63. Faith Fox, by Jane Gardam, 1996, 3/5: her most depressing novel. My favourite Gardam novels are Bilgewater then Crusoe's Daughter then The Flight of the Maidens (but Old Filth is probably her most popular work).
64. The Geographer's Map to Romance, by India Holton, 2025, fantasy romance novel (het), 3/5 A "marriage of convenience" romance novel set in a fantasy version of Victorian Britain (supposedly 1890), peopled by characters with 21st century sensibilities and international English language. The plot, such as it was, would have been enough for a much shorter story, and the magical trappings are arbitrary, but the prose is lively and full of in-jokes and meta-humour about romance and fantasy tropes which entertained me enough to read on. Warning: if you dislike "only one bed" scenes then be aware that's a running joke and Holton crams in as many examples as possible. P.S. Can confirm Much Marcle is the sort of place where a rain of frogs would seem normal.
On audiobook, I'm listening to Even Though I Knew the End, which is a low fantasy noir-inspired sapphic romance, and it's been entertaining. I'm about to hit the climax so I'm curious to see how it all wraps up.
On paper I'm reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant which is just oodles of fantasy politics and it has been SO juicy so far. May go straight to the next book in the trilogy after this, because I must know what happens next!
Yesterday I finished Aurélie Wellenstein's L'épée, la famine et la peste 1 and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I am now waiting to buy book 2 (I have too many unread books). I've started reading M. A. Bennet's Young Gothic.
Just started reading All In by Billie Jean King. It's been on my TBR for... maybe three, four years?
I have And They Were Roommates by Page Powars up next, apparently it was inspired by the ship Haikaveh from Genshin Impact, so that's fun. I'm attending an author event with them next week, hopefully I can manage to finish the book in time.
finally read volume 3 of MXTX's The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System! i enjoyed the isekai elements the most (the main pairing doesn't work very well for me). interested to see more of these characters in the last volume.
Same re. main pairing; in fact there's some elements to it that mean I hugely dislike the way the pairing was written, but I'll mention those when you've finished.
I finished reading A Study in Drowning last night - 0/10, do not recommend. I usually drop books I don't like but I was really into the first ~50% or so? and then it was all downhill from there.
I'm not sure what I'll read next. I've got a bunch of books out from the library but, according to Libby, three people are waiting for Who Deserves Your Love so I'll probably prioritize that one so I can get it done and the next person can have it. (I can't decide if I love or hate the X people are waiting feature on the Libby app.)
I wrote about it on my reading diary; the relevant post for why I didn't like it is here - but spoilers ahoy. I was really angry that the author posed an important ethical question that's even more relevant for a lot of readers now than it was when the book was published in 2023 and then completely swerved to avoid actually answering it. I felt like it was a cheap, cowardly, and ultimately cruel dodge.
I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy. I am going to read all the Grishaverse books, but I am glad I read Ninth House first. I was not as into these. Maybe once I am more into the whole world setting I'll feel differently.
I just finished Salt Magic, Skin Magic. I liked it! A few 'which POV is it right now?' problems, but the author really nailed the ending. I did not guess where things were going, but once we got there it made a lot of sense.
I am soft-DNFing Per Sanguem by Ashlyn Drewek. I do want to get back to it, but I am drowning in books and series I am trying to finish and also want to be more on top of my bookclub reads. Part of why I've put it down is that some bits read like editorial notes were left in? (I don't think they are ChatGPT prompts, tho authors putting books with their prompts hanging out has been going around.)
I am about to start the m/m hockey romance Heated Rivalry because it's becoming a TV show
I am almost done with Blood Trail, and the I can roll into the next book.
I just finished Killer Kung Pao, which was... aggressively okay. Not my favorite of the Noodle Shop Mysteries, but I like what the author tried, even if it didn't really pan out.
Not sure what I'll move on to next, nothing in my TBR really strikes my fancy. Currently debating either Mistborn (Never read Brandon Sanderson before), The City of Brass (I loved S.A. Chakraborty's other book so could be good), or The Children's Blizzard (nonfiction about a severe blizzard in the Dakotas during 1888).
I think both the Mistborn series and the Daevabad series (City of Brass) are excellent and loved both. While I like Sanderson overall, he does have some series that I much prefer over others and the Mistborn is one that I love. I'm hoping to do a re-read/re-listen to the series shortly as it's been a while since I read the earlier books so that I can get to books 6 & 7 which I haven't read yet.
On the fiction side, I'm between books: I finished The First Circle a couple of days ago, and I'm letting it sit for a bit before I start anything else. I recommend it, if you have any tolerance for chunky Russian novels with cast lists three pages long. (For what it's worth, I got through it in less than a twentieth of the time it took me to slog through War and Peace.) A lot of it's quite grim, but part of what it's about is the value of human connections and unexpected kindnesses in dark times. It's the kind of book where the resolution to one character's arc is "None of my problems have actually gone away, and I still have an impossible choice to make tomorrow, but today I've made a friend I can talk it over with, and that's a lot more than I had yesterday."
On the non-fiction side, I'm still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. I'm up to the section on ecological calamities now, and the latest reminder of the book's age is how positively it talks about DDT.
