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.
Showing posts with label year in review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label year in review. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
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...
Sunday, December 31, 2023
December Site Update and 2023 Year in Review
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)...
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)...
Saturday, December 31, 2022
December Site Update and 2022 Reading Year in Review
December's reviews have been archived and cross-linked at the main Brightdreamer Books site.
And, once again, another year ends, which means it's once again time for a Reading Year in Review post.
January started on a decent note, as I wrapped up reading Seanan McGuire's excellent Ghost Roads trilogy with Angel of the Overpass. Other highlights of the month were Nicole Glover's postbellum historical fiction/fantasy/murder mystery The Conductors, John David Anderson's imaginative take on wishes and the fairies who grant them in Granted, and Joe Hill's short story collection Full Throttle. The top book of the month turned out to be Leigh Bardugo's dark fantasy heist novel Six of Crows, a marked improvement over her Shadow and Bone (and incentive to some day go back and finish off the first Grishaverse trilogy; to be honest, I mostly gave Crows a try because Kaz's crew was retconned into the Netflix show and they were my favorite parts). It was also a month with some disappointments; Penric's Demon is the second swing-and-miss for the much-vaunted author Lois McMaster Bujold, enough for me to decide I just plain do not get her appeal and never will (though I've read worse), and Matt Wallace's Envy of Angels, a culinary romp through forbidden foods at a catering company with decidedly unusual clientele, left me with no appetite for further courses.
I kicked off February with Terry Pratchett's standalone tale Nation, a solid enough start in a month that would include several highlights: Christopher Buehlman's darkly humorous fantasy The Blacktongue Thief,
Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune in the Singing Hills Cycle, and the conclusion to Leigh Bardugo's excellent Six of Crows duology, Crooked Kingdom. Seanan McGuire continued her impressive
Wayward Children series with Where the Drowned Girls Go, and Catherynne M. Valente presented a dystopian nightmare twist on a familiar creation tale in Comfort Me With Apples. Another surprise delight was the audiobook presentation of Brent "Lt. Commander Data" Spiner's Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir ("inspired by true events"), a tale elevated by his narration and cameos from fellow Star Trek: The Next Generation cast members. I also greatly enjoyed Gary Paulsen's autobiographical Gone to the Woods, read after the iconic author's passing. There were a few lowlights, of course, but more in the "meh" category than actively aggravating.
March brought some memorable titles, including Brian McClellan's French Revolution-inspired flintlock fantasy Promise of Blood, the Expanse novella collection (and final print entry in the franchise)
Memory's Legion by James S. A. Corey, and the surprisingly enjoyable fairy tale/space opera mashup How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason. Adrian Tchaikovsky impressed with his flintlock fantasy
examination of war in Guns of the Dawn, while Marie Brennan wrapped her five-book series of the lady dragon scientist Lady Trent in Within the Sanctuary of Wings. I also was unexpectedly impressed by the middle-grade ghost tale The In-Between and enjoyed the thrillers Alone (Megan E. Freeman) and The Girl in the Well is Me (Karen Rivers). I even found time for a fun little picture book at work, Tara Lazar's 7 Ate 9, and finally got around to Stephen King's classic The Shining. As a counterpoint to that title, the month's clear low point was another hotel-based tale of suspense, Shari Lapena's An Unwanted Guest, a story so generic and bland that I found myself forgetting it even before I'd finished.
I got quite a lot of reading (and listening, though audiobooks count as reading) done in April, starting with the graphic novel/picture book Captain Raptor and the Space Pirates by Kevin O'Malley and Patrick O'Brian and
ending with the dark near-future vampire tale Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Highlights in between included Darcie Little Badger's indigenous-inspired tale Elatsoe, Adrian Tchaikovsky's space opera Shards of Earth, and Rebecca Coffindaffer's lively space adventure, the Crownchasers duology. I was disappointed by Charles Martin's tale of wilderness survival and broken hearts, The Mountain Between Us, though, and thought a few - such as Margarita Montimore's time travel tale Oona Out of Order and Karen Mascarenhas's The Psychology of Time Travel - could've done more with their promising setups.
