@misdre's reading diary so i'd remember my impressions on books. i have wildly irrational reading habits so there's no logic to what i read whatsoever. goodreads has an archive of things i read between 2019 and 2023 before i started this blog.
1 finished out of spite and/or because the book was super short. there won't be many of these because i don't hate myself this much
1+, 1½ only marginally less insufferable.
2- considered dropping but didn't; not dropping didn't feel worth it, a negative impression remained
2 considered dropping but didn't; meh, a whatever, mostly feel neutral
2+ considered dropping but didn't; some pros in there but not enough to actually like it
2½ considered dropping but didn't; had entertainment value or something in the end so not totally terrible
3- didn't consider dropping, but it wasn't good either
3 basically a default score when i don't feel much anything either way or don't know whether i liked something or not
3+ alright, not bad
3½ alright, not bad; either there was something that clicked personally or entertainment value was high
4- good, overall captivating, just not super interesting
4 good in the neutral way. just good
4+ very good, i liked it
4½ very good, i REALLY liked it, not quite a fave but up there
5- favourite; honestly the only books in here (on this blog) are the locked tomb so idk what to say, other than that there needs to be a ship for me to give something a five
5 favourite; screaming, yelling, squirming out of my chair etc
a couple has just moved to an old house in the middle of nowhere when one night a family of five appears at their door, the father announcing that the place was his childhood home and he'd like to show it to his family now. being a chronic people-pleaser and alone at home, one of the new owners reluctantly lets the family in, then becomes increasingly paranoid about their presence in the house.
running parallel to the story is pieces of some report about "an old house" that's somehow supernatural and related to alternate timelines.
🏠🌨️📵
➕ this started off promising, i really enjoyed the creepy premise of a family just inserting themselves into your home uninvited and things becoming increasingly weird about them, and the paranoia and anxiety around "what if they just won't leave". also the report parts reminded me of the zero escape series, big fan of the "here are random ominous facts about things that may or may not be real" streak of horror. i also enjoy the "big weird house" genre of horror, so you'd think this book was a banger.
➕ the audiobook has a pretty banging soundscape
➖ the longer this went on, the worse it got, unfortunately. this was convoluted horseshit that spiralled into confusing nonsense and basically the "horror" being that a young woman has a mental health crisis. how original! the moment we started moving away from BOTH the "there's a weird family in your house" and "something is weird about this big old house" narratives i knew the story was cooked. there was so much of eve just going around doing random things, i started majorly tuning out from listening to the audio around the time when she was visiting the neighbour's house, it all got sooo fucking boring from there. like the story laid out all these scares and left you waiting for more development and then… nothing came. we move on to other so-called scares (which mostly consisted of eve being paranoid and spiralling) and set the premise aside entirely. this felt like a string of dropping hints of something interesting and spooky going on and then never properly dwelling on any of them. the ending was stupid and disappointing shit.
⭐ score: 3- -- not a two because of the promising beginning, but then it was like stepping on a giant turd when you thought you were on a nice little walk at the beach. this apparently started as a nosleep story on reddit which explains so much tbh
after the suspicious alleged suicide of his boyfriend best friend, a young man moves to the same house the bf(f) lived in and starts attending the same college and hanging around the same people he did in order to solve what actually happened to him. the two had been sensing supernatural things ever since a freak incident in the woods when they were teens, and the guy is not impressed to find out that the bff had been researching local folklore instead of ignoring all things related to the hauntings like he wanted. he's also pissed to find out that he had made new friends and interests without telling him while living away for a year, boo.
👻📓🚗
➕ i liked the whole thing about the hauntings and local folklore theme, some dark academia themes going on with research done on the occult and such. in general i enjoyed the intensity and mood of the setting, it's a bit of "american gothic" which is one of the few ways in which i actually enjoy a story being set in the US.
➕ i also enjoyed it being an LGBT story, although the whole thing about andrew taking ages to even admit the possibility that he could be gay (when he's spent half his life in love with a guy) was a bit jarring, but this is apparently based on fanfiction and that's such a fic thing so okay that explains it
➖ despite liking american gothic this was too US-centric for me, it's like, cars and drugs and not giving a shit about college when you're supposedly attending it, i was rather bored with a lot of it. this also starts veeerryyy slowly. i did enjoy the plot more once it really picked up but i felt like a lot of this book was just andrew being angsty in the house. andrew reading a text message or an email. andrew angsting. andrew reading a text message. andrew reading an email. every choice he made throughout the story was so unrelatable and i just, blahhh
➖ i enjoyed the mood the writing evoked in general, but occasionally the author is drenching entire scenes (the hauntings in particular) in so much metaphor and analogy that i had no idea what was even happening anymore. suddenly there's just talk that andrew is again injured this and that way and idk how it even happened. sometimes it's better to just say what happens with the real names of things instead of trying to be all art house about it tbh. these repeated injuries also felt very fic tropey, very whump-esque. i'm not sure i enjoy that in a published novel that much (or it just wasn't executed well here)
➖ another thing that's very blatantly gay fic coded is that there are no female characters that the reader ought to give a shit about, the two main protags have a female "friend" that they both fucked as a substitute for each other but don't actually even care about (literally andrew is just, oh well she's right! and i realise i don't miss her at all so i won't care about her to be in my life ever again byeee), come on.
