Catchy Name Needed

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)

The last Expanse book* came out last week, and I had pre-ordered it so I already have it, but I haven't started it yet. I decided I need to read the two books before it first.

(*so the authors say, apparently they have a contract to do some new series after this!)

For those of you who don't read these, this new book is the ninth book in the series, and they fall loosely into three trilogies. (Or, I don't know, book 4 always feels sort of like a semi-standalone to me, but 1-3 definitely more or less go together and so do 5 and 6.) I re-read the earlier ones this year already (1-6, that is) but I decided to stop there and wait until closer to time for the new one. I got through #7 a few days ago - that one's called Persepolis Rising - and I'm still in the early part of book 8 - Tiamat's Wrath. I don't really know why I feel like I must read the new one the minute it comes out, anyway, but I keep feeling like I'm "late" - it's silly, really. Besides, I actually had pre-orders for two books that came out that same day, it turned out, and I did read the other one practically on the spot, because it was a romance novel and I knew it'd go fast. (Mary Balogh, Someone Perfect, if you want to know!)

At work the other day, I read a chapter or two of a book I found on Kindle Unlimited - something called The Dublin Trilogy and the first book was The Man With One of Those Faces (I may be capitalizing that all wrong, sorry). I think that's a hilarious title, and the book is pretty funny. We'll see if I manage to finish it. Actually I have a rule - which I was obviously breaking - that I'm only allowed to re-read things I've already read at work, and not read anything new, on the theory that I'm less likely to get heavily involved with something I've read before. My work involves a lot of interruptions, but we're allowed to do other stuff when it's slow. I've been re-reading Shelby Foote - The Civil War: a narrative, which is three big volumes. That seemed to be something I was less likely to get too involved with - I know how it ends, after all. I have actually gotten through the first volume and on to the second one, although actually the second one might be more dangerous at that because I'm to the point in 1863 where the big stuff is coming up - The WildernessChancellorsville** and Vicksburg and Gettysburg.

I've also been reading more hard sci-fi, which is the Foreigner series by Cherryh. I have read a bunch of those before, but it had been at least a couple of years. I'm probably only reading 1-6. This one also falls into loose trilogies, as far as I've read, but I got bored with it after the third or fourth trilogy where it quit being hard sci-fi at all, really, and became stuff about atevi politics. I think I looked on Amazon and there's something like 17 books now, and I think I just can't, unless somebody who's read them wants to make a case that they get better again at some point!

(I really bounce around between multiple genres - I like hard sci-fi and I like fairy tales and I like at least some romance - particularly Regency romances, if they're well-written. I went on a big kick of reading mysteries earlier this year and I've even read some contemporary romance, which I normally rarely do. I've read some police procedurals lately as well.)


**I just caught myself on this mistake several days late. The Wilderness and Chancellorsville were two Civil War battles that happened about a year apart, in Virginia in 1863 and 1864. I should have thought to check, really - they were fought on basically the same ground, or at least overlapping ground. The one in 1863 is called Chancellorsville (which is a town) and the one in 1864 is called The Wilderness, which was literally a wild area near Chancellorsville. (The South won the battle both times, but Hooker was in charge in 1863, and the army retreated afterwards. By 1864 Grant was in charge, and he did not retreat afterwards, but kept his troops moving forward.)

I'm trying to remember to post a little bit here & there, but I am totally sleep-deprived again and so I hope this comes out making sense. (I got like four hours of sleep yesterday.) I've already had one try at going to sleep earlier and I sat and read instead (now on Expanse book 3, which is called Abaddon's Gate, I believe? not sure of their spelling of that but I'm fairly sure that's the name. SPOILER (although fairly minor, I guess): there's a giant alien stargate (?) thing - or maybe it's not a gate, just a Ringworld - lurking around so that makes sense for the name at this point in the overarching plot.)

