September & October Booklog

I was on holiday at the turn of last month, so this might be quite a long list, fortunately as I read a few of them in early September I can't really remember what I wanted to say about them.

Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay
The Paying Guests - Sarah Waters
Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living - Nick Offerman
Ask the Passengers - A.S. King
Astray - Emma Donogue
Full Fathom Five - Max Gladstone
Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer
Ascension - Jacqueline Koyanagi
The Duchess War - Cortney Milan
The Heiress Effect - Courtney Milan
The Countess Conspiracy - Courtney Milan
The Suffragette Scandal - Courtney Milan
The Governess Affair - Courtney Milan
A Kiss for Midwinter - Courtney Milan
Talk Sweetly to Me - Courtney Milan
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel
Ancillary Sword - Ann Leckie

Bad Feminist is a collection of essays about feminism, and pop culture, and guilty pleasures. Clever stuff. I mean, I read and enjoy the likes of Caitlin Moran, but it's good to read anything about feminism that isn't quite so straight, white, and middle-class, you know?

Sarah Waters is one of my very favourite authors and The Paying Guests is my favourite of hers since Fingermsith. It's a bit of a return to form, I thought; I tell myself that I have other reasons for disliking The Little Stranger than the absence of lesbianism, but fair or not, queer women throughout history are why I read Sarah Waters. Anyway, this is about an upper-class mother and daughter in the interwar years who have to take in lodgers to make ends meet. It's half historical lesbian romance, half courtroom drama, and I really liked it a lot.

The Nick Offerman autobiography I read all in one night as I was fending off a panic attack. I don't actually watch Parks & Rec, but I'd seen enough gifsets of him on tumblr to think: this is a man who should have a manifesto, I would like to read that manifesto. The best bits were where he was talking about his marriage. My new romantic aspiration is to marry someone who talks about me the way Nick Offerman talks about Megan Mullally.

Ask the Passangers is YA novel about a teenaged girl's coming out, with a dash of magical realism thrown in. I think it suffered from my unfairly comparing it to The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which I'd read a few months ago and is similar on the surface, and they aren't remotely in the same league.

Astray is a collection of short stories about people moving to or around the US and Canada. What really struck me about it was that there wasn't a single story that I didn't like or was underwhelmed by; that never happens with short story collections. I continue to be knocked out by Emma Donogue's writing is what I'm saying.

Full Fathom Five... I just can't say enough good things about Max Gladstone's Craft sequence. Brilliantly wrought, diverse fantasy about gods and magic and all those stuck in between. This is a don't walk, run type of recommendation.

I had heard so many good things about the Southern Reach Trilogy, and I think maybe outside factors played a part. Because I was chugging through Annihilation cheerfully enough; then when I was about two thirds of the way though my dog died, and I lost interest in reading for a while. And when I finally picked the book up I found the last third really hard going and bleh, and have pretty much no interest in picking up the next two books in the series. So, yeah, sorry, book, it's not you, it's me.

Ascension had so many good things in it. Spaceships! A werewolf in space! Important sibling relationships! The protagonist is a non-white lesbian with a chronic illness! With all that it was kind of a shame that the plot never really came together for me, and by the time it turns out that half the ship's crew is in a poly relationship it had the feeling of some kind of bingo card being checked off. Not that you couldn't do something awesome with a poly spaceship crew, just that this book didn't do it. File under: books I wish I liked more than I did.

Historical Romance is not a genre I read much, or at all. But I heard Courtney Milan's name bandied about in connection with the ask-a-man tumblr, and I read the entire Brothers Sinister series, including the novellas, within about a fortnight. I couldn't get my grubby little hands on them quickly enough. I completely loved them, the heroines, beta male heroes, background queer relationships, inter-racial romances, lady scientists, feminist notes, and so so much fun. So, yeah, I'm taking this as a lesson on the benefits of reading outside my usual genres.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is the very definition of a book I bought because of the title. The title story is magnificent, the others slightly more hit and miss. There were a couple I didn't actually understand, but, hey, Hilary Mantel is smarter than I am, news at eleven.

Ancillary Sword I actually liked more than Ancillary Justice, and I fucking loved Ancillary Justice. I loved that the sequel is a little more tight focus on a small group of characters, but that still has the fascinating world-building and smart as heck gender and identity stuff.

I'm having a bit of a book slump at the moment, because all I really want to read is Ancillary Mercy, which, alas, will not be released for a year or more. So if you've read any good books recently, you should totally tell me about them.