➖ i didn't like how andrew and sam(was that his name? gosh i read too much shit too fast)'s situationship just ended and then the whole book ends there! that was very unsatisfying
⭐ score: 3 -- i don't know, overall this book felt a bit strange? i didn't vibe with any of it much. it felt rather shallow and like i didn't care a whole lot about anything that was going on at any point, i'm basically more interested in the fact that this is probably fanfic (of the raven cycle? i have read the raven boys. twice in fact, had to re-read to make sure i didn't give a shitt)
a society of theoretical magicians in england learn of a man who claims to be a real practical magician and are amazed to find that it's true. mr norrell is an elusive hermit who has wanted to keep all things magic (including his enormous library of books on magic) to himself but now agrees to enter society to make english magic great again. he wishes to join the war against napoleon, and in order to wow the government with magic, he agrees to resurrect the cabinet minister's dead wife. he does so by summoning an eccentric fairy who places an enchantment on the wife that does resurrect her but also starts a catastrophic chain reaction of magical mayhem in the cabinet minister's household.
another englishman named jonathan strange decides to become a practical magician as well. at first norrell considers him a rival, but once the two meet, norrell wants to make strange his pupil in magic instead. the two clash and cooperate in turns over several years, but ultimately their relationship turns sour due to norrell's inflexible and stubborn character. strange accumulates a reputation of his own as a powerful magician with different ideologies from norrell.
🔮🧚♂️🏴
➕ this book is very special, very difficult to summarise adequately also because it's so long and meandering and there are so many facets you could talk about in the summary alone. i thoroughly enjoyed this! a lot of it seems nonsensical on the surface but the world (which is but also isn't the real world, somehow) is so immersive, all the magical theory, stories, detailed lore, the use of footnotes to bring it all to (academic) life. the enormous cast of characters, the Englishness(TM). it all just took me to a special place that only truly wonderful books manage to do. i love the way the story goes to completely crazy places yet somehow everything ends up making sense anyway. my favourite characters are stephen black and childermass by far, both these sort of low-key unsung heroes that hardly get the recognition they deserve in the narrative.
➖ norrell himself and the fucking Gentleman With Thistledown Hair are insufferable assholes. i assume it's a deliberate parallel between the two where they are character-wise complete opposites but are horrible people in very much the same ways of being ignorant and self-absorbed while thinking they're doing all these favours to other people. it's ingenius, is this really a minus? maybe it's not (consequently childermass and stephen are perpetually fucked over by norrell and the gentleman which made me love the former and detest the latter all the more like GIVE THEM A FUCKING BREAK)
➖ since the book is very long, there did end up being some parts that had me just yawning and low-key skipping lines to make it pass faster. notably the part of strange going to portugal. although the stuff about magical warfare was still entertaining, i found that things really kind of dragged there in a way the rest of the book didn't for me
⭐ score: 4+ -- short review for a long book because honestly it's kind of hard for me to put into words? i think it's enough to say i enjoyed. for the vibes. also, i read this after temeraire #2 which is also a fantasy version of the napoleonic wars from a british perspective, AND i also finished katabasis just before this which is all magical theory and academics, also from british perspective. it was like one seamless experience of similar themes in succession. fun!
a morbidly obese gay man is approached with an invitation to participate in a clinical trial for an allegedly miraculous new weight-loss drug, and he agrees to join. he's hesitant at first, especially when the trial starts off with an invasive procedure at the hospital, but is won over by the results as his weight soon starts going down like crazy. as he slims down he accumulates social media fame, is promoted at work, and starts a relationship with an old crush of his. everything is going truly miraculously well -- aside from the minor, somewhat inconvenient side-effect that he starts craving human meat. alongside his narrative is that of a police report going through the events and causes of what led to him becoming a murderer.
🍔🍕🥩
➕ well, that was fun. the premise is just fun, i can't lie. instantly hooked. this may sound weird but i liked how unlikeable emmett was, he's so fucking Woe Is Me, he wallows in self-pity complaining that he's done everything and simply cannot lose weight, but i don't think he eats a single healthy thing in the entire book so obviously he has not tried very hard. it gives my 300lbs life, like, these bitches be complaining they haven't lost any weight when they only ate five slices of pizza today instead of the usual ten. i love trashy reality tv btw
➕ this handled its subject very well, and in a way this was kind of a therapeutic read for me. the descriptions of emmett's identity as a fat person were very familiar although i'm not obese, but i am overweight and have garbage skin so i always feel imprisoned by my meat bag of a body too, as if somewhere underneath were the real me but the truth is that the real me is one pussy-ass anxious bitch who probably wouldn't put herself out there even if she were 20kg slimmer. like, emmett loses weight and continues being too embarrassed to go to the beach, that was SO relatable to me who am nowhere near the weight he is at the beginning of this book and still i can't make myself go to the beach either. i also binge-ate snacks like crazy this past weekend and was to myself like, am i stupid? i literally just finished this book about obesity? what the fuck am i doing tbh
➖ now, this was fun, but it was also kind of boring that we are just given the result of the drug trial in the beginning. there wasn't anything suspenseful about it because we already knew exactly what's wrong with the drug. the journey to get there was decently entertaining but there wasn't any sense of omggg i wonder what's about to happeeen. it made everything very predictable, like [spoiler] it was incredibly obvious immediately that emmett's going to eat his toe-sucking boyfriend like come on. step dad being the main scientist was a lousy and boring twist also.
➖ my feelings about this were very similar to how i felt about don't let him in, actually. not only was this boring in its lack of tension, it was also a very preachy piece about obesity and how fat people are treated and how/why americans are so fat and whatever. yeah sure, more horror less essays about fatness thanks
➖ this book got so many pokemon facts wrong which is bizarre to me since the author clearly wanted to include that narrative, maybe because he likes pokemon himself, but like, really? calling og gen jigglypuff a fairy type? sobble is his favourite pokemon when sapphire has just come out or something? how did this bs come to be
⭐ score: 3 -- marginally more entertaining than don't let him in, since i'm comparing the two now, but that's about it.
a recently widowed woman starts correspondence with a man who introduces himself as her late husband's old colleague, and before long the two are in a relationship. the man seems all around perfect, too perfect in fact, which drives the woman's adult daughter to investigate whether everything he claims to be holds water.
at the same time, a different woman is struggling with taking care of her business, her two teenaged children, and an infant she's had with her new husband who is suddenly away from home a whole lot, and no matter how hard she works, there never seems to be enough money.
a third PoV is that of the man, who is not only two-timing these women but has an impressive history of treating everyone around him like shit all his life.
