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I am reading one of the (many) books about autism I've acquired in the last couple of years, trying to work out whether I can see myself in them enough to justify identiying myself as autistic instead of just weird and a bit useless. (Answer; yes, definitely.)

Picking this one up, I wondered vaguely if "books about autism" has now become a special interest. And then I remembered how, at the age of seven or eight, I was so obsessed with reading Doctor Spock's Book of Baby and Child Care (trying to work out what I was meant to be like) that my mother ended up hiding it from me. And then later, when I started to work out that I wasn't straight, I tried to find myself in queer fiction (of which not much was available in the local library, and none of it was terribly helpful, because I had no idea I was looking for ace rep and even if I had done, I don't think there was a lot of it about in the 80s).

Later on, I mostly tried to learn how to interpret and interact with other people from books, but I've always been trying to find myself there, too.

Amy-Jane Beer's The Flow is a book about rivers, and particularly the rivers of Great Britain. It's my favourite kind of nature writing, mixing personal memoir with history, science, ecology and culture, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Less enjoyable was Empire of Light, which we went to see last night. From the trailers, I'd expected a nostalgic tribute to the power of cinema, possibly involving the restoration of a derelict building. I was not expecting a violent racist attack, and was definite not expecting a disturbing portrayal of severe mental illness leading to sectioning. I think it was a good film (and the cinematography was stunning) but it really wasn't much fun to watch.

Till Human Voices Wake Us was Victoria Goddard's first published book. While it is set in the same universe as the later books which I'd already read, and mentions characters who appear in those, it has a quite different feel, and is also different in being set in a version of modern London (Ysthar, in Goddard's Nine Worlds, turns out to be Earth). The central character is Raphael, lord magus of Ysthar, who is coming to the end of a centuries-long magical competition for the role of lord magus when his long-lost brother reappears in his life. It's largely a story about processing and moving on from trauma, and about someone learning to let people in after years of shutting them out, and although it is hopeful and sometimes funny it does feel a bit sadder than the other books I've read. I enjoyed it a lot, though; it reminded me a bit of Fire and Hemlock (the title is taken from 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' and Eliot pervades the novel in a similar way), and also quite a lot of Sandman.

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter is the first Alexis Hall book I bought, though not the first I ended up reading by a long way. It's a kind of steampunk Lovecraftian reimagining of Sherlock Holmes, probably by way of BBC Sherlock, with a gender-flipped sorceress Holmes (Shaharazad Haas) and a buttoned-up Victorian (though gay and trans) Watson (Captain John Wyndham) trying to solve a case of attempted blackmail. I thought this was great fun.

I am not quite sure how I managed to read 144 books last year, but apparently I did.

( Full list behind cut )

27 of them were graphic novels, which I do read faster than prose, and several were quite short (novellas/novelettes rather than novels). But still. (Also, two of them were The Hands of the Emperor and At the Feet of the Sun, which bring the averages back up again.)

A Case of Possession - K.J. Charles: the sequel to The Magpie Lord, a supernatural mystery set in Victorian London with a central m/m relationship. Quite a lot of explicit sex (as is typical for K.J. Charles) but a solid plot as well.

Act Your Age, Eve Brown - Talia Hibbert: the third of Hibbert's romances about the three Brown sisters. Both of the protagonists of this one are autistic, which I found particularly interesting, but the sex-to-conversation ratio was skewed a bit too much towards sex for me.

Burnout - Emily and Amelia Nagoski: an interesting and helpful look at the causes of burnout and how to recover from it.

Those Who Hold The Fire - Victoria Goddard: prequel short story to The Hands of the Emperor, very charming.

The Sandman: Overture - Neil Gaiman: both a prequel and an epilogue to the series. Clever and beautiful.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley: steampunky m/m romance. Clever plotting and very charming.

At the Feet of the Sun - Victoria Goddard: the sequel to The Hands of the Emperor, and the epic ace romance of my dreams.

But You Don't Look Autistic At All - Bianca Toeps: another memoir by an autistic woman. I found this one particularly interesting because the author is Dutch, and it was interesting to see how growing up with undiagnosed autism is both the same and different in different cultures.

Sisters of the Vast Black - Lina Rather: NUUUUNNSS IIIIIN SPAAAACE! Also, they are badass nuns who are working to oppose a fascist government.

The Raven and the Reindeer - T Kingfisher: a lovely sapphic reworking of The Snow Queen.

