March reads

I ended up going back to my folks' house for a few days mid-March for some family time.  Because it was mid-March in Maine, the weather was such (snowing, raining, cold and gloomy) that we spent a lot of time indoors, watching the college basketbasket tournament and reading.  

• The Consequences of Fear by Jacqueline Winspear.  #16 in the Maisie Dobbs series - which, if I'm honest, diminishes in quality as the series goes on, as though the author is maybe just a little tired of the whole thing - finds our intrepid sleuth in September 1941.  Europe is reeling under Nazi occupation and Maisie finds herself investigating a murder that has implications for Britain's war effort.
• Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey.  When a faculty member dies under suspicious circumstances at an elite magical boarding school, non-magical Ivy Gamble, private investigator, is hired to figure out what happened.  Things are complicated by the fact that Ivy's magical and estranged sister is an educator at the school.
• A Sunlit Weapon by Jacqueline Winspear.  Maisie Dobbs #17 (which I liked better than 16) is in October 1942, following women pilots and American servicemen and a possible threat to Eleanor Roosevelt, who is visiting England. 
• Women of the Post by Joshunda Sanders.  Based on true events, this is the story of the all-Black battalion of American women soldiers, sent to England to sort out the millions of pieces of mail languishing in warehouses and get them to the servicemen who badly need the morale boost.  I had no idea about this piece of WWII history - there's a movie? - so I enjoyed learning about it.  I didn't think this book was terribly well written, however.
• Listen to Me by Tess Gerritsen.  A murder mystery from the Rizzoli and Isles series (#13, but I don't think it's crucial to read them in order - these are popcorn books), wherein Jane Rizzoli (detective) and Maura Isles (medical examiner) investigate the murder of a well-liked nurse, all while Jane's nosy mom Angela starts getting suspicious of new neighbors down the street.
• Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon.  I LOVED this one.  Another WWII novel (there's been a lot lately, I know), this is a historical novel based on the TRUE story of Nancy Wake, an Australian socialite who became a spy and a French resistance leader against Nazi Germany.  She began as a journalist, segued to helping Allied servicemen escape from occupied France over the mountains to Spain.  Then, after the Nazis learned about her, she escaped to England herself - but then went back to France to help arm and organize the Maquis rebels as they fought against their German occupiers.  Amazing woman.
• The Black Ascot by Charles Todd.  This is the 21st murder mystery in the Ian Rutledge series by mother-son duo/pseudonym Charles Todd.  Rutledge is battling his own shell shock from WWI while trying to solve a decade-old murder.
• Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Profession Wiseass by Dave Barry.  This is a memoir, not a straight humor book or funny novel like so many of Barry's books.  As such, there are some poignant moments, especially when dealing with his parents.  But it's still pretty friggin' funny!
• A Cruel Deception by Charles Todd.  This one is from their Bess Crawford series (#11), with heroine/nurse Bess Crawford assigned by a superior to find wayward soldier who has abandoned his duties and salving his mental WWI war wounds with opiates.  I liked this one okay but Bess Crawford is no Maisie Dobbs.
• Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth.  Ooh I liked this one too!  This is an adult fantasy novel by Divergent author Roth, following a group of late 20/early 30-somethings who are plagued by serious PTSD following their defeat of a world-destroying dark entity.  Trouble is, it doesn't look like he has stayed defeated.
• Clytemnestra by Constanza Casati.  As previously noted, there seems to be a trend recently with authors novelizing Greek mythology.  There are mixed results but I quite liked Clytemnestra, bringing to the forefront Helen of Troy's sister/wife of Agamemnon/queen of Mycenae who ruled in her husband's absence and paid him back for the murder/sacrifice of their daughter.

Next month: I finally finish the Maisie Dobbs series!

February reads

Only six books in February.  This is because (I think) we had guests over the Presidents' Day holiday weekend and whereas normally I would have hunkered down and plowed through a bunch of books, I had to be sociable instead.

