Preface: Break Bones, Burn Through Books

I broke my foot and ankle at the end of September, is all I can say about why the October list is uh. Notable. Sometimes you're stuck on a couch for 6 weeks and your library chooses to be of service.

In other news, though, I noticed several themes again this year, as I always seem to. Lots of rereading, which makes sense (something something comfort reads). A couple of series I read because I like some other work in their genre and they all reference each other in certain ways. Several things I didn't love-love but couldn't stop reading until I was done. Body horror, as always.

Overall, as happens every year, I read only things I adored or couldn't put down. I abandoned probably a hundred books that are just fine but hit wrong or were badly timed or my brain simply couldn't catch onto; I read a lot of fanfiction, short fiction, poetry, and essays that aren't counted here. And I don't believe in hate-reading, or in shame about media consumption. Sorry in advance, again, for October, I was in some pain and a lot of distress.

The List: 2023

January

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
Devoted in Death	J. D. Robb	x	In Death #41
Brotherhood in Death	J. D. Robb	x	In Death #42
Apprentice in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #43
The Thing in the Snow	Sean Adams
Echoes in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #44
Secrets in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #45
Alias Grace	Margaret Atwood	x
Kingdom of Needle and Bone	Mira Grant	x
The Gate to Women's Country	Sheri S. Tepper	x
Life Expectancy	Dean Koontz	x
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family	Robert Kolker
Dark in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #46
Leverage in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #47
All Systems Red	Martha Wells	x	The Murderbot Diaries #1
Connections in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #48
The Unseen World	Liz Moore
Vendetta in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #49
Artificial Condition	Martha Wells	x	The Murderbot Diaries #2
Rogue Protocol	Martha Wells	x	The Murderbot Diaries #3
Nightmares & Dreamscapes	Stephen King	x
Golden in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #50

The In Death series will hold a place in my heart forever. They're comforting, fast, often predictable in the exact ways I want them to be, and also I read the first ~30 or so just after my kid was born and I was sitting up all night terrified something horrible was going to happen. My library at the time had big four-packs of them as ebooks and I would check out as many as were available at a time and just tear through them, my sleep-deprived brain soothed by the familiar beats and the slow growth of beloved side characters. Ask me about the Grace Park-helmed adaptation they'll never let me make. I'm not going to talk more about the In Death books because they're all of a piece other than to say #32, Treachery in Death, grapples with ACAB/police brutality in a way I genuinely didn't expect for such a copaganda series.

The Thing in the Snow was fine. It's got a lot of Severance (Ling Ma) in it, in that it's fundamentally a workplace drama through an ~apocalypse lens. And it got described as "darkly humorous" a fair amount, though I will admit I didn't find it especially funny; I like isolation fiction, though, and it was, again, fine.

Rereading Alias Grace was, as so many rereads are for me, because I wanted to reread one specific scene and couldn't remember precisely where it was in the book; it's not my favorite Atwood but I've probably reread it among the most often, because the reveals make me happy and I never remember where exactly we start to see them coming.

Kingdom of Needle and Bone was next to it on my Kindle app, and I hadn't read it since the COVID years began; trying to read pandemic fiction is hit-or-miss for me these days. Sometimes it's very helpful. I think I reread the extended version of The Stand (Stephen King) four or five times in three years, for example.

The Gate to Women's Country is probably my favorite Tepper, though a lot of her stuff hasn't aged well. But there's something really delicious about the ways rereading it shows you how obvious and blatant she was being about what she was doing -- subtle, Tepper is not, ref. Gibbon's Decline and Fall or, even more so, Beauty.

When I was living with my grandmother my senior year of high school, I read every Dean Koontz novel, because she had them all and I was flush with the thrill of non-Christian books lying around the house, freely available. From the Corner of His Eye is a more common reread for me than Life Expectancy, but I found the latter in a mislaid box from our move last fall and by the time I looked up I was 3/4 of the way through.

Hidden Valley Road I deeply enjoyed. I read other mental health nonfiction this year I didn't like nearly as much, and found much less moving and visceral.

I love Murderbot the way I love the Imperial Radch books (Ann Leckie), and for many of the same reasons. I've nothing else to say about that.

I almost forgot The Unseen World; it's not the book I thought it would be (I kept thinking of Alexandra Oliva's Forget Me Not) but it was lovely in its way. Later in the year I read a much better, to me, book that meditated on some of the same themes, but this was quiet and fine.

King, for me, will always be comforting. Even when reading a new one, I know what beats we'll get. I know what themes his work will hit and which parts I'll just let slide over my brain without engaging, and I know that I will be satisfied at worst with whatever happens. Specifically I wanted to reread "The End of the Whole Mess," because I'd reread "Survivor Type" last year and could have sworn it had really similar choices in language (it does, I was right).

