mellicious | Entries tagged with reading

I did movies I've seen, so now it's time for books. I'm not going to put the whole list here, but it says I read 41 books that were new to me, plus some novellas - 50 new-to-me things in all. Here's some of what I thought were highlights.

The first things I read in January were Luanne Rice's Last Night and Last Day, very good thrillers. (The 2nd isn't a direct sequel to the first, but they're connected, as I recall.)
The last new thing I read was Jenny Colgan's Cafe By the Sea, which I read in one day because I completely couldn't put it down. That woman's books seem to have that effect on me.
The very last book I finished in 2024 (it's currently 10pm on New Year's Eve, as I'm writing this, so I don't think I'm finishing any more) was not new to me - it was an Expanse book, Babylon's Ashes. That's the sixth book of nine in the series. I hadn't re-read them in three years, apparently, but I don't think I'm going to read the last three right now because I don't like them as much!
In all I have a list of 70-some re-reads for 2024 - I always re-read a lot. (I really don't obsess at all about the numbers because I read so much no matter what, but I do - obviously - keep lists.)
Possibly my new favorites from this year are the (indirect) sequels to The Goblin Emperor featuring the character Thara Celehar, Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones. I believe there's supposed to be one more of those coming out next year.

I also read several more books in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, and those are always very good. There are quite a few of those still left for me, I haven't read nearly all of them. I also read another book about a Sherlock-Holmes-type character by the author of the books in the preceding paragraph (the Goblin Emperor universe, I like to call it) , Katherine Addison aka Sarah Monette, in which the Sherlock character is an angel, of all things - but not at all a typical angel. I really liked that book a lot too, but trying to describe it is very weird. In fact when I tried to describe it to somebody they said "so it's fanfiction?" and apparently it did start as fanfiction but now it's an actual published book! (I assume that's possible because Sherlock Holmes is out of copyright!)

Happy 2025, everybody!

I'm off until 2025 (which sounds good but is all of, what, 10 days?) but I'm part-time so of course I don't get paid, either. I'm not complaining, though. I did tell them I'd work if they needed me to, and I did my time working weekends and holidays when I first had this job.

UT just beat Clemson, and they're going to the Peach Bowl against Arizona State. This playoff thing feels a little weird to me, but the old bowl system, where all the high-ranked teams played one bowl game each and then some guys voted on who was #1 - that was pretty weird too.

I'm re-reading the Expanse series, mostly because I was reading my old journal entries from when I was reading it before. But I checked and I haven't re-read it since 2021 - was that when the last book came out? It may have been. So it's been three years, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm almost to the end of the second book. I don't know if I'm really going to read the whole nine books right now though.

I'm not doing so great at writing daily. Maybe now that I'm home for the duration I'll do better!

I bought a book while I was at work tonight - a book about the history of bookstores in the U.S. Like I don't have enough reading material already. (However, the reason I saw this in the first place is because it was on a "Best books of 2024" list, so if you're interested: The Bookshop.) I'm sure I will read it before too long but I don't know that I'll read it right away.

I posted a list yesterday with all the books I bought in 2020, as part of a project that mostly has to do with getting rid of some of my paper journals. I wasn't keeping count, but it looked like I had read more than half of them, for sure, but that's a lot of unread books. I have a list with a lot of my unread books on it, somewhere, and I try to get myself to read from that list - and I do, some of the time.

As a matter of fact, I had some trade paperbacks of The History of the Lord of the Rings - a couple of big fat volumes of them, and they were old enough that one of them fell apart while I was reading it. (I'm guessing I'd had them since shortly after the movies came out, so probably 20 years or so!) - Are y'all familiar with this series? It's Tolkien's son Christopher doing a deep, deep dive into his dad's manuscripts. It's pretty fascinating. I actually read both of those this past summer and am almost finished with the third one - there are four in all. (Three books was not enough to cover the three volumes of LotR, apparently.) And there are more volumes for his dad's other works, too - I think it was a dozen total.

So I guess I kind of had Tolkien on the brain, and I happened to notice on Black Friday and over that weekend (which seems to have just become an extension of Black Friday, I assume I'm not the only one to notice that!) that, well, the Tolkien books were on sale. I don't think it was all of them, but it happened to be concentrated on some that I didn't have - The Children of Hurin, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Fall of Gondolin. That's what I bought. Oh, and one more volume of the History of Middle Earth (which is the full series title for the rest of those books I was talking about above). The one I got was the very last one, The Peoples of Middle-Earth. Hey, they were $1.99! (I've been happily reading about the Prologue to LotR, which for some reason is covered in that volume.)

