Fancake

For the month of June, I finished seven books! Fewer than the previous month, but I’m perfectly happy with seven.

It did feel a little bit like I fell behind where I’d wanted, but clearly not too far! Still trying to carve time out pretty consistently, but it was a bit harder to do this month. My biggest reading time tends to be right before I go to bed, but this month I had more days where I started to doze off and had to put the book down, or where something else took longer than I wanted and cut into that time. (I am also realizing that overall health-wise… I probably need to go to bed before 1:30 or 2:00am, which has been my standard for the last year or so. That only gives me about five and a half hours a night, and that’s probably just not enough for me. So going to need to adjust my reading time to make room for the sleep, ha.)

This month…


(I like the covers for this series.)
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
Book 2 of The Murderbot Diaries
2018
Science fiction - physical novella
5/5

Murderbot is on its own, truly a rogue unit. Despite the Preservation team purchasing its contract, and offering it a place on their colony, it knows there’s little use for a SecUnit there, and it knows it would still be owned. Besides, it still has questions about its past: it knows that something happened that caused it to kill the human clients on one of its jobs, but its own memories and all records of “the incident” have been erased.
Posing as an augmented human, Murderbot plans to visit the RaviHyral mining installation, where the incident occurred, looking for answers to whether it was deliberately behind what happened. Not everything goes according to plan. The bot-driven transport that it catches a ride on turns out to be a terrifyingly advanced machine intelligence, that now has an interest in Murderbot’s activities. And in order to access RaviHyral, it needs an employment contract, meaning it has to put its human disguise to the test by taking on human clients. Those human clients are in genuine need of protection, and Murderbot will do its best to provide it, even as it searches out the truth to its own history.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

I really enjoy this book! As always, I feel like I have a lot less to say about the things I love than the things that don’t work for me, but I can at least try to list what I love!
- Murderbot is, of course, a fantastic character, and I like getting to see it in new situations. The type of hiding its doing is different than the way it had to hide itself in All Systems Red. I also really like getting to watch it make its own decisions, again, to a much more complete extent than in the first book.
- ART is also a fantastic character, and I am constantly delighted by the way it and Murderbot interact.
- I love Murderbot continuing to find comfort in rewatching its favorite episodes of media, and the way it contrasts with the media that it turns out ART prefers, and what that says about both of them and the way they interact with the world. There’s a lot to be said about how they both find representation in the media they’re watching. (Which Murderbot makes explicit, when it explains to ART why it doesn’t like any media that actually involves SecUnits, because it knows what roles SecUnits occupy.)
- I love the investigation of RaviHyral and the discovery of what happened.
- Murderbot genuinely fears that it hacked its governor module in the past to cause the murders… yet even before we find out whether that’s true or not, we see how seriously it takes the safety of its clients. (It complains the whole time, but the desire to protect them is so clearly genuine.)
- We do get to see Murderbot being kind of judgmental, not just toward humans, but toward ComfortUnits - or sexbots, as it continues to call them. It’s really interesting to see how some of its own assumptions get challenged during its investigations. (Also a little heartbreaking.)
- I also love watching Murderbot get to fuck shit up. :)

(I like the cover incorporating both the vultures and the roses.)
A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
2023
Horror (subgenres: southern gothic, haunted house, occult) - very background m/f - physical novel
5/5

When archeoentomologist Samantha has her next project put on hold, it provides her an excellent chance for an extended visit to her mother. Arriving to her childhood home in North Carolina, Sam quickly discovers something seems off about the house and about her mother. Her mother’s usual anxiety has apparently gotten far worse, even straying toward fear. Stranger, many of her mother’s choices, from interior decorating to new insistence on prayer before meals, seem far more in line with Gran Mae, Sam’s late, somewhat tyrannical grandmother who used to own the house. When Sam starts to do a bit of casual research on the family, she discovers dark, occult roots that she would never have suspected.

My thoughts:

I really loved this book!

Sam is extremely relatable to me. My actual degree is in anthropology (with an emphasis on archeology), and it’s probably no surprise to anyone here that I have a pretty strong interest in hobby entomology. Had I summoned a bit more drive and not squandered some opportunities, Sam’s career is something I could very well have ended up doing, or would have loved to do. I also had a southern grandmother (though mine was on my paternal side) that there’s a lot of Complicated Family Shit around.

One of the strange occurrences that Sam encounters is the fact that the house’s garden seems like an ecological deadzone, with nothing living except Gran Mae’s roses. I love this, because that’s the sort of thing that I find so extremely offputting and horrible the handful of times I’ve encountered gardens that have been pesticide-bombed into sterility. I DO take note of all the bugs I get to see in a given space, and having them be conspicuously gone is creepy, but I’m not sure that many people would notice or agree, so I liked it in the book. (It’s also a fun inversion of how insects are often a “symptom” of some aspect of the horror. We get the more played-straight version with the ladybugs, but even that is not the usual kind of insect activity that horror leans on.)