February

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
Hench	Natalia Zina Walschots	x
Shadows in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #51
Faithless in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #52
Rolling in the Deep	Mira Grant	x	Rolling in the Deep #0.5
Forgotten in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #53
Abandoned in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #54
Desperation in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #55
Daisy Jones & the Six	Taylor Jenkins Reid
Ella Enchanted	Gail Carson Levine	x
The Two Princesses of Bamarre	Gail Carson Levine	x
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow	Gabrielle Zevin
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke	Eric LaRocca
Salvation Day	Kali Wallace
Killers of a Certain Age	Deanna Raybourne
Catherine, Called Birdy	Karen Cushman	x
Hatchet	Gary Paulsen	x	Hatchet #1
Brian's Winter	Gary Paulsen	x	Hatchet #3
Brian's Return	Gary Paulsen	x	Hatchet #4
A Brother's Price	Wen Spencer
The Last Astronaut	David Wellington

Hench is like the Murderbot books, in that I read it and see what my own writing voice would look like if I was disciplined and better at it. They feel like me, or like someone I'd get along with really well at least.

Killer mermaids in Rolling in the Deep. 'Nuff said.

Daisy Jones I enjoyed more than I expected, and it sent me on a wild goose chase looking for a specific YA novel I used to reread constantly (6X: The Uncensored Confessions by Nina Malkin) but to no avail. I like fake bands; That Thing You Do! (1996) is a perennial favorite. And I think Reid mostly managed to avoid the problem with books about bands, where the lyrics are hard to make sound cool. Books about great musicians or writers demand that you, the author, show how great they are, and that's prone to backfiring. I didn't love the ending of this, and I haven't watched the show, but I have very fond memories of sections, especially the bit with shooting the album cover.

I think Gail Carson Levine had more influence on me as a young reader than any other single author except K. A. Applegate and maybe Stephen King if you squint. I was actually rereading these to test them out for my kiddo, whose reading taste runs hard to graphic novels and books about heroic dogs right now. But they are never, ever wasted rereads, not Levine.

Tomorrow was fantastic. As it trickled through my friend group, one particular moment would be reached by whoever was reading it at the time and we'd get a whole new thread of screaming reactions. Just a beautiful weaving of ideas. (This is the book I hoped The Unseen World would be, or at least, this is the version of grappling with related themes I wanted)

The LaRocca I really liked; it's I think also in a collection of his but I don't need to read it. Just this one. I get leery about "the dangers of the internet" stories, because I grew up on the internet, but this one is almost more about the inherent inability to ever know another human being, which. Perennial subject.

I loved Salvation Day. It's got all my favorite stuff: zombies! Haunted spaceships! Parental trauma! Politics! Claustrophobia!

Killers was very fun and I enjoyed it a lot. That sounds like faint praise but it's not, I read the occasional gimmick and often they're fine but I don't love them but I immediately insisted several friends read this, too, because it was pure unmitigated delight through and through and also poked in certain soft underbelly areas I wasn't expecting (I will be 40 pretty damn soon and a meditation on mediocrity and failing to live up to one's potential and aging out of the parts of life one might be decent at, uh, hits)

Karen Cushman could go on the list of kids' books that changed me, too; I read this because I watched the movie for the first time, and I was so incandescently angry with some of the changes I had to soothe myself by reading it again. The cast is great, the movie looks great, and it so fundamentally misunderstands the ending of the book it made me furious.

See also Gary Paulsen -- note I don't read The River when I reread these books, because it's not nearly as good as the others. And I haven't ever read the fifth, Brian's Hunt, because I read a summary and noped out of it hard. Gary Paulsen's stuff is always a comfort, too, with the same beats in every single book and no qualms at all about them.

I hang out in the what's that book subreddit quite a bit and every week someone asks about a book where men are really rare and they group marry sisters and there's a bunch of princesses in it, and every time it's A Brother's Price. It got to the point where I knew the answer without having read the book, and I figured I should try it out. It's perfectly fine, a nice fast read, and if I bristled some at our ~perfect protagonist, the supporting cast at least has some interesting characters.

The Last Astronaut was fucking great. Just. Fuckin' great. The first half is a really solid near-future sci fi and the second half is deeply and gleefully unpleasant body horror and I loved both.

March

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
Radiant Sin	Katee Robert		Dark Olympus #4
The Midwife's Apprentice	Karen Cushman	x
Skeleton Song	Seanan McGuire		Wayward Children #7.7
I Have Some Questions for You	Rebecca Makkai
Users	Colin Winnette
Encore in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #56
Dead Space	Kali Wallace
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art	Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo	x

Oofa doofa. Katee Robert can write a scorcher and I loved all the others so far in this series, but I really, really struggled with parts of Radiant Sin, namely the ending. But I'm not gonna say it wasn't effective.

The Wayward Children books I find really hit or miss, which bums me out. When I like them, I love them, and when I don't, I'm deathly bored. This is the latter and it's not because it's not well done. I just couldn't get invested at all.

Makkai is brilliant. This fucking ruled.

Colin Winnette always takes me a million years to read (note how short the March list is) but I always enjoy the experience. This was unsettling and made my skin crawl, which is all I ask of a Winnette joint.

Dead Space was great.

Provenance is probably my favorite art forgery nonfiction, which is a special interest I only rarely indulge as it ends with us going to our art museum and muttering conspiracy theories to my pointedly uninterested spouse while my art-loving kiddo is in hog heaven.

