13: What were your least favorite books of the year?
My least-liked three books were... (edit: four. four books. I added a fourth :/ )
Lady Jayne Disappears by Joanna Davidson Politano was a Christian mystery romance that I read this year on a whim. It's definitely the thing I ranked the lowest on my Goodreads this year. Egregious historical anachronisms abounded! !he heroine was praised for having a cruel, eye-for-an-eye attitude towards her relatives! The characters' behavior didn't make sense! And the mystery itself didn't end in a satisfying way.
The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart was admittedly an interesting read, and I'll probably seek out other books in the series, but there were parts of it that bothered me. For one, a pretty important twist in the book relies on the characters forgetting they're living in a multilingual society, specifically a society where people might use Latinized forms of their names. This irritated me because otherwise Stewart has a pretty good grasp of how multilingual the Medieval world actually was. Aside from that, there was your average bizarrely anachronistic portrayal of Christianity that is typical of any Arthurian retelling written in the late 20th century. (She gets points, though, for not doing the same boring old Paganism Good, Christianity Bad cold take that a lot of her contemporaries did.)
I feel bad saying I didn't especially like The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, because I feel like everyone and their cat liked this book, but I didn't. It wasn't bad! I see why it spoke to a lot of people! And I'd be lying if I said I didn't learn from it! But I felt as though Comer's language risked turning the Christian life into a hip new self-help regimen. Like that was Jesus' whole point. I had to set the book down for a while when he swapped out the idea of "simplicity" with "minimalism".
Also, I didn't finish A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, but I had to stop reading it because I found the man's tone insufferable.
17: Did any books surprise you with how good they were?
I learned about Take Me for a Ride by Mark Laxer from Atrocity Guide's video on Frederick Lenz, and I read it off of my phone while on vacation this summer (since it was free on Project Gutenberg).
I was not expecting this book to wow me in the way that it did. It's a memoir about a young man healing from his time in a cult and an analysis of why people join cults in the first place. It was fascinating, but also genuinely well-written. Definitely recommend checking it out.
22: What’s the longest book you read?
Going by page count for these, it was Fellowship of the Ring, which I re-read this year!
For stuff I read for the first time, it was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, which I read in part because Mark Laxer references it several times in Take Me for a Ride.
