Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book with a left-handed character.
The Countess Conspiracy, by Courtney Milan.

This is a friends-to-lovers historical romance. Sebastian and his cousins were nicknamed "The Brothers Sinister" in school, because they were all left-handed. 

Sebastian is notorious for being a romantic rake, a religious skeptic, and a scientist who studies naughty things like plant and animal reproduction. He has a decent grasp of the science, but the discoveries he's published aren't really his. They were made by his best friend Violet, a widowed countess who can't get her work published under her own name.

As is often true in Milan's books, Violet has a painful secret that makes her reluctant to start a romantic relationship. Sebastian is gentle and truly loving with her, recognizing when Violet isn't ready for sex, even when she's all but throwing herself at him.

The author's note at the end is illuminating: the book was inspired by real-life women scholars and scientists who mostly had to settle for being thanked in the acknowledgements when their work was published by a husband or another man. This being a romance, Violet naturally gets a happier ending.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about space tourism.
Vacation on Planet Glor: A Mix-Your-Own Darklingverse Jam, by L. A. Guettler.

"Choose your own adventure" books were popular when I was a kid, before the rise of video games as the way to make yourself the protagonist in the story. This one is not for kids, though: at least one story path leads to an inter-species orgy. The book is very funny, profane, and full of truly twisted twists.

As the protagonist, "you" are a nerdy tourist on your first vacation in years. Your hotel sucks, crooks and cops alike prey on tourists, and a simple trip to the Natural History Museum turns out to be not so simple. Depending on the choices you make, you may wind up dead, arrested, kidnaped, or stuck in a time loop. Some of the endings are unexpected variations on "happily ever after."

This book is set in the same universe as Red Darkling and Bonkpocalypse, and there are assorted cameos from characters from the Darklingverse. It works as a stand-alone, though. The only thing it needed was more page time for my favorite character: Bonk, the glitchy robot cat. 

5 great humorous thoughts on writing - and one of them was mine!

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about chosen family.
Translation State, by Ann Leckie.

This book is set in the same universe as Leckie's Imperial Radch (Ancillary) trilogy and Provenance. It works as a stand-alone, but I liked the way it gave insight into the different human and nonhuman cultures in this space opera, and how they view each other.

The three POV characters are people who never felt they fit in. Enae is human, estranged from hir family (Enae's pronouns are spelled sie/hir and never explained). Sie's been given a make-work job looking for a Presger translator who disappeared 200 years ago. Reet is a foundling, raised by humans from a marginalized minority group. He had a problem with biting people as a child, and continues to fantasize about doing so. Qven is an adolescent from the much-feared Presger species. Qven was raised to be a translator, and has been molded physically and behaviorally to fit in with humans - but doesn't want the life path dictated by others.

There's some pretty disturbing scenes. Presger children will mutilate, dissect, and even eat other children, just out of curiosity. There's also a scene where another Presger tries to force a mental merge on Qven, leaving Qven feeling violated in a way that's clearly meant to resemble rape. The assailant's eventual fate is equally violent.

Leckie's books always stretch our thinking about gender. The Presger are shape-shifters with no gender, so everyone is "they/them." Enae and Reet come from human cultures that have male, female, and nonbinary (e/em/eir). The Radchii are also human, but their culture regards gender as irrelevant, so they call everyone "she/her."

On one level, the book could be seen as an allegory for being transgender. Reet knows himself to be human - but it turns out he's the son of the missing Presger translator. (Not a spoiler; it's telegraphed from the start.) He has to go before an international forum to argue that he's human under the law - while the other Presger and the Radchii ambassador argue, "But biology!" Then Qven declares that they are - or rather, e is - human too.

The book is also about the connections that form between the characters, including Reet's adoptive parents. Adorably, one of the ways that Reet and Qven bond is by watching Reet's favorite serial, Pirate Exiles of the Death Moons. This teaches Qven more about humans than all the tea-party lessons that the Presger had deemed essential.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a road trip.
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.