April

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
In the House in the Dark of the Woods	Laird Hunt
And Then I Woke Up	Malcolm Devlin
Gideon the Ninth	Tamsyn Muir	x	The Locked Tomb #1
Harrow the Ninth	Tamsyn Muir	x	The Locked Tomb #2
Nona the Ninth	Tamsyn Muir	x	The Locked Tomb #3
Lavender House	Lev AC Rosen		Andy Mills #1
The Raven Tower	Ann Leckie	x
Shift Omnibus	Hugh Howey	x
Half Way Home	Hugh Howey

In the House felt like reading Tender Morsels (Margo Lanagan) again. That's a compliment.

And Then I Woke Up was great and I don't want to talk about it.

I'm not going to evangelize the Locked Tomb books, they're buckwild and every book is both a different genre and told from the perspective of the character least equipped to understand or care about what's happening. Also memes.

Lavender House ruled.

The Raven Tower is astonishing, and is probably what I'd hand someone to convert them to Leckie, not because I don't love Breq but because it's a standalone with an immediately less "what the fuck" vibe of trying to figure out what the deal is with pronouns and things. It's fantasy Hamlet. People can get with fantasy Hamlet pretty quickly, then they'll get suckered in.

Hugh Howey is always a little bit of a disappointment. I always like his plots and I never really love the execution of them.

May

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything	Mike Rothschild
Sea of Rust	C. Robert Cargill	x	Sea of Rust #1
Day Zero	C. Robert Cargill		Sea of Rust #0
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead	Sara Gran	x	Claire DeWitt Mysteries #1
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway	Sara Gran	x	Claire DeWitt Mysteries #2
The Hunger Games	Suzanne Collins	x	The Hunger Games #1
Catching Fire	Suzanne Collins	x	The Hunger Games #2
Mockingjay	Suzanne Collins	x	The Hunger Games #3
Pucking Around	Emily Rath
Crash Into You	Roni Loren
The Library at Mount Char	Scott Hawkins	x
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial	Maggie Nelson	x
The Argonauts	Maggie Nelson
Motherthing	Ainslie Hogarth
The Institute	Stephen King	x
Carrie	Stephen King	x
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing	Hank Green		The Carls #1
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor	Hank Green		The Carls #2
The Traitor Baru Cormorant	Seth Dickinson	x	The Masquerade #1
The Monster Baru Cormorant	Seth Dickinson		The Masquerade #2
The Tyrant Baru Cormorant	Seth Dickinson		The Masquerade #3
Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution	Ji-Li Jiang	x
The Boys from Brazil	Ira Levin	x
This Perfect Day	Ira Levin	x
Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir	Padma Lakshmi
The Secret Place	Tana French	x	Dublin Murder Squad #5
The Green Mile	Stephen King	x

OK Look. May was weird. The QAnon book was actually legitimately great, with maybe not quite the tone I expected but very much about the incredible difficulty of deprogramming people who are in cults, and the especially pernicious way that QAnon hits the same parts of the brain that love, like, alternate reality games.

Sea of Rust is one of my personal favorite books, and I didn't know there was a prequel (the prequel is fine). It's a Western in which all humans are already dead because the robots already killed us all, and now there's a robot bounty hunter situation going on. Just pure delight.

Claire DeWitt and the Hunger Games are, for whatever reasons, linked in my head and limbic system. Protagonists who aren't good people, exactly, and are pretty self-aware regarding how unlikeable they are and the levels of harm they're doing to their interpersonal relationships by lashing out. I love them both.

Two hockey romances. Don't ask.

The Library at Mount Char is viscerally upsetting and very good.

I've read The Red Parts a few times and really liked it, but hadn't read any of Nelson's other stuff, and I kind of hated The Argonauts partially because I personally am not especially clever but also because I just found it unpleasant to read. That being said, I read it in a day, and couldn't stop reading long enough to explain why I kept frowning at my phone to my spouse.

Motherthing was fucking awful in the very best possible way.

I read these two Kings because they reminded me of each other. Also I think while King doesn't necessarily write teens especially well, he does very clearly get and get across the ways that systems and organizations fail kids and teens fucking constantly.

Hank Green's diagnosis in May was what got me to finally read his novels and they're both very good. I cried.

The Baru Cormorant books were because I was still thinking about Claire and Katniss, and Baru Cormorant has shades of that, too.

Then Baru lead extremely naturally to this childhood favorite of mine, a memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which lead naturally to one of my favorite Levins followed by my least favorite (I was hoping I'd enjoy it more this read but I did not at all, but in general I love Levin).

Padma's book is a delight and very sad and good.

The King pairing earlier in the month made me want to revisit another person who writes teens with middling, to me, accuracy but a very clear grasp of the emotional truth of teen experiences, and besides Tana French is never wasted time.

I wanted to reread the part in The Green Mile where John Coffey kills that guy, and I couldn't remember how far into it that part was. I'm very predictable.