May started with an audiobook version of the classic Beowulf, translated by Stephen Mitchell, and also Italo Calvino's parody of medieval chivalry (and numerous other topics) The Nonexistent Knight. Katherine Applegate impressed me yet again with her story of ecological imbalance and a young outcast finding her voice in Willodeen, and Martha Wells's memorable SecUnit Murderbot returned in Network Effect. Unfortunately, despite the potential in the premise, Rachel Bach failed to impress me with her space adventure Fortune's Pawn, and after initial interest the final parts of Natalie Zina Walschots's deconstruction of superheroes and villains, Hench, left me cold and more than a little repelled.
June was my most prolific month, with fifteen reviews posted. From classics including Richard Matheson's I Am Legend and Other Stories, John W. Campbell Jr.'s horror classic Who Goes There?, and E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops to near-new titles like A. Deborah Baker's Along the Saltwise Sea (second in the delightful Up-and-Under series) and the children's urban fantasy tale Dragons in a Bag by Zetta Elliott, I managed a range of tales and ratings. Top titles included Zeno Alexander's middle-grade tale of a fantastical library under attack from all too real threats in the Library of Ever duology, Jessie Mihalik's somewhat predictable but still enjoyable space adventure/romance Hunt the Stars, and the finale of Jeff Lemire's Descender/Ascender graphic novel series in Ascender Volume 4: Star Seed. Despite enjoying the first installment of Sarah Beth Durst's Queens of Renthia series in Queen of Blood, I was disappointed in the sequel, The Reluctant Queen, enough that I don't see myself continuing. I also mostly enjoyed Rainbow Rowell's first entry in her fantasy/queer romance Simon Snow series, Carry On, a deconstruction of Harry Potter-style hidden world fantasies, yet find myself on the fence as to whether I'm interested enough in the world or characters to read on; it felt more like a self-aware deconstruction than a world and characters in which to become invested for their own sakes, if that makes any sense.
Though July was one of my less impressive months in terms of numbers, there were no outright clunkers among them. I was very pleasantly surprised, impressed, and absorbed by Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs, I book
I never would've picked up on my own had it not been part of a "mystery box" online offer. Stephen King also kept me interested in the non-genre Billy Summers, and I enjoyed Mishell Baker's Borderline, an urban
fantasy romance steeped in Los Angeles film culture, more than I expected. I even wrapped up K. Eason's excellent Thorne Chronicles duology with How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge. (I also discovered the first of a follow-up duology or series at a bookstore, Nightwatch on the Hinterlands, but unfortunately haven't gotten to it in the To Be Read pile yet...)
August wasn't too bad, but it had a nadir in S. Kaeth's dragon story Windward; despite some very interesting ideas about dragon culture and the role humans might play in their world, I just could not connect
at all with the characters or their motivations, which kept me from enjoying it. Top reads of the month were Elizabeth Bonesteel's space story The Cold Between and Angeline Boulley's contemporary thriller Firekeeper's Daughter. I checked another classic off with John Milton's poetic take on the Biblical fall of Satan and man in Paradise Lost, and got to a more recent classic in The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub, as well as Robert Silverberg's retelling of perhaps the oldest known epic in Gilgamesh the King. C. L. Polk impressed me with Witchmark, but I felt let down by Stephen Brust's Good Guys, especially given how I've enjoyed other titles of his.
September kicked off with an imaginative young adult tale of flying ships and dragon hunters in Black Leviathan by Bernd Perplies, and ended with the excellent, if intense, fantasy slant on Chinese history in Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun. Between were a few older titles, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's first entry in her lauded Hainish Cycle, Rocannon's World, Theodore Taylor's tale of island survival and overcoming prejudice in The Cay, and the classic short stories collected by BBC Audio's Great Classic Science Fiction, some of which aged better than others. I wrapped up (at least for the time being) two series with Peter Brown's The Wild Robot Escapes and Nicholas Eames's Bloody Rose. Elizabeth Acevedo's free verse prose in Clap When You Land translated decently to audiobook, though I found myself let down after high hopes
in Vivian Shaw's tale of contemporary monster medicine in London, Strange Practice.
