failte_aoife

And it turns out just not posting anything does not make the list of books I mean to write about shorter. Who would have thought?

Fantasy

Sam Hawke — The Hollow Empire

The sequel to City of Lies where I liked the very high-stakes murder mystery a lot and had no strong feelings about the characters. The sequel is less murder mystery and more conspiracy thriller-ish including "bad guy tries to frame the good guys for a crime" which is one of my least favourite tropes. Additionally my feelings about the characters didn't change much so I'll give further books in this series a miss.

Romances

Courtney Milan — The Duke Who Didn't

This heterosexual regency romance did give me some Red White and Royal Blue Vibes. Bear with me. It was also set in a world that is slightly better than ours. In this world there's a small town in England that is mostly populated by POC where they can live in peace and don't have to deal with White English People(TM). The heroine is a Chinese woman and the hero is a half-Chinese dude who so far had failed to tell her (or anyone in the village) that he's the duke who owns the land the village is built on. Before he can reveal that to her [Spoiler]and she can tell him that she knew that anyway they banter. And banter some more. And then they land in an inn and she pays the innkeeper to tell them that There Is Only One Bed. No really. And then they banter. And there's a side-plot about her father's sauce but it is also...not terribly exciting and very very low stakes. Like RWARB it might have worked better for me as novella because the cutesy-ness got very repetitive.

Your Childhood Heroes Are All Grown Up Now

Rocky Beach — Eine Interpretation

This is a noir graphic novel about the grown-up Three Investigators/Drei ???. The backstory is that one of their childhood adventures went wrong and ended another friend of them dead. Now they're all adults and haven't talked to each other in ages but fate leads to them meeting again...and of course getting involved in a crime. The art was great and I did love the scenes in which they talked with each other and very awkwardly tried to deal with the death of their friend but the crime story itself was...weak and it felt like someone had written a random noir-style story and then shoehorned the Three Investigators in...all with a dash of "White German dude writes about racism/police violence in the USA after being there on holiday one" which...well.

This didn't fit anywhere else

Die Juten Sitten

Another Audible audioplay. It gets advertised as "for fans of Babylon Berlin"...which I guess depends on what you are watching the show for. If it's for the fucking then you will find something in this. Because there's a lot of fucking. In the 'now time' of the play it's the 1950s and Hedi, a German born actress who has been convicted of murder and is now telling Noah, a journalist about her childhood in 1920s Berlin. Which she spent with her grandmother...who owned a brothel. And there she lives happily with not-actually-French prostitute Colette who is of course unhappily in love with a guy and Russian dominatrix Natalia who hates sex. 

There's a lot of fucking, as I already mentioned, three rapes, unless I lost count somewhere along the lines and Hedi happily tells about events she wasn't present at which even gets called out in the text but she's just whatever. There's corrupt police, fucking, Natalia accidentally kills one of the dudes she's whipping and more fucking. A random lesbian appears and is unhappily in love with Colette and who teaches Hedi some fun drug cocktails. Grandma forces Hedi to spent time with her dad even though she hates him, just because she wants to punish her son because she also hates him. One really wonders why Hedi ended up killing somebody with that charming childhood...but to be fair she is also a manipulative narcissist who treats Noah horribly...but because he's a man and she's a good-looking woman he does not really think with the brain in his head. At one point he tells Hedi that he thinks she lived her life more fully than his entire family in the last 100 years. This is meant to be about him coming from a well-off family and she obviously not. But the fact that Noah comes from a German-Jewish family does make this comment appear a bit...unfortunate.

Well...it was free so there's that.

I also have a list of books about murders, dead royals and other non-fiction but I'll leave those for another entry.

Narrator: there is no other non-fiction. She just read about murder and monarchs

I can also give a short bookish update. I haven't read too much since last time but my fingers have informed me that they want all the blood to dry before I do more stitching [slight exaggeration for comic effect].

In a shocking turn of events, I have read only one whole posh murder book:

The Detection Club — Ask A Policeman

The Detection Club is/was the club of golden age crime writers from Christie to Sawyers to many others who regularly met and discussed murder but were allowed to do it because they were famous. Apart from all writing their own books, they also did some round-robin/collaborations that have been mostly forgotten today. I wonder why.
Narrator: she has a pretty good idea why.
It's just not that good. The basic premise is: Author 1 introduces a crime, authors 2-6 write about a sleuth who finds a solution. But there's a twist...or two:

Twist 1: It's not 'here's a solution and here's an alternative solution and here another' but 'here's a solution. No, actually this solution is the true one. What happened during solution suggestion 1 still happened but the sleuth was wrong. No, actually this solution is the right one.' which results in a very awkwardly constructed case even for golden-age standards who...you know. I love them but you can't look at the logic that much or it collapses.

