Transcription - Kate Atkinson
The Wych Elm - Tana French
Cross Her Heart - Sarah Pinborough
Catwoman: Soulstealer - Sarah J. Maas
Record of Spaceborn Few - Becky Chambers
The Hollow of Fear - Sherry Thomas

Transcription is a historical novel that jumps around between WWII, the 50s, and the 80s. The bulk of the action is set in WWII where a young woman is drafted to transcribe bugged meetings between fascist sympathisers for MI5, it then picks up in the 50s and 80s where her wartime actions come back to haunt her. The WWII sections are really good; atmospheric, well drawn, and compelling. The parts set in the 50s are harder going, and contained more information about the internal politics of the BBC children's service of that era than I really cared to know. Recommended for fans of WWII novels and unreliable female narrators.

The Wych Elm is the first Tana French novel not set in her Dublin Murder Squad series, and doesn't have any of the nods to magical realism that I have such mixed feelings on in those books (I thought it worked in Broken Harbour, was a bit on the nose in The Secret Place, and that The Likeness was stupid.) In it our protagonist is Toby, the handsome, upper middle class poster boy for unthinking privilege. His privilege is put on spectacular display early in the novel where he confidently assumes he got his job as a green as grass graduate over a woman with decades of experience because he was the better person for the job, or when he runs off a guy who was hanging around his girlfriend's job and pestering her without even trying to understand why she was so frightened. All the same, he's not a bad guy, he's just...he's that guy. After Toby interrupts burglars at his flat and survives a terrible beating he goes to his Uncle Hugo's house to recover (because Toby is also the guy who has an Uncle Hugo), where a body is discovered in the garden. From there it becomes both a really engaging mystery (it edged close to having one too many twists for me, and I still can't decide if it pulled it back in time) and a study of the way Toby's privilege both no longer helps him (of course the police suspect the twitchy, nervous guy with the holes in his memory and the weird face) and still does (he's still a white guy with well off parents.) Highly recommended.

I remembered really enjoying Sarah Pinborough's Dog-Faced Gods trilogy years ago, so to say I was disappointed in Cross Her Heart would be something of an understatement. This thriller had too many stupid, ridiculous, suspension of disbelief shattering 'twists' to recap. But the one I found most egregious was the idea that a forty year old could convincingly pass herself off as eighteen to other teenagers for months on end. I mean, come on.

I returned to DC's YA series with Catwoman: Soulstealer after not reading the Batman instalment for the same reason I plan on skipping the Superman one, which is, you know, very much not caring. I actually, and much to my surprise, liked the Catwoman book a lot more than I enjoyed the Wonder Woman one. Maybe it was that I care for Sarah J Maas's writing more than I care for Leigh Bardugo's, or maybe it was just that the Selina, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn team up, and the idea that Harley's relationship with the Joker is toxic and she should be with Ivy instead played up to exactly what I like in my DC.

After frickin' loving the first book in Becky Chambers Wayfarers trilogy and being only so so on the second I am pleased to report that Record of a Spaceborn Few is a return to form. In this one we visit the Exodan Fleet, a human society based around the generational ships they first left Earth on. Like the rest of the series it's told using revolving povs and is rather light on plot, but the povs are endearing, and it's a really interesting study of an insular society and the people who choose to leave, choose to stay, and choose to move in. The whole series is really worth a shot, and you'll know almost instantly if the style isn't going to work for you.

All year I have had nothing but good things to say about Sherry Thomas' Lady Sherlock series; alas, I felt like The Hollow of Fear went off the rails somewhat. A little bit it of my discontent was the overly convoluted plot and the reliance on information the reader couldn't possibly have, but mostly it was that by now Charlotte Holmes is pretending to be the bedridden genius Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock's sister (who is somehow not Charlotte Holmes), and while wearing a false beard and fake paunch Sherlock's brother Sherrinford Holmes. I'm sorry, Sherry Thomas, but this is where I get off.

Give Me Your Hand - Megan Abbott
Dear Madam President - Jennifer Palmieri
Leah on the Offbeat - Becky Albertalli
I'll Be Gone in the Dark - Michelle McNamara
Future Home of the Living God - Louise Erdrich
Unhinged - Omarosa Manigault Newman
A Study in Honor - Clair O'Dell

Give Me Your Hand revisits Abbott's favoured topics of female friendship and female rage, this time set in a research lab studying severe PMS. And if you've liked previous Megan Abbott books you'll probably like this one too. I must admit though, I keep picking up her books thinking I'm going to like them more than I do, and I can't put my finger on exactly why they don't entirely work for me, because they're all technically brilliantly written, and about subjects that should be right up my alley. I guess they're maybe that little bit too dark for me.

Jennifer Palmieri worked in both the Obama White House and on the Clinton campaign and her contribution to the ever growing "what that fuck is happening?" genre is a slim volume framed as a letter full of advice for America's eventual first female president. Dear Madam President is a quick read - I read it in a single sitting - and its biggest takeaway is that people hold women to different, and harsher standards than the do men. Not an original observation, to be sure, but a valid one, and one that a lot of people seem weirdly reluctant to accept.