💍🧳💔
➕ jewell's stories are always solidly written, this was intriguing enough that i finished it in under a week, and it was interesting to have the man's point of view for once since usually these kinds of stories are from the women's perspective as they gradually find out how rotten the men they're with are. it was different for sure.
➖ although having his perspective is interesting, it also means there is nothing mysterious, nothing suspenseful about the story unfolding whatsoever. sure there is a little bit of tension in the layered timelines where we slowly get to hear more and more of what the man has done with all the women, but ultimately this is the kind of story where you know exactly what is happening and are subjected to reading about characters who don't know what you know flailing uselessly while trying to piece it together, and i always find this type irritating to read. it's not really interesting to be like, okay when will they realise it tho. when will they come to this and that conclusion. there's no joy of figuring out the mystery for yourself. the characters aren't nearly strong enough that you'd feel any connection and root for them and feel triumph when they figure something out. it's just tedious.
➖ more than a suspenseful story, this felt like a textbook for spotting red flags in dating. if a man does this and that, drop him. if a man's stories don't seem to add up, don't just let it slide like Oh Well He Has His Reasons I Guess. jewell outright says in the afterword that she was inspired by documentaries and podcasts about men/relationships like this and that's why she wrote this book, so it felt very much like she wanted to create a warning example to the undoubtedly vast female readerhood that she has. which isn't a bad thing at all, to be clear, but that makes this novel preachy and like a case study of narcissistic partners more than an interesting story.
⭐ score: 3- -- the worst of jewell's that i have read so far for sure.
a writer with a lukewarm career is suddenly presented with the opportunity to finish an immensely popular crime novel series because its author recently became comatose in a car accident. the comatose author's husband invites the new writer to live in the family home to do research for the massive undertaking, and after reluctantly agreeing, she ends up finding a secret manuscript of an autobiography where the wife confesses in intimate detail how she is morbidly obsessed with her husband. the more the woman reads the disturbing memoir, the more suspicious she becomes whether the wife is actually vegetative at all. she also starts an affair with the husband (obviously!) and is constantly on the fence about whether she should let the man know that his wife is a psychopath and a pathological liar.
📚🦽✍️
➕ i was predisposed to dislike colleen hoover, just based on what i knew of her work from before, but decided to read this after i saw the trailer of the movie version a couple times in cinema and got curious. and i was surprised to enjoy this book, actually. it introduces the key characters in an interesting way, it builds and bears the suspense from the start very well. this is a thriller where nothing much is actually happening, yet it FEELS like a lot is going on because the main character is so in her head and keeps imagining all kinds of shit, the reader isn't really sure what's real and what isn't either. you keep thinking there has to be something wrong with the husband because there always is in stories like this, but is there? is he just genuinely a great guy after all? (well no he isn't because he's cheating on his comatose wife in their own house, in front of their small son, but) anyway i had a great time listening to this, actually. the first audiobook in a while that i didn't want to put down.
➖ it's stupid as shit though, not any real Quality entertainment by any means. the story basically hinges on the characters acting as stupidly as possible at any given time. very funny how both female leads are absolutely fucking bonker obsessed with this man that we don't learn a single intersting thing about (or we do, at the end, but it's not a thing either likes him for). and i didn't understand [spoiler] what verity was pretending for, surely she was just actively making her life fucking turbo garbage when she could have dropped the act literally any time? it's almost more credible that the memoir is actually true and she's doing the act because she imagined she'd get jeremy's uncontested attention with it (obviously backfired, so she starts moving around in the house more and more and is just about ready to drop the act but then he brings in some other bitch to have an affair with). that's kind of fascinating though so it's almost a positive instead of a negative. see i did genuinely like this book, it's unbelievable
⭐ score: 4- -- look, i'm sorry for rating this so high…….. but i can't pretend i didn't breeze throug this book in a couple of days out of being so invested and entertained! the movie is still not in theatres btw where the fuck is it. why were there trailers if there's no film finnkino
a cambridge graduate student of analytical magic travels to hell to bring back her dead professor because she cannot imagine getting her doctoral degree without his guidance. she ends up being accompanied by another student of his whom she used to be very close with but who has lately become more of an academic rival (or so she thinks). while the two travel through the different tiers of dante's hell together, they gradually discover the truth of their relationships with both each other and their professor.
⛤🎓♾️
➕ this book is so good on paper. it starts with a bang, we are tossed straight into alice using ramanujan summation (or whatever) to travel to hell and peter just kind of walks in and then we are there already. i thought this was overall a beautiful story, a sort of combination of science and fairy tales, with some very dark themes (i mean. we are in hell) without ever becoming all that heavy. i enjoyed the application of philosophy and scientific formulas to explain how magic exists and works, and the way fictional stories about hell are treated as real academic sources. i listened to a translation but there were parts of the writing that flowed very beautifully to me, there were also some individual scenes that i really liked for the vibes and aesthetics. and i liked the way the story was constructed, we go straight to business from page one and are like Oh okay i see! this is kind of quirky! and only later start getting actual insight into who the characters are and why they are doing all this. i also liked that there really are only three central characters here, alice, peter, and professor grimes, so the narrative can go very deep into just them.
➕ this is a long-ish book (21 hours as audio) and i went through it in like a week and a couple of days -- not because i couldn't stop listening but because of time constraints but anyway -- which i felt was good for this story, it made it feel sort of breathless and, i dunno, urgent?