I'm making slow progress at the moment - I'm still reading the Murderbot Diaries vol 2 - so I've finished Exit Strategy and am on to Rogue Protocol within that. Enjoying it but not getting a lot of opportunity to read while still being energised enough to make it through more than a few pages.
I've had a couple of DNFs this week in audio 'Into the River' and 'Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain', so I've moved onto 'The Shadow of What Was Lost' but I'm just not quite in the right mood for it. I'm actually thinking a bit of a break and listening to music instead for a week might be of more benefit than persisting with the audio book problem - maybe a break will allow me to reset and focus again more positively.
About a quarter of the way through Nell Zink's Doxology, which I've been eyeing for a while but finally decided to try. I've read one or two of her other books and don't remember anything about them, but this one has been pretty engaging. There's something about the narrative voice and the characters I find a little off-putting, but the book is stuffed with Gen X subcultural references and that's kind of fun.
Just cracked into Elizabeth Knox's The Absolute Book. I'm not very far in yet, but it's an interesting start. I was really missing the sensation of pages in my hand :)
Continuing with the vintage SF trend from last week I read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. I'd seen the movie, so I knew the book held sexual assault and violence. DO NOT READ this book if that is going to be unsettling or triggering for you. But the book is extremely well written, the youth nadsat culture and language are really well developed and the exploration of free will vs. mind control never seemed more relevant than it does today.
I had no idea that someone was writing new Hercule Poirot novels until I picked up The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah at the library. I enjoyed it a lot.
Finally finished James Baldwin's Another Country, I savored it for a whole month even though I wanted to devour it much more quickly. I think I'm going to need some nonfiction now, it is a truly spectacular novel and I'm sure to compare anything to it unfairly. And I need to spread out the rest of the Baldwin books I have yet to read, I need em to last me.
I'm currently reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I'm not sure just what I imagined the "first dystopian science fiction novel" to look like, but it wasn't this.
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booknook2025-06-11 10:04 pm
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63. Faith Fox, by Jane Gardam, 1996, 3/5: her most depressing novel. My favourite Gardam novels are Bilgewater then Crusoe's Daughter then The Flight of the Maidens (but Old Filth is probably her most popular work).
64. The Geographer's Map to Romance, by India Holton, 2025, fantasy romance novel (het), 3/5
A "marriage of convenience" romance novel set in a fantasy version of Victorian Britain (supposedly 1890), peopled by characters with 21st century sensibilities and international English language. The plot, such as it was, would have been enough for a much shorter story, and the magical trappings are arbitrary, but the prose is lively and full of in-jokes and meta-humour about romance and fantasy tropes which entertained me enough to read on. Warning: if you dislike "only one bed" scenes then be aware that's a running joke and Holton crams in as many examples as possible. P.S. Can confirm Much Marcle is the sort of place where a rain of frogs would seem normal.
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On paper I'm reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant which is just oodles of fantasy politics and it has been SO juicy so far. May go straight to the next book in the trilogy after this, because I must know what happens next!
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I have And They Were Roommates by Page Powars up next, apparently it was inspired by the ship Haikaveh from Genshin Impact, so that's fun. I'm attending an author event with them next week, hopefully I can manage to finish the book in time.
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I'm not sure what I'll read next. I've got a bunch of books out from the library but, according to Libby, three people are waiting for Who Deserves Your Love so I'll probably prioritize that one so I can get it done and the next person can have it. (I can't decide if I love or hate the X people are waiting feature on the Libby app.)
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I just finished Salt Magic, Skin Magic. I liked it! A few 'which POV is it right now?' problems, but the author really nailed the ending. I did not guess where things were going, but once we got there it made a lot of sense.
I am soft-DNFing Per Sanguem by Ashlyn Drewek. I do want to get back to it, but I am drowning in books and series I am trying to finish and also want to be more on top of my bookclub reads. Part of why I've put it down is that some bits read like editorial notes were left in? (I don't think they are ChatGPT prompts, tho authors putting books with their prompts hanging out has been going around.)
I am about to start the m/m hockey romance Heated Rivalry because it's becoming a TV show
I am almost done with Blood Trail, and the I can roll into the next book.
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Not sure what I'll move on to next, nothing in my TBR really strikes my fancy. Currently debating either Mistborn (Never read Brandon Sanderson before), The City of Brass (I loved S.A. Chakraborty's other book so could be good), or The Children's Blizzard (nonfiction about a severe blizzard in the Dakotas during 1888).
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On the non-fiction side, I'm still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. I'm up to the section on ecological calamities now, and the latest reminder of the book's age is how positively it talks about DDT.
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I've had a couple of DNFs this week in audio 'Into the River' and 'Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain', so I've moved onto 'The Shadow of What Was Lost' but I'm just not quite in the right mood for it. I'm actually thinking a bit of a break and listening to music instead for a week might be of more benefit than persisting with the audio book problem - maybe a break will allow me to reset and focus again more positively.
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But the book is extremely well written, the youth nadsat culture and language are really well developed and the exploration of free will vs. mind control never seemed more relevant than it does today.
I had no idea that someone was writing new Hercule Poirot novels until I picked up The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah at the library. I enjoyed it a lot.
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