Book 19: The Book Censor's Library by Burthaina Al Eissa

A book club book! This is one of those books where I get what it's doing, and it's interesting enough, but it didn't quite pull together in the end to be something new or bigger, for me? Part of my reaction to that is definitely related to a fatigue regarding dystopia narratives--I am not completely opposed to them, but it takes a lot more for me to emotionally engage with them at the moment, and I really need to them to go someplace new or profound for the story to stick. This was an interesting parable about censorship and the ways books change us and why that's so dangerous to authoritarians, but it didn't ultimately hit, for me. A perfectly fine read, but not what I was hoping for.

Grade: B

Book 18: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

A book club book! This is a sci-fi space allegory about castes and what we tell ourselves when we create processes to lift up those who have been restricted. It's basically got a Snowpiercer vibe but about academia. It read a bit more like an intellectual exercise than a story, but I did enjoy it, and it should be a good discussion starter.

Grade: B

Book 13: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

A book club book! Although I've read it well in advance for once. 

I think I may have gone into this book with expectations that were too high--there's a lot about this time travel book to like, and I had a really nice time reading it. But I kept expecting either the relationships in the book to really wow me, or for the structure and worldbuilding of this specific time travel project to hit me harder, and instead it was just nice! I liked what it did with the historical event of the HMS Terror and what happened to the men searching for the Northwest Passage, but it never quite clicked into place with the current day story for me, and I never fell in love with the romance the way I was supposed to. 

Part of that is that the narrator felt a bit too opaque and naive for my liking, and while some of that is because of various reveals that occur in the final third of the book, that only compounded what didn't entirely work for me about her. It was all fine! But I had been hoping for something that made me swoon, and unfortunately it didn't.

Grade: B

Book 9: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

A book club book! And one that read with some trepidation, because I don't always vibe with a short novel that's more about mood and language than it is about plot, and I am more lukewarm on stories set in space than others. 

However! I really, really loved this book. The prose is certainly stylized, but I think the structure and format of the novel (24 hours on a space station that's rotating around Earth 16 times in that timeframe) made it all work for me. There are six astronauts up there, from a variety of backgrounds - two from Russia and then one each from Italy, the UK, the U.S. and Japan - and the book tells the story of what they go through on a typical day up there, and what they see of the world below. It's not a lot of plot, but it isn't just descriptions of the glory and wonder of the planet below, and even that stuff made me so happy. I just had a great time reading this book, and in the end that's worth a lot!

Grade: A 

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 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 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 34: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

A book club book! This is a vampire-esque story set in modern England, only instead of them surviving on human blood, they eat--you guessed it--books! The story centers on Devon who is on her own and caring for her son, a particular kind of book eater who eats people's brains if they don't have access to a medication. The narrative alternates between following them in the present day and her childhood and young adulthood showing us how they ended up there, and the specific cultural institutions she's fighting against to survive and raise her son. 

There's also a whole plot about the women of each family being controlled and married off in order to strengthen family lines, and the difficulty they have with breeding because women can only have two (at most) children before they become infertile, and a whole lot of nonsense society construction around all of this. The narrator is well-aware of how nonsense it is, because it's not as if the patriarchy is a sensible system, but it's also not exactly an uplifting story. There was a lot to chew on (heh) in this book, but it never quite coalesced into something greater than the sum of its parts, for me.

Grade: B  

Book 32: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author of this book socially. 

Man, I knew going into this book that it was going to go in directions I wasn't expecting, and boy did it. This is the final book in the Scholomance trilogy, and it also picks up immediately after the end of The Last Graduate. El has made it out of the Scholomance, and now she has to attempt to deal with the aftermath of the escape and whatever is happening outside of the Scholomance, and neither of those processes go at all how I was expecting. This trilogy engages with and subverts so many of the magical universe tropes and archetypes, and it does so knowing exactly where that should lead. There are three separate reveals in this book that made me gasp and stare off into the middle distance, and the commitment to the worldbuilding and no easy answers is really incredible and frankly rare. I loved how complicated it all is, and how satisfying I found the ending both in spite of and because of that. 

Grade: A 

Book 31: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author of this book socially. 

For some reason, after I read the first book I took months and months to pick up the second one, I think in part because I knew that once I read the second one I would then immediately need to finish the trilogy, and I wanted to save it or something? I definitely end up putting off doing some things because otherwise I won't 'savor it' or something, and it's not my favorite habit! What is my favorite, however, is this book! 

The Last Graduate takes place immediately after A Deadly Education ends, so now El and her friends are in their final year in the Scholomance and are staring down the barrel of the final gauntlet. Plus the school is now attempting to kill El and a flock of freshman she's unexpectedly in charge of in all new ways, and something weird is going on with Orion!!! This book is a great example of a narrative arc following the internal logic of worldbuilding and then attempting to actually address it, with fantastic tension and development, and it's also a story that as soon as things start to feel like they're going well, you get nervous because that means a rug is about to get pulled, and boy does it. A perfect middle novel of a trilogy. 

