Books 2022

Dec. 28th, 2022 04:07 am
mellicious: "I think the subtext here is rapidly becoming text." (subtext Buffy quote)
I just finished reading The Dictionary of Lost Words today, which I started, I swear it was like six months ago, and I kept putting it down and then picking it up again later. So I'm pleased to have finally finished, even if it gave me a huge headache because I cried a lot. (Spoilers! I probably cried when Esme gave the baby up, but I'm not sure because that's where I stopped the last time. But I cried basically all the way through the war years and right up to the end, I think.)

(That reminds me that my sister has yet to get accustomed to the way I cry during movies. I think I'm going to have to say, "Look, it's just what I do, so ignore it, please," because her making a big deal about it is even more annoying to me than the crying itself, which I'm accustomed to because I just have no control over it.)

I also read another Miss Marple book, which was A Murder is Announced. I don't have the one that's next in publication order, but I have some other ones I haven't read so I may quit worrying about reading them in order. They've all basically been standalones anyway - you don't really have to worry much about continuity between books, it seems. That may be partly because she wrote them so far apart - the first novel came out about 1930 and the one I just read, which is the fourth novel, came out in 1950. (I could tell it was postwar because they were talking about ration cards etc. - I'm old enough to remember how my older relatives used to talk endlessly about that stuff! But the two books before that basically just ignored the war even though I think they were actually written during the war years.)

I looked at the list of new (that is, new-to-me) books I've read this year and I'm at 59. Last year I think I read a few more than that but I was reading a lot of series mysteries and those tend to be short. Honestly I feel like I've been reading less, but I suspect I'm not, especially. And the list of re-reads is even longer.

mellicious: "I think the subtext here is rapidly becoming text." (subtext Buffy quote)
I seem to be a bit obsessed with Miss Marple now. Well, I haven't even made much of a dent in the novels yet - there are nine more, so I'll have much more to obsess about.

When last heard from I was re-reading the first three books, and I've finished that now. The three that I read all seem quite different. In the third one Miss M doesn't even turn up until way at the end. In the first and second ones she's around all the time, but often just in the background.

The first and third books are first person. In The Murder at the Vicarage it's the vicar who tells the story - he's Miss Marple's next-door neighbor so she has a bird's eye view of things. In the other two she gets called in by somebody who knows her, and I'm sort of assuming that's how it's going to continue to be since the odds are that murders won't keep happening right next door (no matter what various TV mysteries may tell you). The second book is The Body in the Library and it's told in third person, although occasionally it sort of zooms in and tells you how a certain character feel
s about things. In The Moving Finger, book 3, it's told from the POV of a young man who has been sent to the country to convalesce - is that the right word? - after an accident. This is the one where Miss M doesn't turn up until late, like three-quarters in.

(When I saw the name The Body in the Library I went, aha! that's where that phrase comes from! - but there's a foreword where Christie says it was already a familiar phrase to her from previous mysteries she had read.)

mellicious: blinky holiday lights (holiday lights gif)
So, Warnock got reelected - whew. The idea of That Man (i.e., his opponent the football player) being in the Senate just made me shudder. (Plenty of football players are perfectly nice people. It's the part where some people presumably voted for him because of that - and despite his other issues - that bothers me.)


I haven't talked about reading yet, and I'm certainly capable of running on about that at some length. For now I'll just say that I have been reading Miss Marple, which I had never read before - I had read some Christie years ago but that was mostly the Poirot books. I guess I wasn't interested in reading about old people when I was young myself, but that's no longer the case and I'm enjoying Miss Marple. I read the first book a while back - that's The Murder at the Vicarage and I liked it but I had this sense I was missing something. I went on and read the second and third books, but what I finally figured out is that there are a bunch of short stories that were written first, which I guess accounts for my feeling that I was expected to know some of the characters ahead of time! And so I've gone back and I'm reading those, now.

(I don't know that Poirot is supposed to be all that young, either, but Miss Marple was always portrayed as a slightly-batty old lady, at least until Murder, She Wrote made her into a sort of icon. Now that I've read (some of) the books I see that that's just supposed to be people making assumptions.)




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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