Book 25: The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

Book club book! This novella has a setup that's pretty classic: two children, the daughter and son of the ruler of a land, have gone into a forest that humans do not escape from, and the ruler asks a woman who has been there before to retrieve them for him. But the specifics throughout the story are much more complicated than the standard telling: the ruler is the Tyrant, who has caused the death of the woman's mother and father, and while she did succeed at bringing a child back before, the child never recovered. This is a request that Veris cannot refuse, and if she fails, it will be mean the death of her village and the only family she has left. 

This was a very easy read that pulled me right along, and it's a story that doesn't hold your hand overexplaining things, which I really like as a narrative choice and also fits the sort of arbitrary world both within and without the forest. Bad things happen, in the woods and in the village and in the larger world, and all you can do is keep going. (It is possible that I am bringing something of my own mood to this story in the second week of November 2024.) I could have done with an ending that gave me a few more answers or even just hints for the direction of the future, but I don't think that's what the author wanted, so fair enough! Ambiguity isn't always a flaw, even if I could do with a bit more certainty right now. 

Grade: B

Book 24: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

A novella that's a fable! About what happens when three tigers who are also sometimes humans want to eat you but will wait until after they've heard a story. Cleric Chih has to tell the version of the story that humans tend to tell, and then the tigers tell them their version. It's a story within a story that I enjoyed a lot, even if I'm not entirely sure what I was supposed to take from it, in the end. 

Grade: B

Book 23: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

A book club book! This is a lesbian romance that's also a detective story that happens to take place on the rings of Jupiter? So there's a lot genre tropes and narratives all kind of smashed together in it. The set up is that earth became uninhabitable, so humanity set up a space colony of sorts on the rings of  Jupiter that's connected by all of these trains. Different settlements resemble different cultures or really settings of humanity, so you have one town which feels like the old west, another area that's basically a living zoo of all of the creatures and vegetation the colonists will want to bring back to Earth when it's inhabitable again, and then there's a university which feels very Oxbridge. The story is a fun noir involving two exes, even if I could have done with more development of why they broke up and why being together now makes sense. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series and finding out where it's going. 

Grade: B

Book 22: Fire and Blood by George R. R. Martin

So about halfway through the second season of House of the Dragon, I decided that I really wanted to just read the 'history' that the show was based on, because I was tired of only sort of understanding who all the characters were and also I wanted to know in advance what the bad things were. The show has the same problem that most prequels do, which is that it's the story of how the world arrived at the terrible situation that the main story starts in, so it's inherently tragic and we know where the story has to end up. But I've been enjoying the show, and I'm a big fan of the style of book that Fire and Blood is; I love a fake narrative historical book, which cites differing accounts and tells us what happens but can't actually confirm why they do. 

The first thing to note is that the book is extremely long and dense - the story arc that the show is based on doesn't even start for two hundred and fifty pages, and then it continues for another two hundred, more or less. I did enjoy the first parts of the book, though, which is essentially the equivalent of the Norman Conquest, an event that I know sufficiently little about to not be bothered by how much (or how little) GRRM is lifting from real history. But then I finally got to the part of the story that's been adapted, and I discovered almost immediately that I vastly prefer the show to the book, and think that basically every story change that has been made for the show improves upon the narrative immensely. 

This is in large part because the book's narrative has no use for women at all. And it's arguable that this is because the entire conflict is about that cultural bias: the succession battle is kicked off by one generation choosing between a female heir and a male heir, and then the next generation has to go through the same thing, only the second time around everyone fucking dies (because, as I said, it's a tragedy). Twice the rightful heir (by birth order) is denied because of her gender, and that's just how things are because men in the fake middle ages, am I right, and look sometimes I want my fiction to make me mad I guess. But what all of the women characters are lacking in the book is any MOTIVATION for why they do anything. We are told what happened but not really why, either the delay or the unreasonable action or whatever, and this isn't me wanting characters to behave rationally and being mad that people don't always do the logical thing. That's fine! That's truthful both in fiction and reality! People make bad choices or don't succeed because of the dumbest things all the time in history. I actually really like stories that acknowledge that sometimes a letter gets delayed because of the weather and it completely alters the trajectory of millions of lives, for better or for worse. 

What I don't like is a story that due to its incomplete view of characters or whatever tells me that things happen with no explanation for it at all. I'm not mad it's a tragedy; I knew what I was getting myself into. I'm just mad that honestly for the first time in my experience of reading GRRM's books, it felt like the worldview of misogyny etc. was just the explanation for everything, without the redeeming quality of getting to be in the point of view of various female characters with a diverse range of interests and abilities and failings. I don't regret reading the book because I do have a much firmer grasp on what the show is doing, and I actually enjoyed the sections that aren't about the characters in the show's narrative much much more than those sections, but boy. I finished the second season of HotD after I read the book, and it continued to diverse significantly, and I can only hope it continues to do so for however many more seasons they have to tell the whole story, because we all deserve better. 