I opened October with an audiobook version of Neil Gaiman's short story (and poetry) collection, Fragile Things, which mostly impressed. (As a side note, while listening to this at work, at home I was wrapping up Netflix's silly little animated musical confection Centaurworld, where one character's theme song is also titled "Fragile Things". This made for some truly bizarre juxtapositions of moods and mental images and earworms, I can tell you that much... and, dang it, just writing this up brought back some earworms from that show...) Another classic got checked off with Bram Stoker's somewhat lackluster tale of Egyptian curses and English grave robbers, The Jewel of Seven Stars. Christopher Buehlman made two impressive appearances this month, with the post-World War I tale of a cursed Southern town in Those Across the River and a gruesome yet absorbing story of France's plague years as the backdrop for Lucifer's army rising up against Heaven and an indifferent or absent God in Between Two Fires. Adrian Tchaikovsky managed the difficult task of making me interested in spider protagonists in Children of Time (more interested than in the human characters, honestly), while Alix E. Harrow excellently deconstructed the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale in A Spindle Splintered. The recent Netflix adaptation prompted me to take another crack at Neil Gaiman's classic graphic novel series with The Sandman Volume 2, but alas I still just do not seem to click with these, for all that I mostly enjoyed the show and keep
feeling that, given their themes and mythic roots and impressive artwork and such, I really should enjoy them. (I think I liked the show better because it reworked some of the things that kept me from being absorbed in the comics, such as the heavy tie-ins to the greater DC hero universe that act as gatekeeping against casual engagement and constantly remind me why I don't read more "big name" comics. One of the coldest shoulders I ever got was one time I went to a comic book store just to see if anything caught my eye, a dark-side-of-Pluto-level silence and stares from the small clump of customers and employees at the counter that as good as pushed me back out the door without a penny spent. Which is yet another reason why I only read comics via hoopla and my library's online offerings these days... but I digress.) The true lowlight of the month, though, was the thrill-less "thriller" The Stranger in the Mirror by Liv Constantine.
November started with another clunker, Emily Henry's When the Sky Fell on Splendor, which started out like a solid early-season X-Files episode in a small town and ended like... a late, post-shark-jump show that may or may not have ever been tangentially related to The X-Files (so, basically, a late-season episode of The X-Files). When Ruby Dixon's shamelessly smutty sci-fi romp Ice Planet Barbarians produced stronger characters and a better overall story, that says a lot... Yet another classic turned out to be not quite my cup of cocoa (not helped by aging around the edges and all-around preachiness), Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. The month's clear highlight was Catherynne M. Valente's middle-grade fantasy adventure, Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods. I also got a kick out of The Poodle of Doom, by Susan Tan, an impulse read at work.
December was an unproductive month, especially on the reading front, due to holidays and due to various weather-related work outages (since a good chunk of my reviews come from audiobooks listened to at work; it's much harder to get alone time at home to listen... or read, too much of the time). I had high hopes for the space elevator-themed sci-fi/action tale The Darwin Elevator by Jason M. Hough in December, but was left disappointed. I had a better experience with Charles Portis's classic story of revenge in the Old West, True Grit, though I remain among the few on the planet who still hasn't gotten around to watching any film adaptation. Ed Greenwood's old-school fantasy adventure The Kingless Land earned marks for wholeheartedly embracing what it was, though at some point I couldn't help expecting something more out of it (and that whole weird obsession with naked women and snakes...). Popular novelist Nevada Barr's Track of the Cat, first of the national parks and wilderness themed Anna Pigeon murder mystery series, was decently entertaining, though I'm not sure I'll seek out more titles any time soon. J. S. Dewes's The Last Watch kept me entertained with its action-filled story of a ragtag crew of misfit soldiers at the literal edge of the universe... a universe that is suddenly contracting at an alarming rate, just as ancient enemies of humanity have re-emerged to throw civilization into disarray. I finished off the month, and the year, with the highly enjoyable and thought-provoking How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur, creator of the TV series The Good Place (a favorite of mine), which explores ethics and morality and why we should really be thinking more about both.
And there it is, a quick (and admittedly not exhaustive) rundown of my reading year. 2022 could've easily been worse, but I'd be lying if I said it was a great time in general. Hopefully, 2023 is a better year
in more ways than just reading (though right now I'd settle for no more expensive surprises, especially car-related ones...).
Friday, December 31, 2021
December Site Update and 2021 Reading Year in Review
The month's reviews have been archived and cross-linked at the main Brightdreamer Books site.
