Welcome to booknook, made because a lot of the reading comms on DW seem pretty dead and/or focused on getting you to read.

This is made to be a general reading community. Hopefully there'll be a few regular posts:

RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday
Monthly themed rec post (to be clear, inviting other people to rec books that fit the theme in the comments, not me reccing books)

(If you realize I've missed a regular post, you're more than welcome to post it in my place! My memory can at times not be relied upon.)

Members of the comm are able to post whenever they want. A few suggestions are things like reviews, discussions about a particular book/author/series, reading challenges, reading memes, asking for recs, recomending books, news about upcoming books you're excited about (or dread; there can be a lot of feels about books!).

While you need to be a member to post, you do not need to be one to comment.

General Posting Guidelines

The subject line should always make it clear what kind of post it is; IE, it should state if it's a review, recommendation, request for recommendations, discussion post etc.
All posts should be tagged. If the tag you need doesn't exist, use the tag [!] non-existent tag. If the amount of tags is overwhelming (I know it can be), then use the tag browsing feature on the post creation page, at which point there will be an option to search for tags. Use that to search for the tags you need and ignore the rest. And don't worry; as the admin, I can add/remove tags as needed!
If your posts includes NSFW material, whatever that may be, adjust the post's age restriction. The default is no restriction. There's also NSFW and SFW tags; these are voluntary.
Review posts should include headers with all necessary information; title, author, genres, content warnings etc.
Crossposting is allowed! But if you're crossposting a post here, do please post it in its entirety, don't just go "and you can continue reading at..."
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HTML Code for a read more cut:

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This is not a self-promo community for authors, but in the interest of there being clear rules about that, here are those:

One (1) promotion post per title OR one (1) promotion post per series. It should be clearly tagged as self-promotion, and the subject line should go like this: [Self-Promo] your books title (Genre, Sub-Genre)
You are not allowed to rec your books unless a person is asking for recs that your book specifically fits.

quillpunk

Hello, hello!

booknook is (again) tossing its hat in the ring for

3weeks4dreamwidth in the form of a friending meme :D

This is the same meme as last year, as I do not have the brain-space to make a new one, but who knows! You're answers might have changed! You might not have seen the newest entries! You might have completely forgotten to check it out at all, even though you're the admin and you really should have. So let's do this again! <3

Copy and paste the text from the little box below into a new comment on this post. Feel free to remove the questions that aren't relevant for you! (If you want to fill this out in a post somewhere else, you're welcome do so, simply credit

booknook :D)

rocky41_7

Title: Empty Wardrobes
Author: Maria Judite de Carvalho
Translator: Margaret Jull Costa
Genre: Fiction, literary

I collect false treasures in empty wardrobes.

This quote by Paul Eluard opens book #14 from the "Women in Translation" rec list, which continues to fatten up my TBR list. This is Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. This novella, originally published in the 1960s, is about the ways in which women are subsumed by the men in their lives, or otherwise are buffeted about with less control over their lives than they ought to have.

The forward by Kate Zambreno is a wonderfully complementary piece. She talks about the anger she feels going to a woman's funeral and hearing the dead woman sanctified by men in her life who did nothing but take from her, who can speak of her only to praise what she did for others, and can say nothing about what the woman herself was.

Sometimes you can read a book and just know the author was angry when she wrote it. This is one of those. The book uses the phrase "discreet rage" about one of its characters, and I think that sentiment succinctly describes the whole book. The protagonist, Dora Rosario, is ten years into widowhood, and she has devoted her entire life to mourning her unremarkable husband as much as she had previous devoted her life to supporting his every opinion regardless of whether or not she agreed with it. Now, a decade on, her mother-in-law reveals something about Dora's late husband that changes her entire perspective.

I would like to believe we are moving away from the world portrayed in Empty Wardrobes (though not with as much success as I'd like), but this is a stark reminder of how even a few generations ago, in the Sixties, a woman's identity was so controlled by her husband's. There are only two men in this book--Duarte, Dora's dead husband, and Ernesto, the longtime partner of a side character--and they both, through social structures, exercise incredible control over the lives of the women around them without any respect or even knowledge of their impact.

The three main women in this book--Dora, her daughter Lisa, and the narrator--each take a different approach to the male romantic partners in their lives, and none of them comes out the better for it (well, perhaps for Lisa, but I personally doubt it will last), because the ultimate problem is societal attitudes about the way men and women are meant to relate to each other.