➕ peter is clearly a palamedes variant so kudos for that
➖ good on paper, as i said. i SHOULD have absolutely loved this, it's dark academia with myths and magic and cambridge and friends-to-lovers and alice is a linguist and and and!!! but i didn't love it. in fact i found this mostly kind of boring? hell is an incredibly uninteresting place in this book, it's mostly desert, occasionally a university building but mostly just empty wasteland with nothing and nobody anywhere in sight. even the city (which idk how it's spelled) managed to be uninteresting when it was supposed to be this grand place at the very end of the world, and we leave it without it ever carrying much any weight whatsoever. the characters mostly spent time solving really boring problems that never had me on the edge of my seat to find out how things play out, the "villains" were uninteresting. the "academia is hell" allegory is maybe fun for people in academia but for the rest of us it's just kinda tedious and leaves us feeling like this is one of the most unimaginative renderings of hell we have ever seen (and for some reason everything in hell is mysteriously anglo-centric? like how do they just HAPPEN to run into other cambridge students when supposedly literally millions and millions of people from around the world are in hell? lmao)
➖ i wanted to like the characters but they mostly felt empty. especially alice, i didn't like her and given that 99% of the story is from her perspective, it rang pretty hollow and failed to reach me emotionally whatsoever. i really tried to be moved by the love story here but NÖPE
➖ and the whole premise of the story is that they go look for grimes but for the majority of the book, they aren't even looking for him, not really? they just march through the tiers, skip some entirely, without any real intention or effort of seeing if he's anywhere. this annoyed me so much. like the entire vehicle of the narrative is pretty much forgotten repeatedly, or they sort of mention it but never truly act on it, they have no idea where he is yet never stop to make any kind of plan for how to look for him so they, well, don't. like the entire narrative is somehow off. they spend so much time on all kinds of other shit and not the thing they went to hell for?? RAHHHH i wanted to grab these bitches and shake them LIKE WHY DO THEY KEEP THINKING "NAH GRIMES IS TOO GOOD FOR THIS TIER" GUYS HE IS THE FUCKING SLEAZIEST SCUMBAG EVER AND COULD BE LITERALLY IN EVERY TIER BUT Y'ALL NOT EVEN LOOKING
⭐ score: 3½ -- i have not read any of kuang's earlier novels so thankfully i can't compare, because people who enjoy her seem to all agree this was not one of her best. maybe it's easier for me to enjoy others later.
a world-renowned author has invited a group of not-so-successful writers of various genres to his private island for one weekend, but upon arriving they learn that the author is actually dead and his agent and editor have brought the writers there to finish his final novel, in a competition of who can ghostwrite the best ending for it. since they are now stuck on an island with all their belongings confiscated for three days, they have no choice but to start writing -- or try to write, since time is running out even faster when they start dropping dead one by one.
📚🖊️⌛
➕ so the premise is fun af. big fan of "a group of people are stuck on an island and violent/mysterious shit starts happening". that's the reason i wanted to read this at all. i also liked the concept of the famous yet elusive author who may or may not be dead, and i even liked the setting of the characters all being writers of different genres (well, mostly, because there's three crime writers for some reason, or four if fletch counts)
➕ the mood was mostly on point… at least i wasn't bored.
➕ for what it's worth, i admit i didn't see where this was going, i was surprised when the first character suddenly died, i didn't foresee who the culprit would be (maybe i should have, but i didn't) so like, credit where credit is due.
➖ but one of the reasons why i didn't see it coming was that something was just really really off about the structure and flow of this book, to the point that it took me quite some time to realise we are doing an agatha christie style murder mystery so i didn't realise i was supposed to figure out a culprit and shit. and this is most definitely a sign of this a) not being a very good story at all, b) being a horribly bad murder mystery. probably why it didn't click is that this book was trying to do too many things at once, i felt like it wanted to critique the publishing industry first and foremost and anything else was almost an afterthought built around that. the "mystery" itself could be ignored completely, as i basically did.
➖ the characters are so incredibly bad. like, really really really bad. they are cartoony caricatures of what people who write these specific genres might be like, and not in an ironic way but entirely seriously, to the point that i was convinced this author really actually thinks this way about each genre. literally each character is introduced with bad cliches about the genres they write, and there's shit like the first scene with the sci-fi writer describing him jogging "in alien terrain" and thinking about wanting to be a machine. and when they all meet for the first time, their first conversation is about insulting each other based on the genres they write, like everyone automatically thinks the horror writer is suspicious and likes killing people, the YA writer is a stupid, childish bimbo and whatever. and i thought, this characterisation is so bad, this author has to be an amateur who happened to hit a jackpot with her debut. and then i go and read that this "author" is an alias for fucking V.E. schwab and another writer? what? i was so flabbergasted finding this out that i have no idea what to even say. i haven't read anything but the shades of magic series by schwab but i really lived in an illusion that she's a decent writer and creates likable characters… i don't know what's going on here. maybe it's the screenwriter friend who blew this up by writing a story that reads like they want it to be adapted to screen because this 100% feels like that
➖ despite not having seen it coming, [spoiler] it was soo fucking disappointingly stupid that the shy cute writer girl prodigy is the murderer, in a very cartoony evil way that's entirely unconvincing.
➖ the audiobook reader SHOUTS EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MILLIE'S (OR HOWEVER HER NAME IS SPELLED) LINE !!!! then reads the tags and other dialogue in normal or even slightly lower voice pspspspsps AND THEN
HOOHAAH MILLIE IS GOING OOHH MA GOODD AGAINN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i was ready to murder a bitch myself. like i had to keep turning the volume up and down and up and down on my phone to survive her lines, not joking.
