December Site Update and 2024 Reading Year in Review

The month's reviews have been, as usual, archived at the main Brightdreamer Books site. Enjoy, if so inclined.

Another year has apparently ended, so it's time for another Reading Year in Review.

January kicked off with Erin Entrada Kelly's middle-grade tale Hello, Universe, which never quite lived up to its potential. More impressive titles included a sci-fi historical thriller twist on the Cold War space race in Silvain Neuvel's A History of What Comes Next, a fascinating look at one of Earth's most catastrophic events in Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, another enjoyable installment in the Singing Hills Cycle of Asian-flavored fantasy in Nghi Vo's Mammoths at the Gates, and the story of one desperate girl driven to rescue a veritable stranger when nobody else will try in Dusti Bowling's Across the Desert. Other titles generally entertained me on some level, though I was notably disappointed by Amelie Wen Zhao's Song of Silver, Flame Like Night, and Stephen L. Kent's The Clone Assassin suffered mostly for being in the middle of a much longer series which I haven't read. The last book of the month wrapped up "A. Deborah Baker"'s (Seanan McGuire's) delightfully retro Up-and-Under fantasy adventure quartet with Under the Smokestrewn Sky.

I sampled a genre classic to start off February, Jack L. Chalker's sci-fi odyssey Midnight at the Well of Souls, and enjoyed some of the grand ideas and imagery even if it couldn't help showing its age. Another classic title, Cujo by Stephen King, held up better. The final installment of Josiah Bancroft's Books of Babel stumbled at the finish line with The Fall of Babel. I started Derek Landy's clever and adventurous middle-grade/young adult urban fantasy series, Skulduggery Pleasant, and knew right away I'd be following this one to the end. I also continued with Michael J. Sullivan's epic fantasy series, Chronicles of the First Empire, with Age of Swords, which nicely scratched the epic itch I'd been feeling, and began the graphic novel "Season Seven" of the Expanse television series (which also neatly slots into a time gap in between Books 6 and 7 in the written series) with The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 1 by Andy Diggle, which felt just like returning to a beloved series with pitch-perfect characters and writing. The month ended on a low note, unfortunately, with a self-aware young adult thriller that ultimately failed to thrill: Danielle Valentine's How to Survive Your Murder.

Yet another old-school audiobook started March, Terry Pratchett's The Dragons at Crumbling Castle, which collects several stories from the author's younger years; even as a teenager, there were hints of the heights he would later reach with Discworld and other titles. M. T. Anderson's Whales on Stilts delightfully skewered various genre tropes, kicking off his Pals in Peril series that I hope to follow through to the end (though unfortunately my library doesn't seem to carry e-book or audiobook copies of the last volumes, dang it). Another fun middle-grade title took on junior detective tales, Mac Barnett's The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, though Kara LaReau's silly adventures of the Bland sisters in The Jolly Regina didn't trigger the giggles as often as I'd hoped. Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse offered a new look at our extinct cousin species in The Lost Neanderthal, attempting to erase some denigrating myths and misconceptions. I returned to K. Eason's "multiverse" mashup of fantasy and and sci-fi in the Arithmancy and Anarchy milieu as it moved into darker, more adult territory, kicking off with the excellent Nightwatch on the Hinterlands. Other noteworthy titles included the surprisingly intriguing Domesticating Dragons by Dan Koboldt and the mildly disappointing (given all the hype I've heard over the years) A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny.

April showers flooded into a harrowing story of survival on the Amazon River in Holly FitzGerald's Ruthless River and ended in the fascinatingly intricate epic fantasy city of Kithamar in Daniel Abraham's Age of Ash. Between, I explored the psychology of fandom in Tabitha Carvan's This is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, ventured through a variety of real-life adventures in Douglas Preston's The Lost Tomb, snickered at the low-brow humor of the classic picture book The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Joe Scieszka and the second Pals in Peril installment The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen by M. T. Anderson, and explored a noir future where the elite literally tower over the populace (yet aren't beyond reach of a murderer) in Nick Harkaway's Titanium Noir. Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children portal fantasy deconstructions returned with an intriguing shop of lost things from countless worlds in Mislaid in Parts Half-Unknown, while the second installment of Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series, Playing With Fire, maintained the pacing and humor (and flirtation with Lovecraftian-tinged horror) of the first book. Top marks went to the gorgeous multicultural picture book The Truth About Dragons by Julie Leung.

