July Reading Wrap Up

I am exhausted! Never again am I going to try to force myself to read a book every day. I actually ended up with more than 31 books total in July, but I wish I’d given myself a bit of grace. I’m feeling a little bit burned out. That said, I discovered some absolutely fabulous novellas, and a contender for my book of the year, so I think it was worth it in the end.

Air quality has been horrible in Minnesota this month. I’m lucky enough to be far enough south to avoid the worst of it, but this has been a month that I’ve minimized time outside. Thankfully, we managed a single lake weekend that we squeezed in before it got bad. I continue dodging my partner’s insistence that I learn how to water ski.

My brother and his partner came and visited, which was wonderful, and I got to spend far too much money on some carpentry work that is beyond my current capabilities – or my desire to spend so much time on a very tall ladder. I love my century home, and I wish the upkeep were a bit simpler. My mother always told me I’d have been better off in a condo, and its at times like these that I wonder if she was right.

Longform Reviews

With 33 longform reviews this month, I will avoid listing all of them here. However, here are my 9 top picks from this month! And honestly, narrowing it down this much was brutal, there are plenty of 4.5 star books that ended up not making the cut to keep this section somewhat reasonable.

• The Iron Below Remembers mixes alternate-history academia with the pressures of dating a superhero. So many footnotes! Brilliant, but a very specific vibe.
• Penric’s Demon is beloved for a reason. A Himbo gets possessed and makes friends with the demon.
• The Salt Grows Heavy featured bespoke prose that elevated body horror (not usually my favorite) to something really special. Think of it as a terrifying vocabulary game!
• A Taste of Honey did some great things with alternating timelines and the choices that define your life.
• The Last Contract of Isako is the newest Fonda Lee! A lackluster first half, but she swung for the fences halfway in and won me over.
• North Continent Ribbon strings together six short stories into a coherent novella following a civilization’s relationship with technology.
• The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain should have won the Hugo last year, and does an excellent job at layers of theme and thoughtfulness.
• Cinder House should win the Hugo this year (but it won’t). Honestly I thought this was a pretty weak slate of novellas over all, but Cinder House is an exemplar of what fairy tale retellings should be
• Party of Fools is a silly little book that grabbed my heart and ran away. It’s so stupid, but it worked so well. I smiled the whole time.

Mini Reviews

Secrets by Jordan Castillo Price (Psycop #4)
This was my least favorite in the gay paranormal police procedural series so far, by a wide margin. It focuses more on Victor’s relationship with Jacob, which is easily the weakest part of the series. It didn’t help that I found the crime’s solution to be rather obvious from the beginning. I’m excited for where the series heads, as Victor is going to confront the trauma of his ‘education’ at Camp Hell in book 5. This entry dulled the excitement for the series a little bit, but I’ll be coming back for sure. It was a great ‘turn my brain off’ book that helped me recoup from the relentless pace I set this month. 

Entangled with You: The Garden of 1,000 Grasses by Aki Aoi
It’s unfortunate that I found Entangled with you to be perfectly mediocre. Aoi has a phenomenal touch when it comes to art. Their facial expressions for melancholy are gorgeous. Unfortunately, I think they are far better as an artist than a writer. This is a collection of shorter stories with one longer narrative of a man and a horned humanoid falling in love. A trend throughout this collection was Aoi rushing to heavy emotional beats without making room for the small moments that build up attraction and belief in relationships. Characters are constantly having conversations about their relationship, but we don’t see the relationship itself. It felt a little bit like watching The Bachelor, in that way. The shorter work had more coherent structure, but there was nothing here that I found particularly noteworthy, which was a disappointment. 

Stray Cat Strut by RavensDagger
I picked up this LitRPG after seeing it recommended in some Pride Month posts. I generally found it an unsatisfying book. The concept is that aliens don’t want to personally protect earth from a violent menace that rivals their own power, so they pick humans who become ‘samurai’ able to buy advanced technology to kill aliens. These kills give them points to pay for better equipment and body upgrades. Unfortunately our protagonist leans into explosives, which means it will get compared with Dungeon Crawler Carl, and this book really paled in comparison. Repetitive combat, uninspiring dialogue, and the book didn’t achieve the sense of wonder and exploration that I was hoping for (where is the browsing through the millions of catalogues to spark interest in what you might pick up in the future!). This entire book was the main character’s first day as a samurai, which possibly had something to do with my problems, but I don’t think the book needed to spend this much time on a single alien invasion. I probably won’t continue, but we’ll see. 

