all books all the time

Deadlocked - Charlaine Harris. I still appreciate Sookie Stackhouse's pragmatic nature, & that Harris keeps class issues in the foreground; I still cringe whenever Harris writes about POCs. & despite that, I still manage to read around enough to enjoy this series. This one was pretty creepy -- writing this up a couple months later, I can't actually remember that much about it, but I enjoyed being back in Sookie's world.

Dead Ever After - Charlaine Harris. I made it to the last Sookie book! (Though I think I missed one along the way?) The issue of whoever (of her various & numerous supernatural suitors) Sookie was going to end up w/ (because you know she would end up w/someone) was resolved hugely satisfactorily to me.

Chime - Franny Billingsley. Briony is growing up in the rural Swampsea w/a secret: she's a witch & she's used her powers to harm her sister & stepmother. Devastating in its depiction of a young woman who thinks that she's inherently bad, she's just fucked up & harmful to those around her.

The Summer I Turned Pretty - Jenny Han. There were moments I liked in this book about how Belly (a childhood nickname for Isabel) spends the summer in a beach house with her mom & brother, her mom's best friend, and the latter's two sons. Least interesting to me were Belly's changing relationships with the two boys that she's spent every summer with for years; a pity, as that took up a lot of the book.

Paranormal Bromance - Carrie Vaughn. ( Read more... )

Spirits Abroad - Zen Cho. ( Read more... )

Succubus Shadows - Richelle Mead. ( Read more... )

Discord's Apple - Carrie Vaughn. ( Read more... )

Dead Spots - Melissa F. Olson. ( Read more... )

Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe - Edited by Emily Gunzburger Makaš and Tanja Damljanović Conley. ( Read more... )

Kitty's House of Horrors - Carrie Vaughn. ( Read more... )

Thoughtcrime Experiments: Nine Stories - Edited by Sumana Harihareswara & Leonard Richardson. ( Read more... )

Cape Storm - Rachel Caine. ( Read more... )

From Dead to Worse - Charlaine Harris. ( Read more... )

An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots - Edited by Lorraine M. Lopez. ( Read more... )

The Magic of Blood - Dagoberto Gilb. ( Read more... )

Tales from Outer Suburbia - Shaun Tan. ( Read more... )

Spaceman Blues: A Love Song - Brian Francis Slattery. ( Read more... )

Midnight Brunch - Marta Acosta. ( Read more... )

Flight - Sherman Alexie. ( Read more... )

Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood - Virgil Suarez. Rather patchy collection of essays & poetry about Suarez's life being moved from Cuba to the US as a child to be “spared Angola”--a conflict described succinctly multiple times only as “Cuba's Vietnam.” Now, I realize that my historical ignorance of this is totally my fault. At the same time, if Angola was important enough to spur his family's move from Cuba, & thus to lend itself to the title of this book, I expected a bit more detail on how it was affecting other Cuban families or what might've been going on.

Rethinking Tourism and Ecotravel - Deborah McLaren. This is the kind of academic book that spawns a “no duh” reaction from me, as the arguments against tourism as a beneficial mechanism of development are ones that seem patently obvious to me. At first I felt like McLaren was making statements about the harms of tourism without enough examples to back them up, but once she finally decided to get specific, the book got more compelling. This would probably be a good text for someone who'd never really thought about these issues before, though I still found it a bit timid at times in terms of its condemnation of tourism & its willingness (or lack of, I guess) to even entertain the cessation of tourism as a potential option.

At Grave's End - Jeaniene Frost. This third book in the Night Huntress (ugh, what a name) series about half-vampire vampire hunter Cat Crawfield was much better than the second. I disliked immensely the graphic torture bits, though, & find it disturbing that, as in many vampire novels, the vamps have a violent retribution-based code of justice that seems to be aimed at simultaneously raising the disgust & the grudging admiration of the reader. Also, I thought Frost was going to be much bolder in terms of killing off a major character, but she wimps out, & the book is less interesting for it.

A Century of Migration (Bristol's Asian Communities) - Munawar Hussain. ( Read more... )

Chinatown Beat - Henry Chang. ( Read more... )

Once Upon a Time in the North - Phillip Pullman. ( Read more... )

The Summoning - Kelley Armstrong. ( Read more... )

Club Dead - Charlaine Harris. ( Read more... )

Definitely Dead - Charlaine Harris. ( Read more... )

Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals - Karen Dawn. ( Read more... )

The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3 - Edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith. ( Read more... )

Halfway to the Grave - Jeaniene Frost. ( Read more... )

Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing - Edited by Delia Sherman & Theodora Goss. ( Read more... )

Air - Geoff Ryman. ( Read more... )

Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women - Edited by Asian Women United of California. ( Read more... )

Succubus on Top - Richelle Mead. ( Read more... )

Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live - Martha Beck. ( Read more... )

Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage: The First Quarter Storm and Related Events - Jose F. Lacaba. ( Read more... )

Romancing the Dead - Tate Hallaway. ( Read more... )

Wolf Tales - Kate Douglas. ( Read more... )

Topography of War: Asian American Essays - Edited by Andrea Louie & Johnny Lew. ( Read more... )

TNR Past, Present, and Future: A History of the Trap-Neuter-Return Movement - Ellen Perry Berkeley. ( Read more... )

Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World - Edited by Jessica Hagedorn. ( Read more... )

Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History - Catherine Ceniza Choy. ( Read more... )

The Outlaw Demon Wails - Kim Harrison. ( Read more... )