elenajohansenreads

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do me a solid and just reblog this saying what time it is where you are and what you’re thinking about in the tags.

#10:29 pm #drinking a beer while thinking about women in literature #because my current read is #how to suppress women's writing by joanna russ

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Books I Read in 2024

#23 - Paint, Play, Explore: Expressive Mark-Making Techniques in Mixed Media, by Rae Missigman

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

A bit of an odd duck, in my experience, in terms of books on art instruction. There are plenty of exercises encouraging the reader-artist to try new techniques, and constant encouragement to make notes about what was successful and what wasn't; which I find sensible but also somewhat at odds with the free-wheeling, anything-goes nature of the art style as presented.

Whether or not the look of the author's art is to your personal taste isn't the point (I find some of the example pieces pretty and others ugly, as it happens,) the point is the technique. I didn't experiment with every technique presented, because a great many of the exercises called for tools I didn't have (mostly the ones associated with printing, like brayers and printing plates) so I did what I could with the materials I do have. (I also skipped anything involving "organic" dyes like the raspberry juice and the Easter-egg-dye tablets.)

Eventually these exercises lead to one final big project, a large-scale canvas that the author encourages the reader-artist to work on collaboratively with others, especially family members, especially non-"artists." I have not done that at this stage--this is a library book I need to return--but I'm both intrigued and put off by this final exercise, which has incredibly detailed instructions and calls for a whole host of improvised mark-making tools that I don't have and won't invest in.

My final thoughts are that this is a highly inspirational book for anyone looking to play with mixed media, but the exercises themselves intended to teach techniques and encourage experimentation are sometimes so proscriptive in their instruction that they often felt limiting when that's clearly not the intention. I also found it odd that the progression of exercises seemed random, without much in the way of a difficulty curve, and based on assumptions about how I paint that aren't true--I couldn't do the paint-chips exercise because I always clean my palette, I thought I was supposed to? And the earlier exercises suggested cleaning my brushes on scraps of fabric to create new media to incorporate, so I was, and thus also not making paint chips. I've started reserving a few wells of my palette to let paint dry on so I can get them soon, but a "helpful tip" box earlier on, like the one for the fabrics, would have been useful.

And that's indicative of my experience with nearly everything about the book--a mix of interesting and experimental and fun, but also full of assumptions based on how the author makes art that aren't universal. 

Also, and this is such a tiny personal nitpick, but the lengths to which the text goes never to use the word "draw," I found a little ridiculous. Okay, I get it, this isn't drawing even when I'm using media often used for drawing like pens and pencils and crayons, but sometimes the instructions are clearly asking you to draw something, except some people think drawing is hard, so we're "making marks" instead. The introduction of the book goes into detail about the author's thought process in developing her mark-making philosophy, which is somehow simultaneously vague and deeply personal, so I can't relate to it, but I also don't want to criticize her for it; I just found it silly that the book won't use the word "draw" even in cases where it's the most relevant verb for what the instructions want you to do.

#booklr #book review #nonfiction #art #art instruction

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we absolutely did not appreciate Ursula Le Guin enough while she was around, y'all

#favorite authors #ursula k. le guin

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vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

#did not like it #despite marillier being one of my favorite authors at the time

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Books I Read in 2024

#22 - Art Before Breakfast: A Zillion Ways to Be More Creative No Matter How Busy You Are, by Danny Gregory

Rating: 3/5 stars

The ethos of this book speaks to me: it's possible to make time for anything (in this case, drawing) if you prioritize it and/or break it down into small chunks. The "before breakfast" part is encouraging the reader to put their drawing practice first, and in this case I mean "practice" as daily observance rather than action meant to gain or improve skill.

The idea being that gaining skill will come naturally if you just do the thing.

And I think for a lot of people a lot of the time, that's true, but there's very little practical instruction in this book, it's a week-long course of exercises to get started (which I am doing; I read the whole book in a day but this morning saw me on Day 4 of the first week of early-morning art-making) and then a bunch of inspirational exercises in no real order with no real difficulty curve. A lot of the ideas I like, and quite a few I don't--especially the one telling me to "borrow" someone else's child to draw, since I have none of my own...that's a little weird; and the one telling me to skip a meal and draw instead, or that I'll end up eating less if I'm drawing my meals frequently because they'll get cold. I'm not down with bringing food into a discussion about forming an art habit beyond "hey food is fun to draw," the author shouldn't be telling us not to eat.

