Tag: novels

The Top 15 New(*) Books I Read in 2025

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

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.

The twelve previous lists:

And let’s do this:

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 not precisely 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.

Unread Shelf: April 30, 2025

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

A little better than last month? At least there are no books in front of books. Man, I need to do nothing but read this summer.

In which I’m getting dumber

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Man, I don’t know if I should blame my phone or the Current Unpleasantness or what, but my powers of concentration have been significantly diminished lately. I may deliberately abandon the “20% of my books this year should be nonfiction” goal because I keep bailing on nonfiction books halfway through, and the novel whose cover up there and whose title I am deliberately not going to use anywhere in this post is an objectively good book— shut up, that’s a thing– and I’m halfway through it and I am suffering, y’all. And it is 100% because this book demands you pay attention to it and I am currently not capable of paying sufficient attention to complicated texts to have any real idea of what’s going on. It’s making me nuts.

I dunno, man. I don’t want to quit this book but I also don’t want to be miserable when I’m reading and it’s not like I can’t pick it up again later. That’s the good thing about books; you put them on the shelf and they stay there for as long as you want them to. They don’t grow legs and walk away. If you have even the slightest interest in juuuuust barely pre-Christian Britain and aren’t currently brain-rotted like me, you should check this book out because you’ll like it. But right now I just don’t have my shit together enough to properly appreciate it. I’m giving it one more day and if something doesn’t click I’m going to put it away and pretend it’s a temporary choice. Again, this is completely on me. I want my brain back, dammit.

In which that’s enough of that

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading1 Comment

(Trigger warning)

See if you can find a theme in the last several books I’ve read. The first is Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, which is about growing up poor in South Carolina. The second is Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, and the third is Denise Giardina’s The Unquiet Earth, which is a generational saga about coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia that starts during the Depression and ends during the Reagan years.

Did you guess sexual assault? Good goddamn job. Both Bastard and Unquiet Earth feature explicit scenes of sexual assault, and of children no less, and Heinlein was a misanthropic son of a bitch who doesn’t pass up a single chance in his book to have his main character hit a woman. Puppet Masters is less explicitly rapey than the other books, but the MC in that book doesn’t give a damn about consent more or less across the board, at one point spending the night in the home of a woman he doesn’t have a sexual relationship with and getting mad when he discovers she’s locked him out of her bedroom. How does he discover this? He tries to get into her bedroom after she goes to bed.

Bastard and Unquiet Earth are both really good books despite the subject matter. Heinlein has had his last chance with me; I’m tossing him on the pile of Important Cultural Figures I Don’t Care About; he and Stanley Kubrick can hang out together and make things I won’t enjoy together. The next book I’m reading is a fucking slave narrative, so I don’t expect things to get any less bleak for at least the next couple hundred pages, but after that I’m going to have to read a few happy books in a row, because all of this is starting to wear on me. That, and maybe I shouldn’t have saved all the states where “living here is a nightmare” is a theme of all their literature until the end of this project.

I swear I had something else that was going to go in this spot, but I just spent twenty minutes sitting in front of the computer and screwing around on my phone, so … apparently not?

On translations

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

Let’s put a quick trigger warning for sexual assault here; it’s an unavoidable plot point of a book I’ll be discussing several paragraphs into the piece, and it won’t be dwelled upon.

I’m on my third book in a row that I’m reading in translation, and my fourth in a row that wasn’t written in especially modern English, since the Ernest Shackleton book was published in 1909. I haven’t loved any of the three that I’ve finished, but I’m not far enough into the fourth one to really have an opinion of it yet– maybe 40 pages deep on a 600-page novel. And the bit that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around is that I’m not sure how to discern between a book that I didn’t enjoy and a translation I didn’t enjoy. I can think of one particular series where the first book was translated by one person was great and the second was translated by someone else and it was so bad that I couldn’t get even a third of the way through it; that I can blame on the translator. But when it’s the only book I’ve read by a given person, or sometimes the only book by that person available in English, it’s a lot harder to tease that apart and it may actually not be a difference worth bothering to tease apart in the first place.

It’s the most recent book that’s really got me thinking about this, honestly– and if you’re wondering why I’m not specifically naming the book, it’s because this is pretty clearly running into my Don’t Shit on Books Without a Good Reason rule, and my Goodreads is right there anyway– because this book was very clearly deliberately written in a certain way, and I’m not sure it survived translation into English very well.

(Let me reiterate the trigger warning)

The book is about a woman whose father sexually abused her for several years when she was a child, and she is, as a result, estranged from her family, most of whom don’t believe her. She is very much not over her trauma, and in fact dwells upon it more or less constantly. The book is told entirely from her perspective, and, well, she’s not in an especially mentally healthy place; the entire book is about disputes over inheritance, and her father passes away partway through the narrative. Now, I think what’s going on here is that the author is trying to mimic in text what is going on in this person’s head, and as a result the entire text is very very repetitive, constantly circling back to the same events and the same conversations, and also with insanely long sentences that can sometimes take up a page or more. The text is never pauses for breath, never slows down, and constantly loops back to retread the same material, sometimes phrased differently and sometimes repeating the exact same language several times in a (paragraph-length) sentence.