And yet another year is coming to a close, so it's time for yet another reading year in review. My real life has been in a holding pattern (with a distinct downward glide, for various reasons - another year when "at least I'm not completely on fire yet" is about as close as I am to things being "good"), so reading provided a welcome escape.
January kicked off with V. E. Schwab's much-lauded The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which did not entirely live up to its own hype but was nevertheless a decent read. I also finally got around to the classic Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, whose style and very retro-feeling future aged far worse than its general ideas. This is also the month when overtime at work and general burnout/lack of other viable employment options prompted me to either gnaw a limb off to escape or turn to audiobooks via the local library and Overdrive (appropriate, as I work at the local library shipping center) for distraction, with Becky Chambers's thought-provoking novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate as my successful test drive. High points of January included A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher, and Jordan Ifueko's impressive young adult fantasy Raybearer. The month's low point, unfortunately, was Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton, an initially fun and intriguing post-zombie-apocalypse animal odyssey that overstayed its welcome and overplayed its Message by the end.
February, though the shortest month of the year, ironically was my most prolific one insofar as reading, though the titles were a mixed bag. Standouts were Seanan McGuire's Across the Green Grass Fields, Wonderstorm's The Art of The Dragon Prince, and P. Djeli Clark's novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015. I also enjoyed the exploration of racial tensions during a city riot in I'm Not Dying With You Tonight, by Kimberley Jones and Gilly Segal, and the third volume of Jeff Lemire's Ascender graphic novels. February's biggest disappointment was Jenifer Ruff's tale of Arctic survival When They Find Us, which squandered its potential. Also, Amparo Oritz's Blazewrath Games lacked the fire that a dragon-themed story should have... not unlike Patrick Ness's overlong alternate history tale Burn.
March opened with a bang in Tochi Onyebuchi's brutally gripping sci-fi tale War Girls, about a future Nigerian civil war fought by mech pilots and cybernetically enhanced soldiers on an increasingly uninhabitable Earth. I also enjoyed Kelley Armstrong's middle-grade fantasy adventure A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying, and Daniel Abraham's slow-burn The Long Price Quartet showed the value in sticking out an iffy first volume for greater rewards down the line. Low points could be found in Diane Les Becquets's tale of a woman lost in the Colorado wilderness, Breaking Wild, Marie Brennan's listless Driftwood, and Timothy Zahn's Night Train to Rigel, which embraced the throwback vibe too heartily by including some of the cringier aspects of old sci-fi pulp adventures. I also finally tried the prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky with the self-narrated audiobook novella Walking to Aldebaran, which was enjoyable enough for me to keep an eye peeled for other works by him when scrolling through Overdrive.
April opened with an unfortunate dud, one of the worst of the year, in The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James, and ended with the decently adventurous (if inevitably dated) classic swashbuckler Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. In between were several ups and downs, of which the top reads were P. Djeli Clark's horror fantasy Ring Shout, Margaret Owen's The Merciful Crow, and the final two books in Catherynne M. Valente's lyrical Fairyland series. Rob Hart's dystopian near future in The Warehouse was depressingly plausible (not just because I was listening to the audiobook while working in a warehouse, if not a big box store warehouse), and I was sadly disappointed in the first installment of the much-lauded Rivers of London series, Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch.
May was mostly a good reading month; even the lowest point (Heidi Heilig's The Girl From Everywhere) wasn't terrible, just meandering and with characters I never connected with. Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give tempted me out of my usual genre comfort zone, as did Jason Reynolds's free verse poem Long Way Down. An impulse buy of Suzanne Palmer's sci-fi adventure Finder proved an excellent choice. I also returned to Megan E. O'Keefe's exciting Protectorate space opera trilogy with Chaos Vector, and I finished off Margaret Owen's fantasy duology with The Faithless Hawk. Sarah Gailey's dark exploration of cloning and identity and generational abuse in The Echo Wife and Sarah Beth Durst's tale of monsters and reincarnation Race the Sands rounded things out.
