List: romance

This is comfort food, but it's GOOD comfort food. Fantasy world with inverted gender roles (only one man per 20 women, group family marriages ensue). It follows the Regency romance arc perfectly except for leaving out that relationship building part in the second third, which actually might've been better to include. But it's really enjoyable – takes the gender role reversal seriously, isn't stupid about it, but also clearly just has a lot of fun telling the story.

Genuinely enjoyable space opera with a bit of mystery and romance, where everybody has a brain, and a character, motivations and grievances, and different opinions on each other (which is nice with multiple POV characters).

Good forest fairytale. Heavier on the "hurt" side of hurt/comfort that I initially thought. Good characters, good writing, and only a bit low on substance.

Captain Ivan Vorpatril finally gets his own book, after decades – both in our world and theirs – of grumbling in Miles' shadow. Unfortunately for him, he gets his book at the point in life when Miles' bad habits have finally rubbed off enough to push him into a chivalrous-if-ill-advised wedding. Bujold has the decency to show up front that this will be a romance, so that the inclined reader doesn't have to fret about the ending, and just gets to guess how she'll bring it off.

I re-read "Shards of Honour" somewhat by accident while looking up a quote for a writing exercise. I had remembered it as a decent first entry in brilliant series: Okay sci-fi, but nothing special.

Romance, mysterious curse, estate management: A queer/gay romance in a fantasy version of Victorian England. The youngest exiled son of a lord returns to England after his father and brother die, and has to contest with the curse that led to their deaths. Luckily, he finds a strange but attractive young wizard blah blah blah, you see where this ends. Very atmospheric, and too well-written to deserve to be labeled as "enjoyable trash".

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston is a rom-com, pure and simple. It's light-hearted, it's witty, it doesn't feel like "Hello, fellow kids" – what more do you want?

Short, sweet queer sci-fi romance, telling the story of a world where production of humanoid robots has been banned, but the last remaining ones are allowed to live out their life. Ace robot trope though.

Max Gladstone short story: Sweet in its way (which is not a thing Gladstone does, usually), but nothing special.

For the first part of the series, I called it “too well-written to deserve to be labeled as enjoyable trash”. The language of this second part remains well done, but the writing … not as much. It's more over-the-top, tryhard – when it doesn't really need to try hard, being itself would be enough: Magic Victorian lover boys return to the dirty city and deal with giant rats and prejudice while alternating between horniness and relationship drama. It's not bad, but the charm of the first part has worn off a bit. I'm not planning to read the next part any time soon, but I imagine at some point I'll be sick or tired or just in need of a comfort read, and I'll come back to the series then.

More Victorian urban history queer romance with an aristocrat with evil family and a lower-class magician – please somebody tell my why this is such a huge thing. I could do without the repetitiveness and the everything while just enjoying parts of the setting.

Set in Napoleonic Egypt, this is the story of Djinn, Daeva and related beings. Didn't do much for me – the concept of a hidden city of supernatural beings with tons of infighting sounded intriguing, and the stagesetting very promising, but. The protagonist is kind of flat and predictably Chosen (doesn't remember her childhood, knows magic language, has special powers, is very poor), and the dynamic between her and her semi-romantic sidekick fell extremely flat.

Okay look. Dragonriders? A whole social group structured around dragons?!! A whole society slowly losing their belief in the ancient threat that made them support and accept the dragon riders? It sounds so, so good. But. The book, first part in the intimidatingly long Pern series, was a decent read, but shows its age in some meh ways and in some other actively uncomfortable ways. I know the 60s were a different time, but also, Babel-17 was published two years before this book, so I'm not inclined to be too understanding. The gender roles are beyond lazy and verge into terrible (I kept expecting subversion because this could not possibly be serious). All the women kinda suck, including the protagonist, and I don't even want to go into the way sex is handled. Yikes. Y i k e s. The worldbuilding is great and fun, and I want more. The harpers? The ancient traditions showing that spacefaring humans came to Pern and engineered dragons to protect against the extraterrestrial treat? All that slaps. But then there's the plot. It's a bit all over the place, I believe because the book was made up from different stories, which is fine. But why, why the time travel? I'm not sure I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about the arbitrary rules of time travel for 23 more books. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Popcorn read: Victorian encounters with the paranormal continue, but this time it's in the US. A timid philologist from a wealthy family (have to do without nobility in the US, after all) meets a Dresden-style magician for hire. They need to solve a mystery that has its solution foreshadowed so strongly, I nearly couldn't see the text under all the shadow.

Bujold has a type. The type here being "adult physically broken but very clever reluctant hero, who meddles with aristocracy without being a ruler himself". It's not like they are the same person: there are differences between Miles Vorkosigan and Cazaril. Caz had a much worse life and less privileges, and is also less (over-)confident. But the parallels are very much there.

Victorian London, just with vampires and werewolves – both of which very proper and integrated – and propriety, corsets, hats, gossip, and all other Victorian stereotypes. It's Urban Fantasy, complete with the sassy, abrasive, clever, female protagonist and a handsome werewolf.

Luckily you cannot read this book in earnest anymore – times have changed too much. So if you read of the far-too-wild, far-too-stubborn young Ilse, who has to go to a boarding school to learn manners, and who is slowly "tamed" by her new friends and teachers until she turns into a young lady, you can feel amused or offended (depending on your temperament) instead of feeling pressured to do the same.

More from the ever-same dramatic duo with the uncomfortably unhealthy Ds overtones. An old enemy returns for lack of interesting new ones, a new ally spawns in just to be hot and awesome. If not for the overly yikes and predictable parts, I might be interested to see where the series goes after escalating towards the end, but I think I'll stop here.