And it's not like I had read all the Tolkien I had in the house, either. I know I have Lost Tales lurking somewhere, unread, and maybe some more. I kinda have a book-buying problem - not that that's anything new. (I'm sure a lot of y'all can sympathize.)

(But - progress in the unread department - I did finally read The Three-Body Problem this year!)

I should say if you stumble across this that I have a new project: I'm putting my old paper reading journals online. (It's actually intended to be in a separate journal, and now it is - here's the corresponding entry, and it's just called Mel Reads.)

This list is books I bought in 2020 (probably mostly in Kindle format, if I know it's not I'll say so). Bold means I know I've read it at some point since. Many of the others I started reading and just haven't finished! Also I didn't start keeping the reading journal until the middle of the year, so I have no idea if the first half of 2020 is here or not! (It may be that I had been keeping a paper list and I just copied that over, but I don't remember for sure.)

The Physicians of Vilnoc (Penric & Desdemona)
In Their Own Worlds (stories)
Last of the Moon Girls (a freebie - First Reads, something like that)
White Out (First Reads)
A Curse So Dark & Lonely
The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13 - paperback)
Someone to Romance (Westcott series)
Witch Is Where It All Began
Lost Horizon
Girl Waits With Gun (Kopp Sisters #1)
The Unspoken
Vanished (I think this is part of a series but I didn't write the name down)
Spindle's End (Kindle copy; I wore out my paperback)
A Killing Frost (October Daye #14?)
Throne of Glass (this is a series, right? but I never read any further)
Aftermath (paperback) (Chuck Wendig, a Star Wars book)
The Fifth Season
Ancillary Justice (another series)
Ahsoka (Star Wars - obviously!)
Lady Cop Makes Trouble (Kopp Sisters #2)
One Salt Sea (October Daye - another replacement for a paperback that was falling apart)
Masquerade at Lodi (Penric & Desdemona)
Lord of the Rings (it doesn't say but I think this was one big edition with all three books), & also The Hobbit
Touch Not the Cat (a book I had in paperback years ago)

That's the end of that list, but there's more on a separate page:
Night of a Thousand Stars (this one's a series, don't remember the overall name)
Serpent and Dove
The Assassins of Thasalon (more Penric and Des; that series is mostly novellas)
Thrawn Ascendancy
On Tyranny (pb)
The Once and Future Witches
Winterkeep (the Graceling series)
Silent in the Grave (a Lady Julia mystery)
Aftermath: Life Debt
Black Narcissus
A Court of Thorns and Roses (another series where I never read any further, although in this case - unlike Throne of Glass, which is the same author - I did actually like this book)
What the Dead Leave Behind (another mystery series but I don't remember the series name)
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
The Sookie Stackhouse Companion (hardback) and also a book of Sookie-related short stories
From Dead to Worse (pb)
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
God-Shaped Hole (some book club was reading this)
Tears of Amber (1st Reads)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
The Lily Bard series, which is 5 books, I think, which I bought over a couple of months - some in paperback & some on Kindle
The Goblin Emperor
U.S. Grant (a combined edition of Catton's Grant/Civil War books, Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command)
The City We Became
A Curious Beginning (another series which I never read any more of - this one is the same author as the "Lady Julia" books, I think)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia series)
Coraline
Lincoln's Admiral

(Possible mild spoilers, of course!)

I always feel like I should read something appropriate for the season, every year. Last year, all I think I ended up doing was re-reading The Christmas Bookshop. This year, I actually read the one Thanksgiving book I happened to have, which was Penelope In Retrograde, and which it turned out I really liked. I thought it was going to be a romance novel - I bought it a couple of years ago, I think - and I figured out at some point that it was set at Thanksgiving, which is not something you see all that much, so I decided to save it for seasonal reading. It actually was not really a romance novel - there was a romance there, but it was more like a comedic reconnecting-with-family kind of thing in the end. Much more fun than I was expecting. (I don't know if it's a nearly-senior-citizen thing or what, but I don't have much use for romance novels any more. Suddenly they bore me.)

And then it turned out that Amazon had what they called a short story (and I would call a novella, it was around 100 pages, I think) by the author of said Christmas Bookshop, Jenny Colgan. It's called The Christmas Book Hunt, and it is right up my alley: a little romance, a little family drama, a lot of poking around in bookshops looking for what turns out to be an extremely rare book. I enjoyed it, you might can tell. It's the librarian in me.

I don't know if I'm done with holiday-related reading; it's still two weeks til Christmas, after all. I have a couple more unread books that I think are actually that kind of thing - meaning holiday-themed - but I also think I've already tried reading them before and didn't get into either one. I'm probably more likely to end up re-reading some old favorites, really!