• The Incandescent by Emily Tesh.  A grown-up, queer-friendly magic school ("dark academia") novel wherein the heroine, Dr. Walden, must protect the 600 school kids from demonic incursions.  Great world-building, interesting characters.
• The American Agent by Jacqueline Winspear.  #15 in the Maisie Dobbs series.  Maisie is back on the case when an American correspondent is found murdered in her London flat.  As these later books go on, I find myself less engaged when we have to explore Maisie's home life with newly-adopted daughter.  This installment was (thankfully) not so heavy on the child bit.
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.  Another science-adventure-in-space from the author of The Martian.  I didn't like this one quite so well, which is weird for someone who DOES like science fiction and fantasy and aliens and all that.  Movie coming out soon starring Ryan Gosling, apparently.
• Dark Sisters by Kristi DeMeester.  Wow - I don't remember this one at all.  Hold on ... [looks it up] oh yeah.  Three centuries of witches and persecution and a curse.  Didn't love it - seemed scattered.
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.  I've read Kristin Hannah books before about women in war - this one is about two French sisters in WWII, one actively in the Resistance against the occupying Nazis, one resisting the best she can.  
• Hemlock and Silver by T Kingfisher.  This one I liked: Anja - a plus-sized, competent spinster (35 years old lol) - wants nothing more than to putter around her laboratory, manufacturing antidotes to common poisons.  She reluctantly gets drawn into royal intrigue when the king hires her to find out what's wrong with his ailing daughter.  Again, good world-building, interesting characters, humor but also tension and violence.  I am a T Kingfisher fan.

January reads

 Ooo I'm on top of it this month!

• The End of the World as We Know It (anthology).  This is a collection of short stories by horror writers, all based in the universe of Stephen King's The Stand.  The Stand is one of my favorite SK novels and it was interesting to see other fans' takes on it.
• Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this Maisie Dobbs mystery, set in 1938, Maisie is enlisted by the British Secret Service to infiltrate Nazi Germany to affect a Dachau prisoner's release.  The man is a British engineer, very valuable in the war effort.  Maisie poses as his daughter and, while she waits for the Germans follow through on their promise to release him, tracks down a missing woman from her past and also finds herself again in the wake of her husband's death.
• In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear.  Finally returning to England in 1939, as Britain enters WWII, Maisie Dobbs throws herself back into work, investigating the murders of Belgian refugees from the Great War.  
• To Die But Once by Jacqueline Winspear.  This is book #14 in the series - which ends at eighteen and then what will I do? - and Maisie and her team are back at it, investigating the murder of a young apprentice who was involved with a wartime government contract.  Organized crime looms large but Maisie is more than up for it.
• Bittershore by V.V. James.  Ah ... apparently this is a sequel to Sanctuary, which I haven't read.  Didn't really matter, in this fantasy/thriller focused on mother and daughter witches, Sarah and Harper Fenn, regrouping after being run out of town after a literal witch hunt.  Meh.  I guess there's an AMC show based on these books?
• The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley.  Set on (in?) Alcatraz in the middle of a planet-altering apocalypse, this novel follows two zookeepers in the last zoo on Earth.  Dark but surprisingly hopeful.
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  One of my BFFs from college said that he did a book report in ninth grade on this one, but this is the first time I've read it.  Being true crime (indeed, basically inventing the genre), it's not my usual read but boy, was it fascinating.  Meticulously researched via indefatigable interviews, this book switches POVs between the decent, hardworking Clutter family and the two men who brutally murdered them.

And so now I'm going to have to try another classic true crime: I've got Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on my list now.

December reads

I must have been busy doing holiday stuff in December because I only read three books.  That's the fewest in a month all year; the next fewest was five in September.

• The Poppy War by RF Kuang.  The first in a trilogy of "grimdark" military fantasy, this novel follows Rin, a gifted orphan who enters an elite military academy.  She discovers that she has supernatural powers and this catapults her into the war that grips her country.  Didn't love it.
• A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs, this one jumps forwards a few years to find a struggling Maisie trying to lose herself, first in India and then, on her way home to England, in Gibraltar.  Thinking to just solve the murder of a local photographer, she finds herself drawn back towards the machinations of the British secret service as WWII looms ever nearer.
• How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristin Perrin.  The second novel in the Castle Knoll murder mystery series, Annie spends the inheritance she received in the first book by investigating a pair of murders.  These are enjoyable but lightweight mysteries, not quite to the level of Maisie Dobbs or Inspector Gamache.

