Recent Reads + Quick EOY Book Meme

[firstroad]

Wheeeeeeee, last post of the year :)



The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
Reread! I want to reread the full raven cycle again. I am honestly always so happy these books blew up, because I'd have never stumbled across them otherwise or picked them up. I love how not on the nose they are <3 I love the characters. I typically hate dynamics based on ~groups of friends~ but everyone had so many interactions with everyone else that it does feel like a group of friends. I'm eternally surprised by how much I STILL like it when I read it, since I feel like most YA does not do it for me at all these days (even if it's more... fandom-y).

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
Dear person who said Chain Gang All Stars should've been on the Booker shortlist instead of this.. WHAT WERE U ONNNNNNNNN. This was nice! Yes, admittedly the narrative tension towards the end does come like 90% from the game, and for people not interested in sports this might make it fall flatter than it otherwise would, but familial relationships and grief were still so present...

I started telling her about squash. I said it was something Pa had taught us. It was something you had to commit to. It involved discipline and practice and I had my own racket already and there was a court not very far away and it didn’t cost too much. Then I told her about Durham and Cleveland. I said that Pa would be there and that it was only two days. Aunt Ranjan kept sifting. I thought she was going to pretend I hadn’t spoken. But when she stopped to transfer the sorted lentils to another tray, she looked at me. She put down her tray. She said, “No.”

I met her gaze. “Pa let me—”

“I know your father did, but that does not mean it is right.” Aunt Ranjan reached over to empty her metal bowl in the bin, then sat still in the dust. “It is not right for a girl, for my daughter. I told your uncle. But you already know that. You have come to me because it is important to you, and I am saying no because I made a promise to myself to raise you properly, for your mother’s sake, and this promise is important to me. When you are older, maybe you will understand.”

Her face was white. She was upset and she wasn’t going to be moved, and I couldn’t say anything more about it because now Ma was involved. I brushed dust from my knees and started sifting again.

IDK, I think it slays :') "I couldn’t say anything more about it because now Ma was involved" does me in every time. It's only 180 pages but it pulls off the young voice really really well!

The Vicious Circle by Katherine St. John

I can't even write a review for this because I started it back in APRIL and only now finished so I've forgotten everything but the broadest strokes of the plot. It's a cult thriller and it... does its job? I wasn't particularly taken with it (evidenced by my needing like, what, almost 9 months? to finish) but nor did I dislike it in any way, so. Yay, book.


Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Despite its popularity, I went into the book knowing next to nothing. I would like to write a very very lengthy post on this if I have the time, because it's a rare occasion when I actually own the book I want to talk about and have thus MARKED all the stuff I want to talk about... praying. I like that I've read this! All I want out of fiction is for it to make me WANT to think about it (which, yay, means I like a whole lot of things, but, nay, is a lot harder to find recs for...), and this succeeded. I think the relationship between Sam and Sadie (and Marx) was truly wonderful, and I loved reading about people who felt like people. It's wonderful in many, many ways.

That being said! I cannot, for the life of me, get over the fact that a book that relied so much on politics and what political class the characters belonged to, a book that had the game Sadie initially made ("Solution") about complicity be something major (even if not plot-relevant) that they turn back to at the end, was at the same time spending SO LONG discussing Sadie getting into MIT because she DESERVEDDDDDDDD it and not just because she's a ~girl~. Are we ignoring how many things in MIT are sponsored by the department of defense? The fact that even outside of those it gets like 100k a year from that? And like, Sadie was rich as hell already, it's not like she couldn't be picky about colleges, LOL. The other thing was Dov, who was like 'oh you american jews know nothing about us israelis' and was only acknowledged as a bad boyfriend and not much else and uhhhhhh. Well. Do I even need to elaborate. It just felt so tone deaf considering at the same time we were reading about how Sam and his mother grew up, and how his grandparents were Korean immigrants... like, okay, who else was involved in the Korean war? Why do certain aspects of politics matter and others don't? It felt very myopic in this department -- could quite literally only see things within the USA, and even then only within rich areas of it.

