Sometimes you just need a break and need to read a sweet story about nitwits circling around each other while slowly falling in love and also battling evil and sea monsters.
This scratched that particular itch.

Natasha Pulley writes any number of fascinating books with so many wild disparate sources that make up the house itself, but the bones of every one of her books is the same story and this one is no different, although I think she keeps getting closer to the center of what she wants to say.
Obviously I loved this one too.
And the question she asks about catharsis and what it is we need are...fascinating.
I also appreciate that she has a romance novelist's approach to history - it's absolutely informed by the weird stuff she discovers, but in no way bound by it.

This book was pretending to be silly for maybe even the first...third of it?
It is not a silly book. It's a Peter S. Beagle book so, somewhat by definition, it has a extraordinary amount of heart and also that heart is bleeding.
How dare you emotionally skewer me with stories about humanity and identity? Again? 
It's not The Last Unicorn so don't go in expecting that. 
But it does...rhyme in the way it asks its characters to know themselves and just keeps asking until there is nothing left but the answer.

Once again I find myself unable to rate theory books outside of my field - this is fascinating in how it depicts the narrative of love in literature as mapping, reflecting, and shaping the way so many of our cultures talk about love and the love match.
There's also something really interesting here in thinking about the role that early marriage played in Judaism, specifically in the halakhic literature but as discussed in the maskilic literature, and the general way that the past is seen and depicted as creating itself a new past.
I definitely should go back through this with a highlighter because the things that are most important to me in my halakha hat are kind of ancillary to the literary work that Seidman is doing, even as I appreciate the trajectory that she traces.

Thank you KJ Charles, this was an excellent time for a new about romance, murder, and…pseudoscience?
I also deeply appreciated the realism (aside from the graphology) in the denouement. This was a good romance novel, the brain management appreciates it. 

There’s a point towards the final third of this book where I went from being extremely invested to…just kind of wanting to be done. 
I was fascinated by Belle’s life story and I appreciate that not everyone cares as much about incunabula as I do, so I won’t hold the relatives absence of book descriptions against the author. 
And while I was reading the book itself, I noticed the very large role that men play (relative to women) in Belle’s life and I was willing to forgive a historical novel for that one, but given the liberties that the authors DID take, it feels like there could have been more attention given to Belle’s relationships with people other than powerful men. The story they told was fascinating and I keep wondering about the one they didn’t. 

This series gets mysteries and the point of putting really interesting detectives with a significant number of things that get in their way into interesting circumstances.
Also, and I don't exactly think this is the point, but there is a certain amount of this book that is "what if autism was actually a debilitating superpower?"
Also all the other really weird and interesting things that make the mystery work.
Also holy crap the author's note at the end.
Authors PLEASE keep doing this and give me opinionated author's notes at the end. 

This book deserves not to have been read in 2025 when my brain is soup and I remember nothing about the previous books or basically any of the characters or what their losses were. 
Also I think I’m having a hard time with large scale saving the world epic fantasy these days. It feels more “flight of the deserter” than “escape of the prisoner”.  
Two comments behind spoilers - one thing I really liked that it did that felt new and one thing that felt very uninteresting-

I really liked the use of synesthesia to turn auditory magic into visual magic. That was cool. And I was…less than enthused by the ongoing use of “only the person who gave you your sperm can fulfill the prophecy” ad a plot point.

One of the many things I adore about Palmer is that I think her academic work is breezy and readable and then her novels happen. It's such a perfect reversal.
This book is amazing and, to be fair, I am willing to be interested in any period in history provided that someone passionate about it wants to tell me about it, but she is SO GOOD and I love how carefully the book teaches you how historians think about things and, rather than being impartial, weaves multiple partialities into the discourse and showcases them. When you watch how the trick is done, it looks even more impressive.

There's so much about this book to appreciate and it's exactly the kind of writing I want to see more of.

There's a wandering thought in the back of my mind about the way that this messy world with its new ideas and its progress that is neither inevitable nor fully directed but still going somewhere fits in to the way that Judaism develops in this period or, more specifically, how the narrative that branches of Judaism tell about themselves account for the shifts in worldview that they don't always admit to but that still happen to them and that they are part of. I'm not sure; but it does feel like there is a there there (and it's also going to be a different kind of _there_ because of how Jews experienced the world in this time. Doña Gracia Nasi wandering around this world and looking at the failures of virtue politics...)

I picked up this book a few months ago and my brain was not ready to attend to it properly but today it was extremely ready and so here I am, once again in awe of Samatar and the graceful stories she tells of pain and hope. 
For some people, dark academia is an aesthetic, but for Samatar it has always been more about the ways in which its practitioners can do dark things. And what is suppressed and how. And where resistance comes from.