lobelia321

* 234 books (absurd)
* 66 by men writers (28%) (a considerable increase from 2019 when I had gone off men writers completely)
* 37 rereads

My categorisations:
* 19 fantasy, 17 SF, 14 Memoir, 24 How-tos
* 56 romance (of which most in the last 10 weeks of the year; I didn't think to parse into m/m, het, contemp, historical, etc but may do anon)
* 14 children's (I didn't do a count of YAs)
* 60 non-fiction (26%)
* 10 landscape theme books: Rainforest (was last year's landscape)
* 1 in Italian, 1 in French, 20 in German, 27 in translation

My reading challenges:
* The 'Something Bookish' Reading Challenge
* The 52 in 52 Challenge
* Rereading challenge
* Diverse Reading
* 12 Books of Holiday Romance
* Exploring Romance
* My own Diversify Your Decades

* I added 10 new countries to my quest of 'reading the world'.

Authors I read most by:
* KJ Charles (mostly rereads)
* AJ Demas (mostly rereads)
* Ursula K. Le Guin (mostly rereads)
* Lisa Henry and JA Rock (the Lords of Bucknall Club series)

Best five:
* Non-fiction:
Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns
Siddharth Kara, Modern Slavery
* Fiction:
Lee Welch, Mr Collins in Love
AJ Demas, The Boy Bride
Robert Jackson Bennett, Leviathan series

This post is brought to you by the comments section of

tamaranth where it initially appeared.

muninnhuginn

Well, there we went: 2025 all done and dusted.

Somehow got through it in (mostly) one piece.

Healthwise, I'm down to twice-daily tablets until mid-November. The CT scan from December showed no signs of cancer, but apparently I fractured a vertebra in the interim between that scan and the one a year prior. Who knew? Evidently, not me. Stanley continues to gurgle away, mostly unproblematically.

Workwise, I went back in May--and plan to continue until the end of this year. And then cash in my pensions (meagre as they are), and spend them in my (potentially brief) retirement.

Homewise, we added a bath in the middle bedroom/dressing room, had a new path paid along the front of the house, and had the chimneys repointed (and partially rebuilt) before they crumbled away. Hopefully, we've also fixed the leaky roof too.

Beastwise, no new cats, no new chooks, no bees. I've just let my membership of the beekeepers asociation lapse, tho' I could rejoin if I decide I am going to set up a beehive, but it seems less likely. We're about to celebrate the two-year anniversary of acquiring the Smolly Molecule, still the best thing to have happened in 2024. Shadow continues to be Shadow: a little bite-y, somewhat scrarchy, but still as loveable, and acquring ever more complex educational toys to keep him occupied.

So, this year? I'd like a little more energy to get throuygh what I need to do--declutter, sort finances, retire--and want to do--read more, make more, travel more, get bees(?).

Current Mood: still here, still grumpy

muninnhuginn

December 2025

Read:

Novels:

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (K)

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper (K)

Shorts:

I'm ranking 5 coffees from beyond this world(literally)

Non-fiction

What the moral problem of Large Language Models tells us by Stewart Hotston
AI’s Innate Bias Against Animals by Tse Yip Fai & Peter Singer
‘They didn’t de-extinct anything’: can Colossal’s genetically engineered animals ever be the real thing? by Patrick Greenfield
I grew up in the world’s coldest city without central heating. Here’s what the world can learn from us by Yangang Xing

Watched:

Megson (online)
Buildings in the Landscape (online)

osprey_archer

Looking at my New Year post for 2025, I see that my plans were (1) plant a garden, and (2) compost. (1) I achieved in a small way: I planted herbs, I ate fresh herbs, I planned my guest meals around being able to airily comment “I need some chives” purely in order to waltz out onto the patio and clip the chives fresh. (However, the non-herb parts of the garden grew outside of my control, and I must do a better job with them in 2026.)

I was stymied in (2) by the small size of my yard and the voracity of the local wildlife, who enthusiastically dug up anything I buried to compost. However, a friend has started to compost, so I save my compost things in the freezer and bring them along to add to the heap whenever I visit, so at least it’s all getting composted eventually.

The New Year’s Resolution I actually kept was one I stole from

genarti later in January, to read one book from my physical To-Read shelf each month. I achieved this! A couple of months I even read two! One month I DNF’ed the book, but upon consultation with

genarti we agreed that, as this also achieves the ultimate goal of removing the book from the Unread Book Club, it still counts.