⭐ score: 2½ -- i was ready to give this 3- before i learned that schwab is somehow (partially) behind it. well. i didn't completely hate this, as i still had some fun and liked the premise, but lord. also this can go in the 2s because i really did consider dropping this for a hot minute when the characters started insulting each other's genres. but then decided i didn't feel like finding another audiobook to try
La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) by Isabel Allende
[ physical book, read in finnish ]
a family chronicle that begins with the adolescence of a pair of sisters, the older of which is pursued by a man who's very infatuated with her and proposes to her, only for her to die before they can marry. he becomes so devastated that he leaves the city and moves to a run-down family farm that's been left to rot for ages. after giving the farm a glow-up, he travels back to the city and ends up marrying the younger sister (who has paranormal powers and communicates with spirits, occasionally more so than with the living) instead. the book follows the sometimes toxic, sometimes extraordinary lives of them, their children, and their granddaughter, as well as chronicles a slice of very tumultuous history and politics of their home country (which is never mentioned but is chile).
✍️🔮🇨🇱
➕ i have read cien años de soledad (a very long time ago, but still) and the one thing i remember absolutely loving about it is this meandering, rambling way of storytelling where you just kind of never know where the next paragraph may take you, and this is exactly the case with la casa de los espíritus as well. even when i wasn't all that invested in what's being told, it's just so much fun to read that i was captivated anyway. one of my favourite examples is that there is a single (1) paragraph that goes from nicolás attempting to fly a blimp, to him being denied permission to ever fly a blimp, to him becoming depressed, to him starting mass-producing chicken sandwiches, to that business failing as well. this brought me so much joy.
➕ i do love me a family chronicle that spans multiple generations.
➕ another thing i love is learning about a country and its culture and history through a novel. even when the name of the country is never even mentioned, nor the names of the major historical figures that are being talked about. (i was low-key pleased that i knew the dictator we're dealing with here is pinochet, clearly listening to podcasts hasn't been for nothing)
➕ a third thing that i love, and also a thing that cien años does, is that the story wraps around itself at the end
➖ esteban trueba, what a fucking despicable character. he basically does the worst possible thing at any given moment except the last couple of pages of the book. hated every minute of reading about him
➖ i can't believe i'm saying this but i think this book was too short? it doesn't really end anywhere… it just kind of goes "and then grandpa and i wrote all this down!" and ends. i would have liked there to be something about the political situation being resolved before the story ends.
➖ now… this book is from 1982, so it's not THAT old. and i had a 2nd edition finnish translation, from 2010. and it's casually dropping the n word multiple times like it ain't nobody's business
⭐ score: 4 -- solid, a very cool book. there could have been a bit more of the magical realism, it's more like a small curiosity or a fever dream that occasionally rears its strange head amidst everything else that's happening (i did read this because it was on a fantasy novels list, for being an example of magical realism). but, i can't call that a minus because i can also see the merit of this book being exactly the way it is. one of the more captivating reads of this year so far for me.
a young woman is kidnapped on her way to the gas station one night. two years later, she suddenly reappears from the woods. the female detective who was in charge of her case before becomes obsessed with figuring out what happened to her, but the girl is hesitant to talk about her expriences, forcing the detective to re-open the investigation. while the detective scrutinises new evidence and chases new leads, the girl recites her experiences in detail from her own PoV.
🚌👮🏻♀️👭
➕ i have very little to say, this was… fine? i found the beginning intriguing enough, it opens with a filthy ellie being discovered by some hikers and not remembering her own name or whatever so you're like oooo what do we have heeerre. this is a short-ish book so then i just, figured i could as well keep going... at 1.5x playback speed
➕ i didn't see the twist at the end coming i guess. (i thought it was kind of lousy tho and came in so late that we got almost nothing out of it)
➖ yeaah i was kind of bored tbh. this is the third book i've been reading within a couple of months that's about Men Doing Bad Things To Young Women which is a heavy subject to begin with and i'm kind of fed up. not getting anything out of these stories of girls being violated and traumatised, and the social commentary is the same in each, so. compared to i have some questions for you this was a lot less about the "mystery" of the kidnapping being unveiled through investigation because ellie's PoV is just there to tell us what happened. chelsey's part is about her own power trip and projection instead. there were multiple PoVs that didn't really need to be there, and for some reason the audiobook gave each one its own narrator which created an illusion that they're important and we'll keep getting more of each but nope, there's a couple who just have one chapter for themselves annndd that's it that's the PoV. so needlessly die-hard, this wasn't that epic a book to warrant 6 or 7 different narrators, come on
⭐ score: 3 -- a neutral ass three because i really just thought almost nothing of this. i don't care, i will forget about this book after i hit Post now
Les Fiancés de l'hiver (A Winter's Promise) by Christelle Dabos
[ physical book, read in english ]
in a fantasy world where god has splintered the globe into several floating countries called "arks," a young woman one day hears that she's been set to marry some guy from another ark and will be taken to live there shortly. she has no interest in marrying anyone whatsoever and, even worse, once at the (literally and figuratively) cold and hostile foreign ark, finds that the plan is to keep her locked up until the day she marries some grumpy asshole who doesn't appear to give a shit about her. gradually, she learns more about the ark and the insane clan wars constantly raging there, as well as finds out that there's a whole heinous plan behind her having been brought there.
