Another delayed update, but the two books I managed to finish in July have been archived over on the main Brightdreamer Books site. Rather a pathetic number, but at least the books were good, even if life distinctly is not.
Enjoy!
Showing posts with label site update. Show all posts
Showing posts with label site update. Show all posts
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
(Delayed) June Site Update
Another day-late/dollar-shot update marks the halfway point in a year that has yet to demonstrate a redeeming quality that isn't qualified and asterisked and otherwise simply "not quite as bad as the absolute worst case scenario just yet." Anyway, June's five reviews have been archived and cross-linked at the main Brightdreamer Books site, as usual.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Sunday, May 31, 2026
May Site Update
The month's reviews - all three of them - have been archived and updated on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
(Incidentally, I may try changing my blog review template in the coming month, just in case things look weird if/when I next post a review. I really should be using headings and such, so I'm going to try that. There's no way I can retrofit old reviews at this point, though.)
Enjoy!
(Incidentally, I may try changing my blog review template in the coming month, just in case things look weird if/when I next post a review. I really should be using headings and such, so I'm going to try that. There's no way I can retrofit old reviews at this point, though.)
Thursday, April 30, 2026
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
March Site Update
March apparently ends today, for anyone keeping track. Accordingly, the main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated with the month's reviews.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Saturday, February 28, 2026
February Site Update
February's over already? For a short month, it sure was far too Eventful... Anyway, the main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated, with February's three reviews archived and cross-linked to related titles. (Yes, apparently the new job has had a negative effect on available reading time.)
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Saturday, January 31, 2026
January Site Update
Is it too late to return the unused portion of 2026 for a refund? The main Brightdreamer Books page has been updated with the month's reviews, including the last audiobooks I'll likely be able to get to for some time. (As for the new job... I'm hoping it just got off on the wrong foot and it'll get better, though I made sure to update my resume in case it doesn't.)
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
December Site Update and 2025 Reading Year In Review
Well, that was a year that felt like a decade... At long last, though, 2025 has come to an end (on the calendar; the damage will last lifetimes). So, in addition to the usual monthly update of the main Brightdreamer Books site, it's time once again for my Reading Year in Review, where I look back over highlights and lowlights. (Note that I don't touch on every title I read; any omissions are more about lack of time and/or energy than a specific commentary.)
I went into January knowing that this would be a trying year at best (and it was not, at all, best); on a personal level, my father was in home hospice care for late-stage dementia and other health issues, while on a national level my country had opted to slam the self-destruct button rather than even attempt to progress past the worst parts of our own history. So perhaps it was little wonder that my first review of the year, Libba Bray's peculiar metaphysical young adult romp Going Bovine, disappointed me, though not as deeply as a classic that had a very deceptive description on Libby, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. I was more impressed by P. Djèlí Clark's first foray into middle-grade fantasy, the African-inspired tale Abeni's Song, though my top read - and one of my best of the year - turned out to be a surprise, the contemporary middle-grade fiction title The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart... a book I found less than a week after my father passed away, which spoke so clearly to family and grief I couldn't not give it top marks.
February continued the year's trend of being cruddy (you can pretty much assume at this point that the best 2025 managed was "not quite as terrible as the month before"; I don't think I can point to one week, let alone month, where I could honestly say something was actually, quantifiably, without any mitigating asterisks and qualifications, "good"), but the reading improved somewhat. Henry. H. Neff's humorous take on family curses and demons in modern Appalachia, The Witchstone, started the month off on the right foot for reviews, while Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series continued its impressive streak with Death Bringer. I ventured into a little history with All Blood Runs Red by Phil Keith with Tom Clavin, the remarkable tale of a young Black man who fled Jim Crow and America in the early 1900's to become a soldier, war pilot, boxer, spy, and more in France. Ray Nayler's The Tusks of Extinction explored a near future where resurrected mammoths are helped by the uploaded mind of a scientist who was murdered by poachers while trying to protect some of the world's last wild elephants, a thought-provoking tale. The short month ended with Ghostdrift, the fourth and final novel in Suzanne Palmer's highly enjoyable Finder series of sci-fi adventures. In between were a few more middling, sometimes mildly disappointing reads, but no outright clunkers.