I also managed to keep pace with any new book purchases as they came in, meaning that the number of books in the Unread Book Club is in fact smaller. So I’ll be continuing with this resolution. At the present rate, I should empty the To-Read shelf in 2027. Naturally I will celebrate with a trip to John K. King Books and return with a massive pile of books with which to restart the Unread Book Club.

Otherwise, my goal for this year is not to start any new reading projects. Read at whim! I do want to continue the Book Log Challenge, because it is a good way to remind myself of authors I’ve been meaning to read more books by… but it often happens that I’ll be reaching the end of a particular list and really just don’t feel like reading anything by the last author or two.

That is fine! I can simply decide to strike that author and move on! The list is an aide-memoire, not a binding document. Maybe I should change the tag to Book Log Frolic rather than Book Log Challenge.

…Having said this, I was all set to strike Project Hail Mary because I keep looking at the book and going “Naaaah don’t feel like it,” but then

rachelmanija posted it was one of her favorite books of the year, so… Okay, I have to at least pick it up. Give it twenty pages or so to grab me. That seems only fair, right?

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

End of Event
We have revealed creator names at the main 2025 collection and the 2025 Madness collection. (Reveals seems to be working as intended - fingers crossed!) The New Year's Resolutions 2026 collection will shortly open for posting. The structured parts of this year's event are over - but you can keep posting recs at

yuletide and commenting on works to let their creators know you enjoyed them.

Please comment!

Please check that you have commented on any gifts you received - you can search on your username at the Yuletide 2025 collection, or the Yuletide Madness 2025 collection, or check your own personal AO3 gifts page. We understand not everyone can comment immediately due to late-December commitments or unforeseen events, but please comment when you can to acknowledge the gifts you requested. Comments and kudos on other Yuletide works are also very welcome.

Thank you from mods and team
Thank you to everyone who took part in Yuletide 2025: writers, requesters, betas, pinch hitters, community coordinators, chatters, hippos and the hippo pool.

Thank you from mods to the tagmod team: these are the assistants who research and process tags, proofread announcements, brainstorm author questions, contribute specific fandom knowledge, check stories, and discuss how to solve problems.

We look forward to running Yuletide again in 2026!

And now
There's a reveals post up at the participant community, if you want to chat about your writing process now that you can.

New stories can be posted to the New Year's Resolutions 2026 collection.

Feedback
As always, general feedback is welcome!

This year, we increased the nominations allowance from 4 fandoms to 5 fandoms. Since that worked okay, we anticipate continuing that next year.

We introduced a limited Do-Not-Match system. That was manageable so we're interested in repeating the same process next year - though it's possible it could grow beyond our capacity, so we don't want to guarantee it indefinitely.

We changed the deadline time and the reveals times. Those changes were based on mod availability, and it was really helpful to us to have multiple mods awake at the point of deadline and reveals. We'll need to base future deadline and reveals times on that priority, but since that isn't the only factor making deadlines and reveal times effective, we're interested to hear feedback too.

Next Yuletide, we may review franchise rules to make sure we're being consistent and fair. We may also specifically review rules for music videos.

As requested by a participant, we will also be adding a section to our rules on AO3 listing what you can expect from the mod team’s communications and conduct. We have had an internal Code of Conduct for several years but agree it would be helpful to share a public version.

Again, feedback on these or other topics is also welcome.

Thank you for helping to make Yuletide 2025 a wonderful event.

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! After my family had banged the new year in with pots and wooden spoons and I had blown the conch, my niece asked if our neighbors were still talking to us. I could say truthfully if not causally that some of them had moved away.

It snowed all morning, a postcard mantling of soft-spiraled white over shriveled leaves and evergreen spikes while the occasional crow called out of sight. I would be fine with a little ice age if we could get one without the jet stream falling to pieces or some other climatic monkey's paw.

