Before you read this review, which is of the second book in the Blood at the Root series, I’d like you to read my review of the first book, Blood at the Root. Why? Because it’s kind of fascinating just how cleanly my reading experience of Bones paralleled my reading of Blood:
I definitely and absolutely have had Malik in my classroom before. Even more so in this book than in the previous one, honestly; Williams calls Malik “messy” in his Author’s Foreword to this book, and I feel like Malik’s messiness, and to be more specific, his temper, maybe hurts him more in this book than it does in Blood. This is a kid who has been handed a raw deal by life on a ton of different levels (the magic kinda makes it better, I imagine) but one way or another he doesn’t handle it like a grown-up. Why? He’s not one.
Watching Malik navigate romantic relationships? Also super familiar.
I would say the moment where Williams absolutely stomps on the accelerator is closer to the 2/3 mark of the book than the halfway point, but while Blood came close to making me cry a couple of times– something that, let me repeat, almost never happens while I’m reading– page 368 absolutely 100% got me. Like, a literal gasp, and a well of pride, and I’m not going to pretend I was sobbing or anything but there were actual real tears.
I am not enough of a nerd that I’m going to figure out exactly what percentage of the book was finished at page 368, and you can’t make me.
NO.
It’s 67.6%, so my estimate was right on the money, fuck you.
Anyway, I referenced “twists and turns and betrayals” in the first review, and … YEAH. Along with some major reveals and some major shake-ups of what you thought you knew from the first book.
And then the Goddamned thing ends on a cliffhanger, and … remember when I was reading Godsgrave, a million years ago, and I said that I’d never been happier to have the sequel of a book on hand before finishing it? The sequel to Bones at the Crossroads hasn’t even got a release date yet, so LaDarrion Williams is about to acquire a new, and very impatient, roommate.
I will ding the book a tiny bit for dragging occasionally before that pedal-to-the-metal moment that carries through the rest of the story, and it doesn’t mean a whole lot to say this is the best book I’ve read so far this year on January 7th, but this was real real good and if you haven’t read Blood at the Root, go pick that up, and read slowly, and maybe by the time you finish Bones the end of the trilogy will be available.
I need at least one more hobby. I mean, I have reading, and being a huge nerd about reading, and collecting books. I need a fourth.
According to Goodreads, I read 189 books in 2025, at 87,775 pages. According to Storygraph, I read 189 books in 2025, at 88,360 pages. Let’s call it 88,000 pages, as I’m entirely uninterested in trying to reconcile the discrepancy between the two. At the beginning of this year I started a bunch of different book app accounts and said that I was going to eventually settle on one, and Goodreads and Storygraph scratch slightly different itches, so I spent the year keeping both updated. 88K pages works out to 241 pages a day. How? I read every single night for at least half an hour before going to bed, and on weekends and days off I generally get up between 6:00 and 8:00 and spend a few hours reading in my library. For the record, I’m not trying to get up that early to read; believe me, I’d kill to be able to sleep until noon again if I wanted to. This is one of my body’s ways of showing me I’ve gotten old, apparently, but it’s working out for my reading, I guess.
26 of the books I read were nonfiction, and Storygraph claims I read 5% of them digitally, although I’m not convinced I was especially vigilant about making sure that was recorded properly. I said last year I wanted to read six books about teaching, and didn’t pull that off, mostly because after reading the first one I decided books about teaching were dumb and I didn’t want to read any more of them. I still want to read more nonfiction next year; maybe I’ll shoot for 36 nonfiction books by the end of the year. I definitely want to read more books digitally because my shelves are groaning and I’m genuinely running out of places to store shit. My bookshelves can only get so efficient, y’all, and I don’t think my wife is going to agree to buy a new house.
Average page length was 464 pages, which is another reason I’m thinking about moving more to digital. I read a ton of doorstoppers– according to Storygraph, ten different books were over a thousand pages. That’s nuts.
I read books by 141 authors, 86 of whom were new to me this year. Authors I read more than one book by were:
8 Books: Matt Dinniman
7 Books: Brandon Sanderson
6 Books: Robert Jordan
4 Books: Samantha Shannon, Ryan Cahill
3 Books: Brian McClellan, Megan E. O’Keefe, Wesley Chu, Anthony Ryan, Nghi Vo
2 Books: Keith Ammann, Leigh Bardugo, S.A. Barnes, Suzanne Collins, Osamu Dazai, H.E. Edgmon, K.M. Enright, James Islington, Yume Kitasei, James Logan, John Scalzi, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Xiran Jay Zhao
I’m expecting Robert Jordan to be the big winner next year, as I expect to finish The Wheel of Time, unless it kills me, which it might. Actually, that’s not true, I’m going to finish them even if it does kill me. I’m gonna do it this time, God damn it. I promise. Naomi Novik and Robin Hobb are also going to get a lot of attention.
I didn’t make any particular effort to pay attention to race or gender this year; those repeat authors mean that in terms of raw number of books read I’m absolutely tilted toward white men, but a quick count shows 74 authors who at least immediately scan as female-presenting, which is slightly more than half of the 141 total. There are probably a handful of nonbinary people in there who might move those numbers a bit if I looked closer.