It's not a long book, and I can't say much more without spoiling things, but I also think it does some fabulous things with its narration and perspective, and the way it doles out information. Really an excellent framing that allows for a lot of fluidity and filling in gaps with your own visions while remaining clear in the nature of the story it's telling.

This book was only translated into English in 2021, which is a shame, because I think it would have struck a nerve much earlier, but we have it now! Costa does an excellent job with the work too; the writing is full of punchy phrases like the above, and she captures some realistic dialogue--characters repeating themselves, responding in ways that don't quite match up with what was asked, etc.--while keeping it natural-sounding.

silversea

Humble Bundle's running a sale where you can pick up 65 science fiction, fantasy, and horror books by women for only $18 through January 31st.

Pretty good deal, if you ask me!

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/fierce-women-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-open-road-media-books

Edited: Apparently this bundle is only available in the US (unsure if it's available in Canada?).

quillpunk

It's Wednesday! What are you reading?

rocky41_7

Title: The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Illustrator: Michael Kaluta
Genre: Fantasy, fairy tale

First book of 2026! This was The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente with illustrations by Michael Kaluta. I have no recollection of how this ended up on my TBR and I was a little skeptical checking it out in the library, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it ended up being a lot of fun and I will definitely check out the second volume.

You might be a little confused in the beginning, as In the Night Garden is a series of nested stories within stories and the style takes a minute to get used to, but it's worth it. Valente unfolds a veritable matryoshka of tales into neat blooms whose petals all fit together. Retroactive reveals and recontextualiations are delightful here.

Valente's vivid prose brings together her fantastical tales with such clarity; she attends frequently to all five senses, so that the reader knows what the characters are not only seeing, but hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling as well. There's obviously a lot of fairy tale inspiration here, but Valente definitely brings her own flavor. Women are almost always the hero of Valente's tales (though they play the villains too!) and there are such a great variety of them. Monsters abound too, but they get their chance to tell a tale too. (There's also some gentle ribbing at the Arthurian legends, with one witch lamenting about "all that questing" princes get up to.)

I was so engrossed in the work I didn't realize until quite late in the book how little romance factors into it. In a fairy tale inspired book like this, I would have expected a great many characters motivated by romance, but I can only think of two here who are primarily motivated by a love interest, and this delights me too. I'm arospec myself and while I enjoy a good tale of romance, I also weary of how frequently and totally it is centered in stories, so I was really enthused by how little that's the case here.

Friendship and family relationships do make frequent appearances though, and the friendship between the orphan teller of tales and the young boy hanging onto her words is the framing story. Love between mother and daughter, between brother and sister, even between strangers is a common thread.

She also avoids a pitfall I see in various modern fantasy stories which are so keen to explain the magic of their world they strip it of all mystery. Valente's world remains largely unexplained and asks the reader to simply take it as it is, which I found fun and appropriately mysterious.

The style of the book allows Valente to pull in a great many diverse characters and voices, which she does it well. Most impressive though is her ability to pull a cohesive tapestry out of all the various threads she's juggling.

A really fun and unusual story which I enjoyed a lot--a great start to a new year of reading!

vamp_ress

Lots of middling stuff in December with one notable exception:

Parrott, Ursula: Ex-Wife. Faber & Faber. 2024.
Discovered, once again through Lost Ladies of Lit (my favourite literary podcast by MILES) this novel from the roaring 1920s gets compared to The Great Gatsby a lot. In my opinion, this is the better book. Bold, outspoken, modern - Ex-Wife (despite the stupid title) is an excellent novel and I'd love for more of Parrott's work to get re-issued. Alas, I can't find anything anywhere. Such a shame!

Schweblin, Samantha: Little Eyes. Riverhead Books. 2020.
For years after Covid I couldn't touch dystopias, even though I've always loved that genre. I'm slowly getting back to those novels (very tentatively), but this was just not IT. It should definitely have been a short story. This isn't so much a novel as it is a collection of interconnected stories in the same world where smart plushies invade people's most intimate spaces. The novel wants to say so many things, but it never really goes there. Additionally, while I think the basic premise sounds plausible to a lot of people it simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny. I won't deny that something like this would appeal both to voyeurists and exhibitionists. But that's about it. The most shocking thing about this novel is the fact that it was on the longlist for the International Booker.