Twist 2: the authors don't send their own sleuths, they swap them around. Meaning Helen Simpson and Gladys Mitchell, an author I've never heard of and an author I am vaguely aware of swap sleuths and so do Anthony Berkley and Dorothy Sayers, an author I know and an author I know and like. The result is supposed to be a humorous parody but parodies work not that well if you don't know the source material. And while Sayer's take on Berkley's Sheringham was nice, Berkley's jokes about Lord Peter boiled down to: Look at him! He posh! Isn't that funny! I went to Oxford, I know jokes!

Further reading:

Slightly.

KJ Charles

Flight of Magpies

Despite enjoying the Magpie-books I took my time with reading them and I have eventually figured out why: I enjoy the stories themselves, I enjoy the side-characters, I enjoy Stephen and I enjoy Lucien and I enjoy their relationship...in the sense of I enjoy their bickering with each other. As soon as they are in the bedroom I aggressively Do Not Care. Which is partly a YKINMK thing but mostly...idk just not seeing any sexual chemistry between them? (I also do not care about what Silas and Dominic get up to in the bedroom in Seditious Affair but despite that, I can still see them working as a couple. Lucien and Stephen? Nope).

Sugared Game

Some Murder

Two more Crime Library Classics that were meh: Jefferson Farjeon's Thirteen Guests was the ever-popular murder at a house party in the countryside but the characters all stayed far too bland for me to care about them. Meanwhile, George Bellairs tried in Surfeit of Suspects a bit too much to make his characters memorable and ended up with every single one being an over-the-top-stereotype. I'm just never happy...except for 

 Maryla Szymiczkowa — Mrs Mohr Goes Missing

A lady amateur sleuth investigates in 19th century Krakow. She's not old enough for Polish Miss Marple and too old for the average cozy mystery heroine plus she's not the typical historical cozy heroine in general. If they are not full-on Not Like They Other Girls they are usually still very ahead-of-their-time and...have views that are still considered feminist by today's standards. Zofia, the MC in this book doesn't really. Her husband thinks it's not necessary that women get the right to go to university and so she doesn't see the point either. But she's also a 38-year-old woman who has no children and is now looking for a way to pass the time and once she has found something that interests her — aka crime-solving — she doesn't let anyone stop herself. And tbh that makes her character much more interesting than if she had just spend all her time preaching 21st-century feminism. 

The mystery itself was fun but did drag a bit towards the end but the biggest surprise for me was discovering that Maryla Szymiczkowa is just a pseudonym and the book was actually written by...two guys. I would definitely not have guessed that.

Louise Penny — Fatal Grace

Two balance my joy at discovering a cool new series out this one was...not good. I do not like throwing the term Mary Sue/Gary Stu at everything but I can only take so much interior monologing by everyone on how amazing Inspector Gamache is...while the reader is also constantly informed how much everyone else sucks. Seriously. Gamache has a colleague who is also an inspector, who is married and has children...and who when asked to watch a movie (for plot-relevant investigation reasons) whines about how there are no explosions and how that means it's a stupid movie. I'm not kidding. I mean I know straight white men fall upwards on the career level but I think there are certain steps you only reach if you have slightly more emotional maturity than a teenage boy.

Josephine Tey — Daughter of Time

So Josephine Tey did some research on Richard III as a hobby came to the conclusion that he didn't murder the princes in the tower (Henry VII did) and wanted to share that with the world. But because she thought nobody would read non-fiction she gives the inspector of her mystery novel series a broken leg and lets him read some history books where he eventually comes to the same conclusion (while judging some other non-fiction on the subject).

I must say I admire that level of confidence. It's beautiful. (To be fair I haven't spent that much time with various theories on Richard...her reasoning does seem sound to me but I guess you could just as easily convince me of the opposite)

Fantasy

P. Djèlí Clark — The Haunting of Tram Car 015

The novella-sequel to Dead Djinn in Cairo which I enjoyed and so I had been looking forward to reading more. Only I didn't only enjoy it for the worldbuilding (which tbh is cool and intriguing) but also because I loved Fatma who was doing the investigating in that book. In Haunting the investigator is...some dude. He's not a bad guy and I think if I hadn't read Dead Djinn I would probably still have enjoyed Haunting because the worldbuilding is really amazing and the investigator (duo) is fun but I kept thinking: but...want cool worldbuilding and cool investigator from the last story.

