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Trying new things that have been on my bookshelves for at least five years. Both of these books are by well respected authors of whom I have never managed to actually get into their works. I have tried several times, both with these two and with others, but it’s just never really quite worked out.

Maybe this year will be the year.

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I do appreciate that y’all don’t judge me when I accidentally reblog posts to the wrong blog.

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Welcome to 2025!! I haven’t abandoned this blog by any means, but I kind of sort of hadn’t read any books in the first third of this year due to my other various hobbies taking up space. Damn you FFVI.

That being said, I’m trying to get back on the book train and I’ve managed to successfully reread a couple of books, so time to update the pinned post!!

Currently reading:

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

First read:

Kushiel’s Avatar

Reread:

Howl’s Moving Castle

Cassiel’s Servant.

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How about I deliver you a review?

I promise this blog isn't dead, I just got stuck on reviewing one of the meatier books I read this year and that made doing any reviews a whole ordeal but that's a problem for a different day when I'm not talking about the most recent book I finished!

I got to read something really special, the book of a movie I loved as a kid and couldn't ever find because it wasn't translated into english at the time, but twenty some odd years later, a copy of Kiki's Delivery Service somehow managed to float into my hands and I devoured the whole book in an afternoon.

I will start by noting that the book and the movie are two very different animals, so if you go into either one expecting the same story, you'll be disappointed. But I've known this for years and was expecting to see something that would have shades of one of my favorite movies while still being a different story.

It starts in the same place, with Kiki being a thirteen year old witch ready to set out for her training, but it shifts very quickly, for one thing her parents have been pushing her to leave for a while and she has to ask her dad to buy her a radio. She takes off on a clear full moon night and flies south until she's able to find the not so little town of Kokiri by the sea and decides to settle down and try being a witch for a year.

Kiki is a delightful character from the getgo, she's sassy and determined and also so very sweet. Even though she's determined to be a more modern witch and not just follow tradition, her journey is more about discovering what sort of witch she wants to be, and finds that she's happy to keep some of the traditions around. She loves her black cat, and while she's not so pleased with the long black dress at first, she comes to enjoy it and her inherited broom too, all the while running a little errand system, doing deliveries for people with the idea that they'll share something in kind. Money isn't the concern, she'll swap delivering a birthday present for the chance to make a friend, she'll accept a knitted belly band for her cat and future knitting lessons to deliver a belly band to a sailor with a boat that's getting on there in years, her first delivery is an exchange of returning a pacifier to a baby and being given some delicious rolls. Her journey is less a journey of self discovery and more just... growing up. She knows most of the things that are important to her and picks up more of them as she goes.

Compared to the movie, the book is very relaxed, there's no plot with her losing her witch's power from overwork, there's nothing about having to leave behind childhood including being able to talk to her beloved cat, in fact Jiji has been her cat since infancy and the book makes it clear that they will be close friends till Kiki is completely grown up, and if they wish to live separate lives then, they can. What there is instead is a lot of little stories about her meeting people and getting integrated into the city of Kokiri, going from the strange girl who people are a little afraid of to their very own beloved delivery witch. At the end of the book she makes it through her first year and gets to go home for some time, but discovers that though she is happy to be home, she misses her work and her seaside city and the people there, and chooses to return earlier than planned in order to see them all again.

It was a really nice, soft read for a cold winter's day! It's a children's book, and one that could easily be enjoyed by a kid who's just seen the movie (as long as they're not a book purist snob who'll turn their nose up to any changes from the book, I speak from sad example here), but there's something to it for adults too. It's just such a nice whimsical read and I had a wonderful time and immediately added it to my bookshelves as a book to keep.

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Well it took me 9 days instead of 3, but I have finished Chalice! In true form as most of my reading, Zephyr supervised the lion’s share of it by lying on my book as often as he could, so it has the Zephyr seal of approval if nothing else.

I enjoyed my reread quite a lot, though as usual I struggled to grasp entirely what the plot of the story was. This is a thing that sometimes happens with Robin McKinley, so many of her stories are just moments in people’s lives where things are happening that they must adjust and adapt to where they can and fight where they can’t that it’s difficult to name a plot for a review. I do think this time though, I can do it.

Chalice is a story about mending what was broken. The story begins with Mirasol, a new Chalice, which is a magical cupbearer bound to a demesne who feels the magic in the land and people around her and keeps them all connected together, who has only recently come to her Chalicehood after a devastating incident took away the demesne’s previous Master and Chalice at once and has left the land itself shaken and at odds between the deaths and the seven years of chaos that came before, waiting to greet their new Master, who is a man who left them years ago to become a priest of Fire, and came back to them partway through his training because there was no one else and the land needed them both. (God that’s a run on sentence but I am not fighting it to make it better right now, this is a blog for random book thoughts, not meta or fanfic)

The story is slow and almost plods along at times, Robin McKinley can be very skilled with exposition but sometimes it stands out anyway and Chalice I think it is a bit more prominent than some of her other books, but it is also very comfortable and warm and soothing. It’s rather like the honey that fills its pages, as among other things Mirasol is a beekeeper and her magic manifests in her bees and the honey that comes with them, and as such is a nice book to just sit down and slowly absorb. Honey is wasted if you wolf it down without ever stopping to absorb the taste.

It was a nice ease back into her writing style too, she was the author who most inspired me as a child to want to learn how to write and how to write in a specific way. Her stories are not fast and the tensions are often simmering beneath the surface beyond where her protagonists can see, but there are layers and layers to the story and I have enjoyed the process over the years of coming to find new things in her writing every time.

