Ruth Sadelle Alderson

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 loved Santa Olivia so much that I promptly put in an interlibrary loan request for the sequel, Saints Astray. Again, I don't have a lot to say about it. If you liked Santa Olivia, you'll probably also like Saints Astray. If you didn't read Santa Olivia, Saints Astray might stand alone, but you'll miss the backstory. ( Review/mild spoilers )

I read about M+O 4EVR in a 50books_poc review that made a point not to spoil it. I went and read the summary at Amazon so I would be spoiled, and then put off reading it because I thought it was likely to be the kind of YA novel that would make me cry. ( I didn't cry and other spoilers. )

Last year when I asked for lesbian fiction suggestions, one friend highly recommended Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet. I'd heard of Tipping the Velvet, but it never sounded interesting to me, and inlovewithnight had just read it, and the things she didn't like about it (spoilers in her post) made me think I wouldn't like it either. Then the friend who recommended it gave me a copy for my birthday, with the note that even if I ended up not liking it, she thought I should own it.

I took the book - and nothing else to read - with me when I went for jury duty in March, and read the first 48 pages while waiting to be called to a courtroom. Then it went back into the stack of unread books. When I was on vacation in August, I saw a recommendation for it in an independent bookstore that said the sex scenes were hot, so yesterday I finally went back to it and flipped through to find just those parts. One of them is hot, and the others are okay.

I didn't like the book for basically the same reasons I didn't think I was going to: first, because I don't like literary fiction, and secondly, because I don't like historical fiction about queer characters based on real history. I think it's the literary fiction aspect that was the most annoying one to me in this book; nothing in the world can make me care about that much detail about oyster-parlours. Yesterday's skim of the rest of the book somewhat allayed my fears about it as historical fiction; the bad things that happen to Nan aren't quite as dire or as historically-bound as I would have been anxious about. I did pretty much laugh at the ending, though, in which ( spoilers. )

Anyway, a lot of people have loved Tipping the Velvet, and the writing in the part I read wasn't bad in a technical sense, so if it sounds like your sort of thing, you might like it. If you dislike the kinds of things I dislike, you probably won't like it.

It's been almost a year since my friend gave me the book and I've made a sincere effort to read it, so I feel justified in getting rid of it now. If anyone wants my copy, let me know. If no one claims it in a week, it's going on PaperBackSwap.

The Art of Detection is the last of Laurie R. King's Kate Martinelli books, and thank goodness. I really don't think I could have handled another one, but King is a compelling enough writer that her books are hard to put down.

( Spoilers/Review )

With Child is the third Kate Martinelli mystery. Given my experience with the last two, I saved this one for a Saturday morning when I could sit down and read the whole thing in one go without staying up past my bedtime.

( Spoilers/Review )

When I asked, both here and on Facebook, for lesbian fiction recs, Laurie King kept coming up as a suggestion. I don't read very many mysteries, although I read more when I was a teenager (my mother for a very long time read primarily mysteries with some literary fiction and poetry thrown in), but I was willing to give it a try.

The first two hundred pages of A Grave Talent are very good. It's an interesting mystery being worked on by interesting characters, primarily Kate Martinelli and Al Hawkins. The one quibble I have with that part of the book is that Kate's partner is referred to only by name - Lee - for 190 pages before King finally reveals that Lee is a woman. I find that kind of deliberate keeping the reader in the dark annoying, but I'm willing to let it pass in this instance since the book was written in 1993; I'm willing to accept that the world was a different place in the early 90s and this is one of the ways it was different.

I did not think as much of the next hundred and fifty pages. We find out who the murderer is on page 198, and the rest of the book is occupied with actually catching said criminal. But before we get to that, there is a whole bunch of artist as precious special snowflake nonsense, and yes, I do mean to be that derisive about it. ( Spoilers/Details )

All of that said, the mystery was very good, and I will probably read the next book.

I'd really like to read more lesbian fiction. I will take any and all recs, from any genre of professionally published work or fan fic. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you already know my tastes, but just in case you don't, a quick rundown of my recent-ish experience with lesbian profic: loved Malinda Lo's Ash and Huntress (review forthcoming) and all of Naomi Kritzer's work; hated Gerri Hill's The Killing Room and Karin Kallmaker's Substitute for Love; and am struggling my way through SteamPowered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories (although to be fair to the collection, I don't really like steampunk prose). Any suggestions?

I try to avoid spoilers for books I already know I want to read, and I knew I wanted to read Malinda Lo's Ash the first time I saw it on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. I did read the opening comments of at least two posts that said, "Everyone keeps saying they wish this was longer, and so do I." I'll say that too, and I have some ideas about how it could be longer.

But before I get to that, I will say that I loved this. It's essentially a Cinderella retelling, ( Spoilers )

I did buy the book (yay for multiple Barnes & Noble gift cards!), so if anyone wants to read it, let me know and you can have my copy.