While May didn't have any outright clunkers, it also didn't bring many brilliant standouts. Opening with the often-gruesome modern riff on Jonah in Daniel Kraus's Whalefall, a mixed reading bag awaited me. M. T. Anderson's perpetually-imperiled young "pals" returned in Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware as the month's only sequel, the rest being standalones (save Steve Cole's moderately entertaining and definitely different Z. Rex and another M. T. Anderson title, the less-satiric, somewhat darker fantasy The Game of Sunken Places). Charles Yu took a surreal, scriptlike approach to Asian stereotyping in Interior Chinatown, while Erica Bauermeister tracked the journey of a debut novelist's breakout hit through various readers in No Two Persons. I ended the month with a memoir by a trans actor chronicling their ongoing discovery of their true identity in Elliot Page's Pageboy.

June started with a disappointment, Sara Wolf's far-future tale of fighting mechas and social injustice in Heavenbreaker, but ended on a better note with Katherine Arden's middle-grade horror tale Dark Waters, third in her Small Spaces quartet. The month's clear high spot was Shannon Chakraborty's historical fantasy swashbuckler The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, and Michael J. Sullivan continued to impress with Age of War. After much anticipation, I found myself underwhelmed by Hannah Kaner's Godkiller, and M. T. Anderson's fourth Pals in Peril novel Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger! started feeling a touch stretched but was still mostly fun.

I began July with a decent little tale of a sapient ink blob in Kenneth Oppel's Inkling. The month contained more than one disappointment, though. Helene Tursten's collection of tales about an old serial killer, An Elderly Lady is Up To No Good and Stuart Turton's literary look at the twilight of humanity in The Last Murder at the End of the World failed to quite live up to their respective expectations, and the collaboration between M. T. Anderson and artist Eugene Yelchin, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, probably should not have been presented as an audiobook given that doing so cut out almost half the book in the form of Yelchin's illustrated chapters. Megan E. O'Keefe's The Blighted Stars took a little too long to gain traction, but was more or less enjoyable, even though I preferred her Protectorate trilogy. The month's high point was T. Kingfisher's superb fantasy novella Nettle and Bone, with Andy Diggle's graphic novel The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 2 as a close second. Morgan Housel offered some perspective on modern times in Same as Ever, and Scott Westerfield kicked off a science-based middle-grade adventure series with Horizon.

Katherine Arden's Empty Smiles wrapped up the Small Spaces horror quartet and started August off on a good foot, as did the next book, Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Other high points were Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree, The Faceless Ones by Derek Landy, and the epic conclusion to K. Eason's Weep duology in the Arithmancy and Anarchy series, Nightwatch Over Windscar, with a surprise top mark for Kiyash Monsef's story of a girl discovering her link to magical beasts in Once There Was. I continued Michael J. Sullivan's Legends of the First Empire series, clearing the fourth and fifth entries in the six-book sequence (Age of Legend and Age of Death), which made me question whether there were indeed six novels worth of material in the story he was spinning. A couple nonfiction titles made it into the reading queue, both of which turned out to be interesting in their own ways: an examination of the ways the human brain can deceive itself in Oliver Sacks's Hallucinations and the story of an adventurer's disappearance and likely death in the Himalayas in Harley Rustad's Lost in the Valley of Death. A fictionalized middle-grade retelling of a First Nations legend (Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson's Eagle Drums, a historical fiction tale (Paulette Jile's News of the World), and a somewhat disappointing Korean-inspired space adventure (Elaine U. Cho's Ocean's Godori) rounded out the month.