June

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
The Collector	John Fowles
Yellowface	R. F. Kuang
Translation State	Ann Leckie		Imperial Radch #5
Sister, Maiden, Monster	Lucy A. Snyder
Natural Beauty	Ling Ling Huang
We Sold Our Souls	Grady Hendrix	x
BadAsstronauts	Grady Hendrix
The Final Girl Support Group	Grady Hendrix	x
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes	Suzanne Collins		The Hunger Games #4
Spindle's End	Robin McKinley	x
Pageboy: A Memoir	Elliot Page
My Best Friend's Exorcism	Grady Hendrix	x
The Mimicking of Known Successes	Malka Older		Mossa & Pleiti #1
A Psalm for the Wild-Built	Becky Chambers		Monk & Robot #1
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy	Becky Chambers		Monk & Robot #2
Self-Portrait with Nothing	Aimee Pokwatka
The Thick and the Lean	Chana Porter
Some Desperate Glory	Emily Tesh
The Seep	Chana Porter
The Fifth Season	N. K. Jemisin	x	The Broken Earth #1
The Great Believers	Rebecca Makkai

I cried at nearly every book I read in June. The Collector wasn't one of them; I've meant to read it for ages but I always mixed it up with The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks), which I've read a few times. It's not that. It's in fact horrifying in the exact same way, so at least I wasn't wildly off-base.

Yellowface made me howl, and when a friend started reading it I waited patiently for them to reach a specific moment. We screamed about it for a while. It's very good; I haven't managed to get through any of Kuang's fantasy work, but this I enjoyed a ton.

Translation State fucking rules.

Sister, Maiden, Monster and Natural Beauty are both really, really gross body horror, and I enjoyed both very, very much.

All the Grady Hendrixes are worth the time. I always like his stuff, though I've picked up and put down How to Sell a Haunted House a few times this year because the timing hasn't worked yet.

Ballad of Songbirds was fine. It was wild how much Hunger Games fanfic nailed the eventual canon, I'll just say that.

Spindle's End is my very favorite Robin McKinley, even over The Hero and the Crown which was one of my first real loves.

Pageboy was moving, visceral, and -- this is not an insult -- could probably have used a slightly stronger editorial hand. I found the returning element of swimming and swimsuits really effective and, again, moving.

Malka Older sniped me right in the soft underbelly. Sapphic Holmes/Watson in space? Like?!

I loved Becky Chambers as a sci-fi writer, I should have expected this gentle post-apocalypse story about healing and hope to also gut me, and yet! I was surprised!

Self-Portrait with Nothing made me sob unexpectedly as well, it's about a lot of things including parenthood and guilt and shame.

I like Chana Porter's stuff, though I wouldn't say it made me, idk, sob like a tiny infant, but that isn't a bad thing. Think, yes; sob, no.

Some Desperate Glory got me good, though: religious trauma is uh a thing and I happened to read this just after my grandmother passed away, and it -- she'd had dementia for a really long time so I'd done a lot of mourning already. But I hadn't mourned the way her house, that year I lived with her, was the first place I could ever try to be someone I thought I might actually be, instead of remaining the person I was expected to be. I cried about every eh let's say twenty pages of this. No one is irredeemable and also no one can ever really escape the evil they did, and the evil one did unknowing, or at least unaware, is no less evil for it, but too one has the responsibility, once that unknowingness is gone, to do whatever can be done to make up for it (which you can't, ever, you can't ever fix what you did, you can't ever even the scales, you can only do the best you can do with every remaining choice you make now that the scales have fallen from your eyes and...).

Anyway. N. K. never misses.

I liked this Makkai but if you're only gonna read one it's gotta be I Have Some Questions for You, they're incomparable.

July

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
The Transall Saga	Gary Paulsen	x
Ancillary Sword	Ann Leckie	x	Imperial Radch #2
Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie	x	Imperial Radch #3
Maeve Fly	CJ Leede
Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost	Michael C. Bender
Seveneves	Neal Stephenson	x
Beware the Woman	Megan Abbott
A Restless Truth	Freya Marske		The Last Binding #2
Camp Damascus	Chuck Tingle
The Witch King	Martha Wells
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms	N. K. Jemisin	x	The Inheritance Trilogy #1
The Broken Kingdom	N. K. Jemisin	x	The Inheritance Trilogy #2
The Kingdom of Gods	N. K. Jemisin	x	The Inheritance Trilogy #3
Anathem	Neal Stephenson	x
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness	Megan O'Rourke
Watch How We Walk	Jennifer LoveGrove	x
Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism	Jeffrey Toobin

This Paulsen also shows up on what's that book a ton, mostly people remembering the twist or the blue light without a lot of the surrounding elements. Paulsen doesn't do sci fi, really, so this one sits oddly, but I've always liked it.

The thing about the Imperial Radch books -- not the thing, a thing -- is that they're about labor, about who benefits, who prospers, who gets justice, etc. So was The Raven Tower, maybe even more explicitly. Leckie writes about labor in every word on the page, and it kills me.

Maeve Fly is another kind of gross book with a strong body horror element but it genuinely really did surprise me, which doesn't happen much, and I liked it quite a lot.

Fuck the former President. Sometimes I can't read about him or his whole deal and sometimes I devour anything that ends with him losing.

These are the only 2 Stephenson books I've ever finished and I like them both very much for very similar reasons, in that they're in large part about people making choices to serve a larger goal that sometimes backfire horribly because the villains are less villains and more people with different starting points of view and different frames of reference whose difference makes it hard to understand them.

Megan Abbott rarely misses; I sobbed hard at this one, too.