Sam’s character in general really did shine, I thought. I enjoyed that she related to so much through the lens of her entomology.
The only other T. Kingfisher books that I’ve read are the Sworn Soldier novellas, and Sam and Alex’s voices are somewhat similar—they both have a very dry sense of humor—but I did find them to still be distinct from each other.
That particular dry tone works really well for me in terms of humor. Sam’s description of her phone consistently failing to connect to the wifi was extremely funny, and will probably be one of those things that I think of every time I struggle with a bad connection. (Paraphrasing, but: “Her phone assured her that it had an excellent relationship with the wifi. She went to load a page, and the phone informed her it wasn’t that kind of relationship.”)

I also love black vultures (though we mainly have turkey vultures in Colorado.) We had a fun encounter with a black vulture that was roosting inside the ruins of an old Pentecostal church we visited in Maryland, and that felt like one of the most southern gothic things to possibly happen to me.

The early vibes of the story, where things were just creepy and wrong and unsettling was the strongest part for me. Even so, the reveal/conclusion/resolution didn’t feel weak to me at all.

And of course, it has a lot of the typical themes you’d expect from haunted house/southern gothic type stories. There’s a lot about what it means to cling to the past, what an “idealized past” actually idealizes, what it means on several levels when it comes to an unwillingness to move on, whether something is truly “normal” if it requires coercion to enforce. (And I think that having someone who studies the past as an archeologist, and who categorizes things as an entomologist makes for an excellent contrast to the past-as-tradition and categorization-as-judgment.)

This was excellent, and I really want both Taylor and Alex to read it, ha.

(Again, I like pretty much all the Murderbot covers.)
Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
Book 3 of The Murderbot Diaries
2018
Science fiction - physical novella
4.5/5

After investigating its past on RaviHyral failed to provide hoped-for closure, Murderbot is at a loss for where to go next. It discovers from a news broadcast that the case between Preservation (the group Murderbot was contracted to,) and GrayCris (the corporation that tried to kill them,) is ongoing. There is some evidence that GrayCris has engaged in similar activities in their past, including their time on the planet Milu. Officially listed as a failed terraforming attempt, there is credible suspicion that it was actually an illegal attempt to mine alien remnants. If Murderbot could find evidence confirming this, it could help Preservation’s case.
A human team is going to Milu to assess GrayCris’ abandoned facility, which makes Murderbot’s plan simple: hitch a ride to Milu, perform its investigation, and hitch a ride back, with the human team none the wiser. Unfortunately, the humans from GoodNightLander Independent have no idea the lengths GrayCris will go to keep their wrongdoing from being exposed… but Murderbot does. Once again it finds itself in the position of choosing to protect a group of humans.

My thoughts, some spoilers for both this book and Artificial Condition:

Another good one! Though I will say that I understand why, in my initial read of the first four novellas back-to-back, that I sort of conflated parts of books two and three, because they have fairly similar arcs. (Murderbot visits a distant planet/station that has been abandoned, in order to find evidence that was supposed to be hidden, sneaking into the mostly-inaccessible place by way of subterfuge and joining up with a group that does have permission to be there, that it then has to protect, while it also encounters different machine intelligences/bots.) THAT SAID. The stories are still quite different, and the similarities and differences both highlight things about Murderbot’s character and personal arc.

My other thoughts:
- Miki. ;-;
- I really like how Murderbot’s interactions with both ART and Miki really throw its existence (and the existence of SecUnits in general) into relief. ART and Miki are extremely different, ART being an impossibly complex and powerful machine intelligence, and Miki being what Murderbot disparagingly calls a “pet bot.” Yet both genuinely care for and value the humans they work with, and those humans genuinely care about them. It makes Murderbot/SecUnits’ situation that much sadder, in multiple ways.
It’s awful that SecUnits—a mix of mechanical parts and cloned human tissue—are treated so much worse than bots. Yet it also makes sense, as we see how readily humans are exploited.
Murderbot’s repeated insistence that it obviously isn’t jealous of Miki is already kind of heartbreaking, but it’s extra so when [redacted] is what prompts it to return to Preservation in person.
- Another thing that comes up in both Artificial Condition and this one is getting to see Murderbot change a (judgmental) opinion after it learns more about the thing in question. In Artificial Condition it really seems to dislike “ComfortUnits,” calling them Sexbots, and seeming to be uncomfortable with them in general. Then it discovers that the ones on RaviHyral sacrificed themselves in an attempt to avert disaster, and it very clearly softens its opinion. In Rogue Protocol, it’s very dismissive of Miki’s relationship with Don Abene and the rest of the human team, refusing to believe that their connection was genuine… until it’s clear that it was. I like this.
- While we’ve already seen it, this book also helps to highlight how extremely effective Murderbot is without the control of the Governor Module. It’s so extremely good at figuring out how best to protect the team, even against extremely dangerous situations. Its ability to act under its own orders are the only way it can successfully do so; if it were forced to obey, it would have been destroyed, and members of the human team would have been killed.
- It is also clear that the sort of “rogue SecUnit” that is fearmongered about—one that truly does want to cause destruction and kill as many people as possible—would be extremely, terrifyingly lethal… but we keep seeing Murderbot’s drive to protect the teams it encounters, even the ones it has no external reason to. Again, I like that we see this multiple times and in various situations.

