sailing the fingers of the dragon

I am up too late because I just absolutely inhaled The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and I want people to read it and then write fic about how the queer ladies in the book intersected with the arcs of queer ladies in Hollywood's Golden Age. *angel emoji* Also it was a solidly excellent read with a fantastically Slytherin character. I wanted more TO the framing story, but I just plain wanted more OF Evelyn Hugo.

I have maxed out my holds list at the library because it is full of time-travelling lesbians (and also the "Giant Days" graphic novel omnibuses, which I highly recommend). A good problem to have.

Reading Wednesday! I have some content!

what I just finished:
Seanan McGuire's new InCryptid novel, That Ain't Witchcraft, came out last week, so I re-read its immediate prequel and then picked the new one up. I had trouble getting into this series originally, but I really enjoy them now. It's about a family of cryptozoologists who work with 'unnatural' creatures ranging from frogs with feathers to bigfoots and chupacabras, trying to keep them safe, and their vendetta against the people who just want to purge the world of 'monsters.' Like other of Seanan's work, the world gets much deeper and the stakes get much higher the further along in the series we get. Fun, heartrending, light, and can't-put-down, all at once.

The Brightsiders by Jen Wilde popped up from my holds queue and I have no memory of putting it on there. It's a YA novel about a very queer group of teenagers who form a hit band, and then there are romance entanglements. Definitely a kind of book I wish I'd had as a kid.

A Fatal Obsession by Faith Martin is a murder mystery set in 1950s Oxford, starring a WPC and a coroner thrown together to Investigate. This was nicely twisty and did a good job with multiple viewpoints. I will read the sequels. Very much of its genre.

"The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal is a novelette - I don't often read shorter books, but this is the intro to a series I'm interested in, about, gasp, lady astronauts in space. This was very good but actually quite depressing. I am looking forward to the other books - they seem to be effectively Hidden Figures but sci-fi, and possibly (though I am not certain) less Black.

what I'm reading now:
A Study in Honor by Claire O'Dell. This is a near-future, slightly sci-fi exploration of 'what if Holmes and Watson were Black and American,' and Watson, at least, is queer. I think I just picked this one up this morning. Definitely enjoying it so far!

what I'm reading next:
My other current loan is A Room Swept White by Sophie Hannah, which I think is another British Murder Mystery (I do love them a lot), so unless somethign else interesting rears its head, probably that!

How about you?

I have absolutely no intention of making these on a regular basis, mostly because it is slightly absurd to me how little reading I get done lately, but I have actually read a few things in the last couple weeks, so why not!

what I just finished:
I still haven't had a chance to see the film Colette, but I picked up Claudine at School to see what the actual Colette's writing was like and... did not finish. I just could not get invested in any of the characters. If I can find it, I might give it a whirl in French, just to see if I enjoy it any more in the original language - I found the translation quite stilted, and it's hard to tell if that is the translation or if it's just the style. Very low on my priority list, though.

I think courtesy a cosmic_llin recommendation, I read and really enjoyed Outrun the Moon by Stacy Lee, which is about a Chinese girl in San Francisco at the turn of the century who bribes her way into a boarding school populated by wealthy white girls. It's blurbed as 'perfect for fans of Code Name Verity,' but I'm not sure I'd go that far. V good, though.

My aunt rec'd Educated, by Tara Westover, which is a memoir by a woman who was raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family, homeschooled in a lackadaisical fashion, and then gets herself through BYU and on to a DPhil at Cambridge. I don't usually read memoir, but I went to a talk at the London Review Bookshop a few weeks back by a memoirist who discussed the ways in which sexism affects reception of the genre, and that has been rattling around in my brain since. I found this fascinating and disturbing - serious tw for abuse - but it was a good book to read while thinking the above thoughts, because there is a lot of discussion in it about memory, diary, forgetting, concocting alternate narratives and how to prove 'truth' about our memories/pasts, things like that.

Storm Season by Pene Hanson is a very fic-ish 'caught in a rainstorm and sharing a bed' lesbian romance set in Australia against the backdrop of the music scene. The sharing-a-bed bit was fun, but I found the plot really hit its stride when it moved into more of the Sydney indie music scene setting. This was light and fluffy, porny and fun.

The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff must've been something I saw on a bookstore table or something. It's a narrative about female SOE agents in France during the Second World War, specifically one particular agent, the woman who ran the female agents, and a woman working in New York after the war. This was very good. There are a couple of mysteries intertwined with the spy narrative and several different time periods, and they're brought together in a relatively satisfying fashion. What I really enjoyed was the way each world was built out and fully populated with characters who gave a great feel to the time. There's a lot going on in the background that informs the women we're focussed on. Good spying, would spy again.

what I'm reading now:
Currently I am reading Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis, which I think was another cosmic_llin rec. Fantasy romances set in alternate nineteenth-century Englands are honestly kind of a bulletproof thing for me? i can't help it. :P So this is nicely suited to my tastes! I started it this morning and if I stay awake long enough I will probably finish it tonight. It's the first of a series, which makes me happy. And there's nice subtle worldbuilding, there's elves, there are queer women, it's got neat systems of magic that I'm interested to learn more about, plus I like all the characters. It's maybe a little faster paced than the plot really deserves - it feels like there should be a lot more to go than there are pages left in the book - but we'll see how I feel once I'm done.

what I'm reading next:
After that... I have two books checked out, The Tiger's Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera (rec'd by my dear friend A) and Out of the Blue by Sophie Cameron (I don't know where from). Unless any more interesting holds come in, it will probably be one of those.