I like these gay-ass magic books so much. Freya Marske could write another thirty in this trilogy and I'd be stoked.

Camp Damascus fucking ruled.

I wasn't sure I'd like this, as I'd tried to read a different fantasy novel by my beloved Murderbot's author, but I was immediately hooked and deeply obsessed. There is a new Murderbot but I want to do a full reread of the whole series in one go before I take it on, sue me.

N. K. never misses. I found this one more meaningful on reread than the first time through; the whole trilogy is again really interested in guilt and shame, and in legacy (like beloved best favorite forever The Broken Earth Trilogy is).

I read The Invisible Kingdom in the narrow sliver of time where I thought maybe a test result meant my terrible body had a reason to be terrible and there might be things I could do to fix it, which ended up not being true, but I'm glad I read it.

I wish I could hate Watch How We Walk because it makes me so sad and angry and ashamed every time I read it. It's very good.

Homegrown was very hard to read; a few years back I read Sam Anderson's Boom Town, which is a history of Oklahoma City, mostly, and it had a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the Bombing and I, who was seven when it happened, have not yet apparently reached a place where I can dispassionately read about it. Last year we took my kiddo to the Bombing Museum and Memorial, her first time, because we were moving away from Oklahoma and wanted to give her this last piece of it, and I immediately realized that it was going to be very difficult for me, an adult, to walk through this museum. We kept having to stop to let me try to breathe, and to avert her gaze from something that was too much, and it's just -- if you're ever in the City, hit up the Museum. It's worth it. This was very good and very upsetting.

August

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
The Archive Undying	Emma Mieko Candon
Braniac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs	Ken Jennings	x
Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America	Audrey Clare Farley
Room	Emma Donoghue	x
Feet of Clay	Terry Pratchett	x	Discworld
Haven	Emma Donoghue
Slammerkin	Emma Donoghue	x
Jingo	Terry Pratchett	x	Discworld
Helpmeet	Naben Ruthnum
Unwind	Neal Shusterman	x	Unwind Dystology #1
Unwholly	Neal Shusterman		Unwind Dystology #2
Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA	Theresa Runstedtler
Unsouled	Neal Shusterman		Unwind Dystology #3
The Deep	Nick Cutter
Undivided	Neal Shusterman		Unwind Dystology #4

The Archive Undying should be subtitled "S this is so much your shit you're gonna be furious you can't read it for the first time again."

Ken Jennings kind of sucks now but I loved this book back in the day. It's fine. I did quiz bowl (we called it academic team) and was very good at it because it, like ethics debate, was a place where what made me bad at being a person was a strength.

Girls and Their Monsters wasn't as good as Hidden Valley Road but has the same vibe.

Emma Donoghue gets it.

Sir Pterry never missed.

Helpmeet fucked me up.

I'd read Unwind like everyone in my library program did, but I had never had any interest in the rest of the series. Having finished it, I still think it's fine to stop at the first. The rest is something something diminishing returns (ha).

Nick Cutter's The Deep maybe was the most expectation-busting thing all month. I'd really liked his The Troop last year but I was not expecting to be genuinely scared during this one. It's Sphere but way worse (better).

Black Ball became the go-to dad gift for a few friends; my "your dad and I probably like all the same movies" joke isn't really a joke, there is a dadly element in my love of weird documentaries and movies about teamwork and sports documentaries especially.

September

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
Noumenon	Mariana J. Lostetter		Noumenon #1
The Beauty	Aliya Whiteley
The Loosening Skin	Aliya Whitely
Skyward Inn	Aliya Whitely
Love & Other Disasters	Anita Kelly
Noumenon Infinity	Mariana J. Lostetter		Noumenon #2
Meddling Kids	Edgar Cantero	x
There There	Tommy Orange
Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously	Julie Powell	x
The Gate to Women's Country	Sheri S. Tepper	x
Reader, I Murdered Him	Betsy Cornwell
The Golden Spoon	Jessa Maxwell
Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season	Nick Heil
A Separation	Katie Kitamura
Legends & Lattes	Travis Baldree		Legends & Lattes #1
Son	Lois Lowry		The Giver Quartet #4
The Devil's Arithmetic	Jane Yolen	x

The Noumenon books are fun. I didn't adore them but I liked them.

Of the Whiteleys, if I was going to recommend one, it'd be The Loosening Skin, though I must be clear that I deeply enjoyed all three.

Love & Other Disasters was very cute and features a nonbinary protagonist character so like. Duh.

I like Meddling Kids so much, it's like The Afterward (E. K. Johnston) but for Scooby-Doo.

There There was very, very good.

Julie & Julia was what I had at hand when I was stuck in the car for a while on a trip. It's fine. I didn't ever read Powell's other work because I didn't like her as a narrator much.

Yes I read The Gate to Women's Country again. Shut up.

Both Reader, I and Golden Spoon were fun, fast, and not quite what I hoped for from the premise, though I did truly enjoy Reader.

Dark Summit is probably my third-favorite book about how no one should climb Mount Everest.

I've owned A Separation for probably five years, and never got around to even cracking it open. It's dreamy and odd and I can't say I loved it, but I did devour it very fast.

Legends & Lattes was very cute and if not as gay as I hoped, much sweeter.