(This cover is fine. Not amazing, but perfectly fine. I'm not sure I think all the elements gel, but I'll take it over AI slop any day.)
Before the Broken Star by Emily R. King
Book 1 of The Evermore Chronicles trilogy
2019
Fantasy (subgenre: YA, steampunk [barely]) - m/f - ebook novel
2.5/5

Everley should be dead, and would be if not for the miraculous clockwork heart her uncle used to save her life. She is very aware that her life is literally lived on borrowed time, with no idea when Father Time may come to collect. Her deepest hope is that she has enough time to get revenge. Governor Markham murdered her parents and siblings, leaving her for dead, and Everley intends to make him pay… if she can ever get close enough to him.
Then a raid on the docks gives Everley her chance. The raid was intended to sweep up as many women—mostly streetwalkers and thieves—as possible, convict them, and sentence them to transportation to an island prison colony. Here they will serve as wives for the existing convicts, helping to establish a settlement on the island to serve the queen’s expansionist aims. Governor Markham, who first mapped the island with Everley’s father, is the one in charge of the colony. Getting herself sentenced to the island may be her best chance to access him.
Everley wants no distractions from her singular focus, not even her accidental marriage of convenience to the charming Lieutenant Jamison Callahan, or friendships with any of the other women being sent to the island. Everley hopes her opportunity for revenge is approaching, but both the island and Markham himself are hiding secrets she’d never imagined, secrets that could connect to the creation of the world, stories long dismissed as myth and heresy.

My thoughts, vague spoilers:

This one wasn’t terrible, but was definitely a story that was Not For Me. I could see it maybe having had a bit more of a hold on me back when I was more the target audience for YA, and there were aspects that were enjoyable, but as a whole, it felt a bit forgettable.

The good:
This really did do a good job of making every character feel like the protagonist of their own story. I can envision interesting “versions” of the plot with almost any of them as the main character.

The set up to share the myths/relevant fairy tales felt pretty natural, and not like an obvious exposition info-dump, or like the book was trying to wink at the reader to make sure you knew it was going to be important. (It could have come across as that meme of Mickey Mouse, where he’s whispering in an aside to the viewer about how “this is a special tool that will help us later.”) I honestly thought it was just worldbuilding flavor.

The mixed:
The downside of all the characters feeling like their own protagonist is that I’m not completely convinced that Everley is the most interesting one to follow. She probably has the most interesting plotline, but in terms of character? I’m not sure.

Everley’s clockwork heart. It’s really the only steampunk-ish thing, which is a bit of a bummer. I love the steampunk aesthetic, but it’s basically nonexistent outside of the one thing. The book seems to get tagged as being steampunk fairly often, but it very much isn’t. I do like that the clockwork heart comes with genuine, serious drawbacks for Everley, from the risk of strong emotions causing the mechanism to malfunction, to the fear of water getting into it, to the plain fear of discovery. This does limit her… at times. Unfortunately, those limits seem to disappear when convenient for the plot. For something we’re told is uncontrollable, she sure does control it in a lot of “important” situations.
(I also couldn’t ever quite adjust to her calling it her “ticker.” I so deeply associate that with like… old men talking about “their ticker” when they want to avoid a heart attack that it was always jarring, haha. I DO agree it’s a perfect term for something that’s both a heart and a clock, but it just sounds so unserious!)

Some of the things I found the most fun were things like the little aside/side quests in the forest, like the evil illusory cottage. However, those bits could have been chopped out with minimal impact on the story, and also just kept reminding me of Deltora Quest and making me wish I was reading that instead, ha.

The not great:
The book and characters are a little weird about sex work, even though I get the feeling that it’s trying not to be? Everley falsely pleads guilty to sex work (“street walking”) to get sentenced to the island, and some of the other characters (the Cat and the Fox) were sex workers… which is apparently a capital offense, and is basically always treated as shameful. Everley seems to be trying to be non-judgmental about it, but sometimes she does get judgey. There’s never really any push back from the actual sex worker characters beyond taking minor offense, and there’s a pervasive vibe that of course none of them would ever have chosen to do it, but were forced into it. It’s very much treated as a plot device.