Bridle, James: New Dark Age. Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future. Verso. 2018.
Bridle sometimes goes on the wildest tangeants (I now know more about Peppa Pig than I ever wanted to know) and his own interests show clearly (he seems overly interested in air travel), but overall this was a riveting and thought-provoking read. I thoroughly enjoyed following him on his journey through the history of technology.

Wood, Benjamin: Seascraper. Viking. 2025.
This novel is set in the 1960s, but it reads like it's the 1660s. Nice language and prose, but it sounds too much like a creative-writing-class for my taste with no actual plot to carry all these fancy words over the finish-line. The last 25% did not seem to belong with the rest of the book and stood out like a sore thumb. If you want to give this a go either way, I'd recommend the audiobook. Well read (and sung) by the author himself.

Whitehead, Colson: Underground Railroad. Doubleday. 2016.
My least successful Whitehead so far, maybe "only" because I'm not American and I couldn't really tell when he was being faithful to the history of slavery and when he was making stuff up. That considerably lessened my enjoymend and what I could take away from the novel. Also, he wasn't doing himself any favours with the many voices and POVs he used throughout. I've been looking forward to reading Underground Railroad for years now, but I must say that this - sadly - was a letdown.

merrileemakes

Arms Race: And other stories By Nic Low

Nic Low is a writer of Ngāi Tahu and European descent who divides his time between Melbourne and Christchurch. His writing on wilderness, technology and race has been widely published and anthologised on both sides of the Tasman. His first book was Arms Race, a collection of speculative fictions shortlisted for the Readings and Steele Rudd prizes, and named a New Zealand Listener and Australian Book Review book of the year.

This was a real mixed bag of stories, not in quality or interest but in tone. They ranged from very speculative future dystopias to... I don't even know what the counter to spec fic is. Normie? Mundane? I can't remember the last time I read garden variety fiction. But one of the Low's mundane stories was a total riot - 'Rush' describes a group of First Nations Australians styling themselves as the Aboriginal Land Council of Minerals and digging up a war memorial in central Melbourne to prospect for gold. It was bang on in tone and hilarious in the way it perfectly captured the double standards and unconscious (or just fucking conscious, really) bias of colonised Australia. (hey remember the time when a brown muslim woman tweeted on ANZAC day about the human rights violations Australia was inflicting on (brown and mostly muslim) refugees and the backlash was so strong she lost her job, had to move house and eventually had to flee the country?)

I had to check to see when this book was published to work out which of the many sacred First Nations sites destroyed by the resources industry could have prompted this story, but considering the book is 11 years old there's too many to even consider.

I also really liked 'Facebook Redux', about a 70 year old millennial who digs up his old Facebook Profile to find his dead wife's old profile and gets scammed by Russian AR hackers. A really prescient story about what we broadcast online and how it can be used against us.

Low's style of not using quotation marks for speech was a bit challenging to get used to, but it was worth persevering to experience the depth and variety of these well-crafted stories.

5/5 stars. Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time.

Current Music: Tuck Shop Ladies - Hi Vis

quillpunk

r/fantasy MegaSale 2025

Dec 26-27

All books 99¢ or free. Each sale or download benefits the Mary Cariola Children's Center.

https://megasale.yrliu.com/

petrea_mitchell

It's gift card season and there are a couple sorts of books I would like to get with mine, but I don't even know what sorts of terms to start searching on.

1) Something about different legal systems and the philosophies that go with them. How they shape how people think about what the law is even for, and so forth. Would prefer to focus on modern systems, but historical examples are fine if they help illuminate the present. (E.g. I have come across mentions a few times that things work in such and such a way in France or its former colonies because they were shaped by the Napoleonic code.)

2) How the governments of really huge cities/metropoles work.

Blogs or newsletters are okay too. But no podcasts or YouTube series unless they're scripted, please.

merrileemakes

A Chorus, Divergent anthology by Reckoning Press

A special issue featuring reprints by neurodivergent creators from Reckoning’s first decade.

Essays, poetry, fiction, and art by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, E.C. Barrett, Kaye Boesme, Offor Chidera, Jacob Coffin, Kelsey Day, Tania Fordwalker, Abbie Goldberg, A.P. Golub, Ruth Joffre, Taylor Jones, Laura McKnight, Kat Murray, Micah Nemerever, Mari Ness, Ellis Nye, Maria S. Picone, T.K. Rex, Ariadne Starling, and Adam Stemple, with new cover artwork by Abi Stevens.