My movie-watching abilities have been on the fritz for some weeks, but I was so surprised by the internet existence of the 1965 RADA Romeo and Juliet that I watched it on the spot. If it was the autumn term, Clive Francis was nineteen years old and his blond prettiness looked it and his voice is instantly recognizable for its dry and slightly harsh, easily sardonic timbre that he would learn to make even more of. It's better than some of his line readings; it should have made him a natural Mercutio on the John McEnery model, but his inarguable good looks evidently fixed him for Romeo. He must have worked overtime against them in order to accumulate his next decade's catalogue of trash fires: it's a little unfairly funny how much more familiarly he flashes out with humor or distress than when falling archetypally in Elizabethan Liebestod. I would love to know more about his student roles, how fast anyone identified his gifts for cynicism or weakness that played so well against a sensitive face and diamond-cut diction to produce some spellbinding fuck-ups. (I can find the information for Gareth Thomas, who was the same production's Benvolio.) It's such an odd record even to have in the first place, 16 mm, intermittently cinematic and abridged. Were there others made and this just the one that escaped containment? If not, what made this particular production of a play which must have been in constant rotation at a drama school worth memorializing? It is exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to need a time machine for and some very tolerant friends.

We are eating Chinese food with my brother for New Year's Day. I am in happy receipt of a late-arriving birthday CD of Torchwood: Sigil (2023) and a twelve-days-of-Christmas present of my very own paperback of Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace (1998).

Current Music: Wednesday, "Reality TV Argument Bleeds"

sovay

That was the year that was no good. I kept up with my website and my presence on AO3 and slept terribly and spent six days in hospital.

I published one new piece of fiction, although a meaningful one to me:

"Hyperboloids of Wondrous Light" in Not One of Us #81, January 2025.

Very little new poetry:

"The Ghost Summer" in Weird Fiction Quarterly Winter 2025: Ghosts, April 2025.
"The Burnt Layer" in Not One of Us #84, September 2025.
"Below Surface" in Not One of Us #83, June 2025.

One reprint:

"Twice Every Day Returning" in Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Stories 2024 (ed. Sheree Renée Thomas), Psychopomp, December 2025.

Nearly as much fanfiction as all of the above, counting the fills I transferred to AO3 and the one I left in place:

"Fall from the Sky" (Repeat Performance), January 2025.
"Floriography" (M*A*S*H), January 2025.
"A Good Accountant, All Right" (I Walk Alone), January 2025.

Very much less than I had wanted for Patreon:

Cover Up (1949), January 2025.
Decoy (1946), January 2025.
Grand Jury Secrets (1939), February 2025.
Lost Boundaries (1949), February 2025.
A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962), February 2025.
Black Kitten Micro-Thon 2025 [Final Offer (2018), "Come Back Mrs Noah" (1977), "Contact" (1981), Other Other (2024), Once in a New Moon (1934)], February 2025.
"Poison" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1958), March 2025.
No Publicity (1927), April 2025.
A Bell for Adano (1945), May 2025.
City of Fear (1959), June 2025.
Ladies (2024), June 2025.
The Sea Wolf (1941), July 2025.
None Shall Escape (1944), July 2025.
I Won't Play (1944), August 2025.
The Gaunt Stranger (1939), August 2025.
The Perfect Murder (1988), August 2025.
The Hot Rock (1972), September 2025.
The Innocents (1961), September 2025.
Heat and Dust (1983), September 2025.
The Immortal Story (1968), October 2025.
Marooned (1994), October 2025.
Girl Stroke Boy (1971), October 2025.
Fear in the Night (1972), November 2025.
Enys Men (2022), November 2025.
Blind Spot (1947), November 2025.
Defence of the Realm (1985), December 2025.
A View from a Hill (2005), December 2025.

My major achievement of the last twelve months looks like not dying. More than one member of my family could say the same. Happy New Year. A healthy year, a more than endured one. Mir zaynen af tselokhes.

Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Through This Fire"

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

osprey_archer

1. Bought the Hummingbird Cottage.

2. Resolved to read a book from my TBR shelf each month. Happy to say I have kept this resolution! Also kept the sister resolution to read purchased books in a timely manner rather than add them to the TBR shelf to languish.

3. Moved into the Hummingbird Cottage.

4. Started work on my garden. This was not wholly successful - the already established mint has unfortunately completely gotten away from me - but I did manage to grow a nice array of herbs, and at least planted two cherry tomato plants, which I think got a little too much shade to flourish as they should. A beginning at least!

5. Learned how to cross stitch and completed MANY cross stitches. (Bsky thread with photos of my cross stitches.) Highlights include the Halloween cat, the fat red bird, and the unfinished trio of Puss in Boots. I have completed Puss Putting on Cape and Puss Putting on Boots but not yet Puss in Full Regalia with Plumed Hat… Then I needed some emergency Christmas presents so I ended up giving them all away and will need to begin the Puss in Boots trio all over again.

