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mistressofmuses) wrote2025-01-31 07:56 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2025-01-31 07:56 pm
Books read in January:
I realized a few things regarding my reading:
- If I wait to write up what I thought of the books at the end of the year, I will not remember the early ones very well.
- I said I was going to try and read 25 books this year, but that would barely put a dent in my TBR list, so I'm pushing to do a lot more!
- I have so far succeeded far more than I thought I would, considering my usual reading pace over the last couple years.
This month, I read six books! :)
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
4.5/5 - Fantasy (background m/m romance) - physical novel
A government worker (for a somewhat comically bureaucratic fantasy-semi-UK government) is sent to investigate an orphanage that houses magical children. He is tasked with determining whether the orphanage is safe, for the children or for the world, considering that some of the children are considered extremely dangerous... including the antichrist.
I think I gave this one a 5/5 when I read it before, and I think it's because I read it at very much the right time. I read it the first time in 2021, on the trip down to see my grandmother (which would ultimately be the last time I saw her in person,) right after my aunt had taken her to live in New Mexico. We were worried about her health, and the world still cared about how bad covid was, but there was at least an undercurrent of hope to the world, like things might be getting better. Vaccinations had become possible, things were improving politically... It was a good time to read about a character who wanted to do well ultimately deciding to rebel individually against an unfair system in order to protect and help people he loved.
It's a deeply hopeful story, and a sweet one of found family and finding love later in life. It's a fun sort of alternate history/alternate universe setting, set in an unspecified time period, but I'd guess sort of 1960s or 70s ish. It even ultimately overcomes my usual dislike of child characters!
This time it took me longer to really enjoy the early character interactions, and I feel like I wasn't quite as charmed by them all, but the second half of the book still flew by for me.
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
4.5/5 - Fantasy - physical novella
Nancy has returned to our world from her time in an alternative world she knew as The Halls of the Dead. Her family wants her to return to being the "normal" girl they had before, while she longs to return through the door that led her to the place she most belonged. She is instead sent to a boarding school entirely full of returned children, children who went through some sort of portal to another world, but have since come back. Then murders start to happen.
This is a fun concept, and one that certainly appeals to me. I always wondered how the protagonists of portal fantasies were supposed to return to mundane life afterwards. Also, points for making Nancy's world (which sounds kind of awful to me personally) still seem completely understandably compelling to her.
The Infernal City by Greg Keyes
4/5 - Fantasy - physical novel - read with Alex
An Elder Scrolls tie-in
A mysterious floating island appears, causing mass death and chaos everywhere it visits. Annaïg has accidentally wound up on the island, and is swept into the bizarrely cut-throat world of the island's kitchens, where servants endlessly labor to create appealing meals, often including souls as an ingredient, for the island's unseen upper class. She has called on the empire's prince, Attrebus, to help save the empire from the island... but he narrowly escapes a plot on his own life, and discovers that perhaps his heroic reputation is not as iron-clad as he believed.
This was a fun book. Alex really loves Skyrim (though I do, too), and so while this was set more post-Oblivion, I bought it for him in the hopes he'd enjoy it. It's fun to get lore a bit differently, to explore areas like Black Marsh, to have Khajit and Argonian characters... I wouldn't say it's astoundingly revolutionary storytelling, but I found the characters and settings fun, and to me at least nothing felt like it was retreading the games, but added fun new explorations of a pretty extensive world.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune
4/5 - Fantasy (background m/m romance) - physical novel
A year or so after The House in the Cerulean Sea, there's been some uproar in the government about the mistreatment of magical people by the agencies in charge of them. Unfortunately, a regressive faction has started to seize power, and is particularly targeting the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and its headmaster, sending a new representative to report on them.
If I originally read The House in the Cerulean Sea at the very much right time, I feel like I read this at the... wrong right time. I wanted to read something that would feel hopeful, even in the face of terrible things. While the book wants that, I think I was feeling far too cynical to allow it to work for me.