This is one of those books that's very different for a male versus a female reader. I'd heard a great deal of rhapsodizing from male critics about this book's message of freedom, and the character of Dean Moriarty, the ultimate wild-and-crazy Fun Guy. Picking up hitchhikers, traveling alone, traveling with no money : a woman doing any of those things would have to put all her energy into protecting her physical safety - and even then she'd be accused of "asking for it."

And the misogyny in the book had me grinding my teeth the whole way through. Yes, it was written in the 1950s, but there are books from that era where women get to be fully realized characters. The narrator seems to view them more as sexual appliances. At one point, Dean wants to watch Sal, the narrator, have sex with Dean's wife Marylou. Marylou's opinion on the subject is barely an afterthought. (Mercifully, Sal backs out.)

Dean goes back and forth between three wives over the course of the book, cheats constantly, and barely notices the children he keeps fathering (while trying to track down his own father). At one point, while married to Camille, Dean decides he "loves" Marylou, and shows up with a gun telling her that she has to shoot him or else he'll shoot her. Marylou talks him down, but the whole horror is treated as just another wild Dean story. And when Sal gleefully recounted the fun party they'd had with the teenage girls in a Mexican brothel, I couldn't help wondering how the story would sound from the girls' point of view. It's only when Dean abandons a very ill Sal in Mexico that Sal acknowledges Dean is "a rat" - and even then he continues his weird idealization of Dean.

There are times when a book is so well written that I'm able to see past rampant sexism (for instance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). But On the Road is a thinly fictionalized version of actual events, so it doesn't even have a real plot, just a lot of random conversations and roaming around going nowhere.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about an overlooked woman in history.
Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement, by Wendy L. Rouse

This book was very academic in tone for my taste, but extremely informative. I'd heard of Carrie Chapman Catt, but had no idea that after losing two husbands, she spent 38 years with a woman companion, Mary Garrett Hay, and was buried next to her rather than one of the husbands. Similarly, I'd heard of Black suffragette Angelina Weld Grimké, but had never seen the letter urging another woman to be her "wife," nor the passionate poems addressed to women.

Passionate "friendships" between women were accepted at the time, sometimes termed "Boston Marriages" (apparently after The Bostonians, an anti-suffrage novel by Henry James). Such relationships were outwardly portrayed as nonsexual, even as the women lived together for years and spoke of each other in romantic terms. Suffragettes were attacked with the usual anti-feminist stereotypes: ugly, masculine, man-haters, etc. (The same tired attacks get recycled every generation.) The suffrage organizations tried to counter this with respectability politics, keeping wives and mothers in the forefront, with any deviation from standard gender roles pushed to the back.

There were a number of other interesting women discussed. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, whose photo appears on the cover, was an early advocate of dress reform. And Annie "Dan" Tinker, who was apparently bisexual, also wore men's clothes and led mounted cavalry in suffrage parades. It was definitely worth the textbook-like writing style to learn about such fascinating women.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book by the oldest writer on your to-read stack.
Little Novels, by Wilkie Collins.

I'm interpreting "oldest" as "born first," regardless of how long the author lived, so it's Wilkie Collins, 1824-1889. The "novels" are actually short stories, around 20 pages each, usually with a twist ending. There are some mysteries, lots of romance, and a couple of ghost stories - including more than one where the "ghost" turns up very much alive.

As in most Collins stories, the right couple usually winds up together at the end. There are a couple of tragic exceptions, including a grimly accurate portrayal of domestic violence. One rather surprising theme in multiple stories is the jilted lover who becomes the friend and protector of his beloved and the man she rejected him for.

The one clunker for me was "Mr. Captain and the Nymph," which has all the tired tropes of the "exotic" brown maiden who lives among the savages until she falls for a white man who wants to carry her away."


My favorite was "Mr. Lepel and the Housekeeper," in which a dying man marries his best friend's beloved, so that she can marry the friend as a rich widow. But the "dying" man suddenly gets better after his wife accidentally drops the tray with his medicines on it. (The unlucky friend had warned him all along that his housekeeper was poisoning him.)

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book in which an adult character changes careers.
Act Your Age, Eve Brown, by Talia Hibbert.