Next year … man, next year all I want to do is get my TBR under control. That’s it. I will probably not manage it.
I’m currently trying to clear as many short books as I can off of my Unread Shelf before taking that picture tomorrow, but I’m willing to take it on faith that none of them are going to blow me away, and if they do, well, under the “My Blog, My Rules” rule, I can include them next year if I have to. This is the thirteenth year I’ve done this list, and the fifth time I expanded the list to 15– the shortlist was 28, and the first cull took it down to 15, then I took that down to 10 and then thought about it some more and decided to do 15 anyway. I surprised myself with a couple of these books, honestly; we’ll see what y’all think.
As always, “new” means “new to me,” not “released in 2025,” although the majority of at least the fiction books were 2025 releases and at least one of the nonfiction releases was as well. The oldest book on the list is from 1999.
Also as always, don’t read too much into specific placements. I spend a lot more time thinking about whether books should be on the list at all than where they should be on the list, and if I put this together again tomorrow without looking at it I doubt they’d be in the exact same order.
15: The Stationery Shop, by Marjan Kamali. I went back and forth several times about whether this book or Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! were going to be #15, nearly expanded the list to 16 books, then decided that I remembered The Stationery Shop a lot better and that should make the difference. You’re going to see a theme reading through this list; the quality of the book matters to getting on the shortlist, but going from the shortlist to the final 15 really depends on how much recall of the book I have, which isn’t always perfectly correlated with how much I enjoyed the book when I first read it. At any rate, this is a historical fiction and a love story and it borders on hated litratcher, beginning in Tehran in the 1950s just before the coup that installed Mohammed Reza as leader of Iran. The main character is a young woman whose engagement to a revolutionary is derailed by the coup, and the book bounces back and forth between various periods in her life as she eventually moves to America for college and marries another man. This will hit you in the gut if you ever feel like you lost anyone; the emotional bleed-through from Roya’s grief and loss over the course of the story is intense.
14: Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World, by Emma Southon. I wanted to read more nonfiction this year, and I read a lot of good history in particular this year. Agrippina succeeds on several levels; Roman history can be excruciatingly complicated and dense (Southon riffs on their penchant for reusing names repeatedly) and a lot of the histories I’ve read of the Empire ended up really dry even if they didn’t want to be. This book is both a good biography of one of the more well-attested women in the ancient world and a good general history of Rome, and Southon’s salty sense of humor easily carries the book through what be a significantly trickier read in lesser hands. My only regret is that the book lost its original title in transition to paperback; it was originally subtitled Emperor, Exile, Hustler, Whore, but the publishers apparently rebelled after the hardcover edition came out and forced a name change. If you ever spot the original book in a used bookstore or anything like that for less than $75, please grab one for me. I’ve seen them listed for up to $300, but I don’t want it that much.
13: The Enchanted Greenhouse, by Sarah Beth Durst. This will be the first and only appearance of the phrase cozy fantasy on the list and the first but probably not the last appearance of the word delightful. This is the second of Sarah Beth Durst’s books that I’ve read, and while it’s notprecisely a sequel to The Spellshop, it’s set in the same world and alludes to a lot of the same events– in fact, the book begins when the main character brings a spider plant to sentience, and said talking spider plant was one of the main characters in Spellshop. It may not surprise you to learn that the book is about an enchanted greenhouse, and that the main plot of the book involves threats to the plants in said greenhouse. This is cozy fantasy! The stakes are not high. The worst thing that could happen in this book is that a bunch of plants might die, and spoiler alert: the plants are not going to die. Terlu Perna is not much of a botanist and not much of an enchanter, however, and watching her and the hunky greenhouse guy she’s found herself inadvertently imposing upon (it’s a long story) try to figure out why the greenhouse is failing and how to fix it is a lot of fun. I’m going to keep reading this series as long as Sarah Beth Durst keeps writing them.
12: His Face is the Sun, by Michelle Jabès Corpora. When I reviewed this in July– brief pause to be surprised it was only July— I called it “#1 with a bullet” on my shortlist. So why is it all the way down at #12? To be honest, I had to stare at the cover for a minute to remember much about it. This feels unfair to the book, because I remember saying that, and it’s not like I’m not rereading my own reviews in preparing this list, but other than “Man, I really liked this book,” and a vague idea that it was set in Not Egypt, I couldn’t remember a damned thing about it. I’m definitely rereading it when the sequel comes out, because I’m not about to let my shitty recall screw up future books. This is a multi-POV book with characters ranging from child of Pharaoh to a farmer’s daughter to a young priestess who sees visions, and the characters interact with each other fascinatingly, popping in and out of each other’s lives over the course of the story. In my defense, even July was a hundred damn books ago. It’s possible that I read too much. Oh, and there’s a cat who sort of serves as a frame character to the entire book. I liked the cat an awful lot. The cat had better be in Book 2.
