#book roundup | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

meta-squash · 4 months

Text

Squash's Book Roundup 2023

Last year I read 67 books. This year my goal was 70, but I very quickly passed that, so in total I read 92 books this year. Honestly I have no idea how I did it, it just sort of happened. My other goal was to read an equal amount of fiction and nonfiction this year (usually fiction dominates), and I was successful in that as well. Another goal which I didn’t have at the outset but which kind of organically happened after the first month or so of reading was that I wanted to read mostly strange/experimental/transgressive/unusual fiction. My nonfiction choices were just whatever looked interesting or cool, but I also organically developed a goal of reading a wider spread of subjects/genres of nonfiction. A lot of the books I read this year were books I’d never heard of, but stumbled across at work. Also, finally more than 1/3 of what I read was published in the 21st century.

I’ll do superlatives and commentary at the end, so here is what I read in 2023:

-The Commitments by Roddy Doyle -A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Leila Guerriero -The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell -Uzumaki by Junji Ito -Chroma by Derek Jarman -The Emerald Mile: The epic story of the fastest ride in history through the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko -Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks -The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington -Sacred Sex: Erotic writings from the religions of the world by Robert Bates -The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics And The Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown -A Spy In The House Of Love by Anais Nin -The Sober Truth: Debunking the bad science behind 12-step programs and the rehab industry by Lance Dodes -The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima -The Aliens by Annie Baker -The Criminal Child And Other Essays by Jean Genet -Aimee and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 by Erica Fischer -The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov -The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere -Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont -Narrow Rooms by James Purdy -At Your Own Risk by Derek Jarman -Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm -Countdown: A Subterranean Magazine #3 by Underground Press Syndicate Collective -Fabulosa! The story of Britain's secret gay language by Paul Baker -The Golden Spruce: A true story of myth, madness and greed by John Vaillant -Querelle de Roberval by Kevin Lambert -Fire The Bastards! by Jack Green -Closer by Dennis Cooper -The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe -Opium: A Diary Of His Cure by Jean Cocteau -Worker-Student Action Committees France May '68 by Fredy Perlman and R. Gregoire -Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher -The Sound Of Waves by Yukio Mishima -One Day In My Life by Bobby Sands -Corydon by Andre Gide -Noopiming by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson -Man Alive: A true story of violence, forgiveness and becoming a man by Thomas Page McBee -The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko -Damage by Josephine Hart -Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai -The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector -The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock n Roll by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press -The Traffic Power Structure by planka.nu -Bird Man: The many faces of Robert Straud by Jolene Babyak -Seven Dada Manifestos by Tristan Tzara

-The Journalist by Harry Mathews -Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber -Moscow To The End Of The Line by Venedikt Erofeev -Morvern Callar by Alan Warner -The Poetics Of Space by Gaston Bachelard -A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White -The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee -Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson -Notes From The Sick Room by Steve Finbow -Artaud The Momo by Antonin Artaud -Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle -Recollections Of A Part-Time Lady by Minette -trans girl suicide museum by Hannah Baer -The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars -Sweet Days Of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy -Breath: The new science of a lost art by James Nestor -What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund -The Cardiff Tapes (1972) by Garth Evans -The Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe -Mad Like Artaud by Sylvere Lotringer -The Story Of The Eye by Georges Bataille -Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante -Blood And Guts In High School by Kathy Acker -Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton -Splendid's by Jean Genet -VAS: An Opera In Flatland by Steve Tomasula -Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want To Come: One introvert's year of saying yes by Jessica Pan -Whores For Gloria by William T. Vollmann -The Notebooks by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Walsh (editor) -L'Astragale by Albertine Sarrazin -The Decay Of Lying and other essays by Oscar Wilde -The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot -Open Throat by Henry Hoke -Prisoner Of Love by Jean Genet -The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia -The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx -My Friend Anna: The true story of a fake heiress by Rachel DeLoache Williams -Mammother by Zachary Schomburg -Building The Commune: Radical democracy in Venezuela by George Cicarello-Maher -Blackouts by Justin Torres -Cheapjack by Philip Allingham -Near To The Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector -The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander -Skye Papers by Jamika Ajalon -Exercises In Style by Raymon Queneau -Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein -The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

~Some number factoids~ I read 46 fiction and 46 nonfiction. One book, The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia, is fictionalized/embellished autobiography, so it could go half in each category if we wanted to do that, but I put it in the fiction category. I tried to read as large a variety of nonfiction subjects/genres as I could. A lot of the nonfiction I read has overlapping subjects, so I’ve chosen to sort by the one that seems the most overarching. By subject, I read: 5 art history/criticism, 5 biographies, 1 black studies, 1 drug memoir, 2 essay collections, 2 history, 2 Latin American studies, 4 literary criticism, 1 music history, 2 mythology/religion, 1 nature, 4 political science, 2 psychology, 5 queer studies, 2 science, 1 sociology, 1 travel, 2 true crime, 3 urban planning. I also read more queer books in general (fiction and nonfiction) than I have in years, coming in at 20 books.

The rest of my commentary and thoughts under a cut because it's fairly long

Here’s a photo of all the books I read that I own a physical copy of (minus Closer by Dennis Cooper which a friend is borrowing):

~Superlatives and Thoughts~

I read so many books this year I’m going to do a runner-up for each superlative category.

Favorite book: This is such a hard question this year. I think I gave out more five-star ratings on Goodreads this year than I ever have before. The books that got 5 stars from me this year were A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Leila Guerriero, Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko, The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere, The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector, trans girl suicide museum by Hannah Baer, The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia, Mammother by Zachary Schomburg, and Blackouts by Justin Torres. But I think my favorite book of the year was The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia. It is an embellished, fictionalized biography of the author’s life, chronicling a breakup that occurred just before she began her transition, and then a variety of emotional events afterward and her renewal of a connection with that person after a number of years had passed. The writing style is beautiful, extremely decadent, and sits in a sort of venn diagram of poetry, theory, fantasy and biography. My coworker who recommended this book to me said no one she’d recommended it to had finished it because they found it so weird. I read the first 14 pages very slowly because I didn’t exactly know what the book was doing, but I quickly fell completely in love with the imagery and the formatting style and the literary and religious references that have been worked into the book both as touchstones for biography and as vehicles for fantasy. There is a video I remember first seeing years ago, in which a beautiful pinkish corn snake slithers along a hoop that is part of a hanging mobile made of driftwood and macrame and white beads and prism crystals. This was the image that was in the back of my head the entire time I was reading The Fifth Wound, because it matched the decadence and the strangeness and the crystalline beauty of the language and visuals in the book. It is a pretty intense book, absolutely packed with images and emotion and ideas and preserved vignettes where reality and fantasy and theory overlap. It’s one of those books that’s hard to describe because it’s so full. It’s dense not in that the words or ideas are hard to understand, but in that it’s overflowing with imagery and feelings, and it feels like an overflowing treasure chest. Runner-up:The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere. However, this book wins for a different superlative, so I’ve written more about it there.

Least favorite book: Querelle de Roberval by Kevin Lambert. I wrote a whole long review of it. In summary, Lambert’s book takes its name from Querelle de Brest, a novel by Jean Genet, and is apparently meant to be an homage to Genet’s work. Unfortunately, Lambert seems to misunderstand or ignore all the important aspects of Genet’s work that make it so compelling, and instead twists certain motifs Genet uses as symbols of love or transcendence into meaningless or negative connotations. He also attempts to use Genet’s mechanic of inserting the author into the narrative and allowing the author to have questionable or conflicting morals in order to emphasize certain aspects of the characters or narrative, except he does so too late in the game and ends up just completely undermining everything he writes. This book made me feel insulted on behalf of Jean Genet and all the philosophical thought he put into his work. Runner-up: What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund. This graphic designer claims that when people read they don’t actually imagine what characters look like and can’t conjure up an image in their head when asked something like “What does Jane Eyre look like to you?” Unfortunately, there’s nothing scientific in the book to back this up and it’s mostly “I” statements, so it’s more like “What Peter Mendelsund Sees (Or Doesn’t See) When He Reads”. It’s written in what seems to be an attempt to mimic Marshall McLuhan’s style in The Medium Is The Massage, but it isn’t done very well. I spent most of my time reading this book thinking This does not reflect my experience when I read novels so I think really it’s just a bad book written by someone who maybe has some level of aphantasia or maybe is a visual but not literary person, and who assumes everyone else experiences the same thing when they read. (Another runner-up would be The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but I think that’s a given because it’s an awful piece of revisionist, racist trash, so I won’t write a whole thing about it. I can if someone wants me to.)

Most surprising/unexpected book: The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere. This book absolutely wins for most surprising. However, I don’t want to say too much about it because the biggest surprise is the end. It was the most shocking, most unexpected and bizarre endings to a novel I’ve read in a long time, and I absolutely loved it. It was weird from the start and it just kept getting weirder. The unnamed narrator decides, as a joke, to shave off the moustache he’s had for his entire adult life. When his wife doesn’t react, he assumes that she’s escalating their already-established tradition of little pranks between each other. But then their mutual friends say nothing about the change, and neither do his coworkers, and he starts spiral into confusion and paranoia. I don’t want to spoil anything else because this book absolutely blew me away with its weirdness and its existential dread and anyone who likes weird books should read it. Runner-up: Morvern Callar by Alan Warner. I don’t even know what compelled me to open this book at work, but I’m glad I did. The book opens on Christmas, where the main character, Morvern, discovers her boyfriend dead by suicide on the kitchen floor of their flat. Instead of calling the police or her family, she takes a shower, gets her things and leaves for work. Her narrative style is strange, simultaneously very detached and extremely emotional, but emotional in an abstract way, in which descriptions and words come out stilted or strangely constructed. The book becomes a narrative of Morvern’s attempts to find solitude and happiness, from the wilderness of Scotland to late night raves and beaches in an unnamed Mediterranean city. The entire book is scaffolded by a built-in playlist. Morvern’s narrative is punctuated throughout by accounts of exactly what she’s listening to on her Walkman. The narrative style and the playlist and the bizarre behavior of the main character were not at all what I was expecting when I opened the book, but I read the entire book in about 3 hours and I was captivated the whole time. If you like the Trainspotting series of books, I would recommend this one for sure.

Most fun book: The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko. This book was amazing. It was like reading an adventure novel and a thriller and a book on conservationism all wrapped into one and it was clearly very passionately written and it was a blast. I picked it up because I was pricing it at work and I read the captions on one of the photo inserts, which intrigued me, so I read the first page, and then I couldn’t stop. The two main narratives in the book are the history of the Grand Canyon (more specifically the damming of the Colorado River) and the story of a Grand Canyon river guide called Kenton Grua, who decided with two of his river guide friends to break the world record for fastest boat ride down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The book is thoroughly researched, and reaches back to the first written record of the canyon, then charts the history of the canyon and the river up to 1983 when Grua made his attempt to race down the river, and then the aftermath and what has happened to everyone in the years since. All of the historical figures as well as the “current” figures of 1983 come to life, and are passionately portrayed. It’s a genuine adventure of a book, and I highly recommend it. Runner-up: Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton. It asks “What if Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was actually a trans woman?” Actually, that’s not quite it. It asks “What if a trans woman living in poverty in southwest America believed to an almost spiritual level that Brian Wilson was a trans woman?” The main character and narrator, Gala, is convinced that the lead singer of her favorite band, the Get Happies, (a fictional but fairly obvious parallel to the Beach Boys) is a trans woman. Half the book is her writing out her version of the singer’s life history, and the other half is her life working at a hostel in Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, where she meets a woman who forces her out of her comfort zone and encourages her to face certain aspects of her self and identity and her connection with others. It’s a weird novel, and definitely not for everyone, but it’s fun. I was reading it on the train home and I was so into it that I missed my stop and had to get off at the next station and wait 20 minutes for the train going back the other way.

Book that taught me the most: Breath: The new science of a lost art by James Nestor. In it, Nestor explores why humans as a general population are so bad at breathing properly. He interviews scientists and alternative/traditional health experts, archaeologists, historians and religious scholars. He uses himself as a guinea pig to experiment with different breathing techniques from ancient meditation styles to essentially overdosing on oxygen in a lab-controlled environment to literally plugging his nose shut to only mouth-breathe for two weeks (and then vice-versa with nose breathing). It was interesting to see a bunch of different theories a laid out together regarding what kind of breathing is best, as well as various theories on the history of human physiology and why breathing is hard. Some of it is scientific, some pseudoscience, some just ancient meditation techniques, but he takes a crack at them all. What was kind of cool is that he tries every theory and experiment with equal enthusiasm and doesn’t really seem to favor any one method. Since he’s experimenting on himself, a lot of it is about the effects the experiments had on him specifically and his experiences with different types of breathing. His major emphasis/takeaway is that focusing on breathing and learning to change the ways in which we breathe will be beneficial in the long run (and that we should all breath through our noses more). While I don’t think changing how you breathe is a cure-all (some of the pseudoscience he looks at in this book claims so) I certainly agree that learning how to breath better is a positive goal. Runner-up: The Sober Truth by Lance Dodes. I say runner-up because a lot of the content of the book is things that I had sort of vague assumptions about based on my knowledge of addiction and AA and mental illness in general. But Dodes put into words and illustrated with numbers and anecdotes and case studies what I just kind of had a vague feeling about. It was cool to see AA so thoroughly debunked by an actual psychiatrist and in such a methodical way, since my skepticism about it has mostly been based on the experiences of people I know in real life, anecdotes I’ve read online, or musicians/writers/etc I’m a fan of that went through it and were negatively affected.

Most interesting/thought provoking book: Mammother by Zachary Schomburg. The biggest reason this book was so interesting is because the little world in which it exists is so strange and yet so utterly complete. In a town called Pie Time (where birds don’t exist and the main form of work is at the beer-and-cigarettes factory) a young boy called Mano who has been living his childhood as a girl decides that he is now a man and that it’s time for him to grow up. As this happens, the town is struck by an affliction called God’s Finger. People die seemingly out of nowhere, from a hole in their chest, and some object comes out of the hole. Mano collects the things that come out of these holes, and literally holds them in order to love them, but the more he collects, the bigger he becomes as he adds objects to his body. A capitalist business called XO shows up, trying to convince the people of Pie Time that they can protect themselves from God’s Finger with a number of enterprises, and starts to slowly take over the town. But Mano doesn’t believe death is something that should be run from. This book is so pretty, and the symbolism/metaphors, even when obvious, feel as though they belong organically in the world. A quote on the back of the book says it is “as nearly complete a world as can be”, and I think that’s a very accurate description. The story is interesting, the characters are compelling, and the magical realist world in which the story exists is fascinating. Runner up: trans girl suicide museum by Hannah Baer. This is a series of essays taken (for the most part) from Baer’s blog posts. They span a chunk of time in which she writes her thoughts and musings on her experience transition and transgender existence in general. It is mostly a series of pieces reflecting on “early” stages of transition. But I thought it was really cool to see an intellectual and somewhat philosophical take on transition, written by someone who has only been publicly out for a few years, and therefore is looking at certain experiences with a fresh gaze. As the title suggests, a lot of the book is a bit sad, but it’s not all doom and gloom. A lot of the emphasis is on the important of community when it comes to the experience of starting to transition and the first few years, and the importance of community on the trans experience in general. I really liked reading Hannah Baer’s thoughts as a queer intellectual who was writing about this stuff as she experienced it (or not too long after) rather than writing about the experience of early transition years and years down the line. It meant the writing was very sharp and the emotion was clear and not clouded by nostalgia.

Other thoughts/commentary on books I don’t have superlatives for:

I’m glad my first (full) book read in 2023 was A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Leila Guierrero. It’s a small, compact gem of a book that follows the winner of an Argentinian dance competition. The Malambo is a traditional dance, and the competition is very fierce, and once someone wins, they can never compete again. The author follows the runner-up of the previous year, who has come to compete again. It paints a vivid picture of the history of the dance, the culture of the competition, and the character of the dancer the author has chosen to follow. It’s very narrowly focused, which makes it really compelling.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington could have easily won for most fun or most interesting book. Carrington was a surrealist writer and painter (and was in a relationship with Max Ernst until she was institutionalized and he was deported by the Nazis). In The Hearing Trumpet, an elderly woman called Marian is forced by her family to go live in an old ladies’ home. The first strange thing about the place is that all of the little cabins each woman lives in is shaped like some odd object, like an iron, or ice cream, or a rabbit. The other old women at the institution are a mixed bag, and the warden of the place is hostile. Marian starts to suspect that there are secrets, and even witchcraft involved, and she and a few of the other ladies start to try and unravel the occult mysteries hidden in the grounds of the home. The whole book is fun and strange, and the ending is an extremely entertaining display of feminist occult surrealism.

Sacred Sex: Erotica writings from the religions of the world by Robert Bates was a book I had to read for research for my debunking of Withdrawn Traces. It was really very interesting, but it was also hilarious to read because maybe 5% of any of the texts included were actually erotic. It should have been called “romantic writings from the religions of the world” because so little of the writing had anything to do with sex, even in a more metaphorical sense.

Every time I read Yukio Mishima I’m reminded how much I love his style. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea almost usurped The Temple of the Golden Pavilion as my favorite Mishima novel. I’m fascinated with the way that Mishima uses his characters to explore the circumstance of having very intense feelings or reactions towards something and simultaneously wanting to experience that, while also wanting to have complete control and not feel them at all. There’s a scene in this novel where Noboru and his friends brutally kill and dissect a cat; it’s an intense and vividly rendered scene, made all the more intense by Noboru desperately conflicted between feeling affected by the killing and wanting to force himself to feel nothing. The amazing subtle theme running through the book is the difference between Noboru’s intense emotions and his desire/struggle to control them and subdue them versus Ryuji’s more subtle emotion that grows through the book despite his natural reserve. I love endings like the one in this book, where it “cuts to black” and you don’t actually see the final act, it’s simply implied.

In 2016 or 2017, I ran lights for a showcase for the drama department at UPS (I can’t remember now what it was) that included a bunch of scenes from various plays. I remember a segment from Hir by Taylor Mac, and a scene from The Aliens by Annie Baker. In the scene that I saw, one of the characters describes how when he was a boy, he couldn’t stop saying the word ladder, and the monologue culminates in a full paragraph that is just the word “ladder.” I can’t remember who was acting in the one that I saw at UPS, but that monologue blew me away, the way that one word repeated 127 conveyed so much. This year a collection of Annie Baker’s plays came in at work so I sat down and read the whole play and it was just incredible. I’d love to see the full play live, it’s absolutely captivating.

Narrow Rooms by James Purdy was a total diamond in the rough. It takes place in Appalachia, in perhaps the 1950s although it’s somewhat hard to tell. It follows the strange gay entanglement between four adult men in their 20s, who have known each other all their lives. It traces threads of bizarre codependency, and the lines crossed between love and hate. The main character, Sidney, has just returned home after serving a sentence for manslaughter. On his return, he finds that an old lover has been rendered disabled in an accident, and that an old school rival/object of obsession has been waiting for him. This rival, nicknamed “The Renderer” because of an old family occupation, has been watching Sidney all their lives. Both of them hate the other, but know that they’re destined to meet in some way. Caught in the middle of their strange relationship are Gareth, Sidney’s now-disabled former lover, and Brian, a young man who thinks he’s in love with The Renderer. The writing style took me some time to get used to, as it is written as though by someone who has taught themselves, or has only had basic classes on fiction writing. But the plot itself is so strange and the characters are so stilted in their own internality that it actually fits really well. Like The Mustache, this book had one of the strangest, most intensely visceral and shocking endings I’ve read in a while. It was also “one that got away.” I read it at work, then put it on my staff picks shelf, and only realized after someone else bought it that I should have kept it for myself.

The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector blew my mind. I really don’t want to spoil any of it, but I highly encourage anyone who hasn’t read it to do. The build in tension is perfect and last 30 pages are just incredible. Lispector’s style is so unique and so beautiful and tosses out huge existential questions like it’s nothing, and I love her work so much.

Moscow To The End Of The Line by Venedikt Erofeev was another really unexpected book. It’s extremely Russian (obviously) and really fun until suddenly it isn’t. The main character, a drunkard, gets on a train from Moscow to Petushki, the town at the end of the line (hence the title), in order to see his lover. On the way, he befriends the other people in his train car and they all steadily get drunker and drunker, until he falls asleep and misses his stop. Very Russian, somewhat strange, and I was surprised that it was written in the late 60s and not the 30s.

Dr. Rat by William Kotzwinkle was what I expected. Weird in a goofy way, a bit silly even when it’s serious, and rather heavy-handed satire. The titular Dr Rat is a rat who has spent his whole life in a laboratory and has gone insane. The other animals who are being tested on want to escape, but he’s convinced that all the testing is for the good of science and wants to thwart their rebellion. Unfortunately, all the other animals who are victims of human cruelty/callousness/invasion/deforestation/etc around the world are also planning to rebel, connection with each other through a sort of psychic television network. It’s a very heavy-handed environmentalist/anti-animal cruelty metaphor and general societal satire, but it’s silly and fun too.

Confessions Of A Part-Time Lady by Minette is a self-published, nearly impossible to find book that came into my work. It’s self-printed and bound, and was published in the 70s. It is the autobiographical narrative of a trans woman who did drag and burlesque and theatre work all across the midwest, as well as New York and San Francisco, from the 1930s up to the late 60s. It was originally a series of interviews by the two editors, who published it in narrative form, and it includes photos from Minette’s personal collection. It’s an amazing story, and a glimpse into a really unique time period of gender performance and queer life. She even mentions Sylvia Rivera, specifically when talking about gay activism. She talks about how the original group of the Gay Liberation Front was an eclectic mix of all sorts of people of all sexualities and genders and expressions. Then when the Gay Activists Alliance “took over”, they started pushing out people who were queer in a more transgressive or unusual way and there was more encouragement on being more heteronormative. She mentions Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, saying “I remember Sylvia Rivera who founded STAR – Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. She was always trying to say things – the same kinds of things Marsha P Johnson says in a sweeter way – and they treated her like garbage. If that’s what ‘order’ is, haven’t we had enough?”

Whores For Gloria by William T Vollmann was exactly as amazing as I thought it would be. I love Vollmann’s style, because you can tell that even though the characters he’s writing about are characters, they’re absolutely based on people that he met or saw or spoke to in real life. The main character, Jimmy, is searching for his former lover, Gloria, who has either died or left him (it is unclear for most of the novel). He begins to use tokens bought from sex workers (hair, clothes, etc) to attempt to conjure her into reality, and when that doesn’t work, he pays them to tell him stories from their lives, and through their lives he tries to conjure Gloria. This novel’s ending had extremely similar vibes to the ending of Moscow To The End Of The Line.

Prisoner Of Love by Jean Genet was a lot to take in. It was weird reading it at this moment in time, and completely unplanned. It’s just that I have only a few more books to read before I’ve made my way through all Genet’s works that have been translated into English, and it was next on the list. Most of the book focuses on Genet’s time spent in Palestine in the 70s and his short return in the 80s. He also discusses the time he spent with the Black Panthers in the US, although it’s not the main subject of the book. Viewing Palestine from the point of view of Genet’s weird philosophical and moral worldview was really interesting, because what he chooses to spend time looking at or talking about is probably not what most would focus on, and because even his most political discussions are tinged with the uniquely Genet-style spirituality (if you can call it that? I don’t know what to call it) that is so much the exact opposite of objective. It’s definitely not a book about Palestine I would recommend reading without also having a grasp of Genet’s style of looking at the world and his various obsessions and preoccupations, because they really do inform a lot of his commentary. It was also written 15 years after his first trip to Palestine, partly from memory and partly from journal entries/notes, which gives it a sort of weirdly dreamlike quality much like his novels.

Blackouts by Justin Torres was so amazing! It blends real life and fiction together so well that I didn’t even realize that most of the people he references in the novel are real historical figures until he mentioned Ben Reitman, who I recognized as the Chicago King Of The Hobos and Emma Goldman’s lover. The book follows an unnamed narrator who has come to a hotel or apartment in the southwest in order to care for a dying elderly man called Juan Gay. Juan has a book called Sex Variants, a study of homosexuality from the 1940s which has been censored and blacked out. Back and forth, the narrator and Juan trade stories. The narrator tells his life story up until the present, including his first meeting with Juan in a mental hospital as a teenager. In turn, Juan tells the story of the Sex Variants book and its creator, Jan Gay (Ben Reitman’s real life daughter). The book explores the reliability of narrative, the power of collecting and documenting life stories, and of removing or changing things in order to create new or different narratives.

Again, Clarice Lispector rocking my world! Generally I can read a 200-ish page novel in somewhere between 2 and 4 hours depending on the content/writing style. Near To The Wild Heart took me 9 hours to read because I kept wanting to stop and reread entire paragraphs because they were so interesting or pretty or philosophical. The story focuses on Joana, whose strange way of looking at the world and going through life makes everyone sort of wary of her. This book is so layered I don’t really know how to describe it. So much of it is philosophical or existential musings through the vehicle of Joana. Unsurprisingly, it’s a beautiful book and I highly recommend it.

I’m just going to copy/paste my Goodreads review for Skye Papers by Jamika Ajalon: This book had so much potential that just…fell short. I could tell that it was written for an American audience but the way the reader/Skye is “taught” certain British terms and/or slang felt a bit patronizing. The characters were fleshed out and interesting and I liked them a lot but the plot crumbled quickly in the last half of the book Things sped up to a degree that felt strange and unnatural, the book’s pacing was inconsistent throughout. Perhaps that was deliberate considering the reveal at the climax, but if it was, it should have been utilized better. If the inconsistent pacing wasn’t deliberate, then it just made the book feel strange to read. There were moments were I felt like there should have been more fleshing out of certain character relationships. Even with the reveal at the end and the explanation of Pieces’ erratic/avoidant behavior, I wish there had been more fleshing out of the relationship or friendship between her and Skye at the beginning, when Skye first arrives in London. Characters who seemed cool/interesting got glossed over and instead there was a lot more dwelling on Skye walking around or busking or just hanging out. I could have gone without the last 30 or so pages after the big reveal, where Skye went back through everything that happened with the knowledge she (and the reader) had gained. It dragged on and on and at that point I felt like the whole story was so contrived that I just wasn’t interested anymore. A friend who read this book before I did said she thought it was an experimental novel that just hadn’t gone far enough, and I completely agree with her. I think if the style with the film script interludes went further, into printed visuals or more weirdness with the interludes, more experimental style with the main story, or something, it would have been really good. It just didn’t push hard enough.

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson was a fun little true crime novel about a young flautist who broke into a small English natural history museum in 2009 and stole hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of preserved rare bird skins dating back to the 19th century. He was a salmon fly-tying enthusiast and prodigy, and old Victorian fly designs used feathers of rare birds. The book first goes through the heist and the judicial proceedings, then examines the niche culture of Victorian fly-tying enthusiasts and obsessives, and then chronicles the author’s attempts to track down some of the missing birds. It was a quick, easy read, but fun and an unusual subject and I quite enjoyed it.

In 2024 I don’t plan on trying to surpass or even reach this year’s number. I’m going to start off the year reading The Recognitions by William Gaddis, then I’m going to re-read a number of books that I come across at work or in conversation and think Huh, I should reread that one of these days. So far, the books I am currently planning to reread: Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, The People Of Paper by Salvador Plascencia, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere, McGlue by Otessa Moshfegh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neil, Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell, and Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

#reading list #book list #book roundup #reading list year in review #books #squash rambles #reading year in review #book list roundup

6 notes · View notes

goldrushreads · 2 months

Text

My Favorite Books of 2023

It's been 2 months since 2023, but here are my favorite books of 2023. To be clear, these are the books I read in 2023, not books that were published in 2023. And the books are (in no particular order):

The Celebrants, by Seteven Rowley

Anyone who knows me knows how I’ve been obsessed with the idea of death. The last book by Steven Rowley that I read was The Guncle, and I loved how he tackled the idea of a loved one dying with this bittersweet angle - like the heart expands to make room for the grief in addition to all the love you have for this person. The Celebrants had the exact same effect on me.

It’s a story about six friends who met in college and made a pact- to throw each other living funerals so that they don’t doubt how much value they each held in the world. I will think about this book (like I think about The Guncle) for a very long time.

Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett

This was my very first Ann Patchett (I know!) and I just know I’ll be reading so many more books from her. It’s about young love and the fresh and gutting memory of it. It’s about parenthood and how you will never truly know about your parents. It’s about (the complexities of?) family and of relationships that you are bound by whether it be via blood or via memory. Meryl Streep needs to do more audiobooks, that's for sure!

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner

To call it a memoir about losing your mother is a disservice to the expansiveness of this book. I would call it a memoir about belonging, independence, and food. It’s also about the complicated feelings you have with your mother, especially when the mother’s worldview is very different from yours. It’s about how particular food brings out particular emotions and memories. It’s about hardship and reconciliation at a breakneck speed. What I’ll also say is: everyone was right about this book and it is truly what you should pick up if you want a good snotty cry. I should most definitely not have read it at the tail-end of my trip home. I think I’ll be haunted by the raw emotionality of this book for a long time.

Paris: The Memoir, by Paris Hilton

I don’t remember the early 2000s, and after reading this harrowing book, I am so glad I don’t remember. I also don’t remember Paris Hilton from that time and don’t know what she’s up to at any time. This is probably why I assumed it would be a pink frilly fun book, but it devastated me (girlhood!). There is a lot that needs to be said about how we treat girls and young women in our society, the expectations we have from them, and the sharpness of the steel of the knife we use to cut them open with. I thought this book is important and should be read by anyone who is fascinated by celebrity culture.

All the Lovers in the Night, by Meiko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

Meiko Kawakami’s books always have a way to uncannily linger long after I’ve finished reading them. All the Lovers… was no different. It is a poignant narrative written in masterful prose about a copywriter in her mid-thirties living in a city where it’s difficult to form new relationships. It’s a book about the unsettling comfort of loneliness, and about feeling like your life is slipping away from you so fast that you don’t recognize the person who is staring back at you in the mirror. But then again, to me, Kawakami has always painted a vivid picture of the yearning for connection and solitude and striving and failing to find the delicate balance between the two.

Pyre, by Perumal Murugan (translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan)

This is a sobering novel about the harsh realities of intercaste marriages and how marriages are somehow everyone’s business in India, and how everyone somehow has an opinion about the people within them. Everyone at Kumaresan’s family and village have something biting to say about Kumaresan and Saroja’s marriage. You always think that the annoying little remarks and the constant nagging and scornful quips are trivial, but they simmer until they burn into a pyre. And that’s where Perumal Murugan’s excellent writing (and Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s seemingly-effortless translation) shines.

Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, by Aravind Jayan

This is a novel about the aftermath of an illegally-shot video of Sreenath and his girlfriend Anita posted on an adult website(s) and going viral. Where do you (and your families and friends) go from there?

I’ll be quite honest, I initially did not think of this book as one of my absolute favorites from the year. But it seeped in slowly- I periodically kept thinking about the book. The author has somehow perfectly captured the sense of annoyance you feel when dealing with an arrogant young adult who thinks they know everything, the always-present tangible tension between siblings, and the absolutely wretched and unsympathetic allure of other people’s mistakes and misfortunes.

Ducks, by Kate Beaton

I first read Ducks because I loved Kate Beaton’s hilarious comics about Jane Austen. I don’t think that prepared me, because Ducks is about Alberta’s oil rush. I don’t know how to talk about a graphic novel about what seemed to me the most boring thing on earth- working in your twenties in an oil sand. And yet, this one is gripping in a very bleak way. Beaton is one of the very few women in a freezing-cold and isolated camp. She has just graduated from college with an arts degree and massive debt. She comes from an area where people have to leave to other places in order to make a living. I don’t know how anyone can write about this experience, let alone draw and create a graphic memoir.

Uncanny Valley, by Anna Weiner

At the height of the tech boom, Anna Weiner leaves a job in publishing for one in a big-data start-up. The bubble seems surreal and extravagant and abundant at first and from a distance. And then comes disillusionment. I’ll tell you it had me sat! I am always so fascinated by culture and tech, and this one scratched all my itches about a non-tech role in a tech space. As someone who grew up surrounded by tech people who love behaving like just studying engineering in some unknown college makes them god’s gift to earth, this book just felt oh-so-familiar.

Palo Alto, by Malcom Harris

I just wanted a light book about California, but this was just the opposite of it, in an excellent way. (I am entirely at fault here; who reads the subtitle “A History of California, Capitalism, and the World” and thinks, oh yeah, light reading?). I came out enraged at everything and everyone. I wish there were more history books with this level of analysis and expertly-crafted narrative, because it was so gripping. I was not bored once, even though it was a 720-page tome. Riveting stuff.

Shubeik Lubeik, by Deena Mohamed

Shubeik Lubeik is a gorgeous graphic novel with magical elements woven so effortlessly and seamlessly that I know I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about this book for a long time. In the novel’s world, wishes (like wishes from a genie in the bottle) are real. However, these wishes are monetized and commodified as a part of a quintillion-dollar industry. What happens when wishes can be licensed by world governments, have a frustrating bureaucratic process, and mirror the all-too-familiar prejudices ingrained in our society? What if you could pool your resources to buy a wish to use literal dragons as a war weapon? Shubeik Lubeik is exasperating and heartwarming- exactly what it sets out to be.

Heartstopper: Volume 5, by Alice Oseman

What do I even say about Heartstopper that hasn’t been said a million times? I love this universe so much and I am so upset that it ends soon. What do you mean Heartstopper cannot go on and on indefinitely?! These books have been filling me with so much tenderness and joy since I’ve been seeing snippets of them back in the day. My heart is always brimming when I am reading these books- I want these characters to be so happy forever. The plotline in this book hit me a bit too hard that I wanted to sob, but Alice Oseman being Alice Oseman dealt with these themes with so much consideration and affection that I physically could not sob. Instead, I felt calm and affirmed. And that is a typical Heartbreaker reading experience for you.

Shout out to my local public library and the Libby app for making it available to me the day it was published! Lifesavers! I was in anguish thinking I’d have to wait the estimated 10 weeks!

#book review #book reccs #book recommendations #long reads #reading #queer books #bookblr #book haul #libby app #books #book roundup #tbr list #grab bag #12 books #book club #gold rush reads

5 notes · View notes

theawkwardterrier · 4 months

Text

2023 book roundup

According to my Storygraph, last year I read (new books only, not counting rereads) 575 books total, including:

152 adult books

132 young adult books

150 middle grade books

25 easy readers/early chapter books

132 picture books

This is not as many books as I've read in the past, but I'm proud of several different aspects of my reading this year. First, I upped my engagement with graphic novels and easy readers, which has been something I've been trying to prioritize for a while. Second, I tried to pay less attention in general to stats and counts and how I was comparing to past versions of myself. Third, I kept up with notable books for younger readers but also started to focus more on my own interests like romance rather than feeling like I had to make it all about professional reading. Fourth, I explored new areas for myself like more nonfiction, and tried to be proactive about getting myself out of reading slumps (and also tried to do the same when the reading slump turned out to be depression).

I know that this next year is going to be different - I'm starting a new job soon that is going to necessitate some changes to my lifestyle, and which will almost certainly mean that I won't have as much time for reading or as much time at work to take advantage of audiobooks - but I'm hoping to continue to get better at knowing my own tastes and picking books that really matter and are appealing to me, and being willing to dump books that aren't working.

#book roundup

6 notes · View notes

novlr · 4 months

Text

6 notes · View notes

readwing · 4 months

Text

Anyways, here's the books I read last year (that weren't manga or cookbooks)-

The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sister, Kjell Ola Dahl (#......like 7 or 8 in the Oslo Detective series)

American Prometheus (Oppenheimer biography), Kai Bird

Matilda, Roald Dahl

Blackmail and Bibingka, Mia P. Manansala (#3 in Tita Rosie's Kitchen)

Homicide and Halo-Halo, Mia P. Manansala (#2 in Tita Rosie's Kitchen)

The Moving Finger (Miss Marple #4), Agatha Christie

The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood

Ymir, Rich Larson

I'm not sure how to put these in an order of what I liked the most because I read them for different reasons so I'll just do a drive by:

Ymir - Started with the pedal to the floorboards and did not let up one bit. One of my favorite flavors of sci-fi is when the narrative is unabashedly About Somewhere Else. Loved how the protagonist could not move through the story without somehow cutting everyone around him, and I loved the traumatic, unresolved tension between him and his brother. Probably my favorite book by vibes alone

Sister - I adore the Oslo Detective series, for reasons that possibly scratch my brain and my brain alone. It's so dry and uninterested in selling you melodrama. I want to study the way this guy writes his interview scenes; they are the main way the detective work gets done and they work so fluidly. They never slow down the pace to make sure you're keeping up. This was a particularly fun installment, seeing one of the lead two detectives on his own doing PI work after having quit, although the cases took brutal turns.

The Moving Finger - Loved it. Love how AC is just out there inventing characters whole cloth that you'll never meet again, but as soon as you meet them you're like 'oh, wow, you're not just a character you're like a full ass person.' I loved this installment in particularly because the dynamics between the characters were just so fascinating?? Once again, I've yet to correctly guess an AC mystery. Better luck next time.

Matilda - read it for a fic I am writing. Spent most of it getting big feelings and marveling at how completely fucking accurate the live action Mara Wilson movie was. Like there were entire scenes where I was like 'this is the movie, this is exactly what happened in the fucking movie.' Great book, but also wow that movie was a wonderfully accurate adaptation.

American Prometheus - Two things I like in a biography: research and calling out when the research didn't yield anything and/or yielded contradictory records. While I struggled to get through the political back half, particularly the bits leading up to the trial, this book was an interesting look on the development of scientific ethics in the twentieth century and on how today's scientific community today is still shaped by the political machinations of the past.

Both of the Tita Rosie's Kitchen books - it's a food-themed setting for a murder mystery book (which is like it's own genre now, which is cool). Relatively easy read. I think the author is still growing into herself, but one thing that she does well is mystery-plotting. Another thing is food descriptions.

The Love Hypothesis - Mainly read it because I owned a copy. It was... probably more enjoyable for people who like romance. Given that it is a romance book. But I do try to read a bit of everything, because I think each genre has something to bring to the table story-wise. This one had some very nice getting-to-know-you moments between the characters, who had good chemistry, but I think where it was weakest was in giving similar moments to the side characters, who often felt one dimensional. The story beats about feminism and institutional unfairness could've been less heavy-handed. For something that was relevant to the plot, it often felt like the author knew they were supposed to say something about it but couldn't figure out how to say it in a way that hadn't been parroted before, which is a shame because the scenes where the protagonist actually had to deal with those issues played well.

#year in review #book roundup

2 notes · View notes

mermaidsirennikita · 1 year

Text

Caro's January 2023 Book Recommendations

Listen man. I read a lot of books this month. I'm sure it will slow down (it has to, literally mentally). But while we're going at this rate, check out some of the books I enjoyed most this January.

Exposed by Kristen Callihan. Brenna and Rye have known each other since they were teens--and in the years since, he's become the bassist for world-famous rock band Kill John, and she its competent publicist. But they've never liked each other. That's why Brenna is shocked when, after overhearing her complain about her dismal sex life, Rye offers a no-strings-attached arrangement through which they'll both benefit. And she's even more shocked when she finds herself agreeing. Hooking up allows Brenna and Rye to burn off the sexual tension that's been building for years--but what happens when they realize that their connection goes far beyond the physical?

As I've stated quite often as of late, I love a book that's about two people who fuck it out but find feelings a lot harder, and this is that kind of book. Rye and Brenna have bickered in the background of the VIP series, so seeing them have ... frankly incredible sex, while also dealing with their issues? Was great. This isn't a super plot-y book. It's a character development book, and I really just loved Rye and Brenna together. Their comfort, built over years of knowing each other, was really lovely. Her professional weariness, her restlessness, was all very true to life. There is one aspect of why Rye and Brenna fell out that I feel could've been dealt with differently, and I DO think Kristen Callihan could've followed through on the clear daddy kink these two had even harder, but overall this book really scratched an itch and worked for me. It's a sweet, hot, romantic book.

The Recruit by Monica McCarty. Widowed for several years, quiet Mary of Mar values her independence--her husband didn't hurt her physically, but his neglect and decision to separate Mary from her son when the baby was less than six months old led to a cold marriage. But she's not above an affair, which is why she gives in to an encounter with the charming, hotheaded Kenneth Sutherland, a knight attempting to join Robert the Bruce's Highland Guard. The king wants Kenneth and Mary to wed, but upon finding out that he has no intention to be faithful upon marrying, Mary turns him down. But a chance encounter with Kenneth months later reveals that the two of them aren't quite done with each other yet...

So, so good. My favorite Highland Guard book yet, this one hit all the buttons. To rip off the bandaid and warn those who aren't into this--yes, Mary's one night stand (if you could even call it that) with Kenneth leads to a pregnancy. Which she's actually got a plan for, and that plan isn't supposed to involve him until he figures it out. Then we have all the "YOU WERE GOING TO KEEP MY BABY FROM ME???" and "IT'S MY BABY" drama, which I love, and which is even more valuable here because Mary didn't get to raise her first child. She wants to be independent so badly, despite not being a girrrrl power "look at me, I am Merida on a horse" type of heroine. Mary isn't cold--but she is withholding, no matter how hard Kenneth works to break down her walls. And of course, he's telling himself that he's breaking those walls down to overpower her, when really he's just a dork who wants to cuddle. The physical connection between the two of them burns so hot immediately, and it takes a while for the emotional connection to catch up. But when it does? Gold.

The King's Spinster Bride by Ruby Dixon. When teenage princess Halla protects the enemy prince Mathior from her father's soldiers, she's repaid in kind--upon the fall of her kingdom, Mathior's father spares her life. Now Mathior is king, and with Halla's conquered kingdom beginning to rebel, he proposes a peaceful solution--uniting their houses through marriage to the woman he's been infatuated with since he was a child. Though Halla reluctantly agrees, she's skeptical of whether Mathior's professed attraction is real--and she isn't quite ready for the intensity of his people's wedding customs...

This novella takes place in Dixon's Aspect and Anchor universe, and If found it super fascinating--the world-building made sense, and the conflict was surprisingly deep for a shorter book. And it just focused on a dynamic that you basically never see--a 33-year-old virgin princess with a 24-year-old warrior king (who's also a virgin because he's been saving himself for her.) If you're worried about any creepiness, don't be. Though Halla and Mathior met when he was a child and she was a teenager, their interactions were minimal, and he simply developed a huge crush on her that she was completely unaware of. As a woman, she feels like an undesirable spinster on the shelf--and a lot of the book is Mathior convincing her that yes, he really, really wants her. And does he. It's a really fun, hot novella--would recommend.

Take the Lead by Alexis Daria. Read full review here.

Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon. When a group of human women are abducted by aliens, competent Georgie is elected as their leader. After the women commandeer the spaceship and crash onto an icy, foreign planet, Georgie sets out to scout for help and information--only to run into giant, blue, and very interested Vektal, chief of a clan of warriors. Vektal and his people can save Georgie's group--but his help comes with a price in more ways than one.

I finally started this series! And I'm glad I did. I have a feeling that the first entry, as is often the case with series, is one of the weaker installments--there's a lot of explaining to be done, a lot of setup and worldbuilding. But Ruby Dixon is just an engaging, entertaining writer, and it's easy to run along at the brisk pace she sets and enjoy a book that is kind of absurd, actually pretty hot, and sort of heartwarming? George and Vektal's romance may not be particularly deep, but nonetheless, I was rooting for these two crazy kids (in part because Vektal... is a giver). I'm into the world, and I want to know what the hell happens with the next pairings. TW: the heroine does witness the sexual assaults of other women (not by the barbarians, but by the original abductors).

Barbarian Alien by Ruby Dixon. Liz is not super thrilled about being taken in by a tribe of aliens, and she's not afraid of making this known. She certainly isn't into the idea of being paired with Raahosh, one of the surlier, quieter aliens. In fact, she's not even sure that she wants to take on what is necessary to live on this strange planet. But Raahosh takes that choice away, kidnapping Liz and essentially forcing life onto her. And she is not happy.

Before I write anything else--this is a kidnapping book, but it is NOT a noncon book. Raahosh does kidnap Liz, but he never forces himself upon her, and what follows is basically a complex courting situation, which I personally found funny, delightful, and better than the previous book. Liz is a mouthy broad who is not afraid to kick up a fuss (same) and Raahosh is quietly frustrated. His silence only annoys Liz more, and it is basically the "exasperated man with mouthy girlfriend" dynamic that I tend to be a sucker for. Raahosh just walks around, silently feeding Liz and tending to all her needs, while she calls him out on everything she sees fit to complain about. And when she finds out he can speak English? GOLD. Whereas the last book had a lot of introductions to make, this one was able to jump into the meat of the romance (and oh, is there meat) and I found that it worked a bit more for me. Liz/Raahosh forever, basically.

The Portrait of a Duchess by Scarlett Peckham. ARC; full review to come closer to release.

Barbarian Lover by Ruby Dixon. Kira is one of few women on the ice planet who hasn't resonated and taken a mate--and there's a reason for that, which no one else knows. So it's not a surprise that friendly, flirty Aehako is pursuing her. But despite his charm and their chemistry, Kira is determined to resist him; there's no point in teasing something she can't possibly take advantage of. Resisting him, however, becomes much more difficult when the aliens who kidnapped Kira and her friends threaten to return, and she and Aehako must trek out to stop them.

I feel I have to give a warning here--infertility is a huge part of this book, and it is resolved through what is essentially a magic baby situation. As soon as it became apparent that Kira was infertile, I figured this would happen. To be fair, the solution is less "magic" and more "plot device Ruby Dixon set up in the first book". With all that being said, the romance in this one is so endearing and very, very hot. Rather than being driven by the mating bond stuff that is present in the other books (which I do love) Aehako and Kira are driven by simple attraction and love. There's something really romantic about that. And yes, he did carve her a replica of his dick and did use that on her, so like. Points!

Barbarian Mine by Ruby Dixon. Getting kidnapped by aliens isn't the worst thing that could have happened to Harlow. After she's taken in by the sakh-khui, her inoperable brain tumor is apparently cured. Great! Not so great? Getting kidnapped by the feral, tribeless Rukh, who can't speak her language but has resonated with her. Against the odds, the two form a bond--but for all that they care about each other, there's only so much that Rukh can do to protect Harlow when her health takes a turn... And they're all alone in a frozen wasteland.

This one was... wild. And I liked it? You have to be okay with a hero who is not only a virgin, but basically a Tarzan virgin. He's running around, completely feral, having been totally alone since childhood. HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT COME IS. But oh, does he learn, and is Harlow willing to help him. In some ways, it's kind of bizarre that Harlow is like "you know what, I'm just gonna blow this guy who can't talk to me but seems to be nice and a provider", but like? Maybe it's because this is my fourth Ice Planet Barbarians book in a row (I'm determined to knock out the first six before taking a break) and I, like Harlow, am suffering from some form of hormonal intoxication and Stockholm Syndrome... but I found Rukh rather charming. This is a very pregnancy-heavy book, and that was also kind of wild to read about, but I can't say I wasn't fully entertained the whole time. These books are like... culture clash meets slice of life meets ALIENS meets breeding kink? And I'm not mad.

Hotel of Secrets by Diana Biller. ARC; read my full review here.

Barbarian's Mate by Ruby Dixon. After growing up in the foster system, Josie has adjusted remarkably well to life on the ice planet, and all she wants is a mate and a family. Unfortunately, her IUD has prevented her from resonating. When it finally falls out, she resonates to her mate immediately--unfortunately, it's Haeden, the one guy in the tribe she can't stand... who she thought couldn't stand her in return. But while Josie is willing to do anything to break her bond with the surly Haeden, he feels quite differently...

This is the book I started the series for (and I'm taking a break after it to avoid overdosing on IPB) and it wholly lived up to expectations. I'm reluctant to use the term "grumpy/sunshine" because I feel like it's overused, but this book. Is the definition of that. Haeden is indeed quite grumpy (if also deeply capable, which, hot) while Josie is a perky ball of energy who just wants to be loved. I mean, not by him. But she wants literally anyone else's love! The bickering between these two has been so real, and it was great to see them confront their attraction to each other in the middle of it. (The sex is crazy hot, and also just kind of crazy at points?) Some truly absurd things happen over the course of this novel, and honestly? That's what I want from IPB. It was fabulous, and ultimately, I somehow ended up feeling very, very soft about these two.

Spare by Prince Harry. I mean, y'all know what the hell this is about.

Separating my feelings on Harry, his family, and his own opinions expressed in this book aside, this is a really well-done memoir. His ghostwriter did a great job with the prose, and with synthesizing Harry's thoughts and voice (to me). It's got all the dirty little secrets and gossip, but it's also like... deeply emotionally sad, in many ways. Regardless of his immense privilege, the family division is just.... rough. But I appreciated reading about it.

The Half-Orc's Maiden Bride by Ruby Dixon. Iolanthe is sold in marriage by her miserly father to the wealthy new warrior-lord of a nearby keep--but is surprised to find that the lord, Agakor, is a half-orc. But as they walk through the wedding rituals of his people, Iolanthe finds that Agakor is kind and passionate; and when her father decides to take her back, she's willing to do anything to stay with her new husband.

This novella is another arranged marriage ritual book by Ruby Dixon, and though the orc thing threw me off at first (this is my first orc book) I might have actually liked it even more than The King's Spinster Bride? Iolanthe is big and ungainly, and fortunately for her, Agakor is INTO IT. The sex scenes in this one (and there are many) are..... everything. If you're looking for a quick read that is emotionally sweet but not.......... physically sweet............ this is the one. Also, good Intro to Orcs.

Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins. Eddy Carmichael heads out west to start over--and is promptly robbed and left for dead. Fortunately, she's rescued by handsome, rakish businessman and budding politician Rhine Fontane, who nurses her back to health and sets her up with a job in Virginia City, Nevada. There's an instant chemistry between Rhine and Eddy, but it seems impossible--Rhine is not only white, but engaged, and Eddy is determined to move on to California as soon as possible. What she doesn't know? Rhine isn't white. He's passing. And in order to be with Eddy, he'll have to give up everything--and risk his life.

Beverly Jenkins writes historicals with such an old school flair, and Forbidden is no different in this respect. It's lushly romantic, full of a rich cast of supporting characters, and it tees up a classic rake/virgin dynamic, complete with an awful other woman (and you know what--I had zero issue with that; I found Natalie at the intersection of "wacky villainess" and "realistically horrid 1800s white woman"). This is a slow burn--it works up to Rhine and Eddy getting together, and considering the... entire plot, that makes total sense. Because Rhine passes, he cannot be with Eddy publicly without endangering her, and Eddy has way too much pride to accept anything less than what she deserves. The subject matter here is heavy--but it never feels like Jenkins is wallowing in that. The core story is always the romance. And I was in the mood for something old-fashioned and lovely, so this hit the spot.

Their Duchess by Jess Michaels. ARC; read the full review here.

Lush Money by Angelina M. Lopez. Prince Mateo's tiny principality is reliant on winegrowing and making; however, his father's poor financial decisions have left it nearly bankrupt. That's why he's (very reluctantly) willing to take billionaire Roxanne Medina up on her indecent proposal. She wants a baby; and she wants that baby to know its father; and the baby being royal wouldn't be bad either. In exchange for a bailout, Mateo will give Roxanne a year of marriage--and during that year, they'll meet three nights a months to have sex until she conceives. Intelligent, under the radar Mateo can't stand the cold, arrogant Roxanne; but that doesn't mean he isn't attracted to her...

This was so good! I love contemporaries that swing for the fences, and this one certainly does--between the royal element and the billionaire plot, and of course... all that babymaking (there is a LOT of sex in this one). Roxanne and Mateo start out all lust and no connection, and the book is all about building that connection, through slowly-won vulnerability. There's a lot of family drama on both sides, discussions of class, some twists and turns, and just... really, really good angst. I loved it wholeheartedly.

Again the Magic by Lisa Kleypas. Blue-blooded Aline Marsden grows up alongside John McKenna, the illegitimate servant on her father's land. As young adults, Aline and McKenna fall in love--but after their affair is discovered, she's forced to dismiss him herself, using cruelty to convince him to leave. Twelve years later, McKenna is back, successful, independent, and bent on revenge. But the Aline he meets is not the same girl he remembered--for many reasons.

Ugh, this was so good, and definitely lives up to the hype. Aline and McKenna are perfect childhood sweethearts turned former lovers with beef--he's such a classic Kleypas hero too, all self-made and with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. Their connection is angsty and full of past wounds, and it's really gratifying to watch them come back to each other and come to terms with their past. I'm usually a bit skeptical of secondary romances, but Kleypas delivers a really good one with Livia, Aline's little sister (who's spent the past two years grieving her dead fiance and suffering the scandal of miscarrying his child after he died) and Gideon Shaw, McKenna's American business partner who's charming, kind, and an alcoholic. There's a lovely level of realism to how Gideon and Livia deal with their situation, and it's incredibly satisfying. Plus, you get some Westcliff: The Early Days and delightful foreshadowing of his book ("Americans suck at riding", says Westcliff, who ends up with an American horsewoman who for sure rides him)!

Hate Crush by Angelina M. Lopez. Sofia is known as a wild child, rebellious princess (literally). And ten years ago, she was that when she fell in love with Aish Salinger, who promptly broke her heart to pursue stardom. Now she's determined to make her winemaking venture a success to benefit her nation--and that's derailed when Aish, now a rock star, drunkenly reveals that his biggest hit was about her. Though Sofia can't stand him, she agrees to fake a reunion with Aish to take advantage of the publicity.... But the wounds between them may make even that too difficult.

This one is... a lot. Very much a second chance grovel romance, with a lot of conflicted feelings, a lot of mistakes made, and a lot of angst. The connection between Sofia and Aish is palpable, but he's got a LOT to make up for--and despite the hot sex scenes and chemistry, his passivity bugged me towards the end. Until... Angelina M. Lopez left it all on the floor with a twist so fucking insane that I was simply delighted. Trust, it's worth reading for that alone.

#romance novel blogging #book recs #books #book reviews #book roundup

10 notes · View notes

ingloriousgigi · 1 year

Text

These are the books I read for the trans rights readathon.

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Hyacinth by Elle Porter

Caroline's Heart by Austin Chant

Heart Haunt Havoc by Freydis Moon

Fear and Other Love Languages by Aveda Vice

#trans rights readathon #book roundup #booklr #trans authors #trans books #non binary authors #non binary books #trans visibility #international day of trans visibility

4 notes · View notes

doppelgangerleaverite · 1 year

Text

Book Roundup 2022

ok ive never done this before but i read a lot in 2022 so im just gonna make a post abt it! yeehaw 🐎

Favorites:

i read so much good stuff this year but i think my two favorites were Project Hail Mary and Borne.

Project Hail Mary is a great sci fi book. Andy Weir writes very good stuff, and this is even better than The Martian imo. please please if you can go into this book knowing NOTHING about what happens. don't even read the blurb. if you like hard sci fi that has some techno talk but not overwhelmingly much you'll like this just trust me. it's so engaging and if you like reading about an extremely capable person dealing with Circumstances and Situations it's such a satisfying book.

Borne is about two people and a creature (will not be explaining him further) surviving in a post apocalyptic city that is ruled over by a gigantic flying bear. there's mutated things and other humans trying to survive and an evil corporation, etc. Vandermeer is super creative and writes very well imagined settings. i always want to climb inside his books even when they get horrifying, which they do. there's unexpectedly a lot of love in this book amidst the horror and it's quite beautiful.

I'll put the Southern Reach trilogy next, even though it's pictured last, because it's also by Jeff Vandermeer. this trilogy has a ton of captivating speculative ecology, and a biologist main character who is so much like so many biologists I've met. the first book is excellent but i think it really shines as a trilogy because the way the characters and setting unfolds and affects each other is so well done. also whitby for best character i love that little freak so much.

i reread Perdido Street Station followed by the next two in that world (not strictly a trilogy but they all take place in bas-lag and are vaguely chronological), The Scar and Iron Council. PSS is about a fucked up city and biological engineering gone wrong, the Scar is about a fucked up city but what if it was on boats and there's a leviathan, and Iron Council is what if we left the fucked up city to live on a train. they have magic disguised as science, and science disguised as magic, multiple human and non human intelligent races living together (occasionally having sex), anti-fascism, vampires, anti-capitalism, old-timey diving bells, and dirigibles. please read them i wish they had a fandom im dying inside

Reading Stats:

books read: 40

top 3 genres: fantasy, sci-fi, horror

using this to plug storygraph because goodreads is owned by amazon. i find storygraph just as useful and intuitive and they'll transfer all your stuff from goodreads for you 👍 also they made me this cool graph look

ok im gonna tag a couple people but i rly don't know how many of you read so if u wanna share your favorites please do and tag me!! @speculativefictions @crunchity-munchity @egoborderline @astronargles

#books #reading stats #science fiction #fantasy #China Mieville #Jeff vandermeer #please can we start a New Weird fandom on tumblr please please i prommy ill be cool about it #my post #long post #i tried to put in a readmore but tumblr is being shitty and keeps crashing when i do lol #book roundup

6 notes · View notes

sn0tcl0wn · 1 year

Text

i'm fine i swear lmao

#personal #here's the list in case anyone was curious #22 in '22 babeeeyyyy #may 2023 be peaceful enough for me to look at more words on my phone #bookblr #book roundup #reading list #books read in 2022 #bibliopunk #girlblogging #horror books

3 notes · View notes

therainbowfishy · 1 year

Photo

Favorite books of 2022

THE HURTING KIND by Ada Limón

WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A LIST OF FURTHER POSSIBILITIES by Chen Chen

THE LESBIANA’S GUIDE TO CATHOLIC SCHOOL by Sonora Reyes

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC by Kevin Wilson

SCOUT IS NOT A BAND KID by Jade Armstrong

PASSING FOR HUMAN by Liana Finck

MOOMIN: THE COMPLETE TOVE JANSSON COMIC STRIP, VOL. 1 by Tove Jansson

LANDINGS by Arwen Donahue CYCLOPEDIA EXOTICA by Aminder Dhaliwal

MAMO by Sas Milledge

THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER by Emily X.R. Pan

HITHER & NIGH by Ellen Potter

DUCKS by Kate Beaton

CLEAVE by Tiana Nobile

WHITE CAT, BLACK DOG by Kelly Link

Not pictured favorite picture books: MINA by Matthew Forsythe and IF YOU WERE A CITY by Kyo Maclear and illus. by Francesca Sanna

4 notes · View notes

dykevillanelle · 1 year

Text

savannah “dykevillanelle”’s 2022 reading list!

{ books read 2015 x books read 2016 x books read 2017 x books read 2018 x books read 2019 x books read 2020 x books read 2021 }

books read: 93 (goal was 100 but sometimes we have a hard year) pages read: 32,179

top 5 fiction:

(best) the overstory (richard powers)

the stars and the blackness between them (junanda petrus)

no one is talking about this (patricia lockwood)

girl, woman, other (bernardine evaristo)

last night at the telegraph club (malinda lo)

top 5 nonfiction:

(best) afropessimism (frank b. wilderson iii)

recovery from schizophrenia: psychiatry and the political economy (richard warner)

the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (shoshana zuboff)

virology: essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between (joseph osmundson)

crying in h mart (michelle zauner)

bottom 5:

girl made of stars (ashley blake herring)

the four winds (kristen hannah)

aphrodite made me do it (trisha mateer)

come closer (sara gran)

(worst) lovecraft country (matt ruff)

full list and reviews, in order read, under the cut

yolk (mary h.k. choi) [ya, realistic fiction | ★★★★★]

the secret scripture (sebastian barry) [ historical fiction | ★★★]

she drives me crazy (kelly quindlen) [ya, romance | ★★]

last night at the telegraph club (malinda lo) [historical fiction | ★★★★★]

the stars and the blackness between them (junanda petrus) [romance | ★★★★★]

come closer (sara gran) [horror | ★]

racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america (eduardo bonilla-silva) [nonfiction, sociology | ★★★]

something to talk about (meryl wilsner) [romance | ★★]

real life (brandon taylor) [realistic fiction | ★★★★]

invisible no more: police violence against black women and women of color (andrea j. ritchie, editor) [nonfiction | ★★★★★]

queenie (candice carty-williams) [realistic fiction | ★★]

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo (taylor jenkins reid) [historical fiction, romance | ★★★]

how we get free: black feminism and the combahee river collective (keeanga-yamahtta taylor, editor) [nonfiction | ★★★★★]

one last stop (casey mcquiston) [romance | ★★★★]

patsy (nicole dennis-benn) [realistic fiction | ★★★]

hani and ishu’s guide to fake dating (adiba jaigirdar) [ya, romance | ★★★]

my year of rest and relaxation (ottessa moshfegh) [realistic fiction | ★★★★]

wilder girls (rory power) [ya, horror | ★★★★]

not straight, not white: black gay men from the march on washington to the AIDS crisis (kevin j. mumford) [nonfiction | ★★★]

sex object: a memoir (jessica valenti) [memoir | ★★]

severed (ling ma) [science fiction | ★★★★]

blood meridian, or the evening redness in the west (cormac mccarthy) [historical fiction, classics | ★★]

her royal highness (rachel hawkins) [romance | ★★]

i’m thinking of ending things (iain reid) [horror | ★★★]

things have gotten worse since we last spoke (eric larocca) [horror | ★★★★★]

evicted: poverty and profit in the american city (matthew desmond) [nonfiction | ★★★★]

boy parts (eliza clark) [realistic fiction, horror | ★★★★]

crying in h mart (michelle zauner) [memoir | ★★★★★]

leave the world behind (rumaan alam) [science fiction, horror | ★★★★]

killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty (dorothy roberts) [nonfiction | ★★★★]

no one is talking about this (patricia lockwood) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★]

my best friend’s exorcism (grady hendrix) [horror | ★★★★]

helter skelter: the true story of the manson murders (vincent bugliosi) [true crime | ★★]

perfume: the story of a murderer (patrick süskind) historical fiction, horror | ★★★]

the tattooist of auschwitz (heather morris) [biography | ★★]

recovery from schizophrenia: psychiatry and political economy (richard warner) [nonfiction | ★★★★★]

lovecraft country (matt ruff) [horror | ★]

pretty girls (karin slaughter) [horror | ★★★]

therapeutic communication: knowing what to say when (paul l. wachtel) [nonfiction | ★★★]

maybe you should talk to someone: a therapist, her therapist, and our lives revealed (lori gottlieb) [memoir | ★★]

the examined life: how we lose and find ourselves (stephen grosz) [memoir | ★★★]

written in the stars (alexandra bellefleur) [romance | ★]

klara and the sun (kazuo ishiguro) [klara and the sun | ★★★]

go tell it on the mountain (james baldwin) [realistic fiction, classics | ★★★★★]

luster (raven leilani) [realistic fiction | ★★★]

queer and trans artists of color: stories of some of our lives (nia king, editor) [anthology, interviews | ★★★]

annihilation (jeff vandermeer) [science fiction, horror | ★★★★]

my sister, guard your veil; my brother, guard your eyes: uncensored iranian voices (lila azam zanganeh, editor) [nonfiction, essays | ★★★★]

girl made of stars (ashley herring blake) [ya, realistic fiction | ★]

the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (shoshana zuboff) [nonfiction | ★★★★★]

folklorn (angela mi young hur) [science fiction, fantasy | ★★★★★]

girl, woman, other (bernardine evaristo) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★]

aphrodite made me do it (trista mateer) [poetry | ★]

we do this ’til we free us: abolitionist organizing and transforming justice (mariame kaba) [nonfiction, essays | ★★★★★]

the chinese lady: afong moy in early america (nancy e. davis) [biography | ★★★]

the parisian (isabella hammad) [historical fiction | ★★★★★]

under the udala trees (chinelo okparanta) [historical fiction | ★★★★]

the overstory (richard powers) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★]

queen of teeth (hailey piper) [horror | ★★★]

the southern book club’s guide to slaying vampires (grady hendrix) [horror | ★★★★]

the vegetarian (han kang) [horror | ★★★]

the priory of the orange tree (samantha shannon) [fantasy | ★★★★]

harlem shuffle (colson whitehead) [historical fiction | ★★★★]

the poppy war (r.f. kuang) [fantasy | ★★]

parable of the sower (octavia butler) [science fiction | ★★★★]

the idiot (elif batuman) [realistic fiction | ★★★★★]

tender is the flesh (agustina bazterrica) [horror | ★★★★]

the four winds (kristin hannah) [historical fiction | ★★]

manhunt (gretchen felker-martin) [horror, science fiction | ★★★★]

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow (gabrielle zevin) [realistic fiction | ★★★★]

ace of spades (faridah àbíke íyimídé) [ya, horror | ★★★★★]

nona the ninth (tamsyn muir) [science fiction | ★★★★★]

blitzed: drugs in the third reich (norman ohler) [nonfiction | ★★★]

virology: essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between (joseph osmundson) [nonfiction, essays | ★★★★★]

we have always lived in the castle (shirley jackson) [horror | ★★★★]

the black flamingo (dean atta) [ya, poetry | ★★]

things we lost to the water (eric nguyen) [realistic fiction | ★★★★]

ruinsong (julia ember) [ya, fantasy | ★★]

flung out of space (hannah templar & grace ellis) [graphic novel, biography | ★★★★★]

everything i never told you (celeste ng) [mystery | ★★★★★]

here the whole time (vitor martins) [ya, romance | ★★]

why freud was wrong: sin, science, and psychoanalsis (richard webster) [biography | ★★★★]

sea of tranquility (emily st. john mandel) [science fiction | ★★★★]

free food for millionaires (min jin lee) [realistic fiction | ★★★★]

my heart hemmed in (marie ndaiye) [horror | ★★★]

greywaren (maggie stiefvater) [ya, fantasy | ★★★★]

bad gays (huw lemmey & ben miller) [biography | ★★★★★]

cinderella is dead (kalynn bayron) [ya, fantasy | ★★]

eileen (ottessa moshfegh) [realistic fiction | ★★★]

artemis (andy weir) [science fiction | ★★★★]

my heart is a chainsaw (stephen graham jones) [horror | ★★★]

the orange eats creeps (grace krilanovich) [science fiction, horror | ★★]

afropessimism (frank b. wilderson iii) [nonfiction, memoir | ★★★★★]

#bookblr #books #angel.txt #2022 reads #book roundup

3 notes · View notes

meta-squash · 1 year

Text

Squash’s Book Roundup of 2022

This year I read 68 books. My original goal was to match what I read in 2019, which was 60, but I surpassed it with quite a bit of time to spare.

