Answered more in depth below, but, and in no particular order, Catch and Kill; A Memory Called Empire; Girl, Woman, Other; Ancillary Justice; The City We Became (reviews and cws: here)
13. What were your least favorite books of the year?
I am having a bit of a love hate relationship with Dune, which i cannot get round to finishing (have been reading since summer 2019); i do appreciate intricate world building and interesting side characters, but it’s obviously steeped in orientalism and frankly, it doesn’t deserve the title of “the greatest sci-fi ever written” which it has on the back of my copy. Read some Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia E Butler who were roughly Frank Herbert’s contemporaries. Or go read NK JEMISIN for modern, brilliant, mind-blowing sci-fi/speculative fiction. White men are actually the weakest link in science fiction writing.
I wanted to enjoy “Boyfriend Material” by Alexis Hall more than I did. It’s very much fluffy romance and sometimes you crave fluffy gay romance, it’s incredibly funny, but unfortunately, the POV character has a lot of self-hatred and it’s very difficult to read someone telling themselves how stupid and horrible and gross and etc they are for like 200 pages. Maybe i’m just not in the right place to read it, but the tone shifts were jarring and sometimes a little triggering.
22. Already answered! But another pretty long book that i definitely will finish before the end of the year is Neal Stephenson’s 499 page “The Diamond Age”.
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