I made fun of this on Twitter while I was reading it, and the fact is this isn’t that far off from what’s going on:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1379459752720269313

So, like, I can see what the author is trying to do here, and I even appreciate the technique, but the unfortunate result is that, in English and to me at least, the book is really damn difficult to read. Imagine a book where every sentence was like that Tweet, and each sentence in the book was similar to the Tweet in a way that was very like the Tweet, and not like things that are not like that Tweet, that’s what you’re trying to imagine right now, you’re imagining a book where every sentence is like that Tweet, because the sentences in this book are all like that Tweet and you’re imagining them.

I am not kidding. Like, I’ll post examples if I have to.

And the thing is, I didn’t dislike the book, I just didn’t enjoy it at all, if that’s something that makes any sense. I mean, I finished it instead of putting it down, and I don’t think I regret buying and reading it, and it made a big splash in its country of origin when it came out so it even remains a good choice that way. But I wish I could read it in its original language to see behind the scenes, so to speak, on how the translator did her job, because this book must have been a nightmare to translate.

I need to be able to read all of Earth’s languages, is what I’m getting at here. Is that the Moderna shot, maybe?

In which you should read this: CONJURE WOMEN, by Afia Atakora

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Something you may not know about me: despite my fairly high degree of confidence in my own intellect in many domains, I actually don’t think I read very well. Which may sound really. strange, coming from someone who regularly reads well over a hundred books a year. The thing is, my greatest weakness as a reader is that I’m a very surface-level guy. While I can handle complex narratives, I have to be in the right mood for them, and the fact that I read so fast can really hurt my comprehension if I’m not deliberately paying careful attention to what I read. This means that I tend to stay away from anything that, broadly classed, might be literature, which I nearly spelled litratcher in order to convey a sort of condescension toward the entire concept. If a novel feels the need to tell me it’s a novel on the cover, that’s a sign that it may not be for me. You know what never says “a novel” on the cover? A book with a dragon or a space ship in it. Not once. Not never. The closest to an exception I can come up with is John Scalzi’s Redshirts, which some editions of declare to be “a novel with three codas,” and which I think Scalzi put on the cover more as a lark than anything else.

In short, whenever I read literature, I always feel like I’m missing something; that there is some theme or some Hidden Meaning or some Deeper Symbolism that I’m not seeing, either because I’m being sloppy or the book is just smarter than I am. Is it there? No idea. But I’m convinced it’s there and I just can’t see it. This may be a sign that I’ve been poorly served by my English teachers; I have a copy of A Tale of Two Cities from high school that has a big chunk of the first page circled and the word “foreshadowing” written next to it, and as someone who has read that book as an adult I have no idea what I thought the foreshadowing was or what it might have foreshadowed. I still can’t handle Jane Austen.

Afia Atakora’s Conjure Women needs to become part of The Canon, because it belongs next to books by Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. That’s it. That’s the review. The book is magnificent. You should read it. I took my time with this one, because I wanted to savor it; normally it’s a good sign if I read a book in a day, and this one took several because I didn’t want it to be over with too quickly. It’s set in and around the Civil War, on a plantation, and the two main characters are mother and daughter, so the book alternates between the two of them, jumping back and forth between just before the war to just after it. A third significant character is Varina, the daughter of the former landowner, who has a bond with Rue, the daughter of the pair, and her story weaves in and out through theirs in a way that isn’t really typical of– here’s that word again– literature set in this time and place. Both Rue and her mother are … well, the title Conjure Women does the job to some extent; they are healers and midwives, and while Rue in particular is generally at some pains to think of her work as entirely natural and (though she doesn’t use this word) scientific, those around them generally don’t, and the book does have just a tinge of the supernatural around it to keep genre-obsessed dopes like me interested. Everything’s just a little better with a little hoodoo sprinkled on it, as my mom never once said in her life.

Every so often someone will ask me, generally not in especially good faith, why I do things like decide I think I’ll read 52 books by women of color this year, when I could … not, I guess. Well, this is part of it; I might not have looked at this book were I not focusing on a certain kind of author, and I’ll freely admit that had Afia Atakora been Ahmad Atakora I probably wouldn’t have bought it. (That said … a man couldn’t have written this book, but that’s not quite the point I’m making.).

In other words, the reason I work on diversifying my reading is that when you go looking for new and/or different reading experiences, you get them, and this book all by itself kind of pays off the whole experiment. Go read it.

In which I vent

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, Writing4 Comments

I– well, all of us, really– got a letter from my superintendent this morning outlining the district’s plan to reopen this fall, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that their plan is basically “we reopen, and nothing changes, so try not to die.” Apparently he mentioned some vague sort of “we’ll try and create a virtual school, and you’ll have options for e-learning if you want them” thing at an event this morning, but there are no details, there is as of yet no staff for such a thing, and the letter makes no mention of it.

