According to Storygraph I read 181 books this year, to which I feel like I have to caveat this number includes a lot of children's chapter books and individual volumes of manga. Which is all "real" reading, but they are short. This number is actually down from previous years because I have been stress-reading fewer chapter books.
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
An unnamed youth is brought into a mysterious dream theater to witness the long-ago story of two young men escorting a dying goddess across a crumbling empire. This one took me most of the year to read because the prose is just so rich and dense and gorgeous and I needed to savor it.
Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
A girl with no memories just wants to have a birthday party with her friends but the planet-destoying monsters and empire of evil space necromancers keep getting in the way. Honestly I wasn't the biggest fan of Gideon when I first read it, but watching the series unfold like some kind of elaborate origami structure has changed my opinion drastically and okay, I see why people are feral about this series because I am too.
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
A boy discovers the ghost of his father under his house and oh no that's not a good thing because it's a metaphor generational trauma. My first foray into horror! Just a teeny little novella because I'm still a weenie though.
A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell
A trans man in Victorian England convinces a woman botanist to join him on a bicycle race in order to win a bet. A sweet romance, lots of historical details about gender and bicycles, and a more nuanced take on trans identity that even some contemporary books, the angst being not so much "how can I exist?" as much as "how can I keep being a feminist?"
Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge (translated by Jeremy Tiang)
A writer lives in a city where much of the population is "beasts" that look and act mostly human except for some very distinctive quirks, depending on the beast. Each chapter is a story starts with a list of facts about the beast, and by the end of the chapter each of those facts turns out to be... not exactly wrong, but twisted. And the line between beast and human gets murkier and murkier until you're left wondering if perhaps we aren't all beasts in the end.