The Tower at the Edge of the World - Victoria Goddard: a short story set in the same universe as her other novels, giving an insight into one of the characters' backstory.

What Abigail Did That Summer - Ben Aaronovitch: Peter Grant's cousin Abigail gets mixed up in supernatural goings-on (with talking foxes) while Peter is away during the events of Foxglove Summer. Fun and nice to get a different point of view.

Hither, Page - Cat Sebastian: vaguely seasonally appropriate murder mystery-cum-m/m romance set in postwar England, very sweet.

Legends & Lattes - Travis Baldree: an orc mercenary decides to retire and open a coffee shop. A bit reminiscent of Pratchett, great fun, also very sweet and cosy.

The Red Scholar's Wake - Aliette de Bodard: a sapphic romance between a sentient pirate spaceship and a scavenger who has been taken prisoner. Gorgeously visual prose, full of swirling colours and images, beautifully romantic. Plus pirates.

In The Company Of Gentlemen - Victoria Goddard: another short set in the Nine Worlds, with a couple of glimpses of familiar characters.

I would like to get back to writing proper reviews, but for now, here's a catch-up of the last month or so.

The Witness for the Dead - Katherine Addison: set in the same world as The Goblin Emperor, but not a direct sequel; a gentle fantasy murder mystery which I enjoyed a great deal.

The Ministry of Unladylike Activity - Robin Stevens: the first in her new series, following the adventures of May Wong (younger sister of Hazel from the Murder Most Unladylike books) during World War II. Great fun, with likeable characters, even if one of the plot points was easier to guess as an adult who had a Bad Feeling as soon as the characters ended up in Coventry in autumn 1940...

Doctor Who: At Childhood's End - Sophie Aldred: a tie-in novel which reunites Ace (one of my favourite Classic Series companions) with the Thirteenth Doctor.

Infomocracy - Malka Older: from the depths of the e-TBR pile, I really enjoyed this near-future thriller about electoral tampering in a world of divided into "microdemocracies", with each group of 100,000 able to select its own government.

Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble - Alexis Hall: sweet baking-themed m/m romance with a main character with anxiety, which was extremely relatable (possibly too relatable).

Lady Liesl's Seaside Surprise - Tansy Rayner Roberts: fun gaslamp fantasy mystery focusing on one of the side characters from the earlier Teacup Magic books.

The Return of Fitzroy Angursell - Victoria Goddard: the story of what happens when the Emperor from The Hands of the Emperor goes on his quest. An utter joy of a book, full of delightful coincidences. (And I do love a fantasy book where the narrator is extremely concerned about the availability of bathrooms, and makes use of a Bag of Holding to carry large numbers of cushions and other bedding.)

How to be Broken - Emma Kavanagh: a book about post-pandemic burnout which was very good on the causes and symptoms but less good on how to get over it.

Ocean's Echo - Everina Maxwell: m/m space opera romance, utterly lovely.

Undercover - Tamsyn Muir: a novelette(?) with zombies in a vaguely Western setting. Creepy and unsettling but very good.

The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul - Victoria Goddard: the sequel to The Return of Fitzroy Angursell. Features (a) a middle-aged female academic heroine; (b) a band of middle-aged adventurers; (c) a large number of nods to Dorothy L Sayers and is another delightful character-focused fantasy.

The Steerswoman - Rosemary Kirstein: classic fantasy novel from 1989, featuring a female variant of the brains-and-brawn odd-couple-travelling-together trope and some interesting ideas (the steerswomen travel around, making maps and answering people's questions, but the trade-off is that people have to answer their questions in return, and if they don't, they are cut off from that knowledge for ever). The first in a series, and I will be reading the others.

Rivers of London: Deadly Ever After - Ben Aaronovitch: the latest of the Rivers of London graphic novels.

Deep Wheel Orcadia - Harry Josephine Giles: this is a verse novel in Orcadian dialect (with parallel English prose translation) set aboard a remote space station. Hauntingly beautiful with wonderfully resonant language, addressing questions of home and belonging and the tradeoffs needed for a life on the geographical margins.

Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander - Victoria Goddard: a companion novella to The Hands of the Emperor, exploring one of the background characters in more depth and giving a different perspective on one of the scenes. This also brings some welcome explicitly queer content to the series, where the previous books I read had queer background characters but none in the foreground.

A Trifle Dead - Livia Day: Tasmania-set cosy murder mystery with cake (the heroine runs a cafe). Entertaining and not too serious, but really made me crave a flat white.