11: Capitana, by Cassandra James. Man, Goodreads really doesn’t like this book– the average review over there is 3.28, which in Goodreads terms may as well be a zero. Why? Apparently Cassandra James said some stuff, and I’m deliberately not going to find out What Kind of Stuff She Said because that would violate my Don’t Want None Won’t Be None rule. If I hadn’t noticed the low score and decided to wander through a couple of the reviews over there I wouldn’t be aware that the author is Considered Problematic, so I’m not going to worry about it and just tell you that this book is about a pirate hunter who turns pirate, and really, that’s generally all I’m going to need to enjoy a book? I like books about pirates. There’s a romantasy element to it, but it’s not overwhelming, and main character Ximena really does need a few things beaten into her head a couple of times before she actually believes them, but she’s also supposed to be seventeen, and … well. I’m well accustomed to the idea that sometimes teenagers have to be told things or be exposed to certain ideas multiple times before they sink in. Feel free to look into James if you’re worried about supporting whatever kind of person she’s going to turn out to be; Illumicrate sent me this one blind, and I enjoyed it, and now it’s on the list.
10: Hammajang Luck, by Makana Yamamoto. Speaking of “books Illumicrate sent me,” this one also would never have crossed my radar if I didn’t have a subscription to that service, and speaking of “you had me at the premise,” it’s a Hawaiian-inflected cyberpunk lesbian heist novel set on a space station, and what that means is that if I’d encountered it on my own it would have been an instant buy regardless. There are shifting loyalties and betrayals and an ending that took me completely by surprise and I had an enormous amount of fun reading this. I’m still not sure if this is a one-shot or if there are more planned, but Makana Yamamoto went directly onto my “buy immediately” list after reading this. “Hammajang,” by the way, is Hawaiian Pidgin for “messy” or “chaotic” or maybe “fucked-up” if you’re feeling salty; there’s going to be a decent amount of unfamiliar vocabulary sprinkled throughout this one, if I remember correctly, so be prepared for that. Future Space Station Hawai’i isn’t as nice a place as the original, but it’s awesome to read about.
9: The Bone Raiders, by Jackson Ford. This one was originally not on my shortlist, and I looked at my shortlist and thought “Where the hell is The Bone Raiders?” and added it and then it ended up in the top 10. I will reiterate what I said in my original review: please judge this book by its cover. Five badass women of color with a dragon. Okay, it’s not a dragon, but it might as well be a dragon. It’s dragon-adjacent. You are absolutely getting the book you think you are getting from looking at this cover, and I don’t want to beat the phrase “right up my alley” to death in this piece, but … yeah. The band of titular Raiders are called the Rakata, and Genghis Khan isn’t the bad guy but close enough, and damn near every POV character in the book is a woman. This one is definitely book one of a trilogy; the final chapter leads directly into the next book. This book also has the distinction of being more concerned about animal husbandry than anything else on the list. It turns out that’s a plus. I’d never really considered “does this book involve animal husbandry?” before choosing to read something before, but I’m definitely starting now.
8: Mark Twain, by Ron Chernow. Here’s where we enter the And now, for something completely different phase of the list: Ron Chernow is a known quantity around here; I have read his biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and I keep getting surprised by the fact that I haven’t read his biography of Ulysses S Grant. He writes giant doorstops — Twain is 1200 pages — and despite that his books are still quick, propulsive reads. I have to admit that I came away from this book with a slightly lower opinion of Mark Twain as a person than I did going into it, but the book itself is magnificently well-done. I didn’t review the book after I read it, but I did review Mark Twain himself, who gets 3/5 stars as a human being. Writing biographies of authors can be really tricky, as authors don’t necessarily tend to do a whole lot beyond, y’know, writing stuff, but Twain was enough of a world traveler and general hob-knobber of famous people that the book never devolves into “he wrote this, and then he wrote that,” and instead can focus on things like his absolutely absurd number of failed business ventures and his odd obsession with young girls. Which … yeah. Three out of five for Twain. At best.
7: The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, by Joel F. Harrington. This one is a biography-but-not-really, of a Nuremberg executioner named Frantz Schmidt. Schmidt left a priceless historical record behind: he carefully wrote down forty-five years of details about the three hundred and sixty-one people he put to death and hundreds more who he tortured or disfigured as an agent of the Imperial City of Nuremberg. He also had a medical practice, as it turns out public executioner wasn’t enough to pay the bills even in the late 1500s. The reason I can’t really call it a biography is that the journal itself didn’t have a ton of details about Schmidt himself, so the book tells us what it can and then pivots to being a history of sixteenth-century Nuremberg and the profession of executioner in general, dipping its toe into Renaissance-era legal theory and criminal justice. The book is chock full of little details that will surprise you– did you know that most executions with swords were carried out with the victim sitting in a chair, for example? — and as I don’t know a ton about the Renaissance era in general, particularly in what would eventually become Germany, so there was a lot to learn here.
