The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

I'm paring down my physical bookshelves again (making room for some new stuff). Last year (or the year before?) I read many of the books that I had bought but never read. Now I'm working my way through some that I read many years ago to see if I still like them. I don't have enough to say for full reviews, but I want to record my reactions.  Lythande and The Gratitude of Kings Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1986, 1997 Oof. Talk about problematic authors. I always wanted to like MZB's stuff more than I actually liked her work, even before I found out about her being probably a terrible awful person . (I have a strong memory of throwing Mists of Avalon across the room in fury as a teenager, although I still overall enjoyed it at the time.) Lythande is a book of short stories about the wizard Lythande, whose power depends on keeping the fact that she's a woman a secret. ( The Gratitude of Kings is another story about the character written a decade later.) I liked these storie...

The Stars Too Fondly Emily Hamilton, 2024 Premise: Chloe and her friends meant to break into the old spaceship and try to find out what happened to the crew. They didn't intend to end up on a trip across the galaxy.  This is a light fluffy read if you're in a light fluffy romance mood. I didn't hate it overall, but the sci-fi parts were terrible. I didn't find the characters particularly compelling, but the story was interesting enough, at least at first. The group felt a little checkbox-y, by which I mean that our main protagonist Chloe was "just" a lesbian, but the others "checked off" a bunch of other minority groups, but not in a way that really affected the story, other than the fact that they were a bunch of different flavors of queer and a tight group of friends.  So they are exploring this ship that was supposed to be humanity's great attempt at the stars 20 years earlier, but the crew vanished on the day that was supposed to be the laun...