Ruth Sadelle Alderson

I read 110 books in 2025, which averages out to just a fraction more than two per week. If you want more, shorter recs, I kept up an ongoing Bluesky thread where I recced things as I read them. My impression of this year was that I stopped reading romance novels and started reading thrillers instead, but when I looked at my list, I did still read a bunch of romance novels, but most of them weren't good. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.


Top 13 fiction books/series I read in 2025

The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson was absolutely engrossing. I enjoyed the combination of supernatural horror, women's rage, and horse culture. Content notes: ritual murder, terrible men, grief/mourning, all kinds of pregnancy things, mysterious supernatural being.

Third Time Lucky by Aurora Crane is a completely delightful m/m grumpy cop whose previous partners both cheated on him/sunshine military pilot who's always been straight before romance novel. There's food and bed sharing and a very close relationship before they have sex.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan is an engrossing and queer novel about an author and the history behind her, her pseudonym, and the things she's running from. I recommend it! It pairs well with Once More from the Top, below.

Of Time and Of Seasons and A Striving After Wind by Norma Johnston are a YA duology about a large, artistic family in New Jersey in the first year of the Civil War. I have no idea if they're good if you didn't read them when you were a child. I did, and I loved revisiting them. I find them fairly fluffy if melodramatic at times, but a bunch of content notes: offscreen rape of a character with diminished mental capacity due to a childhood traumatic brain injury, offscreen other attempted sexual assault, judgy Christian community, more God than I remembered in the second one, extreme lack of thought about enslaved people.

Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer is a delightful, fun book about a teenager on a seastead in a near-ish future world. She has adventures and bargains with people and saves the day. My sci fi book club all enjoyed it and would read more about the character and the world. It was originally separate stories that have been spliced together, and there are a few details that didn't quite get smoothed out in the editing process.

Prince and Assassin by Tavia Lark is a genuinely good m/m fantasy romance. An assassin is sent to infiltrate the prince's household and assassinate him, but they fall in love instead. Plus, there are magical giant cats. It's a good time! Content notes: blood magic coercion, past murder.

Once More from the Top by Emily Layden is an excellent book about a Taylor Swift-ish singer-songwriter. The inciting incident is that her teenage best friend's body is found in a lake 15 years after she disappeared, and the story gives us the story of what happened then and the music career interwoven. I lived deep in the world of the book the whole time I was reading it. It was in the suspense/thriller category in the library catalog, but it isn't really that kind of book. There is a mystery, but that's not what it's about, and Layden does a great job weaving it all together.

A Killing Cold by Kate Alice Marshall is an excellent protagonist with an unremembered past, her fiance's super-rich family, and just the family and three servants at a mountain retreat thriller. I fully stayed up too late reading it and there were elements that were vivid enough that they kept popping into my head later. Content notes: genre-typical violence, past child danger.

The September House by Carissa Orlando is an excellent haunted house horror novel. It starts out very funny - Margaret is not leaving her house just because the walls bleed and the ghosts become active in September - but gets darker as it goes along, both as the supernatural elements intensify and as we learn more about Margaret's past. Content notes: domestic violence, murder, supernatural evil.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi is so fun! It's funny and not too realistic and my sci fi book club and I enjoyed it a lot. There are cats who are spies, unionizing cetaceans, and jokes about Spotify's level of evil. Be sure to read the bonus story at the end, which is also very funny.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh is so good! The main character is the head of the magic department at a boarding school, so there's great world building and dealing with the everyday work of a school. I found it delightful. Also, funny and queer. It's British, and I'm sure there are some jokes and references I didn't quite get because I'm not intimately familiar with the British school system. Content notes: demons, past death, teenagers in danger.

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera is a really good a podcaster stirring up an unsolved case where the main suspect, who is the protagonist of the book, doesn't remember what happened novel. I liked that it was also funny. First line: "A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I'm buying a chicken." Content notes: murder, terrible men.

This Girl's a Killer by Emma C. Wells is an enjoyable thriller about a woman serial killer who kills terrible men. I read a handful of thrillers about women killing terrible men this year, and this is the one I liked the best. It could have used a smidgen more copyediting, but I read the whole thing in one day. Content notes: murder, terrible men.


Top 5 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2025

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks was one of my choices for my general interest book club this year. As a group, we mostly liked the historical parts and had some quibbles with the framing device. I enjoyed reading it but had a lot of questions about what it had to say. One of the stated values of the book is that it took a mixing of cultures to make the book the book is about (the Sarajevo Haggadah); then the historical parts are all dramatic (we never saw people just using the Haggadah) and variations on the Jewish experience of we thought we were safe and then they tried to kills us. I thought about that a lot. Content notes: varying kinds of historical antisemitism/wars/violence.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys had really interesting worldbuilding, but the pacing was a little off and I didn't love the ending. I also found it super interesting that she didn't explain any of the Jewish elements - just assumed you would get it. I thought a lot about the worldbuilding element of watersheds as the base unit of political entities.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll is one of those books I found it hard to leave. It's a very good, feminist, queer, intense story about women in the 70s in the path of a serial killer. I also ended up thinking about it a lot more after I read This Book Will Bury Me, below. Content notes: terrible men, difficult families, period-typical bigotry.

