Murchie Plus Books: The End

Every Sunday for the last two and a half years, I’ve shared pictures of my beloved dog, Murchie, posed with everything I read that week.

Last Sunday night, Murchie didn’t sleep. He couldn’t stay still, he didn’t want anything I offered him, and he was obviously confused. Over the last couple of years this had become a frequent nighttime routine on account of a bowel issue and something that looked an awful lot like doggie dementia.

All through January, he had two or three bad days for every one where he was his usual spunky self.

My parents and I took him to the vet at lunch on Monday. She gave him a checkup, listened to everything he’s been through recently, and told us that while she could perform some more tests she couldn’t guarantee any further treatment would help him. It’d been a while since his medicines eased his suffering in any appreciable way.

None of us wanted to say goodbye to him, but we didn’t want him to suffer anymore, either.

I’m grateful I got to hold him while the sedative took effect. I felt him relax in my arms, the way he used to before sleep became so difficult for him. I laid him on the exam table and stroked his head while the vet administered the final injection. It was awful, but he had loved ones with him the whole time and that made a terrible day a little easier to bear.

Murchie Plus Books: January 22nd to 28th

I make my dog pose beside everything I read, barring single issue comics. Some weeks he’s a star and some weeks he refuses to keep his head still.

The photos go live on Instagram as I edit them and appear here in digest form every Sunday, with descriptive alt tags and additional commentary.

Last week’s Not Pictured selections included the usual number of X-Men comics. They feel horribly relevant right now.

I love it when I ask the library to buy a book and they order a bunch of copies that a bunch of other patrons check out as soon as they're available. Guess I wasn't the only one eager to see how Ciere's story continued.

Emily Lloyd-Jones's DECEPTIVE [Amazon] is the sequel to ILLUSIVE, a book I sought out because I saw it recced on Twitter as X-Men meets Oceans 11 and I love both those things. It was an accurate comp, and it fits this book, too, with the caveat that DECEPTIVE's got a lot more stuff on the fed side of the equation. While it took me a little bit to readjust to this the world after my time away, I was hard into the book by the end and was sorry to say goodbye to all the characters.

So sorry, in fact, that I popped right onto Lloyd-Jones's website to see if there was any chance of a third book somewhere down the line. Alas, she's got ILLUSIVE and DECEPTIVE tagged as a duology. While it's easy to read Ciere's storyline as concluded (with enough dangly bits that she could enjoy more adventures down the line), I feel like both Devon and Daniel have a middle book thing going on. Shit gets dark for them, and the ending puts them in position for the traditional third book Lightening Of Burdens. It's not the worst possible conclusion to their storylines, but I'm still sad we'll never get to see where they go from here.

Review: Freckles by Amy Lane

Warning: FRECKLES [Amazon | Scribd] is quite possibly the cutest book ever. You will squee.

Carter's boyfriend just dumped him and the head of his law firm has got him working on a case that’s legally sound but morally reprehensible. He needs something positive in his life, and he gets it in the form of a tiny, fluffy puppy a kid hoists on him in a parking lot. Carter has no idea what to do with a puppy (if Freckles even is a dog and not a hamster, as her size suggests), so he rushes straight to the nearest pet store with a veterinarian attached and has the good fortune to meet Sandy, a vet tech who's willing to give the occasional cute, dog-loving lawyer some after hours help with the whole pet ownership thing.

Their relationship is sweet and mutually supportive, but it's the dog angle that sold me on this nominally holiday romance. (The Thanksgiving and Christmas bits are light enough that you can read this any time of year, as I did.) Freckles is a tiny Shih Tzu/Chihuahua cross, and I recognized so much of what Carter goes through as he adjusts to dog ownership and strives to be a good caregiver for her. I've had dogs all my life, barring an eighteen-month dogless stint when I was very young, but my wee Murchie is the first dog who's really been mine. He decided I was his person mere hours after we met, despite family plans to the contrary, and I spent a certain amount of time freaking out about how I was now responsible for this 2.5-pound fluffball who was brand new to the world and correspondingly lacking in common sense. I wanted to do right by him, and I was terrified he'd get sat on or stepped on or otherwise injured during one of his exploratory forays into the great unknown¹.

I still worry he'll get sat on or stepped on, especially since he's a bit too inclined to trust people will notice he's there and work around him. That's a dangerous attitude to adopt when you're still only 3.5 pounds and you're the same colour as the kitchen floor, y'know?

Murchie Plus Books: January 15th to 21st

I make my dog pose with everything I read, barring single issue comics. When he isn't up to this challenge, I call upon stand-ins.