Everley’s character sometimes really frustrated me. Part of it is probably it being YA, and it being understandable that she’s a bit impulsive or at war with herself, because she is young. But it seems we’re supposed to think that she’s a master planner, building up this entire plot in service to her singular goal of revenge… yet she seems utterly unprepared for it. I understand her utterly pacifistic religion causing conflict for her about killing… but girl, what was your plan, then?? That was always supposedly your goal! I also understand or can appreciate a conflict between who she would be if she could/who she has been forced to be/who she wants to be… but the execution makes her seem a bit wishy washy.

Characters almost always end up confirming what Everley thinks of them, even if there’s a brief moment where it seems like there’ll be a subversion. There’s no tension over whether Markham is a villain, even though it seemed like the reader was supposed to be wondering. He insists there’s so much Everley doesn’t understand, that there are secret reasons and context that will change everything she assumes about him… and immediately kills off that question by threatening to facilitate the abuse of a child in order to make Everley do something. And then it turns out, yup, he is the villain. No special absolving context, just context that explains “yup. Evil.” (Bummer, because I love “this changes everything!” context.)

While the stakes have definitely raised by the end of the story, and I know it’s setting up the rest of the trilogy, it also feels like a lot of things have just returned to status quo by the end. Everley is still consumed with a desire for revenge against the same man. She still resents and rejects attempts at emotional connection. One of the big reveals ([redacted] is actually alive!) is reset when [redacted] is one of the only named characters to then die, so that’s a bit of a wash.

This is silly, but there’s a scene of Callahan playing the violin, and it is maybe the worst description of violin playing I’ve read. “Lieutenant Callahan strums a violin alongside a drummer and a whistle player. His fingers fly across the strings as he moves the bow up and down the neck of the instrument.” Lol. (Did she mean the bow flies and his fingers move up and down? But then why strumming? You can pluck the strings, but in that case the bow wouldn’t be doing anything…)

I could see this having appealed a bit more to me if I’d been able to vibe with Everley and just enjoy the adventure aspects, which might have been something I’d have been more inclined toward when I was younger. But also maybe not. Like I said, I’m sure it’s for someone, just not for me.
It also felt just… so extremely het. (Even if I was hoping for Everley and Harlow to have an enemies to lovers arc, or for the Fox and the Cat to be partners in more than crime wink.)
No regrets having read it, but I do not see myself picking up the remainder of the trilogy.

(I do think this has a great cover.)
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
2023
Horror (subgenre: queer, religious) - f/f - physical novella - read with Alex
4/5

Rose Darling is a devoted and devout member of Kingdom of the Pine, a conservative Christian church that all but owns the town of Neverton, MT. Their main claim to fame is Camp Damascus, the only ex-gay conversion camp in the world to boast a 100% success rate.
As she starts to take her first steps into adulthood, strange things start to happen to Rose. She vomits black flies; she begins to see a strange, inhuman woman following her, who may even be responsible for the death of one of her friends; she begins having impossible memories of a relationship with a girl that she doesn’t know. Her parents and her church-appointed therapist are dismissive of these occurrences, chalking them up to strange coincidence, or psychological manifestations of some secret guilt she’s harboring. Dissatisfied with this lack of explanation, Rose continues to investigate, despite Kingdom of the Pine’s reminder that curiosity is a sin.
The more she looks into things, the more certain she is that the answers are at Camp Damascus. She—and others she meets—have no recollection of the camp, despite apparently having attended. It seems like Kingdom of the Pines is doing something even worse than anyone could have guessed.

My thoughts, slight spoilers:

I enjoyed this one a little bit more on this second read, so I nudged it up from a 3.5 to a 4.

My thoughts are mostly the same as they were last year.

The good:
I like Rose’s character and perspective. Her analytical, scientific way of looking at things informs the way she acts, and what things she notices as well as how she thinks about them.

I mean… a church making a literal deal with the devil (demons) in order to more successfully attempt to force the gay out, while finding infinite justifications for it, really does feel quite real.

There are a lot of aspects of the religious control that really do feel quite real. I like the way in which Rose is being pushed into adulthood, with her parents trying to set her up with a boy, and seeming in part to expect her to be moving on to her own life… while also doing everything possible to prevent that from happening. Rose is just graduating high school at age 20, because members of the church are required to take two years off to do mission service, which puts them at a social delay compared to the norm. She’s an adult, but her father takes away her laptop as punishment for just trying to research something happening to her. She’s being kept sort of childlike, even when her family seems to resent that fact. It’s very “you need to be a responsible adult and make your own choices… but only if you’re making the choices we want you to make.”