The Widow on Dwyer Court by Lisa Kusel is a page-turner that needed more setup for the ending, but it's one where I thought about it a lot because of my complaint about the basic premise of the book. The protagonist Kate is an asexual (she learns the term "sex averse" partway through the book) erotic romance writer married to a very sexual man who travels for work. Their deal is that he can have one-night stands while traveling, but then has to come back and tell her all about it for her to use in her books (sometimes she gives him assignments). That would be fine, except that she can't write sex scenes without hearing about his experiences and using them. It would be one thing if the book was like, this is how this one person does things, but the book's position is that an asexual person couldn't possibly write sex scenes just from their own imagination. That's not how that works??? I promptly thought of at least four tweets/Tumblr posts about asexuals writing sex scenes to counter that. Boo, terrible representation, did she do any research beyond googling for baseline definitions of sex averse versus sex repulsed?

This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead is a thriller about true crime internet sleuths investigating murders told from the point of view of one of the sleuths setting the record straight about what happened. I don't know how much I liked it, but it was a page turner, and I kept thinking about it mostly because it made me think about and contrast it to Bright Young Women. Content notes: grief/mourning, murder, danger.


The author whose entire oeuvre I read in 2025

I read or reread all of Natasha Pulley's books this year. I started with The Mars House, which I loved and which my sci fi book club read at the beginning of the year. It has sci fi, climate change, immigration, a ballet dancer, queer romance, arranged marriage, linguistics jokes/references approved by a linguist friend, a character learning how to be part of a powerful family, plus mammoths, all as a very good story.

Then I reread The Watchmaker of Filigree Street so I could read the sequel, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, which I hadn't read before, and I loved both of them so much. Everything I want to yell about is a spoiler, so I'll just say, AAAAAAAHHHHH, FEELINGS!!!!

I next reread The Bedlam Stacks. I didn't have quite as many feelings and it's a little slower, but still good. It's more of an adventure. Everything I remembered about it came from the last 25% or so of the book.

I hadn't read The Half Life of Valery K before because I thought a book set in the Soviet Union in the Cold War might be too grim. It was pretty grim (and with an only partly happy ending), but also completely engrossing. I could not put it down and I wasn't ready to leave it at the end. It's probably the most haunting of her books. It requires all kinds of content notes: Soviet state violence, deliberate murder, human experimentation, radiation poisoning and its effects on everything from the landscape to children.

Then I reread The Kingdoms, which is still very good. I remembered the happy ending and forgot how rough (emotionally for characters, not the writing) the middle is. But aaaahhhh, the happy ending! I have a lot of feelings about it. Content notes: death/disappearance of people in different timelines, war-related violence, off-screen/past sexual coercion.

Finally, I read The Hymn to Dionysus, which I had to wait to read until it was actually released. It's so good. Gods, politics, queer romance. It was adorable and intense and I love how much the main character loves babies. Content notes: suicidal ideation, PTSD, death.

Here is my definitive which is best for which situation ranking: The Mars House is the most straightforwardly enjoyable. I have the most feelings about The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow. The Half Life of Valery K is the most intense. The Bedlam Stacks feels the shortest and is also the most point A to point B to point C storytelling. The Kingdoms is the one that reads most like a mystery. The Hymn to Dionysus is the most magical. Anyway, if any of them sound good to you, I highly recommend her work. The other thing I will say about her books is that reading a bunch of them all at once made me see how much she writes variations on the same relationship dynamic. If you read one of hers and dislike the dynamic, you might not like the others.

I read 85 books in 2023, which is about two-thirds as many as I read last year. If you want more, shorter recs, I kept up an ongoing Twitter thread where I recced things as I read them. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.


Top 11 fiction books/series I read in 2023

Major Bhaajan series (Undercity, The Bronze Skies, The Vanished Seas, The Jigsaw Assassin) by Catherine Asaro - This is a very fun sci fi in space series about a woman who was in the army but is now a PI who also leads her looked down upon people. It's a spinoff from the Saga of the Skolian Empire, but you don't have to read that (or remember anything about it if you have read any of it) for this to make sense. Also, you can skim a lot of the technobabble. My mom also read them and was irked by the gender politics of the world; they make more sense if you know that they're part of the established Skolian Empire, which Asaro started publishing in the mid-90s. Content notes: genre typical violence, somewhat of a military is good vibe.

Before She Finds Me by Heather Chavez - This is a really good thriller with alternating points of view between a pregnant assassin with a moral code whose husband took a job without telling her and a woman whose daughter was shot (but not fatally). Content notes: gun violence, murder.