6: Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love, by Dava Sobel. Hey, look, a theme! Galileo’s Daughter is also a history from the fifteenth century drawn mostly from the writings of its main character, and is also a book that isn’t quite a biography of the person it’s supposedly named after. Perhaps a third of this book is concerned with Suor Maria Celeste, the second of Galileo’s three illegitimate children and the one he had the closest relationship with. Suor Maria was sent to a convent by her father at a young age, but stayed near him for most of his life and exchanged an enormous corpus of letters, from which this book is drawn. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the book is mostly actually about Galileo through the eyes of his immensely intelligent and doting daughter; you get the feeling that had Suor Maria been born four hundred years later she’d have been a famous intellectual giant on her own terms. Much like The Faithful Executioner, you also get a lot of information about the Italian Renaissance, and again, European history isn’t one of my strong points, so Sobel’s deft hand with her topic was greatly appreciated. This book got recommended to me enthusiastically a couple of years before I finally got around to it; I shouldn’t have waited so long.
5: The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due. I need to treat Tananarive Due with more respect; I keep being surprised by how much I enjoy her books, and then forgetting how much I enjoyed them later. Well, damn it, The Reformatory is awesome, and I can imagine a world where I put it higher in the top five than it is right now. It’s a historical fiction and a horror story; set in 1950 in Florida, the main character is Robert Stephens Jr, a 12-year-old Black boy who kicks an older white boy who is harassing his sister and is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys, a so-called “reform school” run by an absolute monster of a human being. His sentence is supposedly six months, but everyone knows that anyone sent to Gracetown isn’t getting out before their 21st birthday if they ever get out at all; they will simply find excuses to keep the kids imprisoned for as long as they want them there. This is already a horror story before you get to the ghosts, is what I’m saying, and … well, you can probably imagine that any ghosts sticking around at a reform school are not going to be the happy friendly type. The book bounces back and forth in POV between Robert and his sister, who is doing her best to get him away from Gracetown and is stymied at every opportunity. There are a ton of twists and turns and I enjoyed this one enormously.
4: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives, by Siddharth Kara. This book wasn’t precisely recommended to me; I found it lying on a countertop at my brother’s house and picked it up and before I knew it there was another copy on its way to my house. The Reformatory started what’s going to be four horror books in a row; Cobalt Red is the scariest, by a long shot, as it’s nonfiction and everything discussed in it is absolutely terrible. So, it turns out that cobalt is essential to every lithium-ion battery on the planet, right? And 75% of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from the Congo. And unfortunately you will probably not be surprised to learn that said cobalt is mined under fucking awful conditions, largely by hand and frequently by children, and that very little of the wealth generated by the Congo’s cobalt actually makes its way back to the Congolese. If you’ve ever read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, you can consider this book an unofficial sequel to it, as the way modern companies and multinational corporations are strip-mining the Congo and enslaving the Congolese to do it is not especially different from the way Belgian colonizers were exploiting the Congo for its rubber and other natural resources a century and a half ago. This book will make you feel awful, and then you won’t do anything about it, and that will make it worse. Read it.
3: The Eyes are the Best Part, by Monika Kim. This excellent little horror debut was another book box find– not Illumicrate this time, but Aardvark, although once I’d read it I discovered that Illumicrate had their own edition of it and immediately ordered that one too. I called this “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up” in my review, and I absolutely stand by it. Eyes is about a college-aged Korean-American woman named Ji-Won, who lives at home with her family. Early in the book her father abruptly deserts his wife after having an affair, and the rest of the book is equal parts psychological horror, body horror and political indictment of a certain kind of white fetishism about Asian women, as both Ji-Won and her mother attract the attention of men who are terrible in related but different ways and Ji-Won herself suffers a mental break and basically becomes a serial killer. The eyes referred to in the title are fish eyes; there’s a deeply squicky bit at the beginning where her mother waxes poetic about how delicious fish eyes are and Ji-Won, born in the States, isn’t able to bring herself to try them. It, uh, doesn’t last. You’ll need a strong stomach to get through this one, I think, but it’s well worth it.
2: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White. It is possible that if you’re a regular reader and have a decent memory that this one is surprising, as my initial review of this book wasn’t wholly positive. But remember earlier, two thousand or so words ago, where I said that how a book sticks around for me is almost as important as what I think when I first read it? Because You Weren’t Meant to be Human has crawled into my brain and lives there permanently now. I’ve recapped my own reviews repeatedly through this piece but I’m going to directly quote myself here:
Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen … and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.
That’s still one hundred percent true. You should absolutely go read my original review before you pick this one up if you’re curious, because it needs every single one of the trigger warnings before you read it, and I do not blame you one bit if you read my review and decide it’s not for you. I’m not even sure it’s for me, and this is also a book where I got a special edition right after reading my Aardvark copy, although in this case it was part of the regular subscription and not one I picked on my own.
This book is fucked up, and it’ll fuck you up, and it fucked me up, and as I’ve gotten farther away from it I’ve lost a little bit of my original “God, no” reaction to it and just come to appreciate the sheer amount of craft necessary to write it in the first place. It’s simultaneously one of the best books I read this year and easily the least enjoyable. Do with that what you will.
And finally …
1: Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman.
Oh, shut up.
I’m cheating here a little bit. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series is currently on Book Seven, with Book 8 due out next year and at least two more planned to follow after that. I read all seven of them in 2025, and of the seven, the last three all made the shortlist. I suppose if you put a gun to my head I could put This Inevitable Ruin here and not the first book, but we’re going to go with using the first book as a stand-in for the entire series. My blog, my rules, dammit.