The other bit that sticks out to me is her mom’s “bonding activity” for them, where they go on walks and “diagnose” their neighbors/friends/total strangers with sins, and “prescribe” the way they would spiritually fix them or have them repent. Her mom does treat it as a fun activity, but it’s just such a creepy and gross way to behave! Extremely realistic, ha.

The meh:
I do still find some of the stylistic things awkward. Rose refers to her parents by first name sometimes, which seems super weird and jarring. I again tried to tell if it was something that was indicating her emotional distance from them, but it didn’t seem to be. She also uses “my friend” as an epithet pretty often, in situations where it again, feels unnatural. In that case, just using the friend’s name would seem more natural. Those two things make it seem a bit like an attempt to avoid monotony, but instead it sticks out as jarring to me.

I realized that I misread something the previous time, where I thought that Rose’s girlfriend, Willow, is a sort of undefined pagan. She isn’t; she’s actually a presumable atheist, who simply likes the witchy aesthetic (girl, same!) (I’m not sure why I missed it, so I have no excuse.) That does at least slightly soften one of the thematic things that I had an issue with previously. The first time, it really rubbed me the wrong way that Saul remained a devoted Christian, Willow had (I misinterpreted) a sort of undefined non-Christian faith, and then Rose swung to atheistic, before deciding that that was the pendulum swinging too far, and coming to the decision that she should have some faith. Now, with Willow providing that atheistic counterpoint, it bothers me less that Rose ends up sort of settling in the middle. It’s still a “meh” thing for me, because I don’t necessarily like that as an answer, but it no longer feels quite so invalidating, ha.

It did strike me even more this time how little Camp Damascus actually features, which feels strange, with it sort of looming large over the narrative. It’s not bad per se, to have the sort of lurking threat, but it feels very weird to see the remaining pages dwindle, without having even reached the camp yet.

I still feel like this would ideally be like… a SyFy original movie, but it’d be a really good one, haha.

(Apparently this cover artist is willing to trace shit, so I feel no need to be nice, so I'll say that this one is at best extremely bland and does nothing to convey anything in particular about the book. Also, if book 1 was the secretly-Stucky-fic, why is this the cover where it looks like them?)
Common Goal by Rachel Reid
Book 4 of Game Changers
2020
M/M Romance (subgenre: hockey romance) - ebook novel
2.5/5

Eric Bennett, veteran goalie, knows that his life is going to change. First, he knows it’s time to start seriously thinking about retirement. Second, after his divorce, he’s starting to consider the possibility of dating men.
Kyle Swift, a grad student and bartender, has definitely had more than enough of closeted older men interested in using him for a bit of fun. Despite his certainty that Eric would be exactly that, he can’t deny that Eric is exactly the sort of man he’s attracted to.
Despite their mutual certainty that a real relationship has to be off the table, the two strike up a friendship… with benefits. Kyle is happy enough to indulge in his attraction to Eric while giving Eric some good “firsts” to put him on a path to eventually dating a man for real.
Regardless of their intentions, neither of them can switch off the emotions that leave them wanting more with each other.

My thoughts, spoilers:

This book felt pretty solidly “meh.” I was going to give it a 3, and then I realized how little I have to put in the positive column. :/ 2 feels super harsh, so… 2.5 it is.

The good(?):
I like having a bisexual protagonist, and while it’s never labeled as such on-page, I’d argue that Eric seems to also probably be demisexual. (Which should be super duper relatable to me! Unfortunately, it didn’t quite hit as well as I would have wished, but I still appreciate the characterization.)
I also appreciate that it didn’t totally demonize his ex-wife. There’s a bit of “well, maybe I was never really satisfied with her…” but she isn’t made out to have been awful or anything.

Hooray for a Maria redemption? (In book 1 she wanted to go become a cop. In this book she quit cop school to study human services and “actually” help people.)

I did genuinely feel for Kyle, and his struggles with the past relationship that went extremely sour, and how that's left him with some baggage. (It felt like he harbored more guilt than he should over it, but I sympathized.)

In theory I like the idea of "we're going to have sex, because I'm helping you get over your nerves about it, and this is supposed to be no strings attached... but oh no, the strings!" Unfortunately, it's probably not a good sign that one of my positives is "well... I could have liked something like this..."

The meh:
I know I mentioned that Heated Rivalry had a very slight kink dynamic, but one that worked well for me, and was basically right at the point where I enjoy it, and don’t start disliking it. The Dom/sub kink dynamic here is much more overt, and did cross that line of “diminishing returns,” where I do not enjoy it, and hit the point where I actively enjoy it less. Not to the point of squick or anything, and it’s not like it’s super extreme kink or anything, it just got to the point where I was not into it. This is entirely a personal taste/personal baggage thing, and not something I’d knock the book for, but as a result I did personally think the sex scenes were less appealing. (And my ratings are subjective related to my enjoyment!)