Discussion about any of these welcomed in the comments!

what I just finished:
In the last two weeks, since I missed last week: Broken Harbour by Tana French, which didn't creep me out this round as badly as it used to. I started re-reading French's Secret Place but got sidetracked by the discovery that there's a new Sara Paretsky book out next week, so I'm re-reading all the V.I. Warshawski novels in advance. I've finished the first eight so far.

what I'm reading now:
Tunnel Vision, the ninth Warshawski novel. I really love these books, but I haven't re-read the whole series in a very long time. I'm finding it interesting to re-read them and think about their feminism as related to the era in which they were written. It's also quite interesting to read them adapting with the times - I re-read all the Kinsey Millhone novels earlier this year and they are resolutely grounded in the 80s, while these keep up with the calendar and the technology even as I think they keep V.I. at an acceptable age to continue detecting. I'm also enjoying thinking about the times at which I originally read these - when I started the series, which books I picked up as they were coming out. I think I started reading them in high school, so it's been a while.

what I'm reading next:
I have eight more Warshawski novels before the new one comes out on the 28th. I'm spending a bunch of time in airplanes and airports over the weekend, so who knows, I might make it. :P I also seem to have missed one novel in the group, or at least I don't remember it from the synopsis, so, yay, it's like two new ones!

what I just finished:
When I finished Uprooted (see last week's post, but: definite recommendation if you like magic and fantasy and female protags and... lots of good stuff), I couldn't think what I needed as a followup, but it finally hit me: Kristen Cashore's Graceling trilogy. I re-read Graceling and Fire while on the island and now I really, really, really want more from her.

what I'm reading now:
I am a few pages from the end of Bitterblue, the third of the Graceling novels. I love these books and their unapologetic feminisms and their brilliant characters and their insistence on working through terrible things.

what I'm reading next:
I finally bought the most recent of Laurie R. King's Mary Russell novels, Dreaming Spies. I should probably re-read some of the previous ones first, but I don't think I have them handy. Still, I think that's up next, and then possibly some Val McDermid.

I was a faithful and loyal reader and re-reader of Elizabeth George's series of Inspector Lynley novels from when I first encountered A Great Deliverance in, I don't know, '96 or '97. And then I was so incredibly broken by With No One As Witness in 2005 and I haven't been able to re-read any of the earlier books or pick up the new ones since (I won't say why, though the summaries for the next few books totally spoil it). Anyways, seven years later, I finally feel like I might be able to start reading through the series again. That's the plan, so. We'll see how it goes, or if I break down in angry tears when I start encountering foreshadowings of the traumatic event that I am still angry about. :P

Also reading of late: Jacqueline Carey's three Kushiel/Naamah trilogies, which are among my favourite brain candy novels ever. And I hadn't read the ninth one, which came out last summer - so I read my old favourites and then got a new treat at the end. :D Which reminds me that I want to keep an eye out for her Santa Olivia books - I like her style.

I also read the six volumes of Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson series last week. They are not exactly serious and amazing books, but they're my favourite kind of urban fantasy and they were certainly entertaining. Plus they creeped me out quite a bit in some places, which is impressive - that doesn't usualy happen.

...anything else I should be picking up in order to while away the possibility of being snowbound in the next few days? ;) Or just in case I find that I really can't face re-reading the Elizabeth George books?

(PS. I have achived the ability to recite SG-1 dialogue in advance of the characters. I should perhaps not categorize this as an 'achievement.')

I feel like I have been playing a lot of people who are not particularly me, over the past few days. It's kind of tiring. However, I'm happy to report that the new flatmate is installed and now I am just playing "me, on a computer, in a room with another girl on a computer," which is a role in which I am quite comfortable. I should possibly get an Oscar for the recent roles I played in which I was not at all homicidal, though. I'm just saying.

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I have been writing about Wonder Woman! Then I took a break to plan my course! And now my brain has kind of gone poof. I think that's a sign that it's time for bed and a nice, non-challenging book. What else do I need to tell students on the first day (besides "don't piss me off, kid"?)? I'm sure I had a list of stuff I meant to say last term and didn't...

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Speaking of books, I read a fantastic one in the last couple of days - Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. (Midnight Riot in North America, apparently. How bizarre.) Apparently the gentleman in question has written a few Doctor Who eps, which makes a whole lot of sense. I picked it up because of the title and bought it because it was blurbed on the cover, by Diana Gbaldon, as "What would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the Fuzz." Highly recommended - and it's the start of a series to boot! (I read a lot and rarely make posts like this. Keep that in mind.)

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For my Sex Is Not The Enemy prompt, I received this lovely photo of two ladies making out in a bar. Guess what fandom I'm going to write in. No, go on, guess.

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Here comes the deluge of pounding rain. I think that's a sign that it's bedtime.