Alias Emma by Ava Glass - This is a very well done action thriller about a spy taking an asset across London in one day - without getting caught on any of London's cameras. It would make an excellent movie.

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin - This is the sequel to The City We Became, which was one of my best books of 2020. Jemisin originally intended this to be a trilogy but made it a duology instead, so you no longer need to wait to read the whole story. I loved everything, but also cared absolute most about the Manny/Neek romance. Content notes: eldritch horror, real-world racism and injustice.

Wild Massive by Scotto Moore - This book is ultimately a little forgettable, but it is also a super fun read. If you have watched or know about any long-running sci fi/fantasy TV series (Supernatural fans, I'm looking at you), you will probably enjoy the meta of it all. This was a sci fi book club choice, and people's responses ranged widely from loved it to couldn't finish it and included everything in between.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley - This is a very enjoyable book that plays with alternate history and time travel and is also queer. I loved it and when I was thinking about what I read this year that was definitely going on my list, this was one I immediately thought of. It also helped me develop my theory that "genre bending" in the description of a book actually means "this is a very specific type of story, but telling you the specific kind is a spoiler." Content notes: death/disappearance of people in different timelines, war-related violence, off-screen/past sexual coercion

When the Sparrow Falls by Neil Sharpson - This is more or less a thriller, and also funny. It's set in a future repressive anti-AI state in an otherwise benevolent AI-governed world, and has one of the funniest navigating bureaucracy scenes I've ever read. Content notes: repressive state violence.

Lay Your Body Down by Amy Suiter Clark - The book cover calls this "a novel of suspense," which I disagree with. This is a solid mystery in a small town with a megachurch and a former member of the church both investigating and confronting her own past. Content notes: all kinds of harm to women and girls in that kind of environment

First, Become Ashes by K.M. Szpara - This is a completely compelling queer story. The worldbuilding and the place of kink within it are much better done than in his first book, which I read two years ago and still occasionally think about. I loved the ambiguity about whether or not the magic was real. Content notes: cults and all kinds of physical and sexual abuse, including rape. It also has some Harry Potter references, which made me twitch. Szpara is trans and in the acknowledgements, he talks about fandoms, not necessarily creators/original stories: "To Drarry but not to JKR."

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - I loved this book. This is another one that immediately came to mind when I was thinking about this list. I thought Tesh did such a good job of putting the reader in the character's worldview, the worldbuilding was interesting, and parts of it were funny even inside a serious story. The rest of my sci fi book club disliked both the main character and everything else I liked and thought worked well, so it may or may not be your thing. Content notes: all kinds of fascism related horrors

This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel - This was a completely engrossing story. It did a good job building the characters and their stories, and I did not see the ending coming (in a good way). Content notes: a cult, self-harm as performance art, death.


Top 5 books/series I read and then thought about a lot in 2023

Godshot by Chelsea Bieker - This was so well-written, and I got completely absorbed in it. It is also about the sexual assault and forced pregnancy of young teenage girls (the protagonist is 14) in a cult in a drought in central California, and I kept thinking about it after I read it.

Adrift by Lisa Brideau - This is a thriller involving amnesia set in a climate change-devastated near future. It starts out a little slow, but I kept thinking about it after I read it and I enjoyed the building a new life aspect of the story. Content notes: climate change, storms, genre-typical danger.

Constance by Matthew FitzSimmons - A big part of why I kept thinking about this is that I had a lot of complaints about it that I was prepared to share at book club, and then everyone else liked it. The plot had potential, but what I found most annoying about it was that the author seemed to smugly think his ideas were new and revolutionary, which they are not.

Captive Prince trilogy (Captive Prince, Prince's Gambit, and Kings Rising) by C. S. Pacat - This was on my best books of 2021 list. This year, I watched all of Black Sails and wanted to read some other twisty plotting, and ended up rereading this whole trilogy twice. I still love it, and reading it closely twice means I started to see that some elements of both the worldbuilding and writing style start to fall apart if you think about it too hard. Content notes: Ancient Greece-style slavery, consent issues, war-related violence, explicit sex scenes.

Cover Story by Susan Rigetti - This is an Anna Delvey-inspired story that's built around diary entries, emails, etc. I don't know how much I enjoyed reading it in the first place, but the final reveal at the end recontextualized the parts I thought were boring enough to skim and made me keep thinking about it.


Top 2 nonfiction books I read in 2023

"You Just Need to Lose Weight" and 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon - I sat down on a Saturday morning planning to read just the beginning of this and finished the whole book by lunch. I found it much more accessible than her first book, while still being grounded in facts and pointed toward justice. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in social justice and/or the science behind weight. I do have two criticisms: 1. There's a heavy reliance on the implicit bias tests, which in my understanding are not fully scientifically validated as useful. 2. The last chapter is dedicated to pointing out all the other kinds of discrimination that are alive and well in our world today, which is great! Except she leaves out antisemitism, which seemed like a bad thing to leave out.