I didn't read Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda but I did really love the move adaptation, and there was a bit (the bit where all the kids are meeting up in costume to go to Bram's party) where it seemed like they were hinting at Leah having a thing for Abby, so I jumped straight into the second book Leah on the Offbeat where that is indeed the case. God, if I'd read this book as a teenager teen me would have over-identified like whoa with nerdy, overweight but not bothered by it , never been kissed Leah Burke. And thirty-five year old me really loved the book too.

I don't read a lot of true crime. It's like Gillian Flynn says in her introduction to Michelle McNamara's I'll be Gone in the Dark, you have to accept that you're making yourself a voyeur to the worst thing that's ever happened to another person. And the fact that McNamara died suddenly while writing it added, for me, another layer of ick to it. But there had been a lot of buzz about this book looking the golden state killer, a serial rapist and murderer who terrorised Californians for a decade during the seventies and eighties, not least because not long after its publication he was finally caught. McNamara is a brilliant crime writer, a brilliant writer full stop, which is never more obvious than in the places that her collaborators have had to fill in the blanks to get the book ready for publication. And it is darkly fascinating. But, still, ick.

Future Home of the Living God is a reproductive dystopia (there's lot of them about lately) set in a world where evolution has stopped, and in some cases started running backwards. The scene where a sabre tooth tiger eats a chocolate lab while our protagonist watches out her kitchen window illustrates the premise well, but, darn, I could have lived without it. Pregnant, and later on fertile women, are expected to turn themselves into the government to see if they can produce quote normal unquote babies. It was brilliantly written; it was also meandering, bleak, and ultimately unsatisfactory.

Okay, I'll hold my hands up. As part of my continuing addiction to the soap opera/prelude to the end of the world that is US politics, I read Omarosa's book. I am not proud of myself. I also felt like I needed to shower after finishing it. If asked to summarise it I would do so thusly: Holy revisionist history, Omarosa!

A Study in Honor is a near future, pre-cyberpunk, political dystopia set in a US riven by a second civil war. Janet Watson is a PTSD riddled veteran with a malfunctioning cybernetic arm who through circumstances ends up sharing an apartment with undercover federal agent Sara Holmes. It is a perfectly acceptable pre-cyberpunk, political thriller. But the weakest thing about it, the very weakest thing, is pasting on the names Holmes and Watson. Look, just because Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain and you can use it, doesn't mean you should. Watson's PTSD was really well done, and making her black and a lesbian was an A+ choice. Although I did have some quibbles about the way the book leaned into its portrayal of race, which as the whitest person in the world second only to Benedict Cumberbatch I am utterly unqualified to comment on; I'll just say I was not surprised to discover that the author was white too, and leave it at that. But Sara had nothing in common with Sherlock beyond a last name; she was a spy not a detective, and her "deductions" were the result of cybernetic implants and high speed wifi. She was also a blank slate; the name Holmes obviously being meant to stand in for any depth, personality, or characterisation. It was really disappointing.

The Queens of Innis Lear - Tessa Gratton
Down Girl: the logic of misogyny - Kate Manne
Only Human - Sylvain Neuvel
The Covert Captain - Jeannelle M. Ferreira

The Queens of Innis Lear is a female focused fantasy retelling of King Lear. Sounds right up my alley, right? Except whatever seed of promise it has quickly gets buried in tediously overwritten prose and at least three hundred unnecessary pages. Needed a good hack-and-slash editing.

Okay, reading Down Girl was my own fault. I'd seen something about the book somewhere and come away with the impression that it was for general audiences. It is not. And when I realised that instead of putting it down and seeking out something more my speed I ploughed on through hundreds of pages of moral philosophy. I don't disagree with anything Manne says about misogyny as the law enforcement arm of the patriarchy, but I also understand a lot better why Chidi Anagonye ended up in the Bad Place.

The law of diminishing returns is strong with The Themis Files. The first book in the series was outstanding, the second was fair-to-middling. By the time we get to Only Human... Oh, dear. The ending is unsatisfying, and the author has gotten locked into the format (which worked so well in book one!) of presenting everything in the form of interviews. Except by book three they're not interviews. They're just two characters who know each other well talking. Seriously, that's not an interview. It's a conversation. Stop it.

The Covert Captain is SO BAD, YOU GUYS. It's about a woman who's been disguised as a man in the army for years and when she returns to England she falls for her commanding officer's sister. And I am 100% the audience for a book with that plot, and if it were any good at all I would surely be reccing it to high heaven, but alas it is SO, SO BAD. It is bad on a technical word handling, sentence structure level. It is bad on a characterisation level; can we see how the fiancée got from freaking out that her intended is a woman to being totally cool with it? Does the character who spent 10+ years disguised as her dead brother have any thoughts about gender or identity? No, okay then. It is bad on a plot level; never mind dealing with the gender reveal because now here's a long lost brother! Never mind that! Now they've all got scarlet fever!