Current Music: singing "Dancing Through Life" to myself

I found a list that came from LitHub, 10 Books That Defined the 70s. I think I've seen a bunch of things like this over time, right? (Apparently LitHub did every decade starting with 1900 a few years ago. I know other places have done similar things, too. Magazines - Time magazine comes to mind - used to love to do stuff like this periodically. I say that in the past tense but I'm sure they still do.)

I turned 10 in 1970, so I was 19 in 1979 - that covers a lot of ground. I think I was in 5th grade in 1970, and I started college at UT in 1977. I was an English major for three of those years (starting in 1978), so I read some things, or at least knew of some things, because of that that I certainly wouldn't have otherwise. I'm going to go through all of the list and some of the other things listed at the bottom that presumably are sort of the runners-up.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (published in Spanish in 1967 but not published in English until 1970) - I read this a long time ago, and I need to re-read it. (Garcia Marquez won a Nobel Prize in 1982, so I'm wondering if I read it about that time. I remember hearing about it in classes but I don't think it was ever required reading.) I remembered being sort of baffled by the "magical realism" stuff, which is a bit odd since I grew up reading SF/F constantly and it's not like it was really anything new to me. This is why I say I need to re-read it.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume (1970) - it's weird, but I'm not entirely sure whether I ever read this or not. I kind of think I did but I don't remember it much if I did. (This would be consistent with having read it once & never re-reading it,, I guess.) I know I read some of Judy Blume's books. Note that there's apparently a movie coming out based on this, I think this spring.

The Joy of Sex, by Alex Comfort (1972) - I remember sneaking around with my friends to clandestinely read bits of this as a pre-teen or young teenager - at their houses, because if my parents had it they hid it extremely well. I've definitely never read the whole thing - by the time I was old enough to read it openly, it seemed dated.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) - I read this sometime in the years I lived in Austin, maybe in the early 80s. I think I may still have the paperback, but I haven't re-read it in a long time.

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (1973) - this is one of those books I tried and tried to read, and just never got interested in it enough to keep going.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig (1974) - ditto on the above, basically. I remember a (male) English professor going on about this being a neglected classic, back in the day, but I tried and couldn't ever get interested. I think I had my last try at it just a few years ago, and I got far enough to be pretty sure I wasn't going to like it. I suspect it's more of a guy thing.

All the President's Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (1974) - read it long ago, loved it, have re-read it many times. I don't know when I first read it, maybe late 70s.

Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugiosi with Curt Gentry (1974) - I don't think I read this in high school, because I think my mother would have had a fit. She let me read many "adult" books as a teen (meaning things with violence and some sex, not actual porn or anything - I usually use The Dirty Dozen as an example) but she was very religious which made her very skittery about things involving Satanism etc. I do remember talking about the Manson family in high school (actually at school, I mean - like, I remember talking about The White Album, with reference to Manson & his followers.). The miniseries apparently came out in 1976 (so did Roots, below) so that probably is why we were talking about it in school. I did read this book, multiple times, but I don't think it was until later.

Roots, by Alex Haley (1976) - I saw the miniseries and I read the book, somewhere vaguely around this time, but I'm not really sure when I first read it. It might have been around that time, '76 or '77.

The Shining, by Stephen King (1977) - I've read this, but I think it was much more recently. I've always read some of King's books (see Carrie, below) but I mostly skip the "scary" stuff in favor of The Stand, The Dark Tower, etc. I don't think I saw the movie or read the book until much later. Still, it was such a huge hit that it was impossible not to know at least a little about it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So that's the "winning" 10. I do think those do give you a good feel for the 70s, between them. But many of the ones below are the same way, and I have comments about some of them, too:

Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem (1st English translation, 1970) - I've never read this, and I know there's a movie I've never seen, also. I don't know why, because this is totally in my sci-fi-loving wheelhouse.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown (1970) - I know exactly why I've never read this - it's because I know it would totally depress me. But I should have read it anyway. (If I can get through books about the Civil War, I can get through this.)

Deliverance, by James Dickey (1970) - I know I read this, but probably not til much later. 80s, maybe?

Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion (1970) - I picked up a Didion habit after The White Album came out, so I probably read this in the 80s.

The Exorcist, by W.P. Blatty (1971) - I know my mom wouldn't let us go see the movie (I think that was about '73?) and I know I read the book, multiple times I believe. I imagine it was at least somewhat later, though.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach (1973) - I really can't believe they didn't put this in the top 10, just because this book is so, so 70s. I doubt that I read it in '73, but I bet it was in the mid-70s. It was dumb, but somehow kind of compelling.