I read quite a few anthologies this year and this was one of the best. It has some real stellar stories that I'll be thinking about for a long time, and some new writers that I definitely want to see more from. The stories are all speculative fiction and many dance with the climate apocalypse in its many forms and stages.

The real knock-out of the whole book was SQUAWKER AND DOLPHIN SWIMMING TOGETHER. I am a sucker for animal communication stories, and dolphins, and climate disasters and finding glimmers of hope amongst the rubble. There was so many cleaver plot threads dropped in here and there, the story felt like a much longer and fleshed out novel. (I've already preordered their upcoming anthology!)

Also shout out to The Blackthorn Door and Fixing the System in Tilt Town, both with really interesting worldbuilding. And a nod to Icediver, which started off strong but I feel like the wheels fell off halfway through.

I didn't dip into the poetry but if it's of the same quality of the fiction than it's pretty good too.

The entire anthology is free to read online or follow the links to support through an indie bookseller.

rocky41_7

Title: Solo Dance
Author: Kotomi Li
Genre: Fiction

Last night I wrapped up Solo Dance by Kotomi Li, translated from Japanese by Arthur Morris. This short book is about a young gay Taiwanese woman who struggles with both internal and external homophobia, and eventually moves to Japan looking for understanding.

Queer stories from other countries are always interesting to me and it’s a good reminder that progress has not been even all over the world. Much of the book is pretty depressing, because the protagonist struggled with fitting in even before she realized she was gay, and she has some real struggles. She is battling severe depression for much of the book and at several points, suicidality.

The book is touching in that the protagonist’s struggles feel real and she’s someone who is so close to having positive experience that could change her life for the better, but her luck keeps dropping on the other side each time.

I don’t want to spoil too much about the end, but while I was grateful for the overall tone of the it, it is contrived and not very believable. But I did enjoy the protagonist’s travels leading up to that point. It’s not at all subtle, and it packs a lot more plot into the final handful of chapters than the rest of the book, but it was still sweet to see the protagonist’s perspective shift a little through her engagements with other people.

I’m not sure if it’s the translation or the original prose, but the language is stilted and very emotionally distant. The reader is kept at arm’s length from the protagonist virtually the whole novel, and while we’re often told she’s feeling these intense feelings, I never felt it. It was like reading a clinical report of her feelings, which was disappointing.

This is Li’s first novel, and it reads that way. There’s a lot of heart in it, and I appreciate it for that, but it lacks a lot in technical skill. I would be interested to see more of Li’s future work, when she’s had more time to polish her ability, but I don’t regret taking the time with this one.

rocky41_7

Title: The Tomb of Dragons (Cemeteries of Amalo #3)
Author: Katherine Addison
Genre: Fiction, fantasy

Time and circumstance conspired to keep me from reviewing the second book in the Cemeteries of Amalo book, The Grief of Stones, but today I finished the third book, Tomb of the Dragons and I do have time to review this third and final book in the trilogy.

This is NOT a spoiler-free review.

Tomb of the Dragons retains much of what I loved about the first two books, including Thara’s character and his investigations into the underbelly of Amalo, with a healthy helping of Ethuveraz politics.

Thara is having to adjust to the events at the end of the last book, and here, I feel, is where we truly see how important his calling is to him—how he handles losing it. It gives some good perspective to why he is so dogged in pursuing his work goals—his calling really is his sense of purpose, his life. Watching Thara grapple with this change and its indefinite consequences was fascinating.

However, it also retains in greater measure some of the things that I didn’t love about the earlier books, including Addison’s obsession with minutiae. I can only read about the characters traveling on this or that tram line so many times before my eyes start skipping lines to the things that really matter. This would bother me less if it didn’t feel like it came at the expense of more important things.

( Read more... )

rocky41_7

Title: Martyr!
Author: Kaveh Akbar
Genre: Fiction, literary

It took over a month for my hold on this book to come up, but Friday night I finished Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. If you look into online book recommendations like on New York Times or NPR, you've probably seen this title come up. This book is about a young poet who sobers up after years of severe addiction and is now looking for meaning and purpose.

Martyr! is a beautiful book about the very human search for meaning in our lives, but it also is not afraid to shy away from the ugliness of that search. It juxtaposes eloquently-worded paragraphs of generational grief with Cyrus waking up having pissed the bed because he went to sleep so drunk the night before. Neither of these things cancels the other out.