One thing that I’ve enjoyed previously about the series was how different each book and the couples in them felt. They all had very different dynamics with each other and as individual characters, and that was something I liked. This book… doesn’t feel that way. It feels like this book was built out of pieces of the previous ones.
Eric is friends with Scott, and Kyle is friends with Kip, and they sort of feel like a rehash of the Game Changer storyline. It’s another closeted-for-now hockey player x out grad student/service industry worker couple. Sure, Kyle is a bartender not a smoothie barista, but Kip has since also started working at the bar, an them being coworkers kind of highlights the similarity.
There’s the friends-with-benefits “oh no I can’t let him know I caught feelings” aspect that Heated Rivalry has, but where I was all-in for Shane and Ilya, it felt really artificial here. Shane and Ilya at least arguably have external forces that keep them from wanting to acknowledge the relationship; for Eric and Kyle it’s purely internal, and felt far weaker to me.
There’s even the “I’m planning to stop playing hockey” aspect like Ryan (even if Eric’s exit is a much more positive one), while Kyle serves as Eric’s introduction to some aspects of queer culture, not entirely unlike Fabian does for Ryan in Tough Guy.
Eric and Kyle aren’t exact retreads, and it is probably the kink dynamic and age difference that I’d say sets them apart the most, but it still sort of feels like the previous three books got tossed in a blender and came out as a much blander story.

The bad:
The most minor bad thing: more typos this time around than I’ve noticed in any of the previous books in the series. Still not egregious, and frankly in line with most tradpub stuff, but it still bugs me to notice.

The biggest sin in my opinion is that it eventually got to a point where the emotional beats felt so repetitive that I stopped caring. Eric and Kyle’s mutual “I enjoy the sex, but a relationship would be a ~bad idea~, so I can’t let feelings factor in” thing lasts the whole book. After 300-odd pages of “no, he’s bad for me! I’m bad for him! We can’t be together, because it’s a bad idea!” I started to hope they’d just give it up. Like, if you’re that sure that the relationship is all wrong for you, then call it quits!
On page 295 (of 321), it says “For the millionth time, Eric shut all of his thoughts and feelings about Kyle into a box and locked it.” I’m reading it going “yeah! And I feel like I’ve heard about it all million times! Just fucking break up all the way already, if you’re going to keep doing this!” and that should absolutely not be how I feel about the main couple in a romance! I don’t usually mind (and even sometimes enjoy!) the “I want to, but I can’t! Woe is me!” emotional beats, but this drew it out for far too long, with far too little true reason behind it.

The other part that I had the worst time with was that it sometimes felt like the characters were reacting to scenes that never happened. This was especially egregious at the start, but it set the tone for the whole book to me. Early on (somewhere around the 40-45 page range), Eric thinks about how Kyle had obviously and firmly rejected him at their first meeting. Around this same time, Kyle is thinking about how Eric is obviously one of those shitty married guys who wants a gay fling on the side… but neither of those reactions felt set up by that first, casual meeting at the bar. Kyle had noticed Eric’s wedding ring, but didn’t have the same sort of vitriol about it, and instead just figured that meant that Eric wasn’t interested. There wasn’t really a “rejection,” certainly not a firm one, because there was never an overture to reject; they chatted, and both privately thought the other was attractive, and then they parted ways.
I have zero proof of this, but to me it feels like the first scene where Eric and Kyle meet each other got rewritten at some point, or some parts got reshuffled, and some of those later bits are still “reacting” to the original version. That might not be the case, but that’s how it felt. It was whiplash to have Eric say on page 36 that he plans to flirt with Kyle the next time he sees him, seeming excited by the idea, to saying on page 40 (after a chapter break, but no significant time skip) that he thinks it’s a bad idea to go back to the bar at all when Scott invites him to, because Kyle had rejected him.

I am given to understand that the next two books are better again, so looking forward to those, but yeah… this one felt like a backslide in quality, or like it was an idea that hadn’t quite baked all the way.

(I really like the cover for this one.)
Inkpot Gods by Seanan McGuire
Book 4 of Alchemical Journeys
2026
Urban fantasy - m/f and f/f - physical novel
4.5/5

In 1870s Boston, alchemist John Baker adopts a niece he’d never known. The girl wants to please her uncle, and becomes his assistant in his alchemical workings. Eventually naming herself “Asphodel,” she wants to become an alchemist in her own right… but the North American Alchemical Congress will never allow a woman to attain that status. She will do more than prove them wrong; she will find ways to punish them for it.
In the modern day, Lilianne, a self-taught alchemist, comes to Berkeley, in search of the lab she knows the Alchemical Congress abandoned. She meets Smita, and through her, Rodger, Dodger, and the rest of the cuckoos, constructs, and incarnates with connections to the alchemical world. Most of them have plenty of reasons to distrust and dislike alchemists, but they know the lab could be dangerous and needs to be dealt with. They take Lily with to investigate. The lab is supposed to be abandoned, but something has been left behind, and that something may have designs of its own.

