A Book List from Past Me!
Ages ago in grad school, I toyed with the idea of writing a “Best of [x] year” list for myself. Unfortunately, as many things in grad school go, this was an idea that seemed grand for a minute until faced with the reality of time management and motivation. For the purpose of this post, though, I thought I’d look at what I was feeling strong feelings about in 2019.
Books of the year (those that have stuck with me):
- Song of Achilles (so sad)
- Half-Witch (kinda weird but so good)
- Witchmark (adorable!)
- Girl in the Green Silk Gown / Sparrow Hill Road (so good)
- Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (so sweet)
- The Bone Witch (so sad)
- The Poppy War (so sad)
- Nimona (so sweet and sad)
- Under the Pendulum Sun (so weird)
- Unmasked by the Marquess (so sweet)
Comfy/cozy reads:
- Snowspelled
- Odd Spirits
Reads that I keep going back to:
- Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal
- Magpie Lord series
- Ruin of a Rake
- Uprooted
- Just Like Heaven
It’s now the year 2022 and A Lot Has Happened in the world in general. So what impressions of the books on the list still stay with me? Honestly, things have changed a bit. I still think of Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller as being a very sad and emotional read. The Girl in the Green Silk Gown and Sparrow Hill Road (both by Seanan McGuire) I still think about when I think of roads and places that have memories. Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is something I look to as an example of found family goodness in space. Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng is one of my favorite examples of gothic vibes and hits my lapsed organized religion + fae loving self (though watch out for content warnings on incest). The others on this list I still remember, but the urgency of how much they’ve stuck with me has faded a little bit. This might be a consequence of some of the being parts of series: The Bone Witch, Witchmark, and The Poppy War are main examples of how I struggle to finish series (of these three, I’ve finished the Kingston Cycle, which is the one Witchmark belongs to, and it suffered from me not binge-reading, I think).
As for the “Reads that I keep going back to” of this list, I have gone back to them less. Uprooted by Naomi Novik is still a favorite romance of mine (though your mileage may vary, I tend to have terrible taste in romantic leads). And K. J. Charles’s the Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal and the Magpie Lord series are also still up there and I think about Simon Feximal all the time. Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian and Just Like Heaven by Julia Quinn are still romances I love, but have thought about slightly less. Of course, now that I’ve gone and read this list, I might have to go re-read them.
Maybe what I’ve really learned from looking back at this list is that I’m seeing some of the process of what happens to stories in my head after I read them. There are so many books from my childhood and youth that I call formative, but do I even know what that means or what happens in them? At this point, it might all just be vibes. Do I even want to revisit them and be faced with how they might have aged badly as I’ve grown and as writers have become more proactive about avoiding including racist, imperialist, sexist, and other problematic tropes in their writing? (I mean, whether I look back at them or not, those things are in there and should be taken into account, also fuck that TERF who wrote those wizard books I used to love but who has done so much harm) Maybe one day I will. At any rate, I would love to think about what makes a formative book formative to me.