One more year crawls across the finish line, and the month's twelve reads have been archived to the main Brightdreamer Books site so it’s time for yet another Reading Year in Review.
January kicked off with an exciting space adventure, The Exiled Fleet, second in the Divide series by J. S. Dewes, and wrapped with another fun (if very different) book, Jessica Townsend’s middle-grade fantasy Nevermoor. In between was a variety of mostly interesting titles, from the utterly unique Light From Uncommon Stars (Ryka Aoki) to the “weird West” Wake of Vultures (Lila Bowen). For nonfiction, I delved into an intriguing, if sadly already dated in its optimism, look at how humans might survive mass catastrophe in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz.
February began with one of the older titles I’ve reviewed, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which posited a utopian future beyond the selfish greed of capitalism. I also got around to John Bellairs’s whimsical wizardry in The Face in the Frost, and checked out Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr. Griffin from my local library’s Frequently Banned Book list. There were a few disappointments, though. In particular, Shelby Van Pelt’s popular novel Remarkably Bright Creatures left me underwhelmed despite all the hype around it. I also expected more from A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, and Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore failed to live up to all the buzz I recalled. Alix E. Harrow returned to her Fractured Fables world with the dark, thought-provoking A Mirror Mended. The month wrapped up with Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters, which created an intriguing subspecies of vampiric humans who consume books like blood, but which ultimately didn't quite deliver the story I'd hoped for.
March’s highlights included Neil Gaiman’s homage to Rudyard Kipling in The Graveyard Book, Nghi Vo’s return to the world of Singing Hills in the novella Into the Riverlands, and the nonfiction story of the search for a lost Mayan city in Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God. I also enjoyed the hard science fiction of Saturn Run, by John Sanford and Ctien, and the classic space horror novella Nightflyers by George R. R. Martin. David James Warren’s time traveling mystery story, Cast the First Stone, left me cold, unfortunately, as did the X-Files-like conspiracy thriller The Darkest Time of Night by Jeremy Finley.
In honor of April showers (that would theoretically bring May flowers), April’s first book was the middle-grade story of an aspiring meteorologist and stormchaser in Ginger Zee’s Chasing Helicity. The month as a whole proved to be a mixed bag, however. While I enjoyed the updated paleontology of Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michal J. Benton and the return to the space adventures of "finder" Fergus Ferguson in The Scavenger Door by Suzanne Palmer, I found Alex Jennings's fantastical tribute to the spirit of New Orleans, The Ballad of Perilous Graves, too surreal for its own good despite a great premise and interesting ideas. Charlie Jane Anders impressed with the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive, a call to keep fighting on and creating despite the very dark turns the world as a whole seems to be taking. Though technically a prequel, Michael J. Sullivan’s Age of Myth had a nice, old-school fantasy feel to it that I hope to get back to one of these days (Libby and my local library’s audiobook selection willing).
May started with a whirlwind tour of obscure American cryptids in J. W. Ocker’s The United States of Cryptids and ended with the middle-grade fantasy chiller The Thickety by J. A. White. I also finally got around to reading H. P. Lovecraft’s classic tale At the Mountains of Madness, part of his cosmic horror milieu that has remained influential to this day (but which I don’t one hundred percent click with, for all that I could appreciate the imagery and ideas). I quite enjoyed my first James Riley title, the middle grade fantasy adventure Story Thieves, as well as Meg Long’s young adult science fiction tale Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves. Monica L. Smith described the history and possible future of humanity’s greatest innovation in Cities. Two more frequently banned books made it into the list, with Marion Dane Bauer’s On My Honor and Walder Dean Myers’s Monster.
June turned out to be my most prolific reading month of the year, though not without its low spots. It kicked off with Lev Grossman’s cynical take on portal fantasies and magical schools in The Magicians, which had promise but ultimately left me disliking the characters and world too much to enjoy. Another popular author that sadly disappointed in this outing was Mary Robinette Kowal in her retro-future light sleuthing tale The Spare Man, leaning into a Nick and Nora Charles banter dynamic that just failed to click with the setting or with me as a reader. Surprise enjoyments were the teen spy thriller The Athena Protocol by Shamim Sarif and Dale Lucas’s mashup of police procedural and fantasy in First Watch. I also visited a few classics, such as Michael Moorcock’s iconic Elric of Melnibone and H. A. DeRosso’s noir Western 0.44. An impulse buy at the used bookstore proved just as light and entertaining as promised, Simon R. Green’s Blue Moon Rising, while Ben Guterson’s middle-grade tale a magic-tinged mountain resort, Winterhouse, intrigued. My month’s nonfiction title was a collection of odd historical and prehistorical trivia in Adrienne Mayor’s Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws.
I kicked off July with Peter Bognanni’s love letter to movies in the young adult tale This Book Is Not Yet Rated, which had a lot more heart and interest than I anticipated, and wrapped the month by finally getting around to Larry McMurtry’s classic Western epic Lonesome Dove. In between were several solid reads/listens, with high points being Stephen King’s The Body, Seanan McGuire’s Lost in the Moment and Found, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, James S. A. Corey’s standalone short How It Unfolds, and A. Deborah Baker’s return to the Up-and-Under in Into the Windwracked Wilds. The much-lauded dragon academy/romance tale Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros mostly lived up to its hype, though I found myself let down by Edward Ashton’s Mickey7. Clive Finlayson explored a fascinating world of Neanderthals and how our understanding of them has been rewritten in recent years in The Smart Neanderthal.