6. Finished the Newbery project! This has been either seven or twenty-five years in the making, depending how you’re counting.

7. Roasted a duck.

8. Made marshmallows! A friend sent me homemade marshmallows over a decade ago, and I’ve been chasing that homemade marshmallow high ever since.

9. All Christmas Book Advent, during which I read nothing but Christmas books during the advent season. Successful AGAINST MY WILL, as I attempted to break my vow on December 24, only to discover that the book with which I intended to break my vow started on Christmas Eve. Have considered this challenge for years so glad that I gave it a go, but have established to my own satisfaction that All Christmas Books is Too Many Christmas Books for me.

10. Picture Book Advent! In which I checked out 24 Christmas picture books from the library, wrapped them up under the tree, and opened one to read each day. I enjoyed this so much that I intend to make it a yearly tradition. Already planning to cross-stitch little Advent tags numbering 1 to 24.

gloriamundi

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: cheerful

sovay

Out of intolerable exhaustion, I may have slept close to twelve hours last night. The dreams I can remember were banally about a T station that does not exist in the middle of a salt marsh, much less have a sort of ferry situation for cars. Less fortuitously, our kitchen was abruptly deprived of water this weekend and the property manager has not yet sent a plumber to take a look at it. We have kept the taps faithfully dripping through the well below freezing temperatures, but as we have no control over the state of the pipes in the still uninhabited upstairs apartment, we are concerned. The last time something went wrong with the kitchen sink, half our pantry got ripped out. Have some links.

1. Following that meme about random geographic coordinates which assumes instantaneous transportation to the location with nothing but the objects currently on one's person, I rolled 28.36967, 80.57272 and seem to have been dropped in the middle of the Sharda River closest to the village of Majhaura in Uttar Pradesh. The good news is that it's south of the whitewater rapids and the rumors of man-eating goonch and when it's not monsoon season, it seems to have a relatively placid flow, albeit to the detriment of the surrounding communities it's been changing its course onto for decades. It's overcast, in the Fahrenheit forties, a little past seven in the morning. I am going to vote that I will be cold, exhausted, annoyed, and lose my shoes, but probably not drowned. As I know an extremely small number of words in Hindi and none whatsoever in Bhojpuri, it may take me a little while to explain the situation.

2. I had never heard of the Television Village:

This lack of formal training came back to bite the presenters multiple times. Hornby remembers being chastised by a producer for ruining "continuity" after getting a perm; Terry Jones of Monty Python fame tried to eat the studio's pet goldfish during an interview; and the whole production was put at risk when a Weetabix box that was being used as a prop to hold up scripts out of sight of the camera was accidentally broadcast, potentially breaching advertising rules. Numerous people involved with the station recall the broadcast being interrupted, only for it to turn out that a sheep had chewed through cable wires.

spatch who did public-access television and college radio in the Pioneer Valley around the same time nodded in enthusiastic recognition as I read selections out to him. I am hoping that my keyboard survives the spit-take of the Weetabix box.

3. I had no idea that steak tips were specific to New England. I wonder if that means my parents only started making them after moving to the Boston area. They always seemed to occupy an intermediate niche between kebabs and London broil.

4. Intrigued by a photo of Neal Ascherson, I vectored through his aunt Renée and discovered that a film I have wanted to see since grad school was rediscovered this summer. I had not been aware that The Cure for Love (1949) had actually ever been lost: I just knew it as the sole film directed by co-star and producer Robert Donat which never did me the courtesy of turning up on any of my streaming services or the free internet. If it made it to TPTV, fingers crossed for TCM.

5. How did I miss the existence of The Vatican Stole the Menorah and We're Going to Steal It Back (2025), a one-shot, dreidel-powered TTRPG complete with a Player's Guide for the Perplexed? Obstacles include some schmuck and the Popemobile, allies include space lasers and the Golem of Prague. I hope they make their end-of-year goal for the print edition.

P.S. I have just been informed of the existence of a bilingual Sanskrit–Greek stele from the third century CE. This is such a neat planet. I wish people would not make it so difficult to inhabit.

