Matt

I’ve read a few books like this, where each chapter is essentially a history lesson on a certain part of a greater object. Generally I love the way these books are organized but find the writing itself dry. This is very much not the case here as the 15 chapters that Dr. Jonathan Reisman writes about various parts of the human body are all fantastic to read.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is the most obvious: Reisman is a good writer. The issue I had with those other books is that while the authors were clearly knowledgeable about what they were writing about, they weren’t able to deliver the information in an interesting way or even a way that worked in this medium. I can picture them as good history lectures, but nonfiction writing is not just about presenting facts. Reisman structures each of his chapters well enough to the point that while the reader is learning a lot of information, it’s given in easily digestible chunks. Each chapter being relatively short also helps with that: the book clocks in at just over 200 pages, meaning each body part is discussed for about 13 pages. The short nature of each chapter means Reisman has to make each paragraph count and he does. Another thing that helps is the fact that Reisman has lived a genuinely interesting life and as such he is able to tell personal vignettes about his own life as it relates to the body part that is being discussed. These vignettes allow the book to be entertaining as well as informative. For me that is the most important thing a non-fiction book can do. All in all this is a pretty amazing book and very worth anyone’s time.

After finishing A Darker Shade of Magic, the first book in Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy, I found myself wondering what she was going to do with a sequel. After all, Darker Shade is a very strong standalone novel that doesn’t really set things up for a trilogy. After reading A Gathering of Shadows, I am more convinced that Schwab didn’t exactly know what she was going to do either, but she still managed to write a mostly great book.

Something that Schwab nails throughout A Gathering of Shadows is vibes. Vibes can carry a book a long way for me and A Gathering of Shadows has fantastic vibes. It’s just a really fun read thanks to its sexy, adventurous atmosphere. From the moment the book starts it’s a damn good time. It’s such a good time that I managed to ignore some of the things I didn’t like about it. A Gathering of Shadows is a weird book in that I have a much easier time verbalizing what I didn’t like about it as opposed to what I did like about it despite me being mostly positive on it overall. Sometimes a writer just knows how to construct a really fun reading experience without necessarily being technically perfect and that’s totally ok. I honestly think A Gathering of Shadows is a more enjoyable book than its predecessor even if I do think Shadows has a far weaker plot and more annoying dialogue. Schwab just gets how to put characters in positions that make them interesting and that is key. Do I wish that she had done a better job in Darker Shade of making these positions make more sense? Of course, but she didn’t do that and Shadows is still a really fun ride that I would gladly recommend to people who enjoyed the first book. I can’t say I’m super excited for the conclusion to this trilogy but if there’s anyone who can make a great book out of otherwise mediocre attributes, it’s Schwab.

One of my most pleasant surprises of 2024 was The Shadow of What Was Lost, the first book in James Islington’s Licanius trilogy. Going into that book, I was expecting a solid but not spectacular Wheel of Time knockoff and came away very impressed by Islington’s natural talent as a fantasy writer. That book did everything right in terms of being the opener to a door-stopper fantasy series, so I was very excited to see what Islington had in store for the rest of the series. With that said, second installments are notoriously challenging and so I tempered my expectations.

As it turns out I didn’t need to do that! An Echo of Things to Come is in many ways better than The Shadow of What Was Lost. My biggest gripe with Shadow was its characters. I liked the characters there but I didn’t find myself growing that attached to them. I felt that the characters were mere conduits for some really strong storytelling and great worldbuilding. Here, that changes. The characters in Echo feel a lot more fleshed out and interesting than they ever were in Shadow, allowing for a lot more emotional resonance as I started caring a lot more about them.

What’s even better is that this increase in character quality does not come at the expense of what made Shadow as good as it was. Islington’s pacing is once again quite strong and in Echo that’s even more necessary as the scope expands a lot more. A lot of Echo follows four POVs in at least three different locations, making it a really tough juggling act. This is an act that many writers would fail but Islington doesn’t and the result is as good of a second volume to a fantasy trilogy that you’re going to get. My expectations are officially through the roof for the final book in the trilogy.