In August, I explored racial injustices and their deep roots with Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, took a look at futures that failed to manifest in Daniel H. Wilson’s Where’s My Jetpack?, explored a “lost world” and forgotten tale of survival and sensationalism in Mitchel Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La, and toured the human skeleton through the lens of forensic anthropology in Sue Black’s Written in Bone. For fiction, I had my usual random mix of tales with my usual random reactions. Neil Gaiman’s modern classic American Gods and Josiah Bancroft’s surreal take on a Tower of Babylon that never fell in Senlin Ascends impressed, as did Stephen King’s dark classic Pet Sematary. S. A. Patrick’s wonderful middle-grade fantasy A Darkening of Dragons entertained me enough to almost immediately seek out its sequel, A Vanishing of Griffins, both of which leave me eagerly anticipating the next installment in the Songs of Magic series. On the other end of the spectrum, Elizabeth Peters’s Crocodile on the Sandbank, first in a long-running popular series of historical fiction mysteries set among English archaeologists in Egypt, showed its age even as it delivered a serviceable story, as did Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions.
September opened with another classic, this one holding up rather better, in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, a book written to help the author flesh out the screenplay for the classic noir movie. Another classic, Lois Lowry’s dystopian The Giver, aged a little less well but still had solid emotional impact. I revisited the zombie apocalpse of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series with Rise, the collection of short stories and novellas filling out events before and after the main trilogy, and ventured into the dens of 1970’s vampires living under New York City with Christopher Buelhman’s dark tale The Lesser Dead. Elise Hurst’s collection of imaginative ink drawings acted as spurs for the imagination in The Storyteller’s Handbook, while Mark Manson offered life advice in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Despite my skepticism over Sherlock Holmes pastiches, I found the Western take on it offered in Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range unexpectedly amusing.
I opened October with a father’s tall tale of a milk run gone sour in Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the Milk, and ended it with Arik Kershenbaum’s speculation on how alien life might evolve in The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy. Between, I continued the Books of Babel series with Josiah Bancroft’s Arm of the Sphinx, revisited Stephen King with the novella The Mist, and ventured into another middle grade classic with Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons. Moniquill Blackgoose offered an utterly unique alternate history of conquering Vikings, conquered Native Americans, and dragons in To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. The light sci-fi/military comedy Mechanical Failure by Joe Zieja brought some smiles, more than the light graphic novel fantasy Three Little Wishes by Paul Cornell. John Geiger explored an unusual phenomenon in The Third Man Factor, where humans in high stress situations can sense or even see a person who is not there. And Buelman’s vampires returned (though technically this story came first) in The Suicide Motor Club.
In November, Natalie Lloyd’s middle-grade fantasy of flying horses, Over the Moon, didn’t rise quite as high as it promised. Similarly, the Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves prequel, The Road to Neverwinter, felt a little too much like a road already traveled (and traveled better) in the movie. H. Beam Piper’s classic science fiction tale, Little Fuzzy, showed its age despite some interesting ideas. The bonds of sisterhood, stressed by unusual circumstances, were explored in Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer and Cat Clarke’s The Lost and the Found, and a father reflects on the legacy he gifted his son (and whether that legacy contributed to his disappearance) in Roman Dial’s The Adventurer’s Son. Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman lightened the reading mood up a bit, while Susan Hood related a harrowing tale of wartime survival in Lifeboat 12 and K. L. Going’s Fat Kid Rules the World explored the painful inner world of a borderline-suicidal teen rediscovering a reason to live through punk rock. Mallory O’Meara shed light on a long-forgotten trailblazer and horror movie icon, the woman who designed the classic Creature from the Black Lagoon costume (and was subsequently erased by Bud Westmore and studio executives), in the biographical Lady from the Black Lagoon.
December kicked off with an alternate-history gumshoe searching 1940’s Chicago for an occult serial killer in C. L. Polk’s excellent Even Though I Knew the End. There were a few disappointments, such as Lish McBride’s Hold Me Closer, Necromancer and a space opera reboot of King Arthur, Cori McCarthy and A. R. Capetta’s Once and Future, but also one of the best reads of the year in Alix E. Harrow’s alternate-history fantasy The Once and Future Witches. I tried the classic children’s fantasy The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, but preferred the genre classic Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s explorations of the evolution of intelligence, particularly in octopuses, in Other Minds made for some interesting food for thought. I finished off the year with the third installment of Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel series, The Hod King.
The year also ended with my internet service provider’s modem/router developing an interesting glitch, in that I could no longer see my own website in any browser, on any device using our ISP for internet access. (I could, however, still see my site through other networks, and confirmed that it was still up and available to the world at large. I can also update files. I just can't view the results unless I take my phone off the home wifi and use the 4G/5G network - and even that can be spotty.) Having done every online remedy I could find, from cache clearances to disabling various things to unplugging/replugging and resetting anything that could be reset, I’m officially out of ideas save a factory reset - a drastic option that may break more than it fixes - or getting a new modem/router from the ISP. Rectifying this problem, with all associated headaches (because we have never had one device from this outfit just plug in and work without at least one round of tech support having to visit the actual house), will probably eat the start of next year, or whenever I can get the go-ahead to tackle the problem. (Me not being able to view my own website on our internet service is a "me" problem, while messing up the network for the household is an "everyone" problem.) If I didn’t already suspect 2024 will be aggravating beyond words, this would be one of those signs…
In any event, apparently this was my most productive reading year since I started keeping my blog, due in very large part to workplace boredom and the Libby app's audiobook capabilities. In the coming year, I hope to whittle down my at-home TBR (To Be Read) pile, and dig into sequels and series I've started and keep meaning to follow through on. We shall see how that goes (see also: high likelihood that 2024 will be aggravating beyond words)...
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