What I read in 2019

I couldn't work out how to share the Goodreads "My Year In Books" graphic to a blog (rather than to Twitter or Facebook - although I did finally find a permalink) so I won't - also, despite telling me that I'd read 40 books for the year in the reading challenge, it only acknowledges 38 in "My year in Books", so something is skew-wiff there. 

I will say that when you (I) look at my reading for this year... there's a lot of romance. I did a very rough genre breakdown and came up with the following numbers:

Historical Romance: 10
Contemporary Romance: 10
Historical fiction that is not strictly romance: 2
SFF: 9
YA (I know, it's not a genre): 1
School Stories: 1 (only one?)
Self help: 5
History: 2

Some other things of note:

• all female authors but one and a half (Max Gladstone is half of This is how you lose the time war)
• all authors but three are white, and this is something I really want to work on next year. I have a goal of reading at least twenty books by non-white authors in 2020.
• Some of the SFF could just as easily have counted as Romance, and vice versa. In fact, I've switched the Heather Rose Jones books from Historical Romance to SFF and back a couple of times: they're not strictly historical (being Ruritanian) and they're not strictly Romance, either, which is why I've finally left them in SFF.
• There is at least one long-form fic counted in here - Telanu's Truth and Measure. I went on a massive re-read of fics after finishing Casey McQuiston's Red, White and Royal Blue, and earlier in the year I went on a massive NCIS re-reading spree, but for some reason the only one I went looking for (and found) on Goodreads was T&M. Might try to do better with that next year?

As for the 30 (oh, help!) books on my Currently Reading list... there's actually quite a lot of NF History there. A couple library books I need to finish sooner rather than later - and some that have already gone back to the library. Must update the list...

Hopefully I'll be a bit better at updating this blog in 2020.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Wednesday Reads - 23rd October 2019

After a very long hiatus...

What I've recently finished reading:

Goodbye Picadilly, by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

First of the War at Home series, which I've begun mostly because I'd been reading some really great Downton Abbey fic and that reminded me that this existed. I enjoyed it: it's about a family who are comfortable upper-middle class (although the local Earl and Countess do figure!), and their servants and other members of the community. The structure of the series is that each book covers one year of the war (plus 1919 for the beginning of the post-war period), so this one is really only a few months, although plenty happens! There's some parts from the perspective of those on the battlefield, but very little: the series is the war at home, after all. Sadly this was not quite as good as the Downton Abbey fic, but it was perfectly readable, and as you'll see, I've already begun the second in the series.

[fic] Trust and Providence by Rachel Smith Cobleigh (rated M, m/f, Matthew/Mary, Anna/Bates)

This is the Downton Abbey fic mentioned above. It's a WIP, and last updated in 2015, so I don't have my hopes up. However, it ends at a nice enough spot as it is, and there's 400k words "so far". Christianity plays a significant role in the fic, so it's not for everyone. But I really rather liked it.

What I'm reading now:

Keep the Home Fires Burning by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Second in the War at Home series.

The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones

Second in the Alpennia series. I read the first a few months ago and loved it. The fourth in the series is coming out late this year.

What I'll be reading next:

More Alpennia, more War at Home, and I hope to get back to Alison Weir's "Six Tudor Queens" series.

A portion of the TBR pile

I came home from work tonight with a small pile of books to read.  It's not as though my existing TBR isn't already significant, but things just kept jumping out at me today.

Current loans from work include:

New Guard, by Robert Muchamore - the latest "Cherub"
A Call to Duty, by David Weber and Timothy Zahn - first of the new Manticore Ascendant sub-series
The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff
While We Run, by Karen Healey
Queen Isabella by Alison Weir
Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian stories from a social revolution

So - how long will it take me to get all these read...?

Wednesday reads - 10 August 2016

It's been a while...

What I've just finished reading:

The Heir/The Crown  - the final two "Selection" books by Keira Cass.  These two were unexpected sequels to the first three "Selection" books, a sort of "The Bachelor" dystopian YA... In The Heir and The Crown, it essentially becomes "the Bachelorette" as Eadlyn Schreave tries to find a husband.  The premise is dodgy, and the writing isn't brilliant, but it says plenty that I came back to this series after having read three books of it already.  I do feel the world building in the final two lacked something from the first three: there simply wasn't as good a sense of the wider world.  But Eadlyn was sympathetic, while flawed, protagonist, and both books hooked me sufficiently.