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino (1st English translation, 1974) - this is one I know I read because I heard about it in class. I don't remember if it was actually required reading, but I know I loved it and read it several more times, at least.

Jaws, by Peter Benchley (1974) - I loved this book. I read it and I saw the movie, I don't remember exactly when. This is something my mother would have let me get by with reading, so I probably first read it in high school, anyway.

Carrie, by Stephen King (1974) - I feel like I read this in the late 70s, but I'm not sure. (Oddly, I don't think I saw the movie until much later.)

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow (1974) - Man, I loved this book. I bet it was more like around 1980 when I first read it, though.

Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice (1976) - loved this, too. I think I've said this before, but when we got married (which was in '87), Rob and I each had a copy of this - identical paperbacks. Again, I'm not sure when I first read it. I'd guess college.

The World According to Garp (1978) - I read all of John Irving's books for a long time, although I quit at some point. (I think I started thinking they were all kind of alike.) Loved this one, though, read and re-read it.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1979) - I imagine I read this pretty shortly after it came out - it was one of those books that everybody was suddenly reading.

Sophie's Choice, by William Styron (1979) - this was another one of those books. I'm pretty sure I read it fairly soon after it came out. I remember reading reviews of this, and how much they all loved it. And I did too.

Note: I think I wrote this very very late on the 24th and forgot to post it!

I read a book called The Christmas Bookshop, which is a nice story about a woman reconnecting with her family and finding romance and all that feel-good kind of stuff. I like to read something like that around Christmas time, it puts you in the mood, kind of. (I also pulled out that novella that I talked about last year called "The Best Gift" and re-read it, too, for good measure.) I have some more Christmas-themed books that are new to me but it's already after midnight here and so obviously if I get any of them read this year it's likely to be post-Christmas.

We are going to my sister's tomorrow - we went to see The Fabelmans with them today but we just met them at the theater for that. I enjoyed the movie - Rob went and read some stuff about it when we got home and he came away with the impression that most of the movie is based on the real events of Spielberg's life, at least loosely speaking.

I mentioned last week that I was reading Miss Marple. And from what I put together I think that the stories Agatha Christie first wrote about Miss M were first published in magazines ("The Royal Magazine" was where the first one was published, in 1927). Later on the first set of stories were apparently published as The Thirteen Problems, but that's no longer available on its own, that I could find. They are in Miss Marple: the complete short stories, which does put them under the header of "The Thirteen Problems" in the table of contents. (Actually, I can see the point of grouping them all in one book, because the original 13 are quite short; as a book they would seem kind of lacking.)

Anyway, so I read the original 13 stories, and then I went back and started over with the novels, and it did make a difference in how I perceived things. Not all the characters from the novels are in the stories, of course, but you get a feel for the English-village background and so forth. I thought it helped - I grew up in a small town but not anything like these tiny villages Christie describes.

I had already read the first three novels, but now I've re-read the first one and I'm going to re-read the other two before I go on to the rest. (Also, I keep waiting for Amazon to put her books on sale, but I guess they still sell well because they're still mostly priced pretty high.* She is apparently the best-selling novelist of all time - said to only be outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible!)

(I wrote down the paragraph about the publication of the short stories because I wanted to remember it myself, but I thought some of y'all might well be interested too!)

*They do turn up on those daily sale e-mails Amazon sends out from time to time, though. Oh, also watch out for another anthology which is seemingly marketed as by Christie but is actually stories in Christie style by other authors - fine if you know what you're getting, but it didn't seem super-clear to me at first, looking at the cover info! (I just looked and the one I'm talking about is called Marple : 12 New Mysteries, which would be fine if it didn't have "Agatha Christie" in huge letters on the cover. That seems deceptive to me.)

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.)

I have a new t-shirt that looks like this icon, more or less, on a black background. Since I have to work tomorrow, I'm wearing it to work. (I don't really watch football any more, except the occasional Texas game. I did watch the entire UT-Bama game, which they should have won.)

(there may possibly be some spoilers below!)

I realized I haven't posted here in ages - since May, apparently - so I did that thing I always do, I went through my planner and checked to see what movies we've seen. Rob's been to nearly as many movies without me as he has with me. (I usually check mid-week to see what's being released, and if there's nothing I want to see, then I check for a horror movie for him to see, in which case I generally just stay home and read while he's gone.) So here's the updated list. I'm pretty faithful now about putting movies into my planner, but before I got methodical about that, well, I wouldn't even know what we'd seen years ago if it wasn't for Dreamwidth and Livejournal.

