Lindsay > Recent Status Updates

I mean, the book is fine, but how can you write Pride and Prejudice with dragons and think that women were struggling into corsets to get into their dresses like in Gone with the Wind? Stays! They wore stays! No trussing was required. SMH. This whole concept is kind of a heavy lift for a first novel, IMO.

On chapter 19. Enjoying it much more than the first time I read it, now that the concepts have been marinating in my mind for a few years. I love so much how the default pronoun is “she” in the Radch.

Clouds of Witness is an entertaining read, not surprisingly. Interesting that with the possible exception of Lady Mary and the definite exception of Lord Peter’s mother, the women tended to be described based on their looks and not too much else. Even Lady Mary was a bit silly, though she has a slightly bigger part. The conclusion required a truly incredible set of coincidences, but still in all it was good fun.

Taking a pause at chapter 12 til I get the audiobook. Enjoying it well enough, though it is very much a sequel continuing the main plot from the first book.

Had to return this to the library. It’ll come around again!

This book is showing so well what it actually FEELS like to be a young person trying to figure out a complicated relationship with your older sister, and how people actually act when they have strong emotions they don't know how to express. Oh, yeah, and there's a weird war that just finished, a tear in the fabric of the world, and the quiet new hired hand on their farm is not telling them everything about his past.

This is looking very promising. Fingers crossed!

It's not bad, but I don't know if I'm into it. So far it seems like a surpassingly ill-conceived time-travel experiment, and I'm interested to know if the government is doing it badly on purpose or if the author just didn't have the skills to make it realistic. I do enjoy the parallels between the narrator's Cambodian past and Graham's horrific experience on the Franklin Expedition. Plenty of trauma to go around.

It's Bertie Wooster in Jazz Age New York, but with Thomas Nightingale as a foil!! So much fun. I already wish it were more than a novella, but am thankful that I get anything like this at all. Not LITERALLY Bertie, but the influence is instantly obvious. First sentence: "As I have often opined, what good does it do a fellow to be a master of the mystic arts if he's not allowed to do a bally thing with said mastery?

Well, fortune cookies were just independently invented in this book. Also, the world combines a fantasy stand-on of China (complete with the same language as Mandarin!) with generic western fantasy world. I think if you never had read fantasy this might be for you. If I had known it was being marketed as in the same genre as Legends and Lattes I wouldn't have started it; as it is it's unlikely I'll finish it.

This isn’t gripping my attention. I realized that I read the author‘s Red Sister trilogy. I really enjoyed the first one, but felt the second and third went downhill. I read some spoilers about this one and I feel like it’s trying to be Piranesi and all mysterious, and I just don’t care about the machinations of the plot so far, or how the author will construct his conundrum. Plus, it’s due at the library.

Good but soooooooo loooooooong.

More than halfway through and they’ve been out of the windowless train ONCE 😂. Lots of discussion of the details of labyrinthine Atevi politics, definitely not the place to start with these books! I’m into it though.

I am not quite sure why this book is still happening, or why I refuse to quit. It feels like a novella or three became this very long novel…

This audiobook so far is almost inexpressibly charming. I may be rationing it.

I'm enjoying this SO MUCH. Tolkien-esque (though many similarities I could name are spoilers for the first quarter of the book), but with female leads & female power respected. It is even overcoming the first-person narration. A young woman with rare magic goes on an unexpected journey north with her shieldmaiden. But hark! all is not as it seems!! Evocative and the most engaging thing I've started in a long while.

ONE CONVERSATION. Just one. Have it. She’s not impersonating your wife for inexplicable reasons, she IS your wife! Just ask her a question, dude! Try to get to know her! Your continuing deep conviction that the woman you’re falling in love with is the adorable pawn in some plot on the part of a wife you’ve never met is, frankly, exhausting. It’s a good thing this is the audiobook equivalent of a one-eye show.

Good news! I think I will be able to read this without being confused & regretting that I didn’t re-read Hild. (To be fair, the ending of Hild was very memorable.) There is a good series of maps, an annotated character list, & a family tree to help. The beginning is perfectly set up to remind the reader of past action and make clear that this is a new adventure for Hild. You could read a synopsis and be fine. Phew!

My main takeaway from this book so far is that Pleiti can ring for tea and scones to be brought to her university rooms whenever she wants. Or dumplings. I don’t quite understand why she likes Mossa so very much. Especially when she already has a life of endless scones!!

Going up to 1.15 speed. Our protagonists have finally decided to trust each other & now we know allllll about Envy’s male anatomy. I predict that next will be endless politicking with various supernatural courts and clues for the life-and-death Game delivered exclusively in anagrams. (Anagrams! Truly the only format these very clever people can handle? They all speak English? What happens w/ the book translations?)

My decision to go from 1.05 to 1.10 speed is validated as we move from Prince Sloth’s court (a palace of books and reading areas) to the vampire court, with ~9 hours to go. This is certainly a maximalist, “the kitchen sink and the kitchen too” approach to world-building. Would probably be enjoying this more if I had read (and loved) the previous YA/NA trilogy that I belatedly found out about. Lotta callbacks.

Every instance of “room” was auto-replaced with“chamber,” also “problem” & “issue.” They are Princes of Sin, but it’s more like Envy is just his character flaw while he fills his palace w/ art and cares for his court. And the princes love sex! But he is always calling her a “deviant” when she is into it- does the author mean depraved? This book is very reliant on fast pacing and sexual tension.

Jam-packed w/ princes of hell, a vampire, an artist heroine w/ silver hair & eyes in alt England with fairy market, blackmail, a scavenger hunt with high stakes, & so many backstory mentions I thought this must be book 3 (no). Saddened that magical setting only gives the heroine a little more agency, propriety still rules. The author is addicted to using “parchment” & “chamber” at every opportunity. Riveted.

My 25 pages a day are a pleasure, not tedious, but it’s really about all my brain can handle. I enjoy how this is a history of evolution, an explainer on the female body, and also a commentary on how medicine has historically treated that body all in one book. Dense but nutritious and unexpectedly funny at times.