*insert obligatory whine about how shite f/f romances are here*

Red Clocks - Leni Zumas
Disobedience - Naomi Alderman
Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit - Jaye Robin Brown
The Wanderers - Meg Howrey
Anatomy of a Scandal - Sarah Vaughan
A History of Britain in 21 Women - Jenni Murray
The Seagull - Ann Cleeves
Utopia For Realists: and how we can get there - Rutger Bregman
Null States - Malka Older

I keep reading about how there is a new wave of feminist dystopia novels coming. Gosh, I wonder why that might be. Red Clocks is set in a US five minutes from now where a president most people didn't vote for and a number of ideologically driven governors amend the constitution to ban any and all abortions and make fertility treatments really hard to come by. The thing I really liked about it is-- Like, The Handmaid's Tale is scary, but it's allegorically scary, it wouldn't happen like that, not exactly like that, and not that quickly; but this, the idea that there could be this huge sweeping reduction to women's rights, and there would be some grumbling, and some protests, but mostly life would just chug on, that's more insidiously frighting, because that's possible in the short to medium term. And because the tragedies that come from it - because you can't force a woman to go through with a pregnancy she absolutely doesn't want, all you can do is force her into taking stupid risks, and come down like the fist of a vengeful God on terrified teenagers - are small and intimate and not a large scale horror movie, people just, kinda, get used to it.

The bit of world building that really fascinated me was the Pink Wall, where the US has somehow strong-armed Canada into turning any woman suspected of seeking an abortion back at the border. It got me thinking about about the Repeal the 8th vote coming up in Ireland, and how my sister who's lived in Galway for years thinks that there would have been a vote ages ago if not for the fact that it's so easy (not easy, no, but there's no one turning you back at the airport) to go to England, allowing people to just... keep not thinking about it.

There are four pov characters: a teenager who's pregnant and doesn't want to be, her teacher who can't get pregnant and desperately wants to, the mother of two young children, and a weirdo who lives in the woods and knows more about the gynaecological uses of plants than the authorities are comfortable with. It's actually a very good literary dystopia, with a dystopia that feels all too possible.

I read two books about religion and lesbianism in quick succession, and my reactions to them probably tell you more about me than it does about the books.

Disobedience I picked up because of the Rachel Weisz adaptation coming out later this year (trailer here), and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it someone on that basis. The trailer makes it look the movie will focus much more on the relationship between the two women; in the book their relationship is pretty incidental to a study of grief and an insular religious community. I also wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for a book about a happy f/f relationship; the two women don't end up together, and I don't think as a reader you were meant to want them too. But if you're interested in a very quiet, very British, room-with-a-view-with-a-staircase-and-a-pond type novel about the orthodox Jewish community in London then I can quite honestly recommend it.

Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruits is a YA novel set in, well, Georgia where the out daughter of an evangelical preacher agrees to go back into the closet for a year at the behest of her father, and then, dun dun dun, meets a girl. It is bright, it is cheerful, it is well written, it has a happy ending where the two girls end up together. And it left me feeling squirmy and uncomfortable and particularly British. Maybe it's the generally hangdog vibe of the anglican church, maybe it's that nothing will cure you of catholicism quite so thoroughly as thirteen years of catholic school, but there's something about evangelical religion, particularly US style evangelical christianity which makes me, well, squirmy and uncomfortable.

Anatomy of a Scandal is a courtroom drama about a disgraced politician accused of rape. With plot twists that wouldn't be out of place in a soap opera and some really questionable punctuation choices I barely finished it.

The Wanderers is about three astronauts participating in a simulated mission to mars for a private corporation, a la space x, to help work out the logistics for a later manned mission. But as the simulation continues and becomes more and more elaborate they start to wonder if maybe they haven't been sent into space for real. It's claustrophobic, and ambiguous, and paranoia inducing, and I really liked it a lot.

A History of Britain in 21 women was by the lady what does Women's Hour on the radio, and I'm not sure who the intended audience was? Each chapter was a precis of the life of one british woman from Boudica to Nicola Sturgeon; it was too much stuff I already knew about the women I was familiar with, and not enough information on the ones that were new to me. I'm just not sure who this book was actually for.

I've never really been able to get into the Vera novels before, even though the the TV show is excellent, with a top-notch line in dramatic shots of the Northumberland countryside, and grouchy upper-middle aged lady detectives. With The Seagull I finally cracked it, you've got to pretend Brenda Blethyn is reading it to you. If they're not having her narrate the audiobooks then they're missing a trick.

In Utopia for Realists Rutger Bregman advocates for a universal basic income, a fifteen hour workweek, and a world without borders. And, look, I am totally convinced by his arguments in favour of a universal basic income. Partly because I work in social care, and my retirement plans are a) universal basic income, or b) that comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, I guess; and partly because you can tell that UBI is what Bregman is passionate about, it's what he's thought most deeply about, and where his arguments are most cogent.

He's pretty good at making the case for a fifteen hour workweek too, and I can't tell if the fact that I was less convinced was because his argument was less refined, or because my lived experience of mcjobs and bullshit jobs has made me a cynic, because that seems to me distinctly more utopian and less likely to happen in my lifetime than UBI. By the time Bregman gets to the section on universal free movement... well, he throws in some statistics in support of his case, but you can tell that he hasn't really tuned his giant, empathetic brain onto the subject with any kind of focus.

So the book starts strong and fades, but there's still lots of food for thought there, and I'd really recommend it.

I'd really freakin' adored the micro-democratic world-building of Infomocracy where people are governed in clusters of ten thousand people, and your government may be totally different from the government two streets over. So I was so disappointed when most of Null States took place outside the world of micro-democracy. This is the second book in a series; murders were committed and then never solved, plot arcs were set up and then barely advanced an inch. It was a second book so second book-y that it made me not want to read the third book.

