Kyrie

This is a very soft and introspective book. Each of the many characters in the book are trying to figure out how to be happy in life, using various methods of trying to attain that happiness in a society that says, "If you just do this, this, and this, then you will be happy."

And most of them fail in spectacular ways. Every single person that is drawn to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is broken and disillusioned with the world, and how they're told that things should be. But Yeongju and her bookshop (and well-intentioned book recommendations) give people the space and time to think about their lives, where things went wrong, and how they want to move forward.

The act of reading the book itself feels like the act of taking and exhaling a long, steady breath.

This was such an amazing book - Anaïs Mitchell also does the narration on the audiobook, complete with singing some of the original, cut sections. It also includes sections of some of the more vocally intense parts of various songs.

She has such a hauntingly beautiful voice - both in her actual speaking voice, as well as in her poetry.

For each song, you're given the lyrics and then a breakdown of the various iterations of the song through the various productions - Vermont, Off-Broadway, England, etc. There are a lot of lyrics and themes from the early days that I wish had made it through to the final, official musical...for instance, I really saw what she was going for with the Garden of Eden allegories.

It's an absolutely stunning musical though, just the way it is. I've never had the chance to actually see it, but every few months or so I'll listen to the entire Broadway Cast album on Spotify. All of it. In one sitting.

Also just wanted to say that I knew about Anaïs before her Hadestown days, thanks to a Weather segment on Night Vale featuring her song "Of a Friday Night" from The Brighter. Gotta have my music hipster moment. I don't have very many of them. 😂

An interesting divergence from the typical collection of ghost stories - all of the tales in this book are stories that could be backed up and proven by actual newspaper articles. Naturally, many of the stories are proven to be hoaxes, or caused by a simple thing, like lights reflecting in a neighboring window, or a loose board pushed about by wind.

I do have to say though - SO MANY of these are set in Ohio! Was it not enough to be Serial Killer Central, now Ohio's got to have a grip on ghost stories as well? :P

I love how this book is so victim-centric, giving them so much more time and exploration than the alleged killers/the actual killer. And just, the respect he had for the families. There was one who didn't really appreciate the way that he depicted her in the book, and instead of ranting about it and vilifying the woman, he has a very nice paragraph dedicated to understanding and acknowledging her perspective.

An absolutely fascinating look at the challenges of working in the game development industry. It does a good job of balancing the ideas of the creative fulfillment that people get from the work vs a realistic look at what attempting to work in the industry is actually like, and the ways that things have changed from the early games of gaming to the present day.

The book covers the production histories of several games, including Epic Mickey, Bioshock Infinite, and The Flame in the Flood. There's also a chapter on the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper, which was especially interesting, with an in-depth dive into the unique challenges of working on free-to-play games...even more so when the company is putting pressure on you to monetize a game in outrageous ways. Like, say...doubling the time it takes things to finish building in a mobile game, to push players into spending even more money on your in-game currency.

Oh, that got so much darker than I was expecting. I love it!

For as short as this book is, it manages to cover a lot more information than I expected! It goes over important deities, mortals who became deities, creation myths, some mythological creatures, and the founding stories of the Three Kingdoms.

Read this as an introduction to Korean folklore, and use it as a launching point into more in-depth works for maximum effect.

Also, just a side note, but all of the sources listed in the bibliography are websites. :/

I'm torn - I LOVE the world, the mythology, the murder mystery and courtroom drama! But...I wasn't a huge fan of the romance? I mean, they're adorable, but the story was constantly bogged down by the "oh I like her, but I shouldn't!" followed immediately by "oh I like him, but I shouldn't!" For 20 chapters, while in the background Marguerite is being a spy and severed heads are turning up all over the place.

I'm settling on a 3.5 rating.

The story is about a family of fairy tale protagonists, and I love it! Each member of the family is a different type of fairy tale protagonist - you've got the brave knight, the clever middle child, the cunning lowborn knight who uses his wits to rise above his station, and of course, the daughter who has a curse to break (she set the curse herself, but that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things).

For such a short story, everything ends in a very satisfying way.

Of course, I don't think I've disliked a single thing that I've read by Naomi Novik, so probably take my review with a grain of salt.

Oh wow, that was so much more racist than I was expecting. 😬

And it's not just a product of the times, Andrew Lang was alive and writing about these things at the same time, and he didn't go off on tirades about "primitive cultures" and their silly games.

Disregarding that, this is a history of nursery rhymes in the sense that it's a list of various rhymes and games that the author knew, and the approximate time frame in which they were sung/played.

Another fun pick from my daughter! This one focuses on facts about the various continents. It's got some genuinely interesting facts in there, and unlike the books when I was a child, it's got a healthy balance on descriptions of different cultures. I absolutely love it!

My daughter grabbed this as one of her library books, and it's incredible how many stories they've got in here! This volume focuses on words with long vowel sounds. Each story focuses on adding in a new long vowel sound/combination, so that the entire thing is a very cumulative experience.

The light novel is so good that I'm literally learning Korean because the translation that I was following wasn't updating fast enough for me.

For some reason, one of my latest hyper-fixations has been missing persons cases, specifically where people have gotten lost in the woods or wilderness.

I'm running low on podcast episodes to listen to, but I saw this pop up on my Spotify home page...that's right, I've made it through an audiobook! I never thought I'd see the day.