Everybody should go see The Woman King, it's awesome. I think Rob would say of his horror movies, he recommends The Black Phone and (for some reason) Orphan: First Kill. Oh, and we also both really liked Nope. I wouldn't go at first and then I figured out it was more of an alien movie than a horror one - although it has its horrible moments - and I gave in. I also liked the Dr Strange movie a lot (Thor, not so much).

We've watched the hell out of Disney+, of course - Obi-Wan & now Andor, She-Hulk and so forth. I wake up and find Rob watching the weirdest things - I'm pretty sure he watched the entire run of Adam-12 over the summer. (He said it stayed pretty good right up until the very last season, when it finally started going seriously downhill.) Oh, and of course we're watching The Rings of Power - I like it but can't say I really love it, so far. It did cause me to go pull out my copy of Fellowship and start looking things up in the appendices, I admit.

(I just re-read The Golden Compass series lately and started on The Book of Dust. I'm really wanting to go subscribe to HBOMax for a while so I can watch that series. Plus apparently they have the entire Studio Ghibli output, which is a draw!)

Movies seen in a theater in 2022 (finally updated!):

The Woman King
Nope
Kiki's Delivery Service (Ghiblifest) (Rob had never seen this one, apparently)
Thor: Love & Thunder
Dr Strange & the Multiverse of Madness
The Northman
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Batman (twice)
Cyrano
Belfast
Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it)

...and Rob also saw:

Pearl (which is a ~~sequel~~ prequel to X, below)
Barbarian
Orphan: First Kill (twice)
Beast
Nope (without me, then later on with me!)
The Black Phone
The Thing (40th anniversary re-release)
Men
X
The Cursed
Scream

This started out to be a movie update, but I had so little to say about that that I went on to TV and books, too!

So far this year, Rob and I have seen these movies in a theater:

Spider-Man: No Way Home (twice since January 1st, as well as once in December)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (also one we'd seen in 2021)
Belfast

The usual January movie "desert" was especially lean pickings this year - that's mostly why we went to see Spider-Man so many times! I think there were at least two weeks where we just gave up and stayed home, which is unusual for us! At least the only new-to-us one that we saw (Belfast, that is) was quite good.

Rob has also been to see these without me:

Scream
The Cursed

(He seemed to like The Cursed considerably more than Scream, from what I gathered.)

On TV, we enjoyed The Book of Boba Fett a lot, even if it was a bit uneven. I have also watched a whole lot of Marvel, as usual (Black Widow holds up to repeat viewings much better than I would have expected), and also repeat viewings of Encanto (resulting in a semi-permanent "Bruno" earworm). Rob still watches the news a lot but I have cut back because I find it so depressing. (And he watches a ton of horror movies, mostly when I'm asleep.)

(I've come to think one of the secrets of our going-on-35-year marriage is having schedules that vary enough that each of us can do our own thing while the other one is asleep!)

I've been reading the Cinder series (I guess it's officially The Lunar Chronicles, right?) and re-reading a bunch of other things because I've kind of been in a slump where I can't seem to finish much. I think I've finished a dozen books so far this year that were new to me, but they were mostly short, very easy reading. There's another dozen or more that I started but didn't get very far into - and only a couple that I officially called as DNF. The rest I'll hopefully come back to.

Current Mood: weird

My friend nonelvis posted this on Tumblr, and hey, I can never resist these things. Plus it's nice and short!

favorite color palette: cool colors - blue/green/purple

last song: Ophelia, The Lumineers (I was listening to some of the new album yesterday, and then I drifted to the old stuff)

currently reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and taking notes. I've been in sort of a reading slump - I can't seem to settle on one thing - and apparently reading an old favorite and taking notes on it is my way out of that. (This time last year I did Lord of the Rings, so at least this isn't quite as long as that one!) -- I think one of the reasons this works is because I get to the point eventually where reading anything else starts to look incredibly good!!

last movie: on TV: Infinity War In a theater: Spiderman: NWH (yeah, I know, I'm all about the Marvel)

sweet/savory/spicy: savory I guess?

currently working on: the above note-taking project, mostly (and trying to be organized, generally, which is a really long-term project for me!)