🪞❄️📖
➕ the worldbuilding is so intriguing and engaging, though i would have loved to see a bit more of anima instead of us being whisked away from there early to the book, but the pole is like a mixture of the nordic countries and russia in winter months and therefore feels very homey to me so, can't complain. there are tons of fun details sprinkled in all the time that bring the world to life, and instead of tedious info dumps, we get all of it through ophélie's eyes and experiences. surprisingly many books can not fucking manage this
➕ i have been waiting to find a book with a female protagonist who is not conventionally attractive, not social, not popular, not magically talented and great at everything she does. ophélie is quiet, secluded, disagreeable, small, clumsy, and importantly, she does not have a rose-coloured whirlwind romance despite initially having no interest in love. in fact she finds it totally off-putting when she thinks she's being pulled into a romance and refuses it. she's perhaps the only relatable female protagonist in any book i've ever read and i love that a lot. please let me know about more books with characters like her. i also love her magic abilities although they weren't really focused on much in this first book, but i don't dislike this approach to introducing her powers because they feel almost mundane in the narrative, which is fitting for the story being told from her PoV. again there's no tedious info dumping about it because it wouldn't make sense for her to go on and on about something that's so obvious to herself. i rather am a fan of this kind of storytelling so it's fine to me
➕ i like how morally grey the universe here is. all the characters (and not just ophélie) are very unconventional and kind of strange. the pole is clearly a hostile place that encourages everyone to be selfish and not trust other people. a lot of the characters felt to me like, when they are introduced you kind of go uhhh so.. is this a nice person or…?? and at times it feels like they are not, at times it feels like they are? there are some rare glimpses of genuine friendliness in there but even those you have to dig for it at first, peel down some layers. throughout the book i kept being confused whether i should like or hate thorn. is this how the french view us northern europeans
➕ the book cover is my favourite hue of blue so it was always a delight to pick up
➖ the downside of this morally grey universe is that none of the other characters are likeable, and at times it really started getting to me how antagonistic everyone was constantly behaving towards ophélie. the only character who is at least somewhat unconditionally on her side is the aunt and she's not very reliable so it's kind of distressing. like, reading this made me a bit stressed out because nobody liked nor accepted her. then again, the reality of existing in this world as an unassuming, unattractive, socially clumsy woman is exactly like this so perhaps i got what i wanted when i wished for a relatable protagonist tbh
➖ i don't know if it's the writing or the translation or this being YA, but the text is rather flat. or maybe it's on purpose because ophélie is a laconic character and just kind of states everything matter-of-factly without going into dramatic flowery prose about, well, anything much. things just kind of happen and then we move on. she's beaten to a pulp at one point and then she kind of complains about a rib hurting throughout the rest of the book but i didn't feel like we really get any introspection of how she FEELS about just suddenly being beaten up bloody by the police in a foreign country, which is frankly a horrifying thing to go through and i'm surprised we don't deal with PTSD for the rest of the book or something. the whole narration is shockingly flat about it all, the emotional connection is not there. does ophélie not have an emotional connection to what's happening to herself? this is a terrifying prospect actually
➖ there also kind of is no traditional story arc here... it's more like, things are shit for ophélie from the start and continue being shit. there's no redemption at any point, no real climax. as said above, she can be thrown to jail and beaten to a pulp and that's just a random scene opening one chapter and not a big deal as a story element. the book ends with her deciding she'll keep going despite everything, the only shift is that she's no longer in disguise but i didn't feel like that was the main narrative element of this story anyway so that's also just sort of.. another thing that happens. i guess it's the set-up for a sequel/a whole series buuuut usually even first-parters stand on their own as complete stories you know.
➖ what's actually a thing i don't like about the writing itself (and what really makes it sound like a YA, in a negative way) is that things are repeated so. many. times. the characters all have some caricature-like physical traits that are mentioned every single time the character is in a scene. yes i got it the first time that the aunt has a horse's teeth, why are we mentioning them for the tenth time
➖ also not a fan of the localised translation. i get it that some of the names mean things but that could just be mentioned at character introduction and then we move on. i don't like that they tried to make a european book sound american.
⭐ score: 3½ -- not exactly a four, but i liked this decently much! even if all else failed me in the book, i would still have appreciated it for having the one relatable female main character in this world of sexy fantasy girl bosses.
a woman inherits a house in the boonies in cornwall from a recently deceased grandmother whose existence she had forgotten about. after receiving a shocking cancer diagnosis, she decides to move to the sleepy seaside town to work as a detective one last time, but sells the house to a married couple instead of living there herself.
the wife of the couple, a rather reclusive artist who doesn't bother to get to know anyone in town after moving in, goes on her usual morning jog one day and returns to find that her key no longer fits in the door, there's an unknown woman pretending to be her inside the house, and for some reason her husband is playing along, claiming to not know his real wife. little does she know, it's all just the culmination of a much bigger scheme of revenge and deception involving the detective who sold the house to them.
🏡🗝️👮
➕ so, overall, despite its flaws, this was a very entertaining book and fun and fast to listen to. when i pick up something labelled as a mystery, what i want is that we start with a character just minding their business and a tangle of mysterious events starting to unfold as the story progresses, and that's exactly what this is, so it was satisfying that way. even though i didn't like it very much in the end, i have to give it the credit of making me want to read it at all in the first place, because i have started so fucking many mystery novels and dropped them after a couple of chapters for being so effing boring and unengaging. like, feeney at least knows how to hook a reader in, even if it was a bit heavy-handed here.
➕ and i genuinely found this interesting in the beginning, i liked the environmental setting, the atmosphere was mysterious, and the story did not go in the direction i thought it would (i thought eden being replaced as the wife would be a much bigger element in the overall story) which kept me reading, so kudos to that.
➖ but the problem here is that the story went some places… and then it went some different places… and then again and again. the author was clearly trying to be as super fucking clever as possible to avoid writing a predictable story, but it's really not a proper mystery anymore if the plot itself is grasping for straws and not giving the reader all the information they ought to have to solve it, so i refuse to even call this a mystery novel. it's just twist after twist, and the problem with too many twists is that then none of them have any impact because we keep doing a 180 every two chapters. by the end, i couldn't even follow the story anymore, i was so confused about birdie's entire character, i didn't like how the book dealt with eden, there were too many PoVs here, it was way too much everything at the same time.
