Hi and welcome to December everyone! However you’re spending the final month of this year, I hope you find peace and comfort. Without much additional ado, here’s my penultimate month of 2020 wrap-up.
My November goal was a seemingly average (for me) 5 books. I’m pleased that I managed to read 4 of those 5 I set out to read, with 1 bonus book from my at-times overwhelming backlog of ARCs.
I had decided that on Election Day I would pick a wonderfully warm, happily-ever-after romance to binge read that day, so I read The Duke Who Didn’t by the ever-amazing Courtney Milan. I don’t read too widely within the romance genre, but Courtney Milan is one of the authors I do very much enjoy, and The Duke Who Didn’t is a perfect infusion of incorporating common tropes and turning them just a little bit sideways to be something lovely and playful (I was laughing out loud at the “just one bed” twist). The Author’s Note, too, is not something to be skipped. The detail, research, and clear personal connection and care that went into this book and into historically accurate representation in regency romance somehow makes this stand out even more than it already did.
About four years ago, at this time of year, I read an ARC of The Bear and the Nightingale, and then read the rest of the Winternight Trilogy as they came out each following winter. After seeing someone hosting a Winternight Trilogy read-along, I decided to re-read the series that I remember quite fondly. Re-reading, though, I found I may have been looking back with rose-colored glasses, and parts that I found actually unsettling (the way the priest looks at and internally narrates about the barely-a-teenager Vasya) I had completely forgotten. Looking back at what I originally wrote about the book, too, made me realize I didn’t quite enjoy this as much as I thought I did. I’m still planning to keep up the re-read, and we’ll see how The Girl in the Tower stands up next month.
In my continuing quest to read past ARCs (and to alleviate a bit of that guilt), I read How To Stop Time by Matt Haig. In a quick review on Goodreads, I described it as a pleasant, light sort of read, with small ruminations on love, fear, memory, and, of course, the passage of time. Haig takes the premise of a kind of near immortality to deftly explore how our perceptions of fear and time intertwine in our lives and our relationships.
A local university hosted Claudia Rankine for a virtual event last month. And while I unfortunately missed the event, I still read Citizen: An American Lyric. This is one of those books that is art, and I wind up feeling like I often do with art, that I both get it and don’t get it at the same time. There are parts, too, I cannot “get” and never will – the daily lived experience of microaggressions; the call into question of my being, my identity, my selfness. But I can read Rankine’s lyrical, poetic, evocative words, see the visual art interspersed, and I could hear the ocean waves.
And finally, I read Persephone Station by Stina Leicht, which will be published January 5 from Saga Press. I’ll have a full review when it’s published, but I’ll say this much for now. Persephone Station is somehow dense and fast-paced at the same time. Reading it felt like bingeing an entire season of a hard SF TV show that’s (bonus) entirely and exclusively cast with female or nonbinary characters without gimmick but (minus) leaves more complex themes unexamined.
Looking towards December…
December Reading Goals
- Song of Blood & Stone by L. Penelope
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab (trying again this month!)
- The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden (continuing the re-read)
- The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C. M. Waggoner (expected publication Jan 12, 2021)
- On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu ( expected publication February 2nd 2021
Bookish Brianna 