My thoughts, some spoilers:

I really liked this one! The series as a whole has felt a bit mixed (I generally like it but don’t love it, but this was one of the entries I’ve enjoyed the most.)

The good:
The dual timelines were good. Again, I really enjoyed both time periods that we were following, so while sometimes I did want to get back to what happened with one group, I was never disappointed when we switched to the other.

I love getting to see Asphodel. She’s been such an important figure, lurking in the background of the series, and with such a complicated legacy. And she’s terrible! Just the fucking worst! Yet at the same time, I sympathize. She did get a raw deal, she did have to fight for what she deserved… But she’s terrible!
I do love seeing her at full murdering-for-personal-gain horribleness, and letting that give really interesting context to that current legacy that she’s left. It makes the cuckoos and the brutality of so much in alchemy make more sense. It also is such a good contrast to the fact that she’s most publicly known as a beloved children’s book author.
Along with that… I enjoyed the sort of rug pull with Deborah. (Which may have just been me.) Knowing that Asphodel would eventually go by “A. Deborah Baker” makes Deborah’s introduction interesting. Like “oh, so is this person going to be important to her? That she’d later adopt her name?” Woof. I mean… she was important. But Not As I Expected.

Lilianne is a trans woman, and I love getting trans protagonists in anything, but particularly in a story that isn’t overtly About Being Trans. It’s still extremely relevant to her character: alchemy allowing for a lot of very literal reinvention and alteration and influence over reality would of course appeal! But I appreciate that she’s just getting to be the protagonist of this story.

The bad:
…how many times am I allowed to gripe about typos? I will never stop griping until they stop being such a problem. There’s one on the first page of the first chapter where a character’s name is wrong! And because of the way it’s wrong, it’s sort of an immediate spoiler! (Only spoiling a familial relation that would be revealed fairly quickly, but still!) Can some of these major publishers please fucking invest in some damn copyeditors??

I really don’t have much ‘bad’ to say about this book!

It does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the next book slated to be the last. I don’t know if it has an official date yet, but at a guess I’d say 2028. (I’d be happy if it was 2027, but I’m not counting on that.)

This does also make me more excited to read the Up and Under books (four novellas published “as” A. Deborah Baker; the children’s books that she’s canonically the author of.) Those will be coming up before too long in my TBR. I sort of wonder how reading them now will feel (having learned more directly about Asphodel) as opposed to how it would have felt reading them earlier on.

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Bonus novelette/short story


(I think a good illustration of the space station that they're visiting.)
“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells
A Murderbot Diaries novelette, set after Artificial Condition
2025
Science fiction - online novelette
Published on Tor.com (now Reactormag) here.
4/5

The crew of the research transport ship Perihelion, one of the most powerful and advanced artificial intelligences ever, are heading to a station where they hope to find and study a Pre-Corporation Rim site. When they arrive, they discover the station is in the midst of a hostile takeover, and their already secretive mission has gotten significantly more dangerous. As they move through the station, Perihelion offers its assistance, as usual… but it seems to have gotten a lot of interesting new ideas and strategies regarding surveillance and how to manipulate security systems. Iris, one of the crew members, is quite interested in where ‘Peri’ may have gotten these new ideas.

My thoughts:

(I am reading The Murderbot Diaries in chronological order this time, rather than publishing order, so despite this being one of the more recent pieces, I read it now.)

This is a really fun story! I was excited about it when it came out last year, but never got around to reading it, in part because I felt like it had been too long since I’d read other parts of the series, particularly Artificial Condition, which it’s set after. I probably did not need to wait for the reread, but I did like getting it in the chronological context. That said, there are a lot of characters mentioned as parts of ART’s/Perihelion’s crew, and recognizing them from later books was helpful. I do think that it would have been an okay introduction to those characters, but I can’t say for sure.
I loved seeing ART’s interest in security systems and surveillance drones and such, because it’s absolutely obvious where it learned about those and how to use them. (And how to do so “creatively.”)
It’s also nice to see ART spending time with its crew. We know from the series how much it values and cares for them, and I like getting to see them doing things in the course of their normal lives and activities. We get to see them through Murderbot’s perspective later, but getting a bit of a sense of the baseline is good.

