I loved this the way I love a Sarah Waters novel. Gothic and tense and so tightly written, it unfolded precisely and beautifully. Perfection.

I‘ve had this on my shelf for years, and finally read it last night. It was DELIGHTFUL and I can‘t wait for the sequel next month.

SantaThing books have started to come! After so much ordering for other people it‘s nice when my own presents come in :) thanks @emz711 !

I loved this series, even though this wasn't my favorite book in it.

Dark and twisty and gay and I loved it.

Give me a messed up family saga any day, but written by Ann Patchett, and I will devour it.

This is a Möbius strip of a novel, with a graduate student, an underground library, and layers upon layers of twisty stories to sort through. It‘s magical and fantastical and oh so worth the delightful ride it takes you on.

This is like The Good Place meets Jasper Fforde‘s Thursday Next. It was a little slow to get started—a lot of characters and a lot of backstory to build, but it eventually got there and then rolled delightfully along.

It isn't like the movies, Amaryllis Fox says in the early chapters of her memoir. There aren't high speed chases through city streets, jumping through civilians as the undercover agent evades their surveillance tail. She then proceeds to tell a story that is so compelling, I can't for the movie (which is, apparently, coming).

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Prose so deliciously lyrical that I just want to eat it.

I loved this. It‘s sharp and smart and tough to read at times. On its face, this is a story about Toby Fleishman and his divorce, but Taffy turns it into such a good exploration of relationships and gender roles. I‘ve always loved the profiles she‘s written, and am thrilled her first novel delivered.

It turns out I DO enjoy girls with swords. A whole hell of a lot. This book is magnificent.

Sparse and tense.

Nothing says “book to relax by the water with” like lesbian necromancers.

Ugh, SO good.

Well great, thanks Brynne Rebele-Henry, for making me cry on an airplane while sitting next to a stranger. This slim book is not an easy read at all, mostly taking place in a terrifying pray the gay away camp. It‘s haunting and graphic and truly gutting.

Snagged this arc at #ala2019—it‘s a retelling of the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice as two teenager girls in a conservative Texas town. #airportread

Lyrical and gutting.

Queer high schoolers, astronaut parents, NASA, and reality tv—this book is charming. I snagged an advance copy at #BEA and devoured it on the train ride home.

Mostly Dead Things is a weird and funny and sad book about grief and family, with one of the strongest senses of place (taxidermy in swampy hot Florida!) that I‘ve read in a long long time. It‘s also fantastically queer, in an uncomfortable “I see myself in this, it‘s too good, make it stop” kind of way. I would read it all over again, right now.

This is the queer rom com of my actual dreams—I pulled every string I could to get an advance copy last year (thanks @ph9k ) and proceeded to read it 4 times through. I can‘t remember the last time I was so excited for a book to come out so I could force/tell everyone I know to read it, and now it‘s out and debuted on bestseller lists and it deserves all the praise and attention. Go forth and read and be charmed and be hopeful.

If there‘s anything better than footnotes, it‘s wooing someone with a bibliography. Fact.

Oof.

This book. Started great, getting even better.

This book is...not small.

We have to wait until NEXT FEBRUARY for this! “The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.“

I miss Peter Grant, but this novella was still a fun diversion into the German equivalent of the Folly! #NetGalley

Release day! I've been waiting for this one...

My TBR is frequently disrupted by whatever comes off hold at the library. And so, this is all of a sudden up next: drag queen cat burglars? Yes please.

I bought this after seeing it mentioned everywhere following NASA cancelling the all-female space walk for lack of enough suits in the right sizes. I‘m only a few chapters in, but so far, excellent. Good and infuriating fodder for fueling rage.

So good. Pirates and magic and excellent characters (strong women! Queer characters!). This last book of the trilogy was long but didn‘t feel like it at all. I wish there was more to read.

Ahhhhhhhhh. So good. Queer, dystopian, rebellion. Ends on a cliffhanger please bring me the next book right quick.

Magnificent and dark and gutting in its horrificness. Incredibly well written, but very hard to read.

Train reading!

Feisty pirates, brooding royals, magic, multiple Londons. And I‘m ready for book 2. Thank you @kgriffith this was good SantaThinging.

A smart, political, nicely paced spy story, featuring a young black woman working for the FBI in the 80s. Fantastic.

Sad and beautiful. It flows like poetry and I absolutely loved it.

"How many lives could a person lead at one time, and how did you keep them from crashing into each other?"

“You think I deserve a love story. This is the best I can do. He came for someone else, but I was the one he chose. They are different things, being loved and being chosen. Being chosen is the more powerful powerful drug. It enslaves you. And what you miss when it ends is not the man who did the choosing, but that rush at having been seen by him.”

This was fantastic. It's a murder mystery set in a fantasy world, with queerness and assassins and secrets and scribes. It moved quickly, and I can't wait for the next book.

Inspector Betty Church is one of the first female police officers, returning to work in her small hometown after losing an arm while working in London. Now she's investigating a series of murders, while dealing with a crazy cast of characters--sexist coworkers, unappreciative parents, and an ex-boyfriend's family who seems more like family than her own. The book is delightful and quirky (in a Jasper Fforde kind of way--which is to say, good).

Murder mystery, time travel, groundbreaking female scientists—I am 120% on board with this book. The beginning dragged a bit—too much announcing that things had happened rather than letting the story unfold. Luckily that faded once the mystery got going and the timelines more convoluted. It's a good and twisty story, with interesting questions about how you might feel about death when you're constantly visiting past and future selves and (con't)

This book is absolutely beautiful. The narrative is split between present day, when Nedda is an astronaut, and 1986, when she's growing up in a small Florida town with a scientist father who used to work for NASA. It's a work of speculative fiction, sure--but also a poignant reflection on relationships, family, death, and time.

Holmes and Watson, but where Sherlock is the sorceress Shaharazad Haas. The book is (of course) narrated by Ms. Haas‘s housemate, the fumbling Captain John Wyndham, whose gentle sensibilities frequently require him to to censor his account. This is a queer fantasy world, with sky-pirates, vampires, underwater cities, necromancers, fishmongers, and luxury express trains. It is weird and ridiculous and I loved it.

Snagged an #arc of this thanks to @ph9k.

Book signing!

Every year, LibraryThing staff comes up with the best books we‘ve read that year (not necessarily *published* then, just read). I love reflecting on what I‘ve read and trying to remember why I loved each one—and then getting endless recommendations for what‘s next from my coworkers.

This year, these are mine. All of them are in this blog post: http://blog.librarything.com/main/2018/12/top-five-2018/

Completely and totally riveting.