I will say that the first book, Infomocracy, was really good and didn't feel like it needed a sequel.

I started but DNF'd The Woman in the Window having decided that I'd liked it better back when it was called The Girl on the Train.

(February Graphic Novels:

Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat!: Careless Whiskers
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: BFF

I have decided to embrace that what I like in comics are bright colours, simple stories, localised happiness, and female characters aplenty. Sorry, dude who's my only rl friend into comics, but I am never going to read The Killing Joke.

AKA Hellcat! was easily my favourite of all the comics I've read so far. I'm bummed that it's finished, but also not bummed because I feel like three trades is a complete story and plenty for me to treasure forever.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur was super lovely, but I feel like I got it and don't need to read more. I shall certainly look forward to the upcoming animated show for mornings when I am hungover and/or sad.

The other thing I've decided I like in comics is things that are off to the side and don't get hijacked by the main continuity. Like, I don't care that She-Hulk got taken out of commission in whatever smash-bang comic book event was going at the time, she should have been able to continue being bffs with Patsy in AKA Hellcat!, goddammit!

This is true of the movies too. I keep saying that I don't care about the MCU, even though I've liked-to-more-than-liked the last three that I've seen (Homecoming, Ragnarock and Black Panther), when what I really mean is that I don't care about Steve, Tony, Infinity Stones, or Thanos.)

Final Girls - Riley Sager
The Last Place You Look - Kristen Lepionka
The Prey of Gods - Nicky Drayden
Wolf by Wolf - Ryan Graudin
Artemis - Andy Weir
Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

I already had Final Girls - a fairly generic thriller in which three 'final girls', the only survivors of previous massacres, find themselves the target of a new killer - out from the library when I read the thing about how Riley Sager is the pen name of a dude named Todd who was trying to cash in on the fact that female penned thrillers in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train seem to make real money. And while lots of authors write under more than one name, and it shouldn't necessarily be a big deal, something about this one left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know if I would have liked it more had I read it without knowing about the author, but as it was a lot of the handling of the female characters made me think, yeah, this was written by a dude named Todd.

Luckily, I liked The Last Place You Look a whole lot more; plus I'm almost entirely sure Kristen Lepionka really is a woman. It's about a hard drinking bisexual private investigator called Roxane Weary. I really love it when these noir-ish sorts of of books are about women, and this was a good one. Apparently it's the first in a series, and I will certainly be back for more.

Prey of Gods is one of those books that's super hard to explain, so I'm going to talk about by means of a pro - con list.

Pros: the AI uprising, South African demigods, one protagonist is a super violent demigoddess nail technician, another is a transwoman, two more a teenaged gay couple, it is really fucking good.

Cons: phonetically spelled South African accents.

So, you know, you can make up your own mind.

The nazis won alternate histories are a dime a dozen, and while I've enjoyed some of them (The Small Change Trilogy comes to mind) Wolf by Wolf was not one of those. It's about a girl who is experimented on in a concentration camp and ends up with face changing powers. And first of all, the idea of someone getting superpowers from eugenics experiments was, I thought, in very poor taste. And then, of course, the assassination of Hitler is down to this teenaged girl, all the while she's caught between two boys, and oh god...

In the end, the tastelessness bothered me more than the generic YA-ness of it all, but both were offputting.

Artemis is a heist set on the moon. In the end, it's not quite as cool as that premise makes it sound. The nerdy, engineering details are a bit pasted on in places, and it doesn't quite have the same charm as The Martian. But it's still a heist set on the moon, and as such is very, very cool. I also feel like I want to give points to Andy Weir for making his new protagonist a woman of Saudi Arabian extraction, because I feel like it would have been easy for him to write white guy sci-fi forever.

I had really liked Celeste Ng's first novel, but Little Fires Everywhere, set in the US suburbs in the 90s and featuring class differences and cross racial adoptions, did very little for me. Maybe if I were more of literary fiction person...

(Graphic Novels of late have been: The Mighty Thor: Lords of Midgard, The Mighty Thor: The Asgard/Shi'ar War, Bombshells: Allies, Mockingbird: I Can Explain.

Jane Foster!Thor continues to be my favourite, and of the comics I've tried so far the one where the art style works best for me.

Bombshells with it's ladies kissing and no super dudes allowed clubhouse is so very much in my wheelhouse that I don't even care that the plot lurches around a tiny bit incoherently.

I'm not surprised Mockingbird was not long for this world, it was cute and funny and all, but it leaned too hard on the puzzlebox aspect which was not nearly as clever as it seemed to think it was.)

Wonder Woman: Warbringer - Leigh Bardugo
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman
What Happened - Hillary Rodham Clinton
SPQR - Mary Beard
The Ruin of Angels - Max Gladstone
Waking Gods - Sylvain Neuvel

DC's new, shiny thing is hiring Young Adult authors to write YA novels about their headliners, of which Warbringer was the first instalment. It had a couple of things working against it for me: I am super fussy when it comes to YA, and I've bounced pretty hard off Leigh Bardugo's work before. It also features a slightly different Themyscira from the movie, which felt like a mistake with the book following so hotly on its heels, and an actualfax teenaged Diana, which, um. That said, it was a fun adventure, it neatly sidestepped the het romance I was dreading, and the teenaged characters were fine, even though they were, you know, teenagers...