I understand the people who have resisted this series, I genuinely do. The idea that there are seven books and probably at least six thousand pages about some random dude and his talking cat who get sucked into an intergalactic role-playing game after Earth is invaded and mostly destroyed, with leveling and magic and weapons and ability scores, and that their job is to fight through successive levels of an actual dungeon cobbled together from the ruins of Earth for the televised enjoyment of the rest of the sentient species of the universe, is so fundamentally ridiculous that I cannot blame anyone who refuses to go near it. But not only does the Dungeon Crawler Carl series overcome its own absurdity, it’s a giant fantasy mega-series that is somehow getting better as it goes on. And it’s not just me! Damn near everyone I know who has read these books agrees! They start good and they keep getting better. My wife is not a huge fan of fantasy, and she picked up the first book begrudgingly, on my recommendation (much as I picked it up begrudgingly, on the Internet’s recommendation) and she read all seven books back to back. That is not a thing she does!
These books are amazing, and Matt Dinniman is some sort of evil genius, and it is entirely possible that I will read the entire series again before Book 8 comes out, and it would be utterly absurd for me to pick anything else as the best thing I read this year.
HONORABLE MENTION, in NO PARTICULAR ORDER: The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates; The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore; Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar; The Bones Beneath My Skin, by TJ Klune; A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett; Revelator, by Daryl Gregory, It Rhymes with Takei, by George Takei, Harmony Becker & Steven Scott; Advocate, by Daniel M. Ford; The Blighted Stars, by Megan O’Keefe, A Promise of Blood, by Brian McClellan; An African History of Africa, by Zeinab Badawi, Shadows Upon Time, by Christopher Ruocchio, and The Silverblood Promise and The Blackfire Blade, by James Logan.
The original coverThe new coverThe “are you fucking kidding me” cover of the sequelThe main cover of the sequel
I make bad decisions, guys, and it seems like James Islington’s books are just absolutely committed to proving that at their every opportunity.
Islington has written, to my knowledge, five books. I own six of his books. I have read three and a quarter of them. I have liked one of them. I bought and read The Shadow of What Was Lost, the first book of his Licanius trilogy, three years ago. I did not like it very much, but the book as a physical object was remarkable, and I bought the entire trilogy before finishing the first book. I made it, if I remember correctly, less than 25% of the way through the second book before deciding I was done and putting it away. Other than placing it on the shelf and perhaps moving it to a different shelf once or twice, I have barely touched the third book and have never opened it.
Somehow, this did not prevent me from buying The Will of the Many when it came out– and I bought the original cover, the one with the columns up there. I read it and quite liked it– the world building was a little shallow, and the plot not especially unique; every “brilliant young person goes to a Special School” book is gonna have some major similarities, but the Rome-inflected world was at least interesting if, again, not very deeply thought-out, but whatever.
Then I started seeing the book on shelves with a whole new cover. You know this about me; I like my shit to look nice and clean, and midseries changes to covers annoy me tremendously, and I didn’t want to buy a second copy of the first book just to match the second on the shelf.
And then they made an announcement that all copies of The Strength of the Few would have reversible covers, one to match each version of the original cover! My understanding is that Islington himself was behind that decision, which I both support and tremendously appreciate. My man knows his audience! Good on you.
The fucking word “Hierarchy,” the title of the series, was spelled wrong on the spine.
I swore– a lot– and then said “Fuck it, this is why I have a job” and bought a new copy of the first book so that it would match. I cannot display a fucking spelling error on my bookshelves. Unimaginable.
(Right about here is where I’m going to stop reviewing myself and start reviewing the books, btdubs.)
I decided that since I was getting a new copy of the book anyway, I’d reread Will before diving into Strength. This, I feel, was the right move. I read so much that most of the time I have read literally hundreds of books in between any given book and its sequel, which means that I frequently don’t enjoy sequels as much as I should because I simply don’t recall the first book as well as I should. And I’d already had one Islington series go sour on me, and I didn’t want it to happen again.
The Will of the Many was an excellent read the second time through as well. It’s a genuinely good book. I stand behind it.
The Strength of the Few … was not. I’ve got it three-starred on the various book services right now and I genuinely might move it down to two. And the most frustrating thing is that a lot of the problems with Licanius are showing themselves again in Hierarchy. It was okay that there wasn’t a whole lot of clarity about how the wider world worked in Will, because the main character was confined to this little school on a tiny island and wasn’t really interacting with the wider world, so when you’ve split the … government? into Religion, Governance and Military and not really defined what it means to be “in Religion”, or when you have a couple of characters who are in the Senate, because this world is based on Rome somehow so there has to be one of those, but haven’t actually really said what the Senate is for, you can get away with it. But you’ve got to broaden that scope out in any sequel, especially when you end Book One, which was mostly a hunt for What Really Happened to the MC’s adoptive father’s brother, by splitting the entire universe into three parallel planes. At that point, I would like to understand how all this works. The main character exists in all three worlds in book two, only at least two of the three versions of him don’t know that he’s in all three worlds, and one of them is Egypt-except-not, and one of them is, bewilderingly, Wales-except-not.(*)
It means that the world you’ve learned about in the first book is only a third of the second book, and the other two worlds genuinely aren’t very interesting (not-Egypt is better than not-Wales, but not by much) and that’s before he starts sidelining and/or killing every interesting female character in the first book, and it’s also before you hit the No One You Thought Was Dead Is Still Dead part of the book, which is just fucking annoying.