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan - I was glad I bought a copy of this instead of trying to get it from a library. It's very good and also very intense, so I needed time to recover between chapters and it took me almost four months to read. I greatly appreciated her voice as a fan of TV wrestling with some of the same issues I've been working through, and her turns from thoroughly reported facts to conversational opinions. I do think she lets Damon Lindelof off too easily - sure, he says the right things now, but has he changed his behavior? Content notes: All kinds of interpersonal, institutional, and systemic injustices, harms, and crimes.


The authors I read the most in 2023

There wasn't anyone whose books I read in large amounts this year. I read four or six books by a few people, and they're worth mentioning because they're representative of the kind of easy reads I read a lot of this year.

Jessie Mihalik - I read a total of six of her books in two trilogies. They're sci fi romances with political intrigue and space adventures. I liked the Consortium Rebellion trilogy better than the other one I read. The content notes for these sound very serious, but they're mostly just adventures with space ships. Content notes: genre typical violence, past intimate partner violence, results of nonconsensual human experimentation.

Annabeth Albert - She was one of the authors I read the most in 2021. This year I read the four books in her Hotshots series, which are m/m romances about smoke jumpers in Oregon. I continue to appreciate the diversity of relationship dynamics in her books. One of these deals with disability issues, including sexual functioning after a spinal cord injury, in a way that seemed respectful to me. Content notes: grief/mourning, injury.

A.M. Arthur - I read four of her books this year, and I've read several others before. She writes basic contemporary m/m romances, which is sometimes all I want to read. Content notes: explicit sex, various past traumas.

I read 240 books in 2021, which is not quite one and a half times as many as I read last year. I managed to read so much because I'm a fast reader, I gave up on doing anything but read this year, I read a lot of fast-read romance novels, and I read significantly less fan fiction than usual. Only ten of those are books I reread (two of them for book club reasons), which continues the trend of the last few years of reading more new books. The large number of books I read this year again made it difficult to narrow down a small number of the best ones, which is why this is a long list. I've provided content notes where I remember them; as always, feel free to comment or message/email me if you want more information.


Top 10 fiction books/series I read for the first time in 2021

Note: I made a choice to take a handful of things I greatly enjoyed out of this list because they were written by people in the later section of authors I read most, so you can look there for more recommendations of things I particularly loved.

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave - I found this in a thriller/suspense category of the library's ebook selection, but I would call it more of a family mystery/drama. I thought it was really well written, and it has one of the best last lines I've ever read in a book, in that it's an understated line that also sums up the entire theme of the book.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson - You can travel to any of the parallel worlds close enough to reach only if your counterpart there is already dead. Cara can travel to all but eight. This was a fascinating premise and a good story, and the only thing I was disappointed about was that I read it on my own because it would have made for some really interesting discussion with my sci fi book club.

Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell - Super tropey and super enjoyable m/m space romance. It does a particularly good job with having the key relationship conflict be well done/non-annoying miscommunication where both of them think in truly good faith that they are communicating and understanding clearly. In terms of the non-romance elements of the plot, the if you like you'll likes for this are Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Content notes from the author.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern - This is such a good fairy tale-ish book about the nature of stories. Last year a friend said it paired well with The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which my book club read last year, and it was interesting to think about that as I read it. This was a fairly polarizing book for my sci fi/fantasy book club - people either really liked it or really didn't.

Captive Prince trilogy (Captive Prince, Prince's Gambit, and Kings Rising) by C. S. Pacat - This is an amazing slow burn enemies to lovers m/m romance trilogy set in an Ancient Greece-ish world. (While not an entirely accurate comparison, think Queen's Thief but make it gay.) There were something like six places where I thought, "This is where they have sex, right?" before they finally did, and I deeply enjoyed the slow burn of it all. The writing is excellent, and the friend who recommended it to me and I had an entire phone conversation where we just exclaimed back and forth about our favorite parts. Content notes: Ancient Greece-style slavery, consent issues, war-related violence, explicit sex scenes.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid - I knew the instant I finished this book that it was going on this list, and in the months since then I still haven't figured out how to describe it in a sentence or two. It's a literary masterpiece without being pretentious. It does actually live up to its hype. If it sounds at all interesting to you, it is absolutely worth reading. The only disappointment is that it's the author's first book so I couldn't immediately go read everything else she's ever written.

Barbed Wire Heart by Tess Sharpe - In some ways The Girls I've Been, which I also read and enjoyed this year, is the better book, but this is the one that stuck with me more. Harley McKenna's father Duke runs a significant portion of the criminal underworld in North County (a fictionalized Del Norte County). There are rumblings of the power shifting and it's time for Harley to execute her plans to take down her rivals - those inside her father's organization as well as the ones outside. This is a very intense book that involves a lot of scheming, plotting, and violence. Content notes from the author.