Hey, I think I've just put my finger on why most YA doesn't work for me!

I can't say I've much interest in the upcoming Batman or Superman books in the same series, but I will probably tag back in for Sarah J. Maas' Catwoman instalment.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is about a woman in Glasgow who grew up in care, has no understanding of social niceties, and is in massive denial about how lonely she is... then she accidentally makes a friend. As someone who doesn't have the best social skills (but is certainly more cognizant than Eleanor of where I'm going wrong) my levels of secondhand embarrassment reading this were off the charts like whoa. But once I got over that it really was a very lovely, very uplifting book.

My first reaction to What Happened was that I wasn't going to read it, but I would defend to the death Clinton's right to have written it. I mean, it's not like Hillary Clinton is the first politician to have lost an election, or the first to have written a book about it. I don't know what it is about her specifically that makes people think that she should put her herself out to sea on an iceflow, accompanied only by that woman from Game of Thrones shouting SHAME. Just kidding. Of course I know why that is, everyone knows why that is.

Then bits of it started leaking out, and it seemed like she was mad at all the same people I was mad at, and baffled by all the same things I was baffled by, so I picked it up. It opens on election night, and I immediately started bawling like a baby. I'm still baffled by the reviews that called it an exercise in deflecting blame, because she accepts responsibility in this, she accepts so much responsibility that by the end I was going 'okay, it was your fault, I get it, enough already.' Mostly the book is her going: 'I was the candidate, the buck stops with me. But this was a weird election, and other things were happening. Here are some of them.' Which seems more than fair to me.

It did veer into the saccharine in places, mostly where she was talking about religion, but that might have been me being British and going 'ew, get this religion off my politics, it's all sticky'. And she does go on a fair bit about having won the popular vote, which is fair enough; in her position I would have had that tattood on my face.

I kind of want to say you done fucked up, America, but I feel like you already know that.

I have never been that interested in ancient Rome, but I have been extremely fond of Mary Beard ever since she got publicly lambasted for daring to go on Question Time looking like how you'd expect an oxbridge classics professor to look, while also being a woman, and shortly thereafter doing a BBC series on Calligula while wearing gold lame converse because zero fucks were given.

Anyway, SPQR was very readable, even for someone who picked it up more out of feminist feeling for the author than interest in the subject matter.

I've talked before about how much I love Max Gladstone's godpunk Craft sequence, and on paper The Ruin of Angels should have been my favourite; it featured library heist and all the relationships were f/f, but it felt like the flaws of the previous books were writ large in this.

The worldbuilding always was the best thing about this series (and it is seriously fucking awesome) but here it felt like the books were starting to crumble under the weight of all that worldbuilding. The plot, such as it was, felt like we were just moving from one worldbuilding set-piece to another until everything happened in the last fifty pages. And the characters desperately tried to avoid telling each other plot relevant information in case that accidentally created some story momentum.

On the upshot, there's an admin demon who considers taking bloody, demonstrative action to stop people erroneously flagging intra-office mail as triple urgent, and a lady knight who breaks her lady love out of prison with the line: knights can rescue their ladies from towers; that's practically what knights are for.

Basically, there's individual moments of brilliance interspersed through a sea of meh.

Waking Gods is the sequel to Sleeping Giants which I'd really loved a couple of months ago. It's plot can be summarised thusly: what good does a giant, unstoppable robot do you when the other guys have thirteen giant, unstoppable robots? Both books are told through interviews and log entries, and even if I'm not totally sold on the SF plot, they are super quick, super twisty, super fun reads.

(Graphic novels were Bombshells: Enlisted, and The Mighty Thor: Thunder in her Veins, both of which I got a hell of a kick out of. Because I am new to comics, and because there are so many, while I am but one person, my method to winnowing them down to the ones I might want to read is: no dudes need apply.)

Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
Everything Leads to You - Nina LaCour
Into the Water - Paula Hawkins
Nimona - Noelle Stevenson
American War - Omar El Akkad
Giant of the Senate - Al Franken
Hunger - Roxane Gay

Fates and Furies, or A Portrait of a Marriage Between Two Terrible Heterosexuals Who, Quite Frankly, Deserve Each Other. Lotto and Mathilde (and the fact that their names are Lotto and Mathilde tells you everything you need to know about them) are an upper middle class couple whose twenty year marriage is based on them having quite a lot of sex and both being mildly dreadful. Lotto (short for Lancelot, fucking Lancelot) is an eternal manchild, failed actor, and playwright so self-involved that he spends more than a decade failing to notice that his wife is rewriting his plays while he sleeps. Mathilde is the chick from Gone Girl, only lacking in any of the things that made the chick from Gone Girl compelling.

The writing is intermittently beautiful, and the rest of the time drips with pretension so thick you can practically taste it.

File under: fuck off.