There’s also a form of magic called Will, and an interesting setup in not-Rome where society has organized itself into pyramids where everyone pledges part of their Will to the people above them, and Will does stuff but it’s not entirely clear that Islington has figured out the parameters of what it can do, nor is it clear to me why holding someone’s hand and saying “I cede you my Will,” or whatever the code phrase is, lets them take part of your life essence away from you. It’s rigorously codified without actually making a whole lot of sense, which is not a great combination. I feel like if you poked the whole system too hard it would collapse.
(Even the school the MC attends in the first book was … kinda sketchy, as far as the worldbuilding goes. It’s also organized into tiers, and the MC moves from seventh tier to third over the course of a single semester, but everybody seems to be the same age and it’s not at all clear how often or even whether anyone graduates, or how long they’re supposed to be there, or really even what they’re studying; dude mentions that his classes are getting harder a few times but never really says why, and nothing is ever difficult for him, really.)
I damn near DNFed the second James Islington Series Volume II in a row, is what I’m saying here. It’s just not nearly as good as the first book, and again, much like the first series, I feel like the central conflict is not well defined here. The first book was a pretty straightforward “find out what happened to this guy” thing, and it got more complicated than that but that was basically what was going on. Now there’s a Cataclysm every three hundred years (what happens during a Cataclysm? Bad stuff, but … don’t ask what kind! People die, alright?(**) It’s bad!) and apparently we’re going to stop it somehow, I guess, and something something worlds got split up, and …
<spits>
Blech.
Again, I’m an idiot, so I’ll probably pick up the third volume when it comes out (I hope there are only planned to be three, but who knows) just for completeness’ sake, because it would really piss me off to have two copies of the first book, one of the second, and not have the third) but I think I probably have to be done with this guy after that unless everything really turns around.
(*) This got me thinking about how Rome and Alexandria, two massively different cultures, are only 1200 miles apart. That’s about the distance from northern Indiana to Houston.)
(**) The phrase “all right,” which is two words, not one, and I will let you get away with “alright” in dialogue but not much else, is misspelled every single time it appears in both books. I hate it.
I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”
I have all the books. Do you understand?
And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.
This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.
So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:
along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.
We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.
I was originally going to write a review of this book and discuss this in the review, but I took a nap this afternoon and still have 60-some pages left. Why did I just say “this book” and not the name of the book? Well, I’m doing that thing where I don’t want this post necessarily showing up in search results for the book, especially since this post is going to be pretty critical and it’s important for you to know that I’m really enjoying the read. I’m going to be a little sneaky about which title I’m talking about, though. Let’s see if you can figure it out.
I am a lifelong genre reader, and for most of that time I’ve been fairly open about my disdain for what people call Literary Fiction. Feel free to blame it on me being too dumb for Literary Fiction. That’s fine. I have an ego but for some reason it doesn’t extend to being bothered by that particular allegation. I don’t get most of the examples of the genre I’ve read; I usually don’t understand why anyone bothered to write the book in the first place and I understand even less what anyone is talking about when they praise them. In particular, use of the word “comic” can be a red flag. One guarantee is that any time a book reviewer I’ve never heard of describes a book as “comic” is that it will not, in any way, be funny. In fact, for the most part, it won’t even be trying to be funny and failing. “Comic” means something else to Literature People. I don’t know what it means and I’m not going to bother finding out.
This particular book has a bunch of pull quotes by people I’ve never heard of who wrote books I’ve never heard of on the back. The sole exception is George Saunders; I’ve heard of him and I know he’s fancy but that’s all I can tell you. The blurbs aren’t as bad as they can get; none of them appear to be random collections of words, and none of them use words that should not be used to describe books (“deliciously turquoise and refreshing prose”– HARPER’S) in them. But this was on the New York Times’ 10 Best Books list, which usually means only ten people read it, and it was a National Book Award finalist. Here is the list of every National Book Award winner. I admit, I have read five of them– interestingly, all but one nonfiction winners– and I have never heard of considerably more than five.
Anyway, this book should have been YA and nothing, nothing will convince me otherwise.
If the exact same book had been written by a woman, it would be shelved with YA. It’s The Hunger Games with a more complicated vocabulary, more swearing, and footnotes about the American carceral system. The premise is the most YA-coded thing I’ve ever seen; the idea is that incarcerated criminals can get their sentences commuted if they agree to engage in gladiator combat to the death every so often; if they make it three years and are still alive, they get to go free. They earn something called, no shit, Blood Points as they work their way through the combats; Blood Points can be cashed in for food, weapons, armor, better accommodations, shit like that. There’s this weird color-coded & scientifically implausible technology built into their wrists so that their captors can torture them for talking.