Single-line answer EOY Book Ask:

How many books did you read this year?
If I've counted correctly, 49! That's a much bigger number than I expected, because this year was one of the busiest :D

Did you reread anything? What?
Plenty of things! Notably Dare Me and the Captive Prince trilogy.

What were your top five books of the year?
The White Book by Han Kang
The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda
I guess Western Lane takes the fifth spot, though I admit it might be recency bias.

This was hard, and not because I loved so many books that I didn't know which to pick. They were having a mid-off!!!

Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?
Han Kang! :D I will actually be checking out other things by everyone in my top 5 list ^

What genre did you read the most of?
Contemporary, I guess. ~Literary~

Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?
See, my way of reading is to start 15 things at once and then slowwwwwly progress, so the answer is both yes and no.

What was your average Goodreads rating? Does it seem accurate?
3.7... It's accurate in the sense that I was giving 3 stars to lots of books I didn't enjoy because I thought they were solid in what they were trying to do, it's just that what they were trying to do was like. Fine. Unremarkable. It did its job and then I forgot about everything. My enjoyment rating would be way lower.

Did you meet any of your reading goals? Which ones?
I don't have reading goals. My soft goal each year is 10-12 books (one per month, while also offering a little leeway if things implode), so in that sense, yes.

Did you get into any new genres?
No, but I fell out of my old ones :( Fantasy and mysteries/thrillers no longer do anything for me... or rather so much of my enjoyment comes from the writing itself and it's far easier to find serviceable writing that drives the suspense forward in those genres than anything else.

What was your favorite new release of the year?
No idea if anything I read was new. I don't check when a book was published because everything I read has been published post-1990s I think.

What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?
see above

Any books that disappointed you?
WHERE DO I START. Yellowface was a joke. The Book of M. The Crane Husband. Gideon the Ninth (though disappointment is the wrong way to describe the feeling here...). No Longer Human. Murderbot 1. PIRANESI. I didn't have expectations for most of my reads, otherwise they'd be here too.

What were your least favorite books of the year?
Tie between murdertrending and Hysteria by Jessica Gross. All Systems Red is soooo close to being here too.

What books do you want to finish before the year is over?
If I manage to finish anything I'll be very surprised! Pleasantly so!

Did you read any books that were nominated for or won awards this year (Booker, Women’s Prize, National Book Award, Pulitzer, Hugo, etc.)? What did you think of them?
The Vegetarian :D Western Lane. Was The Locked Tomb nominated for anything? I think so. Piranesi (derogatory).

What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?
All Systems Red. I'm sorry, I don't get it!!

Did any books surprise you with how good they were?
The White Book!!!!!!!! So much!!!!!!!! I wasn't expecting anything and then got EVERYTHING. Jawbone, too. Idol by Louise O'Neill was better than expected.

How many books did you buy?
7!

What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations?
I don't have the time to keep up with releases T___T

Did you participate in or watch any booklr, booktube, or book twitter drama?
I watch booktube in general! I get some of my recommendations that way, though it feels really hard to find channels that talk about the kind of books I like that aren't also run by men.

What’s the longest book you read?
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez, at 736 pages!

What’s the fastest time it took you to read a book?
I finished Yellowface in a day!

What reading goals do you have for next year?
I think I'll stick to 10ish books read, and hopefully surpass that. I want to be more focused on what I read and only pick things that I'm 99% sure I'll love or at least enjoy a lot. I enjoy reading slowly and soaking in what I read and maybe reading less will be better for that! I also want to pick a lot of things from a certain region, or a certain demographic, and have that choice be on purpose rather than because what I was into at that moment aligned with X book that was already out, no matter who had written it and when and where. I want to read more author interviews! I want to know more about the context of the books I read.