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

Winterkeep (Graceling Realms #4)
Star Wars Aftermath
Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia #1)
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
Flying Too High (Miss Fisher #2)
Silent in the Sanctuary (Lady Julia #2)
Silent on the Moors (Lady Julia #3)
Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden #1)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
Shakespeare's Landlord (Lily Bard #1)
Murder in the Heir (Violet Carlyle #1)
Kennington House Murder (Violet Carlyle #2)
Shakespeare's Champion (Lily Bard #2)
Murder at the Folly (Violet Carlyle #3)
A Merry Little Murder (Violet Carlyle #4)
Dark Road to Darjeeling (Lady Julia #4)
Murder Among the Roses (Violet Carlyle #5)
Shakespeare's Christmas (Lily Bard #3)
Murder in the Shallows (Violet Carlyle #6)
Shakespeare's Trollop (Lily Bard #4)
The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric & Desdemona) (I originally had this in with the novellas, but I was mistaken)
Shakespeare's Counselor (Lily Bard #5)
Gin and Murder (Violet Carlyle #7)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia #5)
Night of a Thousand Stars
Obsidian Murder (Violet Carlyle #8)
Murder at the Ladies' Club (Violet Carlyle #9)
Wedding Vows and Murder (Violet Carlyle #10)
The Magic of Found Objects
An Untimely Death (Anna Fairweather #1)
An Unfortunate Demise (Anna Fairweather #2)
What the Dead Leave Behind (A Gilded Age Mystery #1)
An Uninvited Corpse (Anna Fairweather #3)
An Unexpected Misfortune (Anna Fairweather #4)
Shadow Hunter (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill #1)
Strange Practice (Dr Greta Helsing #1)
The Schoolmistress of Emerson Pass (Emerson Pass #1)
An Unhappy Murder (Anna Fairweather #5)
An Untidy End (Anna Fairweather #6)
Lock In (Lock In #1)
Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain #1)
Austenland
A Rogue By Any Other Name (Rule of Scoundrels)
Head On (Lock In #2)
When Sorrows Come (October Daye #15)
A Heart So Fierce and Broken (Cursebreakers #2)
Love at First
News of the World
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)
Vanished (McLand & Callahan #1)
The Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple #1)
The Other Bennet Sister
If Ever I Should Love You (Spinster Heiresses #1)
A King of Infinite Space (Long Beach Homicide #1)
The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
The Pain Scale (Long Beach Homicide #2)
A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (Long Beach Homicide #3)
Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales #1)
Come Twilight (Long Beach Homicide #4)
A Deal with the Elf King (Married to Magic #1)
Bridge to Terabithia
Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales #2)
Someone Perfect (Westcotts)
Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9)
A Dance with the Fae Prince (Married to Magic #2)
Sleigh Bells Ring
In a Holidaze
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)

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.

I don't know if today (Monday) is the shortest day of the year or if it's tomorrow, but it's one or the other. I happened to look out my balcony windows, which face west, right after sunset - it was allllmost completely dark by 6:00 - there was a very faint glow left around the tree-line, but not much. So maybe tomorrow the day will be just as short, but at least after that we know they'll start getting longer again!

Added: I looked it up - the actual time of the solstice is apparently about 10 in the morning (my time, which is Central), which I think means Tuesday's sunset will be ever-so-slightly later than Monday's, right?

Let's see, as far as reading: I finished Sleigh Bells Ring, which was very low-key and nothing at all like most Hallmark movies that I've seen. Whoever wrote that blurb I read maybe thought amping up the drama would sell better? Anyway, it was pretty good. And I finished the book I've been reading off & on with the Regency Christmas novellas, which was called Under the Mistletoe. (That story I liked so much about the teacher and the viscount is "The Best Gift.") I have some more Regency short novels and maybe some more story compilations on my Kindle, too, so I may try to shoehorn some more of that stuff in while I'm still in the mood for it!

Somebody at work gave us both those holiday necklaces with the big blinking lights, and I draped them on the TV and put a picture on Instagram, if you care to look. (Mostly my Instagram is full of nail polish, but I'm trying to remember to take pictures of other things!)

Oh, I almost forgot - I meant to talk about those candles I bought from an Etsy seller, which came last week and which I really like so far. I bought the one 8-oz candle and a couple of samplers with 4 2-oz. candles in tins in each set. (You can see the bigger one and one of the tins sitting in front of my TV in that picture I linked to above.) Those two both smell really good - the small one is Wizarding Christmas (which just smells sort of generically Christmas to me, but in a good way - it says pine, fir, orange, and ginger) and the bigger one is At the Lamppost (I assume that's meant as a Narnia reference) and it smells like trees. My brain keeps insisting that it smells like snowy trees. It's blue spruce and birch, the label says. Those are trees that I associate with winter, I guess - I don't think either of those grows down here, much, so that's probably why I associate them with snow.

We went to see Spider-man:NWH and despite me saying a day or two ago that I don't identify with Peter Parker, I really liked it. I'm not going to say any more about it right now, though. (Tom Holland is pretty much grown-up now, even if Peter Parker's not, quite, so that may have helped.)