Grade: C

Book 21: Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat

In soccer commentary, there is a classic terribly overused cliche that when one team is dominant for one half and the other is dominant the other, it's been a "game of two halves." Usually you can't divide books so neatly in half, but in this case I spent the first half of the book attempting to figure out how I would have restructured it to actually make it compelling and engaging, and then the second half I was hooting and hollering. So! A book of two halves it is. 

This is a story about Will, an orphan in early 19th century London whose mom died trying to protect him from evil doers and who discovers a secret magical underbelly to the whole society and blah blah blah you have probably read a YA fantasy before. That's part of the problem with the start of this story: it's extremely derivative and yet it also has pages and pages of exposition to get the reader through, but I can't say that I ever felt grounded in the setting. This is partly because the secret magic brings him to a hidden place that's out of time, since the Stewards (a secret society and a name I cannot keep in my head for longer than two minutes) has been training to prevent the rebirth of the Dark King for ages, so they feel much more King Arthurish than Regency, to say the least. The first two hundred pages has about ten pages of actually interesting stuff, and then it quickly shifts away to explain how good the good guys are, but when it's revealed that actually they've been doing some pretty questionable stuff in the name of being good, actually!, it's not really a surprise because we have no investment in the good guys. So up until this point: basically a C! Not something I'd want to read a second novel of!

However. We then arrive at the kidnapping of the most perfect and powerful and (most importantly) beautiful blond twink that Will has ever seen, for super honorable reasons we swear, and suddenly the whole thing kicks off and the second half of the book is a jam. I can't say that the book is particularly surprising--I started texting friends who had read it with predictions and I was pretty dark accurate--but I don't mind that at all, and certain scenes did make me honk like a goose. So! If you're willing to skim your way through 200 pages of setup to get to the actual emotional heart of a story at the beginning of a trilogy, I highly recommend this, and that especially goes if you've read the Captive Prince trilogy and know the kind of tropes this author is into. If you're wondering if that still applies to this, boy howdy does it. 

Grade: (C + A)/2 = B  

Book 20: You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

The second book in her series about mid-century gays living in New York City, this one unfortunately suffers a bit from comparison with the first one, which I enjoyed so so much. But this is still delightful, just slightly less my speed.

The love story here is between a journalist who is still privately grieving the death of his boyfriend a year and a half prior, which of course is something very few people know he's going through, and a slumping baseball player who's been traded to a team that sounds suspiciously like the Mets but of course isn't. Mark gets assigned to write a series of articles about Eddie's slump, and in the process they strike up a friendship that very very slowly becomes more. It's an interesting narrative in part because both of them are out to themselves, so it's less about coming out and more about creating a community. But I found the resolutions of some of the conflicts to be more expedient than I wanted. I don't need or want historical accuracy in the form of tragedy or the threat of outing from my gay historical romance novels, but this one went a little too far in the other direction, for me. Mark also felt like a character who made more sense as a 40 year old than a 28 year old, and while that may have been intentional from the standpoint of him aging as a result of losing his partner, I kept bumping up against it. So not quite the home run of her prior book, but still a solid double. 

Grade: B

Book 19: The New Guy by Sarina Bowen

Okay, look. If you're in the market for a hockey m/m romance novel to read on a porch while you're on vacation, this is perfectly serviceable. The titular new guy is both of the main characters: one is a young hockey player who keeps getting traded to new teams, the other is a newly hired athletic trainer for the team. They meet before the season at a bar before they know who they are and almost hook up! The hockey player has an overbearing dad! The athletic trainer is a young widower with a kid and an overbearing mother-in-law! 

I was sort of hoping for more from this, but the characters don't make a ton of sense and while the daughter's not the worst kind of kid character you find in a book like this, it was still more than I really wanted. Plus I kept arguing with the sports, which is never a good sign. But again, it did its job on my vacation, so I can't complain too much.

Grade: C 

Book 18: The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

A book club book! Which was also already on my list of things I needed to read, but this gave me the nudge I needed to actually read it. Unusually for this author, it's a standalone novel and also one that I think is probably New Adult rather than YA. It takes place in Spain post-Ferdinand and Isabella and focuses on a young servant named Luzia who is hiding both her family's Jewish faith in an era when anything other than public Catholicism was outlawed and her magical abilities. Her magic is discovered by the mistress of the household she works for, and a powerful noble who has a mysterious assistant wants to train her and present her in court for his own gains. 