The photos go live on Instagram as I edit them and usually appear here in digest form every Sunday, with descriptive alt tags and additional commentary. Sometimes life intervenes and they go up on Tuesday instead.

Last week’s Not Pictured selections included lots and lots and lots of X-Men comics. I hit UNCANNY #475, then zipped back in time to tackle some one-shots, Annual issues, and miniseries I’d missed. I also reread DEADLY GENESIS, which made a lot more sense with hundreds of issues of X-Men under my belt. It reaffirmed my belief that Professor X is the worst, too. Seriously, the dude may talk about building a happy world for everyone, but he’s way too quick to mess with peoples’ heads when it suits his purposes.

Mindwiping people is not appropriate behavior, Professor X. Not now, not ever.

I loved TRUTH IN THE DARK so much that I decided to squeeze in one last Amy Lane book before my Scribd membership ended. I combed through the catalogue in search of novellas and finally settled on FOOD FOR THOUGHT [Amazon | Scribd], in which Emmett, a closeted gay guy who longs for a family, learns families are a lot more variable than his life to date has led him to believe. When his sorta-adoptive mom gives him an old family cookbook, he gains some clarity by preparing one of the recipes with his neighbour/best friend/uber-crush.

The resulting novella is mostly very sweet, with moments of remembered sadness and one deeply upsetting incident involving Emmett's girlfriend, with whom he does not part ways before he embarks on his quest for clarity. I teared up.

A word of warning: the novella is much shorter than its presentation leads one to believe. The last 28% of it is ads for Lane's other books.

Marginalized Genders Reading List: 2016 Edition

At the start of 2016, Renay of Lady Business issued herself a challenge to read work by 100 different women authors and artists over the course of the year. I liked this challenge so much that I took it up myself, with a slight adjustment to include nonbinary, genderfluid, and agender authors as well.

I counted everyone whose work was at least novelette-length for prose or issue-length for comics, and my year-end reading list looks like this, in alphabetical order:

Murchie Plus Books: January 1st to 14th

I make my tiny dog pose with everything I read, barring single issue comics. Lately, it's been easiest to corner him in bed first thing in the morning. Little dude loves a blanket cave.

The photos go live on Instagram as I edit them and usually appear here in digest form every Sunday, with descriptive alt tags and additional commentary. I missed last Sunday because 2017 started off on a low note: Murchie got sick right after New Years, then my grandma had a bad fall, then I got a nasty (and long-lasting) flu mutation mere days later. Neither Murchito nor I was good for much last weekend, so I'll cover two weeks' reading today.

FINDING X by Miles Tan [Amazon | Scribd] had the potential to be adorable. Carlisle (pronounced car-lees-lee, not car-lyle) has been wary of romance ever since her seven-year relationship ended, but she's almost more intrigued than taken aback when she meets blue-haired Matteo, a charming scientist. Their evolving relationship is mostly very sweet and friendly, with both parties making an effort to overcoming their reservations and connect.

Trouble is, Matteo treats Carlisle as an experiment to be solved rather than a person who makes her own choices. He keeps a notebook in which he tracks the results of his quest to discover the best ways to make her happy, some of which involve charting her daily routine and lying in wait for her so he can try his next gambit. At one point, he gushes about how he schedules a date on a rainy day so she'll have to accept a ride from him. Tan's aiming for "sweet but bumbling scientist doesn't quite know how to conduct a romance," but it comes across as "stalker targets lady and proceeds to worm his way into her life in unwelcome ways."

Scientific approaches to romance can work on the page, with Nicola Yoon's THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR being a recent example, but Matteo's experiments are a dealbreaker for me because he never cuts Carlisle in on them. Their relationship becomes something he's doing to her, not something they're working on together. I dearly wish Tan had reworked this aspect of it all, or nixed it entirely.

Best of 2016

2016 was a crap year in many respects, but I did read a hell of a lot of good books. Here’re my top picks in the order I read them, with some stats and commentary tacked onto the end for good measure.

2016 Top 16

Sixteen, people! That’s the most ever! I tried and tried and tried to narrow it down, but the books refused to let me ignore them.

Thanks, books.

to the sky without wings by leupagus

Never in my life did I imagine I’d read a novel-length piece of fanfic, and never ever ever did I think said fanfic would end up on my yearly Top 10 list (or Top 16 list, as the case may be). But here we are.

This Star Wars fic (which you can read in its entirely here) gripped me so hard that I dropped everything whenever another chapter came out. It convinced me fic can have a place in my life, and that sometimes my least favourite tropes can win me over.