Over the past several weeks, I thought about blogging more and getting this post up sooner. I meant to do it. I really did. But a solid sense of time and my motivation to do pretty much anything have gone out the window in social distancing life. But here I am now.
I hope everyone is holding up out there. I so far haven’t gotten sick or gone insane, but there’s still time. I did finish my five trillionth round of revisions on my middle grade fantasy project, and then my five trillion and first round of revisions. Now I’m back to the memory-wiping academy project. I also bought myself a television because my iPad or laptop just wasn’t enough of a screen, and I hope to have friends over for a movie night someday ever. I’ve been cooking all the time too. I’ve learned to make some really good bread thanks to a recipe my brother shared with me. I tried lentil pasta, with mixed results, and harissa marinated tofu which probably would have turned out better if I had enough harissa to actually marinate the tofu. But after that it’s been a lot of staples like couscous and frozen veggies or rice and beans or pasta. I’ve also been making homemade ice cream, and there’s no going back to the store-bought stuff now.
Basically I’m doing fine but life is upside down and I hate it so much, even though it’s definitely necessary.
I also read eight books in March. I read most of these books in the first half of March, before the lockdown set in. Oddly I haven’t been reading as much even though I’m stuck at home now. I saw a tweet about this somewhere. I can’t find it now, but the gist is we expect to be a lot more productive with life on lockdown, but we’re also spending a lot of time holding the existential dread at bay.
While I enjoyed all these books a lot, I admit that none of them really stuck out to me, and I’m having a hard time remembering them, but I think that’s more because of the world getting thoroughly messed up in the last month than the books’ fault.
I continued a lot of the series that I started last month, and I started a couple new series. I also read a variety of genres again, some middle grade and YA, some fantasy and sci fi, and a superhero story.
All the books I read were audiobooks. I’m not doing so great on my goal to read one Braille book a month. But even though I won’t be completely successful on this goal this year (unless one of you knows how to time travel), I’m going to keep trying.
Now let’s dive in and talk about these books.
First, I read the second Uncommon Magic book, A Little Taste of Poison by R. J. Anderson. I read the first book, A Pocket Full of Murder, back at the end of January, and I loved it lots. This was a great sequel. It did a great job following up on the problems left unsolved at the end of the first book, delving deeper into the world, and complicating everything further. My only complaint is there’s this epilogue at the end that, without spoiling anything, puts a new twist on everything, and it’s really sudden and fast and in my opinion makes the book and series feel incomplete. If there’s going to be a third book, I’d be okay with it, but I’m not sure there will be a third book based on my very cursory research on Goodreads. On the whole though I really loved this world and these characters, and this is a very fun middle grade fantasy series.
Next, I read the second Renegades book, Archenemies by Marissa Meyer. I don’t want to say too much in terms of plot synopsis because I don’t want to spoil the first book if you haven’t read it, and almost anything I say would be a spoiler. But we continue with the spying and the secret identities and the superhero teamwork and friends and romance and everything I loved about the first book. Archenemies took the story forward in a logical way but a different way than I expected. It also raised the stakes a lot, and it did a lot better with the issue I had with the first book that I felt like we were in the wrong character’s head during key moments for the other character. And oh my gosh I loved the twists this took for its characters and the complexities it added. I just love all the characters and I don’t know how I want this to end because I’m cheering for all of them (with a few exceptions). I’m really looking forward to diving into the third and final book soon.
Last year while I was studying for the bar, I read Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian. I really loved the book, but also had no recollection of it because I was studying for the bar. And since the third book just came out, I reread Ash Princess this month and then read the sequel, Lady Smoke. And just oh my gosh these books are amazing! Ash Princess follows Theo, the princess of a conquered country who has been kept by the conquering force as a prisoner and tortured to keep her people downtrodden. But when she is forced to do the unthinkable, Theo decides to fight back. These books go some really unexpected places, and I just love how brilliant and driven Theo is. She is willing to sacrifice everything for her goal, and she does. And while she has emotions like any other sixteen-year-old girl, she has iron control over them and she acts for her head every time. The world is also really interesting, and like I said the plot takes some really interesting twists and turns. At this point I’ve finished the third book, and while I’m not talking about this until next month, this series is one I’d love to go back and reread from the beginning knowing what’s coming. If you haven’t read these books, I highly recommend them.
After that, I read the sixth Expanse book, Babylon’s Ashes by James S. A. Corey. A lot of this book felt like fall-out from the events of the last book. There was a lot of political maneuvering and planning and then finally a big battle. We get to see Holden play the mediator again which is fun because he’s bad at it. Some pretty big important things happened in this book that I won’t spoil. But on the whole, it was just an okay book. There were honestly too many point of view characters, characters who were very minor players in previous books and rose to the level of point-of-view characters in this book. Some of them it was cool to see their viewpoint, but on the whole it felt like just too much and it became hard to follow. I’m not entirely sure I’m going to continue with this series, because I can’t get any of the rest of the books on audio from the library, and I’m not sure I care enough to either buy the audiobooks or invest in reading them in Braille. I might just switch to the TV show at this point. I don’t know. We’ll see.
When the lockdown hit and I needed some literary comfort food, I started rereading Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic books. In March I read the first two, Sandry’s Book and Tris’s Book. Did I momentarily forget that the fourth book in this book is a plague book, and now I’m on track to read a plague book in the middle of a pandemic? Yes. Yes I did. Will I read it anyway? Probably. These books have been all-time favorites for a while, and they held up on reread, which is fabulous. They’re just so much fun and full of such great meaningful relationships, and I love them. I also love Tamora Pierce’s Circle world way more than her Tortall world. It’s so detailed and rich. I loved rereading these books, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the series soon.
Finally, I read the second book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, The Drawing of the Three. I enjoyed this more than the first book. It was way more coherent, story-wise. There was also a female main character. Yay! Unfortunately, I’m not really comfortable with King’s representation of mental illness in this book, and his treatment of women still isn’t great. I’ll probably keep reading this series, but not with a ton of enthusiasm. (Spoiler alert: I’m really just in it to get to the talking pink train I remember in the third book.)
And that’s it for March. Have you read any of these books? Do you have any other reads I might want to check out during quarantine?
December also means it’s time to look back at the books I read in November. I read ten books in November. Four of them were rereads. A lot of them were pretty short books that I just blew through in a single day. It was sort of a weird month in terms of how fast I read, because when my parents were visiting and when I was home for Thanksgiving, I didn’t get much reading done because I wanted to actually interact with people instead of just hang out in my room reading. But in the couple weeks in between my parents’ visit and Thanksgiving, I just churned through a ton of books. On the whole, I was really happy with what I read this month.
I didn’t read too much in September. Given that I was unpacking and organizing my new apartment and learning my way around my new neighborhood and also D.C. and then starting a new job and also working on revisions for my book, this isn’t at all surprising. But I finally got my hands on the third book in The Expanse series, Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey, and now that I have a little more time on my hands, I’m going to give individual book reviews a try again.