It’s a good book for cold, wet days when everything seems dreary, warm and rich and oozing as sweet honey, and more than anything made me wish that summer was over with by now so I could more easily curl up in my chair to read more.

I got encouragement and also I wanted to reread this one in particular, so sure, let’s go for it! Let Robin McKinley month begin!

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I got encouragement and also I wanted to reread this one in particular, so sure, let’s go for it! Let Robin McKinley month begin!

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Hmm, I have 10 Robin McKinley books in my library and I can usually read her books in 1-3 days easily enough.

Maybe I should make August the month of Robin McKinley?

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Over the past two weeks, I have read all of The Raven Cycle. I picked up the first book on a recommendation from my little sister (and the promise of a well done bisexual character) thinking that I might slowly read the series over the course of this year.

Read it? Yes. Read it slowly? Hell no. I devoured those books and am happy to have done so! Although it has left me with a distinctive reading hangover where I think I’ll need a little bit before I pick up something else to read.

What can I say? Hyperfixation’s a bitch.

Anyway, it’s a brilliant series, I love the way it in which it plays with your expectations from the start, and gets you invested in the characters first and foremost. Out of the 20 plus characters in the books, I think there were four I didn’t care for in the end and all of them were antagonists. So well done, author. Also the different types of magic were intensely fascinating to me, and I was very happy to see a household with a similar setting that I grew up with represented not as weird and out there and thus unpleasant, but just different, and interesting in its own way. That was a really nice change of pace.

I’ll probably do a few more posts about this series once I’ve recovered and had a chance to reread some of it. I definitely haven’t finished codifying my thoughts yet, and some level of reread is necessary to notice all the foreshadowing I missed the first time. But it was a relatively easy read, and a very engaging and satisfying one.

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I replied to your message in my head several days ago did you not get it

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And I have finished Gideon the Ninth!

Still just as spectacular as it was the first time, only now I know all the secrets and all the grief locked up that weren’t even spots on my radar the first time I read it. It is a fantastic tragedy and knowing that it’s coming doesn’t make it any less compelling all the way down.

Truly it is one hell of a book, it’s rather like a tidal wave - slow to start, impossible to stop once it gets going, and you can’t look away from it as it collapses upon you.

I very much look forward to my Harrow reread, but in the meantime, I have another book I’ve promised to read with my sister first.

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One of the absolute delights about rereading a book that you read maybe a year and a half ago is that you recall just enough information to pick up on everything you missed the first time around.

This is to say that Gideon the Ninth is even deeper than it seems and both Gideon and Harrowhark are far worse at concealing their feelings than they pretend.

In other words, I just reached the line “And Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star.”

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“Do you want,” Gideon whispered huskily, “my hanky?”

“I want to watch you die.”

“Maybe, Nonagesimus,” she said with deep satisfaction, “maybe. But you sure as hell won’t do it here.”

Well now that’s just rude.

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This has been a much more successful restart given that I’m already five chapters in. The beginning hurts way more knowing just what these girls have been through and also I caught a sneaky Roranoa Zoro reference! So, it’s been fun so far.

Trying to read Scum Villain unfortunately derailed my reading train. I guess I’m not ready to try getting back into my danmei yet. Let’s go for angsty goth lesbians instead.

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Trying to read Scum Villain unfortunately derailed my reading train. I guess I’m not ready to try getting back into my danmei yet. Let’s go for angsty goth lesbians instead.

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I did start reading this, it’s been slow going in part because life was hectic this week and in part because I spent my spare time writing instead.

I’m still in the very early chapters, but it is reminding me already of a few things I appreciated, including the clear delineation between what Shen Qingqiu is picking up on and what he’s missing, and (with the benefit of a reread) knowing that there are things he just never grasped about any of the characters even before they started to develop. It’s fun and shows well why and how he’ll be surprised as the story continues on with him, revealing depths he never thought to look for.

I think this is the next book I’ll be reading.

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I think this is the next book I’ll be reading.

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I finished Privilege of the Sword!!

So in the end, I enjoyed most of the story, but felt the ending was a little rushed. It goes from Katherine and her companion’s shenanigans and explorations leading them stumbling into the tangled web that the antagonist and her uncle have been playing with in time to save one of the minor characters, to her uncle going to confront and suddenly killing the antagonist in question to running away and making Katherine the next Duchess of Tremontaine with a few of the still dangling plot threads loosely tucked into a slim epilogue without really showing us the fallout from his actions beyond the part where he just goes “shit I’m getting out of here, summon my boyfriend from the summer estate”. Artemisia’s subplot isn’t really resolved, though she shows up there, and there’s a few others that were introduced partway through that aren’t mentioned at all.

However.

There’s one more book - I believe it’s called Fall of the Rival, that’s at least what it looks like from where it’s sitting on my bookshelf - which may clear up a lot of these grievances. I don’t think I’ll read it immediately, I’ve got something else in mind to pick up first, but I’ll give it a shot soon. I did on the whole enjoy a ton of the book too, I loved the slow escalation of the political quagmire that makes up Tremontaine versus the rest of the nobility, Katherine’s journey from farmgirl to swordfighter complete with bisexual awakening was really charming, I cared about most of the side characters at least a little bit, which is very impressive considering how many of them there are, I just wish that either there was more time to show the fallout or that there hadn’t been the epilogue that feels like it’s trying to wrap up enough of the dangling plot threads to feel like it’s a satisfying ending. I’m fine with trilogies ending with a sort of null ending in the middle, it just doesn’t really need an epilogue at the same time.

Also Artemisia and Katherine should have become girlfriends. C’mon. I deserved it.