2020 Reading Report

Like many of you, despite having more time alone at home this year because of the pandemic, I read far fewer books—at least, fewer new books. It was a year of rereading old comfort reads, rewatching favourite Korean dramas, and listening to a lot of comedians (generally the only way I could handle the news).

I do not keep the scrupulous records that many bloggers manage, so I can't tell you how many of what sort of book I read, but I can go through my kindle purchases and library borrows and get some idea of what the year's reading was like.

Most anticipated and didn't let me down:

Network Effect, the Murderbot novel! 

Return of the Thief, the final book of Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series, and the long wait was so, so worth it! One of my first goals in 2021 is to reread the entire series.

New books from writers I like:

Call Down the Hawk, Maggie Stiefvater's spin-off from her Raven Boys series, which I liked a lot but didn't love as much as I'd thought I would.

The Once and Future Witches, by Alix Harrow. I loved The Ten Thousand Doors of January so much that I was nervous about this one, but it had three awesome characters and a great premise and was imaginative and gripping and now I know I like Alix Harrow!

Tuyo and Nikoles, by Rachel Neumeier. I cannot believe how prolific Neumeier is! Not one, but two new books in a completely new series, that I enjoyed so much I've already re-read them. And she also put out a new book in her Black Dog series, Copper Mountain! Have to say, the pandemic would have been much bleaker without Rachel Neumeier. (She also kept up her interesting blog, which I appreciated.)

Plus there were two new Penric novellas from Lois McMaster Bujold, two new novellas from T. Kingfisher, the latest Invisible Library novel from Genevieve Cogman—oh, look, there's an even newer one! Yay!—, a new short story in Andrea Höst's Touchstone world, a cool novella from Zen Cho ... you know, I did read some really enjoyable stuff this year!

New-to-me Authors:

M.C.A Hogarth: the Dreamhealers series was so utterly perfect for this year. Gentle, wise, fun but not taxing world-building. Much of the suspense was the fascination of exploring a new friendship between two very different species. Quite refreshing and delightful.

Margaret Rogerson: I don't know why I read very little YA and Middle-Grade this year. But Rogerson is a new author I will be looking out for. I read Sorcery of Thorns for the Cybils and then went looking for An Enchantment of Ravens, her earlier book. Both were good; Thorns was better, and I look forward to seeing what she does next. I'm also highly anticipating the sequel to the Cybils winner, Fireborne, by Rosaria Munda.

Nghi Vo: I was blown away by the novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune. Haven't picked up the second one yet, but I will definitely.

Books I tried to read but couldn't:

I was very excited about A Memory Called Empire, The Starless Sea, The Lovely War, and The Priory of the Orange Tree, but in the end I didn't finish any of them. Maybe the world-building required too much of my brain? Or I wasn't quite grabbed enough by the characters? They were all good and interesting and had lovely writing, but I put them down and never picked them up again.

But I'm glad I did this post: I feel better about last year's reading, and I'm quite excited to discover new books to love in 2021!

Cybil's Shortlists are out!

January 1st is when the Cybils Round One Judges announce the shortlists they pass on to the Second Round of judging, and these are always books well worth reading. I am hoping that 2021 will be a year with a lot more headspace for discovering new books, so I'm adding these to my TBR.

Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Patrick Ness has a new book? You don't have to tell me anything more: I'm in. It has dragons? And is set in an alternate history Pacific Northwest during the Cold War? With dragons?? Pretty sure I'll be reading this one tomorrow!

The others sound good, too: I've heard a lot of good things about Cemetery Boys, and when Kiersten White's take on Guinevere came out I flagged it for myself. The others are new to me and I'm excited to check them out!

Young Adult Fiction

Not going to lie: a lot of these choices sound very heavy and depressing to me, and as important and relevant as they may be, they are not what I want to read right now. But there's one about fútbol that sounds like a lot of fun! Furia is set in Argentina, about a girl who plays football (or soccer as North Americans strangely call it!) in secret because of her family's rigid disapproval.

Middle-Grade Speculative Fiction

These ones all sound perfectly fantastic and right up my alley! A Thai, magic retelling of Les Miserables? Yes please! Some fun and original-sounding witches, a kid dealing with anxiety on Mars, and a great Halloween read about a town with a dark secret ... I will be checking all these out as soon as possible!

Middle-Grade Fiction

I love how many different realities are represented here. There's poverty, grief, injustice and abuse, but it looks like there's a lot of resilience and friendship. I had already added From the Desk of Zoe Washington to my TBR; now I have more!

And I'm already a little overwhelmed, but you can go on to check out the other lists, including graphic novels, picture books and non-fiction.

