tullycat

Happy 3/4s of the year wrap-up!


Oh this is only the January wrap-up? It's only February 3 you say? Could've fooled me.

Books

• Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman
  • This book reads like a video game - literally. I didn’t know LitRPG was a genre until this book. The narration was grating in the beginning but somewhat less noticeable as I got into it. I think there is an audience for this book - gamers who don’t read much because this would serve as a gateway. Or perhaps fans of Ready Player One. It was also fairly misogynistic in parts :/ I admit I was strangely compelled to continue the series - there start to be hints at a much bigger world, but I will not. The series is already 7-8 books long and some of them get up to 700-800 pages.
• The God of the Woods, Liz Moore
  • 3.5 ish stars? This is a family drama wrapped up in a thriller packaging. It’s how I imagine Taylor Jenkins Reid would write a thriller, not Tana French. There aren’t necessarily clues to solve, it’s more watching the family secrets unravel. And the clues we are given are sometimes red herrings that, when looking back, are kind of confusing why they were included. This is also a book about women who don’t have much expected of them being the star of the show, which I liked.
• The Stars Too Fondly, Emily Hamilton
  • So many things didn't work for me. If this had been tagged as YA/written with 17 y/o I would've been more forgiving, but I cannot believe these are late 20-30 y/o. The side characters seemed completely flat to me. The plot actually raised a lot of interesting questions and could've gone so many interesting places, but the author swept all the obstacles out of the way so by halfway through the ending was completely obvious. Because all the obstacles were out of the way, there was absolutely no tension between the main couple for me. And (spoilers ahead) when the Billie hologram dies, I didn't care at all because we had been told there was the real Billie waiting who had all the hologram's memories and was still the same age and already loved Cleo. Again this could've gone to so many cool places but the author wrote a YA plotline. Also this is fantasy in space, not sci-fi 😅
• Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder
  • This book is 238 pages and should've been shorter. The book is about a mother that turns into a dog at night (a nightbitch...). I don't think this really added anything new to the feminist oeuvre and said everything it needed to say by about the halfway point...the ending left nothing for the reader to ponder. It's not often that I say a book should be a short story collection, but this one should. The main character read a book that described other types of magic creatures/transformations and I think that should've been what /we/ were reading. Also, head's up for pet death.
• Mammoths at the Gate, Nghi Vo
  • A novella from Chih's universe. It deals with grief and storytelling about the people who have passed on. It did what it set out to do and was a much better read for me than the third book in the series.
• Mountains Made of Glass, Scarlett St. Clair
  • I read this for my in-person bookclub because I've already read The Mistborn trilogy, which was the other choice for the month. It's a no from me 😂The premise of Beauty and the Beast (prisoner falling in love with captor) is already suss but this book really did not do itself any favors by making it only 200 pages and saying they also need to fall in love in 7 days. They spend at least half of those hating each other. The second half, all of our narrative time is spent on them having sex. So yes, I definitely believed they fell in love in 3 days. Lol. (Having her figure out his name would've been perfectly acceptable narrative stakes idk why we had to add the love part.) I know this is erotica with the thinnest of plots holding it together and I shouldn’t be taking the plot so seriously, but it could’ve given me the thinnest of plausible deniability that this had a plot. Also every time he called her 'creature' did not help my rating.😭
• The Wall, Marlen Haushofer
  • A woman in the mountains is separated from the rest of the world by a wall one morning and must continue to live as what she believes the last person on earth. This is a slow, contemplative book about her previous life and society in general as she has to survive for herself and the animals she is taking care of. This is slow paced and you need to be in the right mood to read it, I think. Something interesting I saw in the reviews of the book was the younger women and older women seemed to rate it differently/have different reactions, so I wonder if what my thoughts would be if I read it in 20 years. Points for her using a stream to keep food cold, because I read that in a Boxcar Children book probably 20 years ago and that changed my brain chemistry since I still remember it now. Also, pet death galore.
• Heaven's Official Blessing #3, MXTX
  • The pacing of this book is a rollercoaster; the first half is an extended flashback that took me two weeks to get through. Then as soon as we switch back to present day (aka I could read about adult Hua Cheng), I finished the second half in a day 😅
• Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells
  • If you've read the other murderbot books, this is exactly what you would expect from them. Now that I'm 6 books into this universe, I don't find myself gulping them down, rather reading 1 every year or so, because I don't think they're covering any new ground. But if you enjoy the universe, you'll probably enjoy this.
• Private Rites, Julia Armfield
  • Sigh....I really wanted to like this since I liked Our Wives Under the Sea by her. All of the plot happened in the second half of the book (honestly everything in the plot description on Goodreads/Storygraph basically happens 50+% in); the first half was basically just family dysfunction and rain. There are some inklings of something sinister happening, but a soporific 85% and mad dash final 15% of a book isn't very satisfying to me. I am one for three on Julia Armfield now.....her books have left me feeling 'am I stupid and missing something, or was that just not well written.' So maybe if you're smarter than me you'll get more out of this than I did??