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Reading goals for 2026:
- Read 50 books (38/50)
- Read more genre classics (Tolkien, Le Guin, Pratchett) (5/x)
- Re/read the Murderbot Diaries (3/8)
- Read the 2025 Pride ebook bundle (7/14)
- Read some short story collections (2/x)

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It took me a while to get caught up on June’s reviews, so I’ve so far read two more books:
- Butterfly Effects by Seanan McGuire, a co-read with Taylor
- The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

I am currently reading four books:
- Exit Strategy by Martha Wells, the next Murderbot book (which I may finish today)
- The Fever King by Victoria Lee, my ebook side-read
- Diavola by Jennifer Thorne, my co-read with Alex
- A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher (again), my co-read with Taylor

My plans for what to read next:
- Luminescent Machinations a short story collection, one of the Pride ebooks
- Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells, continuing Murderbot, reading in chronological rather than release order
- The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
- Network Effect by Martha Wells, more Murderbot
- The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin, the next Earthsea book
- System Collapse by Martha Wells, more Murderbot
- Fair’s Point by Melissa Scott, another from the Pride ebooks
- For my ebook side-read, I’ll probably read the next Game Changers book, and then either another non-romance ebook or another short story collection

My TBR has somehow hit 855 books.
A chunk of those came from another humble bundle of books, which I sort of regret, because none of them were ones that were already on my wishlist. (But at the time it was more of a “ooh, stuff I’ve never heard of, but was well-received! This is good for expanding my reading horizons!” But with this much on the list, I probably don’t need to worry about that so much.)
Now I’m resisting the Tannith Lee bundle they currently have, because I do want to read more of her work, and only one of the books in the bundle is one I already have. I will probably give in and explode the TBR even further.

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Bonus book-related thoughts that don’t quite deserve their own posts…

Now that we’re (more than) halfway through the year, I’m at the point that I was going to “allow” myself to reorganize my TBR if I wanted to. (In order to quell the temptation to constantly reshuffle things, I told myself I had to stick with it for six months first.) At this point… I’m not planning a reshuffle. I still want to finish the Murderbot reread/get to read this year’s, keep reading the Earthsea books, and I’d really love to finish the Pride ebooks (which is the “stretch goal” that I most hope to hit for the year.) With those still being my main goals, I’m sticking with the plan that lets those be the main focus (with a few other things mixed in.)

However I have started to think about what I want to do for next year, even if that is getting ahead of myself a little. I’ve been pretty happy with my reading this year so far, so I will probably do roughly the same thing, alternating between the classics I’ve wanted to read, individual books/trilogies/etc. on the TBR, and things that I did get from bundles and such. I’ll also still have my ebook side-reads, probably still also alternating between indie romance stuff, the fairly random non-romance ones I’ve picked up via FirstReads or elsewise on kindle, and short story collections.
While that’s the overall plan, I also do need to actually organize and prioritize the list. (I prefer actually having a list, so I always know what I’ll be reading next, rather than allowing decision paralysis to keep me from picking up a new book for days or weeks.) Prioritizing is tricky for me, because I have a lot that I really want to read and am looking forward to. I could read JUST things in that category for a couple years, probably! However, I’ve really enjoyed the bundles of books that have included books I probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, so I do want to still allow myself to be surprised by the sorts of things I wouldn’t have personally put at the top of the list. (It has meant I read stuff I didn’t like, too. But I think bad books or fine books that aren’t for me are also a good part of my book diet.) The TBR does also include quite a lot of rereads, and I’m still hoping to actually get to some of them, too!
So we’ll see.

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A while ago, I posted about the sort of conflicted feelings I have surrounding books that I own copies of, but that are no longer available for sale. (Though I think I’ve come down on the side of treating them no differently than the other things on my TBR.) I’d mentioned the sort of worry that it awoke for me about things on my wishlist disappearing before I purchased them, and the FOMO worry about losing the chance to read something at all.
Well, two things on my wishlist have indeed since been removed. (The book cover and title still show up on my list, but no price, and the product page is now a 404.) One book, an indie novella, appears to still be available via the author’s website, so I will likely eventually buy it there. The other is part of an anthology series (not short story anthologies, but stand-alone novels written by different authors) that was tradpub.
The publisher is still around, and there are at least two upcoming entries in that same series that they’re actively advertising. The book is listed on their website, but hard copies are sold out, and all the ebook links lead to 404s. There’s a bsky post about the cover for one of the upcoming entries in the series, that mentions the new look for the series, so I’m hopeful the book I’m interested in will be available again, and is just getting a new cover or something… but I’m frustrated that the ebooks were taken down. (True of other books in the series, too.) I couldn’t find any mention of the earlier entries being taken down or being reworked or anything, so it’s also possible they’re just gone, which seems sucky for a series that you’re still publishing and promoting.
So… I guess a couple more data points regarding books disappearing.