The early reads of March were adrift in the three-star doldrums, from Holly Gramazio's deconstruction of love and marriage and the notion of a "perfect" life mate in The Husbands through the surreal dystopian future of Djuna's Counterweight, though it ended on a somewhat brighter note with Fundamentals, an exploration of some of the fundamental concepts of physics by Frank Wilczek. High points were Devin Elle Kurtz's delightful picture book The Bakery Dragon and Derek Landy's seventh Skulduggery Pleasant book, Kingdom of the Wicked, while I dabbled in yet another classic with Oscar Wilde's famed tale about a man whose portrait bears the mark of his depravity and sins in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was enjoyable but couldn't help showing its age.
April opened with the surreality of Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which had some fun and intriguing parts but ultimately skewed too random and vague for my tastes. I had better luck with Ta-Nehisi Coates's fascinating essays in Between the World and Me, chronicling his experiences as a Black man grappling with the omnipresent specter of American racism. David LaRochelle's silly picture book 100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli still has one of my favorite titles of all time, while Amber McBride's poetic young adult tale Me (Moth) felt like a strange and sometimes beautiful, if poignant, dream of grief and acceptance and love found too late. The rest of the month had a mixed-to-good assortment, from tales of peculiar experiences on the Navajo reservation in Stanley Milford, Jr.'s memoir The Paranormal Ranger to a tale of a shapeshifter finding unexpected love with two-legged prey in John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In, concluding with Anne Rice's iconic tale Interview with the Vampire, a trendsetter that also aged a little poorly around the edges.
Derek Landy had two solid entries in May: the eighth chronological entry in his Skulduggery Pleasant series, Last Stand of Dead Men, and the short story collection (that also contained "spoilers" for later entries due to weird series chronology labeling by the publisher) Armageddon Outta Here. Overall, it was a good reading month, including a new Wayward Children novella from Seanan McGuire (Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear), the surprisingly touching tale of an imaginary friend finding his own way in the world (Michelle Cuevas's Confessions of an Imaginary Friend), and Chuck Tingle's brutal takedown of Hollywood's problem with algorithmically-controlled entertainment and non-hetero representation in Bury Your Gays. Another top read was Maya Angelou's recollections of her childhood in the Deep South during Jim Crow years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Weaker reads included Sung-il Kim's Asian-flavored fantasy Blood of the Old Kings and E. E. Knight's epic dragon adventure Dragon Champion.
June had few standouts. While the Skulduggery Pleasant wrapped up its original run with the ninth book, The Dying of the Light, in spectacular fashion, other titles that I had high hopes for, such as Peter S. Beagle's I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, left me disappointed or nonplussed. I did enjoy Tochi Onyebuchi's novella Riot Baby, and Alex Bledsoe's melding of private investigation with a fantasy world, The Sword-Edged Blonde, had potential. The month ended with a DK Smithsonian book, Dinosaurs, that suffered mostly from iffy and inconsistent editing and a sometimes-frustrating mix of what was explored and what was glossed over or ignored, though as with most DK titles the pictures were (usually) intriguing enough to make up for weakness in the text.
I had hoped to start July off right with yet another Derek Landy book, but Resurrection not only couldn't quite strike a balance between the familiar Skulduggery Pleasant characters and the "next generation" brought in to keep the titles middle-grade/young adult, but suffered from an unfortunate bout of bad timing, as it featured a minor baddie with parallels to a monster currently (literally) demolishing the highest house in my country with impunity. I also had very high hopes for Scott Reintgen's spacefaring dragon romp The Last Dragon of Mars, but my suspension of disbelief was knocked out of orbit and burned up on re-entry. Jim C. Hines offered a fun middle-grade fantasy adventure as a girl tries to rescue her missing friends from a dangerous portal fantasy world in Tamora Carter, Goblin Queen. I ventured into nonfiction and politics with a few reads - Emmanuel Aoki's Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man and Democracy in Retrograde by Sami Sage and Emil Amick - because I'm very tired of feeling ignorant and helpless (and hopeless) about All The Things that are destroying... well, all the things, and the future along with them. To finish off the month, I ventured into thriller territory with Elizabeth Elo's North of Boston.