I wanted to like this book so bad because it has a very interesting concept (the history of the four cardinal directions), but it just fell so flat for me. I think there is some pretty cool stuff in here and I can imagine someone who is more into history than myself enjoying the drier sections but it’s just such a slog. It’s 200 pages and it feels like 600.

I have learned of books through many ways: word-of-mouth from friends, YouTube recommendations, ads in Barnes and Noble, ads on airplanes, Reddit comments, reading random articles that aren’t even about books and so on. One way I hadn’t learned of a book before was from watching a game show. That changed with this book, which I learned about because its author Ram Murali, was on Jeopardy!. He mentioned he was a writer and I liked him on the show, so I ordered the book.

The back part of the cover jacket says that this is Murali’s first novel and you can tell. He clearly has a lot of really interesting ideas but I don’t think they’re expressed in the best or most interesting way. One of the first rules of writing is ‘show, don’t tell’ and there is so much telling in this book, to the point that it detracts from my enjoyment of the story. This characteristic of Murali’s writing unfortunately bleeds into the characters as well, leading many of the supporting ones to be one-note caricatures.

With that said, I did enjoy parts of Death in the Air. The mystery itself is quite interesting and you can tell that Murali is a fan of the classics like the works of Agatha Christie in the way he drops clues. I will also give him credit for writing a really convoluted plot that does in fact make sense at the end. Murali is capable of writing a strong plot, and in a mystery novel that’s extremely important.

I will also say that it’s possible that I’m just missing things about this book. It primarily takes place in India and many issues specific to Indian culture are discussed throughout. I am not remotely familiar with many of the topics Murali talks about here and it’s likely that I would have enjoyed the book if I knew more about what Murali was talking about.

So what do you get when you have a mystery book with ok characters but an intriguing plot? You get a pretty ok whodunnit. I can’t say that I would recommend this to anyone looking for something new to read, but I do think fans of this genre will find something to like here.

I have been known to judge books by their covers before. Part of the fun of being a fantasy fan is that it’s one of three genres (the others being romance and science fiction) where the covers and overall aesthetics tend to be taken quite seriously because they are big selling points. As such there are plenty of fantasy books that I have bought due to how they look. I’d had my eyes on A Darker Shade of Magic, the first book in V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy for a while now simply because of how good the box set for the trilogy looked. Finally I gave into my impulses and bought it.

The result is a pretty good, if imperfect one! This is the second book from Schwab that I’ve read, the first being The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. I think Addie LaRue was pretty perfect for what it was trying to be, but Schwab is more ambitious here. It’s the first book in a trilogy and as such she needs to set up multiple threads to keep the reader interested while also making a story that works well on its own. In these two areas I’d say she didn’t really succeed in the first but did succeed in the latter. Had I not known that this was a trilogy I would have thought this was a good stand-alone work. As it stands I’m not sure where Schwab goes with the series in the next two installments and I’m not sure I’m even that interested. That is a problem, although it has nothing to do with this book.

As I just said, I do think this works as a standalone. This is because Schwab’s pacing is overall quite good. A lot happens within 400 pages and that’s not even including the worldbuilding that she does in order to make anything the characters do make sense at all. If there is anything that Schwab does truly amazing in this book it is this. At no point did I feel lost. The worldbuilding is really strong and I feel like everything within the story makes sense within the rules that have been established. This is the #1 rule of fantasy and Schwab nails it.

Along the way we do meet a couple of fun characters. Kell is a pretty typical angsty bad boy of a protagonist but Lila works really well to balance him out and the interactions they have make the story worth following.

All in all this is a good book that I would recommend to any fantasy fan. While I am not necessarily excited to read the sequel, I do have it due to my aforementioned tendency to buy books based on their covers. We’ll see if Schwab proves me wrong.