Everyone in Martyr! is flawed, often deeply, but they're all also very real, and they're trying their best; they aren't trying to hurt anyone, but they cause hurt anyway, and then they and those around them just have to deal with that. Martyr! weighs the search for personal meaning against the duty owed to others and doesn't come up with a clean answer. What responsibility did Orkideh have to her family as opposed to herself? What responsibility did Ali have to Cyrus as opposed to himself? What responsibility does Cyrus have to Zee, as opposed to his search for a meaningful death?

Cyrus' story is mainly the post-sobriety story: He's doing what he's supposed to, he's not drinking or doing drugs, he's going to his AA meetings, he's working (after a fashion)...and what's the reward? He still can't sleep at night and he feels directionless and alone and now he doesn't even have the ecstasy of a good high to look forward to. This is the "so what now?" part of the sobriety journey.

It's also in many ways a family story. Cyrus lost his mother when he was young and his father shortly after he left for college, and he spends the book trying to reckon with these things and with the people his parents were. Roya is the mother Cyrus never knew, whose shape he could only vaguely sketch out from his father's grief and his unstable uncle's recollections. Ali is the father who supported Cyrus in all practical ways, and sacrificed mightily to do it, but did not really have the emotional bandwidth to be there for his son. And there are parallels between Cyrus and Roya arising later in the book that tugged quite hard on my heartstrings, but I won't spoil anything here.

Cyrus wants to find meaning, but seems only able to grasp it in the idea of a meaningful death--hence his obsession with martyrs. The idea of a life with meaning seems beyond him. He struggles throughout the book with this and with the people trying to suggest that dying is not the only way to have lived.

I really enjoyed this book and I think it deserves the praise it's gotten. I've tried to sum up here what the book is "about," but it's a story driven by emotion more than plot. It's Cyrus' journey and his steps and stumbles along the way, and I think Akbar did a wonderful job with it.

spiralsheep

It's Wednesday in some localised linear timelines (more or less). What are you reading?

rocky41_7

Title: Brahma's Dream
Author: Shree Ghatage
Genre: Fiction, historical fiction, family drama

Brahma's Dream by Shree Ghatage was a book I snatched out of a pile of stuff my sister was giving away last year, but she'd never gotten around to reading it herself, so she couldn't give me a preview. Brahma's Dream is set in India just before it gains self-rule, and concerns the family of Mohini, a child whose serious illness dominates her life.

This is one of those middle-of-the-road books that was neither amazingly good nor offensively bad, and therefore I struggle to come up with much to say about it. That makes it sound bad, but it isn't--I enjoyed my time with it. I thought Ghatage did a good job with exploring life on the precipice of great political change, although the history and politics of 1940s India is more backdrop to the family drama than central to the story. I liked Mohini and her family; because the nature of her illness necessitates a lot of rest and down time, Mohini is naturally a thoughtful child, as her thoughts are sometimes all she has to amuse herself. However, she never crosses the line into being precocious, which was a relief.

Neither did I feel like the book leaned too hard on Mohini's illness to elicit sentimentality from the reader. Obviously, an illness like hers is the biggest influence on her life, and on the lives of her immediate family, and there are many moments you sympathize with her because she can't just be a child the way she wants to be, but I didn't feel like Ghatage was plucking heartstrings just for the sake of it.

Reading the relationships between Mohini and her family was heartwarming, especially with her grandfather, who takes great joy in Mohini's intellect and is often there to discuss the import of various societal events with her.

Ghatage's descriptive writing really brings to life the India of the time, with the colors, smells, sounds, and sights that are a part of Mohini's every day.

It reminded me of another book I read about a significant event in Indian history (the separation of India and Pakistan) told through the perspective of a young ill girl, Cracking India.

On the whole, this was a sweet, heartfelt book. It's not heavy on plot, but if you enjoy watching the story of a family unfold and the little dramas that play out, it's enjoyable.

rocky41_7

Title: The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp
Author: Leonie Swann (trans: Amy Bojang)
Genre: Fiction, mystery, murder mystery, crime thriller

Book # (checks notes) 13! From the "Women in Translation" rec list has been The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann, translated from German by Amy Bojang. This book concerns a house full of elderly retirees who end up investigating a series of murders in their sleepy English town.

This book was truly a delight from start to finish. I loved Swann's quirky senior cast; they were both entertaining and raised valid and very human questions about what aging with dignity means. It did a fabulous job scratching my itch for an exciting novel with no twenty-somethings to be seen. Now Agnes, the protagonist, and her friends are quite old, which impacts their lives in significant ways. However, I felt Swann did a good job of showing the limitations of an aging body--unless she's really in a hurry, Agnes will usually opt to take the stair lift down from the second floor, for instance--without sacrificing the depth and complexity of her characters, or relegating such things merely to the youth of their pasts.