Everything Leads to You was meant to be a palate cleanser, a sweet lesbian romance. Not unrelatedly, why are most f/f romances so shite? Even without the romance it hit one of the things I hate most in YA: characters who're still teenagers, yet live the lives of thirty year olds. The protagonist in this was still in high school, but she was also a set designer in Hollywood. Aye, right. And most of the book focused on her getting tapped to work on an indie movie. Now every time this indie movie is described you get the impression that all the characters and the writer herself think that this is some sort of cannes festival winning level genius, but everything you see about it makes it seem so twee that it would be laughed out of day one of an intro to screenwriting class.

Oh, and when we first meet the protagonist's love interest, she's homeless. But not real, actual homelessness where it's traumatic, and stressful, and terrifying, the type of homelessness that only exists in not very good novels where homeless shelters are like sleepaway camps, you make lots of new friends, and get cast in a not very good indie movie.

I mean, the spelling and the grammar is all correct, which hasn't always been true of all the f/f romances I've tried to read. But you could also have achieved the same effect by just writing the word MEH in five hundred point font.

Into the Water, or Another Book by that Woman What Wrote The Girl on the Train, was about a suspicious suicide and it was... fine. It got a little baggy in the middle in that way a lot of second novels do when the writer worked on their first book for ten plus years, and then had eighteen months to write the follow up. But while it could certainly have used a bit more tightening up, it wasn't so noticeable as to be a dealbreaker, or even particularly distracting.

It was more overtly feminist than The Girl on the Train, which I liked, but without the oh, fuuuck gotcha moment that made that book such a big hit. The twists here were all fine if guessable. If Paula Hawkins doesn't just want to retire and live off her The Girl on the Train swag then she has a bright future in front of her writing okay-ish thrillers.

My local library has found some money from somewhere to make themselves all fancy (and here I was thinking that the magic money tree only gave out to the DUP and the bloody royals) and as a result now has a pretty cool graphic novel section from which I picked up Nimona, a charming graphic novel about a young girl who apprentices herself to a supervillian, oh, and she can turn herself into a dragon when the situation calls for it. It was funny and lovely, and also seems to have been the thing that finally unlocked whatever it was in my brain that was stopping me from parsing graphic novels.

(That lock picked, I also read and enjoyed the first two Ms. Marvel trades and the first collection of the female Thor, which I'm mentioning in an aside because for esoteric and inexplicable reasons I'm not counting them towards my yearly total. Though this may change if I feel like my numbers need to be artificially inflated come December. Also, I don't really have anything to say about them except that, yeah, I consumed them and enjoyed doing so.)

American War was the first book in a while that I have really, really loved. The basic setup is that the US government has banned fossil fuels (seems unlikely given recent events, I know, but just go with it) causing several southern states to band together and declare independence kicking off the second civil war.

It's not about the war, per se, but about life as a refugee, and the indoctrination of child soldiers, and acts of terrorism, and it handles all of these topics with grace. Highly, highly recommended.

More than ten years ago I bought Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them to give to my sister as a birthday present. Just as I was coming out of the bookshop I ran into a boy who I'd met for the first time at a party a few nights before. Because we were at uni together we decided to go for a quick pint to bitch about our upcoming exams. At four in the morning I crashed through my backdoor; us having hauled the Franken book around a number of bars and clubs for twelve hours, and one or both of us having been sick in the bag with the book in it. And that's the story of how I met my best friend, and also the story of how I had to buy the same Al Franken book twice.

In the years since Franken has become a senator, which I didn't know about because pre-Trump I didn't follow US politics with an ever mounting sense of WTF??? But once I realised he wasn't joking, he really is a senator, this was a read I really enjoyed. It's interesting, and funny without being facetious, and even if it wasn't those things it would still be worth reading for the Ted Cruz bashing.

Hunger is Roxane Gay's memoir about all the weight she gained after being gang raped at the age of twelve and fucking ouch. It's important and raw, and if you can read it you should, but fucking ouch.

I also DNF'd The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend which was about a Swedish tourist opening a bookshop in small town America, which I was expecting to be like a cross between Gilmore Girls and The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and had the charm of neither.

The Wolf Road - Beth Lewis
Only Ever Yours - Louise O'Neill
His Bloody Project - Graeme Macrae Burnet
A House Without Windows - Nadia Hashimi
The Mandibles - Lionel Shriver

You know that bit when you were reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road and you thought, you know, I would be enjoying this book a lot more if it featured women and apostrophes?

Um, that may just have been me...

Anyway, The Wolf Road is really good. It's set post-apocalypse (the cold war turned hot) in which a young woman discovers the mysterious man who raised her is a serial killer, and goes on the run pursued by her past, a frontier lawman (law-woman?), and a semi-tame wolf. Along the way she rescues another young woman from dystopian sex-traffickers and discovers the meaning of friendship. So, yeah, this book is pretty much catered exactly for my id, and I really loved it a lot. Also, it's properly punctuated, so that's good too.

I got only Ever Yours as a job lot with Asking For It, like, a year ago, and then didn't read it because Asking For It fucked me up so much. While that one was a contemporary YA about the aftermath of a gang rape, this one was a dystopia where women (called Eves) are designed from scratch and raised to be either wives or concubines. It's like the world's most horrifying boarding school story. And as a straight dystopia it doesn't quite work, there are too many holes in it; the idea that female infanticide would reach such levels that women would simply stop conceiving female children is not how biology works, especially not over the course of a generation or three. But as a parable about how society treats teenage girls, and encourages them to treat themselves, it really does work.