I first became aware of this book thanks to the extremely funny coincidence of two books named The Seven _ of Evelyn H_ coming out within the span of about a year . This book has nothing in common with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo but the two will always be linked in my mind and in fact I don’t think I would have read either of them if the other didn’t exist (fun fact, in the UK this book is just called The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the name was changed in America to avoid confusion with Evelyn Hugo. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Reid’s book about the writing of the memoirs of a Hollywood starlet although it did have its strong points. Fortunately for me I liked this one a lot more.

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle has an incredibly intriguing premise, which is good for any novel but is especially nice for a whodunnit. A man is given one task: find out who is going to kill Evelyn Hardcastle. To do so, he relives the same day eight times, each as a different person who is there on the night of her death. It’s an awesome idea, however it requires a very strong storyteller not only to write it, but to keep the plot stable at all. There are so many ways that a book like this could fail. It can get too convoluted. It can have plot holes. It can get too caught up in all its details. The fact that Turton tackled this concept with his first book is very impressive and I will say he succeeds as a storyteller throughout Evelyn Hardcastle’s 458 pages.

The most important thing that Turton succeeds at throughout Evelyn Hardcastle is making it a blast to read. Whodunnits are at their best when the author drops clues here and there about the central mystery, leading the reading experience to become a game of author vs. reader. I will say that I did not come close to unraveling most of the mysteries laid out in the book but I totally believe that a more astute reader who has more experience with whodunnits could have figured out most of this book’s puzzles.

This book does go off the rails a bit towards the end, when Turton tries to use it to explore deeper concepts that don’t fit all that well here. I get the ideas that he is trying to raise, but this is not the book to talk about them. This book is sci-fi adjacent and sci-fi loves to use its premises to tackle questions about humanity but I think it’s at its worst when it leans too heavy into that angle.

All in all this is an amazing time and I would highly recommend it to any mystery fan.

It has been a while since I’ve read ‘door-stopper’ fantasy, a term I just learned and have fallen in love with. For those who don’t know, door-stopper fantasy books are absolutely massive and are frequently part of series. The Wheel of Time series is probably the best example of door-stopper fantasy but in recent years Brandon Sanderson has become the king of this subgenre. I’ve always said that fantasy is my favorite genre and within the genre door-stopper may be my favorite type so going back to it was a real treat. Even as a fan of the genre I have to say that The Shadow of What Was Lost gave me more than I expected and I’m totally shocked by how much I liked it.

The main reason I’m shocked by the sheer joy that I got while reading The Shadow of What Was Lost is because it’s pretty unashamedly derivative. I mentioned The Wheel of Time and Brandon Sanderson earlier and Islington clearly takes influence from both of them in his own writing. There were about 50 times during this book when I thought ‘this is really similar to a Wheel of Time scene’. So much of this book feels like it’s trying to copy beloved works within its genre. This is generally not a good thing, especially from beginner writers.

And yet… Islington still got me. A lot of the reviews I saw for this book praised Islington’s storytelling and I have to agree with them. At its core, The Shadow of What Was Lost is a very interesting story that’s told in a compelling way. The chapters are well-paced. The book as a whole has a really nice flow to it with periods of high action and periods of exposition that never last too long. The POV jumps make total sense as we stay with certain POVs for extended periods of time when they’re at their most interesting but leave them when it is time to do so. The reader is always told just enough so as to be curious but not confused. Islington just has a knack for putting scenes where they need to go and to have them last as long as needed. That’s a genuine talent that is extremely important within this subgenre in particular. When you have hundreds of scenes spread across nearly 700 pages, the ability to construct and place each individual scene becomes vital for the success of a book and Islington nailed it.

This natural storytelling ability allows The Shadow of What Was Lost to succeed despite its relatively uninteresting characters. It’s not like the characters are bad, but the book is at its most derivative when it comes to them. The purposes they serve within the plot are well-handled and I felt compelled by them, but I do think that Islington’s inexperience is most prominent when it comes to them.