I struggled with tonal dissonance in the story... much of it is very much a sort of... slapstick children's fantasy. Silly things happen with somewhat cartoony logic, and it's fine! But it's also about a regressive government trying to codify the oppression of an entire class of people, with a lot of deliberate real-world parallels, and characters who have experienced very real actual abuse. (Specifically child abuse!) It's not that serious topics aren't appropriate for children's literature (though I don't think this is really intended as children's literature, despite that sort of being the tone at times), or that you can't have funny lighthearted scenes along with the serious examinations of oppression, but sometimes it felt mismatched.
The ending...
I can see how it IS an inspirational/aspirational thing. Land being returned to the rightful inhabitants from whom it was stolen, an entire town rising up to protect some of their own, a powerful leader of the group that's being targeted using that power to turn away the bad guys and protect her own...
But I feel really cynical, and so "the only way to effect change is to have all the townsfolk rise up together, even the ones who have until now been hateful and antagonistic, as a united front, and then also you have to have someone who actually has deity-level superpowers and lays claim as a monarch of that land use those powers to force the villains away magically" just makes things feel less hopeful for the real world, because I'm fresh out of unity and magical island goddesses.
(For comparison, the first book's resolution involved a low-level government employee committing quiet espionage and leaking things to the press, which feels comparatively grounded.)
This is me with an uncharitable gripe, though. Like I said, there are much more positive ways to view the ending, and I think it's very much a "me" problem that I just couldn't buy into it as the sort of fantasy that I think it was intended to be. This is a fantasy world, and I should be happy with fantasy solutions.
Also, I think the character of "Jeanine Rowder" being the primary villain of fantasy!UK, presenting herself as a nice, polite, reasonable woman who is actually promoting extremely hateful and regressive ideology is not a SUBTLE reference, but it was one that I still appreciated. (TJ Klune also says in the afterward that his fondest wish is to be the anti-JK Rowling.)
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
5/5 - Fantasy - physical novella
Book 2 of the Wayward Children, chronologically set before the first book
Jacqueline and Jillian are twins, born to parents who only wanted the idea of perfect children and nothing else. The two girls find a magical staircase that leads them to The Moors, a horror-tinged world of vampire lords, werewolves, sunken gods, and mad science. One twin becomes the apprentice to a mad scientist, the other the ward of the local vampire lord.
I really enjoyed this one, both for the themes of pushing against the role you've spent your whole childhood being forced into, as well as the juxtaposition between Jack and Jill and the roles they take by choice and what that also does to them. I also love me a good horror setting. Compared to Nancy's described world in the first book, I fully understand the appeal of The Moors, even though it's also a harsh place where people are never really safe. Also, Jack and Jill's parents throughout the early part are just portrayed as so perfectly horrible.
Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott
4/5 - Cyberpunk Sci-fi (background f/f) - physical novel
It's been years since Trouble left the world of online hacking, fleeing when the government passed a restrictive act controlling activities on the net and criminalizing those like Trouble who have a brain implant that allows them greater access to it. She also left her girlfriend, fellow hacker Cerise, behind without a word. Now things are catching up to her, as a new presence on the net has begun causing problems under her name. She and Cerise both need to find this imposter before Trouble herself is forced to take the fall by the government.
This is a slightly older book, from the 90s. (So not ancient or anything, but it's fun to see the views of tech and what it could be used for from the perspective of earlier internet days.) Cyberpunk as a genre isn't really about trying to "predict the future" and I think it's a mistake to try and view it in that light (and especially when it's treated as a "failure" for not being "accurate.") It's still really fun and a little charming to see a futuristic setting where people are lining up to use what amounts to payphones, the central hub of the net is a three dimensional BBS, and that everyone has to have wired computer/internet/phone connections.