An Ember in the Ashes series (An Ember in the Ashes, A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm) by Sabaa Tahir - This was an enjoyable and deeply satisfying fantasy series. It's a fairly standard high fantasy story, so if you like those at all, you will probably like this. Instead of a fictional Europe, it's set in more of a fictional Middle East setting (the author is Pakistani-American). It's apparently technically a YA series, which surprises me because it read much more like books for adults. Content notes for all kinds of war and death.

Magic in Manhattan trilogy (Spellbound, Starcrossed, and Wonderstruck) by Allie Therin - I read a handful of m/m romance series this year that were at heart basically the same story, and this was one of the most enjoyable ones. Two men, one with magic, one who protects the world from dangerous magic, work together to save the world and also fall in love. It takes place in New York City in 1925, so there are also speakeasies and bootleggers and it's all around a good time. It's not an exact analog, but I would be 0% surprised if this started life as Merlin fanfic. Content note: explicit sex scenes.

And Then There Were Four by Nancy Werlin - This is an excellent YA thriller. If you've ever read The Grounding of Group 6 (if you haven't, don't), this is basically that but much better written, modern, and in an urban setting. Five teenagers - and then four - find themselves in danger and come to realize that their parents are trying to kill them. There's a good mix of diverse characters, including some queer characters and a character with chronic health problems who both uses a cane and has to figure out what to do about her meds while they're on the run. This is another book I knew was going on this list as soon as I finished reading it.


Top 7 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2021

Family Man by Heidi Cullinan and Marie Sexton - This m/m romance novel is not what I would call a particularly good book; however something about the emotional journey of it stuck with me. I just really enjoyed Vinnie.

Mother May I by Joshilyn Jackson - I read this because I loved Joshilyn Jackson's previous suburban housewife thriller. This one is still fairly well written, but I had a much harder time with the suspension of disbelief required for the plot, and I wasn't sure how I felt about how one of the things at the end comes about. However, she was clearly wrestling with an interesting idea and I've thought about it off and on since I read it. Content notes: an infant in danger, discussion of past sexual assault.

When All the Girls Have Gone by Jayne Ann Krentz - Jayne Ann Krentz's books are bad as romance novels and mediocre as suspense novels and I don't recommend them unless, like me, you sometimes need a palate-cleansing mediocre suspense novel. I keep thinking about this one, though, because of one of the side characters. One half of the couple in this book is an activities director at a retirement home who runs an activity for people to write their memoirs. One of the women in the group starts with a chapter about her pillar of the community husband, and then ends the chapter saying that she murdered him. The main character tries to tell her that although embellishing might make the story more interesting, this is something their children will read and they should write the truth. Later, she runs into the older woman's adult children and forewarns them about this element of their mother's memoir. The children ask her if she says how she did it because they always wondered; their father was abusive and they were pretty sure their mother killed him. That scene was hilarious for the way it contradicted the character's expectations, and I keep thinking about it.

Gravity Is The Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty - This was a very strange book. I don't know if I think it was good, but the oddness of it definitely stuck with me.

Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty - In some ways, this is fairly standard for a Liane Moriarty book. I think what made me keep thinking about it was the excellent, and frequently funny, use of outsider points of view.

Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah - This is set in a dystopian city where women are required to take multiple husbands and have as many children as possible. The book is about women who live outside the system and provide intimacy without sex - for a price. It's an interesting premise, and I thought a lot about the implications of the ending. Content notes for all the kinds of things this variety of dystopia implies.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead - A friend recommended this to me in an email thread where we were talking about thrillers and mysteries, which is probably why I had no idea what the explanation for the mysterious things was until it's revealed in the book. I later heard someone else recommend it by noting what the explanation is as part of the what the book is about, and I might have had a different reaction to the book if I'd known what that was. This book feels more middle grade than YA, and it has a lot of short chapters, which is probably what kept me reading even when I wasn't sure if I liked it. I'm still not sure I liked it, but I have kept thinking about it.


Top 2 non-fiction books I read in 2021

The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Dr. Jen Gunter - This is on this list, in part, by comparison; I read two books about menopause this year and found the other one greatly annoying. This is a straightforward walk through both the science and the history of the cultural meaning of menopause by a gynecologist who is herself going through her menopause transition. I like that her entire project is to provide accurate medical information and that this book really tackles the patriarchal/cultural reasons why we might not have/get accurate information. There are two strong caveats about this book: 1. Skip the weight section. She does a good job of decrying the medical practices of refusing to treat fat people and suggesting weight loss instead of addressing patients' actual issues earlier in the book, but this section is not good. I don't think she's skeptical enough about weight and nutrition science (which is, after all, both deeply complicated and frequently conducted through a lens of anti-fat bias). She also clearly has some disordered eating practices that she feels totally comfortable just putting out there as healthier than they used to be. 2. It takes her until almost the end of the introduction to note that the book primarily applies to cis women because the only science we have about menopause at this point is about cis women. If you are a person with a uterus who is trans/nonbinary and/or taking testosterone, this book may not be affirming and/or helpful to you.

