So how did I do this month? Let’s take a look!

Books Read

14 books read in February, which is just as many as in January! To be honest, my fibromyalgia and depression were kicking my arse this month, so I’m actually pleased I managed this many.

To the best of my knowledge, of the 12 authors here… (12, not 14, because Anne Bishop and Becky Chambers both take 2 spots!)

• 10 are women, and 2 are men. (Not all cis.)
• Only 1 is a person of colour
• 6 are various flavours of queer

I really need to work on reading fewer white authors. Recommendations are welcome.

Of the books…

6 Rereads

• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
• All the Birds in the Sky
• A Stranger in Olondria
• Written in Red
• The Library of the Unwritten
• Paladin’s Grace

7 Arcs

• All the Murmuring Bones
• The Velocity of Revolution
• The Queen’s Weapons
• The Black Coast
• A Desolation Called Peace
• The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
• Helm of Midnight

Only Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was both wholly new to me and not an arc.

Books Reviewed

Six reviews! That’s as many as last month. I think averaging at just over one a week isn’t bad…but I’m still hoping to do better in March!

Books Dnf-ed

I am probably going to be the only one on the planet to not enjoy She Who Became the Sun, but there’s no getting around it; it bored the hell out of me. Insert shrug emoji here, I guess. I don’t think it’s objectively a bad book, but epic without the fantasy doesn’t interest me, and there were no magical elements in the chunk I read. Maybe there are some, later in the book! I do not know; I can only tell you that as book and reader, we didn’t suit.

Dead Money had an incredible premise, but I realised very quickly that the tone was a lot darker than I’d expected. Honestly, that’s probably on me: what was I expecting in a book about capitalism in the afterlife???

The Second Bell…started really well, but rapidly got kind of simplistic and hand-wavey? Which is disappointing, especially because other readers have told me that the magic gets very interesting later in the book. Maybe I’ll give it another try sometime.

The Sword in the Street is the one arc I feel guilty about, because I actually reached out to the author when they were looking for reviewers. I was so excited to see a queer autistic character! But besides being a bit too reminiscent of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint for me, I found the writing pretty uninspired, and the aforementioned autistic character…kind of upset me. I’m autistic myself, and I know we’re all different and also, duh, autistm does not magically make you a perfect person. But it made me uncomfortable as hell, so…on the DNF pile it goes.

Arcs Received

I swore I was going to stop requesting arcs, but…welllllll… Obviously, I did not do that. Although I do want it noted that a couple of these I’d requested before February!

Arcs Outstanding

Aaand, here are the arcs I received before February, and have not yet reviewed. At this point I’m actually reading my own retail versions of The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry and A Summoning of Demons, since they’ve been published since I got the arcs!

Looking Forward

One thing I realised this month is that, receiving and reading arcs takes away some of the anticipation-joy for the future. What I mean is – I’ve already read Desolation Called Peace, The Councillor, and The Queen’s Weapons. That gives me very little to look forward to, and my special calendar of anticipated releases is a big part of managing my depression. So it’s…strange and not-nice, to realise March is left pretty bare of new books for me to be excited for now.

On the other hand, that leaves March open for a) arcs whose reviews are due by April, and b) not-arcs! Rereads and older releases that I haven’t read yet. And there’s plenty of both, more than enough to keep me busy.

So we’ll see how March goes, but if it’s really a downer to not have so many new releases to be excited about, I’ll probably stop requesting arcs altogether. Which would certainly not be the worst thing in the world!

But now I’m going to curl up with the new T. Kingfisher book, Paladin’s Strength. That sounds like a pretty great way to spend the day.

Onwards to March!