for any length of time. Fortunately the YGC is still searching for clues about what this whole I-want-men thing is all about and wants to read and discuss everything we can find. Given the gap in our experience levels, he's chosen to turbocharge his flight into the future by asking lots of questions and listening to the answers. This is the most fun I've ever had with a young man. SFFH reading also progresseth apace. Space is the place, alright. I read all the source stories for the new anthology series PKD's Electric Dreams on Prime, which I liked. The stories were heavily adapted and, in the original form, were often pretty close to unreadable because they were so dated. But Isa Dick Hackett, youngest of the great man's daughters and producer of the series, worked alchemy on her father's ideas and made them fresh again. She also toppled one of the industry's sexual harassers. Chip off the ol' block. The Netflix series Altered Carbon was a lot of fun, and a re-read of the book left me awed afresh by Morgan's twisty brain in action. Artemis was a bitter, bitter disappointment. Jazz felt unpleasantly boyish to me. I began emptying an old bin full of disintegrating paperbacks by choosing some of the ancients that had been adapted into movies. Often the books were...um...not great and the movies were...um...seriously not great. I'm staring at you, Sangaree. Interesting how no one called this one out for brownwashing a previously white savior into a halfbreed Spaniard...in GEORGIA! In the Revolutionary period when Florida was SPANISH! ::eyeroll:: Plenty of Pearl-Ruled pablum. I record the ones that piss me off. The boringboringboring ones I ignore. In a world where anyone can self-publish dreck why are publishers still doing it? And I came to the realization that Seanan McGuire and I are chemistry-challenged when I **HATED** Rosemary and Rue so much that I was ready to heave my Kindle at the wall. Luckily, the YGC was here and caught it. It's my fourth try at one of hers and I have never made it even halfway through one. Feed...gag...was the all-time record-holding worst McGuire read. I threw the tree book away. Picture books and me have had a great year so far. Allen Say's biographical Silent Days, Silent Dreams was a revelation, and his prior autobiographical works of being a young Japanese immigrant to California barely post-World War II were just as gorgeous and moving. Tom Gauld continues to delight and amuse. The genre will never be my first choice but I am slowly shedding my long-held disdain for comic books and kiddielit. The world lost one of its under-recognized leaders. Ursula K. Le Guin died at 88. I read a collection of her blog entries, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters and was most poignantly moved by it. I will bow to none in my appreciation for literature's educational possibilities. I'm the offspring (Dr. Freud, please consult on a slip: I typed "oddspring" since "d" is next to "f" on my keyboard and stared at it for a while considering leaving it) of lunatic-fringe rightwingnuts. LeGuin's fantasy stories started me down the path of questioning WHY the world was going to hell, and reaching the conclusion that it was already hell for anyone who doesn't look like me. Basic human decency led to rejecting more and more of the underpinnings of the world as it is in no small part because of UKL's didactic art. She made me. I miss her. Lastly, politics. I hate 45 and his kakistocracy of deplorables. Nothing is better in the US today than it was on 8 November 2016, a day that shall live in infamy. Since this is inarguably true to people with IQs in the positive range, it need not be discussed. How this fucking nightmare began is worthy of discussion and I read several books alleging to probe this from different angles. I came away more depressed. The Democrats are spineless wussies who deserve to lose, but the alternative is government by the least, the last, the most unworthy and embarrassing ammosexuals in the country. So read On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and at least learn what the vile Russian agents controlling what was once a sovereign government, flawed but ours, have in mind for you. Then try to sleep. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 2018
|
Dec 27, 2018
|
Jan 19, 2018
| |||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.23
| 1,185
| 2017
| 2017
|
it was amazing
|
And with this rant, I wish you all a less-awful-than-you-think family togetherness time, a Trumpless 2018, and more good books to read than you'll eve
And with this rant, I wish you all a less-awful-than-you-think family togetherness time, a Trumpless 2018, and more good books to read than you'll ever live to finish. Even if you meet the vampire of my dreams and Cross Over. Last quarter roundup: It's Booksgiving! Go look for ideas of books to give to your not-quite-so-informed pals this Yule Book Flood! I have nothing important to add except Happy Yuletide wishes to all, and for every reader on the site: Buy Missionary and quake in fear lest it come true. #ReadingIsResistance to the steady erosion of the last tiny vestiges of personal liberty we're grudgingly allowed by the right wing of the Gross Old Pedophiles party and their libertarian running dogs. I'll be adding to this as necessary in the last quarter of 2017. Autumnal Equinox: Barring some major upset, and I do not foresee such, I anoint my 2017 six-stars-of-five read: Missionary by Lehi Renner. This medium-future North Korea-run-by-Mormons story is flat-out excellent. It is trenchant. It is tendentious. It is terrific. I found it more than usually readable, which is code for "fan-damn-tastic writing." The sentences pass by in clouds of feelings evoked with simple and appropriate language. It is the manner of construction that makes the book's style so agreeable to me. And here is my review of it. Please, just go get a copy already, it's astoundingly cheap for ereaders and it's got so much good story packed in it. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 28, 2017
|
Sep 11, 2017
| |||||||||||||||||
| unknown
| 4.23
| 1,178
| 2016
| 2016
|
it was amazing
|
This year was not my favorite of this century. Not by a long shot. I set myself a goal of writing 144 new-book reviews and, even though I've read 219
This year was not my favorite of this century. Not by a long shot. I set myself a goal of writing 144 new-book reviews and, even though I've read 219 books, I haven't and likely won't reach that goal. C'est la vie. I am still appalled at the incivility that so routinely pervades the site's users' interactions with me. Why it's okay with people to revile another person's opinion is beyond my grasp, and I'd like for it to remain so. Don't wanna unnerstan them assholes, thanks. Like the chump who snapped on my review of Last and First Men because he disagreed with it. So what? Grow up, belt up, move on. So I spend less time here, interact less, and that's just fine with everyone...doesn't that seem like a bad thing to anyone else? Anyway, this year's reading was good enough, but the six-stars-of-five read still makes my hair curl: Margaret the First was a delicious, delightful, immersive, instructive fast read. If you haven't, please seek it out and add your voice to the chorus. Like it or don't, I expect it'll leave a strong impression on you. And isn't that one big reason we all read as much as we do? ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 2016
|
Dec 03, 2016
|
Loading...
11 of 11 loaded