August was a lean month for reading, for various non-reading-related reasons. Far and away the best book was Daindreth's Assassin by Elisabeth Wheatley, though the rest were generally serviceable. Hannah Whitten's tale of a princess bound to be sacrificed in a cursed forest (that, of course, is not all that it appears) and the sister who will destroy the kingdom if need be to save her, For the Wolf, didn't quite live up to its promise, but was still fairly good. I was somewhat disappointed by a story of Puerto Rican storytellers and the teen girl unexpectedly inheriting a family gift (and burden), Ann Davila Cardinal's The Storyteller's Death. The Kate Elliott novella Servant Mage didn't quite deliver, either. I ventured into teen romance with the anthology Serendipity, edited by Marissa Meyer. Adrian Tchaikovsky wrapped up the month with an interesting subversion of tropes in his tale of a post-apocalyptic Earth threatened by total annihilation when the "gods" return from their space utopia to "fix" a planet they broke to begin with, The Hungry Gods.
I ventured back to a minor sci-fi classic, Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population, to start September, but it didn't quite live up to the hype for me. It was not the only classic of the month to let me down; I found Robert Sheckley's surreal Mindswap exceptionally dated. Jordanna Max Bordsky's imaginative spin on a prehistoric encounter between the Inuit and Norse explorers (and their respective deities) in The Wolf and the Whale proved much more intriguing. I breezed through Rob Renzetti's fun middle-grade Horrible Handbag trilogy and mostly enjoyed it, and snickered at Freida McFadden's satire of her own thriller genre in The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie. The best book of the month, however, was Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's speculation on space colonization, A City on Mars.
October was another month that opened with a disappointment; after being suckered in by a shiny cover and intriguing early pages, Frances White's Voyage of the Damned just plain failed to deliver. I did my part to push back against the creeping, crushing grasp of book-banners and censors by checking a few frequently challenged titles off: The Complete Maus by Art Speigelman and Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, both in their ways unflinching explorations of how terrible humans can be to other humans, and what war does to bodies and minds. Maus was easily the best read of the month, and among the best of the year. I also enjoyed Chuck Tingle's take on classic horror tropes (and examination of gatekeeping and internal schisms in nonhetero communities), Straight. A classic children's tale, Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, unfortunately let me down, though I could see how it was a groundbreaker in its way, and it had some intriguing parts, even if I never felt they gelled cohesively. I also felt let down by S. J. Morden's hard sci-fi space thriller One Way, where convicts are recruited to build a Martian colony. Katherine Addison presented a different slant on epic fantasy with The Goblin Emperor, where a half-goblin unexpectedly inherits the throne of the elf king and must navigate courtly politics that he was intentionally never trained to cope with. Adrian Bliss offered humorously offbeat perspectives on historic times and figures with the tales of The Greatest Nobodies of History. I finished off the month with Alix E. Harrow's southern gothic-flavored story of a cursed Kentucky coal town, Starling House.
I started November with a long-anticipated prequel, Christopher Buehlman's The Daughters' War, and enjoyed it, though the tone was darker than The Blacktongue Thief. From there, I ventured through a range of stories and ratings, from the abysmal time loop of Edge of Tomorrow by Hiroshi Sakurazaka to the middle-grade tale of an eventful family vacation in the wake of grief in Cliff Burke's An Occasionally Happy Family, the surreality of Nghi Vo's The City in Glass, and the peculiar tale of a man's terminal antigravity affliction in Elevation by Stephen King. Aldous Huxley's cautionary tale of a dystopian "Fordian" future, Brave New World, prompted an exploration of Henry Ford's draconian, paternalistic vision of "ideal" Americana in Greg Grandin's Fordlandia, which chronicled Ford's efforts to export that vision to the Amazon basin. J. A. White offered a sequel to the middle-grade tale of a boy who loves writing horror stories, Nightbooks, in Gravebooks, which proved just as good. I stumbled across a few surprises that I wound up enjoying, one in an alternate-history Chicago - Megaera C. Lorenz's tale of a former "spiritualist" con artist forced to confront a real haunting and his old colleagues in The Shabti - and another in an alternate postwar Japan in a world of dragon companions, Emi Watanabe Cohen's The Lost Ryū.