We have a plan for the weekend which does not include a movie for me. Rob is going to see Vice, finally (no new horror movies this week), and I will stay home and we will go out to eat on Sunday. I'm still saying the same thing I was saying a couple of weeks ago, which is that I was not amused by the Bush administration the first time around and I have no desire to re-live it. Rob has been wanting to go see Glass when it comes out next weekend, but the reviews aren't good. On the other hand, it's his birthday weekend so I may end up going anyway. Movie-wise, I'm just marking time til the things I actually want to see (like Captain Marvel) start coming out.

Also I had a mammo last week and I have to have a followup because they saw a shadow of some kind. I got phone messages about it and looked online, and I get the impression that the nurses who were trying to call me were all set to have to calm me down, and I'm like, no problem, been there done that (every few years since I turned 40, basically) and I'm not going to get excited til I'm sure there's actually a problem.

I've got books and movies to discuss, and I suspect TV is going to wander in here too if I get very far, so "entertainments" it is.

First of all, I finished Queen of Air and Darkness, and it had a satisfying ending, although it continued to be almost unbearably talky right up til the end. Another (more minor) gripe is that I think it's misnamed, because the Queen of Air and Darkness was supposed to be the character Annabel (rather than the Seelie Queen, which was what I expected), who hardly ever showed up. (The Seelie Queen was there about as much as Annabel, for what that's worth.) I kept waiting for something to happen to justify that title. Maybe the idea was that Annabel's actions in the last book (in killing a character who I won't name in case that's a spoiler for somebody!) drove this book all the way through, because a lot of this book was about the process of grieving. Anyway, I'm glad I read it, because it's closure for the series, but at this point I'm even more glad to be done with it. - I don't usually think in terms of how many stars I give things, but on a 1-5 basis I'd probably give this a 3.

Yesterday we went to see what I keep calling the "Spider-verse thing" because its name is too unwieldy to bother with, as far as I'm concerned. It was really good. Easily the best Spiderman movie I've seen, although I told Rob that that's a pretty low bar. I saw at least a couple of the Raimi ones back in the day, they were decent but not really anything special. I never saw any of the Andrew Garfield ones. I would say that the best of the ones I'd previously seen is the one from last year - Homecoming, I think? It was still messy in that way that Spider-man movies seem to be prone to, but pretty good.

In the animated one, we get an origin story for teenager Miles Morales, who eventually runs across an irradiated spider - of course - and then into a confrontation between Kingpin & Spiderman (the usual sort of Spiderman, Peter Parker a few years after his origin story, now in his 20s). Kingpin is trying to bring his wife & son back from a parallel universe, which is how the whole multiverse thing gets started. From there we eventually end up with a whole gang of Spideys - male, female, and in one case, non-human. I won't spoil you past that. It's all a lot of fun, and the animation is wonderful. (Who knew Sony had this in them?)

Before I started on the Shadowhunters re-read, what I read was the first book in the Expanse series, which is also a TV series - it's been on SyFy for several years. We used to watch SyFy a whole lot but in recent years we've drifted away from it, for no particular reason. So I didn't know anything about the series except that it existed. And lately I'd started hearing that the series was pretty good, I guess that's what got me started with this. The TV series turned up on Amazon Prime in the past few months, and I knew it was something that came from a book or book series, and my rule is usually if there's a book and a TV/movie adaptation, I'd rather read (or see) the original one first. So I went and found the book - the first one is called Leviathan Wakes. And man, it was good. So I started wanting to watch the series before I'd even finished the book. Once I got past the first big section of the book (where they're on the Canterbury) I figured that was bound to be as far as the first episode went, and so Rob and I watched the first episode and it was also really good. Anyway, if you're not familiar with this, it's, like, straight-out sci-fi, a space opera set in a not-too-terribly-distant future in which Mars is in the process of being terraformed, and the asteroid belt is being mined and some of the moons of Jupiter & Saturn are starting to be colonized. I'm not going to try to really summarize the plot, which is pretty convoluted, but it has action and a mystery, and I love it. (I love the book somewhat more than the series, but they're both good. I'm only about five episodes into the series, but it's well-done, also. At some point soon I'll probably go hunt down the second book.)

(There's another series or two I've been reading lately, but I'll come back to those later.)