Nay, you may proceed, Minstrel

I guess I might finish another book before year’s end, but this feels close enough to be pretty safe. NB I have reviews for most of these books in my books tag.

How many books did you read this year? Any trends in genre/length/themes/reading patterns/etc?
Books read: 25
Pages read (roughly): 7450

Relative to past years, more murder mysteries, more rereads (five), more older stuff (four before 1940). Less straight horror. Probably more textually queer stuff? I read a lot on airplanes. I took almost the whole summer off from reading and watched movies instead.

I had a mountaineering phase kickstarted by that one Jon Krakauer book, which also meant reading way more nonfiction than usual. Apparently the key to reading nonfiction is to have specific topics you want to know about, rather than just being like “I want to Learn Things.” Who could have foreseen!

What are your top 3 books that you read this year for the first time?
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Yes, it really is that good, just like everyone says.

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge. Beautiful prose, top-notch worldbuilding, and some great horror moments.

A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. A shot STRAIGHT to the id.

What's a book you enjoyed more than you expected?
Maybe The Secret of Chimneys, an Agatha Christie novel that I probably read at some point but had forgotten basically all of. The other thing I’d forgotten: how fun Christie is when she’s really on her game. This was a rollicking delight.

Which books most disappointed you this year?
It was disappointing to realize how much worse the sexism was in the Pern books than I remembered. Just absolutely soaking in it. Ugh.

Also, wow, I hated Wild Spaces by SL Coney. Haaaaated.

And I reread Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys and didn’t enjoy it as much the second time around. There felt like too many characters, too thinly characterized. I still love Aphra and the worldbuilding, though.

Did you reread any books? If so, which one was you favourite?
I reread several this year, but the one that I enjoyed the most and definitely the one I spent the most time with was Moby Dick. The langague, gosh. Good enough to eat. Having reacquainted myself with the story, I think I’m going to keep just dipping in and out of it every so often. I found and bought a physical edition I really love, the Canterbury Classic "Word Cloud" edition that is just a pleasure to read and makes dipping in very appealing.

On a related note, I think this year was the tipping point to me becoming a prose snob. The prose in Moby Dick is so rich and chewy and worth reading and rereading. Sometimes it's basically impenetrable, but even so! Incredibly rewarding. And then I open so many new novels and quit on the first page because the prose is so artless.

It's not like I want every novel to be Moby Dick, which also happens to be a timeless work of literature: hardly a fair comparison for a random novel I pick up at the library. However, there are lots of authors out there writing prose that is graceful and evocative in their own ways. Frances Hardinge and Stephen King come immediately to mind, for two very different living examples.

I just cannot be fucked anymore with prose that doesn't show some skill. Life is too short. I suspect this might lead me to reading more classics, which I'm not mad about.

What's the oldest book you read?
The Unafraid, a 1913 adventure romance by Eleanor Ingram (with a textual gay side character!), is the oldest that I read for the first time. For rereads, Moby Dick was published in 1851.

What's the newest book you read?
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, published this year.

Did you DNF (= did not finish) any books?
My most emphatic DNF was the second book in the Briardark series by SA Harian. I reread the first book just to remember what all was going on, then got like fifty pages into the second one and was like, actually I don’t care about any of these characters or the cosmic horror mystery.

Some others I started and wandered off from:
- The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
- The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
- Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
- The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis
- Blacktop Wasteland by SA Cosby
- Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop
- Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott

What was your predominant format this year?
Still mostly dead trees around here, although I did listen to a mountaineering book and part of Moby Dick on audiobook, and I read a couple of ebooks during my travels.

What's the longest book you read this year?
Moby Dick, with 561 pages in my edition.

Did you reach your reading goal for this year (if you had one)?
I wanted to read more outside my usual fiction genres, which I really didn’t manage to do other than for a couple of specific items on the to-read list. Speaking of, here is all I read from the to-read list. Honestly five books from the January tbr is pretty good for me lol.

Moby Dick
The Iskryne books (I read the first two)
The Book of Lamps and Banners (Cass Neary #4)
something by ECR Lorac

Any goals for 2025?
My immediate list of stuff I want to tackle or finish is:

Knock Knock Open Wide by Neil Sharpson
The Count of Monte Cristo?
Something… literary, maybe?? Maybe My Brilliant Friend or something by Anne Rivers Siddons.
The Draegaera books (starting with Jhereg)
Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle
The Coldfire Trilogy
Ammonite
Dublin Murder Squad
American Elsewhere
Perdido Street Station (reread)
A Zelazny collection (reread)
The Folly of the World
Maplecroft by Cherie Priest (Lizzie Borden + Lovecraft?!)
Craft Sequence – Max Gladstone

I would say the main theme here is "ambitious," for me if not the author. A lot of older stuff, or stuff that is beloved that I haven't tried, or stuff I've just been meaning to get around to. A couple of those are already on my shelf, and it'd be nice to knock them off the TBR.

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

For those unsure what the heck the Snowflake Challenge is, it's a DW event through the month of January where they post a prompt every other day on snowflake_challenge, and you can respond on your journal to whichever ones you want, at your leisure. (If that's unclear or you're curious for more details, feel free to ask me. I was very confused for a long time about how it worked.)