The Path of Blessing by Rabbi Marcia Prager - I read this for a class led by my congregation's cantor. I both learned a lot and found it thought-provoking. I appreciated the way it led our class to talk a lot about gender, and especially appreciated that our cantor specifically pointed out that the book is from the 90s and we have a more expansive idea of gender now. This may not be interesting to you if you're not Jewish.


The 4 authors I read the most in 2021

All four of these authors write primarily or exclusively queer romance novels. (I told you I read a lot of romance novels this year.) This whole section has a blanket content note for explicit sex scenes.

Annabeth Albert - I read two of her series in full and some other miscellaneous books for a total of thirteen of her books. I particularly enjoyed the Out of Uniform series, which has a good mix of tropes, although you do have to be in the mood for "the military is good actually" attitudes to read them. The order of her books doesn't really matter, although Tight Quarters does make more sense if you've already read Wheels Up.

KJ Charles - I read seventeen of her books, one a novella co-written by Jordan L. Hawk. That's more than I would have guessed off the top of my head. I greatly enjoy KJ Charles; however, her books have a higher percentage of plot than I'm sometimes looking for when I want to read a romance novel, and I had the feeling I'd read them fairly haphazardly based only on what library ebooks were available. She's written a variety of kinds of books - mysteries, magic, country house parties - so there is probably something you will like if you're interested. My favorites were probably Any Old Diamonds, A Seditious Affair, and Band Sinister. Content notes for the first two of those for kink.

Jordan L. Hawk - I read my way through the Whyborne & Griffin series for a total of fifteen novels and novellas, one co-written by KJ Charles, in one long rush of needing to know what happened next. I really enjoyed it as a story that had an appropriate ongoing raising of the stakes (I recommend not reading about later books until you get there so you're not spoiled for the escalations), a really solid relationship, some very funny bits about how Widdershins is totally a normal place really, and a woman archeologist who is completely delightful.

Cat Sebastian - I read fourteen of Cat Sebastian's books this year, and the only reason I didn't read more is that she hasn't published more yet. The logo on her website says both "fall in love" and "eat the rich," which is a good summation of the values of her novels. I love that all of her books are about queer characters - even in the m/f books, at least one half of the couple is bi. I don't know why, but A Gentleman Never Keeps Score is the one I liked most (I read it more than once). A Delicate Deception was enjoyable for both the unconventional elements of the endings and a hilarious bit about one character's mother. I also found The Queer Principles of Kit Webb especially fun and charming.

Hello Dreamwidth friends. I was very excited to write that post about Bridgerton last week because it was the first thing I'd written in a very long time, so I thought I would write a miscellaneous recent things entry as a way to practice writing something, anything.

I am now the only unvaccinated member of my family! I am very much looking forward to it being my turn for the vaccine. I would like to hug my family again. (Or anyone really; the closest I've come to touching another human being in the last year was getting a flu shot.) My family has been having Zoom lunches every other week for most of the last year, and we're all ready to transition to close, in-person meals. We did have one distanced outside lunch, but outside is hard here - most of the year it's too hot, too cold, or so full of allergens I can't breathe. On the upside to this whole pandemic thing, I had the easiest allergy year I can remember last spring and it was really nice to stay inside in the air conditioning all day all summer.

I have baked a lot over the last year. I have always said I would bake even more than I did if I had someone else to wash the dishes for me, and it turns out that not feeling like I have to give up some of a limited amount of free time to wash dishes is a second best. I've decided that at this point, I am very much an experienced baker, and I can trust my instincts about recipes. I've had the experience more than once now where I've read a recipe, followed it exactly despite my doubts about the proportions, and then found that the final result would have been better if I'd followed my instinct about how to adjust it. I did, however, realize that I needed to start taking notes about recipe variations because I won't actually remember what I did from time to time. They also need to be useful notes; there's a bread recipe that has water amounts in two different places that might be different things I tried or amounts that need to be combined, and my cobbler recipe has the word "less!" with an arrow pointing at the sugar but no notes about how much less.

Also in pandemic-related news, I got very sick of dealing with my hair so I bought clippers and cut it all off. I'm not sure exactly how much I like it as a look, but I'm so relieved to have it off my neck and out of my way. I keep joking that it's basically lesbian haircut #17, and I was highly amused that while there were some straight people who left positive comments on my Facebook post about it, most of the early comments were from other queer people. I also had a very interesting sense when I first did it of feeling very intensely queer (in a "not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you" sense), probably because this is the most visibly queer my look has ever been.

Speaking of queer people, I have now read all of Cat Sebastian's Regency romances. The Regency Impostors series was fine. I loved The Turners and the Seducing the Sedgwicks series! I actually want to go back and reread A Gentleman Never Keeps Score even though I read it within the last month. I got all of them through libraries (if your library system has access to books on Hoopla, they have a lot of hers), so if you like Regency romances about queer people, I recommend her stuff. I will also take any and all recommendations for other good similarly historical romance novels about queer people.

