Throwback to this morning, when I read my book while Casey styled his hair into a crest by rubbing his head against my duvet.

I wanted to finish DON‘T WANT YOU LIKE A BEST FRIEND today but, while it‘s good, I haven‘t found it as moreish as I hoped it would be. We‘ll see what happens later this afternoon. #AuldLangSpine

Here‘re this year‘s Canada Reads panelists and their selections, for anyone who missed them! For the first time ever, I lucked out; I‘ve already read three of the finalists (the tagged book, A TWO-SPIRIT JOURNEY, and DANDELION; I‘d rank them in that order), and the other two ( ETTA AND OTTO AND RUSSELL AND JAMES and JENNIE‘S BOY) came in for me last week. I‘ll definitely get everything read by the time the debates start on March 17!

I started another from the Canada Reads Longlist while I waited for the final announcement today. So far, THE WHISPERS has the potential to say important things about the expectations people hold for white suburban moms versus the reality they live, but I‘m not sure if it‘ll do enough deconstruction for my tastes.

It didn‘t make the shortlist anyways, and I won BIG with the books that did! I‘ve either read them or I have them in my library stack.

Ahhhh, friends, I‘m having SUCH a good time with SWORDCROSSED! Freya Marske gives off the best vibes. I almost don‘t even care what‘s happening as long as I get to bask in her books‘ overall feel.

There are a couple of domestic thrillers on the Canada Reads Longlist, so I figure there‘s a good chance one of the panelists wants to bring the genre to the table this year. Even if WATCH OUT FOR HER doesn‘t make the cut, I won‘t regret reading it. It‘s creepy as shit! I‘ve got so many theories already and I can‘t wait to see how everything comes together.

I‘m heartsick today, so I‘m looking for small joys to place opposite the horrible hatred I see around me. I hung the photograph I bought last week, and I‘m in the homestretch with this lovely book about queer teenagers who suffer but also have a great adventure together in NYC. #AuldLangSpine

Another recipe with a pretty serious filter on the example photo. Even with Litsy‘s food filter, this soup is way more brown than gold. Maybe Australian creamed corn really is yellow enough to overcome the brownish broth you mix with brown sauce?

It‘s pretty tasty, at least. She cites it as a Chinese restaurant staple, but I‘ve never had it before or noticed it on a menu around here, and I HAUNT my top restaurant‘s menu. A regional thing, maybe?

This week‘s library haul includes another volume by a poet who impressed me last week (SKY WRI TEI ING was so cool!), two more from the Canada Reads Longlist, more from Hiromu Arakawa and Junji Ito, and a religious text.

Here I am, using up the peppermint mocha coffee whitener and the whipped cream while I tear along through WITCH KING. It seems like a lot of Littens had issues with the pacing, but I really like this back-and-forth structure. It offers up my favourite balance of questions and answers. Doesn‘t hurt that the worldbuilding‘s very cool indeed. Martha Wells has let me down before, but I think she‘s gonna land this one. #AuldLangSpine

Supper involved Kris Ripper‘s moreish new romance and Nagi‘s fake mapo tofu. The dish is tasty enough, but I question her tofu to meat ratio and it‘s once again obvious she filtered the hell out of her example picture. Even with a big glop of chili oil on top (and Litsy‘s food filter), this sauce is brown rather than red.

My stack of library books I haven‘t even started yet got waaaaay too tall during my slow reading week. Gonna try to knock it down over the next few days.

Also, I finished my tiny detective‘s office and it now lives beside my library stack. This brings me joy.

I‘m coming off a slooooooow reading week thanks to one good book where the author‘s syntax didn‘t quite jive with my brain and another where I was too distracted to give it my full attention, so I‘m mighty glad to be flying through THE CINNAMON BUN BOOKSTORE! I‘m pretty sure the entire plot will flee my mind within a few days, but that‘s fine. I need books to be enjoyable in the moment, not memorable for ever and ever.

I finished THE SUNBEARER TRIALS this afternoon while I broke in my new moccasins! It was a fun take on the kids-in-life-or-death-competition storyline, set in a queernorm world influenced by Mexico instead of Europe.