Grade: A

Book 21: The Guest List by Lucy Foley

A friend read this and recommended it, and boy did I have a great time reading it! It's a classic Agatha Christie-esque mystery setup (extremely posh wedding set on a tiny remote island off the western coast of Ireland), with five narrative point of views that tell the story of the day leading up to the murder. The reader doesn't know who's dead until very close to the end, but what makes a wedding an ideal setting for a murder mystery in general is bringing together a wide assortment of people who all know various aspects and eras of the bride and groom's pasts. The groom's schoolmates from his days at public school are one key era, and the bride's oldest friend (and his wife) and her sister are another, and the book really draws you through the story because you just want to know how it all fits together as it flips from point of view to point of view. It's extremely satisfying and the characters are so clearly drawn, and I loved how clear-eyed the story is about who the real villains are. A great and fast contemporary mystery read. 

Grade: A 

Book 20: The World We Make by NK Jemisin

A book club book! But also a book that I was always going to read on my own, since it's the sequel to The City We Became, which I absolutely loved.

It's always interesting reading something that you know is in a slightly different form than had been originally intended; this series was initially planned as a trilogy, rather than a duology, and there are aspects of the plotting that felt a bit like attempting to fit two suitcases' worth of clothes into one: there's not a lot of space for things to breathe, and there are definitely elements of it that I would have loved to have seen expanded, and entire sequels or tangents I would have read whole books about. But the fundamental themes and relationships that mattered so much to me in the first book still ring true in this one. She kept me on absolute pins and needles regarding one resolution that I was absolutely ready to burn down the world for, and when we got there it was worth it in the end. The first book captured me completely by the story itself, and the second was both about the text and about how she was able to arrive at the text, a lesson in the world shaping what stories we can tell and how. There was a defiance to the first book that was still present in the second one, but also an awareness of how long the fight is, and how many angles the enemy will pursue to further its goals. I'm so glad I got to read this ending. 

Grade: A 

Book 15: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma

Well, it's the start of February and I finally read the winter Solstice book I bought in December! Not bad. 

This is a queer, poly, multi-faith book about magic and love and family. It starts with Layla hearing that her boyfriend Meraud is missing from Nat, who is Meraud's other partner. Meraud is a wizard who has practiced a risky kind of magic, and is now stuck and hidden in an in between state, neither alive nor dead. The only way to find him and bring him back is for Layla and Nat, as his beloveds, to work together and follow the breadcrumbs to him. 

It's essentially an enemies-to-family story, where the relationship we see develop and deepen is between these two people who have nothing in common other than Meraud. At times Meraud feels more like a mcguffin than a character, but what Layla and Nat (and the other people in their separate lives) go through in order to bring him back is compelling enough that I didn't mind, in the end. A lovely, quick story to read with a mug of tea. 

Grade: B

Book 12: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author of this book socially. 

The first book in the Scholomance trilogy, I decided to finally read this now that it's complete, and I'm glad I waited, because boy that cliffhanger at the end of this book! 

What I knew going in was that it was a story set at a magical school, but very little else, and the start of the story really drops you right into the middle of it. There's no set up, the narrative begins most of the way through the junior year of the protagonist, and in general it feels designed to make the reader feel like they're struggling to keep up. That also matches the school itself: there are no teachers, just classes with assignments, and there are monsters who can kill you everywhere, and then graduation means running a gauntlet of the worst monsters and using your developed skills (and, crucially, the alliances you've built) to survive and make it to adulthood. It's a lot!

Our protagonist is El (short for Galadriel), whose mom is a great healer but who does not follow in her footsteps: her talent in magic is for mass destruction, essentially, and she also makes everyone else feel bad psychically. But over the course of the book, she begins to develop a core group of friends, in part because the golden boy of the school, Orion, rescues her and everyone assumes that if he bothered to do that, there must be some reason to not dismiss her for their own self-interest. I've been watching a lot of Survivor this winter, and there's a real sense of that kind of alliance-building, it's an interesting mashup of genres. 

The end of the book is extremely satisfying, and then the final line is a classic first book ??? moment, and I am very excited to dive into book two now!

Grade: A 

Book 11: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

The second book in the Thursday Murder Club series! This one just jumps right in, since we already know most of the main players, and this time the mystery has come directly to them. We get to see a lot more of Elizabeth's past, and Ron and Ibrahim's friendship (and relationship with Ron's grandson) is so lovely, and this series is just fun to read. There's just the right level of peril; I trust the author to do what needs to be done to make the story work, without being cruel just for the sake of it, but at the same time there is real suspense and real consequences. I don't really want to say much more about the story than that, but it's a sequel that builds on what was great about the first one and keeps running. 

Grade: A 

Book 10: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

It is always so nice when you start reading a book that a ton of people have recommended to you, and within the first couple of pages you're like 'oh yes.' This is the first in a series of English mystery novels set at a very nice retirement community in a small village by the sea. There's a group of four retirees who are all in the titular club together, reviewing old cold cases and files that Elizabeth brings for them to discuss, until suddenly there's a real murder in town and they have an actual current case to solve. 

