Total number of (new to me) books read is slightly up from last year, which is surprising considering how many Valdemar books I reread this year. (Storygraph thinks that I read 83 books this year, including rereads and minor works.)

I'm also pleased to see my Just Read It count is way up, meaning that I've made good progress on my eternal backlog. Just don't ask how many of them I repurchased in order to get them on my Kindle... and that's going to be a continuing trend as long as most of my own books are in storage.

#	JRI	Author	Title	✭	Series
1		Naomi Kritzer	Liberty's Daughter	4
2	X	Steven Levy	Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution	3
3		Christopher Rowe	The Navigating Fox	4
4		Claire L. Evans	Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet	4
5		Emily Tesh	Some Desperate Glory	3
6		Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon	Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet	4
7		Mercedes Lackey	Beyond	4	Founding of Valdemar #1
8		Mercedes Lackey	Into the West	3	Founding of Valdemar #2
9		Mercedes Lackey	Valdemar	4	Founding of Valdemar #3
10		Seanan McGuire	Mislaid in Parts Half-Known	4	Wayward Children #9
11		Tracy Kidder	The Soul of a New Machine	3
12		John Scalzi	The Kaiju Preservation Society	4
13	X	Mercedes Lackey	Brightly Burning	3
14	X	Mercedes Lackey	Take a Thief	4
15		Haruki Murakami	Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa	3
16		Melissa Scott	Burning Bright	4
17	X	Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman	Dragons of Autumn Twilight	3	Dragonlance Chronicles #1
18		Nicole Kornher-Stace	Firebreak	4
19		Cory Doctorow	Red Team Blues	4	Martin Hench #1
20	X	R.A. Salvatore	The Woods Out Back	3	Spearwielder's Tale #1
21	X	R.A. Salvatore	The Dragon's Dagger	3	Spearwielder's Tale #2
22	X	R.A. Salvatore	The Haggis Hunters	3	Spearwielder's Tale #3
23		Ann Leckie	Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction	4
24	X	Rhea Seddon	Go for Orbit: One of America's First Women Astronauts Finds Her Space	4
25	X	Hayao Miyazaki	Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vol. 1	3
26	X	Hayao Miyazaki	Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vol. 2	3
27	X	Hayao Miyazaki	Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vol. 3	3
28	X	Hayao Miyazaki	Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vol. 4	3
29		Grace Curtis	Floating Hotel	3
30		Nghi Vo	The Brides of High Hill	3	Singing Hills Cycle #5
31		Clara Törnvall	The Autists: Women on the Spectrum	4
32		Mike Massimino	Moonshot: A NASA Astronaut's Guide to Achieving the Impossible	5
33		Judith Kolberg & Kathleen G. Nadeau	ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life	4
34	X	Mercedes Lackey	Owlflight	4	Darian's Tale #1
35	X	Mercedes Lackey	Owlsight	4	Darian's Tale #2
36	X	Mercedes Lackey	Owlknight	4	Darian's Tale #3
37		Mercedes Lackey	Gryphon in Light	3	Kelvren's Saga #1
38		Tracy Otsuka	ADHD for Smart Ass Women	4
39		Kristin Cashore	There Is A Door In This Darkness	4
40		T. Kingfisher	A Sorceress Comes to Call	4
41		Jonathan Strahan (ed.)	New Adventures in Space Opera	3
42	X	Douglas Adams with Mark Carwardine	Last Chance to See	4
43		Adrian Tchaikovsky	Service Model	2
44		Phil Collins	Not Dead Yet	3
45		Kevin Jon Davies	42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams	3
46		Geena Davis	Dying of Politeness	3
47		Kate Beaton	Hark! A Vagrant	3
48		Kate Beaton	Step Aside, Pops	3
49		Michael Witwer	Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons	3
50		Daniel de Visé	The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic	4
51		Hayao Miyazaki	Shuna's Journey	3
52		Suzi Ronson	Me and Mr Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars	3
53		Ratey & Hallowell	Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder	3
54		Lisa Mosconi	The Menopause Brain: The New Science Empowering Women to Navigate Midlife with Knowledge and Confidence	3
55		Marty Sklar	One Little Spark: Mickey's Ten Commandments and The Road to Imagineering	3
56		Peter S. Beagle	I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons	3

I finished reading this last month but waited to review it until I had also finished watching the 6 episode miniseries of the same name, filmed 20 years later with Stephen Fry taking the "bemused Brit" role.