All in all The Shadow of What Was Lost gave me exactly what I wanted and more. I eagerly look forward to continuing with the Licanius Trilogy in the future.

This book made me feel gross and disturbed and I think that was the point. I can’t decide whether I love it or I hate it. I can’t even decide if it’s good or not! So much of this book is written in an abstract way that it’s hard to really pinpoint anything about its plot or its characters. It is firmly a book that aims to elicit emotions first and tell a story second. It is very good at eliciting those emotions and some of the phrasing here is super cool (and translated quite well), but I’m not sure what the point of it is. Maybe it doesn’t have a point, or its point is so grand that it can apply to everything. I think it’s kind of brilliant even if it is incredibly uncomfortable and certainly one of the last books I’d ever choose to reread.

The Master of Disguise is a book that feels better than it actually is. While reading it I generally enjoyed it but the more I thought about it the less I liked it. The main reason for this disconnect is that upon reflection I’m not totally sure what it’s supposed to be simply because it’s not great at anything I can think of. Is it an inside look at intelligence operations during the Cold War? Kind of, except so much of what was used was still classified at the time of its writing, meaning so many details have to be left out. Is it a guy telling stories about his time in the CIA? You could say that, except it’s written in an extremely professional, dry manner that makes it hard to appreciate. Is it a memoir of a genuinely interesting guy who lived a fascinating life? Sort of, we only get bits and pieces about who Mendez is outside of the CIA and even then heavy periods of his CIA life are glossed over. As such it’s hard to really praise it when I can’t put my finger on what exactly I’d be praising it for.

There’s also the fact that this is a weird book to talk about simply because of what it is and when it was written: an insider account on American espionage during the Cold War published in 1999. As such, it’s a book that feels like a victory lap as America had defeated its greatest enemy two years before the nation’s collective conscience was completely shaken. Does that make this book an effective time capsule? Once again I can’t really say it’s that either because the book doesn’t evoke the feelings of the late 90s.

All that said, this book is a fun ride at points. It’s at its best when giving these little microdetails about certain declassified techniques. If the book was all that then it would be great. As such it’s really not that and for that reason I can’t really recommend it, even to someone who is interested in this topic.

I’m gonna be honest here. I picked up this book more out of obligation than excitement. For better or for worse Sally Rooney is an extremely important author at the moment due to the frank way she writes about younger Millennials. There are others like her but Rooney is able to write about these experiences in a very relatable way that connects to a lot of readers. I am one of the few people who think that Rooney’s first novel Conversations With Friends was notably better than her follow-up Normal People, although both are quite strong. However, going into this novel I wasn’t expecting much due to how much I disliked her third book Beautiful World, Where Are You. While reading Beautiful World, I got this feeling that Rooney had totally peaked with Conversations With Friends and any magic she captured with that novel was gone.

For the first 150 pages of Intermezzo, my feelings stayed the same. Something just felt off. And then a switch flipped. The book went from mediocre to outright good. And it just continued to get better. I am not sure exactly what is so different between the first third of the book and the rest of it but I found myself having a blast. I reread passages just to enjoy the writing. I started to totally dig the characters. I cracked up at a few jokes. I got emotionally invested.

I’m really not sure what happened. On paper there is very little to differentiate the Sally Rooney work that I do like (all of Conversations with Friends, a good chunk of Normal People, the final 300 pages of Intermezzo) from the writing of hers I dislike (parts of Normal People, all of Beautiful World, Where Are You, the first third of Intermezzo). Rooney is an author that has one subject matter that she really likes to stick to. Her characters are by-and-large middle-class people in their 20s and 30s in Dublin. They are often very messed up mentally and have struggles in relationships that stem from their mental health issues.