June opened with the mildly disappointing Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, read after watching the Netflix series based on the Grishaverse. I ventured back to the classics with Joe Haldeman's landmark indictment of the perpetual human habit of combat in The Forever War, finally got to the second in Mira "Seanan McGuire" Grant's Newsflesh trilogy with Deadline, and enjoyed the middle-grade fantasy adventure of Have Sword, Will Travel, by Garth Nix and Sean Williams. Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers, unfortunately, never lived up to the promise of its premise, and Valerie Valdes's Chilling Effect was an overlong sci-fi joke whose punchline failed to make me so much as chuckle.
July included one of my favorite audiobook surprises of the year, Libba Bray's searing satire Beauty Queens. I finally got around to the much-lauded Joe Hill with the appropriately terrifying Heart-Shaped Box, and I returned to the Finder Chronicles with Suzanne Palmer's fine follow-up Driving the Deep. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Made Things also impressed, though Greg van Eeekhout's promising premise of osteomancy in California Bones never quite came together for me, and S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders suffered somewhat with age.
With only three reviews, August was my least productive reading month, and while none were outright terrible, none were particularly great. Of the lot, the best would be Kit Rocha's sci-fi adventure/romance Deal with the Devil, which actually remembered to put the "danger" in its dangerous post-apocalyptic future.
September kicked off with Django Wexler's Hard Reboot, a tale of battling mechs that didn't quite land its punches for me, and ended with the unexpectedly intriguing tale of haves, have-nots, prejudice, and plague in Sparkers by Eleanor Glewwe. In between, I enjoyed the harrowing young adult survival tale Adrift by Paul Griffin and the quirky, surprisingly dark middle-grade fantasy Cold Cereal by Adam Rex (after which you'll never look at a cartoon cereal mascot the same way again). I returned to Seanan McGuire's Ghost Roads with The Girl in the Green Silk Gown and enjoyed the trip... something I could not say, unfortunately, for my time with Zach Jordan's The Last Human.
October began and ended with horror, first with T. Kingfisher's chilling story of another world behind the walls of a small-town curiosity museum in The Hollow Places, and last with the conclusion to the original Newsflesh trilogy in Mira Grant's Blackout. I also wrapped up the excellent, fast-paced Protectorate sci-fi trilogy with Megan E. O'Keefe's Catalyst Gate, and was delightfully surprised by Beth Bernobich's imaginative fantasy Fox and Phoenix (which sadly has yet to see a sequel). Adrian Tchaikovsky again proved the range of his imagination with The Doors of Eden, examining alternate evolutionary paths.
November brought me back to P. Djeli Clark's marvelous alternate-1912 Cairo (which I first visited in the novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015) with one of my favorite reads of the year, A Master of Djinn, and the novella A Dead Djinn in Cairo, which was good, but which I probably would've enjoyed a little more had I read it before the novel. (Clark's prose seemed more polished in the novel, and there was more time to explore the great ideas.) The dystopian future New York City of Lincoln Michel's The Body Scout was unexpectedly gripping and depressingly plausible, and I returned to Adrian Tchaikovsky yet again with the first volume of his Bronze Age shapeshifter fantasy Echoes of the Fall series with The Tiger and the Wolf. I finally got to the fourth of Marie Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons series with In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and mostly enjoyed TJ Klune's ghostly love story Under the Whispering Door. I was less impressed, unfortunately, with Teagan Hunter's modern romance Let's Get Textual and Scarlett Thomas's middle-grade fantasy Dragon's Green.
December saw me returning to Tchaikovsky (what can I say? He has several audiobook titles through my library on Overdrive, so one is almost always bound to be available) to finish off Echoes of the Fall with The Bear and the Serpent and The Hyena and the Hawk. Mira Grant's Rolling in the Deep crossed mermaid lore with deep sea predators and sensationalist "documentary" network ethos for a terrifying tragedy. James S. A. Corey wrapped up the landmark Expanse space opera series in a suitably epic fashion with Leviathan Falls (even as the criminally overlooked televised adaptation kicked off its final six-episode season on Amazon Prime), and Neil Gaiman sent an unnamed narrator on a surreal trip down memory lane in The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Overall, there were some great reads and discoveries this year, along with the disappointments. I hope 2022 offers some pleasant surprises in my reading, too (because, to be honest and with apologies for the grammar, it ain't lookin' great on the reality front, and not just because of the lingering pandemic).