December... what to say about December. It was a year ago in December that my father went into the ER for what would turn out to be his last hospital visit, followed by the start of a month of home hospice (he came home the day after Xmas), and only a few months earlier this year other relatives experienced significant health crises, so I was already on a fraying mental rope. After about a year of the axe hanging over my head on the job front, the blade finally began its downward swing; the facility where I have worked for nearly twenty years is relocating out of range of my increasingly unreliable vehicle. It is because of this job and my familiarity with it that I manage to review so many books, as I can lose myself in an audiobook while my hands go through the familiar motions, so changing jobs will likely have a notable impact here (though at least I may have a job to change to, which is hardly a small thing in this economy, especially with my anemic resumé). Between that news and general holiday and year end frustrations, it was a lean review month. Jim Butcher offered a solid, if not exactly standout, tale of swashbuckling and steampunk and airships with a tinge of magic in The Aeronaut's Windlass, while Adam Rex delved into the peculiarities of dreams with the surreal A Little Like Waking. I ventured outside the fiction box with Surely You Can't Be Serious, about the making of the comedy classic film Airplane!, by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. Otherwise, there wasn't much particularly noteworthy in the month. Veronica Roth's tale of Eastern European monsters (and the "holy" knights who hunt them) hiding in plain sight in modern Chicago, When Among Crows, had some nice ideas but didn't quite click with me, while Margaret Rogerson's young adult fantasy romance An Enchantment of Ravens kept me interested through most of its length.
So... yeah, that was 2025. I anticipated a cruddy year going into it, and what I got was far worse, save some pretty good books along the way. (I'm not even getting into the local, national, and international horrors playing out...) Looking ahead, I'd be lying if I said I thought better things were awaiting in 2026, for the world or my nation, let alone myself. I'm not sure good things are even possible anymore; too much has been destroyed or poisoned, too little has been protected or gained. Hopefully I can at least find a few books to pass the time with between bad things and worse things.
I went into January knowing that this would be a trying year at best (and it was not, at all, best); on a personal level, my father was in home hospice care for late-stage dementia and other health issues, while on a national level my country had opted to slam the self-destruct button rather than even attempt to progress past the worst parts of our own history. So perhaps it was little wonder that my first review of the year, Libba Bray's peculiar metaphysical young adult romp Going Bovine, disappointed me, though not as deeply as a classic that had a very deceptive description on Libby, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. I was more impressed by P. Djèlí Clark's first foray into middle-grade fantasy, the African-inspired tale Abeni's Song, though my top read - and one of my best of the year - turned out to be a surprise, the contemporary middle-grade fiction title The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart... a book I found less than a week after my father passed away, which spoke so clearly to family and grief I couldn't not give it top marks.
February continued the year's trend of being cruddy (you can pretty much assume at this point that the best 2025 managed was "not quite as terrible as the month before"; I don't think I can point to one week, let alone month, where I could honestly say something was actually, quantifiably, without any mitigating asterisks and qualifications, "good"), but the reading improved somewhat. Henry. H. Neff's humorous take on family curses and demons in modern Appalachia, The Witchstone, started the month off on the right foot for reviews, while Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series continued its impressive streak with Death Bringer. I ventured into a little history with All Blood Runs Red by Phil Keith with Tom Clavin, the remarkable tale of a young Black man who fled Jim Crow and America in the early 1900's to become a soldier, war pilot, boxer, spy, and more in France. Ray Nayler's The Tusks of Extinction explored a near future where resurrected mammoths are helped by the uploaded mind of a scientist who was murdered by poachers while trying to protect some of the world's last wild elephants, a thought-provoking tale. The short month ended with Ghostdrift, the fourth and final novel in Suzanne Palmer's highly enjoyable Finder series of sci-fi adventures. In between were a few more middling, sometimes mildly disappointing reads, but no outright clunkers.
