Another journal

Read more books this month than last, which means nothing in the scheme of things. I did finish a physical book that I’d put down the month prior and forgot to pick back up (collection of short stories), which absolutely torpedoed my average read time–which also means nothing. Stats are interesting numbers and not reflections of Self!

This month I both picked up an author I hadn’t read in a while to my delight and also gave an author a last chance that they did not pass. Lol, the spectrum! Let’s look at April reading stats. NO non-fiction this month, wildly, and tbh thank god. I can only hold so much new facts in my head before saturation means new additions will overspill. Gotta give things time to soak in.

The Storygraph reviews for my top three books:

The Juliet Dove, Queen of Love by Bruce Coville

Every Magic Shop book is a delight and this one even changes up the formula with a twist!

I mean, what else can one say?! I had no idea Coville had this newer addition to one of my favourite middle grade series. If you didn’t know, the books are set around the incredibly ’80s-era concept of a magic shop that appears just when a kid needs it. There’s often a bit of a “careful what you wish for” situation and lots of learning about feelings, and silliness and sorcery. It’s great stuff. This was a particularly interesting entry as it sort of ties together previous stories, gives us more (fascinating) information about the magic shop proprietor and how things work. It feels, in a way, like the end of the series and it’s a satisfying one.

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling

Mad and hungry, this book tangles three women together ever more tightly as the reality of their world and their places in it melt into something new and wild under the eyes of creatures both more and less than saints. Delicious.

If I had a copy of this book it would live on a particular bookshelf I keep that has titles like Delicious in Dungeon, The Locked Tomb, California Bones, and other hungry books. So, you know, big ol’ content warning for cannibalism and madness. Starling is able to sell it though, with a frenetic and hallucinatory kind of prose that whips you along in the horror and hunger of a long siege.

Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Goss with Jo Walton

A dreamy collection of short stories with an emphasis on identity, monsters and, predictably, imaginary places.

Goss clearly loves to dip into the well of telling the stories of literary characters who didn’t get the page time they deserve, and I am not mad about it. Oh no, shall we dally again by the babbling brook of Borges as well? It’s one of those rare short story collections where they basically all are enjoyable to read and do something interesting, which is a bonus.

And here are rest of April’s reads:

I only just now realised that I could upload a cover for the 1960s one missing it up there. But you can have a fancier picture. It’s one of the ones Chase’s mom sent, the lot of which I picked purely on vibes. Delicious, isn’t it? Nothing much going on in its head, but it’s pretty.

Huh, quite a lot of the books in April were collections of a sort – The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel, for all that it’s one book, is more a collection of tales. And I think one worth checking out, it’s very short but just the right size for what it’s trying to do.