And partway through the book the main character finds out that she’s going to have to fight her girlfriend in her final fight– the convicts are loosely organized into teams, and a rule change means people on the same team have to fight if they’re at the same rank– and predictable angst occurs.
Come the fuck on.
Now, I’m not done with the book, so I don’t know whether the two characters are actually going to fight or not, but this is one hundred percent a science fiction dystopia that would have been shelved with YA with a different author. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! I’m thoroughly enjoying the book, and I’ll finish it tonight, having burned through its 360 pages in less than a day. Unless it completely blows the ending, it’s gonna be a five-star review. But looking at these blurbs and a couple of other pieces about it, it’s hilariously obvious that most of the people reading it have never touched dystopian literature in their lives and haven’t read any YA at all, because … one thing this book is very much not is especially original. I could have sketched out a broad outline of the plot within ten pages of the start of the book. So could anyone who has read any YA in the last fifteen or so years. I’m not going to look up how long ago Hunger Games came out because I don’t feel like being old. But there are a ton of “blabla has to fight to the death, because Reasons, plus fascism” books out there and while this is an excellent example of one, that’s still exactly what it is.
I’ve got lesson planning to do and then I really do want to finish this book tonight, so I’m going to leave this here– I probably will do a second post once I’ve finished the book, though. But come on, guys. Somebody got chocolate in your peanut butter and peanut butter in your chocolate and you’re doing your level damn best to not admit that you’ve got a Reese Cup in front of you. It’s a Reese Cup. We love Reese Cups. Just admit what it is and eat the damn thing.
Seven years ago, in 2018, this man’s debut novel jumped off a shelf at me at Barnes and Noble. It looked satisfyingly chunky and as a science fiction book that was obviously going to be Part One of a substantial series, it was something that was immediately Aligned with My Interests.
I opened it and flipped through it and looked at this author picture. And thought Jeez, that guy looks like a prick. I bet he’s a conservative.
And then I put the book down.
And, standing there in Barnes and Noble, I googled this man to see if I could find evidence of him being a prick. And, indeed, I couldn’t find any, and the closest I came was him claiming he “doesn’t talk about politics” on Twitter, which is something that only conservatives say.
And after a few minutes I started feeling bad about it! This is not how I usually work. My rule for politics in my reading has always been Don’t Want None Won’t Be None, and how it is supposed to work is you can believe whatever you want so long as you don’t go out of your way to make that information available to me, but as soon as you do I will judge you accordingly. And, to be completely clear, I’m perfectly fine with people applying that same line of reasoning to me. You can choose to not read a book– which, most of the time, costs you money— for literally any reason you want. Refuse to read a book with a blue cover. Spend a year reading only books with blue covers. I don’t care. There are way more books out there than anyone has time to read in an entire lifetime, with more coming out literally every day, so you use whatever filter you want. I don’t have anything to say about it.
Feeling guilty and kind of stupid, I bought his book. And brought it home, and read it, and really didn’t like it all that much. And it sat on the shelf for five or six years while four sequels came out, and sometime in the last couple of years I looked at it again and thought oh, what the hell, and for whatever reason the second time around I liked it a lot more, and the sequels quickly followed, along with the sixth book, on release day. The series wasn’t world-changing or anything, but it was solid and interesting, and it was also clear that barring some sort of car accident or something it was going to be finished soon.
So how do I feel about the fact that a 2018 interview has come to light recently where not only does he piss and moan about how every YA book nowadays is about a girl who “wants to be an assassin for some reason” and there aren’t any books for boys, and about his affection for Jordan Peterson?
I am, to be clear, almost certainly going to buy the last book of his series when it comes out, which should be this year or early next year. This isn’t JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman territory, where the books are forever consigned to the pit. He’s just a conservative Catholic, and frankly the fact that the interview lurked in the depths for years before exploding onto TikTok in the last couple of weeks for whatever reason means that he actually does seem to be following my DWNWBN rule. But I likely won’t bother with whatever he does next, and next time I’m gonna trust my gut when I take a look at an author and get a vibe. Because, again, there’s lots of books out there, and I don’t need a good reason not to buy one.
This is kind of awkwardly stapling two posts together (and there will be an addendum at the end featuring even more stapling) but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how weirdly gendered reading seems to be getting. I have never believed that there was any such thing as “girls’ books” or “boys’ books”– I’ve told the story here a few times before about my aunt catching me with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret when I was ten or so, a book I picked up and read because it was there and I was bored, and her being vocally horrified, and me being completely baffled about what the problem was. But just because I don’t believe there’s any such thing as gendered books doesn’t mean that society doesn’t think so, and it feels like in the last couple of years reading has taken this weird slide into being Something Men Don’t Do, which is entirely fucking unacceptable. This is particularly clear in retail establishments that sell books but aren’t bookstores– go look at the books in Target sometime, for example, and I’ve seen pictures of Wal-Mart’s book selection and it seems to be the same thing. Target clearly doesn’t think men read.
(Do more women read than men? Sure. But that’s not the same thing as “men don’t read.”)