Back on the positive side, there's also an explicit permission in the book to do art badly, to suck at it. Which is something that a lot of people need to hear.

But do I think this book has really found its way into the hands of the target audience? That audience feels narrow, because this isn't for Real Artists, it's self-help for "busy" people who want to make art but don't feel like they have time. I already make art frequently, so I don't really "need" this book, though as with many ADHD peeps I go through phases with my hobbies and will probably never devote myself fully to one type of art or craft forever. And it's not going to satisfy anyone looking to get more serious about drawing (or whatever type of "art" they end up doing for their 30 days, if they stick to it) because of the lack of practical instruction.

I grabbed it off a library display about art (with another, very different book I'll review soon) and said, "sure, why not, my art journal's been neglected recently" but since I already have a strong interest in art, I can't really judge how successful this book is at what it sets out to do--get a busy newbie started on an art journey. I don't think it's terrible (beyond those exercises I find questionable) but I'm not sure it's all that great, either.

#booklr #book review #nonfiction #self help #art

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Books I Read in 2024

#21 - Never Been Kissed, by Timoty Janovsky

Rating: 1/5 stars

What if To All the Boys I Loved Before got an m/m makeover? You get this book, and I'm on board with that idea, but it turned out that the premise stopped mattering only a few chapters in, because none of the other might-have-been boys matter to the story. (One is a current friend/roommate and the revelation is dealt with quickly, and the other two are entirely off-screen characters who never respond.)

So it's a rehashed setup for what's actually a summer fling romance, but also a bildungsroman, because the MC is a recent college graduate who needs to figure out what the heck to do with his life. That personal arc felt artificial, because most college grads aren't (or at least aren't hoping to) take one last poorly-paying summer job before finding a "real" job--the goal is get the real job right away! 

Also the job itself seemed unnecessarily harsh; a "three strikes and you're out" policy isn't unreasonable, but one of the "strikes" the MC suffered was for getting accidentally stuck in a locked closet for a few minutes, and then the second is explicitly being punished for a mistake an underling made that he fixed. I've worked in some toxic hellholes in my day and this rubbed me the wrong way up one side and down the other, and is clearly supposed to be a source of plot tension but the plot really didn't need "will the MC lose his crappy summer job?" added to all the other nonsense, it never felt genuine because no, of course he's not going to get fired, he can't save the drive-in if he gets fired from it. The fact that the owner/manager is such a jerk boss made me less inclined to want the drive-in saved, he's not a particularly sympathetic figure, and if I'm not rooting for the hero to save the day in the non-romance plot, that takes a lot of wind out of my sails as a reader.

Also, the romance plot was bland. I never really felt invested in either lead character, and the demisexual revelation halfway through sucked out any sexual tension the relationship had (B+ for rep compared to some other demi romances I've read, C- for the pacing issues it caused.) 

On top of not being impressed with either the main plot or the romance plot, I was actively annoyed by the MC's circle of friends, I'm long past the time when "a whole bunch of melodramatic queer people as a group" is good enough to take the place of actually developing minor characters. I finished this a few days ago and I've already forgotten their names and couldn't tell you anything about their personalities beyond a constantly high level of whining and interfering with the MC's life in ways he didn't always find welcome.

Now that I've written it all out, I'm struggling to find anything I actually enjoyed about this book, and I haven't even mentioned the sub-main-plot of reviving a lost queer movie premiere as the bid to "save" the drive-in, I'm not opposed in theory but most of the time it actually felt more important to the MC than the romance, when I thought I was getting a romance novel...

#booklr #book review #romance novels #lgbtq books #i know tumblr loves this author but i was not impressed

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Books I Read in 2024

#20 - Obsidio, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Rating: 5/5 stars

An amazing end to an amazing trilogy. Seriously, when was the last time I read a trilogy in any genre where all three books were this good? Where the ending didn't disappoint?