The moccasins are a limited edition from Manitobah Mukluks, in partnership with artist Rosa Scribe, and they were a lucky thrift store find. They‘re brand new, AND I had a $10-off coupon. #AuldLangSpine2025

Today‘s library haul features two more #AuldLangSpine2025 requests, two from the Canada Reads Longlist, another Junjj Ito collection, Freya Marske‘s latest, a guide to help me plan my time in the Loire Valley, and the first Namibian novel I‘ve had the chance to read.

Oh, hey, I forgot to tell y‘all how much I loved MOST ARDENTLY! It dove straight into my heart and tugged, tugged, tugged. It‘s also the second Remixed Classic I‘ve adored, after INTO THE BRIGHT OPEN by Cherie Dimaline, so clearly I need to seek out more of them.

I finished it while I started this book nook. I‘m now fairly far into it, thanks to stints with a couple other audiobooks. #audiocrafting #AuldLangSpine2025

I can see why BETTER LIVING THROUGH BIRDING is so popular! Christian Cooper‘s enthusiasm really shines through. I‘m enjoying it a lot and I want to prioritize his comics the next time I have a Marvel Unlimited subscription.

That said, either the print book has teeny, tiny typeface or I find his prose style very slow. It‘s taking me forever to get through these 296 pages and my progress-to-effort ratio has made me a bit grumpy. #AuldLangSpine2025

The library made me return my favourite cookbook (so rude), so I turned to my mum‘s favourite online chef for inspiration tonight. I once again suspect Nagi Maehashi used a filter to get the colours in her book‘s photo, but my Korean barbecue chicken thighs were delicious even if they weren‘t as gleaming red as hers. (They WERE slightly redder before I sliced them up and tossed them with rice.) I‘d make ‘em again.

Veteran YA writer Julian Winters‘s adult debut is all kinds of moreish with its punchy prose and characters so vibrant you know they‘re off living full lives even when they aren‘t in Denz‘s orbit. Add in plenty of jokes, a few wacky hijinks, and an ever-applicable knowledge of the romcom canon and you‘ve got something that‘s mighty hard to put down. If you‘re at all interested in contemporary romance, you want it when it drops on January 28th.

Casey and I agree THE NIGHT GUEST is some damned good creepy shit. I started it before bed last night (which, yeah, was a CHOICE), read until I was too tired to carry on, and finished it over breakfast this morning.

Ahhhh, this was so good! I tore on through it in less than a day, thoroughly caught up in Imogen‘s identity struggles and her intense friendships. I laughed A LOT (especially at the small German sausage), nodded along with Imogen‘s thought processes, and desperately hoped for her to reject Gretchen‘s prescriptive declarations. It‘ll stay with me for a long while.

Also, I think both Imogen and Tessa would approve of my penguin. #AuldLangSpine2025

This week‘s library haul features a fantasy from @peanutnine ‘s #AuldLangSpine list, Kris Ripper‘s latest (I think), another small town cozy romance, another Junji Ito collection, and some poetry.

This is Casey‘s, “OMG THE TOAST POPPED” face. Little dude loves breakfast foods.

He‘s gonna help me finish THE CITY IN GLASS this morning. It‘s very good but not propulsive, so I haven‘t torn through it the way I usually do with Nghi Vo‘s work. Still, it builds beautifully. I expect affecting things from the ending.

I spent a nice little chunk of time with a play this afternoon! It‘s been ages since I read one, and this look at family and connection to community was a great place to dive back in. I‘ll be looking for more from Joelle Peters.

Stealth shot of Geo with my first #AuldLangSpine2025 read! This karaoke romance novella was lovely. Lots of music, lots of café/bar realism, and some really, really great talk about clothes and how HARD they are when your body doesn‘t fit together the way the fashion industry insists it should. Lily and I started sewing for the same reason, with the same bumps along our roads to good tailoring.

I could say lots of cogent things about how Natalie Wee references her own lived experience, the historical record, various pieces of queer pop culture, and the wider contemporary poetical canon to produce something that feels entirely personal, deeply rooted to a particular story, and universal, all at once, but…

Well, I just wanna tell you I said, ”Fuuuuuuck” about a million times as I read.

Fuuuuuuuck.