I hadn't read Son for several reasons, despite having read the other three Giver books over and over. It's pretty okay. I strongly prefer The Giver and Gathering Blue and could take or leave the other two.

I don't remember why it was so urgent that I reread this particular Yolen; all Yolens are worth the time, this one especially.

I again apologize for what's coming next.

October

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
Code Name Verity	Elizabeth Wein	x	Code Name Verity #1
Rose Under Fire	Elizabeth Wein		Code Name Verity #2
The Salvation Gambit	Emily Skrutskie
The Grace of Sorcerers	Maria Ying
Bloom	Delilah S. Dawson
Burn the Negative	Josh Winning
Black River Orchard	Chuck Wendig
Curse of the Reaper	Brian McAuley
Daughter of the Blood	Anne Bishop		The Black Jewels #1
Heir to the Shadows	Anne Bishop		The Black Jewels #2
Queen of the Darkness	Anne Bishop		The Black Jewels #3
The Invisible Ring	Anne Bishop		The Black Jewels #4
Dreams Made Flesh	Anne Bishop		The Black Jewels #10
Salt Kiss	Sierra Simone		Lyonesse #1
Wild Things	Laura Kay
Mrs. Caliban	Rachel Ingalls
The Getaway	Lamar Giles
Hide	Kiersten White	x
The Centre	Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible	A. J. Jacobs	x
Really Good, Actually	Monica Heisey
Knock Knock, Open Wide	Neil Sharpson
We Could Be So Good	Cat Sebastian
The Likeness	Tana French	x	Dublin Murder Squad #2
In the Woods	Tana French	x	Dublin Murder Squad #1
Faithful Place	Tana French	x	Dublin Murder Squad #3
Broken Harbor	Tana French	x	Dublin Murder Squad #4
If We Were Villains	M. L. Rio
Radio Silence	Alice Oseman
The Bees	Laline Paull	x
The Trespasser	Tana French	x	Dublin Murder Squad #6
The Secret History	Donna Tartt	x
When No One is Watching	Alyssa Cole
Winter Counts	David Heska Wanbli Weiden
The Guinevere Deception	Kiersten White	x	Camelot Rising #1
The Camelot Betrayal	Kiersten White		Camelot Rising #2
The Excalibur Curse	Kiersten White		Camelot Rising #3
The Bell in the Fog	Lev AC Rosen		Andy Mills #2
Holly	Stephen King		Holly Gibney #3

OK I warned you, you can't be mad. I was on my couch all month, trying very hard to not freak out too bad. So I, in an example of excellent decision-making, reread a reliable sobbing-mess-inspirer, and then realized I'd never read the sequel, which also brought on the sobs though I don't think I actually liked it as much, but, you know. Pain meds.

Salvation Gambit I really liked.

I loved The Grace of Sorcerers which means I was furious when I googled the author and realized it's a pen name for someone I loathe so now I'm mad about it.

Bloom was quite fun. So was Burn the Negative and Black River Orchard and Curse of the Reaper. A bunch of fairly campy, fairly fun horror for my traditionally favorite time of year.

The Anne Bishop books are not, let me be clear, good. I did not really enjoy them. I love the Kushiel books and was recommended these and the comparison's sure not wrong. I don't believe in hate-reading, and this wasn't that, but it was more desperation for something to think about that wasn't my ankle than true enjoyment. Note: yes, I skipped from #4 to that short story collection, because I didn't want to read any more about it. They're what they are. I'm not mad I read them.

Salt Kiss fucked me up.

Wild Things ended wrongly, in my opinion, but I enjoyed it up until then.

Mrs. Caliban fucked me up. Monsterfuckers, it's your Shirley Jackson!

The Getaway I really enjoyed; it spurred me to finally buy a copy of Kiersten White's Hide because I loved that book, too, as I love any and all "theme park plus death" books.

I loved big chunks of The Centre and then again was dissatisfied with the ending.

A. J. Jacobs kind of sucks but I like this book.

Really Good, Actually was very funny and probably twice as long as it needed to be.

The Sharpson fucking ruled.

We Could Be So Good was fantastic.

Tana French never misses.

M. L. Rio wrote The Secret History Again But With Shakespeare and it was fine.

Radio Silence is not -not- Welcome to Night Vale RPF.

I love xenofiction and The Bees is a really cool version of it.

The Secret History The First Time With Greek remains a fave.

I love Alyssa Cole, and this was great.

Winter Counts was amazing and fucked me up good.

Kiersten White doesn't seem to miss.

The Bell in the Fog was even better than the first one, and gayer and sweeter and sadder and I just love these books.

Holly was a Stephen King book about the pandemic, what do you want from me?

See, we made it through! Sorry also about November, I forgot to warn you about it.

