New Years Book Post

Surprising nobody I did not read Alecto the Ninth from last year's anticipated list, nor All Hail Chaos, nor Queen Demon yet, although that one did come out. Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, The Incandescent, and The River Has Roots were all good though.

This year I'm looking forward to Vernon's Daggerbound, a sequel to Swordheart; Moniquill Blackgoose's To Ride a Rising Storm, the sequel to To Shape a Dragon's Breath; Platform Decay, Martha Wells' new Murderbot novel, and Radiant Star, Ann Leckie's new Radch novel. (And then from my tier 2 books I will also mention 2025 books Caskey Russell's The Door on the Sea, Rebecca Campbell's The Other Shore collection, and 2026 books Suzanne Palmer's Ode to the Half-Broken, Isabel J. Kim's novel-expansion Sublimation, and Shannon Chakraborty's second Amina El-Sirafi book The Tapestry of Fate.)

Disepiphany of the 29th-30th

Excavated a bunch of old "special" clothes of mine (my favorite ball dress, a silk blouse, a dress I wore the first time I went to Europe, a vest I mostly wore to Rocky Horror, a velvet skirt that was my grandmother's from the 50s (real velvet, heavy, rich, there is nothing like this in the modern world)) from where they were stashed and handed them off to J to try on. It was fun to see her in everything (she did a little fashion show, like she had done with the previous batch of more recent stuff), although also poignant. (While it is entirely reasonable that J, a few months from 17, fits into stuff I wore in college or my early 20s, while I, a couple years from 50, do not, I do sometimes miss being young and strong and thin and able to dance and occasionally dressing up in fun sparkly clothes and trying to look good, now that I'm old and limping and do not do that. That's mostly fine - the carousel of time mostly helped me escape from the not-great parts of my 20s into a much happier life, so, net positive there, and also it's hard to imagine my present self into the kind of femme presentation that younger self was still playing with - but, still, one does sometimes still feel the banal angst of middle age, what can you do.)