Nothing about the fast-paced and unusual style changed throughout the series, so if you didn't enjoy the first book, then its sequels won't change your mind, but to anyone who has started the series but not yet finished it, finish it. The only reason I waited so long was because I had to get the book through interlibrary loan, and that took a while. (I knew enough about the format of the book to know my brain would hate trying to listen to this as audio or read it on my phone, I had to have a physical book that had nice big pages and that I could easily physically turn to read any text that wasn't upright.)

I won't say anything about the plot aside from one small detail I enjoyed: finding out who was transcribing the video footage all this time. I'd like to say "oh, I should have figured that out" but early on, there's no way to know, and the sort of sass and snark that finds its way into those transcriptions is broad enough to belong to several wisecracking characters. (Also it's alluded to that other characters tweaked a few scenes here and there, so while the bulk of it was done by one person, little bits of others' personalities are present, so yeah, I wasn't going to figure it out ahead of time.)

#booklr #book review

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March additions, all at once because I wasn't diligent about tracking as I reviewed:

small town vs. big city: Hook, Line, and Sinker

STEM stan: Better Sex Through Mindfulness

walk through history: A Brightness Long Ago

live in infamy: Summer Knight

that's not my name: Blood Heir

released the 13th of any month (bonus): Magic Claims

#booklr #beat the backlist 2024

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Books I Read in 2024

#19 - Magic Claims, by Ilona Andrews

Rating: 2/5 stars

Am I an avid IA fan who will keep reading books set in a single universe past the original (long) runtime of the planned series? Absolutely.

Is it disappointing to get a book that says to that original series "let's undo all of the character arcs and set the main characters back where they started, except married, and this time they mean to do it better?"

Ugggggggh.

I want to keep reading future books about Hugh and Julie, I liked the starting entries in their respective spin-off series. (We'll see if/when those book actually get written.) But this book makes me want to give up on the "main" series because hey, Kate's claiming land again and Curran's building a new Keep to house a new, better Pack. When walking away from those things was the culmination of their characters in order to focus on having a family. Now this series says "oops, we tried that, we were fooling ourselves" and hits the reset button.

Also, the pattern the Kate books have fallen into since Kate and Curran became a happy couple--some cute and cozy affection sprinkled through the action with one obligatory sex scene somewhere in the final act--felt really stale here, and the sex scene itself was one of the least inspired, most mechanical I've ever read, not just from this author (who generally does pretty well in this department!) but in any romance or romance-adjacent novel ever. Like, bottom five sex scenes of all time, for sure.

I didn't look at any other reviews but I see the overall rating is high, so I'm guessing I'm in the minority here, and that's fine, I certainly don't want anyone to hate the book on my behalf. But I don't like this direction to the story at all, which overshadowed the plot of the actual book, which was sort of interesting as weird magical shit goes.

#booklr #book review #favorite authors #kate daniels

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My books when it is time to choose my next read

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Somehow or other, I've actually managed to create my dream home library.

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Books I Read in 2024

#18 - Blood Heir, by Ilona Andrews

Rating: 3.75/5 stars

I love Julie and Derek, I have always loved Julie and Derek, but the whole complicated mess of this book maybe wasn't justified by the incredibly satisfying "throw every emotion you've ever had at each other" climactic conversation between them. Did I love that scene to pieces? Absolutely. Did I love wading through endless exposition dumps explaining after the fact how Julie became Aurelia? Not really. 

Julie's post-Magic Triumphs story is doled out in pieces, and several of those pieces get repeated, yet there are still (what I feel are) giant gaps in that story, so the setup for this book is simultaneously over-explained and woefully thin. 

Derek's tale over the same time period is more mysterious, in its way, because Julie rightfully points out in her narration evidence of a radical shift in his personality, yet they speak to each other like they always have, and he reads convincingly as an older, sharper version of his younger serious self. Despite there being so much less of it, by virtue of Julie being the narrator, I think Derek's characterization is better than hers.