Since this month was 10 months long, I somehow fit 10 books in easily. (Granted, at least half were quite short.)

Music

• Artists
  
  • The Boyz (101)
  • WayV (85)
  • Billie Eilish (81)
  • CIX (73)
  • GOT7 (67)
• Albums
  • Hit Me Hard and Soft, Billie Eilish (80)
  • Winter Heptagon, GOT7 (56)
  • Pieces, Sun Queen (37)
  • Trigger, The Boyz (36)
  • Dreamscape, NCT Dream (34)
• Tracks
  
  • Chihiro, Billie Eilish (13)
  • Like a Flower, Irene; Twist, WayV (11)
  • CBZ (Prime Time), BSS; Tidal Wave, GOT7, No Escape, NCT Dream (10)
  • Birds of a Feather, Bittersuite, Lunch - Billie Eilish; Happy Alone, BSS; Out the Door, GOT7 (9)

Briefly pulled my head out of Kpop this month to remember other music existed.

Watched

• I already know I can't reliably keep up with this category but I did watch Nosferatu and Alien: Romulus (yunsan you are babies this isn't scary) this month. Severance came back this month which has been the highlight of my Fridays. (Not to sound like a boomer but maybe streaming did ruin TV.....I really do enjoy having a single episode to watch/look forward to each week.) I also watched Squid Game S2 while Netflix forgot that I don't have access to my parents' account anymore.

Concerts

• None!

Fic

• January word count was ~4k and posted 2 fics
• so sweet, like 자기 - Eric/Jongho, The Boyz/Ateez
• unaccording to plan, San/Yunho, Ateez

Recipes
I can't promise to include this every month, but maybe I'll start adding in some of the recipes I've made...

• Sweet potato and halloumi salad
  • I have been referring to this as the miscarriage recipe because the beginning of the recipe starts with an account of her recent miscarriage. I feel bad for her, but I was not expecting it when I opened up a recipe. Anyway, my initial opinion was that it was missing some final ingredient but I made this twice this month, so I guess this recipe wins. The instructions say to not dress it if you're going to keep it for leftovers but it tasted fine, the sweet potato just got a little soggy but I didn't mind.
• Sushi bake imitation crab casserole
  • Eh. I won't make again.
• Veggie-packed sweet potato boats
  • Wasn't my fav of the month but was pretty easy to put together.
• Fall farro grain bowl with roasted veg and crispy cheese
  • This was my first and last time making butternut squash. LMAO. I am not going through that again. Besides the stupid amount of time I spent cutting up the squash, this recipe had so many components and wasn't my fav of the month so.......was it worth it? idk. I would maybe scale it back a bit if I made it again. (And swap sweet potato for butternut squash or use pre-cut.) Also I liked halloumi from the other recipe better than this bread cheese so I would prob swap that too.
• Edamame peanut crunch salad
  • I found this one to use up some of the ingredients from the other recipes I made this month and I liked it! However I didn't realize I grabbed shelled edamame from the grocery store so I had to sit there and shell it. Very meditative....gave me time to think about how much easier pre-shelled edamame is.
• Masa harina cornbread
  • So when UK recipes say to use cornflour, they actually mean cornstarch. But I didn't realize that, so I have cornflour/masa harina to use up lmao. My verdict of this recipe is: I still don't like cornbread and passed it along to my brother.