March was a productive month, and not just because I read a good number of books. I also started writing again after a bit of a slump, and I managed to unhaul 37 books from my home library, though some of them have not actually left the house yet. The used bookstore I went to didn't take everything so I have to decide which one I'm hitting next. Or if I'm dumping the bulk on a thrift store because let's be honest, most used bookstores aren't going to want what's left either.

Can you tell I got rid of that many? Only if you saw the state of things before. My shelves are neat and tidy with no books wedged on top of other books to make things fit.

And I was so, so close to ending the month without buying more books! I really thought I was going to manage it! And then, well, I mentioned the used bookstore, right? I've been meaning to read Delaney but few bookstores stock him, and Lincoln's Dreams is one of the only Connie Willis novels I don't own. (That shop also had stickers, and a cute bookmark I can't show you because whiting out the identifying features would ruin the effect.) Under the Smokestrewn Sky was a rescue, of sorts. Why return it to the publisher when you could just buy it, right?

Anyway, in terms of books read, there were some really good ones! And only one that was not so great. I think I'm done reading and collecting Rat Queens and might need to include those in the next unhaul. And don't get me wrong about the Evie Dunmore. It is a Good Historical Romance Novel. There's just something about it that didn't work for me.

Click through to see everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.

2024 Release TBR

🏳️‍🌈 - queer MC     🇨🇦 - Canadian author    ⭐️ - BIPOC MC 📘 - have an ARC bold - newly added

I'm not going to write a big long review for To a Darker Shore, but it comes out next month and you should add it to your list! YA fantasy with Laini Taylor vibes and unexpected directions, and also autistic protagonists, a revenge quest into Hell, and some really cool monsters and magic. So good! (And just look at that cover.)

I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko is an incredible book about terrible things. It's devastatingly sad. It's traumatic. It's enraging. It's terrifying. It's thoroughly real and absolutely necessary.

Every chapter of this book looks at another aspect of Russian life that doesn't make the official news or at a segment of society that's marginalized. Often it's both. Most of this is portrayed in real-time, memoir-style recounting so you're right there with Kostyuchenko as she's going places and talking to people. There's relatively little factual research outside her experiences and relatively little opining, but also there doesn't need to be. This is plenty powerful without that and her points come across clearly.

And the point is that life is Russia is awful for a lot of people. Kostyuchenko talks to street kids casually discussing abortion options at 13, spends a shift with a shack of sex workers, visits a toxic dump site and an Indigenous Siberian community with a high suicide rate, lives two weeks in a facility housing the disabled and mentally ill, and that's just some of it. It probably goes without saying, but there are a lot of content warnings in this book. It took me two weeks to read because I could only manage 20-30 pages at a time.

The other point is Russia is a country we should be worried about. There's a real sense here of how tightly wound and corrupt and apathetic the government is, of the complete distrust so many people have in it, of the double-speak and cover-ups to maintain control, of the ways all of it dehumanizes and disenfranchises people, of how hard it is to fight back and do the right thing in the face of it all. It's not a country anyone should want to live in, and a system too many countries are sliding towards. This book is a warning.

I want to recommend this book to everyone because it's important and it's excellent, but it's too emotionally difficult for that. Instead, I'll simply say please read it if you're interested and think you're up for it, and recommend it to whoever you can. It's also a book I'm breaking my usual habits for: this is a 10 out of 10, no question.

February was a pretty good month! I read some books I really loved (and a couple that were simply meh), I got in a father-daughter visit and had really good luck at Scrabble, the weather was mostly not awful, and even if inventory at work took longer than expected, I survived it without brain mush, which has happened before. I am still the fastest scanner! My title holds.

Regular readers will be unsurprised to learn that Eve by Cat Bohannon and Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse were my top reads of the month, or that What Feasts At Night by T. Kingfisher ranks third. My T. Kingfisher problem is at least a year old, after all. (Also I read a couple delightful picture books, so be sure to click through to find them!)

I'm personally more surprised by my lowest picks, because they both sounded so up my alley but fell flat for nearly completely different reasons. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store ended up feeling disjointed and like it was trying for a theme it couldn't quite grasp, and A Market of Dreams and Desires hit all kinds of tropes I love, right down to random Dickens references and weird steampunk machines, but tied everything together a little too neatly for me. Ah well.

And right in the middle of my list is my sole physical TBR read of the month: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. This managed to tick off "Canadian author" and "classic" at the same time, so I get triple points. (This might have had a hand in me picking it.) Duddy has aged surprisingly well, in that it's still pretty fast-paced and amusing and also in that Richler wrote it with the understanding that scam artistry, hypermaterialism, and misogyny were bad and y'know what? They still are. I would recommend if you're looking for a Canadian teen anti-hero, more than anything. Duddy is a trainwreck and you can't look away.

I managed to get through the month with only three books hauled. (We won't talk about ARCs but the book fairies were kind.) The Unfortunate Traveller and Under a Pendulum Sun were bought during the habitual father-daughter bookstore date, and both because I never thought I'd see them and figured I might never see them again. The Unfortunate Traveller is essays and travel writing by a guy who co-wrote with Shakespeare and I didn't know it even existed. Under the Pendulum Sun was recced to me somewhere (here? bookish website algorithms?) and since it's essentially a gothic novel with properly weird fairies, it's been on my list.