Hamed and Fatma do meet at the end and I'm not sure if that is supposed to be a setup for future books in which they share the screentime? (Anyway I will very likely read future books in that world but I do hope for more Fatma)

Katharine Duckett — Miranda in Milan

This is a  sequel to The Tempest that digs further into some of the aspects of the story that are somewhat problematic from today's POV (including some really unhealthy family dynamics and the colonialist...not-really-just-untertones), it is also about a girl who is dealing with discovering that her father is not who she thought he was and who falls in love for the first time (well the 1.5th time). And there's some action. 

I listened to the audiobook which was less than 5 hours long. That's perhaps enough to dive into one of these issues deep enough to come to a satisfactory conclusion but not for all of it. So...the author isn't going on my stay-away-from-list but also not my to-look-out-for

T. Kingfisher — Swordheart

Just delightful. There is not much more to say. I do love fantasy books that are quite low-stakes for the world-in-general (even though in this case the stakes for the characters were still quite high). And the characters (and their bickering) were just delightful.

Well, not all of those but this entry featured a couple of books I started with not very high hopes and then ended up enjoying...well and a couple I hated so it's not quite a sign of the end-times.

Fantasy

Aliette de Bodard: Of Dragons, Feasts and Murder

The major nobody-is-more-surprised book. It's set in the Dominion of the Fallen universe where I made it through 5 chapters or so of book one before deciding that I didn't care for post-apocalyptic worlds, no matter how nice the words are with which they are described. Or how plentiful. But Dragons Feats and Murder is set far away from the Paris of Dominion, at the court of a Vietnamese-inspired empire that feels more fantasy than post-apocalypse. So we get:

He's a dragon prince who really loves books. His husband thinks that stabbing is a reasonable way to solve conflicts. Together they fight crime and are sarcastic. Also, the author uses a reasonable amount of words to describe things.

What can I say? My needs can be very simple. I'd definitely continue reading a spin-off series with those two but I have no intention of giving the main series a second try.

Heather Rose Jones: Floodtide

Aka nobody-is-more-surprised #2. It's the fourth book in the Alpennina series (lesbians and magic in a Ruritania-type country) and my judgement on the first three had been: Meh. A bit dull. Very dull. And I had no intention of picking up the fourth but Storybundle did a Pride month bundle, Floodtide was in it and...I clearly have self-destructive tendencies. Or so I thought but I quite enjoyed it. Mind you, I didn't love it but the book was definitely helped by the fact that it had an MC whom I quite liked and that she was the 1st person narrator of the story. The previous three all had multiple 3rd person narrators and never just the main couple but also various other characters who did exciting things like...accounting. Which didn't exactly make the pages fly by because it was so exciting.

Ginn Hale:  The Counterfeit Viscount

Another pride month story bundle book but one I just didn't care about. It's set in a Victorianesque world where demons are real, look mostly human, are hot and are more or less second class citizens and we follow some dude with a sad childhood and his demon boyfriend trying to solve the mystery of some disappeared demons. I vaguely cared about the mystery which is why read till the end but I cared neither about sad childhood nor hot demon.

Katharina Ushachov: Zarin Saltan (dnf)

A modern retelling of Pushkin's Tsar Saltan in which he isn't a tsar but the heir to a Germany-based Russian supermarket chain, she's a Slavic Studies student and they met on a dating show. It was not bad but it made me realise that when I say 'I like fairy tale retellings' I mean 'I enjoy something like Spinning Silver where Novik grabs random bits of fairy tales, mashes them together and adds some fun new stuff' and not 'I enjoy it when someone takes a story, gives all the characters first and last names, replaces Old Thing with Fitting Modern Equivalent but changes nothing more and the evil characters are still evil because they are evil and the poor not!princess is too stupid to live'

The Unicorn Anthology (dnf)

I got this because it was edited by Peter S. Beagle and admittedly he also wrote a very charming foreword in which he talks about becoming 'The Unicorn Guy' after writing The Last Unicorn and how he didn't enjoy it at first but once he fully realized how much the book meant for some people he came to really embrace it. I should have stopped after that foreword.