So I ended up reading 106 books this past year.  I didn't have a goal, just wanted to track how many books I would read in 2025.  I have a goal for 2026 though: more.

November reads

Ten read in November (thank you, long weekends).  The first one barely counts as I read the bulk of it in October, but I didn't finish it until November.

• I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.  I'm not really a true crime girlie, but after the author's untimely death, I'd read enough about the book to be interested.  And I knew nothing about the Golden State Killer at all.
• The Devils by Joe Abercrombie.  I adore Abercrombie's First Law trilogy and successive in-universe book.  His voice is very clear in The Devils but it's a different world with its own wonderful, scary, heart-breaking and very, very, very flawed characters.  Loved it.
• How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin.  As a girl, Frances learns via a palm-reading session that she will be murdered.  She spends her whole life preparing and attempting to prevent such a thing.  After her demise, her great-niece Annie must solve her aunt's murder in order to inherit her estate.  Fun, low stakes.
• The Care and Management of Lies by Jacqueline Winspear.  NOT a Maisie Dobbs novel (we'll get back to those shortly) but set in England during WWI as a young farmer's wife must keep things running on the home front when her husband and her best friend enlist.  I liked it quite a lot.
• Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear.  Yes, the next Maisie Dobbs novel as our intrepid psychologist and sleuth investigates the murder of horse-whisperer Eddie.  WWII is drawing ever nearer and Maisie is uneasy about her fella's involvement with Winston Churchill and his ilk.  Really good installment.
• Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this one, Maisie investigates the murders of two young Indian women, working in London as household help.  She also starts listening to her heart.
• Shift by Ethan Kross.  Non-fiction, about trying to get a grip on, and adjustment to, one's emotions.  Interesting but didn't offer as many actionable tips/tricks as I had hoped.
• Never Leave the Dogs Behind by Brianna Madia.  This is Madia's second memoir, covering her struggles in Moab, post-divorce.  She's a bad ass, no doubt, but reading this was especially poignant given that one of her beloved dogs, Dagwood, just died last week.
• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher.  I guess this is the third installment in the Sworn Soldier series: I've read the first, What Moves the Dead, but not the second.  I do like these books, set in olden times, with some alt-reality and dead things that flail around in the dark.
• Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar.  This one is written like a true crime book, with the author as the main character, but it is, in fact, a novel.  I liked this a lot, liked the hybrid feel of it.  

That was a good bunch - I rather liked most of them.  What have you all been reading?

October reads

 Lots more books read in October, due to a week of vacation in a place with no TV or internet, and actually getting them posted timely here, due to getting my shit together somewhat.