The TV series does more to showcase the various critically endangered species and the people who are trying to save them, so it is superior in that sense. But the book contains some of Adams' best comedy writing, made all the funnier by being nonfiction.

I attended a lecture Douglas Adams gave at MIT less than a year before he died. I rushed there straight from work, I didn't bring any of his books with me to get signed, and I just wasn't in the right headspace to appreciate it at the time... but I remember that he came with the promise that he could talk about anything he liked, and he talked about this book. He really cared about conservation.

Unfortunately, of the 6 species profiled in the book, one had already been declared extinct by the time the Fry series was filmed, and I believe at least one more is all but gone now.

(And yes, I saved this entry for #42 on purpose.)

This book is rumored to be an adaptation of "The Goose Girl" from Grimm's Fairy Tales, although the author herself makes no such claim, and apart from a horse named Falada and some rather incidental geese, I can hardly see the resemblance. That said, it is (of course) a good story, rather frightening in places, but with a warm heart.

This book spoke to me more than any other ADHD-related book I've read so far. In lieu of a review, I'm just going to paste out all the passages I highlighted, so that I'll have them to refer back to after my Kindle loan expires.

( Read more... )

So yeah, a lot of food for thought here, especially traits going back to my childhood that I thought were just part of my personality, that I didn't realize could also be associated with ADHD. But the stuff about ADHD symptoms being made more severe by the onset of menopause was the big "aha" moment for me.

( Owlflight, Owlsight, Owlknight )

Taken all together, these books partially answer the question of what came next after Storm Breaking, although limited to a remote corner of Valdemar and the barbarian lands to the north. They were published, along with Brightly Burning and Take a Thief, between the years of 1997-2001, when I was too busy hanging out on the internet to read much of anything at all. I'm glad to be finally caught up now, although I'm left scratching my head wondering why Lackey hasn't returned to post-Storms Valdemar until recently, preferring instead to churn out 11 books about the decades immediately following Vanyel's death.

This book covers much of the same ground as his autobiography Spaceman, but is organized instead as "life lessons learned" - I can't help but wonder if this is included as part of the curriculum he teaches as a professor at Columbia. Chock full of inspiration, humility, and hilarious anecdotes.

I don't have much to say about this one. There are foxes on the cover, so trickery is implied. Our normally resourceful protagonist is unusually placid here, caught up as a mere pawn in someone else's game, which ends up being even creepier than one would expect from the premise.

I'm working on giving myself permission to actively quit things once I've invested time in them, instead of just leaving them unfinished indefinitely.

This is the manga that was adapted into Studio Ghibli's first feature film. Although the art is great, the story is hard to follow, and by the halfway point, the plot had diverged so far from what was shown in the movie that I lost interest.

(On the other hand, the manga doesn't have the hints of fan service that show up in the film.)

It just clicked for me that the likely reason I don't usually care for short stories is that they generally provide too little payoff for the initial effort of decoding the characters and the parameters of the worlds in which they exist.

So with that in mind (as well as the fact that I borrowed the book from the library and won't be able to renew it), I skipped all of the unaffiliated stories in this collection except for the longest two, both of which are very good. I also enjoyed the three stories set in the Imperial Radch universe, despite not finding any obvious callbacks to the novels. The back half of the collection is devoted to the universe of The Raven Tower, which was not my jam, so I felt no desire to linger on these.

In other words, I liked the only 5 stories I took the time to read: "Lake of Souls", "Another Word for World", "Night's Slow Poison", "She Commands Me and I Obey", and "The Creation and Destruction of the World" - although that last one is a fable, and it isn't clear to me what the Imperial Radch connection is.

After throwing some shade on Doctorow in my previous review, I decided to read one of his more recent stories, and this one thankfully manages to be more entertaining than preachy. His Martin Hench is a high stakes freelance operative, kind of like James Bond if he were a computer-savvy financial whiz who came of age during the days of Lotus 1-2-3, and also a genuinely thoughtful and nice person. Far too much death and mayhem to be considered cozy, but it does have some really sweet moments.