5 stars

I thought about nixing my daily short story in 2025, but I decided I might as well keep at it. It gives me a good excuse to seek out new anthologies and collections.

Today‘s offering was an enjoyable Lady Astronaut story by Mary Robinette Kowal, from Reactor‘s 2024 Some of the Best anthology. I read it while I drank some delicious mead from a local apiary.

I‘m gonna be sad when I catch up on the Veronica Speedwell mysteries. They‘ve brought me a lot of joy this year, even given the library bottleneck that left me with a months-long hiatus between the 5th & 6th books.

I finished this book nook during yesterday‘s listening session! It, too, brings me great joy. I‘m so glad Michael‘s started stocking them, and including them in their couponable items, so I could nab it on Boxing Day. #audiocrafting

I was gonna save my ARC of if I THINK THEY LOVE YOU for the new year, but I couldn‘t resist starting it last night and I‘ve struggled to put it down since. It‘s exactly what I feel like: a contemporary romance with great energy and vibrant characters.

The beer was 100% a can buy that paid off. It‘s a tasty, low-alcohol offering that goes down easy with a bit of a bite. $0.10 from every can goes to artist Cyndi Wiebe, too.

I went to a particular library branch today because they had a copy of THE SUNBEARER TRIALS on the shelf and it‘s part of @peanutnine ‘s excellent #AuldLangSpine list. Turned out they also had a bunch of enticing poetry just sitting there, unborrowed, and obviously I wasn‘t gonna leave without the academic look at absinthe I found on the New Releases stand.

I chased the dogs all around the house before I got Geo to sort of halfway pose with THE STORY COLLECTOR, and I maybe shouldn‘t have bothered because it was resoundingly okay. Not bad, but also not especially gripping— though I‘m sure for some people, its treatment of particular kinds of grief makes it exactly the book they‘ve always needed.

I finished THE SUNLIT MAN while I assembled the first wall of my new book nook and played a bit of Candy Crush. While I appreciated it as a look beyond the Cosmere chronology we‘ve seen so far, the story never really sparked for me. I think perhaps it‘s best appreciated by Cosmere superfans who‘ve committed themselves to close readings of all the books, with a huge wealth of detail fresh in their memory.

Got my 2025 reading journal set up while I started THE SUNLIT MAN on audio! I find I‘m way less interested in tracking stuff like genres these days, so I went with a simple monthly list setup, some A to Z challenge pages, a place to log a book for every year I‘ve been alive, a Best Of page, and a spending log.

The book hasn‘t totally grabbed me, though I AM intrigued that it features an established character further on in his timeline.

Happy Christmas to everyone celebrating today! Christmas isn‘t a religiously important holiday for me, but I love giving people presents, seeing the decorations, and reading a few holiday-themed books.

UNDER THE MISTLETOE WITH YOU has emerged as my favourite of the three I bought in this year‘s $0.99 sales. It‘s one of those all-too-rare books marketed as a romcom that‘s ACTUALLY A ROMCOM! There are jokes! And whacky hijinks! Whee!

I went to a super fun afternoon party with an unconventional cookie decorating contest, and now I‘m ready to do some reading! I was too tired to really dig into UNDER THE MISTLETOE WITH YOU last night, but I liked the first 10% very much and I‘m looking forward to more.

Still cooking my way through ZAO FAN. I made a batch of xiao jiaozi a few days back and have been searching for the ideal way to cook them. The book says boiling‘s the way to go, but I find it sucks all the flavour out of the meat and encourages the dumplings to pop apart. Today I tried steaming, with much better results. Some of them still came apart, which makes me think I messed up the meat paste a bit, but they stayed juicy and toothsome.

Casey loooooves cats. He lived with one when he was a tiny puppy, with his first family, and the kennel he stayed at before he moved here was primarily a cattery. They had a few rooms set aside for dual-species pet families to occupy together. It was sweet.

I also love cats, and this book has renewed my determination to someday visit a cat cafe. It‘s full of cat-love, unsurprisingly, with some heartrending bits about the pain of pet-loss.

Winter Solstice library haul! I‘m especially excited for the tagged book, and for the Paris guide. I just booked a week there, in an ACTUAL GARRET. All the literary sources agree you should get a garret when you run away to Paris—unless you‘re d‘Artagnan, in which case you may live in a ground floor flat with only one lackey.

