January 2020

It’s been two years since I posted anything here, and I make my triumphant return to weblogging really only to post about the media I consumed in the last month. This is mostly just going to be a place for me to keep track of this for my own piece of mind.

I’m making a real effort to read more books this year, and in January I read two more than I did in all of 2019:

That’s

  • Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir
  • Here by Richard McGuire
  • How To Be Happy by Eleanor Davis
  • Check, Please! Book 1 by Ngozi Ukazu
  • Marvel Masterworks: Doctor Strange – Volume 5 by Steve Englehart, Frank Brunner, and Gene Colan
  • The New Voices of Science Fiction edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman
  • Freddy the Detective by Howard Hughes
  • Bitch Planet, Vol. 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro
  • March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
  • Transcendent 3: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction edited by Bogi Takács
  • Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

I mostly enjoyed them all–though Freddy the Detective, an old children’s book that was bought for me as a gag gift, maybe isn’t the lost classic its cover asserts, and there were more than a few typesetting errors throughout.

Richard McGuire’s Here is a genuinely astonishing graphic novel, while Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please! was a delightful surprise. Muir’s novel, which I read for my book club, was a whole lot of fun, and I’ll definitely read its sequel. And I was really impressed by Linda Holmes’ first novel. I’m familiar with her writing from Pop Culture Happy Hour, and here voice definitely comes through in the prose, but the nicest thing is how none of the characters or their problems feel contrived, despite the ostensibly romantic-comedy plot.

Which leads into my favorite short stories from the month. I’m still trying to read a new (to me) short story every day:

I watched 19 movies in January:

And finally, here’s the music that was new to me in January:

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