The early reads of March were adrift in the three-star doldrums, from Holly Gramazio's deconstruction of love and marriage and the notion of a "perfect" life mate in The Husbands through the surreal dystopian future of Djuna's Counterweight, though it ended on a somewhat brighter note with Fundamentals, an exploration of some of the fundamental concepts of physics by Frank Wilczek. High points were Devin Elle Kurtz's delightful picture book The Bakery Dragon and Derek Landy's seventh Skulduggery Pleasant book, Kingdom of the Wicked, while I dabbled in yet another classic with Oscar Wilde's famed tale about a man whose portrait bears the mark of his depravity and sins in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was enjoyable but couldn't help showing its age.
April opened with the surreality of Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which had some fun and intriguing parts but ultimately skewed too random and vague for my tastes. I had better luck with Ta-Nehisi Coates's fascinating essays in Between the World and Me, chronicling his experiences as a Black man grappling with the omnipresent specter of American racism. David LaRochelle's silly picture book 100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli still has one of my favorite titles of all time, while Amber McBride's poetic young adult tale Me (Moth) felt like a strange and sometimes beautiful, if poignant, dream of grief and acceptance and love found too late. The rest of the month had a mixed-to-good assortment, from tales of peculiar experiences on the Navajo reservation in Stanley Milford, Jr.'s memoir The Paranormal Ranger to a tale of a shapeshifter finding unexpected love with two-legged prey in John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In, concluding with Anne Rice's iconic tale Interview with the Vampire, a trendsetter that also aged a little poorly around the edges.
Derek Landy had two solid entries in May: the eighth chronological entry in his Skulduggery Pleasant series, Last Stand of Dead Men, and the short story collection (that also contained "spoilers" for later entries due to weird series chronology labeling by the publisher) Armageddon Outta Here. Overall, it was a good reading month, including a new Wayward Children novella from Seanan McGuire (Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear), the surprisingly touching tale of an imaginary friend finding his own way in the world (Michelle Cuevas's Confessions of an Imaginary Friend), and Chuck Tingle's brutal takedown of Hollywood's problem with algorithmically-controlled entertainment and non-hetero representation in Bury Your Gays. Another top read was Maya Angelou's recollections of her childhood in the Deep South during Jim Crow years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Weaker reads included Sung-il Kim's Asian-flavored fantasy Blood of the Old Kings and E. E. Knight's epic dragon adventure Dragon Champion.
June had few standouts. While the Skulduggery Pleasant wrapped up its original run with the ninth book, The Dying of the Light, in spectacular fashion, other titles that I had high hopes for, such as Peter S. Beagle's I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, left me disappointed or nonplussed. I did enjoy Tochi Onyebuchi's novella Riot Baby, and Alex Bledsoe's melding of private investigation with a fantasy world, The Sword-Edged Blonde, had potential. The month ended with a DK Smithsonian book, Dinosaurs, that suffered mostly from iffy and inconsistent editing and a sometimes-frustrating mix of what was explored and what was glossed over or ignored, though as with most DK titles the pictures were (usually) intriguing enough to make up for weakness in the text.
I had hoped to start July off right with yet another Derek Landy book, but Resurrection not only couldn't quite strike a balance between the familiar Skulduggery Pleasant characters and the "next generation" brought in to keep the titles middle-grade/young adult, but suffered from an unfortunate bout of bad timing, as it featured a minor baddie with parallels to a monster currently (literally) demolishing the highest house in my country with impunity. I also had very high hopes for Scott Reintgen's spacefaring dragon romp The Last Dragon of Mars, but my suspension of disbelief was knocked out of orbit and burned up on re-entry. Jim C. Hines offered a fun middle-grade fantasy adventure as a girl tries to rescue her missing friends from a dangerous portal fantasy world in Tamora Carter, Goblin Queen. I ventured into nonfiction and politics with a few reads - Emmanuel Aoki's Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man and Democracy in Retrograde by Sami Sage and Emil Amick - because I'm very tired of feeling ignorant and helpless (and hopeless) about All The Things that are destroying... well, all the things, and the future along with them. To finish off the month, I ventured into thriller territory with Elizabeth Elo's North of Boston.
