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One of the only good things about this week was finishing Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree - a book I originally put on hold back in the spring, but which came in at a very opportune time (I needed a palette cleanser between my Gideon the Ninth re-read and... everything that follows)

I remember asking some folks for speculative f/f recs and someone mentioned this one. I put a hold on it immediately just based on the cover, because... come on.



This book was truly like a nice cup of coffee. Not one that you chug in the morning before work because you only got 4 hours of sleep, but one that you sit and enjoy while reading a book, a quick break where you can be still and collect yourself. It will make you want baked goods, for sure.

It's interesting that it's billed as "high fantasy and low stakes" -- on the one hand, for me as a reader that was a helpful thing to keep in mind during some of the more tense moments (there IS an actual plot, and antagonists, even though ample pages are devoted to stuff like... the invention of biscotti). With the world how it is, it's good to have some assurance that yes, the story will turn out fine, nobody is going to die, you can relax. But on the other hand, if you're Viv, trying to start over and throw yourself mostly blind into this crazy idea that you had without much experience -- I don't know if you'd consider that to be "low stakes". For her, the stakes are probably as high as the fantasy!

Even if the stakes are (supposedly) low, the emotions aren't. It's a surprisingly poignant look at trying to start over, at anxiety and doubting whether you deserve the things that happened to you. There's a bit about 3/4 of the way through that sort of gave me a shock because I realized that it was talking about imposter syndrome. and  I did not expect to see that in a book where an orc is the main protagonist.

(As an aside: I don't read enough fantasy these days to know, but are there other books with orc protagonists??? Please tell me.)

Also, I didn't realize this until I read his author bio but Travis Baldree is apparently also a video game developer? Who worked on the Torchlight series???!!! Which I REALLY LIKED??? (Torchlight 2 was really really really good, everyone should play it if they haven't)

Some auxiliary activities that may enable reading but are definitely NOT reading on which I've spent more time this weekend than actual reading:

• Setting up Calibre exactly how I want it
  
  • This includes creating a custom series-like column that tracks in-series Discworld reading order, as well as sub-series.
• Trawling Project Gutenberg (as well as its... slightly more opinionated Canadian offshoot) for public-domain books I never got around to reading;
  
  • Incidentally, it turns out the original Gutenberg is a pretty good source for those lovely monochrome ink illustrations that I was trying to figure out the name for a few months ago (does anyone know? I mean stuff like this); if I can get them cleaned up in photoshop/CSP they might make really nice transparent .pngs
• Fixing metadata on the above
• Also fixing metadata on all the books I had laying around from the 2019 Hugo Voting packet
• Making some custom fanfic covers so my Kobo will look nice (I showedisis the one I made of her fantastic Being Ray Kowalski and she seemed to like it! ♥)

If you're thinking "Solo, you seem to enjoy organizing things around you hobbies more than you actually enjoy your hobbies!" -- well, you might be right. I don't know when I first became aware that I can easily fall into hyperfixation mode when I'm doing fiddly little classification/metadata work, but  it's probably at least partly responsible for my choice of higher education, job, and volunteer work...


In terms of ACTUAL reading, I finished An Unseen Attraction; this was my first KJ Charles book, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I'm always a fan of shifting/alternating POV if it's done well, so that was nice to see. I think I'm realizing that my favourite kind of "romance" (a term I'm going to use carefully for a variety of personal reasons that I'll talk about later, maybe) books are ones that lean towards the plot-heavy or at least have a central mystery/problem/adventure for the characters to solve. Because like, if I want just the "will they realize their feelings?" and the aftermath of that -- well, that's what fanfiction is for, isn't it? 

The blurb describes it as a slowburn, but honestly I thought it was a bit quick? If anything, it took a bit too long for the mystery to start happening, rather than the smut - though the smut was quite good, I am not complaining -- loved the vague Dom/sub undertones and that the characters don't necessarily fall into those stereotypes. Learned some new words (thank you, Kobo dictionary feature!) and more than I thought I would about taxidermy. Will probably check out the two sequels if my library has them.

☀ Finished The Motherless Oven. This book is surreal as all heck. Like - I am still not entirely sure what happened. It's like, you know when you have a dream and while you're dreaming it makes sense but when you wake up you realize it was really weird? That's kind of what this book is like. I sort of started to get at least SOME sense of a plot and how the whole world works towards the end, but not enough to explain, well... anything. 

☀ I had some leftover chopped hazelnuts so I decided to take another stab at chokladbollar. Last time I made them they turned out far too sweet so I cut the sugar in half. Also the cut-up chocolate chips I used for the outside last time got really hard and kinda weird in the fridge, so the nuts should solve that problem. They look like big truffles! So cute. 

☀ This has been thoroughly yelled about over on  yuuago 's journal but I am really really loving this chapter of Stand Still Stay Silent. All the characters that I love but who don't usually get much screentime (Tuuri, Onni <3) are right there and it's amazing. To  be honest, seeing Tuuri in the header image was one of the things that first attracted me to this comic. I couldn't think of any other time where a small chubby girl was in a post-apocalyptic comic, so that made it immediately worth checking out. And Onni, gosh I just have a lot of headcanons about Onni that I won't go into here. 

☀ Also, you know that feeling where you know exactly how a fic should go, and you can picture it, but you just can't write it? I've been wresting with this one thing about Kenma for weeks now and I got to a certain point where all the sentences feel awkward and weird and end up deleting everything I write. Blargh >.<