I didn't mean to take nearly two months off posting, life had just been taking up all my spoons and I haven't really had the energy left to string words together.

I have been reading quite a lot of words, though.

Fierce Company - Stephanie Burgis: the last in her Good Neighbours fantasy romance series. Witty, fun, peril firmly set at "mild".

Back to the Bonnet - Jennifer Duke: in which Mary Bennett inherits a bonnet which enables her to travel in time and has fun making sure the events of Pride and Prejudice come out right. I thought the ending was a bit overcontrived but generally very entertaining.

The Letter of Marque - Patrick O'Brian: Aubrey and Maturin on the high seas again. Joyous as always.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain - Nghi Vo: the sequel to The Empress of Salt and Fortune sees Cleric Chih trading stories with tigers on a snowy mountain, and is just as charming as the first book.

Because Internet - Gretchen McCulloch: interesting look at the way the internet has shaped language.

Holiday Brew - Tansy Rayner Roberts: the second collection of Belladonna U novellas, as much fun as everything Rayner Roberts writes.

Petty Treasons - Victoria Goddard: prequel novella to The Hands of the Emperor showing Cliopher's early years in His Radiancy's service from His Radiancy's perspective. Absolutely delightful.

No Time To Spare - Ursula K Le Guin: a collection of Le Guin's blog posts, thoughtul and beautifully written.

Downstream - Caitlin Davies: a history of swimming in the Thames. More London and less upstream Thames than I'd hoped for, but actually really interesting.

Stim: An Autistic Anthology - ed. Lizzie Huxley-Jones: a collection of writing by autistic authors. I know that I enjoyed quite a few of the pieces here and found them very relatable, but I can't remember much about any of them now.

Dust-up At The Crater School - Chaz Brenchley: another term at the Martian version of the Chalet School, this one featuring a weeks-long dust storm and a Christmas pageant.

The Burning Page - Genevieve Cogman: third in the Invisible Library series, enjoyable and unchallenging.

Rowany Goes To Summer School - Chaz Brenchley: another Crater School-linked story, featuring the former Head Girl at a rather unorthodox summer school.

Beowulf - trans Maria Dahvana Headley: a modern feminist translation which uses the classic text to explore issues around toxic masculinity. I've never studied Old English and will never read Beowulf in the original, but I really enjoyed this take on it.

Nona the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir: the surprise fourth book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb trilogy is as different in style to the first two as they are to each other, but just as full of clues and puzzles to solve and just as much of an absolute delight.

Blackthorn Winter - Liz Williams: the sequel to Comet Weather has the same feeling of a grown-up version of the children's fantasy of the 1960s and 70s, full of timeslips and incursions of faerie into the modern world. Beautiful and lyrical, occasionally scary but somehow still deeply comforting.

Still Life - Sarah Winman: my mother recommended this to me, and I'm glad she did; it's a lovely book, which reminded me of The Enchanted April in the way its English characters are changed for the better by their encounter with Italy and continually open their arms to newcomers (as well as A Room With A View, which is a vivid background presence).

The Far Time Incident - Neve Maslakovic: in the Connie Willis time-travelling academics genre, but narrated by the administrator. I wanted to like this more than I actually did, alas.

Her Majesty's Royal Coven - Juno Dawson: a witchy adventure story which felt like it was conceived and written as a massive fuck-you to J.K. Rowling (intersectional feminism! Trans witches!). There was a lot I liked about this, and if it had ended a couple of chapters earlier I'd probably have said I loved it, but I really didn't like a few things about the ending and probably won't read the sequel which is out next year.

Heartstopper vol 4 - Alice Oseman: just as delightful as the first three.

The Way to the Stars - Una McCormack: I love all of the characters in Discovery, but Tilly is definitely one of my favourites and this novel about the events that led her to joining Starfleet was lovely.

The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Klune: this is charming and managed to stay just the right side of too whimsical, and also didn't do what I feared it was going to do and decide that getting a small number of people out of a manifestly horrible system while leaving millions of others behind counted as a happy ended. (Yes, I'm looking at you, A Close and Common Orbit.)

The Year of Critical Rolls - Tansy Rayner Roberts; Untitled Cryptid Album - Tansy Rayner Roberts: more Belladonna U

Think of England - K.J. Charles: Edwardian adventure romance. Fun and also sweet.

The Last Graduate - Naomi Novik: the sequel to A Deadly Education. I really enjoyed this but found the last chapter almost impossible to get through as the tension was ratcheted up so high. I need to read a lot of fluff now, and possibly wait until I'm in a better headspace before I read the third book in the trilogy.