And yet another year is coming to a close, so it's time for yet another reading year in review. My real life has been in a holding pattern (with a distinct downward glide, for various reasons - another year when "at least I'm not completely on fire yet" is about as close as I am to things being "good"), so reading provided a welcome escape.
January kicked off with V. E. Schwab's much-lauded The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which did not entirely live up to its own hype but was nevertheless a decent read. I also finally got around to the classic Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, whose style and very retro-feeling future aged far worse than its general ideas. This is also the month when overtime at work and general burnout/lack of other viable employment options prompted me to either gnaw a limb off to escape or turn to audiobooks via the local library and Overdrive (appropriate, as I work at the local library shipping center) for distraction, with Becky Chambers's thought-provoking novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate as my successful test drive. High points of January included A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher, and Jordan Ifueko's impressive young adult fantasy Raybearer. The month's low point, unfortunately, was Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton, an initially fun and intriguing post-zombie-apocalypse animal odyssey that overstayed its welcome and overplayed its Message by the end.
February, though the shortest month of the year, ironically was my most prolific one insofar as reading, though the titles were a mixed bag. Standouts were Seanan McGuire's Across the Green Grass Fields, Wonderstorm's The Art of The Dragon Prince, and P. Djeli Clark's novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015. I also enjoyed the exploration of racial tensions during a city riot in I'm Not Dying With You Tonight, by Kimberley Jones and Gilly Segal, and the third volume of Jeff Lemire's Ascender graphic novels. February's biggest disappointment was Jenifer Ruff's tale of Arctic survival When They Find Us, which squandered its potential. Also, Amparo Oritz's Blazewrath Games lacked the fire that a dragon-themed story should have... not unlike Patrick Ness's overlong alternate history tale Burn.
March opened with a bang in Tochi Onyebuchi's brutally gripping sci-fi tale War Girls, about a future Nigerian civil war fought by mech pilots and cybernetically enhanced soldiers on an increasingly uninhabitable Earth. I also enjoyed Kelley Armstrong's middle-grade fantasy adventure A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying, and Daniel Abraham's slow-burn The Long Price Quartet showed the value in sticking out an iffy first volume for greater rewards down the line. Low points could be found in Diane Les Becquets's tale of a woman lost in the Colorado wilderness, Breaking Wild, Marie Brennan's listless Driftwood, and Timothy Zahn's Night Train to Rigel, which embraced the throwback vibe too heartily by including some of the cringier aspects of old sci-fi pulp adventures. I also finally tried the prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky with the self-narrated audiobook novella Walking to Aldebaran, which was enjoyable enough for me to keep an eye peeled for other works by him when scrolling through Overdrive.
April opened with an unfortunate dud, one of the worst of the year, in The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James, and ended with the decently adventurous (if inevitably dated) classic swashbuckler Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. In between were several ups and downs, of which the top reads were P. Djeli Clark's horror fantasy Ring Shout, Margaret Owen's The Merciful Crow, and the final two books in Catherynne M. Valente's lyrical Fairyland series. Rob Hart's dystopian near future in The Warehouse was depressingly plausible (not just because I was listening to the audiobook while working in a warehouse, if not a big box store warehouse), and I was sadly disappointed in the first installment of the much-lauded Rivers of London series, Midnight Riot, by Ben Aaronovitch.
May was mostly a good reading month; even the lowest point (Heidi Heilig's The Girl From Everywhere) wasn't terrible, just meandering and with characters I never connected with. Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give tempted me out of my usual genre comfort zone, as did Jason Reynolds's free verse poem Long Way Down. An impulse buy of Suzanne Palmer's sci-fi adventure Finder proved an excellent choice. I also returned to Megan E. O'Keefe's exciting Protectorate space opera trilogy with Chaos Vector, and I finished off Margaret Owen's fantasy duology with The Faithless Hawk. Sarah Gailey's dark exploration of cloning and identity and generational abuse in The Echo Wife and Sarah Beth Durst's tale of monsters and reincarnation Race the Sands rounded things out.
