Book 18: Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas by Alonso Duralde

This is more of a reference book than it is something that you typically read from cover to cover, but I got a lot out of it this December, so I wanted to include it! This book includes capsule reviews for a whole lot of Christmas movies, from the classics to the modern classics to the comedies to the "is this really a Christmas movie" entries. I can get sad after Christmas is over, even though I am a firm believer in celebrating all Twelve Days of Christmas, but reading this and thinking about which ones I may want to try out over the next year leading up to Christmas 2022 made this week a little brighter. 

Grade: B

Book 17: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

The final book club book of the year! Totally coincidentally, one of my other projects of the year has been to watch a whole bunch of John Carpenter movies for the first time, in order to listen to a podcast I enjoy. As a result, I had so much more context for everything that this book is based around, and I'm so grateful for that. 

The protagonist of this book is a 17-year-old girl named Jade, but she is very clear from the beginning that she's not a Final Girl. But she does quickly begin to believe that her town is in the middle of a slasher movie, and she should know - she's made a study of the entire genre for the past five years. She's half-Native American and lives in a small community on Indian Lake, which is quickly becoming gentrified by a number of rich people who want a lovely place to retreat to, and when bodies start appearing, Jade is convinced she alone knows what needs to happen next. 

The story is both a meta commentary on slasher films (complete with essays she's written to her English teacher throughout her high school) and a horror novel itself, with a whole lot of other stuff thrown in there for good measure. I loved Jade's voice, and while it was at times an emotionally tough read, I'm really glad I read it. 

Grade: A 

Book 16: Regeneration by Pat Barker

A book I have owned forever! I genuinely have no memory of why I decided I needed to buy this, but it has the permanently affixed used book price sticker from my college bookstore, so I have owned it for at least...twenty years. And after finally reading it, I can say: it is very good! 

This is set during World War I in Scotland, at the mental hospital where soldiers and officers are sent when their bodies are well enough to fight but their minds are not. The focus is on fictionalized portrayals of a doctor at the hospital, Dr. Rivers, Siegfried Sassoon, a poet who has been hospitalized for his pacifist views, and Wilfred Owens, a young man who experienced significant shell shock and also begins to write about it with Sassoon's encouragement, as well as a number of fictional characters. It is bracing and infuriating and also it had a really strong resonance for me today; the feeling of being stuck in something terrible and also so much larger than yourself that there's so little you can actually do about any of it is quite familiar! It's a book that I think I would have enjoyed if I had read it when I was in my early twenties, but I don't think I would have gotten the same punch from it. Or maybe I would have: that was just when the U.S. was about to invade Afghanistan, an invasion that has lasted for almost as long as I've owned this book. 

This is the first in a trilogy, and my hope is to read the second and third books at the start of 2022. Here's hoping. 

Grade: A

Book 15: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Another book club book! A huge percentage of the books I managed to read this year have been book club books, but I've also enjoyed the majority of them, so that's great. And this one was definitely worth reading for any reason. 

This book starts out with a young girl in a family with her father and older brother, trying to survive a famine in a setting reminiscent of 14th century China. When her father and brother both die, she assumes her brother's name (Zhu Chongba) and even more importantly, his foretold destiny. She then goes to a monastery, causes some trouble and makes a friend, and eventually finds herself in the center of, well, everything. 

There's also one of the most fucked up king and lionheart relationships I've ever read, a delightful mistrusted brother figure whose skills aren't valued, and a queer marriage that is somehow straight, lesbian, trans and none of the above, all at once. The political machinations are intense, and it's a harsh world and story that isn't in any way grimdark. It ends at a firm conclusion, but the sequel is going to break apart everything again, and I can't wait. 

Grade: A 

Book 14: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

 A book club book! And one which surprised me a lot, largely in how much I loved it.

This is the second book by Becky Chambers that I've read; the first one was fine, but didn't do much for me personally, and I had sort of expected that her work would remain in the category of "fiction that many people I know love, but that is not for me for whatever reason." But part of what's so nice about being in a book club is that sometimes I get nudged into giving an author or genre or whatever another chance, and in this case I could not be more delighted to have experienced this. 

This is a novella about a monk, who decides that the life they're living no longer works for them, and so they needs to make Big Changes and go out into the world. Do they have a plan? No. Do things immediately work out for them? No. Do they discover a previously unknown talent that makes it all worth it? No. But they get to live, and have an adventure, and go on a completely senseless roadtrip, and along the way they find what makes it worth it. 

The worldbuilding is wonderful, the relationships at the core of the story are so incredibly satisfying, and it's a story about reaching and searching that doesn't arrive at answers that are too easy, but it also doesn't punt on giving us answers the text implicitly promised us. I loved it and want to read it again immediately. 

Grade: A 

Book 13: Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

 If you are looking for a lovely queer women historical novella, with a nice bit of mystery and magical realism, all set within San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1940s, then boy do I have a book for you. 

The novella starts out with a framing story that it took me a little bit to get into, but once I realized it was only the present day prologue to the main events which took place in the past, I sank into it. And by the end I loved it even more. It's a story about the community of queer people in San Francisco, and the kinds of lives they were able to create to exist as themselves, and it's also about magic, both metaphorical and literal. I don't really want to give away more of the plot than that because of how it slips through your fingers, but it's a love story and it's about taking big chances in order to be how you want to be, and I loved it. 

Grade: A

Book 12: One Life by Megan Rapinoe

 Well! I can't exactly say why I didn't read a single book for over four months this year, but that's what happened. I finally started to get a bit back into reading in August, but I'm still trying to re-establish a habit. Fingers crossed. 

I did enjoy this quite a bit - it's a fairly classic ghost-written autobiography about a public figure I know a lot about, but there was a lot of background fleshing out of various public events that I hadn't known about. And I also just appreciated both Rapinoe laying out her philosophy on public service and being an activist and what it required of her, and fun confirmation of various pieces of soccer gossip that I always suspected (she and Abby Wambach were totally dating!) but had never known for sure. There's not much more to it than that, at least not for someone who's been following her career and personal celebrity for a decade at this point, but it was an enjoyable read. It definitely made me appreciate more her experience between the 2016 Olympics and the 2019 World Cup, and how much she risked and how easily it could have all gone very differently. 

Grade: B