In terms of fic reading, I am very much between fandoms, and so I've spent a significant portion of the pandemic reading MCU fic, because it's one of those fandoms where I know just enough for it to make sense but don't care about that much. Somehow the pairing I have decided is the one I want to read a lot of fic about is Clint/Bucky. Bonus points to anything with (a) falling in love/competing/flirting while shooting, (b) therapy for one or both of them, and/or (c) d/s-y dynamics. If you have favorite Clint/Bucky or other MCU fic, I would take recs.

( Spoilers )

I'm invested enough now to read the third book, but unless it's absolutely amazing, I probably wouldn't read more of Tamsyn Muir's work. I do recommend reading the books as ebooks, because then you can easily satisfy your curiosity about the meaning of the eighty bajillion death-related words by clicking on them for a definition. I genuinely thought I had a very broad vocabulary, and yet apparently I do not, at least when it comes to death.

I read 109 books in 2019. This is just short of twice as many as I read last year, and that made it very hard to narrow down to a small number of the very best of them. Only seven of the books I read this year were things I reread.


Top 7 fiction books/series I read for the first time in 2019

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert - Fascinating YA story with incredible worldbuilding around fairy tale ideas in a way I haven't seen done before.

Divine Cities Trilogy (City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles) by Robert Jackson Bennett - Totally fascinating, engaging trilogy about a world that's been shaped by a mixture of Gods and imperialism.

In the Woods by Tana French - This book made me feel incredibly anxious in a way that felt all out of proportion with what was actually happening to the characters. I wasn't sure how much I enjoyed that experience, but it did show how good the writing was, and I then read all six of her other books within six weeks.

The Last Day of Emily Lindsey by Nic Joseph - Very good mystery/suspense/thriller. If you can read it unspoiled, I think it's extremely effective. Message/email me if you want the content warnings.

Foolish Hearts by Emma Mills - Totally delightful YA novel. Mills's novels are so much fun, I liked that this one had queer characters, and her stuff about fandom is so great.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - I'd heard how good this is before, and I finally read it this year for a book club. Lovely, magical story.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker - This book was so well written and is really hard to describe. I was especially impressed with her ability to evoke the feeling of junior high without making it feel cringy to read.


Top 5 fiction books I read and then thought about a lot in 2019

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert - Yes, I have this on both lists. I thought about it constantly for about two months after I read it. I later read two other books that sort of reminded me of it and made me think about it again because this was the best of the three.

The Power by Naomi Alderman - This is such a good, clever, enjoyable, and surprisingly funny book. I read it for a book club, which meant I thought about it a lot so I could talk about it, and I've thought about the themes of it off and on since then. Content notes for power and its abuses, up to and including murder and sexual assault.

The Witch Elm by Tana French - This book is very well written and a sharp portrait of privilege. I also found some of it, particularly at the end where we find out the answers to the mystery, really stomach turning. I've thought about it off and on since I read it.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple - In a lot of ways, Where'd You Go Bernadette is the better book, but this is the one I couldn't stop thinking about. The story was so interesting and strange, and I love stories that take place over the course of one day.

The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir - I'm not sure how believable I found the plot of this (not so much the what had happened to the characters, but how Essie navigates her way out of it), but it was extremely satisfying, and I thought about it a lot. Content notes for sexual abuse, fundamentalist Christianity, reality TV, and all the manipulation and abuse that comes along with them.


Top 3 non-fiction books I read in 2019

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum - This was an entirely riveting book, particularly considering it includes a bunch of reviews of hers I'd read before. I found it a slow read in a good way where I kept stopping to reflect on what she was saying. I could spend, like, a year writing commentary about every essay; it's that thought-provoking.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez - This is a well-sourced (there are literally 70 pages of source citation end notes), well written, and absolutely infuriating look at the way we don't do research on women and don't use it when we do. My biggest criticism of it is that she's an economist, so she really thinks in jobs-economy terms where I think one of the solutions is to uncouple surviving, and beyond, to thriving, from employment. We are in agreement that another one of the solutions is for men to step up and do their fair share of the currently unpaid care work/domestic labor that is (STILL) done primarily by women.

Educated by Tara Westover - I couldn't put it down, but take note that it's very harrowing. It was also an interesting contrast to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which I read for a book club and found frustrating because I thought Vance never got to the point where he realized just how messed up his family was. Westover is writing from a point where she knows.

I read 64 books in 2018, which means I read more than my goal of one book a week. Only six of them were books I re-read, which is my lowest re-read percentage in years.

Top 5 fiction books I read for the first time in 2018

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust - Queer YA fairy tale retelling. It's a really well built story, there's queer identity discovery that's organically built into the larger story, and the solution of the ending was everything I wanted.

Far From the Tree by Robin Benway - If you like crying over feelings about families, adoption, and learning to let people in, this excellent YA novel is for you.