June opened with the mildly disappointing Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, read after watching the Netflix series based on the Grishaverse. I ventured back to the classics with Joe Haldeman's landmark indictment of the perpetual human habit of combat in The Forever War, finally got to the second in Mira "Seanan McGuire" Grant's Newsflesh trilogy with Deadline, and enjoyed the middle-grade fantasy adventure of Have Sword, Will Travel, by Garth Nix and Sean Williams. Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers, unfortunately, never lived up to the promise of its premise, and Valerie Valdes's Chilling Effect was an overlong sci-fi joke whose punchline failed to make me so much as chuckle.
July included one of my favorite audiobook surprises of the year, Libba Bray's searing satire Beauty Queens. I finally got around to the much-lauded Joe Hill with the appropriately terrifying Heart-Shaped Box, and I returned to the Finder Chronicles with Suzanne Palmer's fine follow-up Driving the Deep. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Made Things also impressed, though Greg van Eeekhout's promising premise of osteomancy in California Bones never quite came together for me, and S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders suffered somewhat with age.
With only three reviews, August was my least productive reading month, and while none were outright terrible, none were particularly great. Of the lot, the best would be Kit Rocha's sci-fi adventure/romance Deal with the Devil, which actually remembered to put the "danger" in its dangerous post-apocalyptic future.
September kicked off with Django Wexler's Hard Reboot, a tale of battling mechs that didn't quite land its punches for me, and ended with the unexpectedly intriguing tale of haves, have-nots, prejudice, and plague in Sparkers by Eleanor Glewwe. In between, I enjoyed the harrowing young adult survival tale Adrift by Paul Griffin and the quirky, surprisingly dark middle-grade fantasy Cold Cereal by Adam Rex (after which you'll never look at a cartoon cereal mascot the same way again). I returned to Seanan McGuire's Ghost Roads with The Girl in the Green Silk Gown and enjoyed the trip... something I could not say, unfortunately, for my time with Zach Jordan's The Last Human.
October began and ended with horror, first with T. Kingfisher's chilling story of another world behind the walls of a small-town curiosity museum in The Hollow Places, and last with the conclusion to the original Newsflesh trilogy in Mira Grant's Blackout. I also wrapped up the excellent, fast-paced Protectorate sci-fi trilogy with Megan E. O'Keefe's Catalyst Gate, and was delightfully surprised by Beth Bernobich's imaginative fantasy Fox and Phoenix (which sadly has yet to see a sequel). Adrian Tchaikovsky again proved the range of his imagination with The Doors of Eden, examining alternate evolutionary paths.
November brought me back to P. Djeli Clark's marvelous alternate-1912 Cairo (which I first visited in the novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015) with one of my favorite reads of the year, A Master of Djinn, and the novella A Dead Djinn in Cairo, which was good, but which I probably would've enjoyed a little more had I read it before the novel. (Clark's prose seemed more polished in the novel, and there was more time to explore the great ideas.) The dystopian future New York City of Lincoln Michel's The Body Scout was unexpectedly gripping and depressingly plausible, and I returned to Adrian Tchaikovsky yet again with the first volume of his Bronze Age shapeshifter fantasy Echoes of the Fall series with The Tiger and the Wolf. I finally got to the fourth of Marie Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons series with In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and mostly enjoyed TJ Klune's ghostly love story Under the Whispering Door. I was less impressed, unfortunately, with Teagan Hunter's modern romance Let's Get Textual and Scarlett Thomas's middle-grade fantasy Dragon's Green.
December saw me returning to Tchaikovsky (what can I say? He has several audiobook titles through my library on Overdrive, so one is almost always bound to be available) to finish off Echoes of the Fall with The Bear and the Serpent and The Hyena and the Hawk. Mira Grant's Rolling in the Deep crossed mermaid lore with deep sea predators and sensationalist "documentary" network ethos for a terrifying tragedy. James S. A. Corey wrapped up the landmark Expanse space opera series in a suitably epic fashion with Leviathan Falls (even as the criminally overlooked televised adaptation kicked off its final six-episode season on Amazon Prime), and Neil Gaiman sent an unnamed narrator on a surreal trip down memory lane in The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Overall, there were some great reads and discoveries this year, along with the disappointments. I hope 2022 offers some pleasant surprises in my reading, too (because, to be honest and with apologies for the grammar, it ain't lookin' great on the reality front, and not just because of the lingering pandemic).
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