➖ even more so i HATE hate hate how this book is written. i guess it's trying to be an unreliable narrator kind of story but it's not even that, it's just straight up the author not telling us what the characters are actually doing or thinking. you can't have a first person perspective and conveniently skip anything the character does that you just decide the reader shouldn't know and then come back to it at the end of the book like ha ha actually THIS is what the character did and thought and said, not what the passage in 1st person PoV said earlier! this is such a fucking bad way of writing a "mystery". this could maybe have worked if the entire thing was in 3rd person but for some reason feeney chose to not do so (every book being 1st person these days is some kind of plague that i don't undestand). i think the events were also told in the wrong order and could have been dealt with in much more sensible and engaging ways. the way this actually is written feels like engagement bait garbage, like, the brainrot is so advanced in people now that we have to keep them entertained like toddlers by tossing a new exciting toy at them at every turn even if it results in a completely confusing and fragmented story full of plot holes. god i hated this book
⭐ score: 2½ -- i dropped this after the first chapter because i was like, i am so not reading yet another "a woman replaces another woman" story, then decided to keep going anyway because i was promised a twist ending and the ratings are so high everywhere. well, turns out people have fucking shit taste. i don't know what i expected
a woman returns to the boarding school she attended as a young adult to teach a podcasting course and ends up sucked in to the old murder case of her roommate from said school. through revisiting and scrutinising her memories, the four years she spent there, and, subsequently, all the evidence (and lack of) that was presented for the case back in the day, she eventually comes to the conclusion that an innocent man has been in prison for the past 20+ years while the real culprit was someone else she used to know. she and two of her podcaster students set the investigative wheels in motion anew.
🏫📸❓
➕ this one was intense!! i enjoyed the slowly unfolding drama, the low-key investigation that happens almost by accident. we get just enough breadcrumbs of the case to keep up the tension. i also liked how the main character isn't super intelligent, i mean, obviously she's smart but she doesn't have all the answers right away, it takes her time to arrive at the conclusions and then to accept them. i liked how human that was.
➕ all the 90s boarding school drama sprinkled in was fun and really made the world of granby pop in vivid detail. combined with a true crime vibe, it was highly entertaining.
➕ the chapters are all very short (usually around five pages, but often even just one page) so this was fast and easy to read.
➖ there was quite a lot of noise here. a lot about bodie's personal life that feels irrelevant in the big picture, much of it felt like, the reader's not here for this so why am i reading about it in so much detail. i sometimes felt like the author was stalling the actual story to make the book longer.
➖ the whole "bad things happen to women!! ALL THE TIME!! ALL!! THE!! TIME!! AND IT'S MEN DOING ITTTT!!!!" message was kinda heavy-handed. yeah we got that the hundredth time, so the additional 500 times it was repeated were somewhat redundant you know. but i get it, that's the theme of the book. men treat women like shit and get off scot-free most of the time. this is clearly a book that wants you to be uncomfortable reading it.
➖ i didn't really like how [spoiler] this got nowhere and just kind of. ended. i mean it was a realistic conclusion, but hyper realism rarely makes a particularly interesting novel (in my opinion anyway). couldn't we get something even a little uplifting at the end?? and, i mean, we have this whole thing about the elusive "you" and for what purpose? what's the payoff, where does it lead us after a whole book of talking to bloch? fucking nowhere. just a conclusion of "oh you didn't do it i guess. ok!"
⭐ score: 4- -- this book was almost genuinely good… almost. the vibes are great and i wanted to keep reading, i wasn't bored at any point. but this sort of story that's more social commentary than character development is rarely something i'll fondly think back to afterwards
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
[ physical book, read in english ]
two agents on the opposing sides of a cosmic time travel war start correspondence through letters sent in increasingly creative formats and go from enemies to penpals to lovers, jumping back and forth in time to be as near each other as possible without their respective armies noticing.
🔴🕰️🔵
➕ on surface level i like the concept of this book, the whole time travel thing through major events in history going on, the concept of characters interacting and having a larger-than-life love story through letters over a very long period of time, literally in this case (and the fact that the two authors co-wrote the book by each roleplaying the part of one character), the surprise of each chapter when you have no idea where (and when) you're going to be this time, and the way the story wraps around itself. basically i could imagine liking a novel telling this story if it wasn't.. well.. this. (but i don't mean this in a way that disrespects the authors, this is their artistic expression, this book wouldn't exist without it being their work so...)
➕ my favourite plus: short ! even more so than usual because the letters take up much of the book. extremely fast to read.