Anyway! Hi, I'm snick. I'm a fandom old who came to fandom via Buffy the Vampire Slayer a bit after the show had ended. My fannish evolution was something like:
1. Got into Buffy fandom, made my first fandom friends, wrote my first fanfic
2. Got into Supernatural, discovered kink memes, wrote my first porn
3. Got into hockey RPF, learned how to write. As mentioned above, I wrote before that, some that I'm still very proud of, but I feel like I really came of age as a writer in hockey fandom.

Since then I've spent time in the MCU, I got more into horror movies and sometimes into their fandoms, and I got into the band Oasis and have written a bunch of fic about that. I also got more and more into multi-fandom exchanges as a way to fill in the gaps (with mixed success) when I kept getting into smaller, less active fandoms.

These days, this journal is mostly for movie and book reviews and locked personal posts, but I do occasionally post unlocked about my writing or fannish events, that kind of thing. Every so often I even post news or meta about my fandoms, although that doesn't feel like what people do here on DW anymore, alas.

And to answer the other question, I'm doing the Snowflake Challenge because I really like seeing more activity on DW. I'm hoping for some prompts this year that will give me excuses to write about fandom stuff I'm excited about, which as mentioned above I rarely get around to doing. And I look forward to reading everyone else's posts and hopefully interacting with them more. <3

I had a fantastic Yuletide this year. I got two great gifts. I managed to write FOUR things for the main collection, a personal best! (The closest I've come previously is three in the main collection and one in Madness, and that was back in 2013.) I got really nice comments on them, even the one for a fandom I didn't think anyone would know. <3 And then I had so much fun browsing the collection this year, and I found some really wonderful fic. Perfect experience, no notes, can't wait to do it again next year.

Interestingly, everything I wrote this year was for fandoms I watched or reviewed specifically for Yuletide. Like, the two movies are two I pulled out of the Yuletide tagset and put on my to-watch list. I always enjoy making those lists from the tagset, but I don't think they've ever borne so much fruit directly before. (Then again, most of my old standbys that I don't need to review, like Oasis and Re-Animator and Scream, are now too big for Yuletide. That's probably a factor.)

First, my assignment:
stave my soul, Moby Dick, Ishmael/Queequeg, 2.7k. A ghost story. Last year I really wanted to reread Moby Dick and write Yuletide treats, I got about a third of the way in, and then I bogged down and didn't finish. This year, I wanted the same but even more, to the point that I not only offered it instead of planning to just treat, but I got very brave and culled my offers until nearly all my matches were Moby Dick.

I got assigned to whalebone (yes, really) and wrote this in a few days. The idea came to me pretty much fully-formed, and it should have been relatively easy to write once I got a handle on the narrative voice, but it was one of those times where I was finding writing very hard and was really mad at my past self for putting me in the situation, to the point that I wished I'd defaulted before the default deadline.

But! I did manage to write the fic more or less exactly as I'd planned. And this was by far my most popular fic this Yuletide, with more comments than I've gotten in a week on anything since 2020.

--

fires of love, Moby Dick, Ishmael/Queequeg, 2.2k, omegaverse. Then I turned around and wrote a treat, and it was Moby Dick omegaverse. In fact, qkind's prompt for this last year was the number one reason I wanted to reread the book, and I was very happy that they prompted it again this year.

The big appeal here was describing an omegaverse scenario in Ishmael's inimatable prose, and I had a great time trying. In fact the first writing I did for Yuletide was some paragraphs of this that I got in the shower. Ishmael discoursing about omegaverse gender stuff was a hoot to write. This might be my favorite Yuletide fic I wrote this year.

I don't know if I'll write more Moby Dick; I feel like I've gotten those two high-concept fics out of my system, and I don't have any other burning ideas. I really have to get in the right frame of mind to tackle Ishmael's voice, and it's like I'm holding my breath the whole time and have to eventually come up for air. On the other hand, I definitely think there's room for more Moby Dick horror in the world, if nothing else.

--

a restaurant called karma, Red Rooms (2023), Clementine/Kelly-Anne, 5.6k. This is an independent French-Canadian film about two serial killer groupies attending the trial of a man accused of raping and murdering several teen girls. I'd been meaning to watch this for a while, but seeing a Yuletide request was what finally got me to do it, and then I wrote this post-canon getting-together fic in like a week. This is the first fic in the tag, so I wasn't expecting much of a response, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how many people know it and have commented on the fic. <3

It was actually almost 2k longer at one point; the day before reveals I wrote 2k of porn, then woke up Christmas Eve morning and decided the porn took the fic way off track, and I took basically all of it out and made the fic fade to black, all before 1pm. I don't know if I've ever done that before. It was not my favorite time-crunch editing session ever! However, I ship the hell out of these two now and I hope more people write them.

--

wreck, Crash (1996), James/Catherine, 1.1k. James gets in a new, more serious accident, and he and Catherine enjoy the aftermath. This was a quick little PWP of them being fucking weird together. I don't know if I really hit the "if he likes cuckolding, he'll LOVE being rendered impotent by a car crash" button as hard as I wanted, but hey, it's 1k, it's fine. And it turns out I and one other person in Yuletide inaugurated the James/Catherine tag on AO3 because it didn't exist before, which blows my mind.