Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Catching up, after a couple of months when I posted only about health, the social security disability appeal, and food.

Perfect Accord, by Celia Lake, another of her historical fantasy romances, set in a somewhat alternate world where some people have magic. This story is about two people who agreed in their early teens to marry each other if nobody better comes along by the time their parents are pushing them to marry and have children. In the course of the book, the woman discovers that she's tired of solving the man's problems, and that there might be someone out there who she actively wants to marry. I enjoyed this, but suspect there are better places to start with these books.

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, by Peter Beagle. Fantasy romance about a dragon-exterminator, a princess who really doesn't want to get married, and a wandering prince who is officially on a quest, mostly to stay away from his family. This world's dragons range from large and dangerous down to "they're breeding in the walls, better catch the infestation while it's small."

Lady Eve's Last Con, by Rebecca Fraimow same-sex romance/thriller about a con artist trying to make her way on a satellite in orbit around Pluto, with flashbacks to near-future Brooklyn.

Penric and the Bandit, by Lois McMaster Bujold. A good entry in a long-running series, better I think than the couple before it, but there is an internal chronology, and the books are best read in order.

Since the middle of December:

Bookshops and Bonedust, by Travis Baldree: This is a prequel, I guess, to Legends and Lattes. I liked it, and there was something pleasantly recursive about getting caught up in a book that is significantly about other people being caught up in books (people who think of reading as something that other people do). (If you didn't like the first book, you probably won't like this one either.)

Paladin's Faith, by T. Kingfisher. This is billed as "book four of the saint of steel," with an interesting plot about industrial espionage/sabotage along with the demon-hunting and (how) will these two characters wind up together. I liked it, and think it's at least as good as the previous volumes in the series. There's room for three more books, at one per paladin. I'd like a story that's more about the Temple of the White Rat, Zale and Bishop Beartongue, and/or the gnoles, but I'm not sure a romance structure would work for those.

Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer: Beck is a teenager living with her father on a seastead, i.e., a group of offshore platforms and converted ships that has somehow managed not to be part of any country. The story starts with some odd discoveries Beck makes while finding random-seeming things someone wants enough to pay or trade for, like size nine black sandals, and the stakes get higher as the story goes on. The people who run the seastead call themselves libertarians, but Beck's father gives arbitrary-seeming orders and expects her to obey, and these are the sort of libertarians who are happy to have most of the scutwork done by indentured servants. [I think this is a fix-up of a series of stories that were originally published separately.]

I don't seem to have done one of these since the middle of July. So:

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older, is a very good sf/mystery/romance novel. It's set on Jupiter after humans have made Earth uninhabitable. They're living on small platforms attached to rails at a distance from the planet that humans can handle, while they work on figuring out how to restore a livable ecology on Earth. They call their refuge/temporary home Giant, but the moons have their current names. The romance part is, the narrator's ex-lover asks her to work together on a mystery, and they have to figure out whether it's possible for t-hem to be lovers, or even good friends, again. The main plot arc is the mystery, plus gradually-revealed and well-done world-building.

The Wizard's Butler, by Nathan Lowell, is a pleasant low-stakes mystery; the title character has no experience as a butler and hadn't even thought about that as a possible job; he's hired on the basis of his experience as an army medic, after being fired from a job as a paramedic.

he Public Library, a Photographic Essay, by Robert Dawson, The Dawson book has photos of lots of different libraries, with text describing them, and some essays by other people. The photo captions were too small for me to read comfortably, but I enjoyed looking at the pictures and reading the larger-print written material. I think I found this while looking for "a book about libraries" for the Boston Public Library summer reading bingo card.

The Shoemaker's Wife and Old as the Hills, are both set in the author's Albion historical fantasy world. The Shoemaker's Wife is a romance set shortly after World War I, and the male protagonist is a just-demobilized soldier. He and his wife are both trying to find their way in peacetime, and with each other, after meetiong and marrying quickly during the war. Old as the Hills is set in 1939-40, and the war is important to the plot. Much of this book is about an attempt to use a magical transport network to rescue European Jews, while other people are working to stop the Germans from invading via the same portals.

