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Yuletide reveals!

It will probably not surprise many people to learn that I, a person with many swirling feelings about the Yiddish language and queer Judaism and complicated sibling relationships and problematic revolutions, wrote un mir zenen ale shvester, a Fiddler on the Roof fic for the 2018 Yiddish Folksbiene production. Way early in the Yuletide season, when sovay (with whom I saw the original production) asked if I'd happened to get this assignment, I joked that I could probably combine a bunch of reconditarmonia's fantastic prompts by writing lesbian Shprintze as a socialist journalist going back to Russia to write about the October Revolution and meeting her sisters there, but I wasn't going to do that because I absolutely didn't have time to go on the required Russian Revolution research dive before deadline .... well. Anyway. Here we are!

To Avoid Stagnation, The Romance Must Progress! is a pinch-hit I picked up for Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-Kun. As soon as I saw the prompt asking about how Sakura and Nozaki-kun finally get together I realized I'd had a fairly clear idea about this in my head since I first watched the anime in 2014 or so. So I sat down and wrote this out more or less in one night ... and then realized my recipient was also almost entirely caught up on the manga, which I had never actually read, and zoomed through 100 chapters of scanlations in a panic on December 31st to make sure that none of it outright contradicted anything I'd written. A nice last-minute 11-volume boost to my 2020 reading list! Anyway this was extremely fun to write and gave me an outlet for all the screwball energy that wasn't going into un mir zenen ale shvester.

For the first time in a couple years, I also managed to post a Yuletide treat, that which is worth waiting for. Back when people were posting their letters, which also happened to be square in the middle of my Queen's Thief spiral, I'd also written a couple of bits and pieces of a Kamet/Costis fic with the vague intention of bulking them out into something much longer and more thoughtful as a treat for lirazel's prompt later in the Yuletide cycle .... as it turned out, that did not happen! What did happen is that three hours or so before Yuletide go-live, after finally completing all edits to my two assignment fics (and reading 100 chapters of Nozaki-kun), I looked at my bits and pieces once again and decided I probably had just enough time to write the connecting tissue that would pull them together into something coherent. (I did not, however, have enough time to come up with a good title.)

Thank you to genarti, saramily, gramarye1971, and Roommate M for all the extremely useful and reassuring beta reads, and to everyone who sniped me repeatedly by writing such INCREDIBLE gifts that I have barely had any opportunity to read anything else in the collection yet because I just keep going back to the things that were written for me instead!

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Just dropping a quick FYI for anyone who was interested in participating in playlist exchange that I am probably going to be closing signups tomorrow afternoon!

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This is, I think, the shortest my 'books read this year' post has ever been -- certainly since I've been keeping track of what I read, at least, and probably for the years before that, too. A big part of this was the impact of working from home and not leaving the house very much; in normal years, I do a lot of my reading a.) on hour lunch breaks at work, b.) while taking the bus and subway various places around town, and c.) on planes and trains while traveling. I do still technically have a lunch break and I do often use it to do some reading, but when I'm home it's much easier to get sucked into doing other things around the house rather than taking that whole hour to read as I generally would, and even on the two days a week I am actually in the office, I eat in the conference room sitting in front of my computer so I can close the door when I take my mask off, rather than physically removing myself from the workspace, so my lunch breaks tend to be short and distractable. Given all these givens, I'm honestly pretty happy I read as much as I did. (But I still miss traveling and taking public transit very much.)

Anyway, as usual, I aimed to write up everything I read and did not in fact come anywhere near achieving that -- books read closer to the end of the year are more likely to be written up eventually, but please feel free to drop a comment if there's anything you're curious about and I will either say whatever I remember about it or prioritize it for a near-future post!

( Books Read, 2020 )

So: 95 books, and 12 volumes of manga; of those, 20 books were rereads, which is actually not that much higher than in previous years, and eight were nonfiction, which is lower than usual but not ... that much lower .... I did end last year's book post declaring that I wanted to read more nonfiction and more manga and clearly did not actually do either of these things, but, hey, 2020. Perhaps next year will be different!