5 Stars for A Master of Djinn (Day 62)

Raining all day here, and the next best thing to batch cooking on such a day is reading. We finished P. Djeli Clark's A Master of Djinn, and I can't recommend it enough. Alternate History, mystery, fantasy, and really well done on all fronts. 

Now where is the sequel?

Deb in the City

It's not every day a relative shows up in a book (Day 49)

Finally started reading Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim, and it's really good. I would watch fewer k-dramas if there were more books like this. 

Bonus: one of the main characters in the sprawling cast shares a name with my cousin. This doesn't happen often: Nam is an unusual Korean name, and my cousin's name isn't uncommon, but it isn't the Korean equivalent of John or Michael. (Worth noting that this is the first time this has happened to me, despite having some relatives on the other side of my family with more common names like Lloyd, Prince, Simmons, and even more common names like David, John, and Margaret. )

Obviously I am destined to love this book.

Deb in the City

What I've Read (recently) (Day 45)

For the last few years I've participated in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. For those of you who don't know, you enter a goal number of books into Goodreads, and then track your progress. I suppose it's great for someone who has trouble making reading a priority, but that isn't me. Like so many group activities on the internet, it made me nervously aware of whether I was keeping up with the Joneses or, even worse, a past version of myself. (And those versions, for all of my efforts, are really erratic; I have a handful of goals I've been able to stick to for two months, but it's taken me years to get to the point where I can predict what it is I both want and need to do. Making some kind of announcement on a public website that I'm going to read not only a certain number of books, but a specific set of them, frequently made me feel like I was setting myself up to feel like a failure. It may be illogical, but here we are.) All to say that I use Goodreads now primarily to track something I have already read, in large part because, when the planets are aligned just right, I occasionally get a good recommendation that way.

Anyway! I'm using the Boston Public Library's Bibliocommons site to track my reading goals (it's public, but this is primarily for library geeks like me, so I feel less judged). In addition to tracking titles that I am reading or would like to read, I can also track what I want to read. I can also create lists, and this year I pulled from my For Later "shelf" and created a TBR list for 2024 that has all of 41 books. This is less than I usually goal up for, but very realistic given last year and what I want to do this year. (But just to make myself feel better, I also created a TBR 2025 list.) And it's working: as of now, the first week of March, I've read eight of those titles, and unless something catastrophic happens, I think I can meet my goal and, more importantly, knock off some of my other big projects.

The two books I finished this week have been on my list for two years: Blood Scion by Deborah Falaye, and The Ocean of Churn by Sanjeev Sanyal. 

Blood Scion has a compelling story, but the execution was off. I know it was marketed as YA, but the language the characters used seemed off for that crowd, especially when the characters kept referring to themselves as children; that especially didn't ring true. I feel pretty confident that this comes down to editing and not writing, but I suspect I won't be able to tell until Falaye is able to get an adult book published; the constraints of YA seem especially tight.

I wanted to pick up Ocean of Churn because it was something author Shannon Chakraborty recommended, and as she's an even bigger history nerd than I am, I knew it would be good. (I also have had stars in my eyes over the Indian Ocean ever since I read the New Oxford World History title on it. It's amazing how little we talk about that area in the United States, considering how much of the world's action took place there. Then again, maybe it's not.) It's a short book--less than 300 pages--but it's packed with history, much of which I had no idea about. One little factoid: Zheng He's fifteenth century voyages were primarily about projecting power to Southeast Asia. This was almost as much of a face-palm moment for me as when I read in The Origins of the Second World War In Asia and the Pacific that the original issue for Japan was access to China. Oh, that makes sense once you clear out some of the propaganda, doesn't it?

People, this is why I try to read so much.

Deb in the City

Reading

 I’ve been busy reading quite a bit. Finally finished the Poppy Wars trilogy, and that’s all I’m going to say. Also got to read Scott Anderson’s fantastic The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--a Tragedy in Three Acts, and before that I finished America for Americans. I also dug into two books I’ve had on my To Be Read list for a while, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality and New Worlds for All:Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. When I finally dug into those, I wondered why I’d waited so long: not only were their lengths very manageable (less than 400 pages), but they were so good. Weirdly for me, I acquired We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State almost as soon as I heard about it, in part because it’s a subject one of my sons has been obsessed with for about two years now. It was good, but by the second-to-last chapter I felt like the author had made his point and I was just waiting for it to end.

 

 

Now finally digging into Beasts Made of Night, which is a needed departure from some of the fiction I’ve been reading recently, and trying to get through To Hold Up the Sky, Cixin Liu’s latest release of short stories. My reading goal this year is to get through my library Holds list (seven items as of now), then my For Later shelf (nineteen items as of now, but two of them are movies and three I can't touch until the libraries are open to the public again), and then move onto the books sitting on my piano, including a re-read of The Fifth Season, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, Ken Liu’s latest short story collection, and Monkey, one of the many versions of Journey to the West. Ah, but then there is the newest Brunetti, Ken Liu’s third installment of the Dandelion Dynasty, and most especially, Fonda Lee’s Jade Legacy. Twenty-six books to look forward to. This should be a good year.

What's on my To Be Read Pile

Started to panic just a little bit when I realized how many books I have on my pile for review right now. For the next two weeks, I can't entertain any new review requests- but just for two weeks :-)

Currently on tap:

Keeping Score by Jamie Deise
The Wired City by Dan Kennedy
Life's A Ball by Erin Cawood (pre-release)
Birds of Prey by Danielle-Claude Ngontang Mba (pre-release)
Fifty Ways to Leave Your Husband by K.C. Wilder
It's Just A Little Crush by Caroline Fardig
Spellbound in His Arms by Angel Sefer

Alright, excuse me- I've got some reading to do...