August was a lean month for reading, for various non-reading-related reasons. Far and away the best book was Daindreth's Assassin by Elisabeth Wheatley, though the rest were generally serviceable. Hannah Whitten's tale of a princess bound to be sacrificed in a cursed forest (that, of course, is not all that it appears) and the sister who will destroy the kingdom if need be to save her, For the Wolf, didn't quite live up to its promise, but was still fairly good. I was somewhat disappointed by a story of Puerto Rican storytellers and the teen girl unexpectedly inheriting a family gift (and burden), Ann Davila Cardinal's The Storyteller's Death. The Kate Elliott novella Servant Mage didn't quite deliver, either. I ventured into teen romance with the anthology Serendipity, edited by Marissa Meyer. Adrian Tchaikovsky wrapped up the month with an interesting subversion of tropes in his tale of a post-apocalyptic Earth threatened by total annihilation when the "gods" return from their space utopia to "fix" a planet they broke to begin with, The Hungry Gods.
I ventured back to a minor sci-fi classic, Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population, to start September, but it didn't quite live up to the hype for me. It was not the only classic of the month to let me down; I found Robert Sheckley's surreal Mindswap exceptionally dated. Jordanna Max Bordsky's imaginative spin on a prehistoric encounter between the Inuit and Norse explorers (and their respective deities) in The Wolf and the Whale proved much more intriguing. I breezed through Rob Renzetti's fun middle-grade Horrible Handbag trilogy and mostly enjoyed it, and snickered at Freida McFadden's satire of her own thriller genre in The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie. The best book of the month, however, was Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's speculation on space colonization, A City on Mars.
October was another month that opened with a disappointment; after being suckered in by a shiny cover and intriguing early pages, Frances White's Voyage of the Damned just plain failed to deliver. I did my part to push back against the creeping, crushing grasp of book-banners and censors by checking a few frequently challenged titles off: The Complete Maus by Art Speigelman and Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers, both in their ways unflinching explorations of how terrible humans can be to other humans, and what war does to bodies and minds. Maus was easily the best read of the month, and among the best of the year. I also enjoyed Chuck Tingle's take on classic horror tropes (and examination of gatekeeping and internal schisms in nonhetero communities), Straight. A classic children's tale, Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, unfortunately let me down, though I could see how it was a groundbreaker in its way, and it had some intriguing parts, even if I never felt they gelled cohesively. I also felt let down by S. J. Morden's hard sci-fi space thriller One Way, where convicts are recruited to build a Martian colony. Katherine Addison presented a different slant on epic fantasy with The Goblin Emperor, where a half-goblin unexpectedly inherits the throne of the elf king and must navigate courtly politics that he was intentionally never trained to cope with. Adrian Bliss offered humorously offbeat perspectives on historic times and figures with the tales of The Greatest Nobodies of History. I finished off the month with Alix E. Harrow's southern gothic-flavored story of a cursed Kentucky coal town, Starling House.
I started November with a long-anticipated prequel, Christopher Buehlman's The Daughters' War, and enjoyed it, though the tone was darker than The Blacktongue Thief. From there, I ventured through a range of stories and ratings, from the abysmal time loop of Edge of Tomorrow by Hiroshi Sakurazaka to the middle-grade tale of an eventful family vacation in the wake of grief in Cliff Burke's An Occasionally Happy Family, the surreality of Nghi Vo's The City in Glass, and the peculiar tale of a man's terminal antigravity affliction in Elevation by Stephen King. Aldous Huxley's cautionary tale of a dystopian "Fordian" future, Brave New World, prompted an exploration of Henry Ford's draconian, paternalistic vision of "ideal" Americana in Greg Grandin's Fordlandia, which chronicled Ford's efforts to export that vision to the Amazon basin. J. A. White offered a sequel to the middle-grade tale of a boy who loves writing horror stories, Nightbooks, in Gravebooks, which proved just as good. I stumbled across a few surprises that I wound up enjoying, one in an alternate-history Chicago - Megaera C. Lorenz's tale of a former "spiritualist" con artist forced to confront a real haunting and his old colleagues in The Shabti - and another in an alternate postwar Japan in a world of dragon companions, Emi Watanabe Cohen's The Lost Ryū.