November

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
The Dead Take the A Train	Cassandra Khaw & Richard Kadrey
At the End of Every Day	Arianna Reiche
A Brother's Price	Wen Spencer	x
Chlorine	Jade Song
Begin Transmission: The Trans Allegories of The Matrix	Tilly Bridges
Loki's Ring	Stina Leicht
Thornhedge	T. Kingfisher
Nettle & Bone	T. Kingfisher	x
Mister Magic	Kiersten White
A House with Good Bones	T. Kingfisher
A Season of Monstrous Conceptions	Lina Rather
Tipping the Velvet	Sarah Waters	x
Phantom	Helen Power
The Ellimist Chronicles	K. A. Applegate	x	Animorphs Chronicles #4
Visser	K. A. Applegate	x	Animorphs Chronicles #3
The Andalite Chronicles	K. A. Applegate	x	Animorphs Chronicles #1
Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie	x	Imperial Radch #1
Ancillary Sword	Ann Leckie	x	Imperial Radch #2
Ancillary Mercy	Ann Leckie	x	Imperial Radch #3
The Steerswoman	Rosemary Kirstein		Steerswoman #1
A Court of Thorns and Roses	Sarah J. Maas		A Court of Thorns and Roses #1
A Court of Mist and Fury	Sarah J. Maas		A Court of Thorns and Roses #2
Translation State	Ann Leckie	x	Imperial Radch #5
A Court of Wings and Ruin	Sarah J. Maas		A Court of Thorns and Roses #3

Look, I -- okay. Dead Take the A Train ruled. I've tried to read other Khaw joints and they haven't stuck but I adored this gross-ass-gory-ass book. Gross! Gory! Great!

At the End of Every Day is about an evil theme park (kind of), of course I loved it. I did find it weirdly slow to start but it picks up nicely and had a genuinely surprising set of shifts midway through.

Yes, I read A Brother's Price again. Yes, I also reread the Imperial Radch books again. Thanks. I know. I know.

Chlorine fucked me up real bad, I knew pretty quickly what our protagonist was gonna do and I was not at all happy about it but it was really well done.

Begin Transmission made me happy and I rewatched the quartet of movies with joy in my heart. Even before I consciously allowed myself to know that I was Other Than Cis, the Matrix movies meant so, so much to me. Tangent: Resurrections gets flack for a lot of reasons and I get it but fuck off, I love that movie. I love its humor and its seething anger underneath, I love our new crew and their pointed and purposeful reclamation of the signifiers used to show their allyship with the people still in the Matrix and I love the fractal reinforcement of the fuckin' point of the thing and I love Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in his sharp and colorful suits and I love the way Carrie-Anne Moss holds her jaw and I love the movie a lot.

Loki's Ring snuck up on me; I'd gotten maybe a third in and half-decided to dump it and then a bunch of cool and upsetting shit happened very quickly and I read the whole rest of the thing in a day.

T. Kingfisher never misses.

I sobbed constantly at Mister Magic, surprising myself; religious trauma's a real dick punch. I was expecting Hide again, good and worrying and full of moments of real effective heartbreak, but about a third of the way through this I realized what buttons were being pushed (the author's note at the end makes it clear these are intentional buttons, not just "S overreacts to things that hit specific soft places") and I fuckin' lost it. I read the whole thing in one long, agonized gasp, terrified and hurt and scared and never once did I think this wasn't going to be on my faves of the year list; jesus h. tapdancing christ and his unicorn friends, y'all.

A Season was cool, I liked it a lot.

Tipping the Velvet always makes me cry.

Phantom was fine. Very fast.

K. A. never misses and The Ellimist Chronicles is probably my favorite of the whole dang series, the Animorphs tattoo I want is from it.

I read The Steerswoman on a blind rec from bluesky; the advice I was given was to read nothing about it and just start it, and that's the advice I give you as well. You'll enjoy it more the less you know going in.

I'm so mad about these Maas books, y'all. I'll talk about them in the next section.

December

Title	Author	Reread?	Series
A Court of Frost and Starlight	Sarah J. Maas		A Court of Thorns and Roses #4
A Court of Silver Flames	Sarah J. Maas		A Court of Thorns and Roses #5
Last to Leave the Room	Caitlin Starling
Where the Dead Wait	Ally Wilkes
Liberty's Daughter	Naomi Kritzer
Burning Roses	S. L. Huang
Paladin's Grace	T. Kingfisher		The Saint of Steel #1
Bookshops & Bonedust	Travis Baldree		Legends & Lattes #0
Gone Girl	Gillian Flynn	x
Payback in Death	J. D. Robb		In Death #57
Sharp Objects	Gillian Flynn	x
Provenance	Ann Leckie	x	Imperial Radch #4
A Power Unbound	Freya Marske		The Last Binding #3
Swan Song	Robert R. McCammon	x
The Little Stranger	Sarah Waters
Paladin's Strength	T. Kingfisher		The Saint of Steel #2
Paladin's Hope	T. Kingfisher		The Saint of Steel #3