I think I first heard about Victoria Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor from the Be The Serpent podcast. I bought the Kindle edition on their recommendation and spotted it last week when I was flicking through my unread books (of which there are...A Lot) trying to decide what to read next.

My goodness, I adored this.

The Hands of the Emperor is a huge, slightly rambling fantasy about a middle-aged bureaucrat who passionately longs to make the world a better place. Cliopher Mdang is the first person from his remote archipelago ever to enter the civil service in an empire spanning multiple world; his hard work and complete integrity have enabled him to rise to become the Emperor's personal secretary and head of the civil service. When he returns from a visit home and suggests that the Emperor takes a holiday, he finds that he has set in motion a chain of events that will fundamentally change both his relationship with the Emperor and, ultimately, the entire world.

This isn't a perfect book - it's very long, and, as I said, rambles a bit. Some things end up coming up multiple times, and the pacing is odd - a single evening can have multiple chapters, and the next one glosses over years almost without acknowledgement. Despite that, I loved it. The characters feel utterly real and likeable, the world they live in is fascinating (Goddard throws us in at the deep end, and the novel is full of references to earlier events that we only find out the details of later). As an administrator myself, I adored reading about another thoroughly competent administrator (and occasionally found myself wincing in sympathy at the pressures of Cliopher's job). And more than anything, I loved that this is 900-odd pages of people being kind and thoughtful and trying to make the world a better place. Wonderful, utterly absorbing comfort reading.

Chivalry - Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran: a lovely graphic novel version of Gaiman's short story about an elderly widow who buys the Holy Grail in her local Oxfam shop.

Legendborn - Tracy Deonn: I read this because Deonn was shortlisted for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Legendborn is a YA take on King Arthur where the reincarnations of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have migrated to the USA and become a campus secret society in Carolina. I thought it was entertaining enough, with some interesting commentary on race and privilege, but it was very, very YA and I didn't find it entirely convincing.

What Souls Are Made Of - Tasha Suri: postcolonial reworking of Wuthering Heights, exploring how Cathy and Heathcliff's story might have been changed through the acknowledgement of a racialised context. Aimed at the YA market, and occasionally a bit kids' adventure story, but I liked it much more than I ever managed to like the original.

A Prayer For the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers: the sequel to A Psalm For the Wild-Built is even more delightful; a gentle and charming exploration of a gently utopian world where people are still people, and still have problems, and learn to resolve them by connecting with each other. I really hope that Chambers is going to write more Monk and Robot books.

Heartstopper vol 3 - Alice Oseman: just as lovely as the first two, as Nick and Charlie and their friends go on a school trip to Paris.

Take a Hint, Dani Brown - Talia Hibbert: the second in Hibbert's series of romance novels featuring the three Brown sisters. Dani Brown is a junior academic who is looking for no-strings sex and definitely doesn't want commitment; Zaf is a former professional rugby player and incurable romantic who works as a campus security guard. Fun, fluffy fake dating romance.

Lands of Lost Borders - Kate Harris: I really enjoyed this account of the author's cycling trip along the Silk Road, from Istanbul to northern India via China and Tibet; Harris managed to capture the mixture of gruelling slog and utter joy of undertaking a long journey entirely under one's own steam perfectly, alongside describing the varied landscapes she and her friend travel through and their encounters with locals along the way. (There's also a Facebook gallery of photos which I enjoyed working through after I'd finished reading the book, because it turns out that I can't actually imagine how high the Himalayas are.)

How to be Brave - Daisy May Johnson: a modern take on the classic school story, featuring rare ducks, nuns with helicopters and lots of biscuits. Great fun, and I think I need to buy a copy for my nieces.

A Pig of Cold Poison - Pat McIntosh: the seventh of McIntosh's Gil Cunningham mysteries set in medieval Glasgow. Enjoyable whodunnit though, as often with this series, a basic familiarity with the murder mystery genre makes it much easier for the reader to tell whodunnit than poor Gil, hampered by lack of genre savvy and modern scientific understanding.

Penric and the Shaman - Lois McMaster Bujold: the second of the novellas about Penric and Desdemona sees Penric on the track of a missing shaman who is implicated in a murder. Bujold's world of the Five Gods is a fascinating setting, and this was another nice gentle story (and also features a Very Good Doggo, which is always a bonus).