And yet there feels like a marked difference when Rooney just lets the character’s thoughts on the page as opposed to their actions. Rooney’s writing style is fairly weird in that a lot of it is just stream-of-consciousness and that doesn’t work all that well when describing physical actions. If there is one thing I wish she’d do it’s to describe her sex scenes in less detail. I get why the scenes are in there. Rooney’s books are far more character-based than plot-based and any good character-based book needs to have well-defined relationships. Some of these relationships are bound to be sexual in nature. Rooney is putting these scenes in for a reason, the problem is that the scenes don’t work well with her writing style.

Maybe that’s what’s different between the first third and the final two thirds of this book. Rooney is genuinely good at writing a few types of scenes, but there is nothing she is quite as good at as getting in the mind of someone who is having a mental breakdown, and there are so many mental breakdowns in the final 300 pages of this book. These scenes are written with a perfect amount of sympathy and restraint. I think that’s why Rooney is so popular among a certain generation of readers. She just gets what the human mind looks like during periods of crisis and that’s a legitimate talent that not many writers have.

This review itself has itself been kind of stream-of-consciousness but overall I can say I’m a much bigger Sally Rooney fan than I was when I started it, and for that I’m grateful.

Stephen King is an author I’ve wanted to read for a while. He is an absolute legend for how strong and prolific his bibliography is, and many people I trust list him as one of their top writers. At the same time I’ve always been intimidated by him due to the sheer volume of his work. Luckily I was given this for free and thus I can now say that I’ve read a Stephen King novel.

I’m glad to have done it too! Lisey’s Story is just a really cool read. It goes from heart-warming to terrifying to tear jerking very seamlessly. One of the things I’ve always heard in terms of King’s writing is how good he is at writing characters. After reading this I can certainly see why. He has a really firm grasp on every main character here to the point that it feels like they actually exist. The strength of his characters allows the bizarre plot to progress in a compelling way. King’s use of imagery is also fantastic, particularly when describing the surreal world known as Boo’Ya Moon. It feels like something straight out of the Twilight Zone and I’m sure I’ll see it in my dreams (and nightmares) for weeks to come.

There are weaknesses to this book. The main thing is that King really exaggerates accents to the point that I’m not even sure what I’m reading. I don’t think this book needs all the accents. There are also points where King lingers a bit too long on certain scenes. This book is over 500 pages but it could have been 450 with minimal issues. I don’t think the book is poorly edited, I just think some plot points didn’t need to drag on as long as they did.

I don’t know if I’ll be making another trip to Castle Rock, but my first time there was a very good one.

Fantasy is my favorite genre. The biggest reason for my love of it is because fantasy is able to instill a sense of wonderment and intrigue in me. There are few reading experiences greater than finding a great fantasy book that makes you feel like you’re totally transported into another world that is rich with ideas and concepts to explore. When I have an experience like this, I swear I feel a physical sensation in my heart that is euphoric.

For the first 300 pages, The Shadow of the Wind gave me that same feeling. I was entranced by the way Zafón laid out the pieces of Julian Carax’s life and just wanted to know more. Each plot twist and reveal felt satisfying and I just couldn’t put the book down. Few non-fantasy books have ever made me feel the way The Shadow of the Wind did for the first ⅔ of its page count, and for that I am extremely grateful. I can confidently say that no book I’ve read in 2024 has made me feel that way.

And yet, for some reason, that feeling went away during the final third of the book. At a certain point I just wanted it to end. I genuinely don’t know why I stopped liking the book. There aren’t many differences between the first two thirds and the last third, but it felt like the magic had run out. There are some books that I like to call ‘vibe reads’. ‘Vibe reads’ are really hard to review because the impact they leave on the reader is hard to explain in words. Some ‘vibe reads’ are really enjoyable and yet have objectively poor qualities. And there are some ‘vibe reads’ that are the opposite, where despite everything being objectively strong there’s just something off about them. The Shadow of the Wind is the ultimate ‘vibe read’. When it’s good, the vibes are just fantastic and yet something just changes and makes it a slog to get through.