• Night Shift by Stephen King.  A re-read of his first collection of short stories because I didn't want to start in on my horde of library books until vacation started.  You know how I feet about his short stories.  You should probably read them, this one or Skeleton Crew to start.
• Nestlings by Nat Cassidy.  Reviews seem to think it's akin to a lovechild between Rosemary's Baby and Salem's Lot, which I guess I can see.  I found it weird and not entirely cohesive, plus I didn't like either of the main characters.
• Fever House by Keith Russon.  A couple of enforcers sent around to collect for their boss end up with a severed hand that incites madness, bloodthirsty killing and uncontrollable rage.  The hand makes its way across the city, wreaking havoc.  This is supposed to be a sprawling horror/crime novel and sprawling is right - the interconnections didn't really interconnect for me and the ending is a clear set up for the sequel.  Didn't care for this one all that much.
• Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.  At this point, I'm on a roll with books I don't love.  When Abby's mother-in-law dies, she goes all in to save her husband, fight the mother-in-law's ghost and create the perfect family for herself.  The gross parts are fun and it's definitely got some funny parts - but again, I just didn't like the protagonist.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.  In which we switch gears from horror to fantasy.  Piranesi lives in a labyrinth world, ruled by tides and populated only by him, birds, statues and dead bodies.  This is a weird one, with ruminations on knowledge and belief, but I did like it.
• You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron (which sounds like a pseudonym to me, which is fine).  A young adult slasher in book form: a bunch of kids who work at a live action haunted house, set up like a summer camp in a slasher film, actually find themselves face to face with a masked killer on the last night of the concession.  It was cute, I guess, and pretty murdery.  But also pretty light-weight.
• The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs novel!  Maisie is hired by American parents to track down the English nurse their son fell in love with during WWI, before he was killed.  But it looks like he was killed by his own men ... Good one.
• Hawk Mountain by Connor Habib.  Todd, single father and English teacher, gets gaslit by a former high school bully, Jack, after a chance (?) meeting at the beach.  Jack insinuates himself into Todd's life and things escalate A LOT from there.  This is like two totally different books and ends up going completely off the rails.  I sort of liked it until I definitely didn't.
• A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear.  Back to Maisie Dobbs, who does an undercover job  for the British Secret Service as a professor in Cambridge, as Europe rolls inexorably towards WWII.  I am so glad I found out about this series - I do love British murder mysteries.
• A History of Fear by Luke Dumas.  University of Edinburgh graduate student Grayson Hale achieves notoriety when he murders a fellow student and then claims the Devil made him do it.  The novel is from the POV of Daniela, a reporter, as she goes through the evidence after Hale is found dead in his cell, reading Hale's memoir and adding her own comments and portions of third party interviews.  Twisty, slow burn, unreliable narrators.  Pretty good.
• The Songs of Trees by Davie George Haskell.  What ho - non-fiction!  Haskell visits a number of trees around the world over a period of years, commenting on their connections to the life around them: fungi, bacterial colonies, other plants, communities of animals, indigenous people, the owners of the corner bodegas.  Everything is connected, in this increasingly fragmented world.

September reads

So overdue!  We were on vacation for the first week of October, when I normally would have posted my September reads, and then when we got back, I had to dive right into the Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series.  Who has time to read books?  I only got to a few in September, actually:

• An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs mystery wherein the intrepid sleuth investigates goings-on in rural England during the hop-picking season.  I learned quite a lot about hops, but this wasn't one of my favorites.
• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear.  Book #6 in the Maisie Dobbs series.  I did like this one, a lot, as Maisie and Scotland Yard try to catch a madman blowing people up across London as 1931 comes to a close.
• Skeleton Crew by Stephen King.  It has been a while but I reread this short story collection in anticipation of the movie version of The Monkey coming out.  He's so good at short stories and this collection has quite a few good ones.
• Mrs. March by Virginia Feito.  The titular Mrs. March, an Upper East Side housewife, starts to become a bit unraveled when it appears that an unlikeable character in her author husband's new novel is based on her.  I didn't love it but I appreciated the end - didn't see it coming.
• The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty.  The final volume in the Daevabad trilogy.  Djinn and ifrits and demigods all along the Nile.

Stay tuned soon for my October reads!

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #13 Cheerleader Camp

 And here we are, lucky thirteen (I sort of fizzled out at the end, sorry about that), rounding out yet another year (sixteen! wow!) of watching lots of scary movies in October.  To close out the month, we end with the wonder that is 1988's Cheerleader Camp.  Found, in its entirety, on YouTube.  Is it good?  Oh, hell no.  But is it glorious? A resounding YES.

Alison seems to have it all: head cheerleader, pretty, popular, with a studly boyfriend.  But at Camp Hurrah - the titular cheerleading camp, with teams from all over (all over where?  are they college teams? it's vague at best, like much of this movie) - Brent the boyfriend (played by former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett, already way past his prime in 1988) is cheating with other girls, and many of the girls - including some on her own squad - are out to defeat her for title of Queen of the Cheerleaders.  Or whatever.  Only Alison's squad's mascot, Cory, is friendly and supportive, even as Alison is wracked by anxiety, paranoia and scary nightmares.

