Category: Book Reviews

What I Read: May 2023

School officially ended and summer officially begins! We had a successful camping and kayaking trip at Deer Creek Reservoir to kick off the summer. The lake is so much fuller than it was last year. The rocks I remembered being halfway up the beach were almost completely underwater! A testament to Utah’s insane water year.

Kid-sized kayaks are amazing
Playing Phase 10 is an important part of our family camping culture

Some really good writing news this month: I sold a story! “Birthright” will appear in an anthology of speculative fiction detective stories by Inklings Press! This story features a very costly magic system that twists the relationships in a family to the breaking point. I’m sure it will be a while before the anthology will be available, but I’ll keep you up to date on it. I also turned in my edits on “Reclaiming the Desert” to Wayfare, so hopefully you’ll see that one sooner.

On the other side of the writing desk, I’ve finished the developmental edits for my portion of Irreantum‘s genre fiction issue. I should be diving into copy edits soon. The stories we received for the issue are truly amazing and only getting better with every draft. I’m excited to share them with you.

For Mother’s Day, we released an episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree about the portrayal of Mothers in the Media. Our other episode was one of my kids’ favorites for me to prep for, an episode of the Australian sensation that is Bluey.

This month was a bit light on the reading with all the end of school activities, but I’m hoping to get back on track with the summer months before grad school takes over my reading list in the fall. That is, if I don’t spend all my spare time exploring Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom. I cannot believe they made a game this good with a reused map. Every minute of the seven year wait was worth it.

Book reviews after the jump!

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What I Read: January 2023

January was full throttle around here. My kids are finally getting back into the after-school activities that we hadn’t really been doing since the pandemic, so I feel like mom-Uber most evenings. And I’ve been working on my last PTA obligation of the year, the school read-a-thon. I’m keeping it pretty low-key, but it’s still going to be a lot of work. It’s all for the kids, right?

pink rose flower on blue hardbound books
Photo by Jess Bailey Designs on Pexels.com

I nearly hit my word count goal this month, 7242/8000, despite starting a week late due to recovery from the holidays. A lot of those words went into a new personal essay that that the muses dumped into my head right before the BYU Studies contest deadline. I think it turned out really well and my beta readers had good things to say about it. It’s already been submitted to the contest, so wish me luck! I’ve also been working on a fairy tale codenamed “Cats with Footnotes,” though the footnote aspect has yet to appear, so it may just end up being “Cats.” The idea was to write a fairy tale with some elements from my childhood and then have semi-fictional footnotes explaining some of the background. I liked fiction with footnotes (such as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell), and the idea of combining speculative fiction with creative nonfiction was intriguing, so we’ll see if it turns out. I’ve committed to my writing group to get a draft to them by next week.

In February I’m heading Life, the Universe, and Everything in Provo. I’m especially excited to hear “Could The Way of Kings have saved the Nephites?” by Nick Fredrick. Always happy for more literary engagement with Brandon Sanderson! I’m also going to focus on marketing the podcast and taking some classes about plotting, which is my weakness as a fiction writer. If you’re coming to LTUE this year, drop a comment below or send me an email and let’s do lunch!

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What I Read: December 2022 & 2023 Reading Projects

I hope your holidays were much more calm and bright than mine. I don’t think we had a single day of the winter break where someone wasn’t sick, including major bouts of vomiting. There was also a good amount of family drama and about a week of rain. Oh well. Such are the holidays.

I hit about half of my word count goal in December, 4500/8000, but as I had forgotten to account for Christmas break, I consider this basically a win. I finished my short story “Memory” and sent it in to Writers of the Future two whole weeks early. They sent out a few emails saying that not a lot of people had entered this quarter, and I feel like this story is my best one yet, so I’m crossing my fingers for it. I’m also still working on my “Landscapes of Faith” essay which is currently wandering every-which-way with no particular purpose.

christmas cookies on white ceramic bowl
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

In publication news, on the last day of 2022, my essay “Self Portrait in Cookies” came out in Young Ravens Literary Review, issue 17, on the topic of womanhood. Hopefully later this month, I’ll write a little author’s note about this essay, but in general, it explores the relationship between baking and womanhood. Bon appetit!

And over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we released a Christmas special about adaptations of A Christmas Carol as well as our final episode of season one, discussing The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.

For January, I’m lining up my ducks in a row to get my application for graduate school completed and still working on my proposal for the 2023 AML Conference. I’m thinking something on Mormons and aliens right now. The deadline for the Irreantum genre issue I’m co-editing is also coming up (Feb 1st!). I look forward to reading all of the interesting submissions, so make sure to get yours in.