Husband Material - Alexis Hall: the sequel to Boyfriend Material (why yes, I do seem to be reading a lot of books in series at the moment, it's almost as if the world is terrible and I want the comfort of known quantities) picks Luc and Oliver up two years into their relationship, when suddenly everyone around them seems to be getting married. This is just as hilarious and delightful as the first book; the structure is, basically, Four Weddings And A Funeral, just much less heteronormative, and it is an utter joy.

The Green Man's Foe - Juliet E. McKenna: yes, another sequel, this time to The Green Man's Heir. This one takes Daniel Mackmain to the Cotswolds, where he is employed to project manage the conversion of a stately home into a luxury hotel, while also trying to get to the bottom of the unsettling secrets of the woodland on the estate. I'm still enjoying this series a lot.

Having come to the conclusion that I've probably read everything I was going to read, I thought I should probably submit my first ever Hugo ballot.

( Details behind cut )

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within - Becky Chambers: the last in the Wayfarers series is a gentle novel about a group of sentient beings of different species who find themselves stuck at an interstellar service station when a communications failure stops travel for a few days, and how they get to know each other better, despite their many differences. A lovely relaxing read.

Bitch Planet (vols 1 and 2) - Kelly Sue Deconnick and Valentine De Landro: a graphic series set in a dystopian future where women who don't comply with patriarchal expectations are sent to an offworld prison. Not entirely cheerful but plenty of feminist black humour, and I rather enjoyed it.

A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine: the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, wonderfully thoughtful and chewy space opera, asking questions about language, identity, colonialism and who gets to count as civilised, while also featuring a charming queer romance and a host of wonderfully likeable and engaging characters. I was delighted to be able to immerse myself in the universe Martine has created again and quite sorry to leave it.

Something Fabulous - Alexis Hall: an entirely ridiculous and incredibly fun queer Regency romp.

The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson: set in a world where travel between parallel universes is possible, but only when the traveller doesn't have a living counterpart in the destination world, this is a fantastic novel which has a lot to say about capitalism, privilege, race and class, as well as life on a post-environmental-collapse Earth. It's not always easy reading, but it's really, really good, and not as downbeat overall as I feared it might be.

Thirsty Mermaids - Kat Leyh: graphic novel about three mermaids who magic themselves human to go to a bar, and then find themselves stuck on land in a world they don't understand. Fun and very queer, although the kindle edition is not fantastically formatted and I'd advise anyone who's interested to get the print copy instead. (The pages are formatted as a double-page spread, and won't rotate to landscape, so it's only really readable in frame-by-frame mode which I'm not a fan of.)

Record of a Spaceborn Few - Becky Chambers: I wasn't terribly keen on the first two books in Chambers' Wayfarers series, but I rather enjoyed this; it's a gentle read, following the day-to-day lives of a handful of members of the Exodus Fleet, a group of generation ships which carried the last human refugees from a dying Earth into the galaxy, where they travelled for centuries before settling in orbit in a star system given to them by a galactic civilisation which views humanity much as contemporary Western societies view refugees from the global South.

I do wish Chambers didn't keep referring to "veggies", though, but I realise that's an entirely irrational linguistic prejudice of mine.

The Past is Red - Catherynne M Valente: I read this because it's nominated for the Best Novella Hugo. It had a nagging sense of familiarity which was explained when I got to the end and saw that the first part was published as a standalone short story some years ago, as I'd obviously read that. It's a darkly comic post-apocalyptic story set among the inhabitants of a giant floating city made of garbage on a flooded earth. I found the contrast between the comic tone and the grim subject-matter pretty jarring, and am not sure that expanding it from a short story to a novella really added much.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vol 3 - Ryan North: This was a relaunch of the series, with a slightly different style for the character which I found incredibly jarring, though other than that it was a fun time-travel romp.

Radical Sewing - Kate Weiss: less about the radical possibilities of making your own clothes and more about how to do it, which I mostly knew.

A Master of Djinn - P. Djèli Clark: steampunk fantasy detective novel, with a fabulous heroine who walks around in Western-style three-piece suits and bowler hats and a sidekick who is equally kickass despite wearing hijab. Slightly clunky in places, but terrific fun.

Across the Green Grass Fields - Seanan McGuire: the sixth of the Wayward Children series tells the story of horse-mad Regan, who has spent her life trying desperately to fit in, until she walks through a door into a world populated by hoofed animals - centaurs, unicorns, kelpies and many more. Rather charming, though also quite slight.