It‘s been a while since I read something not in Litsy‘s database, but tonight‘s treelight read is mysteriously absent. I‘ve filed it under another book with the same setting.

A GIFT-WRAPPED HOLIDAY has great reviews on Kobo, so I didn‘t hesitate to shell out $0.89 for it. Alas, while it isn‘t bad, it ain‘t as sparkly as I thought it‘d be. Sadness. Maybe things‘ll click for me in the last 2/3.

Last night‘s treelight read. I‘m going all in on the holiday stuff now! I initially passed by this collection in Tiffany Reisz‘s Black Friday sale because I thought I‘d read everything in it, but it turns out I was missing the title novella and one of the short stories. I‘m excited to finish it up today, especially since my evening plans got cancelled. Need to fill the void.

An audio copy of WORDS OF RADIANCE came in for me 12 weeks sooner than scheduled. I‘ve been listening as much as possible so I can finish it in time to also squeeze in a holiday romance before Christmas, which meant it was time to break out the Mustang puzzle I‘d been saving for a special occasion. Now that I‘ve seen 50 years of Mustangs all in one place, I can confirm the ‘69 is 100% my fave. I only wish they‘d used the orange convertible here.

Tonight‘s treelight read. Maybe it‘s because it took me over a year to source THE REVOLUTION BUSINESS and a couple months beyond that to actually read it, but it feels very much like a bridge book. Stuff‘s happening, and it‘ll probably be important to the grande finale, but it hasn‘t gripped me the way the first four volumes did. Oh well. It‘s still interesting, just not AS interesting as I expected it to be.

Tonight‘s treelight read. I switched to it after I admitted I was in totally the wrong mood for the portal fantasy/economics-focused SF I‘ve been not-reading for the last day and a half. So far, I‘m feeling the quirky townsfolk, the planned ghost hunt, and the extremely large typeface. It plays well with the miserable cold I‘m fighting off.

This week‘s library haul includes a few comics and a trendy romance.

I read Junji Ito for the first time last week, and it‘s easy to see why he‘s hailed as the king of horror manga. This guy knows his way around the creep factor. I‘m glad my library owns so much of his work.

I almost returned the tagged book unread to make room for a 48-hour audiobook that came in way earlier than expected, but I decided to at least give it a go. Now I‘ve got an exciting new author to explore! While I solved the mystery many hours before Jake, I had such a great time with all the small town community stuff and the strong friendships that I couldn‘t care about the story‘s faults. I made excuses to listen more. #audiobaking

I read the first 26% of THE SUNSHINE COURT earlier, then made myself put it down so it didn‘t take over my whole evening. I think it‘s gonna wreck me and I‘m gonna thank it for doing so.

Some morning short fiction with Casey, who still believes it‘s indecent to get up before 10:00. I‘m enjoying these very British, very Victorian winter ghost stories.

Last night‘s treelight read got off to a great start! I wish the authors didn‘t explain most every reference, but I like the characters and the stranded plane scenario. I‘m about to dive in and see how things go for them now they‘ve arrived in this little Christmassy town!

No second book slump for Allie Therin‘s Sugar & Vice series! TWISTED SHADOWS deepens everything that worked in LIAR CITY. It‘s a great mosaic of intriguing (but not always admirable) characters, banter, and big questions about power of both the supernatural and governmental sort. I ate it all up and can‘t wait to see where the story goes next after that game changer ending!

I finished assembling this tiny bookshop before I started THE LOST BOOKSHOP, but let‘s pretend the two overlapped so I‘ve got an excuse to show it to you, and to tell you I‘m enjoying the book. It‘s got a solid emotional core, and I‘m assuming there‘s magic to the shop itself as well as to Martha‘s perceptions about people. Intriguing. #audiocrafting

Tonight‘s treelight read, with bonus lucky peach. katherena vermette (who‘s gone lower case) is a must-read for me, and I‘m glad the 133 people ahead of me on the holds list tore on through her latest book so I got it semi-quickly. Now here I am, immersed in her glorious prose that practically reads itself.