September opened with one of the month's top reads, V. E. Scwab's gothic-tinged horror/fantasy Gallant, and ended with the lighthearted graphic novel CatStronauts: Mission Moon by Drew Brockington. In the middle was the usual mix of good and not-quite-so-good reads and genres. Daniel Abraham continued to expand and explore his fantasy city of Kithamar with Blade of Dream, while Derek Landy seemed to slightly rush a series transition point in the Skulduggery Pleasant series with Dark Days. A historical naval tragedy was examined in David Grann's The Wager, my only nonfiction title of the month. I visited the reign of Cleopatra in the historical mystery Death of an Eye by Dana Stabenow, and mostly enjoyed the end of the world with a romantic island vacation gone horribly wrong in Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend by MJ Wassmer. Jane Yolen's How to Fracture a Fairy Tale collected many of her fairy tale retellings, some familiar and some new to me, with some extra notes and poems. It also marked the end of an era, as I switched site hosts from iPowerWeb to DreamHost. (The former is a fine host, but both too expensive and too robust for my modest needs.)

October appropriately featured more than one thriller and ghost story. It launched with Karen M. McManus's tale of high school social media turned deadly in One of Us Is Lying, a solidly good tale. I was, unfortunately, less enthused by Christina Henry's thriller Good Girls Don't Die, which dropped three women into horrific situations straight out of their favorite fictional genres, and Kelly Armstrong's Hemlock Island, the story of a cursed private home in the Great Lakes. The classics were represented by my first foray into Oscar Wilde's works, the short story collection Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, which had some inevitable dating but were interesting nevertheless. I ticked two more entries in Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series off with Mortal Coil and the less impressive novella Apocalypse Kings; Landy wrote the latter standalone well after finishing the main series, and I think it showed that he was out of the groove. For nonfiction, I revisited several terrible days in history with the time traveler's handy guide How to Survive History by Cody Cassidy, explored how humans inevitably project our own mindsets and moralities everywhere (to the detriment of science and conservation) with Lucy Cooke's The Truth About Animals, and took on linguistic elitism with June Casagrande's amusing Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies, which turned out to be the best thing I read that month. It wrapped up with a near-future lunar thriller that was less exciting than I'd hoped, David Pedreira's Gunpowder Moon.

I only managed seven books in November, though they were more or less decent reads. Nino Cipri mashed up parallel dimensions and modern retail in Finna. More genre reads followed, with Charlie Jane Anderson's tale of a planet split by extremes in The City in the Middle of the Night and the story of a math prodigy taking on a psychic supervillain in S. L. Huang's Zero Sum Game, plus the somewhat amusing but ultimately overlong The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. An older young adult thriller had an inexplicable "update" in Lois Duncan's Down a Dark Hall. The best read of the month was also the most timely (and ultimately depressing) Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race? by Keith Boykin; reading this after America basically opted to hand democracy over to a convicted rapist and traitor and openly anti-democratic authoritarian who ran on a promise to violate the Constitution rather than even attempt addressing the inequities underlying so many things hurting our nation added another sad twist of that knife. The last read of the month was Jaime Greene's look at how scientists and speculative fiction approach the matter of extraterrestrial life in The Possibility of Life.

December did not start with me in a festive spirit, for obvious reasons. I tried regaining some hope with a book on the ins and outs of organizing effective resistance, Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Miriame Kaba, though unfortunately not much of it was applicable to my circumstances. Christina Lynch's Pony Confidential was interesting, somewhat entertaining, and occasionally profound and touching, though it seemed misbilled by its cover and official descriptions. Another popular title, Mike Herron's spy caper Slow Horses, intrigued me but had some stumbling points. I sampled a Japanese cozy fantasy about a cafe where one can time travel in a limited capacity, Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, with tepid results. But the end of the month and the holiday season were significantly overshadowed. My elderly father - the man who helped inspire my love of reading in general and SFF in particular - finally entered home hospice care due to ongoing health issues and worsening dementia. Between the time and physical effort of assisting with his care, the emotional toll, and the stress of dealing with both the impending loss and the uncertainty of the "after", I just plain cannot invest headspace in much reading now. I did manage to finish off the "Season Seven" Expanse graphic novel tie-in with Dragon Tooth: Volume 3 by Andy Diggle, based on the TV series and books created by James S. A. Corey, to wrap up the year, though I admittedly read more for distraction than full immersion.

There were some good bits here and there, if I stand back and squint, but overall, as I look backwards from the end of an exceptionally damp, dark, and dismal December, I'd say 2024 was a terrible year and 2025 is unlikely to be better on any conceivable level. But, hey, at least there's books. For now, at least...