This is the final book in Hibbert's Brown Sisters trilogy, and it's a grumpy/sunshine, enemies-to-lovers romance. This one is more over-the-top than the other two, starting with a ridiculous meet-cute where she accidentally backs her car into him. This results in him having to hire her as the cook at his bed-and-breakfast.

They annoy each other a lot at first. Eve is irresponsible, dropping and picking up one job after another. Jacob's autism manifests in an extreme need for order, and being blunt to the point of rudeness. Later, we see Jacob's wounds from having parents who rejected him, and Even figures out she's likely on the spectrum as well.

As the two fall for each other, there's occasional mention of the ethical problem of Jacob being her boss, but then it's just shrugged off. (To be fair, Eve's wealthy & not dependent on the job.)

The third-act breakup is a little predictable, but believably rooted in the character's insecurities. And the reconciliation is as over-the-top as their meeting, and once again involves traffic.

 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book you got for free.
Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally.

This is technically a novel, but the author sticks as close as he can to the known facts of Schindler's life. Where something is unknowable, the author offers possibilities but not answers. Foremost among the  unanswerable questions: why did businessman Oskar Schindler risk everything to save his Jewish workers, when almost all of his colleagues cooperated with the Nazis?

Schindler didn't seem attached to any particular political or religious ideology (he was nominally Catholic but not observant). There was no formative childhood incident that would have made for convenient storytelling. He and his wife had Jewish friends, but as Himmler complained, "every" German had that one Jewish friend that they assumed would be an exception to the persecution. Yet Schindler chose to live the Talmudic saying that his manager Itzhak Stern quoted to him: "He who saves a single life saves the world entire." 

There were a number of stunning moments that were translated faithfully into Spielberg's movie: sadistic camp kommandant Amon Goeth on his balcony, casually using prisoners for target practice. Goeth killing a Jewish engineer because she told him, accurately, that the construction work had been done wrong. One of Schindler's workers giving his gold fillings to make a ring as a parting gift to Schindler. Unlike the movie, the book has space to give Schindler's wife Emilie her due: they had been separated, but when the factory relocated to Czechoslovakia she joined Oskar's  efforts, getting contraband food and medical care for the people under his protection.

Schindler had little success in business before or after World War II, leading some to speculate that the skilled businessmen were Stern and others working with him. Schindler's talent was working with people: glad-handing, flattering and bribing high-ranking Nazis to get what he needed from them. He was so good at it that after the Allied victory, Goeth tried to call Schindler as a defense witness - apparently he imagined they were friends.

The author makes several mentions of Schindler's womanizing, and seems surprised that there were never any public scenes with his wife and assorted mistresses. Schindler certainly wasn't the first powerful man with that sort of arrangement. But it's noteworthy that he wasn't some plaster saint. Oskar Schindler was a man who might have lived an ordinary life - but when he came face to face with evil, he found the courage to fight back, to save those lives and do what he could to save the world entire.

 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a person of color experiencing joy and not trauma.
Black Joy Unbound: An Anthology, edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle.

This book's premise overlaps with This Is the Honey, edited by Kwame Alexander. But while This Is the Honey is strictly poetry, Black Joy Unbound includes fiction and essays as well. It's a short but warm, fun and moving book.

All the authors were new to me. The joys discussed range from the big stuff ("Joy Delayed," a short story by Penny Mickelbury about two lesbians finding love in their later years) to more transient pleasures ("Subway Therapist," an essay by Merlee Miller about a dancer brining joy to NYC subway riders).

In Regina YC Garcia's poem "TO: Whom It May Concern RE: Black Joy," she attempts to define what makes Black joy unique:




While yet another layer of joy plants the seeds 
     of the knowledge
     that there are golden pieces of Black gifting,
     of Black strength, even of Black
     prophecy that cannot be removed from
     Black existence.
That is that Black joy -
     knowing that even in derision, there is provision
     in this joy that secrets us
     and the gifts that save us
This joy that reminds us that
     trouble don't last always
     weeping endures for a night
     joy comes in the morning light