Journals of Evander Tailor by Tobias Begley
I’m on a bit of a mindless reread kick for my audiobooks. This is a nostalgia pick (even though I didn’t read it that long ago), and I know it well enough that if I doze off while listening, it isn’t a huge problem. Returning to this magic school fantasy, I see a lot of Begley’s writing flaws, especially in the first books. Awkward phrasing, words repeated too near each other, lack of depth. But I love a magic school, and these are the books my little gay self wanted as a child. He’s a favorite author of mine, and his writing has made leaps and bounds over the years.

Grandpere’s Ghost Swamp by Rachel M. Marsh
This was a story following a Cajun child of restaurateurs as she navigates her grandfather’s death (and haunting), the financial troubles of her parent’s restaurant, and learning about the loss of land in Louisiana. There were some good bits, such as educating about the difference between Creole and Cajun. It’s clear that Marsh has a deep love for her home’s endangered ecology, great food, and the meaning of friendship. However, it felt just a little forced at times: as a teacher, I can tell you no kid is saying “Career day is on the line.” The story never quite fell into a natural rhythm, and I could see Marsh stitching together plot points. This isn’t uncommon in middle grade books, but the best ones aren’t quite so obvious about it. 

I thought it was an interesting choice to focus so much on land loss – to be clear, very important – but not engage with other environmental issues facing Louisiana. When Basil went on a shrimping boat, why on earth don’t you bring up the growing dead zone? It’s a bigger issue facing shrimpers than land loss, and would be incredibly relevant to the restaurant business. Finally, it felt like Marsh was going out of her way to avoid engaging with race. There’s no discussion about how the worst damage from Hurricane Katrina happened in Black neighborhoods, or the relatively common idea in the 9th Ward that the levee was blown intentionally to protect richer and whiter communities (whether or not this is true is irrelevant, because it’s definitely something Basil would have heard of with how much she thinks about the Hurricane in this book). Race doesn’t need to be a central focus of every book set in New Orleans. However, there were so many moments where it felt obvious that race would come up, yet Marsh seemed intent on avoiding even tangential discussions of how race manifests in the issues she wants to write about. It was notable and disappointing. Overall this is a fine enough middle grade book, but I wasn’t as impressed with it as I hoped. I may still pick it up as a companion novel for my Nitrogen Pollution research unit with 6th graders, but it didn’t hit the brief I was hoping for that either.

Bingo Check In

Unsurprisingly, this was a great month for r/fantasy’s bingo with how much I read! The Novella’s card is complete, as is my Achillean card. I’ll keep updating and slotting in reads as I come across books I like more. However, with eight months left until April, I’m not going out of my way to read things just to fit my bingo cards yet.

Points of Interest

After loving Cinder House, I got it in my head that I want to pick up some more retellings. Every Book a Doorway highlighted Misery’s Wife, which is a) based on a fairy tale I don’t know, b) seems to do some interesting things with the tone of fairy tales, and c) focuses on familial love, which I’ve been craving after this month. 

Poetry from the Plague Pit by Matthew Cheney was a really interesting essay on influential Gay authors in the Horror scene in the 80s and 90s. I’ve not read anything Joel Lane, and only one by Clive Barker. As I’m slowly picking up the historical pieces of queer speculative fiction though, they are both authors I want to explore.

It’s tough that I find a book that will rip my soul out, but I’m curious if Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurt will fit that niche. It follows a modern grim reaper. Thank you to Books are the New Black for putting it on my radar. 

I finally read some Cassandra Khaw, and then shortly after saw this review from breathesbooks about Find Me Where it Ends, and I now have such a tall stack of Khaw books I want to read that it isn’t funny.

DNFs

Only two this month. One was Finna, a multiverse story set in an interdimensional Ikea. I just couldn’t grab onto the characters and found the whole thing rather tired. I was supposed to be invested in the two leads’ recently ended relationship, but I found them both exhausting.

I also didn’t finish The Floating Republic by Rebecca Campbell, which was going to be a magazine novella for my readathon. Unfortunately, this got interrupted by boat weekend, and I didn’t have much audiobook time. I do very much plan on returning to it, though maybe by converting it to my e-reader. There were enough moving pieces that the audiobook wasn’t quite the right format for me.

Upcoming Reads

I’m really trying not to put too many demands on my reading for next month. I’m very excited for The Girl With a Thousand Faces, but I’m worried I’m not in the right headspace for it. Library holds wait for nobody though, and I don’t want to deny other people the book just because I’m dragging my feet.

Cut and Run and The Open Era are both (hopefully) going to be relatively low effort genre-fiction books (thriller and romance respectively). Villain is a sequel I’ve been desperately waiting for, and the library hold for the audiobook just came up today! Finally, Chai and Charmcraft is another library loan that’s about to come due, forcing my hand on it. I’m very excited for it, but 500+ page tomes feel a bit intimidating after spending a month reading nothing longer than than the width of a finger.