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It’s a very bookish book written by someone who actually knows bookstores and events and authors. It was a fun read! Did it stick with me in any sort of way? Nah, but it didn’t need to.

I'm generally a Jane Harper fan, and this is no exception.

the book is not nearly as facile as my review title! I enjoyed this--the powerful writing and the story it was telling. James VI/I has a lot of fucking evil to answer for with his witch hunts.

I read it and I enjoyed it but I also judged it hard. Power play can be a fun dynamic but actually fucking your daughter’s best friend while they’re in your house and without telling your kid is just wrong. But you might feel differently if you don’t have young adult kids.

I liked this. I might not play enough games to fully appreciate it? But I was very into the complicated friendship and the emphasis on the rarity of that connection.

So glad this is finally done. They’re crap! I couldn’t stop reading them!! Very settler fantasy of Yukon wilderness, too many convoluted murders, just don’t start is my advice

I’ve already hooted and hollered about the many ridiculous things the book gets wrong about libraries and academia and I won’t rehash (although ffs if you’re going to write a book revolving around these key details, why wouldn’t you think you need to actually learn about them?!). But even beyond that, this just doesn’t work. Like, the premise of why the murderer wants to do the murdering? Nonsensical. I stand by my appreciation of the romance plot. And I do like the idea of magical maps etc etc. But those are the only reasons this isn’t a one-star review.

Rereading this as teaching prep and rediscovering how much I love this book. It was just about the first thing I read as a budding book historian to help me think about what the field might be. And returning to those questions today from a position of much greater familiarity with book history, I’m struck by how nuanced and yet available to newcomers Howsam is (and now that I know Leslie, it’s no surprise—she and her work are like that!). Anyways, if you’re looking to get a sense of why and what book history might be, this will be tremendously helpful.

This was a delightful translation to listen to--Headley's sense of rhythm and storytelling turns into bro-slinging narrative of blood and kinship and loss (and hoo boy does Headley do a good job with keeping at the front all the misogyny that crops up in the poem). I might try reading Headley's translation at some point. For now, I'm really glad I listened to it.

Back to the grungy drug addled Glasgow of her early books, but this time with sex workers and finding and making family. I love the way Mina’s characters make families for themselves, and I love the care she takes here in portraying sex workers as fully fledged people. I did not love the bits of having to see through the killer’s eyes—that misogyny was hard to be dunked into, even though it was the point. It’s a brutal world, like most Mina, but, as is also true with most Mina, the characters make their own escapes and communities.

This was a great little book, packed full of love for books and bookstores and authors (of course) but also full of angst about incarceration and love and anger about indigenous history and what it means when we lose our connections to community and fail to accept the full circles of who we are. Comes with handy book lists in the back!

It’s an Agatha Christie classic, what’s not to love? My mistake in using the audiobook as a bedtime story, thereby missing big chunks of it, but given that I’ve read this a gazillion times, it didn’t really diminish its joys.

“Enjoy” isn’t quite the right word for a read that’s about something as nuanced and anguished as this is, but it’s also apt. I lingered over it and zoomed through it. It’s generous and devastating, sympathetic to the awful positions poor people find themselves in to get by and to the ways it warps who they are, and devastating in how it depicts the violence directed at everyone—women and the land, especially, but also the men who are used up without regard to turn profits for the company.

I loved this. The long intertwining histories, the people and communities, the unfolding of what it is to study history and how the past is allowed to be shaped. Not to mention the language! Deeply glad I read this, will be thinking on it.

I am bad at titling my reviews but “holy wowwww” seems to cover it. I loved this. The story of Marie, her efforts to turn the dismal abbey into a fortress, the struggle to defy patriarchy, the love for her sisters that turns into holy love, the carnal and secular love for her various lovers that also becomes holy, just the whole thing. Part way through I came across a review that was so dismissive and childish that it raised all my hackles and the ways in which that review has been bothering me helps me understand why I loved this book so much. If you can’t handle nuance, if you’re not open to the long history of women struggling against what they’re told to believe, then this book is definitely not for you. But it’s full of rage and anger and beauty and love.