2023 Reading Projects

four pile of books on top of brown wooden surface
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I’m starting some new reading projects for 2023. I enjoyed the idea of my 5×5 Challenge last year and made some good progress on most of it. But I think I need more structure so as not to put off the books I want to read in favor of the shiny new things I see. This year, I have two major reading projects (three, if you count the year of Sanderson–6 new works by Brandon this year!). First, I’m joining up with the Hardcore Literature Book Club on Patreon to dig into some classics, partly to prepare my brain for grad school and partly because I ran some stats on my Goodreads data and found that the majority of my lifetime of reading is things published in the last 20 years or so. That’s something I hope the HLBC 2023 reading list will correct. (I will probably drop off once/if I go back to school in the fall.)

I’m also planning a personal study of the Inklings in 2023. I’ve got a schedule of approximately a book a month, starting with a history of the group, then working through a fiction and non-fiction book each by Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers (who isn’t technically an Inkling, I know, but I keep hearing so much about her that I figured I might as well include her). Interspersed with these are some of CS Lewis’s works of literary criticism, which are some of the few of his books I haven’t read. If you’re interested in following along, here’s the reading list, though I reserve the right to adapt as needed.

Now on to the book reviews!

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What I Read: October 2022

If I told you that I was sewing Halloween costumes at 9 pm on October 30th, you’d get a good picture of the kind of month I had. Lots of work on my dad’s campaign and getting the Reflections contest up and running, plus all the craziness of Halloween with four kids. All of it good work, but lots of time away from the writing I’d like to be doing.

Word count for October fell short again (3770/4000) but not surprising. I missed about a week of time attending the LDSPMA Conference. I learned a lot at the conference (I focused this time on podcasting rather than writing) and met some great people who I hope to work with in the future.

white and black skull figurine on brown wooden table
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

This month’s writing was mostly focused on academic projects. I finished a book review of Into the Headwinds which is going to be published by Dialogue. But the more exciting piece was finishing my statement of intent to apply for the English MA program at BYU. I’ve got everything all rounded up, just waiting on letters of recommendation. I did begin a new short story at the end of the month called “Memories” focusing on a robot nanny. First draft has already gotten some good feedback from my writing group this week, though lots of changes to make of course. I’m really enthusiastic about the prospects for this story.

Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree released two episodes last month, one on Top Gun Maverick (I didn’t think we’d get so many moral lessons out of a summer blockbuster!) and a Halloween special on Midnight Mass.

During November, I’m going to continue polishing “Memories” and start a creative nonfiction piece about the culture shock of moving from Utah to Seattle and back again. If you’re reading this on the day it’s published, you can catch me tonight at 7 pm MT at the launch party for the Mormon Lit Blitz’s second anthology. I’ll be reading “The 37th Ward Relief Society Leftovers Exchange,” and just basking in all the other really interesting authors who’ll be there. Next week, I’m attending Dragonsteel 2022 for the release of The Lost Metal. At the con, I’ll be recording a special episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree talking about Mormonism in the Mistborn series, which is something I’ve always planning to write about. Come and listen in if you’re at Dragonsteel! Due to all this busy-ness, I won’t be attempting NaNo this month, but I’m already eye-ing Camp Nano in April for a return to longform writing.

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What I Read: September 2022

This month has flown by, my friends! I feel like it’s impossible that I actually read the 12 books reviewed below because I’ve been so busy this month with back-to school and things. I’m volunteering the equivalent of a part time job running my dad’s campaign for county auditor and as the PTA council Reflections specialist.

My word count for September was 400 words short of my 4,000 word goal, but not too terrible overall, considering. I ended up writing 2-3 days a week instead of 4 and making up the word count by writing slightly longer. I need to drill into my head that 250 words doesn’t actually take that long, so I’ll just sit down and actually do it.

branches of tree with yellow leaves in autumn
Photo by Julia Volk on Pexels.com

I finished one story whose working name is “Reclaiming the Desert” but is also known as Solar Punk Utah in my file system. It’s a story about the ecological restoration of Utah and the mending of family relationships divided by a gulf of faith. Hopefully I’ll find a good home for it soon. Submissions are happening, though who knows if they are going well. 7 submissions out this fall, but no bites yet.

We released three episodes of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree last month: one on Netflix’s The Adam Project, one on the anime film Mirai, and one on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

For October, I’m going to continue writing short stories and start work on my grad school applications. So crazy that this is really happening. Book reviews after the jump!

Continue reading “What I Read: September 2022”