Lindsay > Recent Status Updates

The set up here - which is women and secrets and forbidden magic on an island off the British coast post-World War I - is great. I really don’t know what’s going to happen. But there are a lot of mysteries and I’m not quite sure if it’s moving fast enough for me. I’m still totally going to finish it!

Am enjoying it, but am very busy and am about to leave for the summer. Cool elements and I do want to see where it's going when I can pick it back up.

I love the Scottish accent of the narrator. But these are supposedly experienced people, & they keep making mistakes that are so stupid that it either damages their cred or the author’s ability to create conflict. Why would you give your armor to a prisoner? And if you didn’t tell your team about the weird stuff you did with your magic, wouldn’t you make sure to avoid a situation where it could be found out??

Enjoying this umpteenth re-read.

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!!