The premise of this book caught my attention immediately, but after a lifetime of books with riveting premises that dismally fail to deliver, I was still wary. I'm happy to report that The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp fully delivers on its promise! Swann makes ample and engaging use of her premise.

The story itself is not especially surprising; if you're looking for a real brain-bender of a mystery or a book of shocking plot twists, this is not it. But I enjoyed it, and I thought Swann walked an enjoyable line between laying down enough clues that I could see the writing on the wall at some point, without giving the game away too quickly. There are no last-minute ass-pulls of heretofore unmentioned characters suddenly confessing to the crime here! The main red herring that gets tossed in the reader is likely to see for what it is very quickly, but for plot-relevant reasons I won't mention here, it's very believable that Agnes does not see that.

Agnes herself was a wonderful protagonist; I really enjoyed getting to go along on this adventure with her. She had a hard enough time wrangling her household of easily-distracted seniors even before the murders started! But the whole cast was endearing, if also all obnoxious in their own way after decades of settling on their own way of getting through life.

Bojang does a flawless job with the translation; she really captures various English voices both in the dialogue and in Agnes' narration. The writing flows naturally without ever coming off stilted or awkward.

I really had fun with this one, and I'm delighted to here there's apparently a sequel--Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime--which I will definitely be checking out.

pauraque

It's Wednesday! What are you reading?

vamp_ress

In hindsight, it seems my November was horror-reading month. I swear, I hadn't planned it this way, but I won't complain.

Purcell, Laura: Bone China. Bloomsbury. 2019.
I've been reading her books for a few years now, picking one up every autumn. She's a contemporary author, but she writes in the vein of gothic fiction - there are a lot of remote mansions and haunted castles in her books. Bone China features a remote manor on a cliff, an unreliable narrator and the question of what is truly happening and what is actually only taking place in the protagonist's head. Purcell is really good with the psychological horror. If that's your kind of thing you should definitely check her out.

Moreno-Garcia, Silvia: Mexican Gothic. Del Rey. 2020.
This was my first time with a novel by Moreno-Garcia. I felt that thematically, this was all over the place. Apart from the fact that it's horror it also tried to tackle themes like racism, classism, eugenics and mysoginy, but it didn't spend enough time on any of these themes to make it worthwhile. Additionally, this has a historical setting (the 1950/1960s) even though this is never fully realised and you wonder why the author chose to take this route (probably only to constantly talk about the dress the protagonist was wearing, I don't know). And when we got to the bottom of why the house was "haunted" I basically got off the plane - this is a personal thing of course, but I found this rather silly instead of terrifying. What I really liked was the gothic vibes she managed to evoke while describing the house. The atmosphere and the creepy dreams (that only get creepier as the story progresses) were my highlights.

Tremblay, Paul: Horror Movie. HarperAudio. 2024.
Tremblay simply has the best audiobook productions and this was top-notch as well. If you want to give this novel a try, do yourself a favour and consider the audiobook! I can't say that I fully bought into the "haunted set" idea and most of the characters felt flat and hardly realised, but Tremblay is really good with mixed media. There are several POVs and a screenplay in this. But the novel wasn't overly scary or frightening.

Feito, Virginia: Victorian Psycho. Audible Audio. 2025.
As a project this is very well done and successful, but as a book on its own I find it forgettable. As the title says this marries American Psycho to a Jane Eyre-like plot. The language was the most interesting thing about this, because just like in American Psycho the narration starts off very tame and proper only to get more unhinged as the story progresses. I think that progression was the highlight of the novel and very well done. On the other hand, it was riffing off what Ellis has already done decades ago, so I'm not sure how much of the credit (besides the idea of the Victorian setting) can really go to Feito. In the end, mostly a fanfiction remix even if it's executed extremely well.

Kröger, Lisa & Anderson, Melanie R.: Monster, She wrote! The Women Who Prioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. Quirk Books. 2018.
Let's start this by saying that this is a beautifully done book. It was quite obviously typeset before the pandemic and before paper became scarce and expensive - there's a lot of free and waste of space here and it's wonderful to see a book "breathe" like that. Happens rarely enough. Sadly, this nonfiction read didn't fully give me what I had expected. Yes, I filled up my TBR because the authors truly manage to find a lot of hidden gems. But I had definitely expected more literary criticism, more in-depth analysis. In the end, this was pretty much snorkeling just below the surface.