Welcome to St Hell - Lewis Hancox: fantastic graphic novel memoir about a trans boy growing up in north-west England.

A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik: I loved this novel, the first of a trilogy set in a magical high school where there are no teachers and the students are under constant attack from magical monsters which mean that normally only one in four actually survive to graduation. It's kind of the anti-Harry Potter (though it also reminded me quite a lot of Buffy's "high school is hell"). The narrator is a cynical outcast in school society, which imbues her narrative with a lot of dark humour; there's also a strong through-line interrogating privilege and class as well as a compelling plot.

Elder Race - Adrian Tchaikovsky: this novella alternates the points of view of two characters, one of whom is experiencing the story as an epic fantasy and the other who knows they are actually in a lost colony SF story. I found it rather reminiscent of some of Ursula Le Guin's early Hainish novels.

Iron Widow - Xiran Jay Zhao: a futuristic mecha SF novel based on Chinese history, this was everything I'd hoped that She Who Became the Sun would be and wasn't. Its heroine powers her way from peasant girl to empress fuelled entirely by a towering rage, initially at the man who killed her sister and then at the whole system which allowed this to happen; it's not necessarily a particularly subtle or nuanced story, but I thought it was terrific fun, and there is also a lovely OT3 (and I am an absolute sucker for an OT3).

I seem to have got completely out of the habit of book reviews recently. (I have got out of the habit of a lot of things I quite enjoyed, actually.) Anyway, in the hope that I might restart at some point, a quick roundup of the last couple of months.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers: I really liked this novella about a tea monk whose desire to step off the beaten tracks leads to the first meeting between a human and a robot in centuries. It's sweet and hopeful and dedicated "To everyone who could use a break", and as someone who could definitely use a break, I loved it.

Rivers of London: Monday, Monday - Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel: the most recent of the Rivers of London graphic novels, good fun as always.

The Feast - Margaret Kennedy: recently republished, this delightful1950 novel is set in a Cornish seaside hotel populated by a disparate cast of beautifully-drawn characters, and I really enjoyed it.

Heartstopper vol 1 - Alice Oseman: the first volume of the original graphic novel series the recent Netflix series is based on, a lovely romance between two teenage boys.

Are You My Mother? - Alison Bechdel: graphic novel memoir, a bit too much psychoanalysis for me.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 - P. Djèli Clark: steampunky mystery set in an alternate Cairo, great fun.

Amongst Our Weapons - Ben Aaronovitch: the new Rivers of London novel. I enjoyed it but several weeks later find myself struggling to remember exactly what happened in it.

May Day - Josie Jaffrey: urban fantasy murder mystery set in Oxford, which begins on May Morning and which I started to read because I was at a loose end on the first of May. Plotty and rather enjoyable.

She Who Became the Sun - Shelley Parker-Chan: Chinese historical fantasy, though quite light on the fantasy. I know lots of people who loved this but I wasn't keen, or at least, I loved the first section (where the heroine escapes poverty by adopting her dead brother's identity and joining a monastery) and then lost interest when the rest of it was pretty much all military campaigns, including some pretty gruesome violence, with a lot of time dedicated to the point of view of a second character who I wasn't terribly keen on.

Spellcracker's Honeymoon - Tansy Rayner Roberts: frothy fantasy romance, just what I needed after the rather gloomy slog of She Who Became the Sun.

Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities - Nick Walker: an interesting collection of essays looking at neurodiversity as an identity and a rejection of normative ideas.

Swordheart - T Kingfisher: a hugely enjoyable fantasy adventure-romance.

Digger - Ursula Vernon: a webcomic about a wombat who finds herself a long way from home, and her adventures while trying to find a way back. Features vampire pumpkins and is generally delightful.

Heartstopper vol 2 - Alice Oseman

Gifts - Ursula K Le Guin: the first in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, a coming of age story set in a bleak and inhospitable land. Thoughtful and interesting.

Chaos on CatNet - Naomi Kritzer: YA technothriller featuring a benevolent AI with a penchant for cat pictures and a bunch of determined queer kids with parental issues.

Sandman: The Kindly Ones - Neil Gaiman

Sandman: The Wake - Neil Gaiman

Fireheart Tiger - Aliette de Bodard: sapphic fantasy novella with a background of diplomatic negotiations and colonial politics.