The story unfolds more slowly than I was expecting, and then suddenly it opens up completely and takes a lot of turns. It's the third historical book about the Iberian peninsula that deals with religious identity and persecution and magic that I've read, so I was very much in the bag for the overall themes of the story, and when the narrative pace picks up it's pretty thrilling and ends up taking turns with various characters that I didn't expect and found extremely gratifying. It also made me want to pick up her adult fiction series again, which I bounced off of a bit the first time I tried it. But now I think I'm ready for the particular kind of edge she approaches stories with. 

Grade: A   

Book 17: How to be Eaten by Maria Adelmann

This was a book that was recommended by a podcast I listen to, and it sounded interesting enough for me to give it a shot, so I did! The setup is pretty interesting: it's a modern retelling of various folk tales that all basically serve as cautionary tales for women, all having to do with their relationships with men. One woman dates a tech billionaire and narrowly avoids being killed like all of his prior girlfriends; another goes on a reality tv dating show and doesn't fully realize that she's the villain; and then there's a little red riding hood taken to its implied end. They all meet at a support group that's set up by someone mysterious, who has his own agenda, and they all discover new things about themselves. 

I wanted to like this more than I did; it's not a bad story, but it's not one that felt particularly fresh or challenging for me, and a lot of it read like a bunch of MFA short stories that had gotten stapled together into a novel. But I think it's worth reading, even if I was hoping it would arrive at someplace a little less expected in the end. 

Grade: B

Book 16: Nimona by ND Stevenson

My sister wants to show me the movie version of this and had also given me the graphic novel last Christmas, so it was finally time! This was a fascinating example of me having a sense of what the story was about and discovering that I was incorrect, but not being mad about it. I thought it was about a girl with two dads, and instead it's about a monster who adopts a supervillain and has to deal with his arch nemesis. Those two ideas overlap, for sure, but I think part of the joy and revelation in this book is where the story goes versus where you think it will. Anyway Nimona is right and everyone should know it!!

Grade: A  

Book 15: The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord

 A book club book! And one we all felt pretty ambivalent about, sadly. It’s very much what I think of as cozy sci-fi, in that while things are definitely happening (first contact on a future earth where unexplained things have happened to the cities of the world) it’s not actually that interested in suspense or peril? And sometimes that can be nice, but it can also tip over into a story with stakes that should be high but which always feel low because you’re never actually invested in the reality or in doubt of the result. There’s a kind of model UN setup where one of the aliens (surprise!) is in disguise as a teacher, and the students are being quizzed on what’s presented as a fictional scenario but which we know is real, and the entire description of the scenario made me feel like someone was explaining the backstory of their D&D campaign without actually letting me play it, or even watch other people play. I never got hooked into the characters or the world.

 

Grade: C

Book 14: We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian

Man, Cat Sebastian has really found her wheelhouse in writing gay romances set in mid-20th century America. This one takes place in New York and is between a Brooklyn-born Italian-American who scrapes through and becomes a newspaper reporter, and the son of the publisher who joins the reporting desk in order to learn the business before he takes over. The New York of it all is super well crafted and made me want to go wander around different neighborhoods in my city, which is about the biggest compliment I can give it. The love story is really beautiful and the depiction of how gay people lived in a pre-Stonewall era just felt really nice to read: a reminder that we've always been here. 

Grade: A

Book 13: Time to Shine by Rachel Reid

A charming hockey romance about a goalie in the minors who gets called up to the NHL and finds both his confidence and true love! This is a lovely and extremely readable story featuring one taciturn loner and the bubbly yet anxious star player whose love he can't quite trust. However, it's a romance novel, so you know he will eventually! I also enjoyed this one more than others because while we've got a lot of archetypes here, they map less cleanly onto real life players than some hockey romances do, which makes it easier for me to lose myself in the story and not argue with it.

Grade: B

Book 12: Flux by Jinwoo Chong

A book club book! This is a first novel that feels it, in both really positive and slightly tiring ways. It's stuffed to the brim with ideas, and they don't all quite come together to make a cohesive whole. It's very timey-wimey but also has some of the best engagement in what it means to be a person who's deeply connected to a piece of media, and manages to depict that in a way that feels extremely accurate but also not instantly dated - I can't datestamp the author as being on tumblr in precisely 2014-2015 or whatnot. Overall I enjoyed it enough to be very excited about his next book, which is a great landing place for a first novel. 