Fake Dating Romances

Yup

Alexis Hall: Boyfriend Material

Luc has trust issues because his last boyfriend was an asshole and his dad is an even bigger asshole. Luc also lives in a sitcom. His friends-group consists of a gay couple where both guys are called James Royce and after they got married they are now both called James Royce-Royce. Another of his friends works for a publisher and whenever she appears she opens with "Something horrible happened at work today, I'm so getting fired" and then tells an amusing story about how the new Swedish bestseller they just acquired will be titled like the auto-reply for her out-of-office work e-mail. There's also a tiny angry lesbian who owns a truck.

Layla Reyne: Variable Onset (dnf)

Look. I read the blurb. It said that two dudes who happen to be into each other have to go undercover as a couple to catch a serial killer. I didn't expect high levels of gritty realism. I just wanted some fun...but I didn't get it because there's "low levels of realism" and there's "nobody thought for more than 0.2 seconds if the circumstances used to have the characters fake-makeout make even a tiny bit of sense".

Posh Murder

I will do us all a favour and mostly skim over the British Crime Library Classics that I till consume in far too high quantities: Murder in the Mill Race was another book for the "who would have that that I enjoy this" shelf because my previous experiences with the author (E. C. R. Lorac) had been underwhelming but this one had some nice descriptions of claustrophobic village life and a good mystery. Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert was more spy thriller than murder mystery and Mary Kelly's The Christmas Egg featured criminal gangs (and a fairly unlikeable inspector) which is also not my thing. In The Body in the Dumb River, just about everybody was unlikeable and I just wanted it to be over. 

Anthony Berkley: The Whychford Poisoning Case

A story based on the real life-case of Florence Maybrick who was accused of poisoning her husband (and found guilty) which just didn't quite work for me, not only because there's a *~*hilarious*~* scene in which the sleuth's best friend spanks a grown woman for being too feminist (:

No wait...I guess that could be the main reason why this didn't work for me.

 Erica Ruth Neubauer: Murder at the Mena House

Jane Wunderly is Not Like The Other Girls. Other girls dress up in ridiculously revealing dresses to impress men like whores. Jane has no interest in men.

Andrea Maria Schenkel: Tannöd (The Murder Farm)

Another loosely based on true events story. This time on the Hinterkaifeck murders. A few years ago (OK, a lot of years ago I think) that book was been quite a bestseller in Germany but I never got round reading it and now I saw it in the library. While the original murders happened shortly after WW1, Tannöd is set in the 1950s because that way we can add some nazis, since All Serious Literature Needs Nazis. How else do you know it's serious? Anyway, this book is very serious. And dull.

JB Lawless: Tod in der Bibliothek (Death in the Library)

This book cleverly disguised itself as classic/cozy crime novel but it really isn't. The inspector is sad and misanthropic and thinks about his relationship with his father a lot. The victim is a catholic priest who has been castrated post-mortem which means the shocking reveal at the end is shocking to 0% of all readers.

Non-Fiction

Patrick Radden Keefe: Say Nothing

A piece of narrative non-fiction about the Northern Ireland conflict. Which means it doesn't set out to describe what happens from A to Z but tells interlocking and overlapping stories, mainly about the abduction and disappearance of  Jean McConville and two biographies of IRA-Terrorists — Brendan Hughes and Dolores Price — who both were unhappy about the results of the peace deal. But you also get bits and pieces of other stories (a lot of Gerry Adams but also others). On occasions, I thought I could have done with fewer details about all the minor players and while I understand that a completely chronological approach wouldn't have worked, a couple of times I thought "this is a bit too much from the...fiction playbook?" By that, I mean that some chapters ended with quite major revelations and then the next started with something like "So last time we talked about Hughes he was in prison, let's see where he is now". 

But overall, that didn't stop me from...well enjoying the book inasmuch as you can enjoy something with that topic. As said it isn't a chronological history of the Troubles but by choosing those specific stories we still end up with something that starts in the 1950s and goes all the way until the 2000s when McConville's remains were discovered (and then a bit further). I think it should even work quite well as...introductory reading since it pretty much assumes no prior knowledge about anything that happened during the troubles.

David Mitchell: Back Story

David Mitchell the Comedian. Not David Mitchell the author of Cloud Atlas. It's comedian-David-Mitchell's autobiography

Somewhen. But considering the new job starts tomorrow who knows when I'll have time to read and write about what I read again. (OK, the former probably on my commute. The latter...shrug-emoji). So let's get the backlog out of the way.