In terms of literary qualities, I think the biggest issues the book has are with its main character and tendency to exposition-dump. Daniel is the main character of this book and yet I would say without hesitation that he’s the least interesting. The book mostly gets away with having a fairly boring protagonist by having a ton of supporting characters to take the attention off of him. For the first parts of the book Daniel is more of a vessel that allows these other characters to be explored as opposed to a character in his own right. The book also has a way of making the plot so intriguing and expansive that there’s no need to focus on Daniel himself. Unfortunately, the plot is a bit too expansive, leading to a ton of exposition-dumping in the final parts. This book is at its strongest when Daniel acts as a detective in search of the truth of Julian Carax, meeting various interesting characters along the way. He finds out each bit of information slowly, allowing the plot to progress at an even pace. But the last parts of the book just give Daniel all of the information and focus a lot on who he is as a person. These changes are subtle but they really tank the vibes of the book and leave me incredibly unsatisfied.

This book still has a ton of strong qualities. I think the overall mystery of what happened to Julian Carax is really interesting. And the supporting characters (including Julian) are just fantastic. I don’t think there’s a single supporting character who I would say is poorly-written or adds nothing to the plot. I can confidently say that this cast of supporting characters is among the best in any novel I’ve ever read. Overall I can’t say I hate this book simply because those qualities are so strong. Its highs are extremely high, but its lows are low enough that I leave the book feeling more frustrated than anything.

I wanted to like this book so badly. This is the 10th Leigh Bardugo book I’ve read. Before reading this she was batting a perfect 1.000 for me. Of the nine books I had read by her previously I would say that I enjoyed every single one. What’s even crazier is that I felt like she had been getting better. Her two most recent books (Ninth House and Hell Bent) were my two favorites. To top it off, it’s a historical fantasy book set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition, which is a really interesting time period and one rife to do fun things with from a fantasy writer’s perspective. To say that I went into The Familiar with high expectations would be an understatement. I didn’t just think that I would like it. I felt like I already knew that I would like it.

And yet I didn’t. I waited for the moment for the book to click for me and it never did. I don’t think The Familiar is totally irredeemable. Bardugo clearly did a ton of research into the setting, there are some really cool set pieces and some of the supporting characters are really cool. There are really only a couple of criticisms that I can make about the book. Unfortunately they are pretty big mistakes.

The first is that I just don’t find the main characters to be interesting at all. Here I’m mostly talking about Luzia and Santangel, who are easily the most prominent characters in the book. I just can’t bring myself to care about them, which is a really big problem because the book really needs you to be emotionally invested in them and their love story. Luzia is just boring and when she’s not boring she’s antagonistic to the point that it makes it hard to root for her. Santangel is a cardboard cutout of ‘edgy male love interest’ to the point that I could believe he was a character in a Twilight knockoff. When you have a romance between these two characters and have that be one of the biggest storylines of your book, the book isn’t going to be good. A novel can survive having boring or unlikable side characters. But even the best worldbuilding, supporting characters and pacing cannot save a book in which the two main characters just aren’t compelling. What’s so strange about this criticism is that I know for a fact that Bardugo can write characters like this extremely well. Alex from Ninth House and Hell Bent shares plenty of similarities with Luzia on paper but she’s actually great and is a huge part of what makes those books so good. Nikolai from the Grishaverse has some stuff in common with Santangel but he was easily compelling enough to carry a duology by himself. If a writer who I didn’t have as much faith in wrote these characters I’d be more forgiving but once again I know that Bardugo can do better than this and that’s what makes this criticism so frustrating.

While most of what I dislike about the book comes down to the fact that I just don’t care about Luzia and Santangel, it also has to be mentioned that this book has some weird pacing issues. I feel like it’s way too long and yet somehow feels rushed at various points as well. There is a lot of stuff going on throughout this book and I feel like a few sections or subplots could easily be taken out and make the book better.