So, yeah, whatever it loses for ill-thought out worldbuilding, it more than makes up in will-fuck-you-up-ness.

His Bloody Project is about a murder in a 19th century Highland crofting community, and if you like faux discovered historical documents and unreliable narrators this might just be for you.

A House Without Windows is set in Afghanistan, about a woman accused of the murder of her husband and the Afghan-American lawyer fighting to free her. And that plot was fine, but much more compelling to me were the scenes set inside the women's prison, where more than half the women were locked up for 'morality' crimes, and some of them had been turned in by their own families to keep them safe from so called honour killings. I really must find a book about that to read.

I read The Mandibles and holy mixed feelings, Batman! The first three quarters of it I really liked; it was set in 2029 and all about the catastrophic implosion of the US economy. Economic dystopias are fast becoming my favourites; I think because the best ones speak to what we're afraid of, and while I'm not afraid of nuclear winter, I am afraid of having to work till I'm almost ninety caring for people only a little older than myself.

But then the last hundred pages skipped another ten years into the future after there had been a partial recovery, and holy mackerel, did I change my tune. The problems I had with it were threefold:

-Firstly, I think it's safe to say that Lionel Shriver disagree on basically everything to do with taxation and redistribution of wealth. The part I found most objectionable was the idea that caring for the elderly and vulnerable is only worthwhile if it's on an individual charitable basis, and society wide safety nets are what's going to doom us all. Oh, fuck off.

-Secondly, Shriver's obvious self-insert character, who had been fun up to that point, saved the day and lived to one hundred and three. Ugh.

-And thirdly, in the flash forward people have to have a chip implanted under their skin to use like a credit card; and there's a really gross and overwrought comparison between that procedure and sexual assault. And, like, that's one of my hard no's in fiction. You know what's like being raped? Being raped, and literally nothing else. I'm not saying that other experiences can't be as bad or even worse, I'm just saying that those experiences should find their own word.

So, yeah, Lionel Shriver? Start and stop at We Need to Talk About Kevin.

As for what I'm going to read next... my TBR is looking a little listless. Anyone read any good books lately?

Tempting though it's been to spend the last few weeks opening 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale at random pages and going: Oh, God, I have done a wee bit of other (mostly escapist) reading.

The Regional Office is Under Attack! - Manuel Gonzales
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers
Invasive - Chuck Wendig
Mort(e) - Robert Repino
The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio: the true story of a convent in scandal - Hubert Wolf

At first glance The Regional Office is Under Attack! should have been so very much in my wheelehouse. There's a top secret agency of super-powered women saving us all from the forces of darkness! There's a splinter group of super-powered women! One of the main women has a metal arm! It's basically Die Hard with super-powered ladies! There's an exclamation mark in the title!

But, alas. It does that annoying thing where it pretends to be about women, but all the female characters are motivated/manipulated by a dude. The characterisations are thin, and I mean thin even by the standards of a Die Hard pastiche. The writing is, in places, just... not very good. I mean, the Regional Office itself seemed really cool, and there was an afterthought of a subplot where a character got taken over by her metal arm, and - it was like this book chose to tell the least interesting of all possible stories in the world it had created.

Luckily The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was much better. Okay, there wasn't much of a plot to speak of, it's basically a found family/group of misfits in space, but I didn't care because it was one of those books where I would have been more than happy to read about these characters doing not very much and bouncing off each other forever. There are great characters, fun worldbuilding, interesting aliens, and a lesbian romance featuring a human and a lizard alien; it was basically Jenny and Vastra IN SPACE. I can't overemphasise how much fun this was.

Invasive is about weaponised ants, because however bad things seem right now at least the ants aren't attacking. It's really fast-paced and fun, but maybe don't read it if you're afraid of insects, because I'm not at all and some of the bits about the sensation of insects crawling on your skin made even me squirm.

Mort(e) is also about an ant attack. In this the Ant Queen has been plotting war against humanity for thousands of years, and as part of her plan she gives housepets sentience in the hope that they'll rise up and kill their human masters. It's worth noting that while reading this I actually turned to my dog and earnestly said: "I love you very, very much, please don't kill me in the event of the insect uprising. Also, please remember that I gave you this rich tea biscuit even though you're not meant to have person food."

Also, in addition to sentience, the animals also get to be bipedal with opposable thumbs, and understand the use of semiautomatic weapons. I mean, it's mad as fuck, but it does that thing that some truly ridiculous books can, where they overshoot their silliness and come out the other side at really quite good, actually.

Sometimes I can be heard to complain about how hard it can be to talk to people on Tumblr, and it is, but one evening I managed to get involved a conversation that went from whether or not or I should write a La Maupin AU, to my own lapsed Catholicism, to Celtic FC, to people sending me recs for books about nuns, which was how The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio came to my attention.

It's non-fiction about a nineteenth century Roman convent, featuring the attempted murder of a German princess by a nun, several other murders, lesbian initiation rites, and the ensuing cover up by the Catholic church. It was certainly a book where I had to readjust my expectations partway into the book, because I went into it expecting, I guess, 19th century nuns gone wild, and what I got was much dryer and sadder. I mean, it's interesting, especially if you have even a passing interest in religious history, but it's not salacious in the way the summary makes it sound.