The Appeal is an odd epistolary mystery story that didn't work for me, with rounds of "here are some more hints" from a lawyer to two trainees.

Mostly just another list, with some notes copied from my "booklog" file.

Lake, Celia, Winter's Charms. Three winter-themed novellas connected to some of her novels. I particularly liked the one about how Seth, Dilly, and Golshan became a triad (after Seth and Dilly were married, and also after Golshan was seriously wounded in the War).

Rather, Lina, Sisters of the Vast Black. Weird sf, with living spaceships, some of them convents, one of which is named Our Lady of Infinite Constellations, and vaguely hand-waved FTL. This is set a few decades after a very destructive war that left behind extremely nasty plagues. I enjoyed the story, but it is vastly implausible, and not just because it involves faster-than-light travel. This is the first in a loose series, but I didn't like it enough to look for the next one.

Christie, Agatha, After the Funeral and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Murder mysteries about Hercule Poirot, well constructed but ( spoiler )

Moniquill Blackgoose, To Shape A Dragon's Breath. A very good fantasy novel set in a somewhat alternate-history 19th century New England, with dragons. The viewpoint character is a member of the Wampanoag tribe, as is the author, and a significant part of the plot is driven by settler prejudices against the Indigenous inhabitants of the area. First in a trilogy, and I definitely want to read the next book.

Hogan, Linda, The Radiant Lives of Animals. A mix of poetry and natural history, hard to describe but I liked it. I think someone recommended this to me, but I don't remember who.

Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility. An oddly constructed novel about time travel and pandemics.

Dimaline, Cherie, Venco. This is a fantasy novel about a poor Metis woman from Toronto who finds a spoon, which connects her to women who are working against a deadline to assemhle a coven, and about her relationship with her grandmother. I liked this, and not just because it takes it takes older women seriously.

Books I've finished in the last several weeks:

You're My Kind, by Claire Lydon is a lesbian romance that I may have gotten as a freebie via the BookBub email list. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist still misses the ex who walked out on her without a word several years ago, and also has trouble trusting anyone because if Justine could do that, so could anyone. The tone is sweet, but it felt like a little too many of the necessary conversations were not just offstage, but of the form "Maddie, Justine did X" and "Justine, Maddie says Y." Yes, the genre promises the reader a happy ending, but the author is expected to supply it, and this has a bit of the tone of "meanwhile, back at the ranch..."

No Love for the Wicked, by Jessica Cage, is a fantasy set mostly in a world where most people have magic. People are divided into Lights and Darks, which is somehow innate but also everyone is told which they are in high school. There's a romance plot, between two people who meet as adults, mixed in with the assignment to do a series of arbitrary-seeming things to save the world. The plot is driven partly by the protagonist/narrator's mother having carefully not told her the Very Important Prophecy about her. On the other hand, ( spoiler ) This was via a StoryBundle of fantasy books by BIPOC authors, and was clearly spell-checked rather than proofread, based on homonyms and missing words.

The White Mosque: a Memoir, by Sofia Samatar. Someone recmmended it, and I liked her novel A Stranger in Olondria, so I got this from the library.

The White Mosque is a linked collection of many short pieces about Samatar's family; Mennonite history; and her own life, built around a visit/pilgrimage to Uzbekistan in search of German Mennonite history. The "white mosque" of the title is a Mennonite church in Uzbekistan, built in the late 19th century. Samatar talks about having a Somali father and a white American mother, and looking for a place in a religion that still thinks of itself as ethnically (north) German, although most Mennonites today are people of color who live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

Samatar thinks and writes about memory, and about what missionary work does for, and to, the people doing it and those they're trying to convert. And numerous other topics, including the Aral Sea, a failed end-of-the-world prophecy that led some of those Mennonites to what is now Uzbekistan, and the history of photography and movie-making in Central Asia.

