Another week in the books. It’s been so very dry around here, with yet another stretch of days without precipitation of any kind. While a huge swath of the country is being hammered by snowstorms or rain, we are high and so, so dry.

I’m tired of it. I want some snow. Apparently, it is on backorder. If anyone feels like sending some snow my way, please do. I miss the winter weather.

After work last night I managed to make it over to the park in plenty of time for the sunset, which hasn’t happened for quite some time. I settled down at the lake’s edge, on the ice which is still there in spite of the many warm days we’ve had, and shot the changing colors for about twenty minutes until they started to fade and my hands started getting numb.

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Obligatory Mina Photo:

I don’t know why, but Mina has been all about sitting on my planner this year. She’s never shown an inclination for it before, but for the past month, we’ve been battling about who gets the planner when it’s out.

I think it might have something to do with the spiral binding. This is the first year I’ve had a spiral planner (the planner I usually get was not available for this year), so I think it’s a novelty for her. I tend to avoid spiral-bound notebooks and whatnot, as I am left-handed and they get in the way. But because my normal planner wasn’t available, I had to look elsewhere. This one had the layout I liked the best, so I decided the go with it despite the spiral binding.

Unfortunately, it can’t live on the desk all the time like its forebears did, because Mina enjoys pulling at the rings and bending them. So rather than have her distort the binding and risk hurting her teeth, I put the planner away when it’s not in use. When I pull it out to check on my lists, though, she appears out of nowhere to hop up on the desk and plop down on the open pages.

It is not convenient. But it is pretty cute.

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What I Finished Reading Last Week:

• Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel
• Revelation (Matthew Shardlake #4) by C.J. Sansom, audiobook narrated by Steven Crossley

I wrote about my frustration with Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts before, but to sum things up, I found de Hamel to be rather snobby, and I wish he had kept his focus on the manuscripts rather than let the narrative wander around to subjects like the libraries’ security arrangements or the restaurant attached to one of the museums. I bought this book because I wanted to learn about Medieval manuscripts, not because I wanted to learn de Hamel’s opinion of the Getty Museum’s parking lots.

Revelation is the fourth book of CJ Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series, and it was fantastic! There were so many twists and turns and red herrings that I didn’t figure out who the culprit was until Shardlake figured it out, and even then I still had plenty of guessing to do when it came to what was going to happen to everyone. In this story, Shardlake is drawn into investigation and politics after the brutal murder of an old friend. He promises his friend’s widow that he will find the person who did it, and this promise takes him into the darkest recesses of the human mind, where religion and obsession combine to make a person do the worst sorts of things imaginable. The closer he gets to answers, though, the closer the murderer comes to Shardlake and those he cares about. I had initially thought I would carry on and go right to the next book in this series, but after that ending, I decided to give the series a break for a book or two. But I’ll be coming back to it soon, as I want to read about the further adventures of Matthew Shardlake.

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What I’m Currently Reading:

• The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid (275/418)
• Photography: The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang (132/480)
• The Shadow Revolution (Crown and Key #1) by Susan Griffith and Clay Griffith, audiobook narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith (18%)
• Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (42%)

The Wolf and the Woodsman is a standalone adult fantasy- Reid’s debut, in fact- that is based upon Eastern European history and mythology. As the only woman without magic in her pagan village at the edge of the forest, Évike is hated by the other young women she grew up with. When the Woodsmen come to claim one of the village women to give her magic to the king, they send Évike in order to get rid of her. But there is more to Évike than even she knows, and after the group is ambushed by monsters of the wood, Evike and the surviving Woodsman must learn to work together to try to put an end to a pretender to the throne who is whipping up hatred against anyone not of his faith. I’m a little over halfway through this book, and so far I’m enjoying it. There are some things that annoy me, like Évike’s impulsiveness, but I can deal with that. I’m hoping to finish it in the next day or two.

Photography: The Definitive Visual History is just what the title says: an illustrated history of photography, going back to its roots at the very end of the 18th century when chemists were experimenting with chemicals that could temporarily fix images onto a surface. The process grew more sophisticated, and the primitive cameras grew more complex until they turned into the sorts of cameras we recognize today. Ang succinctly describes these advances, the ongoing conflict between painting and photography (and the divisions among photographers), styles of photography, and has articles about photographers from around the world. It’s a beautiful book, and I should have read it long before this, as I’ve had it for quite some time.

The Shadow Revolution is a book that showed up in my StoryGraph recommendations. It said it was for fans of things like Showtime’s series Penny Dreadful, so that caught my attention. My library has the whole trilogy on audio, and as each book’s narration runs about ten hours (a fairly quick read, really), I decided to give it a try. So far, it’s a typical Victorian fantasy novel featuring magicians and alchemists battling supernatural forces like werewolves. So far, Nick and Simon have twice been attacked by a werewolf, and lived to tell the tale thanks in part (the second time) to the timely intervention of Kate, a clever young alchemist. The writing is pretty workaday, with everyone’s clothes being described (succinctly, at least), but it’s entertaining and fast-paced, so I’m willing to continue on. I do like Nick and Simon, and Kate is growing on me.

Confessions of a Bookseller was an unexpected arrival. I had placed a hold on the digital copy through my library back in December, and I had quite forgotten it. But it showed up in my Libby app yesterday morning, and I got to it right away, reading bits here and there as I could. It consists of a series of diary entries, just like Bythell’s previous book, The Diary of a Bookseller, and describes the day-to-day events in the life of a Scottish bookseller who deals with rude customers, people who don’t quite understand what a bookshop is, people who ask for steep discounts on already inexpensive used books, and Amazon pricing that make it nearly impossible for him to make any money on the sales. It’s a funny look at the retail life, as well as being a bit of a love letter to books. I’ll probably finish this one up in the next day or two, as well.

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What I Plan to Start Reading This Week:

• The Saga of the Volsungs by Anonymous, translated from the Icelandic by Jesse L. Byock
• She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

I got both of these books for Christmas, and I want to get to both of them sooner rather than later, as I am looking forward to them. Also, I want to get to all of my Christmas books in the first half of the year so they don’t languish on my shelves overlong. The Saga of the Volsungs won’t take long to get through, as it’s only about 160 pages. I’ve heard that She Who Became the Sun is a bit of a slow burn, so I’m hoping the worldbuilding and character development will be captivating enough to make up for the slow pacing.