Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor

Devil Take the Hindmost

3/5. You guys are about to get an intimate tour of my brain by way of the stuff I read when things start to go very, very wrong. This is the book I reached for when we got the first rumblings that something we were excited and happy about was going to fall apart. This book is an excessively dry, somewhat exhausting history of speculative manias. It is far more interested in recounting events than it is in thinking about the psychology of speculation, though it does in passing touch on the long-running debates over the place of speculation in society, and whether it is a social good or not. So I read this in many many waiting rooms and on many many long drives to doctors' offices, and retained very little of it, and don't actually think it is particularly accessible or interesting. But by God did it serve its purpose for me.

In Other Words....Murder by Josh Lanyon

In other Words….Murder

3/5. Continuation of the M/M series about the cranky ungracefully aging mystery writer who keeps accidentally solving crimes. I read this in one shot on Sunday, when I otherwise would have been doing nothing but wandering around the apartment staring blankly into space and failing to process. These books continue to be slight – calling some of Lanyon's books "novels" is stretching the point, frankly. But this series as a whole is doing nice stuff with someone slowly recovering from a long, bad relationship with a short, bad end. This book does that trick of showing us a lot of how shitty it was without dwelling on any of the details. And also there is an evil clown. So, this book, too, served its purpose of keeping my brain running on rails for a few hours on a bad, bad day.

Magic Triumphs by Ilona Andrews

Magic Triumphs

2/5. And to complete the trifecta of shit I read in the bad times, we have urban fantasy with werelion sex. Really no bestiality in this one, though. And I guess this is the end of the series? I was supremely uninterested in this final battle and parade of magic mcguffins, and I can't tell if that's just where I am right now, or if I'm as over urban fantasy as I feel. It's all just so incredibly samey, which I say with full consciousness that hello, I read fanfiction. But there's satisfying samey and boring samey, and for several years now commercial urban fantasy has been way over on the boring end. It's all just so conservative – about sex (either deeply vanilla or fucking around with consent while gaslighting the reader that it's all completely fine), about monogamy, about what family means. This series wasn't all of those things, and it has the plus of an unapologetically violent lady protagonist. But still. Fundamentally samey.