Honestly, this wasn’t a great month, with more DNFs than usual. We’re going to call Shadows upon Time the Book of the Month, and The Blackfire Blade, The Scour, and His Majesty’s Dragon were standouts among the rest.
Tag: booktok
Unread Shelf: December 31, 2025; IYKYK edition
Hm. Well, that’s a problem. But not my fault; I did everything I could, and you did too.
… also, why are you still here?
In which I choose violence
Or “no one is paying attention today, I can say anything I want.” Choose your own blog title!
There’s been a debate raging– well, there’s been a lot of people alternately talking past and yelling at one another– on social media in general and TikTok in particular over the last week or so, and while I generally try to avoid this topic as much as I possibly can, it’s Christmas Day and no one is looking at the internet so if I’m ever going to say something controversial this is the best day to say it.
The debate: audiobooks. The problem: everyone is wrong.
The following are all true. You are welcome to disagree with me but you’re wrong:
- Listening to an audiobook is not the same thing as reading. You cannot read while you’re driving a car. You cannot read while you’re taking a shower. You cannot read if you cannot read— if I’m reading a book to a toddler, that toddler isn’t reading. You cannot read in the dark. You cannot arbitrarily decide to “read” at one and a half or two times your normal speed. You don’t need electronics or speakers or headphones to read. And reading is a relationship between you and an author, with no third intermediary in between to do a really good job or screw things up.
- This is not the same thing as discussing whether listening to an audiobook “counts” toward some sort of yearly or monthly reading goal. I don’t give one single merry shit what you decide to count toward your reading goal. I’m going to top out around 180-185 books this year. There are a lot of people who might tell me to my face that that’s impossible. Count whatever you want. I do not care.(*) We aren’t getting prizes for this!
- Use whatever verbs you want to describe your reading; I also don’t care about that. Tell me you “read” an audiobook when we both know you “listened” to it. It’s whatever. I do not have the mental energy necessary to police language choices on this and it gets awkward in practice anyway. (Similarly, one might say “we read The Cat in the Hat” when discussing a book read to a preliterate toddler. It’s the same phenomenon.)
- I also don’t care about your reasons for preferring audio to text, whether in general or for any given book. Maybe you just prefer it. Maybe you’re dyslexic. Maybe you don’t have any eyes! I’m not going to ask why you prefer audio and I don’t care. You do you.
- There is also a weird side argument going on about how it’s possible to read over X number of books a year(**) and still remember everything, which seems like a weird criterion that gets applied to readers and no one else. If you pick a random book off of my shelves and ask me about it, there’s a very good chance that I won’t be able to tell you a whole lot, because depending on the book, I might have read that six years and a thousand books ago, and I also feel like my recall in general is not as good as other people I’ve met who like to read. But let’s apply this logic to, say, sports fans. If I pick one random sports ball game from five years ago that I know you watched and ask you to tell me about it, would you be able to even tell me who won? I mean, you might, especially in, say, college football, where there’s a limited number of games per year, but will you remember the score? Individual plays to discuss? And don’t tell me if I ask you about some random game 3 in a baseball series from 2019 that you’re going to remember anything about it. You just won’t.(***)
- If it makes you angry that I don’t think listening to an audiobook is reading … why? Why the hell do you care what I think? Go do your thing; it’s okay! I’m not trying to turn you away from your audiobooks! I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to audiobooks! I’m not saying they don’t count, because I don’t care what counts! Audiobooks are lots of things. They just aren’t reading, and if you disagree with me on that, it’s okay. I mean, you’re wrong, but it’s okay! It’s a fine thing to be wrong about. It really seems like, by and large, audiobook people are hugely defensive about their hobby, which has never made any sense to me. You have no reason to care what anyone else thinks about this!
I’ve had a hundred books as my “reading goal” for several years running and I don’t plan on changing that next year. It’s just not that damn important to me, and unless you’re pursuing reading as some sort of self-improvement practice, it probably shouldn’t be all that important to you, either. But if you’re trying to read a dozen books this year because you don’t read much and you want to read more, you’re genuinely doing something different from what I’m doing with a “reading goal,” which is mostly just indulging my mania for categorizing and keeping track of everything. There was no “Yay, I did it!” moment when I hit that 101st book. I shot for 200 one year to see if I could do it and I did, and I think that’s as excited as I ever plan on getting for a “reading goal” and I don’t plan to repeat the experiment.
Anyway, Merry Christmas, go yell at me in the comments.
(*) I did encounter one person who claimed she read over fourteen hundred books in 2025, and while my response is unlikely to be “oh, no you didn’t,” I am rather intensely curious about how, precisely, she arrived at that number. Again, I’m fully aware that most people think my 180ish is impossible. I feel like if I adjusted my standards for what “counts” or made a deliberate shift toward shorter books, I could significantly increase that amount. For example, if I counted individual issues of comic books as “books”, which I don’t, that’s probably about another 250-300 books a year without making any changes in my reading. Now, when I do that and it only brings me to a third of this person’s total … again, I’m not gonna argue, because they can say whatever they want, but I’m curious about how they arrived at that number. Maybe they do slush reading for a children’s book company or something. I dunno.