December... what to say about December. It was a year ago in December that my father went into the ER for what would turn out to be his last hospital visit, followed by the start of a month of home hospice (he came home the day after Xmas), and only a few months earlier this year other relatives experienced significant health crises, so I was already on a fraying mental rope. After about a year of the axe hanging over my head on the job front, the blade finally began its downward swing; the facility where I have worked for nearly twenty years is relocating out of range of my increasingly unreliable vehicle. It is because of this job and my familiarity with it that I manage to review so many books, as I can lose myself in an audiobook while my hands go through the familiar motions, so changing jobs will likely have a notable impact here (though at least I may have a job to change to, which is hardly a small thing in this economy, especially with my anemic resumé). Between that news and general holiday and year end frustrations, it was a lean review month. Jim Butcher offered a solid, if not exactly standout, tale of swashbuckling and steampunk and airships with a tinge of magic in The Aeronaut's Windlass, while Adam Rex delved into the peculiarities of dreams with the surreal A Little Like Waking. I ventured outside the fiction box with Surely You Can't Be Serious, about the making of the comedy classic film Airplane!, by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. Otherwise, there wasn't much particularly noteworthy in the month. Veronica Roth's tale of Eastern European monsters (and the "holy" knights who hunt them) hiding in plain sight in modern Chicago, When Among Crows, had some nice ideas but didn't quite click with me, while Margaret Rogerson's young adult fantasy romance An Enchantment of Ravens kept me interested through most of its length.
So... yeah, that was 2025. I anticipated a cruddy year going into it, and what I got was far worse, save some pretty good books along the way. (I'm not even getting into the local, national, and international horrors playing out...) Looking ahead, I'd be lying if I said I thought better things were awaiting in 2026, for the world or my nation, let alone myself. I'm not sure good things are even possible anymore; too much has been destroyed or poisoned, too little has been protected or gained. Hopefully I can at least find a few books to pass the time with between bad things and worse things.
Monday, December 1, 2025
November Site Update
A prolific month for reading, if another questionable one outside of reading... The main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated with the month's reviews. (Yes, I'm aware it's a day late. See also: questionable month outside of reading...)
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Friday, October 31, 2025
October Site Update
This year just is not quitting with the cruddy stuff, but at least it let me update the main Brightdreamer Books website between crises (or rather during an ongoing one involving a malfunctioning furnace; hey, at least we have running water, which is better than we had for 11 days at the start of the month).
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
September Site Update
Another month appears to have elapsed, and things keep going from bad to worse everywhere... In any event, September's reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Saturday, August 30, 2025
August Site Update
Goodbye and good riddance, August... Another gruelling month ends, and more reviews archived on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Thursday, July 31, 2025
July Site Update
Well, there's another 31 days of miserable existence I'll never get back... reading (generally) excepted, of course. The month's reviews have been archived over on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Monday, June 30, 2025
June Site Update
2025 is half over and I still can't find anything good to say about it. Anyway, the month's eight reviews have been archived and cross-linked over on the main Brightdreamer Books page.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Sunday, June 1, 2025
(Delayed) May Update
Another month of All The Things coming together in a bad way, with no end in sight to Things pilin' on... Anyway, May's reviews are now archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
April Site Update
It's a day early because of the likelihood of tomorrow being Not Good (job related, because 2025 wouldn't be 2025 if anything remotely hopeful or decent remained in my life), but the month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books website.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Monday, March 31, 2025
March Site Update
Yet another month that felt like it overachieved by packing a year's worth of horrors into thirty-one days... Anyway, the month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Friday, February 28, 2025
February Site Update
The shortest month of the year, and I'm already more than done with 2025... In any event, the month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked over on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Saturday, February 1, 2025
(Delayed) January Site Update
I had low hopes going into 2025, and already those seem impossibly optimistic in hindsight. (Going from "this is going to be terrible" into "do I really even want to bother surviving what's ahead?" territory, here, where there is literally not a thing in my world, my nation, and my life that is not being threatened and/or already irrevocably broken... and anyone offering glib platitudes or vague toxic-positivity admonitions about doing "something" will get a dictionary upside the skull.)
For now, at least, there are still books keeping me going, more or less.
Anyway, January's nine reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy, for the time being at least...
For now, at least, there are still books keeping me going, more or less.
Anyway, January's nine reviews have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.
Enjoy, for the time being at least...
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
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...
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...
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