Although, because the more things change the more they stay the same, I really enjoyed this quote from around the time of the First Vatican Council and the Dogma of Papal Infallibility: "Stupidity and fanaticism join hands and dance the tarantella, making such a caterwaul that one cannot bear to look or listen." Because, yeah.

I have to go to bed in a minute so that I can get up for my silly-o'clock flight to Dublin, so this year's rating system might have gone a bit weird.

1. When We Were Animals - Joshua Gaylord (extended metaphor; meh)
2. Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson (humans are doomed; good)
3. The Library at Mount Char - Scott Hawkins (contemporary fantasy; YAY)
4. The Heart Goes Last - Margaret Atwood (spec-fic; meh-to-good)
5. The Guest Room - Chris Bohjalian (thriller; good)
6. Black Widow - Chris Brookmyre (scottish crime; good)
7. The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie - Jennifer Ashley (historical romance; very good)
8. Black Dog - Caitlin Kittredge (girl hellhouds; the lower end of meh)
9. A Slip of the Keyboard - Terry Pratchett (I miss you, pterry; good)
10. The House of Shattered Wings - Aliette de Bodard (historical fantasy; probably actually good, but meh)
11. Armada - Ernest Cline (13 yr old boy wish fufillment; very meh)
12. The Redbreast - Jo Nesbo (nordic crime; does what it says on the tin)
13. Sweet Disorder - Rose Lerner (historical romance; good)
14. Day Four - Sarah Lotz (horror; fine)
15. In the Labyrinth of the Drakes - Marie Brennan (lady dragon scientist; YAY)
16. Jane Steele - Lyndsay Faye (serial killer Jane Eyre; YAY)
17. The Three - Sarah Lotz (horror; eh, fine)
18. True Pretenses - Rose Lerner (historical romance; points deducted for Tories)
19. Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel - Sara Farizan (teenage lesbians; made me happy in my heart)
20. The Just City - Jo Walton (thought experiment fantasy; fine-to-good)
21. Waiting for Doggo - Mark Mills (dogs; why did I read this, again?)
22. League of Dragons - Naomi Novik (dragons, lower-case-yay)
23. Forty Signs of Rain - Kim Stanley Robinson (humans are doomed, points deducted for pervy protagonist)
24. The Language of Secrets - Ausma Zehanat Khan (canadian crime; fine-to-good)
25. Angelmaker - Nick Harkaway (contemporary fantasy; loses ALL THE POINTS for killing off the lesbian octogenarian spy; bad book, no biscuit)
26. Birthdays for the Dead - Stuart MacBride (scottish crime; ew)
27. The Witches: Salem, 1692 - Stacy Schiff (non-fiction; some witches, mostly footnotes)
28. Stiletto - Daniel O'Malley (YAY, YAY!!!; three exclamation marks, surely the sign of a deranged mind)
29. Four Roads Cross - Max Gladstone (dead gods and magic lawyers; yay)
30. Listen to the Moon - Rose Lerner (downstairs-downstairs historical romance; very refreshing)
31. The Geek Feminist Revolution - Kameron Hurley (essays; preaching to the converted, so eh)
32. Asking For It - Louise O'Neill (feminist YA; OH GOD WHY WOULD YOU LET ME READ THIS?; but good)
33. City of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett (fantasy; YAY)
34. Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch (they folly has an away day in the countryside; good)
35. In Harm's Way - Doug Stanton (non-fiction; fine)
36. Stone Mattress - Margaret Atwood (short stories; why can't I just like Atwood as much as other people do?)
37. Labrador - Ben Fogle (dogs;...dogs?)
38. Infomocracy - Malka Older (election related spec-fic; ARGGHHH; but very good)
39. Do You Want to Start a Sandal - Tessa Dare (historical romance; does what it says on the tin)
40. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu - Joshua Hammer (non-fiction; title better than the book)
41. Think of England - KJ Charles (m/m historical romance; lovely)
42. The Abyss Surrounds Us - Emily Skrutskie (teenaged lesbians and sea monsters; not nearly as good as it sounds)
43. The Girl Before - Rena Olsen (feminist fiction; unreliable narrator; good)
44. City of Blades - Robert Jackson Bennett (fantasy; BUT WHEN IS THE THIRD ONE COMING OUT?)
45. The Trespasser - Tana French (irish crime; very good)
46. Smaller and Smaller Circles - FH Batacan (filipino crime; meh)
47. The Hanging Tree - Ben Aaronovitch (urban fantasy; ...what happened in this one again?)
48. A Week to be Wicked - Tessa Dare (historical romance; best in its series)
49. A Lady by Midnight - Tessa Dare (historical romance; ...how is the same author who wrote a week to be wicked?)
50. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead (spec-fic; very good)
51. Beneath the Surface - John Hargrove (non-fiction; so Seaworld is like a cult, huh)
52. Notorious RBG: the life and times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik (non-fiction; I hope RBG is taking her vitamins)
53. The Wonder - Emma Donoghue (historical fiction; good)
54. Any Duchess Will Do - Tessa Dare (historical romance; fine-to-meh)
55. Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neil (non-fiction; fine)