As of this morning, I’ve finally finished all the books I bought during the first Cozy the Day Away Sale in April. Yeah, four months ago. I bought about 30 books, I’m a slow reader, and I jumped in and out of the list as well as other unrelated books. But now we’re done!
And I have even less idea of what “cozy” is than I did when I started. Well, that’s useful information in itself. I’d hoped to learn, and I did; just not what I expected to learn.
This time around, I decided to just blank out the titles I’ve already talked about, or old titles that Goodreads dragged up to the top of the list for Mysterious Reasons.
I think I talked a lot about I Want to Be a Wall and Ladies On Top last time; these are the final volumes of each. These series meshed well for me even though they are polar opposites in storyline and tone: they are both stories about partners (of wildly different types) trying to navigate what kind of relationship works for them in the face of societal expectations. I find that inspiring, and I was rooting for both of these pairs: the companionate pairing of the asexual/aromantic woman and her closeted gay husband (though again, his “woe, I didn’t get to date my childhood crush and thus I must pine away forever” thing was… frustrating) and the pairing of the two adorably horny straight people who realize that Standard Straight Peopling isn’t working for them.
Awkward is an older nonfiction book, and I enjoyed it with some reservations. It’s essentially about people who are just off the edge of the neurodiversity spectrum, who don’t test on the spectrum but still have difficulties with communication. HI. IT ME. HELLO. I have some beef with the narrative that everyone on or near the spectrum is a Magical Special Gifted Person, and Therefore It’s Okay That They Don’t Meet Societal Expectations In Other Ways, See, They’re Still “Useful”. Ughhhhhhh. (Or maybe we shouldn’t expect people to “make up for” how they are at all, huh?) Or hey, maybe I’m just salty because I have communication issues, but no special interest or ~magical talent~ to “balance them out.” This book really brought that home. Still, it was an encouraging read even with the quibbles I had.
A Short History of Trans Misogyny was great. Unfortunately, the author’s use of a space in transmisogyny makes it look like it’s a TERF book at a glance (i.e. “misogyny by trans people”), and it is absolutely not. If you want a more broad survey of trans history, Susan Stryker’s book Transgender History is a good one; if you want one about how trans people existed throughout history, that’s Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam. This overlaps in some ways with them, but is more specifically about how society reacts to transfemmes. (With unhinged fear over the “”threat”” to the structure that gives the powerful more power. Obviously.)
The volumes popped up out of order here, but I started Chainsaw Man where the anime left off, with volume 5. Okay, so this series is extremely violent, and very easy to brush off as bro-ey. That’s fine. I believe it’s doing more than that with its characterization and theming, but it’s also hard sledding at times. Also, it has temporarily ruined the word “Halloween” for me, just in time for spooky season. Thanks.
BURY YOUR GAYS. OKAY. HERE WE GO. I’m not going to catch us up with the Chuck Tingle’s Horror Books Are Actually Serious And So Is His Whole Thing, Just Not How You Expect argument; I’m not here to justify anything to anyone. But I read Straight and Camp Damascus and enjoyed both of them, and they just keep getting better. Bury Your Gays is not subtle, but sometimes you just gotta say “fuck subtlety” and say something with your entire chest. It’s scary and heartbreaking and triumphant. It deals with creativity in general and horror in particular as a form of healing, with both the titular trope as well as facile pinkwashing, and with THE POWER OF GODDAMN FRIENDSHIP, THANK YOU.
You’ll see two books in there about newsletters — I do hope to start a proper newsletter eventually. I just need to figure out some fun extras for Healers. (Therapist is easy; I have to stop myself from spinning out more ideas for that. But Healers is a tightrope walk of tone, and while I know some people read and like it, I don’t know why. I don’t know if you’re only here for A&K or if the world is interesting on its own. I don’t know if you’re gunning for romance or against it. Welcome to 50% of the reason I’m working on a non-A&K book right now, even though I love those characters.)
Anyway!
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou ended as it began, with a sweet sense of melancholy. I will probably read this entire series beginning to end someday.
The Rogue and the Peasant has cycled through a couple of covers since I bought it, and neither really matched up to the book it actually was: a surprisingly delightful adventure built on the Rapunzel story, but not quite what you might expect. I loved it all, apart from a Labyrinth homage that landed with a thud with me (y’all, I am such a Labyrinth dork that I named my first cat Toby; I should be the prime audience for whatever was happening here). There were some actual feelings in this one, and not the ones I expected going in.
At the end of my CTDAS stack, two books landed in what turned out to be opposite order: I thought I would like Cursed Cocktails the most, because it’s the second most popular cozy fantasy book on the planet, but I just liked it fine. The main entertainment lay in trying to map each scene onto its corresponding scene in Legends and Lattes, because I need more practice in understanding how plots work.
(It also made me realize that I don’t understand the draw of making the main character not the person who comes up with the ideas / does all the work / is good at The Thing The Book Is About. Viv isn’t the genius baker; Rhoren eventually learns to make cocktails, but he’s not the original bartending whiz. Is it to make them more relatable, I wonder? Or do people specifically dream about being management, and having the character do the labor would ruin it for them?)
I have realized that while I’m glad cozy fantasy exists, I don’t think it’s “for” me. I don’t dream of being a manager; I dream of being good at something concrete. I’d rather be the magical cupcake baker or whatever, not just the owner of the store. If that’s your dream, I love that for you; it doesn’t appeal to me much.
Moving on: Inspirational Wink and the Altogether Extraordinary Notebook was a romp. The fine-but-unspecifically-magical cover gave no clue as to what it actually was: a there-and-back-again adventure story with a reluctant heroine, but one that both took itself seriously and absolutely not seriously at the same time. There is a magical mouse that exists mostly to dole out deus ex machinas. The naming schemes are completely off the wall, and I loved them: everything is named both Not Normally and very literally. Ex. the Not Too Bad Inn, which is not too bad. It comes off almost like a children’s book or a fable, where nothing is expected to be realistic.
And now we’re caught up. I have three more books that I got in the July CTDAS, and the next one is around the corner, so my TBR will not get much relief. But hey. I eventually climbed the mountain.