Dec. 31st, 2021

mellicious: Happy New Year! (new year gif)
We went to see Licorice Pizza (me and Rob and my sister and her husband, too) and I honestly don't quite know what to make of it. It was interesting but I didn't love it. My sister thought dating a 15-year-old boy made you a pedophile, and while I don't feel like that's quite true, for a 25-year-old girl to date a 15-year-old boy is pretty damn weird. (And presumably illegal, these days. I guess it wasn't, back then?) Anyway, it's a coming-of-age movie set in the 70s, in case you don't know this part already, and it's well-made - it's Paul Thomas Anderson, of course it is - and the boy is Phillip Seymour Hoffman's son (who was apparently 17 at the time they filmed this) and the girl is Alana Haim, the musician. The rest of the Haim sisters are in it too, playing (guess!) her sisters, and her parents are played by their actual parents. I guess that makes casting easier! The first half of it just rambles and the second half has a bit more plot but it's still hard to figure out where it's meant to be going. I read that Anderson based it at least partly on some stories he'd been told by a guy who had been a child actor (as Hoffman's character is), so maybe it rambles because that's what real life does, I don't know. My brother-in-law hated it so he's going to be pissed if it wins all the Oscars, which they seem to think it might.

(Meanwhile, we're going to go see the Spiderman movie again this weekend.)

I had kind of a trying time at work this week, most everybody is off and our cranky computer system went down again, and every time that happens, our IT department and the vendor that makes the software have difficulty talking to each other - and so this week when everybody is understaffed in the first place it's even worse. I'll be surprised if it gets fixed before Monday. Plus we're on covid protocols again and that made everything a little more difficult - not with the vendor, but with everybody else! But I'm done for the week so it's all somebody else's problem.

Oh, that book I was reading (or not-reading, actually) before, called In a Holidaze, turned out to be a Groundhog Day thing, which didn't really grab me at first, either, but I kept going this time and it was actually pretty good. I won't tell you spoilers other than that, though.

mellicious: Happy New Year! (new year gif)
Happy New Year, y'all. 2021 wasn't a bad year for me personally, but it was a pretty bad year for the world in general, wasn't it? Insurrections, climate change, ugh. So let's hope 2022 is going to be an improvement. (I'm not really holding my breath for that, I'm afraid.)

If I get around to it in time, I'll do a movie wrap-up tomorrow. (I'll probably put it up even if I don't manage to do it in time to post it on Holidailies. The last couple of years I have been posting periodically about movies here even if I don't post about anything else.)

Assuming I don't finish any more books before midnight, the list of new novels I've read this year is going to end at 69. (This is not meant to be a fiction-only list, but apparently the only non-fiction books I finished were a handful of Civil War books that I had already read some years ago. Nothing new.) I highlighted a few things that stood out to me, some of which were actually new books (Winterkeep, Leviathan Falls) and some of which were not new this year but I hadn't gotten around to reading before (News of the World, Lock In).

As far as series go, I really enjoyed the "Lady Julia" series, which are period mysteries, and the "Lily Bard" series, which is categorized as a "dark cozy" mystery series, as I understand it (written by Charlaine Harris, who also wrote the "True Blood" series). I probably read more mysteries this year than I've read in some years, or possibly ever - I can't be sure about that since I only recently started keeping lists of my reading again.

(I really think it's kind of absurd to even post my list at all, but I posted it once before so I figured I would update. I don't ever keep up on Goodreads so this is the only place it's online.) (And I don't consider it a competition. I don't work full-time so I have a lot more reading time than most people.)

I don't particularly set any goals for myself about reading, normally. I read plenty already, I don't have to encourage myself to do that, in general. Left to myself I re-read an awful lot, so that's why I have started keeping up with how much new stuff I read. I did set a goal for myself last year to read 18 books that were new to me, and I passed that ages ago. The only goal I have set myself for the future is to keep reading at least a couple of new things a month. And I made a "to-read" list - it started with an idea I'd seen to do "22 books to read in '22" but I hit 22 and kept going - I have an whole lot of unread books on my Kindle, so I guess you'd have to say getting through some of that list is also a goal.