I started reading that book I was talking about before, In a Holidaze, and it turns out that it starts on December 26th - so it's really a post-Christmas book -- unless it goes on until the next Christmas, or something (which is possible, I don't know.) Anyway, I decided I would be better served to read the other contemporary holiday romance I bought (Sleigh Bells Ring, I think it was) now and save that other one til later. (And I've got more of those Regency Christmas things to get through, too.)

I finally finished another book I've been reading and that's called A Dance with the Fae Prince. I liked it. I have a definite weakness for stuff about elves and fairies. It's a sequel in an indirect way to a book called A Deal with the Elf King, which I also liked, but I felt like this second one was written with more assurance, somehow. It has a pretty twisty plot and I never quite figured out where it was going until it got there - always nice. (The heroine had a mysterious mother who died long ago, and I was sure that was going to figure into it eventually, but I never quite figured out how it was going to work out until right at the end.)

I had been working on a paper list of all my books, but then I didn't keep very good track of what I sent to Goodwill lately (because we did a big cleaning/de-hoarding project this fall). While that was going on, I also read some books that were paperbacks in bad shape and those I just tore up as I went, so I wouldn't be tempted to keep them. I have a ton of books on the Kindle and I'm trying to shift even more to that, just so I won't be destashing books I really would otherwise want to keep. I have books I've bought three or four times because I threw the previous copy out, or took it to Goodwill. I like reading on the Kindle just as well as paper, or really, even better, and they don't take up any space. (I am not giving up on the paper book-list but I think a spreadsheet is also in order, so it can be re-sorted at need!)

I have several holiday romance novels/novellas, so I'm prioritizing reading those, before Christmas passes and I decide I'm out of the mood to read them. I'm very much a mood-based reader, which is one reason I usually have several things going at once. (Me, talking to myself: "No, I'm not in the mood to read that right now, what else have we got?") I have some Regency ones, and something that was recommended called In a Holidaze - I assume it's a romance although I actually know nothing about it at all. If I looked at the info when I bought it I've already forgotten what it said.

I also bought the set of novellas that goes with that Thanksgiving one that I liked - I think the overall title is Holidays with the Wongs. There's the Thanksgiving one and and one for Christmas, Chinese New Year, and something else... Valentine's Day? New Year's Eve? Again, I read the titles but that last one didn't stick.

I also bought one more $1.99 romance from Amazon - I was about to say I don't remember the title but I just found where I wrote it down - it's Sleigh Bells Ring. It was in either an Amazon Books e-mail or a Book Riot because those are the only book e-mails I get right now. (And I buy too much stuff already so I sure don't need any more!) I remember thinking that this one sounded like a Hallmark movie - the convoluted plot, the good-looking but annoying boss/new neighbor/whatever, etc.

I enjoy Hallmark movies occasionally. Lest you think I'm a sad, unromantic, Christmas-hating old lady, I will tell you that I was pretty much in tears due to a story I read yesterday involving a lonely teacher, an orphan, and a viscount, all discovering the magic of Christmas together. (Do Americans other than Regency/Bridgerton fans even know what a viscount is? much less how to pronounce it - I only know that last part from some BBC Jane Austen adaptations, I think!) Anyway, my problem with Hallmark (and y'know, all those other channels that do the same thing) is that the plots rarely make any sense whatsoever. I'm not incredibly picky about this, even, but just a little logic goes a long way with me. I suspect the main problem is that they churn these things out so fast that they don't have time to worry over little stuff like the script. So I have to space my Hallmark (/Lifetime/etc.) movie-watching out so I don't start tearing my hair out.

I'll just go back to my reading instead.

I'm past the 80% mark on Leviathan Falls, but I had to stop to look up a poem. I knew most of it, but I couldn't have told you who wrote it or whether it was a poem in itself or if it was part of something bigger.

I'm sure a lot of you will know this one, too. The quote in the book is "My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night." (There are characters trading information between brains, that's about as much as I can say about the context without getting all spoilery. Really, there is no particular context.)

Anyway, my brain came up with this: "My candle burns at both its ends/It will not last the night/But oh my [something] and oh my [something]/It gives a lovely light."

For those of you who don't know the answer to this already, it's Edna St. Vincent Millay, "First Fig" (1920), and this is the entire poem:

"My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light."

(OK, back to my book, now that my curiosity is satisfied.)

Added, an hour or two later: I finished the book. I liked it. I'll have to see if I have more to say about it after I've digested it a bit!