The book is pretty heavy on queer identity as a background theme - Trouble's titular friends are basically her original collective of hackers, who banded together because they were all some flavor of gay/lesbian/bi. No characters who are overtly trans, but there is mention about the ability to play with gender and how you're perceived as being one of the things people enjoy about the net, and one character who presents as male or female at different times to different people when online. Characters euphemistically refer to fellow queers as "family," even if they don't particularly get along, and have a sense of protectiveness for each other, even in conflict. General cultural attitudes are pretty in line with the 90s as well in terms of pretty present homophobia.
I enjoyed a lot of the book, and found it fun to picture the sort of blend of 2-D and 3-D space that the net seemed to be envisioned as. As I said, the sort of retro-futuristic (via a 90s aesthetic) setting where everyone has to frantically find somewhere to plug their equipment in (while also having those wired connections go directly to their brain) was really quite fun and charming.
I wasn't entirely satisfied with the ending, which may be more a function of what I expected vs. what happened, but... I really enjoyed the reveal of Who Was Behind It All. It was satisfying while neither feeling obvious or like a weird twist, and I enjoyed it! The initial conflict and the setting where it happened were really interesting and cool. But after that, I didn't love the conclusion. Part of that may be deliberate, that there aren't easy answers, that the characters themselves will never be able to answer everything they wanted to, but it was a bit of a shame after the build up to that moment. (I don't want to spoil what happened!)
I didn't love the conclusion to Trouble's character arc, though I also didn't hate it. I think it's more that it felt naive in the present day. "I will abandon most of my legally grey activities and work to fix things from within The System." How adorable.
I've started four (!) more books so far:
- Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders (reading one chapter per day)
- Her Rival Dragon Mate by Arizona Tape (my brain fluff ebook; as much as I am very "down with cringe culture!" I wish romance ebook titles weren't Like That)
- Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes (the sequel to The Infernal City, reading with Alex)
- Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (the third Wayward Children novella)
I doubt I can hope to maintain this pace for the whole year, but imagine if I could, lol.
- If I wait to write up what I thought of the books at the end of the year, I will not remember the early ones very well.
- I said I was going to try and read 25 books this year, but that would barely put a dent in my TBR list, so I'm pushing to do a lot more!
- I have so far succeeded far more than I thought I would, considering my usual reading pace over the last couple years.
This month, I read six books! :)
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
4.5/5 - Fantasy (background m/m romance) - physical novel
A government worker (for a somewhat comically bureaucratic fantasy-semi-UK government) is sent to investigate an orphanage that houses magical children. He is tasked with determining whether the orphanage is safe, for the children or for the world, considering that some of the children are considered extremely dangerous... including the antichrist.
My thoughts:
I think I gave this one a 5/5 when I read it before, and I think it's because I read it at very much the right time. I read it the first time in 2021, on the trip down to see my grandmother (which would ultimately be the last time I saw her in person,) right after my aunt had taken her to live in New Mexico. We were worried about her health, and the world still cared about how bad covid was, but there was at least an undercurrent of hope to the world, like things might be getting better. Vaccinations had become possible, things were improving politically... It was a good time to read about a character who wanted to do well ultimately deciding to rebel individually against an unfair system in order to protect and help people he loved.
It's a deeply hopeful story, and a sweet one of found family and finding love later in life. It's a fun sort of alternate history/alternate universe setting, set in an unspecified time period, but I'd guess sort of 1960s or 70s ish. It even ultimately overcomes my usual dislike of child characters!
This time it took me longer to really enjoy the early character interactions, and I feel like I wasn't quite as charmed by them all, but the second half of the book still flew by for me.
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
4.5/5 - Fantasy - physical novella
Nancy has returned to our world from her time in an alternative world she knew as The Halls of the Dead. Her family wants her to return to being the "normal" girl they had before, while she longs to return through the door that led her to the place she most belonged. She is instead sent to a boarding school entirely full of returned children, children who went through some sort of portal to another world, but have since come back. Then murders start to happen.