The book is a good combination of location descriptions, area history/mythology, and actual cases...with a heavier focus on the mythology and supernatural. The longest chapter is about the author getting Gram Parson's room at the Joshua Tree Inn and two girls conducting a séance.

I'm starting to see what people mean when they say that they can't stand Hastings.

I'm pretty sure this book could give Gatsby a run for its money on how many times people say “old sport”.

I liked the 1st Hercule Poirot book a bit more than this one...it jumped around a LOT with who the story was following, and when the events were taking place, which made the plot feel a bit disjointed. It was still a heck of a time, though!

Ngl, that twist-twist-reverse twist got me. This was a lot of fun to read.

This isn't affiliated with Unsolved Mysteries, it's just a collection of stories that were featured on the Netflix series. I'm pretty sure that the information came directly from the show, as there isn't any new perspective on these stories. It's just straight facts and timelines.

There are also several typos. After chapter 3, the writing itself takes a nose-dive, at times being almost incoherent. The book would greatly benefit from a good editor.

2021 was just a draining year for me. Between work and everything else going on, and everything going on at work BECAUSE of everything else going on, I had absolutely zero focus. About halfway through the year, I started spending more time just hanging out online, playing goofy games with my brothers. It ended up being what I needed to keep myself sane in a year that was nothing but stress and frustration.I did still manage to get some reading in, though a lot of it ended up being comics.

I found so many wonderful webcomics last year. Those helped keep me going, as well. I don't really have enough books/comics for my typical end of the year favorites wrap-up, but I do want to give a shout out to Amanda Rahimi, whose comics are just absolutely, 100% built to my sense of humor, and to Fiothin, whose comic Zocker I found at the very end of the year, but is JUST the kind of warm, goofy sappiness I needed. It also started me down a German webcomic hole that's been giving me some hardcore nostalgia.

I allowed myself to start dnf-ing books. I ended up with more of those than I thought I would - the original plan was to just dnf when I was forcing myself to read a book that I wasn't really enjoying, but I ended up shelving a lot of them because of that lack of focus. There's several on there that I'm probably going to go back to once I have the time and energy for them, so please never look at my dnf shelf and think that everything on there is bad. More often than not, it's a matter of my timing on reading the book not being right.I'm not setting any lofty goals for myself in 2022. Things are far from looking like they're going to settle down, and I'm starting the new year with a resolution to not add extra stress to myself. I'm planning to read what I can, when I can, and that's good enough for me.

Here we are, at the end of another year. And good lord, this year. It amazes me how it seemed to fly by, even though this year was actually 10 years packed into one.I didn't manage to read as much as I would have liked this year. This is the first year in a while that I didn't even manage to hit 300 books read, but I've come to terms with it.My TBR started with 307 books, and ended with 291. So my concentrated efforts to clear out books I've been meaning to read actually gained some ground this year, at least!I had to work a little to put together my favorite reads list this year, but here goes:

1. Bloodline (Whyborne & Griffin #5) - I'd started reading the series back in 2018, and I'd told myself that if I ever caught any of the rest of the books on sale, I'd jump on them because I'm a sucker for a good HPL-fic. Well, Threshold (Whyborne & Griffin #2) went on sale at the end of 2019, and after reading it I gave in and bought the entire series outright. From there, I basically binged the entire series and ended up with a book hangover that lasted an entire month. Bloodline was the point of no return for me - the overarching plot started picking up, and my investment in the series went through the roof. This series brought me so much joy this year that when I saw Unhallowed (Rath & Rune #1) come out, I wept actual tears of joy.

2. Piranesi - I didn't realize that Susanna Clarke was writing this book. I was a little iffy on it, being a completely different beast from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I mean, I can actually fit this book in my purse! But daaaaaammmmnnnnn, the woman can write. Piranesi is gloriously atmospheric, and does a lot with its short page count. After the Whyborne and Griffin series, this is the book that broke my heart the most this year.

3. Truly Devious - The entire set-up for the the Truly Devious series (or the first trilogy, at any rate - not sure where the 4th book is going) was captivating. It has a great central mystery, an awesomely secluded setting, and I 1000% approve of Stevie's book organization system. Sorting books “by feel” is my go-to system.

4. Life of Melody - It's not often that a comic, let alone a webcomic, makes its way onto my favorites read list. But look - Life of Melody is adorable. It's dark, but sweet, and it was such a relief in this dumpster fire of a year that it's more than earned its spot here.

5. Legendborne - I'm always there for new takes on the Arthurian legend, and Legendborn definitely tried something new. At the same time, it goes DEEP into Arthurian lore. Also, just A++ use of Lancelot.

Honorable Mentions*

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your House - I feel bad putting a Night Vale book down in the honorable mentions, but...Faceless Old Woman didn't hit me the same way Night Vale books usually do. Not bad, by any stretch - just different.

The writing style just isn't working for me.

Congrats, Jordan Hawk. You just made me cry.

I started the year binging the Whyborne and Griffin series, and the resulting book hangover lasted nearly an entire month. And then 2020 started to go downhill.

And now, I find out there's going to be more after all?

AND it's about a librarian in Widdershins???

I waited to read My Sweet Audrina until I'd forgotten the twist.

And then I started reading, and I immediately remembered what it was.

It wasn't exactly what I was expecting (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell II: Electric Boogaloo), but I loved it! It reminded me a lot of The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, which means I've come full circle, since I started reading Erin Morgenstern because her writing made me think of Susanna Clarke.

I might try to come back to this one later, but it's just not my thing.