Agatha Christie's idiot spies aka the Tommy & Tuppence Books

The series is less popular than her others, possibly because it's harder to film a series about a couple that's 20ish in book one and 70ish in the last one than a Miss Marple or a Poirot who are eternally...whatever. Well, and who reads books anymore? (Not me. At least I consumed the entire series in audiobook-format).

I already mentioned the first book, The Secret Adversary (spying during WWI), in my last entry and I admit it was a bit meh. Tommy and Tuppence were charming, but they were also big idiots. In N or M (spying during WWII) they were less idiotic...but actually fooled me (and the bad guys) successfully into thinking they were massive idiots for a moment so that was nice. The next one, By The Pricking of my Thumbs, contains zero spying and is just a nice classic mystery. I'm always there for nice classic mysteries. And the relationship between them is just so nice? Tommy is all: "my lovely wife, you're being weird again but I know you well enough that you're usually on to something when you're being weird so let me help you figuring it out." Then Postern of Fate is set in the 1960s and has them figuring out an old mystery that turns into an old spy-ish story, featuring *ominous drumroll* people who would kill to keep those old secrets buried. For my opinion: see above. Tommy is the "Not all men. You're right Thomas Beresford would never do that" meme.

And then there's Partners in Crime. A short story collection about them, set between WWI and WWII in which they acquire a detective agency because of reasons and solve cases. The quirk about it is, that each story is the parody of a different detective that was popular at the time: there's a Sherlock Holmes one, a Father Brown one, one of Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the corner...now the idea is fun but you might be surprised to learn that I don't know every fictional detective (pause for shocked faces all round) and a parody of something where you don't know the original is only mildly funny. However: when I say parody, I mean they actually namedrop the story they are parodying. Tommy says "I shall be Sherlock Holmes this time" or dresses up as Catholic priest or pretends to be blind. And in the final story of the collection? He's Hercule Poirot. And yes, he does actually say "Today I'll be Poirot". That's an admirable audacity and I love it (and it makes me almost forget the casual period- and genre-typical xenophobia that runs through these stories. Beware of Russians and Germans :O)

More spies and posh murder:

I'm actually reading German books, you know

Like Bruce Alexander — Der Zorn des Gerechten...which is a translation of Watery Grave a historical mystery. Or perhaps rather a historical novel in which the main character happens to solve a crime. Or not. It's not really complicated but a bit tedious. I didn't hate it, especially considering the narrator is an old man who tells a story about the time he was a teenager which I usually find extremely obnoxious. The idea is nice overall: the narrator is the sort of adopted son of Sir John Fielding, who was an actual historical person. In reality, he was the blind judge who more or less founded the Bow Street Runners, the first police force in London. In the books he and the narrator also solve crime. This is actually right up my alley but I did not enjoy this specific case they were solving for various reasons. I might try one of the other books in the series, but it's not high on my to-do list.

In actual real German books, I read Herkunft (Origin) by Saša Stanišić. The author was born in then-Yugoslavia-now-Bosnia, and his family fled to Germany during the war. Herkunft is...not really an autobiography and perhaps not even really a memoir. It's not chronological, it also features stories about his relatives that happened before Stanišić was born and the epilogue is a choose-your-own-adventure story. It makes sense in context. It's weird. It's about  family and home and growing up and friendships and also tries to talk about today's refugee-situation which is all a bit much, perhaps also because — see above — it's not really chronological, only a series of anecdote-ish stories that are sometimes only two pages long and sometimes he jumps from rather sad and depressing observations to more light-hearted ones which makes it hard to...idk feel the whole impact. But that's not always the case and overall I really enjoyed the book and am looking forward to the other Stanišić-book I have on my tbr-pile (How The Soldier Stole the Gramophone which btw has already been translated into English. Herkunft is being translated afaik)

Stories about love and stuff

Non-fiction

Bruce Robinson — They All Love Jack

Ahh yes. The actor-turned-director that gave us this masterpiece (seriously I love that movie dearly) wrote a book about Jack The Ripper. I so wanted to love it. Or at least enjoy it but I didn't. I'm also too lazy to copy my whole Goodreads review including all the formatting and links over here so if you are curious about my old favourite pastime that is "yelling at bad books about Jack the Ripper" you have to click here.