This month started out rough. Let's talk about these dang Maas books. I fucking hated them. No. That's not fair. The first one I got frustrated with when I realized it was just "Beauty & the Beast" again, but with "Tam Lin" over the top of it. But that's fine, I like a fairy tale retelling. Then I read the second one, which is just the Persephone myth again, and actually mostly enjoyed it. I liked the nice duology of "oh our trauma killed what could have been something really important, and that's very sad, but I'm going to find happiness anyway." Then I kept reading them, which was my mistake in the books' defense, they didn't make me keep reading them, and every page of the following books made me more and more mad. There's so much The Black Jewels in here, and if I hadn't literally just read those a few months ago I'd think it was very inventive, some of the stuff, but it's just Jaenelle and Daemon and Lucivar and shit! Again! These are Black Jewels fanfic with the serial numbers filed off! And that's one thing, whatever, I can deal with that, but then Maas keeps fucking up the appeal of her decent-to-begin-with male characters by making them 180 from where she placed them! And she released some bullshit extra chapter scuttling the one ship in which I'm even vaguely invested, for some fucking reason! I am angry! I avoided reading these books for years because I was pretty sure I wouldn't like them, and I again don't believe in hate-reading but goddamn, I was fuckin' right. They are fast and easy and some of the characters are pretty cool until the exact second Maas decides she wants them to drastically change into a whole other type of character. I'll be reading the next one(s) in the hopes she lets the one ship I care about be great, obvs, and because I'm mad about it but they have real pull and momentum. Grrr.

Last to Leave the Room was good. Starling wrote The Luminous Dead which I'm obsessed with, and I didn't like this one as much, but it kept changing, which I enjoyed.

Where the Dead Wait disappointed. I love the Arctic and I love lost ships and I love guilt and I love cannibalism and I thought this book could have been cut by at least half and been notably improved. Nearly every scene went on two beats too long.

Liberty's Daughter was disappointing and dragged some especially for the first half, but I did end up mostly enjoying it.

Burning Roses was cool.

Paladin's Grace made me cry and I loved it, T. Kingfisher nailed it again. All 3 Paladin books are great, and don't worry, the 3rd one is finally, finally gay (my library doesn't have the 4th one yet but whoo boise that reveal at the end of 3 has me salivating, baybee).

Bookshops & Bonedust, here I must confess I forgot the protagonist's name from Legends & Lattes and spent the whole book thinking it was very cool to have two very sweet books with hot orcs opening quiet businesses after leaving their violent lives but NO it's in fact ONE hot orc doing that, which is fine! I just didn't realize until the literal closing scene that this hot orc and the one from the first book are the same hot orc (I'm very bad with names).

Gillian Flynn's stuff hasn't, to me, aged super well; I still like Gone Girl and found Sharp Objects still upsetting, but I stopped Dark Places in disgust. I kind of hate that one, and I don't love any of them like I did a few years ago.

New In Death book gave me exactly what I needed from it.

Freya fuckin' Marske nailed the goddamn landing.

Swan Song brought us all the way back around to pandemic fiction; it's very The Stand but also very not. There are parts that are really, really boring, but the overall story just hits for me.

Sarah Waters is always a joy; I actually had read about 60% of this a few times and just never powered through to finish, but my spouse was out of town all weekend and my insomnia was uncharacteristically thorough -- I restarted Baldur's Gate III again (I have run tabletop and D&D games online for nearly a decade but am very bad at video games) and finished Little Stranger finally and dropped something on my good foot so now both feet hurt even more than usual all the time.

Good way to mark off the year, I believe.

10 New-to-Me Faves

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin

"To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could."

Killers of a Certain Age - Deanna Raybourne

"It's a comfortable place, mediocrity. Never pushing oneself to the limit to see what you can take. Never staring down your fears, never reaching into yourself to find that last bit of courage."

Lavender House - Lev AC Rosen / The Bell in the Fog - Lev AC Rosen

"There is no homosexual problem aside from that created by a heterosexual society."

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing - Hank Green / A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor - Hank Green

"Basically, do your best to mock and deride their connection to and appreciation of you because, deep down, you dislike yourself enough that you cannot imagine anyone worthwhile actually wanting to be with you. I mean, if they like you, there must be something wrong with them, right?"

Yellowface - R. F. Kuang

"Does the way that it’s credited matter as much as the fact that, without me, the book might never see the light of day?"

Translation State - Ann Leckie

"You have what you have, whatever you were born with, but you get to decide what to do with that."

Some Desperate Glory - Emily Tesh

"What a waste it was, what a terrible waste, to take a person who dreamed cities and gardens and enormous shining skies and teach him that the only answer to an unanswerable suffering was slaughter."

Camp Damascus - Chuck Tingle

"That acknowledgement could arrive after several decades, or it could happen tonight, but the time will come. Eventually, I'll have to fully contend with this simple fact: the love I was promised was conditional."

The Archive Undying - Emma Mieko Candon

"You push—pull—push—rock and ease and shove, claw your way up the ruddy length of root until it pops out your back and you fall forward on your hands, panting high and tight, afraid of the pain that would come with deep breath.

This isn’t what happened; you never did free yourself."

Mister Magic - Kiersten White

"You never forget the lesson that they would rather destroy you than let you inconvenience them."

Conclusion!

Look, read what you like. I like, as should be clear, body horror and political sci fi and nonfiction about stuff no one cares about and soft fantasy and mean-spirited female protagonists and sweet queer love stories and YA novels and the In Death books and books that I don't realize are going to make me sob but do. I reread constantly and I find something new every time I do.

Next year I'm hoping to do this as a monthly thing, so it's not uhhhh this long. Then a yearly wrap up with more detailed looks at my new-to-me faves. Sorry again about breaking my foot and ankle and your patience, no doubt.

And no matter what, I hope you found something you love this year.

Yours most ardently,

• S