The third book was a total surprise. Apparently I helped crowdfund it in 2019 and they've only just managed to get it printed and also I said I wanted a physical copy? The things we learn. Anyway, it's essays on aromanticism, agender identity, and asexuality so that tracks.

And I know I said I wasn't going to talk about ARCs but I got some good ones this last month and also in January, and there's a lot of them that are out or soon to be out and I'm having that problem where I want to be reading all of them at once. March is going to be interesting and probably a little panic-inducing.

Click through to see everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.

2024 Release TBR

🏳️‍🌈 - queer MC     🇨🇦 - Canadian author    ⭐️ - BIPOC MC 📘 - have an ARC bold - newly added

I've found my first review-worthy book of the year!

Eve by Cat Bohannon is a female-focused history of human evolution and a synthesis of pretty much every research field as it pertains to women. It's also readable and witty and one of those rare science books where I actively had to stop myself reading because I had to, say, go to bed.

Simply taking all the scientific research and turning it into layperson language would get this book praise. (You should see how many studies get cited.) Taking that research, relating it readably, and then drawing overarching conclusions? For instance, studies on how and when cis-female bodies produce sex hormones, and studies on how sex hormones affect neurology, and then saying something like, "this is why pregnant people are moodier"? That takes the whole thing to another level.

And it covers so much! It starts with the first mammals, moves through early primates and hominins, draws in studies of mice and apes and history and economics, talks about language and aging, and ends with the evolution of social relationships and thoughts on the future. There's a lot that I found enlightening, engaging, and validating, and a lot of moments where she reframed something and changed my thinking. And she's very comfortable calling out cultures and researchers and ways of thinking (and ducks and chimpanzees) for how they treat their species.

But like all books, it isn't perfect, though with such a subject, it probably couldn't be. For instance, because Bohannon is focusing so much on the average (i.e., cis-perisex) female body, trans and intersex folks don't come up much, though she's very clear that trans women are women, trans men are men, and intersex conditions are not problems. (Also, I'm sure the lack of info correlates strongly to a lack of studies, but she only mentions this a time or two.) *

More importantly, though, given that this is science writing and one expects scientists and writers to back up their claims, she doesn't always. Most of the time when she doesn't, it's clearly speculation or synthesis or some form of "if X, then Y" but sometimes it's less clear. I keep going back here to her statement that the first hominin culture with midwifery had exclusively female midwives. I would absolutely buy this, especially based on some of her points later in the chapter, but she never says why there couldn't have been the odd male. After all, later in the book she also mentions how men-who-help-women could have shifted the dynamics of the band/tribe/group closer to what we see today and that this probably started around the same time. To be fair, jumps like this are fairly rare but they do make me question if there were others I missed or more statements I should have questioned.

So basically, I'm saying this is an important book, and a good book, and a book that should be read by a lot of people, but also a book to read a little critically. Bohannon makes a lot of really great points and relates a lot of intriguing facts and tells some compelling stories about who we are and how we got here. She's done good work with this book and should be proud of it. But also, there might be some spots where her arguments could be tighter. *she also prioritizes words like "she" and "mother" and "woman" over words like "parent" and "person", which I can see not being great for some trans people even though I understand that she's trying to upend the notion that the average human is a cis male and show that female/afab bodies are pretty important.

So, as you can probably guess by this post, I've decided to continue posting wrap-ups after all, but not necessarily a review every month. (This month, for instance, I read a bunch of good stuff but nothing I wanted to rave about.) I'm still tracking this stuff for my own edification and I like coming up with snappy one-sentence summaries, so if I'm doing 90% of the work already…. You'll also notice that this year, for spice and transparency, I'm adding in where I got the books from, in case people somehow though I was buying everything.

Anyway, I've had a good start to my reading year, all told. Sadly I've already had a DNF—it's a great fantasy if you're moving from YA to adult, but I wanted something more—and one book that probably should have been a DNF but I pushed through to find out what was causing the horror stuff and … didn't get a good answer. But everything else was good!

I have not, however, done well on my goal of "buy fewer books". Mislaid in Parts Half-Known and the new Rivers of London comic were auto-buys, and The History of Magic is one I've wanted to read for a while but is now effectively out of print in Canada and unavailable at the library so when it showed up to work on sale…. My last book purchase was even more accidental; a semi-coworker reached out with their recent unhaul and asked if I'd like to take anything off their hands. I'd heard of Fantomina and it seemed up my alley—17th-century romance/erotic/feminist fiction—and the price was right.

Oh yes, and my work got Bookshops and Bonedust stickers. I had no choice there either.

And that's about it for updates! Click through to see everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.

2024 Release TBR

🏳️‍🌈 - queer MC     🇨🇦 - Canadian author    ⭐️ - BIPOC MC 📘 - have an ARC bold - newly added