Then the killings start.  First a non-teammate rival is found on her bed, wrists slashed. Everyone thinks she did it herself until the other bodies start piling up, including teammate Pam, the camp director, the weird handyman, etc. etc.  I would like to state for the record that after the first body is found, my notes read: I think Alison is killing her competition in a fugue state ... or maybe Single White Female Cory is killing them for her.

I can see where they tried for a plot with this flick but it really didn't quite get there.  The paperthin characterizations and really, really bad acting doesn't help.  But there's classic tempera paint blood, a few nekkid boobies and big 80s hair, so what's not to like?

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 Christmas Bloody Christmans

 This movie (streaming on Netflix) is not what I thought it was.  I thought it was the David Harbour Christmas horror movie, which is actually Violent Night.  This one is The Terminator as played by a Santa robot.

The plot is straightforward.  The military, having successfully built combat robots to fight overseas wars, has sold their robotics technology to various corporations.  One such company has made the "RoboSanta+" for toy stores and malls, doing away with the need for Santas-for-hire.  In some small town, one of those RoboSantas (played by an unrecognizable Abraham Benrubi (from ER!)) wakes up in its Main Street toy store and starts a very violent, very bloody rampage.  And it is a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking indie record store owner who is left to fight him.

CBC is a low budget flick, looking like it was shot on location in town and in various homes.  The number of f-bombs dropped far surpasses Deadwood's own impressive total and I wonder how much dialogue was ad-libbed.  This movie looks like it was a lot of fun to shoot.  It is brutally violent, with a penchant for splitting rubber heads down the middle with a big axe; the practical effects are old school and pretty gnarly.  It was original and quite a change from a lot of the cookie-cutter horror films out there now.  That said, when I paused the movie to see how much time was left, I was surprised that only an hour had gone by (it's around 90 minutes total) - it seemed to take forever.  I liked it okay but don't know that I can really recommend it to anyone.

Funnily enough, for a movie about a murderous rampaging Santa robot, for me the most unbelievable part of the whole thing was that a town that size was able to support an indie record store.

Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #11 The Dead Don't Die

 I knew nothing about The Dead Don't Die going into it.  Well, I mean, zombies, but other than that.  And then, as the titular theme song (good song) rolled over the opening credits, my jaw dropped at the cast. Huge cast, so many names!  And then the director: Jim Jarmusch.  And then I understood the huge cast.  I've never actually seen a Jim Jarmusch movie (until now) and so I don't know if TDDD is exemplary of his style.  But I'm guessing it is, with the deadpan absurdity, the repetition, the fourth wall breaks.  Afterwards, I think that I had read something online about Jarmusch doing a zombie movie but I certainly hadn't made the connection.

Here's the cast:  Bill Murray (small town chief of police), Adam Driver (cop), Chloe Sevigny (cop), Tilda Swinton (Scottish undertaker/ninja/SPOILER); Steve Buscemi (racist farmer); Danny Glover (hardware store owner); Tom Waits (hobo/narrator); Selena Gomez (Cleveland* hipster); Austin Butler (Cleveland hipster*); Iggy Pop (zombie); Carol Kane (zombie); Rosie Perez (news anchor); RZA (delivery driver).

Here's the plot: due to fracking at both poles (the U.S. Dept. of Energy says it's TOTALLY FINE), the earth has shifted off its axis, fucking everything up and causing zombies to rise up and wreck havor.  On the plus side, they're the slow-moving types, easy to kill but overwhelming in numbers.  On the negative side, ZOMBIES.

Is it a good zombie movie**?  It's okay, a little slow but with decent zombie makeup, nice humor sprinkled with legitimate gore.   Is is a good Jim Jarmusch movie?  You tell me.

* No disrespect intended, as I was born in Cleveland but left shortly thereafter and never went back, but does Cleveland even have hipsters?

** Apparently a LOT of zombie movie fans hated this movie, but I do think JJ was attempting some sort of satire, which, as the OG George Romero would tell you, is always a good thing for zombie movies.