Lady Business

In a change from my usual plans for this time of year, this is not a goals post. This is in fact an anti- goals post, because I am officially declaring 2021 a year of reading anarchy.

Like most of the people I know, 2020 was not a good year for my ability to read anything but fanfic – shout out to the Scum Villain's Self-Saving System section of AO3 for getting me through the last half of the year! As for 2021... Well.

*gestures at Brexit* *gestures at pandemic* *gestures at executive dysfunction issues exacerbated by all these apocalypses*

Instead of doing my usual and setting numeric goals so that I can analyse my reading stats, I am officially saying FUCK IT. 2021 is the year where I'm just gonna read whatever and see what happens. If that means that I read nothing but mid-2000s BL manga/speculative fiction anthologies with brightly coloured covers/queer sff novellas from last year/this stack of lesbian detective novels, then so be it! 2021 is not a year for trying to push myself harder, it's a year for recovering.

(I am definitely going to come back and capslock about whatever it is I read though – I haven't finished a full review since... Maybe June? And it's been weird!)

To round off this post, I'm going to ask a question! If you're recovering from a reading slump, do you have a specific book/genre that you turn to? If you have recovered from a reading slump (congratulations!), what was the book that broke you out of it? For me, it was Two Rogues Make a Right by Cat Sebastian. Yes, I did have a little cry about finally being able to read again, and then another cry because I forgot that having feelings about fictional characters and seeing aspects of yourself represented in fiction was a thing that happened! Feelings are the worst, why did I miss those. ... Whereas Two Rogues Make a Right was exactly what I needed to read at the time, because apparently "the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one" and "we are trying our best to respect each other's needs, but also we're terrible at communicating" are just my bulletproof tropes.

Happy new year everyone! Stay safe and take care of yourselves! ♥

I don't know how anyone else's reading is going this year, but every time I look at a book, my brain does this:

1. Wasted Talent Volume 1: We are the Engineers by Angela Melick [Jump]


2. How to Bullet Plan by Rachel Wilkerson Millet [Jump]


3. A Witch's Printing Office Volume 1 by Mochinchi and Yasuhiro Miyama [Jump]


4. The Kingdom of the Gods by In-Wan Youn, Eun-Hee Kim, and Kyung-Il Yang [Jump]


5. Spy x Family Volume 1 by Tatsuya Endo [Jump]


6. Drifting Dragons Volume 1 by Taku Kuwabara [Jump]


7. Pulp Friction by Julie Anne Lindsey [Jump]


8. Slippery Creatures by KJ Charles [Jump]

( Read more... )

Reading Goals

Reading goal: 24/80 (8 new this post) Prose: 7/20 Nonfiction: 3/12
Netgalley: 12/50 (3 new this post)
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 9/40 (1 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 4/20 (1 new this post)

It's incredibly weird to think that the last time I posted Eight Book Minimum – and when I wrote most of these reviews, and when I set my reading goals for the year – we weren't in lockdown. I don't have any profound interpretation to add to that, I just needed to acknowledge for myself that I read these books in 2020, even though it doesn't feel like it because March was a long decade. I hope that all of you and yours are safe out there!

1. These Savage Shores by by Ram V and Sumit Kumar [Jump]


2. Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage: Star Diaries by Jon J. Muth [Jump]


3. Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey [Jump]


4. Wasted Space Volume 1 by Michael Moreci and Hayden Sherman [Jump]


5. Hell's Paradise: Jigokurako Volume 1 by by Yuji Kaku [Jump]


6. The Promised Neverland Volume 1 by by Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu [Jump]


7. Kokkoku: Moment by Moment Volume 1 by Seita Horio [Jump]


8. Ascendance of the Bookworm Volume 1 by Miya Kazuki, Suzuka, and You Shiina; translated by Carter Collins [Jump]

( Read more... )

Reading Goals

Reading goal: 16/80 (8 new this post) Prose: 4/20 Nonfiction: 1/12
Netgalley: 9/50 (3 new this post)
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 8/40 (3 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 3/20 (0 new this post. ... Who am I?!)

A modern-day girl gets whisked away to a strange land where she is sacrificed to a water dragon god!

In the blink of an eye, a modern-day girl named Asahi is whisked away from her warm and happy home and stranded in a strange and mysterious world where she is sacrificed to a water dragon god! What plans are in store for her, and what will happen when she comes face to face with this god?

A young boy named Subaru comes to Asahi’s aid, but despite his help, Asahi must endure a test of survival! Will she be able to make it out alive, or will she end up being sacrificed?

Rei Toma's The Water Dragon's Bride crossed my twitter feeds a fair bit last year, and it turns out that it's for good reason! Our Heroine, Asahi, is a normal little girl living in the modern world, until she's dragged into a fantasy world where people worship a humanoid water dragons as a god, up to and including ritually sacrificing a maiden every year to be his "bride." You see where this is going.

( Read more... )

[Caution warning: human sacrifice, child abuse and neglect, attempted murder, imagery of suicide, torture, floods]

Esther is a stowaway. She's hidden herself away in the Librarian's book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her--a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

I don't think that I can review Sarah Gailey's Upright Women Wanted without mentioning "Between the Coats," an essay that Sarah Gailey wrote about queer tragedies and realising that they didn't have to be inevitable. The question at the heart of that essay – Do you know that queer people are allowed to have happy stories? – is one that I felt like I could see beating at the heart of Upright Women Wanted.

Esther is on the run. She's smuggled herself out of the town where her father executed her girlfriend, hiding in the back of the librarian wagons in the hope that the librarians – perfectly appropriate women who travel around distributing government propaganda – could maybe help her be the person society expects her to be before being herself gets her killed. ... She wasn't expecting the queer gun-slinging librarian spies, okay!

( Read more... )