The book feels a bit like long strings of beads, making something but not a straightforward narrative. This shouldn't have surprised me; A Stranger in Olondria wasn't a linear narrative either. The acknowledgements describe the book as "creative nonfiction," saying some living people's names have been changed but the stories are as true as she can make them and the places are real.

I'm Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy, is good but not pleasant reading. It's a memoir by a former child actor. There's a lot about her being a parentified child, including that she was expected to make her mother happy by, among other things, never having a different preference than her mother about anything, even favorite colors.

Current reading: The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, which feels relatively light so far. And I'm still (slowly) rereading Always Coming Home.

Several weeks' reading:

( cut for length )

Apparently I haven't done one of these in two months. So:

Books I hadn't read before:

Paladin's Strength, by T. Kingfisher -- sequel to Paladin's Grace, another romance novel involving a (different) paladin of a recently-dead god

A Prayer for the Crown-shy, by Becky Chambers -- sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built, further low-key adventures of a monk and their robot friend. This has the same gentle tone as most of Chambers' books, and it's about friendship

Red, White, and Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston -- her first published novel, set in an alternate and much better 2020 than the one we got. Not bad, but if I'd read this first I might not have tried One Last Stop, which is a lot better.

The Missing Page, by Cat Sebastian -- sequel to "Hither, Page". At the end of this book, Leo and James are more settled emotionally, and talking about a future (in terms of "let's go to the seashore in a few months")

The Will and the Deed, by Ellis Peters -- a mystery novel, revolving around the estate and will of an opera singer who dies of natural causes at the beginning of the book. Not bad, very different from her Brother Cadfael books.

Fool's Gold, by Celia Lake -- another romance set in her England-with-magic Albion in the 1920s. I continue to enjoy these

Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach, by Nnm (an AO3 pseudonym) -- Good Omens fanfic, about what happens when a demon walks into the office of a psychologist who specializes in treating people with PTSD. Someone mentioned this online, and I had a vague "maybe I'll reread it"--and apparently there are several different fanfics with this premise. Long, and I enjoyed it; if that description appeals, you might like it.

Beguilement and Legacy, by Lois McMaster Bujold, the first two of her Sharing Knife books -- a romance in which both people are dealing with "you can't do that" first internally and then from their families, for reasons that are mostly "s/he's from a very different culture." It's \set in what feels like a fantasy far future of our world.

Vagina Obscura: an anatomical voyage, by Rachel E. Gross -- nonfiction, about women and different aspects of the (mostly cisgender) female body and reproductive system. "Vagina" here stands in for the vulva, womb, internal clitoris, and connected body parts. Gross talks about women's bodies, and knowledge of and beliefs about those bodies, now and in the past. The author notes that "female" is doing a lot of work here, and that categories are fuzzy. There's a lot here about the clitoris, and a chapter about some of the things ovaries do that aren't connected to reproduction. The book is relatively brief and the tone is mostly light, which includes footnotes like "Wait, what?" (on some of the weirder and/or more harmful things people have said, thought, and done. There are eight chapters, each focused on a different part of the body. Chapter 8 is titled "Beauty (Neovagina)" and gives some history of gender affirmation surgery as well as talking about the present and recent past.

My reading continues to be mostly mystery and/or romance.

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Currently reading: Spirals in Time, by Helen Scales: non-fiction about seashells, some of the many different animals that have shells, and some of the things humans have used shells for.

Self-isolating doesn't seem to mean more time for books, just more online things: Discord servers and Duolingo and DW are all less stressful than the news, but they're a different thing.

Recently read: Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher. It's genre romance, m/f, but the female lead is a perfumer, the man is a not-exactly-ex paladin, and the context has them stumbling on assassins, trying to find a murderer, and a fair-sized helping of espionage. Also a few very funny bits, because it's tkingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon. I enjoyed it, even though -- or maybe in part because? -- this isn't a genre I read much of.

I have no idea what comes next: looking at my kindle last night, I was going "not this" and "it's too soon to reread this one again" and I gave up and did a puzzle instead.