I've been making lists of the movies we've seen for years now, but I never tried to do books - at least, I haven't kept a list since I was in college, anyway, and that was long, long ago. From then until sometime last year, I hadn't been keeping lists of my reading at all, but then I started a reading journal. Part of that was keeping a list of what I was reading, what I finished and didn't, and out of that, what I read that is new to me, because I re-read a lot. I read so much that I really don't worry too much about numbers of books read, in general, but since I re-read so much, I decided that my goal should be to read at least two new books (new-to-me, I mean, not necessarily newly published) each month.

The full "new-to-me" list is below. It's pretty long - much more than two a month - but I got to reading a bunch of series mysteries, and some of those were very short, practically novellas. (There is a list of things that were officially called novellas, too, down at the very bottom.)

I didn't type out all the re-reading I did but here are some highlights:

Lord of the Rings - and I took a crap-ton of notes, too, which is why it took me like two months
the whole Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series
Bruce Catton's two books about Grant (Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command)
the whole October Daye series
a lot of Bujold - but only one Miles book (it was Captain Vorpatril's Alliance); other than that mostly the Five Gods stuff incl. Penric & Desdemona
The Magicians trilogy
the first trilogy of the Foreigner series
Expanse 1-7 (I'm working on 8 now)
the whole Graceling Realms series (including several re-reads of Winterkeep)
a bunch of romance novels

You have to remember - or actually, you may not know, because I don't guess I've mentioned it here! that I had knee surgery over the summer and I had three weeks at home where I had nothing much to do but read and limp around the apartment. My handwritten list of what I was reading in July and August - squeezed into the front of my reading planner - is so small it's barely legible.

Re fiction vs nonfiction: well, as I mentioned before, I've been working my way through the giant Shelby Foote trilogy, but I'm only about halfway through that and I imagine that will go on into 2022. Apparently I didn't read any long-form nonfiction at all this year that wasn't about the Civil War - or at least, if there was anything else, I didn't finish it!

New-to-me reading in 2021
(The boldface books are things that were previously on my to-read list.)

Winterkeep (Graceling Realms #4)
Star Wars Aftermath
Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia #1)
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
Flying Too High (Miss Flisher #2)
Silent in the Sanctuary (Lady Julia #2)
Silent on the Moors (Lady Julia #3)
Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden #1)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
Shakespeare's Landlord (Lily Bard #1)
Murder in the Heir (Violet Carlyle #1)
Kennington House Murder (Violet Carlyle #2)
Shakespeare's Champion (Lily Bard #2)
Murder at the Folly (Violet Carlyle #3)
A Merry Little Murder (Violet Carlyle #4)
Dark Road to Darjeeling (Lady Julia #4)
Murder Among the Roses (Violet Carlyle #5)
Shakespeare's Christmas (Lily Bard #3)
Murder in the Shallows (Violet Carlyle #6)
Shakespeare's Trollop (Lily Bard #4)
Shakespeare's Counselor (Lily Bard #5)
Gin and Murder (Violet Carlyle #7)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia #5)
Night of a Thousand Stars
Obsidian Murder (Violet Carlyle #8)
Murder at the Ladies' Club (Violet Carlyle #9)
Wedding Vows and Murder (Violet Carlyle #10)
The Magic of Found Objects
An Untimely Death (Anna Fairweather #1)
An Unfortunate Demise (Anna Fairweather #2)
What the Dead Leave Behind (A Gilded Age Mystery #1)
An Uninvited Corpse (Anna Fairweather #3)
An Unexpected Misfortune (Anna Fairweather #4)
Shadow Hunter (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill #1)
Strange Practice (Dr Greta Helsing #1)
The Schoolmistress of Emerson Pass (Emerson Pass #1)
An Unhappy Murder (Anna Fairweather #5)
An Untidy End (Anna Fairweather #6)
Lock In (Lock In #1)
Blue Midnight (Blue Mountain #1)
Austenland
A Rogue By Any Other Name (Rule of Scoundrels)
Head On (Lock In #2)
When Sorrows Come (October Daye #15)
A Heart So Fierce and Broken (Cursebreakers #2)
Love at First
News of the World
Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)
Vanished (McLand & Callahan #1)
The Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple #1)
The Other Bennet Sister
If Ever I Should Love You (Spinster Heiresses #1)
A King of Infinite Space (Long Beach Homicide #1)
The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
The Pain Scale (Long Beach Homicide #2)
A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (Long Beach Homicide #3)
Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales #1)
Come Twilight (Long Beach Homicide #4)
A Deal with the Elf King (Married to Magic #1)
Bridge to Terabithia
Ten Thousand Stitches (Regency Faerie Tales #2)
Someone Perfect (Westcotts)
The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric & Desdemona) (I originally had this in with the novellas, but apparently it's too long for that and is actually a novel!)

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 Wilderness~~Chancellorsville** 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.)

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