Grade: B

Book 11: The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman

Another great entry in this mystery series! I'm really enjoying the way each story builds on the last, and how the friendships deepen through the process of solving various crimes. Elizabeth continues to be the greatest, and I accept my place as the Joyce of a group. I'm taking a break after this one because I know the fourth one is a bit sad, and I'm not quite ready for it yet.

Grade: A

Reread: Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay

There are some books that I'll always remember where and who I was when I first read it, and this one I read during the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, while I was on campus for a arts festival. It made me convinced that I was actually going to become a historian, even though I had none of the background or really drive that would make that possible, because this version of the Byzantium empire was so captivating for me that I projected my love of this book onto the idea of studying the time period. I read both this and its sequel (which had just come out) in quick succession, and they've stayed with me on a deep level for the past 24 years. 

Grade: A

GGK Reread Continues! The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

It took me a long time to get back to this book, which doesn't entirely surprise me given the themes involved. 

Kay's sixth novel, and his first that is significantly less high fantasy and more historical fiction with the serial numbers filed off, is set in a world that draws heavily on the Iberian Peninsula in the time of El Cid and the reconquista. He is deeply interested in conflicts of faith and how people of different faiths and cultures either manage to bridge those divides or fail, and the consequences of those relationships can have for both individual lives and nation states and society as a whole.

The analogues for Christianity, Islam and Judaism are extremely clearly drawn, and there's a love triangle in the middle of this novel that in another author's hands could be extremely trite and obvious. But it's so beautifully developed and drawn out, and the tragedy of the end is the utter impossibility of a future that doesn't destroy something that will be mourned. I couldn't quite get through this book again in the fall of 2023, but I finally did this winter, and rediscovered all over again that I cannot read this book without crying, even 25 years after the first time I read it. 

Grade: A   

Book 10: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

This book has been on my radar since it was published in 2019, but I only just now decided I was in the right headspace to read a book about all of the ways that global warming will destroy the fragile equilibrium that enables humans to survive on our planet. I don't know that I actually was in the right headspace for that, frankly, but one of the other interesting elements of reading this book now is that all of the science is at least 5 years out of date. And when it comes to climate science and, more importantly to the thesis of this book, climate projections of how warm it will get by when and even more crucially, what that will have done to various systems, none of the predictions contained in this book had the presumably desired impact of shocking me out of complacency. If anything the timeframes presented in the book feel almost naïve from here, to say nothing of the chapter on the impact a warmer planet has on the likelihood of future pandemics. I don't say any of this because I'm a climate doomer, or think there's nothing that can be done, or even that we're on exactly the same bad trajectory we were five years ago. I just think this book was actually not meant for me, at this time. Also, the book was written during the middle of the Trump presidency, and the despair present from that in the writing did remind me of how that felt to live under every day, and I would really like to not return to that. 

Grade: C

Book 9: White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Hey, I finally read a good book in 2024! I've been meaning to read some of this author's short stories for years, and then my book club chose this collection for our first read of 2024 and I had a great reason to. These stories are all inspired by or in conversation with folk stories or fairy tales, but I enjoyed even the ones paired with stories I didn't previously know. It is such a pleasure to read short stories written by someone who knows exactly what they want to do with the form, and how to craft a complete story in that length that never feels like it's a prologue to a novel that may or may not be written in the future. The stories float along and her character voices are distinct and lovely. Some of the stories left me with a strong feeling of narrative resolution, while others were more of a vibe, and I enjoyed them all. Link has just released her first novel, and I'm looking forward to picking that up soon as well. 

Grade: A

Book 8: Murder on Mistletoe Lane by Clara McKenna

So, this is a sequel! Something I did not realize when I started reading it. It's a Christmas-season set murder mystery at the English manor of newlyweds in the early 20th century. This is apparently the fifth murder mystery that Stella and Lyndy have found themselves in the middle of, and because it's a sequel, the character setup is both perfunctory and spends a lot of time referencing events from previous books, and I found it more tedious than intriguing. I kept reading because I did actually want to find out the big reveals, and while they weren't disappointing exactly, they couldn't overcome the overall experience I had reading it. 

Grade: C 

Book 7: The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict

A Christmas manor house murder mystery! The twist with this one is that it's a contemporary setting, and also that it's a game within a game, essentially - the now deceased matriarch of the Armitage family has required that her whole family gather at the family estate in order to play a series of games to determine who would inherit the house. The whole setup is contrived even for this genre, and the main failing of this book is that there are twelve poems of clues to decipher and solve, but they're not actually clues the reader can hope to solve. The whole mystery development ends up feeling inert as a result. 

