Menage à Trois Bingo

Omitted from June list: Furies of Calderon, Jim Butcher (audio) (see below for general comments about the series)

Also, if you haven't noticed by now, I generally only make negative commentary about books. If I don't say anything, I liked it!

Also also, I finally put my compiled diversity book list on Google Drive, so you can see it too. None of the authors are straight white American men; they might be anything at all else.

1. *Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
   About the reign of Henry VIII and his courtship and marriage of Anne Boleyn. Wolf Hall itself, the home of the Seymours, doesn't even appear in the book, nor are the Seymours a very big presence, so I'm really not sure why it's called that. Good book, generally, and appears very well researched, but it's written in third person and the viewpoint character is almost never named in the course of the text, while there is a huge assortment of other named characters. She'll name one man and then a moment later in the same paragraph say 'he' but now she's talking about the POV character and not the one whose name was just mentioned. Pronoun antecedents are a thing, Dear Author. Still, I put a hold on the sequel.


2. Academ's Fury, Jim Butcher (audio)
   I'm listening to this series (Codex Alera; this is the second book), which I have previously read and enjoyed, and while it hasn't quite reached a point of making me stop, the Suck Fairy has definitely visited, especially in contrast with the intentional diversity of my other reading. I am noticing just how often female characters are described in terms of their sexual attractiveness, how many rapes or rapes-just-barely-escaped there are, and how the classism of the society is validated by the higher class people being objectively better than the lower class at their world's most valued abilities. Sigh. I'm not sure I can continue to recommend these to people.


3. The Philosopher Kings, *Jo Walton


4. Cast in Silence, *Michelle Sagara


5. Cast in Chaos, *Michelle Sagara


6. *The Cooked Seed, Anchee Min


7. *Redefining Realness, Janet Mock
   Two memoirs in a row, VERY DIFFERENT from each other.


8. *Code Talker, Joseph Bruchac


9. The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse, Alan Bradley (short story/novelette)


10. Cast in Ruin, *Michelle Sagara


11. *Trade Me, Courtney Milan


12. As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, Alan Bradley


13. *Futureland, Walter Mosley


14. How to Build a Girl, *Caitlin Moran


15. *The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez