Hello, yes, I know, I know you were wanting to hear about my favorite books for the entire year, and perhaps I will provide that in 2026. However, I have noticed to my sorrow that books publishing in the third quarter of any year are woefully overlooked in Best-of lists. As a structural matter there is not much we can do about this. Time is still finite, despite my best efforts, and the number of books published in October that you can read by December is simply fewer than the number of books published in January that you can read by…
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After noping out of one episode of The Golden Bachelor because I could not bear to see elderly people crying, I switched over to trying out the new Fall of the House of Usher series on Netflix, because it turns out I can very much bear watching a bunch of rich shitheels coming to unpleasant ends. The premise of the show is that there is this rich, awful family whose company created a drug called Ligodone, which fueled the opioid epidemic. There is an awful patriarch and an awful matriarch (his sister), and six awful children (two legitimate, four illegitimate)…
Leave a CommentNothing but Blackened Teeth Surprising nobody, this is my favorite Cassandra Khaw book. I love haunted house stories, and I love it when a bunch of people are stuck in an enclosed space together and all the tensions among them rise to the fore. It’s even better if they then maybe kill each other. Lol! Friendship! The house is haunted by the ghost of a bride whose husband died on the way to the wedding. She asked the guests to bury her alive in the foundation of the house, and ever since then they buried a new girl in the…
Leave a CommentBecause I am a person who derives energy and motivation from inventing goals and assigning them to myself as homework, January is a month in which I tend to be wildly energetic. Everyone else is lying in bed huddled up against the cold as they try to recover from the holiday season, while I charge around like the Energizer Bunny doing so many tasks it gives my mother a headache to hear about1 and being really, truly, genuinely annoying to my friends. But they have to deal with it because they know that the next time they want to make…
Leave a CommentThe weirdest thing about writing this post was looking back at my reading spreadsheet for this year and going “Wait, that was this year?” In some cases, I was so sure I’d read the book in a prior year that I went and checked its publication date online to see if I was losing my mind. Result: I was! The feeling that 2021 passed by in a morbid, exhausting flash and also lasted for two thousand and twenty-one years would be notable were it not for the fact that all of the past few years have felt that way. At…
1 CommentHappy August, everybody! Somehow it’s August of 2021, which is a fact I don’t want to dwell on too much because HOW, but the good news is that it means we’ve circled back once more to Women in Translation Month! While books in translation still don’t comprise a huge chunk of my reading, I fully credit WIT Month and, more broadly, its inventor Meytal of Bibliobio, for making translated books feel less scary to me. I used to require a lot of persuasion before I’d try a translated book, and now I’m actively allured by them, especially when the authors…
Leave a CommentAs we ease into July, I wish everyone zero hurricanes and an adequate heat infrastructure. Because it’s been so consistently rainy here, we haven’t been getting the unbearably hot summer temperatures (though I’m sure they’re coming), but the downside to that is that the ground is going to be completely saturated so if there is a hurricane shit’s definitely going to flood. Ah, the climate crisis! So present! So little political will to protect people against the consequences wrought by a handful of rich assholes and their rich asshole companies! Is it any wonder that I retreat miserably into books…
1 CommentIt’s time again to write about romance novels! To my eternal sorrow, I always read fewer romance novels than I want to read, because they are much easier to get as ebooks, but I much prefer reading physical books. So if I check out five physical library books and five library ebooks, I will prioritize the five physical books and forget about the five ebooks. This is especially a problem if I want to read independent or self-published romances (which I do), which often don’t exist as print books at all. It’s a problem for which I have not yet…
1 CommentSo it turns out that 2020 was a pretty amazing reading year? I hadn’t really noticed because there were so many other things to occupy my brain, such as the quarantine and the election and the crumbling of American democracy, but in looking back at my reading spreadsheet I discovered that I had read a shocking number of books that needed a place on my Best Of list. There are, in fact, so many that it has necessitated me breaking this post down into two parts. This one covers my reading through like mid-June or something, and represents the number…
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