My (really brief) thoughts:
This is a fun concept, and one that certainly appeals to me. I always wondered how the protagonists of portal fantasies were supposed to return to mundane life afterwards. Also, points for making Nancy's world (which sounds kind of awful to me personally) still seem completely understandably compelling to her.
The Infernal City by Greg Keyes
4/5 - Fantasy - physical novel - read with Alex
An Elder Scrolls tie-in
A mysterious floating island appears, causing mass death and chaos everywhere it visits. Annaïg has accidentally wound up on the island, and is swept into the bizarrely cut-throat world of the island's kitchens, where servants endlessly labor to create appealing meals, often including souls as an ingredient, for the island's unseen upper class. She has called on the empire's prince, Attrebus, to help save the empire from the island... but he narrowly escapes a plot on his own life, and discovers that perhaps his heroic reputation is not as iron-clad as he believed.
My thoughts:
This was a fun book. Alex really loves Skyrim (though I do, too), and so while this was set more post-Oblivion, I bought it for him in the hopes he'd enjoy it. It's fun to get lore a bit differently, to explore areas like Black Marsh, to have Khajit and Argonian characters... I wouldn't say it's astoundingly revolutionary storytelling, but I found the characters and settings fun, and to me at least nothing felt like it was retreading the games, but added fun new explorations of a pretty extensive world.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune
4/5 - Fantasy (background m/m romance) - physical novel
A year or so after The House in the Cerulean Sea, there's been some uproar in the government about the mistreatment of magical people by the agencies in charge of them. Unfortunately, a regressive faction has started to seize power, and is particularly targeting the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and its headmaster, sending a new representative to report on them.
My thoughts:
If I originally read The House in the Cerulean Sea at the very much right time, I feel like I read this at the... wrong right time. I wanted to read something that would feel hopeful, even in the face of terrible things. While the book wants that, I think I was feeling far too cynical to allow it to work for me.
I struggled with tonal dissonance in the story... much of it is very much a sort of... slapstick children's fantasy. Silly things happen with somewhat cartoony logic, and it's fine! But it's also about a regressive government trying to codify the oppression of an entire class of people, with a lot of deliberate real-world parallels, and characters who have experienced very real actual abuse. (Specifically child abuse!) It's not that serious topics aren't appropriate for children's literature (though I don't think this is really intended as children's literature, despite that sort of being the tone at times), or that you can't have funny lighthearted scenes along with the serious examinations of oppression, but sometimes it felt mismatched.
The ending...
Spoilers:
I can see how it IS an inspirational/aspirational thing. Land being returned to the rightful inhabitants from whom it was stolen, an entire town rising up to protect some of their own, a powerful leader of the group that's being targeted using that power to turn away the bad guys and protect her own...
But I feel really cynical, and so "the only way to effect change is to have all the townsfolk rise up together, even the ones who have until now been hateful and antagonistic, as a united front, and then also you have to have someone who actually has deity-level superpowers and lays claim as a monarch of that land use those powers to force the villains away magically" just makes things feel less hopeful for the real world, because I'm fresh out of unity and magical island goddesses.
(For comparison, the first book's resolution involved a low-level government employee committing quiet espionage and leaking things to the press, which feels comparatively grounded.)
This is me with an uncharitable gripe, though. Like I said, there are much more positive ways to view the ending, and I think it's very much a "me" problem that I just couldn't buy into it as the sort of fantasy that I think it was intended to be. This is a fantasy world, and I should be happy with fantasy solutions.
Also, I think the character of "Jeanine Rowder" being the primary villain of fantasy!UK, presenting herself as a nice, polite, reasonable woman who is actually promoting extremely hateful and regressive ideology is not a SUBTLE reference, but it was one that I still appreciated. (TJ Klune also says in the afterward that his fondest wish is to be the anti-JK Rowling.)