Doerr, Anthony: Cloud Cuckoo Land. Scribner. 2021.
I only read this because Ben from Ben reads good gave this a glowing review. Half an hour into the (German) audiobook of 16 hours I thought this would be 16 hours of pure torture. In the end, it wasn't quite that bad, but I can't say that the book and I had a successful time with each other. The "hook" - the Greek epic connecting all the different timelines was as silly as the title suggests and had I known that this would fully be shouldered by kid and teenage protagonists I would have opted out before I even started. I just didn't care for any of it. Okay, that's not true. I cared for the poor beasts of burden who died somewhere in the middle - but even that was mostly the author emotionally manipulating the reader, so I don't know what to make of this.

rocky41_7

Title: The Once and Future King
Author: T.H. White
Genre: Fantasy adventure

Last night I finished The Once and Future King by T.H. White, because I felt like it was time I made a real foray into the Arthurian legends. The actual first Arthurian book I read was The Mists of Avalon, but that was years ago and before I had heard the full story about Marion Zimmer Bradley. This book takes a decidedly different tone. I’m sticking to the most common name spellings for all of the characters here, because spellings do vary across all versions of these legends.

The first thing that surprised me about The Once and Future King is that it’s funny, and frequently in an absurd, dorky kind of way. Knights failing tilts because their visors fell over their eyes wrong, Merlin accidentally zapping himself away in the middle of a lesson because he was in a temper, the Questing Beast “falling in love” with two men dressed in a beast costume, that sort of thing. This silliness is largely concentrated in the first quarter of the book, which is about Arthur’s childhood, but it’s never fully lost.

The second surprise was how long the book focuses on Arthur’s childhood, but then again, it is setting the scene for Arthur’s worldview and the lessons he internalized as a child which shape his approach to being king.

( Read more... )

quillpunk

It's Wednesday! What are you reading? 👀

merrileemakes

Buzzing
Written by Samuel Sattin with art by Rye Hickman

Description
A moving middle grade graphic novel about friendship, belonging, and learning to love yourself despite the voices in your head.

Isaac Itkin can't get away from his thoughts.

As a lonely twelve-year-old kid with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), everything from studying to looking in the mirror becomes a battle between him and a swarm of unhelpful thoughts.

The strict therapy his mother insists on doesn't seem to be working, but when a group of friends invites him to join their after-school role-playing game, the thoughts feel a little less loud, and the world feels a little brighter.

But Isaac's therapist says that exposure to games can have negative effects on kids with OCD, and when his grades slip, his helicopter mother won't let him play anymore. Now Isaac needs to find a way to prove to himself, to his mother, and to the world that the way to quiet the noise in his head may have been inside him all along.

Review
This book has the best depiction of intrusive thoughts I've ever seen. Issac's OCD is represented by cartoon bees that swarm his head, saying awful (and often repetitive things). The bees can become fewer in number when Isaac is interested in something and if something (or someone!) is really engaging they can disappear completely. Or if things are going badly, they can swarm Isaac and drown out almost everything else.

Isaac's friends are a great comfort to him and he's most animated and engaged when he's with them. In contrast, he shuts down when he's with his overbearing mother and hateful sister. The art does an amazing job of reflecting it, with the colour literally leeching from the panels when Isaac's family are present. As someone who grew up with a mental illness in a shitful Family of Origin, this all feels so real and believeable. The mother especially is a hall-mark 'doing my best' but actually ignores the emotional needs of both her children, constantly criticises them and has a sour comment for every interaction.

Unfortunately its this strong identify I have with Isaac that makes the ending fall really flat for me.

Spoilers here

After spending half the book despising Isaac, his sister suddenly decides to help him connect with his friends after his mother bans him from hanging out with them. And then at the end the mother puts aside her over-bearing self-absorbtion and starts taking an interest in Isaac and his hobbies, letting him hang out with his friends again and is generally a totally different person.

If you've ever dealt with schemas in Family of Origin you'll know that those roles don't just get thrown aside on a whim. So... I didn't like the ending. But it's a middle grade book. Isaac growing up, moving out, finally getting therapy and going no contact was not an option. Shame though, because I would read the hell out of that.

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Book recommendations needed

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