(**) This, I think, is very similar to the dynamics of driving, where anyone driving faster than you are at that particular moment is a maniac. I know I can read X number of books per year, but anyone reading 1.2X has got to be lying!
(***) Maybe you will! I’ll be impressed. Some people are impressive!
Monthly Reads: October 2025
I’m genuinely not sure how I pulled that off, given that this isn’t a summer month– Storygraph has me at just barely under 7,000 pages for October, which looks ridiculous until you realize June was 11,500.
At any rate, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride is Book of the Month, followed very closely by Mark Twain. Hastings’ Vietnam book is excellent as well but I’m only about halfway through it.
Two quick book reviews
I am in a horrendous mood, as the world is continuing to go to shit and nothing seems to be able to stop it or even slow it down, but there are still books out there, so I may as well talk about them. I don’t have the energy to make a full post about either of these so let’s just do a couple quick paragraphs each and call it a day.
Samantha Downing’s Too Old For This is a book about a serial killer forced out of retirement when a documentarian comes calling who wants to make a series about her. She was never actually brought to trial for her crimes, but changed her name and moved across the country anyway, and she’s less than interested in someone dragging all of that back into the light again.
She’s in her seventies, by the way.
This book ended up being lightweight and quick and more fun than it probably had any right to be, as Lottie Jones’ life keeps getting upended more and more as she attempts to cover for her crimes– both the old ones before she moved away and the new ones she has to keep committing as she keeps making mistakes that wouldn’t have mattered when she was killing people decades ago but are a bit of a problem in an era of near-constant surveillance by our own possessions. I can imagine a reader who is bothered by the fact that the protagonist is an unrepentant serial killer who we’re more or less expected to like, or at least enjoy reading about, but I’m not that reader and I had fun with this. I may look into more of Samantha Downing’s work if I ever allow myself to buy books again.
So, yeah, okay, I finished it, and it’s a thousand pages long and I have a full-time job and I still finished it in less than a week, and because of that I can’t really call it bad, but … if you weren’t going to buy this anyway, don’t let anyone talk you into it. SenLinYu is a perfectly cromulent author and no one would ever read this book and figure out on their own that it was originally brought into the world as Harry Potter fanfiction, but it’s way overhyped, at least from my perspective. I keep seeing videos about people who were in tears for the last two hundred pages or whatever, and I feel like these people need pets or significant others or something, because in the end it’s just a book and it’s being treated like a life-altering event online. I said in my first post that I was buying this out of FOMO, and I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m never going to be missing out if I don’t read a book TikTok likes.
(I deleted the app again today; we’ll see how long it lasts this time.)
Again, it’s not awful, but it’s definitely romantasy despite all the people insisting that no, it’s dark fantasy— I’m pretty sure “dark fantasy” is just romantasy with at least one rape scene to these people– and I’m tired of romantasy as a genre. It’ll look good on my shelf, and I didn’t hate it like I figured I would, but those are the best things I have to say about it.
Status update
I’ll be halfway done with this beast of a book before I go to bed, and … it’s not terrible, but it’s kinda boring? And I was expecting any number of possible reactions to it, and “boring” was not one of them.
One indisputable good thing: there has not been, after about 430 pages, even a single trace of the source material to be found. I have no idea how SenLinYu managed to adapt this from a fanfic of any kind. I’m not going to go looking for the original to compare them or anything, but I think it’s reasonable to lay that worry to bed.
Anyway, off to — no, not reading, you silly goose, Ghost of Yotei is out. My PS5 is calling.
On FOMO and BookTok
I think we all knew this already, but it’s official: I can be manipulated. Rather easily, in fact.
I don’t know if you live a lifestyle that allows you to not have heard of the above book. If you do, I envy you, because it has been everywhere on my everything for two solid weeks. I first became aware of it several months ago, and actually had it preordered for a while, a preorder I cancelled when the word Dramione first entered my vocabulary.
So why do I own it now, snagging it from my local Barnes and Noble for a surprisingly reasonable $21 and change?
Because the reviews this damn book has been getting have been ludicrously good, and while I don’t really think it’s going to be all that good, and I’ve been burned by BookTok fads approximately fourteen thousand times before, if this book is half as good as people have been claiming it’s going to be something I need to read. And the reviews don’t seem quite as dominated by young women as one might expect; TikTok is the world’s epicenter for the “book girly,” a category that I think is supposed to exclude grizzled and ancient penis-havers such as myself, but I’ve seen guys talking about it too, if perhaps not quite as glowingly.
It’s a thousand fucking pages long. I have far too many thousand-page books on my TBR, and seriously, y’all are never going to stop laughing when you see the state of my shelf tomorrow. I will get to it when I get to it, God damn it, and if I don’t love it I’m never trusting another TikTok book of the moment again.(*)
That was a lie, sadly. I knew it was a lie when I was typing it, and it’s a lie now.
The fucking book doesn’t even have pretty edges. I’m trying to save for a down payment on a car, damn it, what the hell am I doing?
(*) What am I reading right now? Book five of Dungeon Crawler Fucking Carl. Which is so much better than it has any right to be that there should be some kind of law that it’s breaking.
In which I KNEW IT
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.
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