Current Music: Wednesday, "Townies"

juushika

Title: The Scorpion Rules (Prisoners of Peace book 1)
Author: Erin Bow
Narrator: Madeleine Maby
Published: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2015
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 390
Total Page Count: 555,850
Text Number: 2085
Read Because:

ambyr's post, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The children of peace are hostages of the world nations, held by the governing AI, doomed to die if their home nation goes to war. Our protagonist is prepared to face that death with dignity—until the newest hostage, from a rival nation, bucks all convention. I don't get on with YA as a rule, and so avoid it; I don't want to spend this review bitching about a genre that's just not for me, but when a book so perfectly executes what I wish the genre would do, my success with it speaks equally to text and its relationship with genre conventions.

The tropes are still here: snarky antagonist, love triangle, dystopia. But it's quality writing, and those tropes are balanced in, grounded by, a thoughtful consideration of worldbuilding and an unrelenting commitment to character and psychology. The scale is horrifying, the specificities localized and intimate; the romance(s) both indicative of and wholly overshadowed by the world; the depiction of torture, trauma, and PTSD thoughtful and realized with a fantastic use of repetition. This remains as iddy as the genre can & should be, but frankly it's better quality than most of the genre is, and so takes a great premise and actually does something with it.

Title: The Swan Riders (Prisoners of Peace book 2)
Author: Erin Bow
Narrator: Madeleine Maby
Published: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2016
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 556,230
Text Number: 2086
Read Because:

ambyr's post, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Despite that this is a different book than the first—changed setting, much-changed protagonist—my reactions are quite similar, finding and appreciating the same strengths. High-concept, speculative premise, and in the background-moving-foreground is an inconceivable scale; and, in the foreground, a focus on intimate social bonds, symbolic of and felt in the larger cultural context, grounded in a minute, exhausting focus on physical and mental trauma. It's iddy, with hurt/comfort vibes, but consistently well-written. I read these on audio, and look forward to revisiting them in print for a more considered experience. What a pleasant surprise it was to give this series a try.

juushika

Title: The Complete Web of Horror
Editor: Dana Marie Andra
Published: 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 555,460
Text Number: 2084
Read Because: seduced by the new books section, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: Web of Horror was a short-running horror fiction comic anthology, published in 1969-70, collected here in its entirety, including prospective issues that went unpublished when it folded.

"Strangers!" by Syd Shores (volume three, page thirty) is about a twink and a bear struggling to survive after crashlanding on a desert island. The twink is useless, and growing weaker every day, but the bear looks after him, feeding him wild game. Because! the bear is a vampire! and preserving the twink as a food source, feeding on him each night! After the twink finally fights back, rescue comes—but it's too late, the twink has become a bear/vampire, himself! (You can find this here on Archive.org.)

I highlight this story because it's delightful; the subtext really is that close to the text, the art reflects the innuendo, and it's well-paced and -plotted. But it's telling that I'd rather talk about one piece than the mammoth collection. The other standout is "Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog" by Frank Brunner (art) and Gerald Conway (story), unpublished in the original run, here in Volume 4, about a rebellious wife reverse psychology'd into dark magic invocations. And that's it. Plenty of the pieces are fine, most are tolerable, but this is more interesting as an artifact of its time than in the individual stories; a forerunner in horror comics, it has all the prejudices expected from the time period and speculative plots that are more spectacle than psychological, a Twilight Zone-y "wouldn't it be fucked if...?". I'm grateful for archival efforts like this one, but would only recommend this to ultra fans; I appreciate genre history but not Western comics, and I think you need to be big into both to get much from this.

Current Music: Vampires - Strangejuice

juushika

Title: The Heart of the Antarctic: Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-9
Author: Earnest Shackleton
Published: 1909
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 1310 (670+640)
Total Page Count: 555,165
Text Number: 2082-3
Read Because: cold boys, haters edition; ( where to find, for nerds )
Review:
The Nimrod expedition was the first Shackleton led, 1907-9, placing it directly between Scott's Discovery (on which Shackleton was a member) and infamous Terra Nova, and later overshadowed by Shackleton's also-infamous Endurance. Hate to say it, because I'm certain I'd find Shackleton, the man, super obnoxious, but he knows what the people want. This is some of the best curated, most satisfying expedition writing I've read, intentionally accessible to the layreader, incredibly corporeal and crunchy in detail, right down to descriptions of sleeping arrangements and food poisoning, to photos of people in their bunks or in drag, while still willing to skim elements that might be repetitive recounted in full. Kudos, I think, to his editor, as Shackleton's letters imply much of that curation and directness comes from an outside influence; and it's utterly absent in Dr. David's extensive sections, which make for a slow end to what's already a mammoth text. The various appendixes are skippable, although whenever these guys write about penguins it's always a delight. I read this immediately after Riffenburgh's Shackleton's Forgotten Expedition and appreciate the larger context, specifically re: social frictions that Shackleton understandably elides despite their significant impact on the expedition.