My Christmas Picture Book Collection

Every year I treat myself to a few new Christmas-themed picture books. I now have a fairly large number of wildly diverse stories, themes and art. Thought I'd share a sample few:

This one is so funny, and the language is delightful!

Gorgeous art, and a sweet story.

I love Barbara Reid's carved-clay images, and they work particularly well for showing snow!

I love this story—makes me tear up every time! And the art, so beautiful.

And here are a few more!

Bloom, by Kenneth Oppel

Kenneth Oppel has done it again. He has to be one of the most versatile writers out there: every book he writes is different from the last, and they are all solidly good to fantastic. Bloom is on the fantastic side of the scale. It's the most entertaining plant-based apocalypse since Little Shop of Horrors.

There has needed to be a book about invasive aliens ever since the gardening world decided that's what they should call introduced plant species that run rampant over native species and become impossible to eradicate. Oppel has obviously had to deal with invasive aliens, because he understands how terrifyingly inimical to human life they can be. I know from personal experience that Himalayan blackberries have an intelligent malice and are actively hostile; so is Scottish broom. In Eastern North America I think it's kudzu. Alien plant species taking over the planet is an entirely plausible scenario! 

I love that Oppel sets Bloom on Salt Spring Island, iconic home to the most down-to-earth, organic, genuine, eccentric collection of farmers and artists in Canada. It just makes the wrongness of the black spiky grass that appears everywhere overnight that much more offensive. (Side note: I read a review that thought the community's swift and organized response to the crisis was unrealistic, but it didn't read that way to me at all. That's kind of how we do things here.)(*Waves Canadian flag a little bit.*)

I liked the variation on the Special Chosen One that Oppel sets up for his three young protagonists, and their different reactions to it, and the reluctant friendship that develops among them because of it.

I love the way he uses allergies: I don't want to say anything spoilery, but I think he also has personal experience of how disabling they can be!

Kudos for all the present, supportive and intelligent parent figures—they're actually involved in solving the problem but there's a plausible reason why the three teen protagonists have a key role.

Bloom is not as creepy as Nest, which was quiet, slow-burn, seriously-mess-up-your-head horror. Bloom is fast and loud and full of peril that can be attacked with chainsaws. (I love that everyone on Salt Spring Island knows how to use a chainsaw!)

Great fun! Hmm. Need a fun vegetarian meal for my food analogy—is that a contradiction in terms?! Maybe veggie pizza! Yes, with those banana peppers to give it some spice. And now I'm going to listen to the Arrogant Worms Vegetable song.

Quick! There's still time to nominate for the Cybils! Also I read Return of the Thief and I am still babbling incoherently.

October arrived without me noticing, and I suddenly realized that Cybil's season has arrived! The Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards want you to nominate your favourite books from 2020. Anyone can nominate! You have until Oct 15, so don't procrastinate! (I'm mostly talking to myself here.)

Don't know which book to nominate? Charlotte's Library has a helpful list of un-nominated (at the time) Middle-Grade Speculative Fiction, and alibrarymama has more.

I ... gosh, I've hardly read any of this year's YA and Middle Grade. It's just been—well, it's been 2020. I will be looking forward to the lists of nominees to get my reading recommendations for the next little while. Let's see: Deeplight has been nominated already; so has Call Down the Hawk; so has Return of the Thief.

Return of the Thief! The long, long, long-awaited final book of Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series. I managed to make it last two whole days, but I had to finish it last night. It was so, so, so, so good. That's all I've got for you right now: I don't even know where to begin to talk about it. There are elephants. They are awesome. 

I think I need to read all six books in order now and see the whole grand scope of the story play out and notice all the little details that she weaves together with such deft trickery (she's been keeping track of all this for more than 20 years, people!) and take the time to savour these characters. I love these characters so much. I'm so sad this is the last book, but so happy they are all infinitely re-readable.

I'm not sure I'll actually be able to write a review of Return of the Thief. A master's thesis, maybe.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving, everyone! I am thankful for authors like Megan Whalen Turner and books like Return of the Thief and characters like Eugenides and Attolia and Eddis and Pheris and fellow bloggers who I can squee with about how awesome authors and books are. And organizations like the Cybils that keep the conversation going and support new and diverse authors so that we and our kids can keep having wonderful reading experiences!

The Kingdom of Back, by Marie Lu

 

I am so happy this book exists, because it needed to, and then Marie Lu wrote it, so all is good with the universe.

Why did it need to exist?

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had an older sister, nicknamed Nannerl, who was also a child prodigy; in fact, he was inspired to begin learning music by watching his father teach her.
2. Nannerl apparently composed music as well, but she wasn't supposed to, because she was a girl. None of her compositions survive, and we only know about them because Wolfgang refers to them in his letters to her.
3. As children, Nannerl and Wolfgang invented a fantasy world called the Kingdom of Back and told each other stories about it.