Lois McMaster Bujold - A Civil Campaign and Winterfair Gifts. AKA The One Where Miles Vorkosigan Goes A-Courting. Delightful comedy of manners, featuring what may be the most cringeworthy dinner party scene in the whole of literature. Winterfair Gifts is a follow-up novella which shows Miles and Ekaterin's wedding from the point of view of one of Miles's Armsmen; it felt disconcertingly like fanfic for actual canon, but was very charming.

Marie Brennan - The Tropic of Serpents. The second in the Lady Trent series about a Victorianesque Lady Explorer with bonus dragons. I remember being a bit underwhelmed by the first one and didn't find this one really managed to hold my attention. I probably won't bother with any others in the series.

Charles Stross - The Bloodline Feud. I've always felt vaguely bad about not having read much of Stross, but found the Laundry Files just not really my kind of thing (too much horror). On the other hand, this (a compilation of the first and second books in the Merchant Princes series) really is my kind of thing; portal fantasy for grown-ups, with business shenanigans, complicated family politics, and a level-headed heroine who ends up teaming up with pretty much every other woman she meets. I enjoyed it a lot.

Kay O'Neill - Princess Princess Ever After. A short and sweet middle-grade graphic novel romance between two princesses. Fluffy and fun, even if the femme princess having the same name as me was a bit disconcerting.

Juliet E. McKenna - The Green Man's Heir. Basically, urban fantasy in a rural setting. The novel started off looking like it was going to be a supernatural police procedural, with the hero (the son of a dryad and a human man, and therefore possessed of some supernatural abilities and able to see and speak to fey creatures) stumbling into a crime scene and trying to bring the killer to justice while avoiding the police's suspicions, but wrapped that storyline up about halfway through; it felt a bit like two linked novellas rather than one novel. I definitely enjoyed it, though, and will read the rest of the series.

Liz Williams - Comet Weather. I absolutely loved this fantasy novel about four sisters who grew up in a house full of ghosts and star spirits coming back together to search for their missing mother. It felt like a grown-up version of the children's fantasy novels I grew up with - The Children of Green Knowe, Narnia, and others, as well as a generous helping of Pratchett's Lords and Ladies - with its own engaging characters and wonderful sense of place.

Victoria Whitworth - Swimming with Seals. A lovely book, structured around a sea-swim off the coast of Orkney and punctuated by Facebook updates describing other swims, part memoir, part history, part nature writing, part meditation on life and faith. Less swimming than I had expected but I enjoyed it very much nevertheless.

Alan Garner - Treacle Walker. It's hard to find the words to describe Garner's latest novel. Treacle Walker is poetic, absorbing, profound in places and extremely funny in others. On the surface it seems slight - the story of an encounter between a young boy recuperating from an illness and a mysterious rag-and-bone man - but its depths go down for miles, and I don't think a single reading got me even halfway down; I was so wrapped up in the glorious way Garner uses words that I don't think I had much space for plot. Absolutely wonderful.

Daisy Johnson - Everything Under. A watery, elliptical book, telling the story of a mother and daughter who have been estranged for many years, with lots of shifting times and points of view. The mythical underpinnings were perhaps more obvious than they were meant to be, and I'd forgotten just how bleak litfic can be, but I still found it hauntingly original.

Seanan McGuire - Beneath the Sugar Sky. The third in the Wayward Children series, about what happens to the children who travel to other worlds in fantasy when they return. As always, the series is really strong on acceptance and diversity, but I found this one just a bit too whimsical for me.

Rainbow Rowell - Fangirl. The protagonist of this YA novel, Cath, writes fanfiction for a fictional book series which is clearly basically Harry Potter; Fangirl is about her first year at university, and how she adapts. I found this a really compelling read, and it was quite sweet, but I didn't love it; the plotting felt a bit too pat, sometimes, and often the characters' various Issues felt a bit shoehorned in to be convenient. (And in a novel set in 2011, why the hell did one character clearly have undiagnosed dyslexia?)

Kim M. Watt - A Manor of Life and Death. The third in the Beaufort Scales series of cosy mysteries with dragons, this sees DI Adams joining the Toot Hansell WI (and the Cloverly dragons) on what is meant to be a relaxing spa weekend. Sadly, when the sous-chef is found dead it all becomes rather too much of a busman's holiday. Light-hearted fun, with bonus cake recipes at the end.

Stephanie Burgis - Frostgilded. This epilogue to the Harwood Spellbook series sees Cassandra and Wrexham celebrating their second winter solstice at Thornfell College of Magic, surrounded by family and students, but Cassandra just wants some time alone with her husband. Short and very sweet, and a lovely ending to the series.