This expedition exists in intimate conversation with Scott's, and the tension between them is both petty and amiable. But what fascinates me is that Shackleton, too, almost died in his effort at the Pole; in fact, almost anyone who did significant man-hauling in Antarctica almost died, cutting corners and overextending themselves in this supremely inhospitable climate. The more I read, the more the death of Scott et al. feels not like bad luck but simply an inevitability: some sledging party was bound to freeze out there, and it was nearly this one.

pameladean

Our beautiful, goofy, adventuring Saffron cat is gone.

Here she is right after arriving in April of 2013.

Orange tabby cat standing on her hind legs in an armchair, playing with a cat dancer toy

Orange tabby cat standing on her hind legs in an armchair, playing with a cat dancer toy

Below the cut are more photos; then there's another cut before I describe her last day. Please feel free to skip that part if you don't feel up to it. She was very much herself and everything went pretty well, but it's still awfully sad.

( Read more... )

Below the cut is a description of her last day. Please skip if you don't feel up to it. There are also a few more photos of her exploring the room the University provided us.

CW for pet illness, death

( Read more... )

osprey_archer

I’m doing the Reading Meme one day early this week, as tomorrow is the last day of the year and therefore the day for the Year In Review.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I am freeeeeeeee of my vow to read Christmas books for Advent, and therefore… accidentally read one more book with Christmas in… Marilyn Kluger’s Country Kitchens Remembered: A Memoir with Favorite Family Recipes, about the farm kitchens she remembers from her childhood during the Depression, not only her own family’s but her grandparents on both sides. Like any good farm kitchen memoir, the book documents the different foods of each season, which means of course a Christmas chapter, but also chapters about the new peas of spring, the corn on the cob fresh cut from the stalk literally minutes before lunch, the frost-nipped persimmons brought in during the Thanksgiving grouse hunt… Good eating and good reading.

But then! Then I truly broke free with Ngaio Marsh’s Spinsters in Jeopardy! Set in summer in the south of France, Inspector Alleyn and his lady wife Troy co-star in a mystery featuring a drug racket run by an erotic murder cult. You know I love a cult! Also featuring their six-year-old son Ricky, a surprisingly well-observed child. A shocking number of writers of adult fiction couldn’t write a convincing kid to save their life.

And I also slipped in my December Unread Bookshelf book by the skin of my teeth: E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet. I got this soon after I read Five Children and It, then it languished for so many years that I forgot why I was putting it off, but as I read it I remembered: I find these children so stressful! They are forever doing things like “setting off firecrackers inside the house,” which is how they set fire to the old nursery carpet which results in the bringing in of the magic carpet.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Rumer Godden’s Thus Far and Now Farther, which so far is what I expected Elizabeth and her German Garden to be: a charming memoir about a woman in an isolated location with her children, her governess, and her vast army of underpriced labor making a charming garden.

What I Plan to Read Next

No plans! Only vibes! Okay, actually I do have plans, but I am contemplating if I ought to jettison them in favor of vibes. Maybe 2026 should be the Year of Vibe Reading? I have been trying to come up with a good New Year's Resolution...

osprey_archer

And Picture Book Advent draws gently to a close. A note for my future self: although traditionally Advent ends on December 24, I think it would be nice to have a final picture book for the morning of Christmas. (My sister-in-law’s large extended family does a BIG Christmas, so we’ve simply ceded Christmas Day to them and have our own little family Christmas later on, which leaves Christmas morning open.)

Because of the way the dates of Advent fell, I had only two books left to review. First, The Wee Christmas Cabin at Carn-na-ween, by Ruth Sawyer, illustrated by Max Grafe, a picture book version of a story I first read in Sawyer’s story collection The Long Christmas. After a lifetime helping out in one cabin after another, with never a home of her own, old Oona is at last driven from her final house on Christmas Eve… only for the Good Folk to build her a house, and grant her wish that every white Christmas hence, the hungry and the lonely will be able to find her home for succor.