If that isn't the making of a fantasy novel, I don't know what is! And Lu's execution nails it.

Lu is obviously a musician herself, because she writes about music beautifully, from the inside—she knows how it feels to practise, to master, to inhabit music, to be inhabited by it. She knows the connection between music and imagination, and she uses it so well to weave the fantasy into the real.

Nannerl is a complex, fascinating character, and Lu hits all the right notes (sorry, couldn't help it!) in creating her fraught relationship with her more famous brother. She loves him, she cares about him, worries about his ill health, loves to see him succeed, and is hopelessly, furiously envious of his success and the life he will be allowed to live that she is denied. She also simply loves music—loves hearing it, loves playing it, has an instinct for it, is a perfectionist about it—and so to be denied it because she is a woman is heartbreaking. Also stupid and unfair and just arrrggghhhh!

So, what if there were a fantasy bargain Nannerl could make that would allow her to create music and, more than that, be recognized for her talent and her creations? (There is historical speculation that some of Wolfgang's works might have actually been written by Nannerl, and Lu makes clever use of that in her plot.) Nannerl wants to be remembered, and a mysterious, attractive boy in a strange, beautiful forest full of haunting music says he can help her if she will help him reclaim his throne.

The fantasy kingdom Lu creates is gorgeous, evocative, imaginative, and just creepy enough. I don't know how much source material she had to work with (apparently there is a map of the kingdom the Mozart's manservant drew at the children's request, but I don't know what else there is), so I don't know how much was Mozarts and how much was Lu, but she comes up with a coherent, believable and compelling world. I love the way it melds with the real world: at one point a real flower grows out of Nannerl's music notebook. I also love the ambiguity: is it real or is it just a dream? Are they both just imagining it because of their stories? Are the stories they tell influencing the reality of the forest world? Are their actions in the forest actually influencing real-world events, or is that just coincidence? Lu plays with imagination and creation and choice and truth in interestingly layered ways.

Nannerl's conflict is so real, so frustrating, and the stakes are so high—at one point I stopped reading because I thought she was going to make a certain choice, and I both wanted her to make it and didn't want her to make it. I thought I knew what she was going to do, because history, but the story really wasn't predictable so I knew it could go either way. Lu doesn't take the easy route and doesn't make the obvious choices, and I loved the resolution she came up with. 

I now want to find out more about Nannerl, and I've started learning some Mozart Variations! Apparently there is a movie called Mozart's Sister that I now need to find.

(PS: the new Blogger is worse in every possible way: how could they have made it so much more clumsy and awkward??)

Studio Ghibli on Netflix

Just in time to make your pandemic a little cheerier, Canadian Netflix gets the rights to Studio Ghibli's animated movies (I can only assume US Netflix has them too). I had only seen a few of these and wanted to see more, so I'm making my way through them. So far I can say they're more diverse in subject and tone than I was expecting, but they are all beautiful and thoughtful with deft storytelling.

Howl's Moving Castle: You don't have to read the book first (though I think you should!). This one is colourful and fun, takes far too many liberties with the plot but still manages to convey much of the same magic and spirit as the original, with its own worthy twist. The castle is a triumph of animation.

Spirited Away: Weird, in the sense of uncanny, not-of-this-plane-of-existence. European imps and goblins have nothing on Japanese yokai, I'm just saying! There are a few scenes that might be scary or grotesque for younger kids, but this is a warm, thoughtful story of friendship and courage, with gorgeous imagery.

Princess Mononoke: The darkest one I've seen so far, with quite a bit of violence; definitely not for younger kids. Really interesting plot, strong environmental and anti-war message. I've noticed with all the Studio Ghibli movies I'e seen that they don't follow the black and white good-guy/bad-guy paradigm of storytelling: there are antagonists, but they tend to get transformed, or at least understood, rather than defeated. (I know there's a name for this narrative paradigm, but I can't remember it.) Except for the military: they're always definitively bad.

Castle in the Sky: So much fun: rollicking adventure, beautiful animated scenery, crazy-imaginative settings and vehicles and devices. And that island in the sky is just—there are no words—gorgeous, fascinating, melancholy, heartwarming, magical. There's some fighting and peril that might be too scary for younger kids, but nothing worse than a typical Disney movie.

Kiki's Delivery Service: Cute and sweet with great characters and stunning scenery (very European: almost a love-letter to Europe). Kiki is a delight, as is her talking cat. Lots of humour and a great coming-of-age theme that connects art with magic.

My humble opinion so far: Hayao Miyazaki deserves his reputation as a brilliant artist and director; the world needs more of this art and these kinds of stories. I'm going to watch all the rest and will report back!