For an NBA player, shooting 90% from the free throw line is exceptional. 90% gets you at least an A- in most classes. For a writer, having 90% of your bibliography be amazing is very worthy of praise. I still like Bardugo and consider her to be one of my favorite authors today. But this book is a notable miss for her.

I read this book for a book club and in a lot of ways it is a typical book you read for a book club. It’s well-acclaimed, not too long and requires minimal context. It’s the type of book that you should have a good time picking up and finishing within a month. That is not an insult to this book whatsoever because I tend to love book club books and this one is no exception.

City of Thieves tells the story of a boy named Lev during the course of one week of his life in WWII Russia. Lev goes through a lot of trauma during the course of this week and we feel every second of it. But where this book truly shines is in the moments where it doesn’t focus on the horrific things that Lev goes through. In these moments we see the humanity of Lev and the other people around him as they do their best to survive and thrive in an extremely difficult time. Historical fiction is a genre that I’ve always really enjoyed for this reason. Too often while reading a history book or listening to a podcast we hear about the sheer numbers or only the important figures. This is especially true of WWII. But a book like this lets us look at a small story within that time period and realize that sometimes teenagers in WWII just acted like teenagers. I can definitely see an argument that this book is too juvenile but I think it’s quite realistic and I never had a problem with the tone. Benioff does not shy away from the atrocities that he is writing about, he just chooses to dedicate some words to things outside of them and I think that allows this story to work. And it works so well. In fact, this is a book that I don’t have any real criticisms for. It’s pretty perfect.

I became aware of this book through two different ways. The first was through listening to Baldree narrate the first book of the Cradle series (a series I firmly mean to get back to at some point). Generally when someone does a really good job narrating or translating a book that they didn’t write I feel obligated to check out some of their own work as a sign of appreciation. This practice was what led me to Ken Liu’s novels so I can say that it has very much rewarded me by giving me more good books to read.

The second way was through the low-stakes fantasy that has been getting popular over the past couple of years. Fantasy has historically been a genre with very high stakes. Someone has to save the world or the kingdom and their actions have consequences that will impact millions of people. And that has always been part of its appeal for many of its fans, myself included. But every cliche or trend will inevitably have backlash or media created that goes against the prevailing idea, and now we have low-stakes fantasy. The idea of ‘low-stakes’ fantasy is to have stories that take place in fantasy worlds without necessarily having world-altering consequences. Admittedly this is not something that I was super interested in initially. I like fantasy in part because of how much each story impacts the world it’s in. My thought was that low stakes are for other genres, not fantasy. But out of obligation to Baldree and some curiosity, I decided to make Legends and Lattes my first low-stakes fantasy book.

Despite my misgivings I will say that I did enjoy Legends and Lattes quite a bit! It does provide a cozy type of feeling that you don’t get from a lot of other fantasy books. Baldree proves himself to be quite the talented writer, to the point that I was outright shocked to find out that this was his first novel. Some of the worldbuilding is a bit clumsy at times but other than that this is a book that totally works once you buy into its premise that an accomplished orc warrior is retiring and just wants to settle down and open a coffee shop. Weirdly enough buying into this premise was one of the things I struggled with the most. This is just so different to any other fantasy book I’ve read in terms of how innocent it is. But once I got over that initial hurdle I had a really fun time.

You can kind of hear Baldree’s inner audiobook narrator come through in his characters. They are all described very vividly with distinct characteristics and I can easily picture Baldree imagining how he is going to narrate these characters as he is writing them. First-time authors can struggle with characters but I do think he does quite a good job with them here. The book really needs you to buy into this ragtag group as they try and build a small business and I felt like I did. Viv and Tandri are the obvious standouts but really every character here works.

Based on how much I liked Legends and Lattes, I feel like I need to give low-stakes fantasy more of a try. Well done Travis Baldree!