The White Rose - Amy Ewing, second in the Lone City trilogy.  I believe my summary of the first book in this series, The Jewel, was "Margaret Attwood did it before you, and better than you.'  Needless to say, this is still true. But the story has gripped me sufficiently that I've already put the final book on hold, and I probably wouldn't have done that I hadn't decided that I should follow up The Jewel to see if I liked the continuing story.  It's just that it took a while for me to decide that.

What I'm reading now:

Currently 75% through At All Costs, the next Honor Harrington in the sequence.

I picked up Cadogan Square by Carol Drinkwater today, a two-in-one British My Story compilation of Edwardian stories: it's pedestrian but the time period interests me.

What I'll read next:

I plan to return to Leanda de Lisle's The Tudors, and while I want to get through enough of the Harringtons to finally finish Torch of Freedom in sequence, I'm feeling Harrington fatigue at the moment and may put it off for a while.  I need to go back to the final Netherwood book, Eden Falls, but that will depend whether it's available from the library.

Discovering the second book first - When We Wake/While We Run, by Karen Healey

I rather startled my colleagues today.

I came into the returns room, saw a book on the shelving trolley, pounced on it and began to bounce with excitement.

The book was "When We Wake" by Karen Healey.

The reason I was so excited was that while I was working on Saturday, I'd picked up "While We Run", and began to read it.  I got 30 or 40 pages in, well into the actual plot, when I looked on the back cover and realised that it was the second book of two.  I really wanted to keep reading that story.  It had grabbed me really hard, in a way that was noticeable because "The Dreams of the Chosen", a Brian Caswell that I'd been very excited about, just hadn't grabbed me.  But I also wanted to read the first story first.

So I went off to the library catalogue, and promptly misread it as saying there was a copy of the first book, "When We Wake", on the shelf at the library (it was at a different branch), put it on hold, and was very disappointed on Monday morning when I discovered that it wasn't on shelf at all.

But today it arrived.  And I am so excited.

I have already begun reading "When We Wake" in spare moments.  It's future/dystopia set in Australia (not unlike "The Dreams of the Chosen" and, in fact, the two Ambellin Kwaymullina books that I really want to read soon if not next.)  There's politics and action and science and I cannot wait to get into these two books properly.

I became a member of the World Science Fiction Society

So, I signed up for membership of WorldCon 75.

I did so the day that the shortlist of Hugo Nominees was released for WorldCon74 (2016), because that shortlist was so hideously stacked by the nominees of the Rabid Puppies slate.

I won't get to vote for the Hugo winners for 2016, because even the supporting membership for WorldCon74 is prohibitively expensive at the current exchange rate.  Besides which, the two categories I was most interested in - Best Fancast and Best Related Work - are complete puppy takeovers, which greatly disappoints me.

(I really, really, really wanted Letters to Tiptree to get on the shortlist, but of course I couldn't vote for them because, not a member.  Next year, I will be nominating!  And Galactic Suburbia will be top of my list for fancast.)

Reading Plaidy - May 2016

More than a year ago I promised to post about my progress with reading through the Plaidy books.  Then I totally failed to post a single thing.  I will rectify that right, now!

Epitaph for Three Women is just not sitting with me.  I have no idea why, because Katherine de Valois! Jeanne d'Arc!  But I think I'm just too eager to get to Margaret of Anjou, and the wars, and I have to admit that I'm disappointed in myself.

I have been variously dipping into a couple of the Georgian books, but not actually finishing them, and during a recent visit to a library that is not the one I work for, I borrowed what is technically the first of the Tudor saga, Uneasy Lies the Head, but which I tend to think of as I'm reading it as the end of the Plantaganet Saga, even though I was trying really, really hard to read them properly in order.  But see above re finding EfTW frustrating.

I've now bought Red Rose of Anjou, but ULtH needs to go back to the library fairly shortly, (actually, I have, just this moment, renewed it online) so unless I decide to be good and go back, yet again, to EfTW, I'll be working my way through the book of the first Tudor king.