G Willow Wilson - Ms Marvel, Vol 2: Generation Why. Kamala Khan is settling into her secret superhero identity and trying to find out more about the mysterious "Inventor" and why he has been kidnapping teenagers. Fun and clever, and I am surprised how much I am enjoying this series given that I'm not a superhero comics fan.

C.L. Polk - Soulstar. The third in Polk's Kingston Cycle trilogy shifts narrators again to wrap the series up with a sweet romance between long-separated spouses and a no-holds-barred push for political changes in the Jazz Age fantasy realm of Aeland. I've enjoyed this series a lot, and this is a great finale.

It's been a while since I last read any Patrick O'Brian, but this week I found myself in the mood for Aubrey and Maturin again and picked up where I'd left off with The Reverse of the Medal. It sees Jack and Stephen returning to England after their voyage to the South Pacific in The Far Side of the World, where Jack is persuaded to make an investment that he hopes will solve his ongoing financial woes, only to find himself in deeper trouble than he has ever been before.

By this point, it's very clear that the Aubreyad is less a series of separate novels and more a single story in multiple instalments; The Reverse of the Medal skilfully pulls together threads of plot from several books earlier in order to move the overall story on. As always, it's an utter delight, and I really shouldn't leave it so long before reading the next book.

***

Borderlands is the self-published debut collection of short stories from Luke Slater (who, for full disclosure, happens to be my middle brother). The fifteen stories here range from science fiction to fantasy with a touch of horror thrown in for good measure. There are two obvious fairytale retellings, though both with a twist. In others, a pair of hapless drop-outs deal with ancient gods and forgotten indigenous inhabitants of the Moon and Venus; the army of Imperial Soviet Russia pursues a fugitive across the Canadian snows in an alternate 1938; a school trip to a provincial museum turns out to be more dangerous than anticipated; and in the title story, the Nine Worlds of Norse myth are translated into a science-fictional reality. These stories are vividly imaginative and atmospheric, often incorporating the weird and uncanny but never uncomfortably dark, bringing fifteen different worlds sharply to life with humour and the immediacy and forward momentum more often found in more visual media than in prose.

I didn't intend to read the book in a day, but each story was such a delight that I kept yielding to the temptation to read just one more, until suddenly there were no more stories left. I definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys SFF short fiction.

Olivia Dade's All The Feels is a follow-up to Spoiler Alert, which I read and enjoyed in 2020. All The Feels centres Alex, who appears as Marcus's best friend in Spoiler Alert, and the slow-burn romance between him and Lauren, who is assigned as his minder by the showrunners of their series after he gets into a bar fight during location filming. It's a fun, fluffy romcom, though it has its more serious moments (content warning for mention of past domestic abuse); it has a hero who has ADHD and a heroine who is struggling with burnout and has multiple t-shirts with slogans and #cronegoals on; it's set in sun-drenched California; and it was exactly what I needed to read right now.

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices is an anthology of short stories inspired by the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table by diverse writers. I've never been able to resist an Arthurian retelling (seriously, that or Sherlock Holmes), so obviously I had to get a copy.

Ranging from the early middle ages to the far future, from Britain to outer space, the stories in Sword Stone Table bring women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people to the forefront. There's a woman swordsmith who makes the finest of blades; a lesbian knight rescuing a damsel in distress; a lonely mixed-race teenage girl spending the summer with family; two young gay men at the height of the AIDS pandemic; a Martian take on the Green Knight; and even a coffeeshop AU. My favourites included Maria Dahvana Headley's 'Mayday', a story in the form of an auction catalogue, set in late nineteenth century America; Silvia Moreno Garcia's 'A Shadow in Amber', which transplants the Lady of Shalott to near-future Mexico City; Nisi Shawl's 'I Being Young And Foolish', which reimagines the Lady of the Lake as a Uganda sorceress, but in general the quality of the stories in this anthology is high. There were a couple of stories that didn't quite work for me, and one based around baseball which is a sport I really know nothing about, but other than that I enjoyed them all, and would definitely recommend this to anyone else who enjoys Arthurian retellings.

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Finding myself in prose

Reading and watching

Reading: Till Human Voices Wake Us

Reading: The Affair of the Mysterious Letter

2022 reading: final list

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Reading: The Hands of the Emperor

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Reading: The Reverse of the Medal and Borderlands

Reading: All The Feels

Reading: Sword Stone Table

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May 2025

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