Elizabeth is a delight; she clearly has a very interesting secret past that means she has all kinds of unconventional methods for investigating leads. We also follow the story through the journal entries of Joyce, who's the newest member of the club and just such a good voice for the novel. They end up working together with a young policewoman who had moved down there from London after a bad breakup, and it's very much a story that I had no idea how it was going to end until just before. 

It's not entirely a light book; while the person whose murder kicks off their whole adventure isn't someone we care about, the entire book is basically a rumination on what makes life living, and grief, and the specter of loss that is everywhere in a community like that. It really hits hard, but for me the balance is exactly what it needs to be. I am very happy that I waited long enough to read the first one that I can now immediately read the next two in the series. 

Grade: A 

Book 9: Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

Man, this book should be a homerun for me. It's a Notting Hill famous/not-famous romance between a writer and the movie star she met when she was young and is now interviewing again, and the narrative goes back and forth between the present and ten years prior, when they first met. It should be light and snappy with an intriguing chronological structure that conceals what actually transpired between the two of them all those years ago, and instead it's just exactly the wrong kind of fantasy for me. The actor is getting ready to play James Bond for the first time, and that's fraught for a variety of reasons, and it's one of those things where I just know a bit too much about the reality of this topic to lose myself in this fictionalized version of it, and meh. I picked this up because it was recommended on a podcast I listen to, and I am honestly a bit perplexed. 

Grade: C 

Book 7: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

First book club book of the year! I was very happy when this book got chosen, because I've been meaning to read something by this author and this was a great excuse for it. This book club focuses on novels that exist within the speculative fiction umbrella, and I would say that this one qualifies but is closer to literary fiction than the standard scifi genre novel. The story spans four or five centuries, starting with a remittance man in Canada just prior to WWI, then stopping off in New York right before Covid hits, and then a worldwide book tour two centuries after that. How are they all linked? Well that's what everyone is trying to figure out. 

I hadn't read anything else by this author, but I've seen the first two episodes of the miniseries based on Station Eleven, so I wasn't surprised at how much of the story is about a possible future and also pandemics and what they do to civilization. I was surprised by the writing; for some reason I went into this expecting it to be a challenging read in some way, and instead I found it delightfully crisp and engaging. I think I went in fearing that it would be all of the things I like least about literary fiction as a genre, and instead it was what I like best. It also has a ton of incidental queerness, which is something I always appreciate. I really enjoyed reading it, and individual images and characters from the story are going to stick with me for a long time. Looking forward to going back and reading her earlier novels now! 

Grade: A 

Book 6: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Man, this book. I started reading it about a week ago, and it's the sort of novel where I read the first section, about the first fifty pages or so, and I had to stop there and pause for the night because I could already tell it was going to wreck me. 

It's the story of two people from LA who became friends as children playing video games together in the eighties, and then find each other again as college students in a T station in Cambridge in the nineties, and live a life together and around each other and video games for the next twenty or so years. It's a book that has a lived-in quality of time and place; they live in Cambridge and Boston about five years before I was there, but it still has the feeling of being exactly right and I felt transported into my own memories. But the sections of the novel set in places I don't know at all well (K-Town in LA, Tokyo, a small video game company in the early 2000s) feel just as specific and devastating, and it's not a book that derives its power from the familiar references of either a location or of multiple video games. 

I read this book suspecting that it would be sadder than most of the books I choose to read are, and it is, but the sadness is earned and balanced in a way that these stories aren't often. Sam and Sadie aren't perfect characters by any stretch of the imagination; they both do and say and feel things that are deeply hurtful and pigheaded and occasionally awful and borderline unforgivable, but there's a thruline of truth and a heart to it all that makes me care about them and their lives and the games they create together. The author has such a light touch with narration - we see the story through multiple POVs, and it's always a story that's being told from a future that is waiting on the early years, but it's so beautifully done, even when where the story is going occasionally made me want to put the book done just so I could stop the next page from being true. I don't want to say more about it because I was glad to have gone in with as little knowledge as I did, but it fucked me up and made me think about art and friendship and storytelling and memory and starting over, and the last line made me spontaneously burst into tears, and if that's not a rec then I don't know what is. 

Grade: A

 

Book 23: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

After meaning to read the Rivers of London series for years, I have finally begun! Turns out it's good. 

It's very interesting what my brain retained about the series from what I had heard from others. I knew it was a detective series, essentially, about a guy named Peter (correct) who was training under an experienced detective (also correct, his superior is Thomas Nightingale). But I had forgotten that it was also a supernatural series, which made the first mention of a ghost pretty exciting, and I also went into expecting a standard white English copper character, and instead Peter Grant is biracial and from North London and quite young, all of which makes him (and the first book of the series) much more interesting than I expected. 

The book reads very much like the first in a series, setting up the world and the central figures in it, and I had been more in a traditional mystery structure mood than I realized when I started reading it and so it took me a bit to get into the rhythm of the book. But in the end I enjoyed it quite a bit, and Peter is a great character, with his at times almost Jim Butcher-level over the top lusting for every female character introduced in the book my only true complaint. It's the only element of the storytelling that felt at all dated to me, but it's worth putting up with for the rest of the narrative. 

Grade: B