I think this is probably mostly BookTok’s fault, which is dominated by women, and whatever, I’m not attached enough to my own gender to be bothered if something is addressed to “my book girlies” and happens to overlap with my interests.
But did I kinda want to fight when I saw this? A little:
Anyway, one way or another, I’m not going anywhere. If that makes me a book girlie, I’ve been called worse.
You may remember a couple of weeks ago when my family attempted to go to a specific local Italian restaurant and, in a comedy of errors, managed to end up at the wrong restaurant, eating a meal there because we are cowards, and resulting in me not getting carrot cake, which was the entire reason I wanted to eat at that place in the first place.
Well. My birthday was yesterday, but my birthday dinner was tonight:
I could only finish half of that gorgeous sonofabitch. I don’t even want to know what my blood sugar is right now. I’m getting my A1C checked later this week in advance of a regular doctor visit next week, and I may just show the doctor a picture of this cake when she jumps down my throat about how I’m so diabetic I’m legally already dead.
First things first: I’ve said this before, but if you’re not tapped into all the sci-fi and fantasy coming out of Nigerian and Nigerian-descended authors in the last five years or so, you are missing out, and you should fix that. This is going to be a somewhat mixed review of O.O. Sangoyomi’s debut novel, Masquerade, but the damned thing oozes with potential, and even if I had liked this less than I did I’d still be in for the sequel. Which sort of feels like “I like less than half of you half of what you deserve,” but I promise it’s a compliment.
The book jacket describes Masquerade as a “richly reimagined 15th century West Africa,” but I’ve got to be honest, despite what I just said about Nigerian fantasy this feels very much like historical fiction to me, and the speculative elements are minimal at best. I’m not precisely sure what’s being reimagined here. It falls under the fantasy genre because everyone is fighting with axes and machetes and spears, and when that happens we just call it fantasy regardless of how well it fits. It’s very low on the “low to high fantasy” axis, in other words.
Now, I’m not going to claim to have a lot of knowledge about West African history– I probably have more than your average American, but the average American knows nothing, so that’s not much of a brag. The book is set in Timbuktu, which was a real place, and the countries and city-states that show up as adversaries are all real, and the Yoruba are still around. If Sangoyomi has played around with history at all, it’s subtle enough that I can’t tell you about it. I can tell you that the main character, Òdòdó, is a blacksmith at the beginning of the book, and blacksmiths are consistently referred to as “witches,” but … I was never exactly clear why? Everybody’s still using smithed tools like it’s not a big deal, but they’re more or less the dregs of society for some reason.
A quick word on orthography: note all the accent marks in Òdòdó? They’re in nearly every word in the book of remotely African origin and there’s no pronunciation guide. The word I’ve rendered as “Yoruba” up there is Yorùbá in the text, for example. The city they live in is Ṣàngótẹ̀, and I don’t even know how to reproduce that S properly– I had to copy and paste it. I hope everyone will forgive me if other than the main characters’ names I don’t bother reproducing all the accents. If I knew how to pronounce them I might, but I don’t.
So anyway, Òdòdó is busy making herself a life as a blacksmith when she is abruptly kidnapped and brought to Sangote to be the wife of the Alaafin, who is basically the emperor. He’s picked her out while pretending to be a vagrant and having a brief conversation with her at her forge.
She is … surprisingly okay with this. I kind of need to rain some abuse down on the blurb-writers for this, who make the book feel like a revenge tale of sorts, and pay no attention to the “loosely inspired by the Persephone myth,” because once you get past the kidnapping there’s not a lot of there there. But no! Òdòdó is surprisingly cool with being kidnapped, she just wants her mom to be at the wedding, and her naïveté (goddammit!) at her fiancé’s (DAMMIT) insistence that he can’t find her mother to get her blessing is rather annoying. Òdòdó gets pulled into some political maneuvering, falls for a couple of truly amateurish stunts from the Alaafin’s mother, and accidentally helps touch off a revolution, and then somehow the book redeems itself entirely at the end, catching me by surprise in such a way that guaranteed the sequel was getting picked up.
Strengths: the worldbuilding, other than the weird witchery of blacksmiths, was really interesting, and the basic novelty of the setting was great. Sangoyomi’s prose is excellent, and the book managed to include some romantic elements without descending into full-blown romantasy. The weaknesses are the characters, particularly Òdòdó herself, who careens back and forth between being a silly little girl and a seasoned political operative. It’s also unclear how much of a time frame the book takes place over, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just a few months at best, which is not enough time for her to learn some of the things she learns how to do. She’s really good at anything she needs to be good at for the plot to move forward, including occasionally outsmarting actual generals (and coming up with war tactics they haven’t thought of) and defeating grown men in combat, and then she’ll turn around and drink from a cup that the mother-in-law has handed her that may as well have this on the side:
If this hadn’t landed the dismount, I’d probably have just put it on the shelf and moved on, but the ending really was well-done, if perhaps again a bit out of character, maybe? Who knows! But I’d have kept an eye out for this author’s next series. As it is, I’m in for the next book. This isn’t the best thing I’ve read this year or anything like that, but it’s solid and it’s a fast enough read, at about 330 pages, to be able to forgive its flaws.
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