New-to-me reading in 2021
  1. Winterkeep (Graceling Realms #4)
  2. Star Wars Aftermath
  3. Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia #1)
  4. A Court of Thorns and Roses
  5. Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
  6. Flying Too High (Miss Fisher #2)
  7. Silent in the Sanctuary (Lady Julia #2)
  8. Silent on the Moors (Lady Julia #3)
  9. Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden #1)
  10. Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
  11. Shakespeare's Landlord (Lily Bard #1)
  12. Murder in the Heir (Violet Carlyle #1)
  13. Kennington House Murder (Violet Carlyle #2)
  14. Shakespeare's Champion (Lily Bard #2)
  15. Murder at the Folly (Violet Carlyle #3)
  16. A Merry Little Murder (Violet Carlyle #4)
  17. Dark Road to Darjeeling (Lady Julia #4)
  18. Murder Among the Roses (Violet Carlyle #5)
  19. Shakespeare's Christmas (Lily Bard #3)
  20. Murder in the Shallows (Violet Carlyle #6)
  21. Shakespeare's Trollop (Lily Bard #4)
  22. The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric & Desdemona) (I originally had this in with the novellas, but I was mistaken)
  23. Shakespeare's Counselor (Lily Bard #5)
  24. Gin and Murder (Violet Carlyle #7)
  25. The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia #5)
  26. Night of a Thousand Stars
  27. Obsidian Murder (Violet Carlyle #8)
  28. Murder at the Ladies' Club (Violet Carlyle #9)
  29. Wedding Vows and Murder (Violet Carlyle #10)
  30. The Magic of Found Objects
  31. An Untimely Death (Anna Fairweather #1)
  32. An Unfortunate Demise (Anna Fairweather #2)
  33. What the Dead Leave Behind (A Gilded Age Mystery #1)
  34. An Uninvited Corpse (Anna Fairweather #3)
  35. An Unexpected Misfortune (Anna Fairweather #4)
  36. Shadow Hunter (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill #1)
  37. Strange Practice (Dr Greta Helsing #1)
  38. The Schoolmistress of Emerson Pass (Emerson Pass #1)
  39. An Unhappy Murder (Anna Fairweather #5)
  40. An Untidy End (Anna Fairweather #6)
  41. Lock In (Lock In #1)
  42. Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain #1)
  43. Austenland
  44. A Rogue By Any Other Name (Rule of Scoundrels)
  45. Head On (Lock In #2)
  46. When Sorrows Come (October Daye #15)
  47. A Heart So Fierce and Broken (Cursebreakers #2)
  48. Love at First
  49. News of the World
  50. Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)
  51. Vanished (McLand & Callahan #1)
  52. The Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple #1)
  53. The Other Bennet Sister
  54. If Ever I Should Love You (Spinster Heiresses #1)
  55. A King of Infinite Space (Long Beach Homicide #1)
  56. The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
  57. The Pain Scale (Long Beach Homicide #2)
  58. A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (Long Beach Homicide #3)
  59. Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales #1)
  60. Come Twilight (Long Beach Homicide #4)
  61. A Deal with the Elf King (Married to Magic #1)
  62. Bridge to Terabithia
  63. Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales #2)
  64. Someone Perfect (Westcotts)
  65. Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9)
  66. A Dance with the Fae Prince (Married to Magic #2)
  67. Sleigh Bells Ring
  68. In a Holidaze
  69. A Subtle Murder (Rose Beckingham #1)
novellas:
  • Midsummer Night (Lady Julia)
  • Silent Night (Lady Julia)
  • Twelfth Night (Lady Julia)
  • Bonfire Night (Lady Julia)
  • All Systems Red (Murderbot)
  • Knot of Shadows (Penric & Desdemona)
  • The Lord Sorcier (Regency Faerie Tales)


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