Flaws aside, though, I'll keep reading when the next book comes out (eventually...) I want to know why Derek has changed, and I want these two to have their happy ending.

#booklr #book review #favorite authors #ilona andrews #kate daniels universe

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Books I Read in 2024

#17 - Summer Knight, by Jim Butcher

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

I have yet to rate any book in this series higher than three stars, but up to this point I felt the series was improving, or at least that familiarity with the mostly-charming main character was making it more likable.

I hit a bit of a wall in this one. It has good parts, certainly--I liked all the Murphy scenes in this a great deal, and even if I think the plant-monster action scene took entirely too long, she was undoubtedly the hero of it, not Harry. So that was fun.

But that particular action scene was where I started to get tired of the action itself, because there was so much of it that having nothing but high-stakes action slowed down the pace instead of speeding it up.

I also felt that the mystery here was convoluted to the point where Harry solving it felt even more confusing than trying to put it together myself--I read through his explanation carefully and came to the conclusion that plenty of the necessary clues were in the text, but most of the logic stringing it together was actually nonsensical. I'm not going to take the time to plot the book backwards to see if the mystery was truly reverse-engineered from villain logic, but it feels like it might have been. (I remember watching a video essay about how one of the Marvel movies makes no sense unless you do that, but now I don't remember which movie it was.)

I will say, though, since it's been a sticking point in my enjoyment of the series so far and I've brought it up in every review, that as promised by my friends who recommended this, the misogyny level has finally been dialed down. It doesn't look like Harry will grow out of his hero complex anytime soon, but the chauvinism in his narrative style is noticeably less frequent, as are the over-the-top sexy descriptions of various female characters. On the larger plot level, basically all the important new characters in this book are female, both allies and villains, and credit where credit is due, that's a good look for male-written fantasy; I've criticized quite a few of Butcher's contemporaries I've read for writing "male" fantasy where female characters are either mostly absent or restricted to incredibly narrow, stereotypical roles.

Even if I wasn't terribly impressed with the plot of this novel in particular, I'm hopeful enough about the positive aspects to keep going with the series. (Am I in it to see if Harry and Murphy get together down the line? Still seems like we're setting her up as endgame romance, and if I'm wrong about that and they develop a deeper battle-tested friendship instead, I'm fine with that too, I love romance but it's not the only satisfying path for two characters to walk together.)

#booklr #book review #the dresden files

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First Australian bookstore visit (but not the last). Thanks to Potts Point Bookshop! Your selection is lovely and the shop is so cozy. I walked away with The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper!

#bookstores

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Books I Read in 2024

#16 - A Brightness Long Ago, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

I loved it, and I'm glad I took my time with it (about three weeks, reading lighter stuff concurrently at times.) I wouldn't recommend this to readers entirely new to Kay's body of work, despite thinking it's an extremely beautiful and thoughtful example of it; I still think Tigana is his best novel, and the highest-value combination of approachable and rewarding to an unfamiliar audience. This novel is deliberately slow, and intensely reflective, and at times startlingly fourth-wall breaking. 

The conceit is an aging narrator looking back to his small role in a web of political intrigue during his younger years. He is the protagonist, certainly, but not the hero, as I don't even think this book has a Hero figure in it. The cast of characters that builds outward from him is rich and varied despite the relatively limited scope (some Kay books have far more POV characters than this!) and depending on your taste, some of them could certainly be more interesting, ultimately, than the protagonist. But this is where Kay's atypical structural composition shines; the narrator is the central thread of this tapestry but nowhere near the strongest, brightest, or most important. He is the narrator, rather than any of the other characters, because he is the one best positioned by events to tell the whole story. 

I look forward to reading this again down the road, perhaps after I've also reread the other novels set in this cohesive alternate world; for example, it was a nice touch to revisit, briefly, the shrine with the mosaic that was so important to the Sarantium duology. I only read it once, years ago, but that location was memorable enough to recall clearly all this time later, so I look forward to discovering other connections I've missed.

#booklr #book review #favorite authors #guy gavriel kay

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📚 Sara Cwynar, All The Red Books, All The Blue Books, 2011.