Everyone will be required to “have” a mask.

Have.

Not “wear.”

I was expecting a lot of different things, but “we’re going to do nothing” was not one of them, and I am frustrated and, frankly, frightened beyond my ability to describe it right now. Like, “take one of your emergency brain pills” frustrated.

So the best thing to do, obviously, is lash out at some bullshit that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m mad about, and luckily I just decided I was done with this deeply stupid book here. Here’s my entire review: don’t read this fucking book, and don’t trust anyone who tells you this is a good book, and I am seriously looking askance at the two Actual Authors who recommended this to the skies and back, because you’re both out of your damn minds.

Need some background for that review? Okay. First, look at the title. The title of this book is Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel, Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere. That title is wordy as fuck and deeply obnoxious, and if you can’t literally get the front cover to your book done without being wordy as fuck and deeply obnoxious then your opinions on writing are probably not to be taken terribly seriously. Second, this author 1) has no relevant experience or expertise in psychology and 2) has never written or published a fucking novel.

Which … really, at that point we’re done. Your book is garbage. I don’t have to read your book to know it’s garbage. Unfortunately, I did, which was clearly my mistake, as I’ll never get that time back, and I should have been using it to look for a job.

Also, there’s no “brain science” in the book. None what-so-fucking-ever. There’s the occasional sentence where she says things like “brain science tells us …” but there are never any citations or, like, quotes from actual people who work in the field, or anything like that, and she also appears to think that “brain science” is a thing, which it’s not. There’s no one in the world where if you ask them their job they will tell you “I am a brain scientist.” The word is psychologist. I would also accept psychiatrist or neurologist or probably a couple of others. Hell, even an anthropologist would probably be useful for some of the claims that she makes, but there’s none of that either. It’s all fuckin’ hooey, and worse, it’s hooey that really only applies to literary fiction and doesn’t work well with genre at all. Don’t believe me? Let me introduce you to George R.R. Martin, who could probably tell you a few things about how his books violate every single one of the rules in this book– if you can coax him off of his gigantic money bed in his gold house to come talk to you in the first place.

The whole book is bullshit; know-nothing, arrogant, prescriptive bullshit, and it’s an easy candidate for the worst book I’ve had to read so far this year.

#Review: WANDERERS, by Chuck Wendig

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers is one of those books that could have been very disappointing. To start, I have been waiting for this book for what seems like a very long time. I actually pre-ordered it, which I don’t do with books all that often– I am generally backlogged enough in my reading that even books that I’ve been looking forward to and whose authors I’m big fans of have to wait for a while for me to get to them. Not this one. I not only preordered it, I specifically timed the books I was reading before it so that I would be free and clear and able to start something new immediately when it showed up in my mailbox. So if it had been bad, there is a strong possibility that I might have cried. Actual book-nerd tears. It woulda been a problem.

Let’s not bury the lede any further: Wanderers is Wendig’s best book, and by a pretty large margin– and, again, remember that this is a guy who I am fond of and whose work has shown up in my end-of-year top 10 before. So this is way better than a bunch of books that I really liked. What’s fascinating about it is how different it is from all of Wendig’s other work. His previous work– which includes multiple Star Wars novels, books that have always sort of had a house style– has always been instantly recognizable: short sentences, present tense, visceral detail, and a certain disregard for strict grammar conventions in favor of impactful language. You can show me a single paragraph from any of Wendig’s previous books and I’d be able to tell you it was his. That recognizable.

Wanderers throws all that out the window. This book must have been a beast to write– not only is it markedly longer than any of his previous books (it’s probably close to twice as long as its closest competitor) but the style of the writing is completely different. I would never have guessed Wendig wrote this from a paragraph or even a chapter, although you certainly see his humor and his themes come through– it is, if this makes any sense, a Wendig book made up of nearly 800 not-very-Wendig pages.

That probably doesn’t make any sense.

So, the plot, and this will be spoiler-free, for the most part: the elevator pitch for this book is “What if Chuck Wendig wrote The Stand,” and those seven words were more than enough to earn my money. To be clear, The Stand is one of Stephen King’s two or three best books, and while I’ll need to read Wanderers a couple more times over the next decade or so to see if it lives up to that book’s very high standard, the comparison is not remotely unfair to either book. This book is about a plague, and the end of the world, and a presidential election, and white supremacists, and it’s about all of those things before we mention the titular Wanderers, people who are locked into their own bodies and sleepwalking … somewhere. The world doesn’t even start ending until like halfway through the book, and the omnipresent sense of dread and horror is thick enough to drag your fingers through, even before the book gets around to one of the scarier human villains I’ve read recently. The book is not stingy with its mysteries, and the way they unfold over the course of its somehow-still-fast-paced 780 pages is immensely satisfying.

I have read 74 books so far this year, and of those 74, 17 are on my shortlist for the end of the year. It’s been a good year for reading! But this is the first book that I’ve read and known beyond a shadow of a doubt that yeah, this one’s gonna be top three. You should read Wanderers, and you should start now.