Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Center a LGBTQ+ Relationship 🏳️‍🌈

And it’s time for a Top Ten Tuesday list again! This week’s more open ended prompt – Love Freebie – also seemed fun. So fun that I wasn’t quite sure what to go for. In the end, I decided to focus on SFF books where the main romantic relationship is LGBTQ+ because…well, because. Not all of them are romance (I wish I had enough romance!), but I’d highly recommend them all and I could easily list 15 instead of 10.

As usual, no specific order.

Review: From a Certain Point of View (edited by Elizabeth Schaefer)

– goodreads –

“Terrible things will always happen. They happened on Kiffex and they happen on Naboo and they happen on Tatooine. There will always be a war, and there will always be someone who wants us locked up. But the only thing we can do is survive, Sen. Survive until they won’t let us.”

When I heard the words “Jawa POV,” I instantly knew that From a Certain Point of View is something I simply must read. It’s no secret by now that I’m madly in love with Star Wars. And my obsession with slice of life and perspectives of more ordinary people is well established. A crossover of the two? A match made in heaven, despite my dislike of short stories and anthologies.

Review: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #1)

– goodreads –

I’ve been a little unsure about whether I’d like this book from the start. The marketing for it gave the impression it’d be very “rule of cool over everything” and over the top. But after I saw friends rave about it, and when I saw I could borrow it, I decided it’s worth a try. Especially given it was one of the most hyped books of 2019 – as a reviewer, I had to see what the hype was about. I needed a light read, I’ve been on a space kick since December…why not?

Unfortunately, my initial suspicions were confirmed: I was not a fan at all.

2019 Wrap-Up: Statistics & Top Books

I think the delay on my yearly stats is almost traditional by now.  But late or not, here they are. I think 2019 was another excellent year, even if it ended in a two and a half month slump. I read (and reviewed!) more books than ever before and managed to keep up my blog, which is now a year and a half old. I became a moderator. I found a new fandom to immerse myself in. And hopefully, 2020 will be better still.

So, let’s have a look at some numbers and lists!

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My TBR I Predict Will Be 5-Star Reads

I haven’t posted a Top Ten Tuesday list in a while thanks to my semi-hiatus. But this week’s topic seemed fascinating and I felt up to writing again. Normally, if my sixth sense that a book will be a 5* starts tingling, I read it immediately. I can in no way resist the pull. So scouring my TBR for candidates has been a bit of a challenge. Still, I managed to find 10 very likely candidates and I think it would be quite fun to do a follow-up once I read them all.

As usual, in no specific order.

January 2020 Monthly Wrap-Up

January was even worse for reading than December. I barely finished a damn thing. I think I’m starting to feel a bit less unwell, so February will hopefully be a little better, but I’m still basically on a semi-hiatus until further notice.

And the end of the Bingo Challenge is drawing near, too…

Read:

• Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy by Martha Wells: While #3 was somehow the hardest to read out of them all, #4 was a great finale. Still, despite Murderbot being awfully likable, there was something…missing that kept the series from fully clicking with me. Meh.
• Hard Contact by Karen Traviss: Loved, loved, loved it. Enough to switch my Tie-In square to that. Flawed characters, great callout of how the prequels used clone troopers, some oddly adorable moments for military sci-fi, very easy to read. Popcorn, sure. But great.
• From a Certain Point of View (anthology): A pretty awesome concept – A New Hope through the eyes of background characters. Some stories were amazing, others not so much (as it’s usually the case for anthologies) but the overall impression is very much positive. It also has the big problem of leaving me very hungry for full-length SFF books from the POV of “minor” characters and slice of life…

Watched:

• The Sequels (The Rise of Skywalker): One word: godawful. While I really enjoyed the first two sequels, I thought the last was a hot pile of garbage with no redeeming qualities, not unlike The Phantom Menace. Structurally poor, inconsistent even with itself, more focused on retconning the previous movie than having a story, shit at characters, based entirely on a series of ass pulls…in short, terrible and disappointing.
• Rogue One and Solo: This was an interesting duo. I found Rogue One, the better received of the two, to be a great concept made boring (and Star Wars should not be fucking boring!) by flat characters. But Solo, the known flop, was just a bundle of fun all around – some flaws, some complaints, but nothing that’d catapult me out of the story. Incredibly enjoyable.
• Knives Out: Not Star Wars, but still. Won’t lie, I went to watch it because of the director and good reviews more than because I was interested in the concept – fuck, I don’t even like murder mysteries all that much – but wow, I was blown away. If The Rise of Skywalker was a disappointment the size of a mountain, this more than made up for it. When like 10 people tell you to go watch a movie, you go watch the damn movie.
• The Clone Wars: Started watching it in official chronological order (though skipping the movie as per common advice) and made it 13 episodes in. The quality is so far super uneven to the point I might skip some episodes (any episode with Jar Jar can get straight in the bin), and it’s so far very obviously aimed at kids, but I’ve been told it improves a lot, so I will persist. And I like Ahsoka and Anakin.
• …and I also did a full rewatch of The Mandalorian. Then promptly started it over again. Yeah…

Currently reading:

• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir: Currently halfway in. Really wasn’t feeling it at the start. It got better once the plot picked up, and I’m probably going to finish it because I’m sick of DNFing, but the dialogue feels super forced and over the top.

Books read this year: 4 (+ 0 rereads)
r/Fantasy Bingo Challenge progress: 21/25 (84%)

Star Wars Without Nostalgia: Rogue One and Solo

INDEX

• The Originals
• The Prequels
• The Mandalorian
• The Sequels
• Rogue One and Solo

Rogue One and Solo were the last two movies left for me to watch before I dived into the shows and books. I initially intended to watch them much earlier (release order and all), but in the end, it made more sense to leave them for last – both because it made more sense to group them together separately from the sequels and because I wanted to watch The Rise of Skywalker as soon as possible to avoid spoilers.

As for the two movies themselves? I find them incredibly intersting to compare. So similar in so many ways, yet one was a riot and the other…not so much.