In Short: December

December means properly cold weather, finally, and unfortunately cold weather + fibromyalgia don’t mix all that well. Thank the gods for good books!

Read

16 books read this month – two more than November! Although two of this month’s books were novellas, which always helps.

I’m coming to the much-belated realisation that actually, I quite like horror! Sometimes. I’ve called myself a horror-wimp for a long time, but I’m starting to think that actually, what I used to consider horror is at the pretty extreme end of the spectrum – a lot of what others call horror = stuff I can very much handle and really enjoy. The Liar of Red Valley and The Death of Jane Lawrence, for instance, are both two of my favourite reads of the year, and both are classed as horror novels.

Excluding rereads, Trouble the Saints and Winterglass completely blew me away, although I have complicated feelings about the latter, because of the author’s appalling behaviour in the past. I’ve been trying to work on a post about wtf to do when the writer of something you love turns out to be terrible, but it’s not going anywhere because I don’t have an answer, obviously. And I find it kind of ironic or darkly funny that I’m thinking about this in terms of a not-very-well-known SFF author, when it’s the author of a particular magic school series that has the larger world conflicted at the moment. (I’m not conflicted about her, but then, her books have never meant as much to me as they have to many others, so.)

Regardless, Trouble the Saints is excellent and I’m mad it took me so long to read it!

I’m not doing author stats this month while I take a while to re-examine how I’ve been doing it, and whether I want to keep doing it. At minimum, I’m not going to be dissecting what I read by the gender of whoever wrote it anymore – 10 years of reading stats have made it clear I read mostly cis women, then nonbinary authors, with cis men coming in last, and I just hate the creepy, stalkery feeling of scrutinising author profiles to see if they’re nonbinary or not. It’s not my freaking business.

Whereas I think I do need to try and keep track of how many BIPOC authors I read, because I read almost entirely white authors, and that’s just not great.

Reviewed

Six reviews this month! Without counting the five mini-reviews I wrote of my DNF-ed reads, because they really were too mini to consider reviews. But I’m very happy, and EXTRA delighted that I FINALLY reviewed The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry, which I read at the very start of the year! And re-read this month, in the hopes of finally figuring out how to put my love of it into words. I don’t think it was a very worthy review, but I’m glad I managed something.

DNF-ed

Looooooooots of DNFs this month. I was especially disappointed by Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, whose writing style was incredibly simplistic and childish, imo. Maybe that was just a side-effect of it being translated? And I wrote about the rest in my DNF post, which went live yesterday, so I’m not going to bad-mouth them again here.

ARCs Received[image error]

Another wonderful month for ARCs!!! I’m probably most exited for Kathe Koja’s Dark Factory, Second Spear by Kerstin Hall (the sequel to her novella The Border Keeper, which I loved beyond the capacity of words to express) and of course, Last Exit by Max Gladstone. I’ve already managed to review The Magic Between, which I loved, and All the Horses of Iceland, which I didn’t (but didn’t hate either!)

Pennyblade and Kaiykeyi are both debuts, from authors I am completely unfamiliar with – I don’t follow them on social media, nothing. But I’m very interested by both books, so we’ll see how they do!

ARCs Outstanding [image error]

I’m pleased that I’ve been able to keep my Outstanding ARCs at eight for a while now. I do want to try and whittle this number down, though! Maybe by the end of January I can have it down to six… Not gonna bet on it, though!

Rec Lists & Misc

I posted my Best Fantasy and Sci-Fi Books of 2021 list! I’ve been working on it since October, and spent way too long agonising over how many books to include, and when to post it.

I also managed to get up my Unmissable Fantasy & SciFi of 2022 done and posted! I’m damn proud of it – I dug deep to find a bunch of under-the-radar reads to feature alongside the bigger names, and I’m sure everyone who checks it out will find at least one book they haven’t heard of on it. (Whether that one is a book that catches their interest…well, I can only hope!)

Looking Forward

January is packed full of books I’m excited for, not least of which is the latest installment in the Wayward Children series (we’re finally going to see the Other School!!!) and new books from Ana Mardoll, Kate Elliott AND Alexis Hall!

2021 comes to an end, and 2022 begins. It’s been a long year that passed by in a blink – may the new year be kinder to all of us!

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