A lovely story. Another solid example from Sawyer that the spirit of Christmas is “generosity” and not “copious evergreens.”

And second, The Christmas Sweater, Jan Brett’s new Christmas book this year! Theo’s Yiayia knitted an extremely gaudy Christmas sweater for his dignified pug Ari. Hoping to win Ari over to the cozy warm sweater, Theo takes her for a snowshoe in the woods… only for a fresh fall of snow to obliterate his tracks! But fortunately, Ari(adne)’s sweater caught on a twig near the edge of the woods, so they can follow the unraveled yarn back home.

From the dedication, it looks like one of Brett’s children married into a Greek family, and this book is an homage to that family connection. I particularly enjoyed Ari’s expressive face, and indeed all the dogs running around in the snow in this book.

juushika

Big delta in relative qualities here! Which mostly comes down to my preference for picture books to be numinous/wondrous and my desire for almost nothing ever to be funny. Anyway, interesting author; I don't expect to dig deeper but I'm glad I checked him out.

Title: Flotsam
Author: David Wiesner
Published: Clarion Books, 2006
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 40
Total Page Count: 553,745
Text Number: 2078
Read Because: saw this pop up a ton when looking at reviews of Tuesday, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: A wordless picture book about a boy who finds a camera on the beach and develops its wondrous photos. I bounced off of Wiesner's Tuesday, but this works for me. The art is more dynamic; there's more narrative than just a subversion of an image of American normalcy. This is wonder as a participant act: to inherit and pass it on through curiosity, discovery, and generosity. (Reading a library copy feels particularly appropriate.) It reminds me of Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which isn't a comparison I make lightly; if I'd found it at the right age, I would probably have an even stronger reaction.

Title: Free Fall
Author: David Wiesner
Published: HarperCollins, 1991
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 553,775
Text Number: 2079
Read Because: reading the author, hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: Of course I'm an easy sell on "enter the book" as a flight of fancy, and Wiesner's typical wordlessness prevents this from reiterating the usual downfall of that premise, more pure wonder than didactic or smug. This lacks the throughline, intent, and therefore the effectiveness of Flotsam, and is objectively less successful. But the imagery is remarkable & I'm a sucker; this might be my favorite Wiesner.

( June 29, 1999 )

( Sector 7 )

Current Music: Crocodile Tears - little hurricane

juushika

Title: Underneath Everything
Author: Marcy Beller Paul
Published: Balzer + Bray, 2015
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 305
Total Page Count: 553,705
Text Number: 2077
Read Because: no idea how I found this one, ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: The tumultuous social life of a high school senior
whose popular/outsider status and rotating relationships all come back to a messy friend-breakup. In a world where Burton's The World Cannot Give and Ojeda's Jawbone exist, this is a little redundant, mostly in a more cakes! way. It's almost without plot or stakes beyond friend group dynamics, an admirable commitment that pulls in the scope but is frequently infuriating, falling apart in the reveals and climax-that-isn't. I simultaneously buy the toxic, homoerotic dynamic and the crucial importance everything has at this age, and feel like, that's it, that's the big drama?; the writing needs to be better to sell this nuance. But I'd love nothing more than to collect fictional toxic female friendships that experiment with breathplay, so, can't fault that.

Current Music: Spectum - Bonefield

juushika

Title: The Haunting
Author: Margaret Mahy
Published: Scholastic, 1982
Rating: 4.5 of 5
Page Count: 135
Total Page Count: 553,400
Text Number: 2076
Read Because:

osprey_archer's review; borrowed from Open Library
Review: Following the death of a great uncle who shares his name, our protagonist becomes convinced he's being haunted by the lonely little boy with once his uncle's friend. I'm enamored of minor middle grade novels that seem to come from nowhere to blow me away. MG has an enviable willingness to get weird and fantastical, which, here, is remarkably phrased and then foiled by an enduring (and plot-relevant) quirky familial domesticity. And then the twist! Which is logical but thematically atypical for the genre, and so satisfying. I love to end the year with one of my favorite books of the year.

January 2026

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David Wiesner picture book reviews: Flotsam, Free Fall, June 29, 1999, Sector 7

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Book Review: The Haunting by Margaret Mahy

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