➖ but my problem is that this kind of poetic flowery prose is not at all something i enjoy reading. this book of only 200 pages somehow manages to simultaneously tell an incredibly large story but also 80% of it is going on and on with the verbose sentences with very little substance so very little actually happens. we get pages and pages of something something garden something but hardly know anything about these two characters outside the context of their penpal romance (not to mention i didn't understand if they're like, a robot and a plant but also human women in each physical manifestation they have on all the different timelines or what). there's so much but also so little going on here. for me there's no inherent value in stacking interesting words in a row to express something simple as arbitrarily and artistically as humanly possible, i'd rather just understand what the fuck we're talking about actually. half of the contents of the letters feels like meaningless filler, red and blue just ramble on about some random shit with no context that's not only hard to understand but is also just not interesting to read for me. it also impacts how their love story appears to me because, like, there's so little substance i don't really understand where the falling in love part comes from? it felt to me like they just wrote each other whatever (and flexed with the ways to send the letters) until they started writing "i love you" over and over, idk maybe i'm not enough of a romantic to get it. that's also part of the problem -- i don't enjoy books that make me feel stupid. this made me feel incredibly stupid because it's so frustrating to read. kinda feels like having a stroke when you just keep reading words and none of them mean anything to you
➖ also what is the time war FOR. WHAT DOES THE WINNER ACHIEVE
⭐ score: 3 -- this is a diplomatic three because i can see the artistic value of this book but it's just not for me? i feel like i can't adequately judge it one way or another so it's an "Idk" three. in a way this should be a two because i would have DNF'd immediately if it were a longer book but, because it's so short that was never on the table. because i knew i'd finish this in a couple of days no matter how little i understood
a woman has finished the thankless job of ghostwriting a book for some random influencer, then has a one-night stand with a guy that she has a totally charming evening with and proceeds to have the worst sex of her life with. the next day she meets up with a hollywood actor whose memoir she's been proposed to write and, of course, he turns out to be said one-night stand. she accepts the job and starts touring cons around the US with the guy and somehow also ends up teaching him how to become better in bed on the side. but it's like a business exchange, right! no feelings involved and no strings attached whatsoever ha ha!
✍️😳🐺
➕ so the reason i even picked this up was that i wanted some brainless entertainment where a girl meets a guy and they fuck. and that's exactly what this delivered so can i really complain? all of the sexy scenes were cringe of course but that's to be expected
➕ by far the most fun thing about this was the werewolf show that finn became famous in. this story would have been elevated significantly if it focused more on that group of actors and all the tension and drama between them. they were so much more interesting that the main character.
➕ i actually kind of liked how the story was formulated like a TV show itself, where each episode (chapter, roughly) starts with whatever chandler and finn are doing in the city they are currently in and ends with them having sexytimes. each sexytime is also a bit different from the previous one. even if it was cringe af (i am quickly discovering i really dislike reading detailed descriptions of what a man might do with a woman's tit in his mouth. among other things)
➖ but this is like if you made a list of tropes and topics to include to write a story that caters to nerdy millennials and wrote it into a book. and i am a nerdy millennial yes, but i don't like things that are too in-your-face catered to me actually. i'd say the author is in fanfiction circles, there's a "there was only one bed" chapter and whatever, this shit is so damn tropey. a lot of it felt like hitting checkboxes instead of being a story that just organically enfolds. also the two main characters are straight white americans but wait! they are both jewish and also umm he has OCD (that's mentioned in, maybe 2 scenes and then forgotten) so they are toootally not generic and this is suuchhh smart social commentary instead!! ah yes.
➖ i felt nothing for the main couple, the relationship is like… too sensible? these two characters are too polished, they basically talk in therapy speech to each other, the only wrinkle in their perfection is that finn is initially not perfect at sex (which basically means that he doesn't know where the clitoris is, which made him completely unattractive to chandler after the best date of her life, but wait! he becomes a fuck machine after a couple of Sex Lessons so now she can fall in love with him after all, hooray!!!!!! of course it helps that he's conventionally attractive). by the time they finally confessed, and i felt nothing and saw that there were still like 2 hours left of the book, i was really kind of considering DNF'ing for a hot minute because i was just so bored and it felt unlikely that this book had anything to offer anymore. the prolonged mutual pining didn't make any sense here, they literally liked each other from the moment they laid eyes on each other, they have a great time on a literal date, they KNOW they have chemistry, the guy confesses several times during the book. the way she's written to be so oblivious about it (and she's not even, like, a shy virgin who wouldn't know how it feels like to be liked by men) is so incredulous and super fucking stupid, this did Not work at all for me.
➖ the premise of this entire book is that chandler is writing a book but we don't get a single snippet of what she's even writing, instead there's these random little bits of the shows and films that finn has starred in for whatever reason, i didn't really get the relevance of any of it
➖ remind me to not listen to any book containing sex in finnish ever again. horrible horrible experience. never heard anyone read the lines of a man having an orgasm with less emotion in their voice. the narrator is also pronouncing shit weirdly, clearly she has no idea we have cons in finland so you don't need to be calling them KHANs to get the point across. and she forces this very american accent with pronouncing all other english words but for some reason arizona gets to be an ARITSOONA in finnish accent
⭐ score: 3- -- in the thirds since i was entertained enough to not consider dropping this but, if this is like, an example of a modern romance novel that's considered good… not sure this is a genre for me who famously does not really read romance.
the story of a king's daughter in ancient italy who refuses to marry a guy that her mother is trying to force on her because the soul of the poet who's going to write her story in the future tells her that she is to marry a foreign king instead. everything happens exactly as the poet has foretold her.
👑🌳⚔️
➕ i honestly don't really know what to say here because i didn't know a diddle darn thing about the aeneid prior to reading this, the stories are not familiar to me, and i'm also not super interested in them. the impression i got from this book is that lavinia was like a random side character with no lines or anything in the original epic, and le guin just looked at her and was like, hey let's make a book from her perspective instead. and let's also make it all meta so she meets virgil and is self-aware about being a poorly written female character in a poem. kind of a weird perspective to choose but i don't dislike it.
➕ short
➖ the biggest minus is that this book was so "alright. whatever" that i have no thoughts or feelings about it in either direction. i just didn't really care? it was a fine read but none of it was very interesting, also there's no real plotline or story arc here to speak of, just some parts of the aeneid described from lavinia's perspective, stuff just kinda happens a little and that's that.
➖ a very puzzling finnish translation. not only are many of the names not written in the established finnish forms, it's full of typos and shit.
⭐ score: 3 -- the most cardboard-tasting 3 to ever be granted a book on this blog, i simply have no positive or negative thoughts whatsoever. i already read the penelopiad last summer so this female PoV thing wasn't all new and exciting anymore either. this was a book.