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
5/5 - Fantasy - physical novella
Book 2 of the Wayward Children, chronologically set before the first book
Jacqueline and Jillian are twins, born to parents who only wanted the idea of perfect children and nothing else. The two girls find a magical staircase that leads them to The Moors, a horror-tinged world of vampire lords, werewolves, sunken gods, and mad science. One twin becomes the apprentice to a mad scientist, the other the ward of the local vampire lord.
My thoughts:
I really enjoyed this one, both for the themes of pushing against the role you've spent your whole childhood being forced into, as well as the juxtaposition between Jack and Jill and the roles they take by choice and what that also does to them. I also love me a good horror setting. Compared to Nancy's described world in the first book, I fully understand the appeal of The Moors, even though it's also a harsh place where people are never really safe. Also, Jack and Jill's parents throughout the early part are just portrayed as so perfectly horrible.
Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott
4/5 - Cyberpunk Sci-fi (background f/f) - physical novel
It's been years since Trouble left the world of online hacking, fleeing when the government passed a restrictive act controlling activities on the net and criminalizing those like Trouble who have a brain implant that allows them greater access to it. She also left her girlfriend, fellow hacker Cerise, behind without a word. Now things are catching up to her, as a new presence on the net has begun causing problems under her name. She and Cerise both need to find this imposter before Trouble herself is forced to take the fall by the government.
My thoughts:
This is a slightly older book, from the 90s. (So not ancient or anything, but it's fun to see the views of tech and what it could be used for from the perspective of earlier internet days.) Cyberpunk as a genre isn't really about trying to "predict the future" and I think it's a mistake to try and view it in that light (and especially when it's treated as a "failure" for not being "accurate.") It's still really fun and a little charming to see a futuristic setting where people are lining up to use what amounts to payphones, the central hub of the net is a three dimensional BBS, and that everyone has to have wired computer/internet/phone connections.
The book is pretty heavy on queer identity as a background theme - Trouble's titular friends are basically her original collective of hackers, who banded together because they were all some flavor of gay/lesbian/bi. No characters who are overtly trans, but there is mention about the ability to play with gender and how you're perceived as being one of the things people enjoy about the net, and one character who presents as male or female at different times to different people when online. Characters euphemistically refer to fellow queers as "family," even if they don't particularly get along, and have a sense of protectiveness for each other, even in conflict. General cultural attitudes are pretty in line with the 90s as well in terms of pretty present homophobia.
I enjoyed a lot of the book, and found it fun to picture the sort of blend of 2-D and 3-D space that the net seemed to be envisioned as. As I said, the sort of retro-futuristic (via a 90s aesthetic) setting where everyone has to frantically find somewhere to plug their equipment in (while also having those wired connections go directly to their brain) was really quite fun and charming.
I wasn't entirely satisfied with the ending, which may be more a function of what I expected vs. what happened, but... I really enjoyed the reveal of Who Was Behind It All. It was satisfying while neither feeling obvious or like a weird twist, and I enjoyed it! The initial conflict and the setting where it happened were really interesting and cool. But after that, I didn't love the conclusion. Part of that may be deliberate, that there aren't easy answers, that the characters themselves will never be able to answer everything they wanted to, but it was a bit of a shame after the build up to that moment. (I don't want to spoil what happened!)
I didn't love the conclusion to Trouble's character arc, though I also didn't hate it. I think it's more that it felt naive in the present day. "I will abandon most of my legally grey activities and work to fix things from within The System." How adorable.
I've started four (!) more books so far:
- Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders (reading one chapter per day)
- Her Rival Dragon Mate by Arizona Tape (my brain fluff ebook; as much as I am very "down with cringe culture!" I wish romance ebook titles weren't Like That)
- Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes (the sequel to The Infernal City, reading with Alex)
- Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (the third Wayward Children novella)
I doubt I can hope to maintain this pace for the whole year, but imagine if I could, lol.
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I'm currently on the wait list! Whoot!
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