dorking around with old books for work and reading new(ish) books for fun with strong opinions but an inconsistent rating system | you can find me most places as wynkenhimself including as @wynkenhimself@glammr.us | she/her
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Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig …
brought back good memories of my bike riding days. she's either your bag or she's not, and I like her
In the much anticipated sequel to Hild, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood transports readers back to …
Parts of this were overwhelming (mostly grief), parts of it dull (so much battle strategy). I adored Hild, I'm happy to see more of her, and I didn't thrill to this as much as I wanted.
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …
in general a big fan of this linked trilogy and this felt like a good extension of the others. it gets better as it goes along / if you live as if it's real, it will be real
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, …
up and down with this one, but pretty good overall.
Long Island homicide detective Maggie D'arcy and her teenage daughter, Lilly, are still recovering from …
I liked her first series about the art historian who studied death and funeral rites better, but I'll probably keep reading this one anyway
"Dulcie Mainwearing is always helping others, but never looks out for herself - especially in …
reread this for my book club and it's just really great. the details! the shifting point of views and sympathy for the characters (who still drive me nuts). and it's even better if you think about indexing while reading it--why is Dulcie an indexer and what is that telling us about the gender and love plots? anyway. it's great.
Qven was created to be a Presger translator. The pride of their Clade, they always …
Yes! Radch-adjacent, if you've read the trilogy, and I'm here for it.
Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel's unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, …
I did it! I finished reading Moby-Dick, a book I discovered in grad school for the 50-book exam (Penn's weird version of comps, which is even weirder because the year my cohort took it, it was more like 75 books and we were the only group subject to what every agrees was a mammoth failure of a list) and of which I only read a handful of chapters because who has the time to read the whole thing when we also had to read Leaves of Grass, Little Dorrit, Canterbury Tales (maybe all?), Emily Dickinson (all), Middlemarch, Ulysess, and so much more? But I loved those few chapters and have meant for decades to go back and read the whole thing and finally, inspired by Hester Blum's new edition and my trip to New Zealand, I started in on it for real in December 2022 and have been slowly working …
I did it! I finished reading Moby-Dick, a book I discovered in grad school for the 50-book exam (Penn's weird version of comps, which is even weirder because the year my cohort took it, it was more like 75 books and we were the only group subject to what every agrees was a mammoth failure of a list) and of which I only read a handful of chapters because who has the time to read the whole thing when we also had to read Leaves of Grass, Little Dorrit, Canterbury Tales (maybe all?), Emily Dickinson (all), Middlemarch, Ulysess, and so much more? But I loved those few chapters and have meant for decades to go back and read the whole thing and finally, inspired by Hester Blum's new edition and my trip to New Zealand, I started in on it for real in December 2022 and have been slowly working my way through since. It is a hella weird book, so much more weird than I was expecting. I read a lot of it while on planes and while stoned in bed, so that may have shaped my reaction, but it's actually a great way to read this, where you just kind of zoom in on the language that's right in front of you and lose track of the plot and big picture. And is there a plot here? I mean there is, but it's not really the point. Anyway. I still don't know how to think about this book, but I'm so glad I read it. And I am still always thinking about it
New mystery series from someone I didn't realize was writing a new series! Some hesitation about the reveal, but mostly fun
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her …
love dictionaries, love words, love recovering histories, did not love this book
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …
Loved the premise, but this should have been so much better than this didactic slog with featureless characters. Victoire's defining characteristic? Born in Haiti. Does she have a personality? Who knows! I'm cranky and can't believe I dragged through this. YMMV! But I felt about this the way Amal El-Mohtar did in her review of Yellowface.
Business consultant Rose Josten might not have officially reached “pug lady” middle age, but she’s …
A good queer romance, although I'm positive the way it describes movie making and funding is bonkers. Like her Satisfaction Guaranteed, very good on anxieties around sex and kind ways of healing, so more than worth suspending disbelief about movieland.
“Go get lost somewhere, it always does you good.”
For Arthur Less, life is going …
I might've liked this more if I'd remembered anything about Less from the first book, but also I liked it fine as is.
An accessible, character-driven story set in 2003 New York City about a genderqueer book conservator …
There are good things about this! But also, at its core, there's a disdain and self-hatred about novels and writing that makes me furious. I read this with #BookishBookClub otherwise I probably would have stopped, but we did have a good discussion!