Books Read In 2022:

-The Man Who Would Be King and other stories by Rudyard Kipling -Futz by Rochelle Owens -The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht -Funeral Rites by Jean Genet -The Grip of It by Jac Jemc -Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roche -Hashish, Wine, Opium by Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier -The Blacks: a clown show by Jean Genet -One, No One, One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello -Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi -The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren -Three-Line Novels (Illustrated) by Felix Feneon, Illustrated by Joanna Neborsky -Black Box Thrillers: Four Novels (They Shoot Horses Don’t They, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, No Pockets in a Shroud, I Should Have Stayed Home) by Horace McCoy -The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Gustave Flaubert -The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco -Illusions by Richard Bach -Mole People by Jennifer Toth -The Rainbow Stories by William T Vollmann -Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse -Equus by Peter Shaffer (reread) -Ghosty Men by Franz Lidz -A Happy Death by Albert Camus -Six Miles to Roadside Business by Michael Doane -Envy by Yury Olesha -The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West -Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche -The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox -The Cat Inside by William S Burroughs -Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry -Camino Real by Tennessee Williams (reread) -The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg -The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams -Comemadre by Roque Larraquy -The Zoo Story by Edward Albee -The Bridge by Hart Crane -A Likely Lad by Peter Doherty -The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel -The Law In Shambles by Thomas Geoghegan -The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzche -The Maids and Deathwatch by Jean Genet -Intimate Journals by Charles Baudelaire -The Screens by Jean Genet -Inferno by Dante Alighieri (reread) -The Quarry by Friedrich Durrenmatt -A Season In Hell by Arthur Rimbaud (reread) -Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century by Jed Rasula -Pere Ubu by Alfred Jarry -Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson -Loot by Joe Orton -Julia And The Bazooka and other stories by Anna Kavan -The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda by Ishmael Reed -If You Were There: Missing People and the Marks They Leave Behind by Francisco Garcia -Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters -Indelicacy by Amina Cain -Withdrawn Traces by Sara Hawys Roberts (an unfortunate but necessary reread) -Sarah by JT LeRoy (reread) -How Lucky by Will Leitch -Gyo by Junji Ito (reread) -Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore -Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau -Bakkai by Anne Carson -Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers -McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh -Moby Dick by Herman Melville -The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector -In the Forests of the Night by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (reread from childhood) -Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren -The Medium is the Massage by Malcolm McLuhan

~Superlatives And Thoughts~

Fiction books read: 48 Non-fiction books read: 20

Favorite book: This is so hard! I almost want to three-way tie it between Under The Volcano, The Quick & The Dead, and The Man With The Golden Arm, but I’m not going to. I think my favorite is Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. It’s an absolutely beautiful book with such intense descriptions. The way that it illustrates the vastly different emotional and mental states of its three main characters reminded me of another favorite, Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey. Lowry is amazing at leaving narrative breadcrumbs, letting the reader find their way through the emotional tangle he’s recording. The way he writes the erratic, confused, crumbling inner monologue of the main character as he grows more and more ill was my favorite part.

Least favorite book: I’d say Withdrawn Traces, but it’s a reread, so I think I’ll have to go with Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. I dedicated a whole long post to it already, so I’ll just say that the concept of the book is great. I loved the whole idea of it. But the execution was awful. It’s like the exact opposite of Under The Volcano. The characters didn’t feel like real people, which would have been fine if the book was one written in that kind of surreal or artistic style where characters aren’t expected to speak like everyday people. But the narrative style as well as much of the dialogue was attempting realism, so the lack of realistic humanity of the characters was a big problem. The book didn’t ever give the reader the benefit of the doubt regarding their ability to infer or empathize or figure things out for themselves. Every character’s emotion and reaction was fully explained as it happened, rather than leaving the reader some breathing space to watch characters act or talk and slowly understand what’s going on between them. Points for unique idea and queer literature about actual adults, but massive deduction for the poor execution.

Unexpected/surprising book: The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox. This is the first book about archaeology I’ve ever read. I picked it up as I was shelving at work, read the inner flap to make sure it was going to the right spot, and then ended up reading the whole thing. It was a fascinating look at the decades-long attempt to crack the ancient Linear B script, the challenges faced by people who tried and the various theories about its origin and what kind of a language/script it was. The book was really engaging, the author was clearly very passionate and emotional about her subjects and it made the whole thing both fascinating and fun to read. And I learned a bunch of new things about history and linguistics and archaeology!

Most fun book: How Lucky by Will Leitch. It was literally just a Fun Book. The main character is a quadriplegic man who witnesses what he thinks is a kidnapping. Because he a wheelchair user and also can’t talk except through typing with one hand, his attempts to figure out and relay to police what he’s seen are hindered, even with the help of his aid and his best friend. But he’s determined to find out what happened and save the victim of the kidnapping. It’s just a fun book, an adventure, the narrative voice is energetic and good-natured and it doesn’t go deeply into symbolism or philosophy or anything.

Book that taught me the most: Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula. This book probably isn’t for everyone, but I love Dadaism, so this book was absolutely for me. I had a basic knowledge of the Dadaist art movement before, but I learned so much, and gained a few new favorite artists as well as a lot of general knowledge about the Dada movement and its offshoots and members and context and all sorts of cool stuff.

Most interesting/thought provoking book: Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I annotated my copy like crazy. I never had to read it in school, but I had a blast finally reading it now. There’s just so much going on in it, symbolically and narratively. I think I almost consider it the first Modernist novel, because it felt more Modernist than Romantic to me. I had to do so much googling while reading it because there are so many obscure biblical references that are clear symbolism, and my bible knowledge is severely lacking. This book gave me a lot of thoughts about narrative and the construction of the story, the mechanic of a narrator that’s not supposed to be omniscient but still kind of is, and so many other things. I really love Moby Dick, and I kind of already want to reread it.

Other thoughts/Books I want to mention but don’t have superlatives for: Funeral Rites was the best book by Jean Genet, which I was not expecting compared to how much I loved his other works. It would be hard for me to describe exactly why I liked this one so much to people who don’t know his style and his weird literary tics, because it really is a compounding of all those weird passions and ideals and personal symbols he had, but I really loved it. Reading The Grip Of It by Jac Jemc taught me that House Of Leaves has ruined me for any other horror novel that is specifically environmental. It wasn’t a bad book, just nothing can surpass House Of Leaves for horror novels about buildings. The Man With The Golden Arm by Nelson Algren was absolutely beautiful. I went in expecting a Maltese Falcon-type noir and instead I got a novel that was basically poetry about characters who were flawed and fucked up and sad but totally lovable. Plus it takes place only a few blocks from my workplace! The Rainbow Stories by William T Vollmann was amazing and I totally love his style. I think out of all the stories in that book my favorite was probably The Blue Yonder, the piece about the murderer with a sort of split personality. Scintillant Orange with all its biblical references and weird modernization of bible stories was a blast too. The Quick & The Dead by Joy Williams was amazing and one of my favorites this year. It’s sort of surreal, a deliberately weird novel about three weird girls without mothers. I loved the way Williams plays with her characters like a cat with a mouse, introducing them just to mess with them and then tossing them away -- but always with some sort of odd symbolic intent. All the adult characters talk and act more like teens and all the teenage characters talk and act like adults. It’s a really interesting exploration of the ways to process grief and change and growing up, all with the weirdest characters. Joe Gould’s Teeth was an amazing book, totally fascinating. One of our regulars at work suggested it to me, and he was totally right in saying it was a really cool book. It’s a biography of Joe Gould, a New York author who was acquaintances with EE Cummings and Ezra Pound, among others, who said he was writing an “oral history of our time.” Lepore investigates his life, the (non)existence of said oral history, and Gould’s obsession with a Harlem artist that affected his views of race, culture, and what he said he wanted to write. McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh was so good, although I only read it because 3 out of my other 5 coworkers had read it and they convinced me to. I had read a bunch of negative reviews of Moshfegh’s other book, so I went in a bit skeptical, but I ended up really enjoying McGlue. The whole time I read it, it did feel a bit like I was reading Les Miserables fanfiction, partly from the literary style and partly just from the traits of the main character. But I did really enjoy it, and the ending was really lovely. In terms of literature that’s extremely unique in style, The Hour Of The Star by Clarice Lispector is probably top of the list this year. Her writing is amazing and so bizarre. It’s almost childlike but also so observant and philosophical, and the intellectual and metaphorical leaps she makes are so fascinating. I read her short piece The Egg And The Chicken a few months ago at the urging of my coworker, and thought it was so cool, and this little novel continues in that same vein of bizarre, charming, half-philosophical and half-mundane (but also totally not mundane at all) musings.

I'm still in the middle of reading The Commitments by Roddy Doyle (my lunch break book) and The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but I'm not going to finish either by the end of the year, so I'm leaving them off the official list.

#squash rambles #reading year in review #book list year in review #book list #reading list #book roundup #reading roundup

7 notes · View notes