Happy July everyone. Summer has really hit, and we’re steaming away here in D.C. I was still really worried about what was going on with Neutron for the first half of the month, but then Seeing Eye came to work with me and we decided that at least right now we’re totally safe, which was a huge relief. Otherwise, it was a pretty chill month, except for the temperature of course. My writing group had a few in person gatherings, but we’re still doing our regular meetings remotely for the time being because the metro has some summer construction we’re trying to avoid.
In addition to reading, I finally finished watching the Tangled TV show on Disney Plus, and I just want to give it a shout-out because it’s adorable. Tangled is probably my favorite Disney movie, and the show was a great sequel. Also the music is very catchy. I also discovered in June that I can watch so many things on Disney Plus in Italian, and since I’ve been feeling like my Italian is rusty, I started rewatching the Tangled show in Italian. It was hard at first but ultimately really fun. Half my thoughts are in Italian now, which is just the way I like it.
I read seven books in June, the same I read in May. It was almost all sci fi and fantasy books and then one classic. The classic was a standalone, I continued two series I’m in the middle of, started two other series, and one of the books I’m not sure if it’s meant to stand alone or be the start of the series. My writing group is going to Worldcon this year, since it’s in D.C., so I also started working my way through the books that have been nominated for Hugo Awards. I’ve already read some of them—Raybearer, Legendborn, and the Murderbot series at least. Harrow the Ninth is nominated for a Hugo, and since I haven’t read the first book in the series, Gideon the Ninth, I decided I should read that first. Honestly, I couldn’t get through it. I got about a third of the way through and still had no idea what was going on, and I ended up putting it down. As you know, I don’t put books down lightly. I think I can name all the books I’ve put down ever. There might only be three. A lot of my writing group is really insisting that I give Gideon another try, and maybe I will, but we’ll see.
I also want to throw it out there that I reread all the Nevermoor books again (this might be the fourth time this year), but this time I read them in Braille. It was a really interesting experience to see things like punctuation and spelling sentence structure that I didn’t necessarily notice when listening to the audiobooks. I am also super excited that we now appear to have a title and a synopsis for the fourth book, even though it won’t be coming out until the end of 2022. I realize I have gotten myself stuck in a loop of Nevermoor, but there are far worse loops to get stuck in, and it makes me happy, so I don’t care.
But now let’s chat about the new books that I finished in June.
First, I read A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This is set in England in the early 1900s, I think. Sarah is sent to boarding school, and when her beloved father dies leaving her nothing, the headmistress of the boarding school makes her become a servant and live in the attic and everything is awful. Frances Hodgson Burnett also wrote The Secret Garden, which I didn’t realize until after I finished this book, but there were several times throughout this book when I kept thinking “this reminds me of The Secret Garden.” In general, I enjoyed this book, hisoough it had that slower, very descriptive quality of older books that I’m not overly fond of. It also had an omniscient narration that told us some things that undercut the tension of the ending. But this was a nice little book, and if you haven’t read it, you might enjoy it.
Next, I read The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart. This is the first book in the Drowning Empire series, and I think the next book is coming out later this year. The Bone Shard Daughter follows a whole bunch of characters living on this empire of floating islands. We have the emperor’s daughter who has lost most of her memories due to an illness and is trying to learn her father’s magic. There is the thief who is searching for his wife who was kidnapped years ago and is now getting roped into saving children from the yearly festivals that give magic to the emperor. There’s the daughter of the governor of one island whose girlfriend is involved in the rebellion. And there are people trapped in a mental fog working on a mysterious island. There is also a very creepy magic system that we discover over the course of the book. My one and only complaint, and it’s a very minor complaint, is that I felt like the emperor’s daughter was supposed to be the main character, especially because of the title, and she was actually the only character I had a hard time being engaged with for a while. But her story did hook me, and once it did, and everything started coming together, it was so great. I particularly loved how all these pieces and layers came together and this book just built and built and built to this great climax and finale. I can’t wait for the sequel.
Next, I read the first two books in Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society series: The Mysterious Benedict Society and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey. The first book is about a group of unusual and talented children who are recruited to infiltrate a boarding school and foil the headmaster’s evil plan. And the second book sees the kids off on new and exciting adventures. These books were a ton of fun. I really enjoyed them, and I’m looking forward to getting the next one out of the library. I’m also currently watching the show that’s coming out on Disney and that’s been a lot of fun.
After that, I read the ninth Princess Diaries book, Princess Mia by Meg Cabot. I believe last month I complained that Mia hadn’t grown as a character much throughout the series so far, and that she was an absolute idiot in the last book. But this book saw Mia really having to deal with the consequences of her actions grow as a character and make some complicated decisions and I love it. It was certainly darker and more serious than the earlier books in the series, but at this point that’s what I needed.
Next, I read Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik, the second book in the Temeraire series. The Chinese want Temeraire back, because they believe only the emperial line can have celestial dragons. Temeraire refuses to be parted from Lawrence, so together they travel to China and political games begin to try and keep Temeraire with Lawrence (the British side) and to keep him in China (the Chinese side). It’s more complicated than that but there you go. I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the first book. The pacing just felt very weird to me. Most of it was very slow, and then the last third or so was a roller coaster of action and political moves and countermoves and it really finished with a bang. That being said, I did enjoy it a lot, particularly the development of the bond between Lawrence and Temeraire, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the third book.
As I mentioned above, I’ve started working my way through the books nominated for Hugo awards this year. In June, I read The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. This was actually my first ever Jemisin book, and I will definitely be checking out more of her work. Recommendations welcome. The City We Became is about how at a certain point cities become actually alive, are born into sentient, human being-type avatars of themselves, but the birth of New York goes wrong, and a bunch of very different people become the avatars for each of the burrows of New York and have to find each other and fight off the evil force that is trying to prevent the birth of New York. If the birth of New York fails, well pretty much New York is gone and a whole lot of stuff around it. What I really liked about this book was how it took a really weird concept and made it really accessible. I also loved the variety of characters we were dealing with. I was not totally thrilled about the ending. This is the book that I’m unclear if it’s meant to have a sequel or not. It’s one of those endings that if there’s more to come, I am totally fine with it. If this is it, it just wasn’t completely satisfying to me.
And that’s it for June. I’ve realized over the past few weeks that unfortunately I’m not enjoying writing these posts as much as I used to. I love talking about books, but these monthly posts about everything I’ve read are starting to feel kind of tedious for me. So starting next month, I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of talking about everything I’ve read each month, I’m going to give you more of a general update on what I’ve been up to with life and writing and then talk briefly about my absolute favorite books of the month. I’m hoping this will make the posts more exciting for me to write and give me some more energy and time to maybe put some other posts up here more frequently. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I hope you’re enjoying your summers and staying safe.