The Passion of Dolssa by Julie Berry - Historical YA about a female mystic and the people trying to protect her from the Inquisition in 13th century southern France. Totally engrossing, and heavy on strong female friendship.

The Good House by Tananarive Due - Small town supernatural/horror that I couldn't put down. I've thought about the ending off and on since I read it in September. Content notes for all kinds of supernatural, physical, and sexual violence.

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge - Really excellent Victorian era science-related YA murder mystery with a potentially supernatural element and feminist themes.

Top 2 non-fiction books I read in 2018

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood - This memoir made me laugh out loud, cry, and marvel at her use of language.

The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English by Lynne Murphy - Hilarious, informative, and well-sourced. I also highly recommend her blog, which I've been reading for over a decade.

Top 5 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2018

The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne - I finished this book and thought, "Huh, weird." It was very well-written and engrossing, and it had some really interesting ideas in it that I keep thinking about. Content notes for murder and sexual violence.

The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos - One of the alternating viewpoint characters is a naive teenage girl being groomed for abuse by a predatory teacher, which is obvious to the reader but not the character and very uncomfortable to read. The book, like her others, is very well-written, and I did keep thinking about it.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko - I thought it was really well written, and I liked the ending, but I didn't enjoy reading it. It was very unsentimental and pretty grim in parts. I have thought about it a lot since I read it.

The Last Hundred Years Trilogy (Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age) by Jane Smiley - I read this entire trilogy, which follows a family through a century, in a week. I read the first one for my general interest, not sci fi, book club, and I was not expecting the last book to include a realistic, grim climate change apocalypse theme. I've thought about that aspect, as well as the various family member's stories, especially Henry's, off and on since I read it.

A Gift Upon the Shore by M.K. Wren - This is an older post-apocalyptic novel, which means the apocalypse is nuclear warfare instead of climate change. I'm not sure I quite bought the unquestioning nature of the premise of the story, but I did think about it a lot and we had an interesting book club discussion about it.

I read 55 books in 2017, which means I averaged about a book a week, which is about what I've been trying to do. (I belong to two book clubs, so one book a week means I read two book club books and two books I want to read a month, approximately speaking.) In an unusual turn of events, only 10 of those were things I was re-reading. (My re-read percentage is usually much higher.)


Top 5 books/series I read for the first time in 2017

Cross My Heart and Heart of Glass by Sasha Gould - Fun historical intrigue YA.

This Adventure Ends by Emma Mills - YA, lots of dialogue, a mix between things that will make you laugh and things that will make you cry.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng - Incredible literary novel about family and grief.

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker - Excellent historical fantasy novel about a golem and a jinni who become friends.

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson - Fascinating contemporary religion, technology, and fantasy novel set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.


Top 5 books/series I re-read in 2017

The Glass Lake by Maeve Binchy - Still my favorite Binchy novel.

Dancer of the Sixth by Michelle Shirey Crean - One of my all-time favorite romantic sci fi novels.

Sable, Shadow and Ice by Cheryl J. Franklin - My favorite fantasy novel built around a Tarot-style card deck, and well worth the reread.

Quest for a Maid by Frances Mary Hendry - A children's historical novel I've loved for years.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng - Kind of a cheat to have this on both lists, but I did read it more than once months apart and it really is that good.


Top 5 books I read and then thought about a lot in 2017

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin - There are a lot of ways this book didn't work for me, and yet I've thought about it off and on.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - Excellent post-apocalyptic novel that I keep thinking about largely for the connections between the characters.

Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst - Both the topic and the structure made this hard to stop thinking about.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley - I wasn't sure I liked this at first, but I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I kept thinking about it even after I reread it.

Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias - This needed at least one more editing pass and was not what I expected from the blurb at all, but there was a lot to talk about in it, and I have thought about elements of it off and on since then.

I picked up Cross My Heart off of either the new books or the shelving area at the library. and I enjoyed it so much that I then checked out Heart of Glass, the sequel. These are straightforward historical YA (no fantasy elements), full of intrigue and politics and women making themselves powerful. They're pretty fluffy, and they're very fast reads. (I read the first one in a few hours one afternoon, and the second one in the first half or so of a day of jury duty.) They center around Laura, who becomes involved with the Segreta, a secret society of women trading in secrets in 16th century Venice. Some of the romance is a little overblown, but not in a too horribly annoying way. I really enjoyed the machinations of the secret society of women, and Laura is a likeable protagonist. Mostly, they're just fun, and I recommend them if they seem like the kind of thing you might like.

I now belong to two book clubs, and one of them read The Circle by Dave Eggers as this month's book. I disliked it so much that I had to stop reading several times to say, "I hate this book," out loud even though I live alone and there was no one to hear me. I also tweeted about it as I went along. (The irony is not lost on me.) One of my friends in an email said she read the Wikipedia summary and asked what I didn't like about the book. My answer got long, so here it is edited into a post. Note that this includes spoilers for the entire book all the way through the ending.

( Spoilers/Ranting )