Mid-year book freakout, 2021

 

Saw this list of questions circulating on BookTube*, and figured – Why not?

 

* The section of YouTube that focuses on books

 

1. Best book you’ve read so far in 2021.

Most of the ones below I loved, but for fiction I have to pick 'Conjure Women'. The characters are well-written, the plot had a bunch of twists I didn’t see coming, and it is just really well-crafted overall.

For non-fiction, it is absolutely ‘Wild Swans: Three daughters of China’, an engaging multi-generation memoir of a Chinese family through a tumultuous century.

 

2. Best sequel you've read so far in 2021.

Nothing I’ve read was a sequel, so have to skip this one.

 

3. New release you haven't read yet, but want to & 4. Most anticipated release for the second half of the year.

I don’t really track new releases, so I have no idea. But I HOPE that someday soon we get an English translation of the light novel ‘Seraph of the End: The Vampire Mikaela’. As detailed below, I absolutely fell in love with the ‘Seraph of the End’ anime and main manga series. This light novel (series?) reportedly covers what Mika was up to while separated from his Yu-chan  - a lot of pining, probably, but there is some fighting of human magic users implied in the main series - and dives deeper into the vampire lore. Yes, please! I want that in my life right now!

 

5. Biggest disappointment.

‘The Windup Bird Chronicles’. A lot of people love this, I thought I was going to love it…but it was NOT my thing at all.

By contrast, I absolutely adored 98% of ‘Lagoon’ but there was one thing that I didn’t like at all and that annoyed me all the more because the rest of the book was so perfect. Why, Nnedi, why? 

 

6. Biggest surprise.

Hmm. Most of the ones I loved I was expecting to love, so here I’m going to go with “not what I thought I was getting based on the blurb, kind of challenging/weird, but I ended up liking it.”

The best was ‘Wild Seed’ by Octavia Butler – NOT a romance, as the back seemed to imply, and thank God for that!

Also interesting was ‘A Maggot’, which is kind of a historical fiction/science fiction hybrid. Very strange and ambigous and I still don’t quite know what to think about it…but it was an interesting experience. Thanks to my husband for buying it!

 

7. Favorite new author.

Jeff Vandermeer. I’d previously read the ‘Southern Reach Trilogy’ and loved it. This year I read ‘Borne’ which is really different (except for the Lovecraftian vibe) and which is weirdly heartwarming. So, it isn’t a fluke and Vandermeer is definitely going on the “favorite authors” list!

 

8. Newest fictional crush.

I’m gonna have to change this to “favorite ship”, which would have to be Mika and Yu in ‘Seraph of the End’ (Gah, I really want my boys to be happy!)

But, if I had to pick, maybe Rue from ‘Conjure Women’. I respect her character a lot and I like witches. She’s got some Sapphic vibes and no particularly strong love interest in the book. So we could maybe work something out.

 

9. Newest favorite character.

Aster from ‘An unkindness of ghosts’. I think I really related to this character and I kind of want a sequel because she’s probably succeeded but lost someone she loves in the process and I really want to know for sure if she was able to save the rest!

But I also fell in love with Sebastian and Grell from ‘Black Butler’ and Mika, Yu, and Ferid Bathory from ‘Seraph of the End’. 

 

10. Book that made you cry.

Nothing literally made me cry, but the bittersweet endings of ‘An unkindness of stars’ and ‘Borne’ came the closest.

 

11. Book that made you happy.

‘The House in the Cerulean Sea’. Not only a sweet, heartwarming story in itself, but also reminded me of one of my favorite authors (RIP, Sir Terry).

 

12. Most beautiful book you've bought so far this year (or received)

The cover of the ‘The Seed Keepers’ got me to pick it up in the first place. But the most impressive artwork had to be in vampire manga ‘Happiness’.

 

13. What books do you need to read by the end of the year?

A few on the TBR list that I’m pretty sure I’ll get to are ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ (young man in 1945 finds a book that leads to murder, madness, and doomed love), ‘The Interesting Narrative, and other writings’ by Olaudah Equiano (memoirs of a former slave who became a leading figure in the abolition movement), and ‘In the Vanisher’s Palace’ (a sort of Vietnamese Beauty and the Beast, with a lady scholar sent to tutor the offspring of a female dragon).

Popular posts from this blog

First impressions review: The Overstory, by Richard Powers

Image
For the first 127 pages of this book, I thought its subtitle – ‘a novel’ – was inaccurate. What it seemed to be was a series of short stories with sometimes strong, sometimes tenuous tree connections. An immigrant family travels west, carrying American chestnut seeds that take root and grow far from where the blight will strike. Adam, a probably-autistic boy, watches ants and obsesses over which trees his father chooses to plant to represent his siblings. The daughter of a Chinese immigrant tries to understand why her father killed himself under the mulberry tree in their backyard. Good, engaging stories, beautifully written, but not a novel. Then I hit Patricia Westerford. Patricia is a partially deaf girl who discovers her love of plants through her agricultural extension agent father (yes, another dad - moms just fuss in the background in this book). As part of her graduate work, she starts collecting the gases given off by trees, and comes to the startling conc...
Read more

First impressions review: Last Night At The Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo

Image
              This historical fiction follows Lily Hu, growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s and realizing she is in love with her classmate, Kathleen Miller. But it also has flashbacks to earlier episodes in the life of her parents and aunt that give more depth and variety to the depiction of Chinese-American life in the mid-twentieth-century. The titular Telegraph Club 1 that is both a welcoming and affirming place for Lily and Kath and a danger, given the frequency of raids and how association with leftists or homosexuals could be used as an excuse for deportation in this time period, not to mention general social ostracism. However, although there are some scary moments, this is overall a really sweet, uplifting, hopeful story.   1. Fictional, but based on several real San Francisco lesbian clubs that featured ‘male impersonators’.         ...
Read more

It oughta be a movie: Silence, by Heldris of Cornwall

Image
  This thirteenth century semi-Arthurian romance 1 featuring a female (or at least AFAB) knight contains some truly fascinating takes on gender for the period. Besides the titular knight, Silence, it also contains their parents’ love story, which is unusuall y sweet and well-balanced between the parties, even by today’s standards. All that, of course, only makes the “happy” ending more of a gut-punch! I was of course expecting that Silence would either die or go back to living as a woman, because that’s the kind of ending a medieval audience would accept. Silence doesn’t die, but…the person they are dies, in a more upsetting way than had to be the case.  However, one could easily adapt this as a more positive feminist and/or queer tale by tweaking the very end, and I’d quite like to see that done (indeed, I’m somewhat tempted to do it myself!)   1.Merlin appears in it, but Arthur does not   If you want to avoid further spoilers…just stop here a...
Read more