Grade: C

Book 6: Hercule Poirot's Silent Night by Sophie Hannah

A classic kind of Poirot mystery, this time for Christmas! He and his trusty friend Catchpool are convinced by Catchpool's fairly unpleasant mother to come to a crumbling manor by the sea a few days before Christmas to help the family solve a murder to prevent a murder. Of course there are many secrets and revelations and red herrings along the way. I would have preferred slightly more Christmas in this story, but it's twisty in the Christie style, and I enjoyed reading it. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Catered All the Way by Annabeth Albert

I liked this one better than the other romance I read by this author this month! I can't say that I completely recommend it, but this is a pretty charming romance between a twenty-something gamer and his older brother's high school best friend who he's always had a crush on. The crush comes back home and helps out the siblings with their family business over the holidays (a subplot I truly could have done without), and sparks fly, etc. It was fine!

Grade: B

Book 4: The Christmas Veto by Keira Andrews

Sigh, another Christmas romance that's...fine, I guess? This is somehow the third fake dating storyline within the same series, where one of the guys in the fake romance is the son/stepson of the fake romance guys of the first novel. At a certain point, you'd think that people would catch on! It's inoffensive but doesn't offer a lot more than that, unfortunately. 

Grade: C

Book 3: Bring Me Home by Annabeth Albert

I keep trying gay romances by this author, because they wrote a couple of romances I read a while ago that I remember liking a lot, and then I end up disappointed. This one is about a retired naval investigator in his early 40s who meets a really hot 23 year old at a gay bar, only to discover that he's the son of one of his high school friends, oh no! And also the 23 year old is going to be living with him in his old victorian house that he inherited from his aunt, and also there's a...mystery to be solved? And it's a whole forbidden romance thing that both wants to be a massive problem and something that's easily overcome, and I don't know! It didn't really work for me, even though I like a lot of age gap romances and I'm not opposed to a fantasy narrative about restoring a house together and finding love. So far I haven't found a book this year that really hits. 

Grade: C

Book 2: The Christmas Orphans Club by Becca Freeman

Another catch up Christmas novel! This book should be right up my alley, and instead it's one that has a pretty interesting conceit that just completely falls apart. It's about two best friends from college who both don't have good family options for Christmas, so they create their own Christmas tradition. But at some point, there's a huge falling out between them, leaving their other orphan friends in a difficult situation, and the narrative shifts back and forth through time and shows various Christmases of the past so the reader can piece together what happened. However, the falling out doesn't really land, and while I'm not opposed to stories about people in their twenties making bad social decisions, the particular choices here just made me wonder why any of them are actually friends. Deeply meh. 

Grade: C 

Book 1: In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren

Yes, it is January and yes, I am still making my way through my Christmas books from 2023! This is a deeply mediocre romance novel about a woman who goes through a groundhog day of her holiday vacation with her immediate family and the family friends they've done Christmas with her entire life. But this might be the final year at the vacation home they all go to, and she hooked up with the wrong pseudo-cousin who's not actually a cousin, and of course she's stuck in a dead-end job and is afraid to tell anyone what's happening! So she gets a million chances to fix it all, and finally does. This wouldn't have been good no matter what, but it especially suffers in comparison with the Hallmark Hanukkah groundhog day movie that came out in 2023, Round and Round, which is legitimately great and shows how a time loop really should be done. 

Grade: C

2024 Master List

 

Well, somehow we've reached my ninth year of publishing this book blog! If that sounds like an improbably long time to you, it feels even more wild to me, since I persist in thinking of this blog as being my 'new' thing. However, it's also true that we've cycled back to another presidential election year, which was the entire impetus behind its creation in 2016 - a method of anxiety moderation. I can't say I actually know how much help or harm focusing on my reading list provided that year, or in 2020 for that matter, but I do know that I continue to value having a place to write about the things I read that's not part of a whole commerce system where my opinions on books will be added to a rating aggregate. I completely understand the value to authors (and potentially readers) of those ratings, but I like not having to consider those things when I give books fairly arbitrary grades.

Anyway, this is a list of books I currently own or have out from the library that I have never read before and that I want to attempt to read this year. It continues to be a pretty weird assortment of books I've owned for a decade plus, newish releases that I'm already behind on, and other titles I come across and decide need to be added to the pile, along with my book club books. As always, I would like to read all of them in 2024, but my secondary (and more realistic) goals are to read at least 52 books, and to start 2025 with a smaller list than I have right now. Of course, that would require me to not add new books to my reading pile, and we all know how well that's gone over the past 8 years. And the real goal is to read a bunch of books that I love and that I want to tell other people about. So here's hoping I can achieve that one if nothing else!