Frances Welch — The Russian Court at Sea: The Voyage of HMS Marlborough

A book about the sea-journey into exile of the last remaining Romanovs (including the dowager empress, the Czar's sister and everyone's favourite chaotic bisexual Prince Yusupov). Generally, an interesting topic but a badly executed idea. The book wants to tell of the journey day by day. Which means we get dropped into the middle of the action and then have extensive "but of course to understand what happened here you have to understand the relationship of those two people and for that I have to tell you all these things that happened twenty years before this" so we get. Things happening on the ship — backstory — more backstory — ship — more backstory...etc. and that is a rather confusing approach and despite having some background knowledge on the Romanovs I felt lost most of the time.

Well, stuff I watched.

Broadchurch S1 and S2

10 Years late with Starbucks

Loch Ness

Broadchurch but in Scotland

Deadwater Fell

A horrible murder in a picturesque small town but this time David Tennant is evil...or is he?

A Very English Scandal

The one where nobody is murdered but not for lack of trying

Harrow

Ioan Gruffudd as a pathologist who solves crime but is not immortal...only Australian. And he lives on a boat.

Grantchester the current season so far

Murder in picturesque English villages but the vicar solves it. 

I don't really have much to say atm. I think the cases have improved compared to the early episodes and the Moral Righteousness is also less strong with the newer episodes. It is sad, that the new vicar still hasn't lost his shirt but I find it delightful that all the heterosexuals in the show have relationship issues due to Anglican guilt, bipolar in-laws or British colonialism while the gay guy is so happy and content in his relationship that he has now written to his estranged father so he can have something to worry about.

The Romanovs

The Netflix doku-drama-ish-whatever. 

I actually remember very little about it except for the fact that when a friend asked if I recommended it I said something like "That depends on how much you want to know about how the writers of this show imagined Rasputin's sex-life". Yes...there was a lot of fucking in this show. Which I guess is a first for a technically-it's-a-documentary. 

Oh and there's also a show on Amazon that's called The Romanovs but it's about people in the present day who all claim to be descendants from the Romanovs. I only made it through episode one which had exactly zero connections to the Romanovs or just Russia and featured a character who was horribly racist But In An Amusing Way and my time is too precious for this shit.

I also watched movies namely...eh Knives Out about which everyone has already talked and so I can only repeat that it was delightful and I want a sequel in which Daniel Craig and Martha solve more crime and discover that the villain was Privilege All Along. Frozen II was entertaining but also felt weirdly disjointed and I am 95% sure at some point in the production meeting someone said "They liked the snowman the last time? Give them more of the fucking snowman!" (Not that I'm complaining much because...I liked the snowman but even for me that was...alot). 

And I also watched...this:

Because I like An Inspector Calls and saw that a version of it was on Netflix. And then I realised that it was a subtitled version from Hong Kong and I went...why not and then I had An Experience. Possibly I consumed drugs without realising it or the movie is just That Weird. But not actually bad...just very different from what I expected. But I think they still conveyed the moral of "It was Capitalism and Privilege All Along" very well and were very colourful while doing it.

Let's not look back at my reading resolution for 2019. (But to be fair it was "read more books from my physical tbr-pile and I ended up in a different place from it for a considerable amount of time).

This year I picked out some concrete books and for half of them the reason is "They were presents and some of those have been lying round here for 3+ years I'm beginning to feel slightly bad about it and also want to avoid feeling like this about the books I got this Christmas in three years).

Anyway. 

List 1 — The Presents

• Benjamin Black — Alchemie einer Mordnacht (Prague Nights/Wolf on a String in the original)
• Bruce Alexander — Der Zorn des Gerechten (Watery Grave)
• Saša Stanišić — Wie der Soldat das Gramophon repariert (lo and behold that's an actual German book. How the Soldier Fixes the Gramophone)
• Sarah Rees Brennan  — In Other Lands (yes, I have already half-read that and then it fell victim to moving-related stress and now I really want to finish it)
• Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes. The No Bullshit Guide to Greek Mythology
• Stephen Brust — The Phoenix Guard

List 2 — Books in a series that I want to continue before I forget everything that has happened

• Maggie Robins — Who's Sorry Now
• Marshal Ryan Maresca: The Holver Alley Crew, A Parliament of Bodies and The Way of the Shield
• K. M. McKinley — The Brass God

List 3 — Nice to have aka books that have been lying around for a while and which I mostly picked at random (and with the exception of buddy read Bronte aren't quite as urgent)