This was a book that had intrigued me for a while. It’s the exact type of book I’m trying to read more of: books with Chinese influence that don’t focus on the male perspective. I held off on it because I was worried it wouldn’t be too serious but it really blew me away. This book is part medicinal textbook, part tale of a friendship between two women, part history lesson on Chinese women in the Ming dynasty and part a commentary on how class and gender interact. This is a book that covers a lot of ground and yet I don’t feel like it’s trying to do too much, which is the sign of strong writing.

Part of that is definitely the characters. Yunxian is a very compelling protagonist and she is able to make her supporting characters really come to life. While it is clear that every character is there to serve an explicit purpose, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. As I said before, this is a novel with a very wide scope and to accommodate said scope one needs a lot of characters. I think every character here is quite well-realized, allowing the rest of the book to flow smoothly.

I’m guessing that most of this book’s praise will come from the research and I’d like to add to that as well. See did an absolutely remarkable job at bringing this period to life and I appreciate that she didn’t just focus on the upper class. Most aspects of Ming Dynasty China life are explored here, which makes it all the more remarkable that this book feels less like a history textbook and more like a well-paced novel. This book could have been incredibly boring but See writes it in a way that it almost doesn’t feel educational. This sounds like an insult but it’s actually a huge compliment.

Overall I’m super impressed by this book and I look forward to reading more of See in the future.

Neil Gaiman is an author I want to like so badly. I get why people like him. He’s clearly a very talented writer with a great sense for pacing, characters and imagery. He’s almost the textbook definition of a good author except calling him that feels like an insult to him because he’s also a remarkably creative man with very cool ideas that he is easily able to incorporate into his stories.

And yet I’ve now read three books by him and I can’t say I have greatly enjoyed any of them. Stardust has all the makings of a good fantasy story and Gaiman is obviously a good enough author to write a competent fantasy novel. As fantasy is my favorite genre that means I should be all over this book but I merely like it when I was expecting to adore it. I’m not sure what it is about this book or Gaiman in general that makes me lower on him than a lot of other readers but the story just doesn’t click. It’s still a very good book written by a guy who knows what he’s doing but nothing more than that.

I believe this is my sixth Murakami novel. He’s easily one of my most read authors despite the fact that I think he has some fairly notable issues that pop up in almost all of his books. Notably I think he is fairly incapable of writing women characters, his sex scenes are always disturbing and he will linger on certain details for far too long. Sometimes I wonder why I read him. And then he’ll conjure up a beautiful turn of phrase or have a really interesting line of dialogue or make a really astute observation and I remember why. For me he is very much an author where you have to accept his flaws in order to truly enjoy his writing. Sometimes the flaws outweigh the strong points and then there are times like After Dark where he keeps his worst instincts restrained and lets you enjoy the beauty of his craft.

Of all of the books I’ve read by him I think After Dark is his least-flawed. His women here actually feel real and not like a different species. There are no explicit sex scenes (although there is one description of a woman’s naked body that feels quite pointless and I feel most authors would not include it). The book is short enough that there aren’t a ton of things that he overly focuses on. Fixing these flaws allows me to appreciate the strong parts of his writing more and they are present here, although not in as high of doses as I’d enjoy. Certain phrases are indeed really pretty, the dialogue is really nice and the narration is quite interesting, but none of these things really blew me away the way they did in other Murakami novels. All-in-all this is Murakami at a very high level and I do think this is a great introduction to him.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

What an absolute blast this is. I know that’s a weird thing to say about a book that focuses on topics such as loss of humanity, alienation, poverty and parental abandonment but consuming The Metamorphosis is some of the most fun I’ve had reading in a long time. It helped that I listened to it on audiobook with a pretty good reader and a really strong translation but I really think this is just an excellent book. I’m normally not someone who notices when something is well-paced but The Metamorphosis is so strong in that category that I immediately noticed it. Nothing lingers for a sentence longer than it should. It’s very short and yet each section feels complete and by the end of the book a satisfying narrative has been told. Each character is introduced at the right time. Each vignette works on its own as well as within the complex of the overall book. Each concept is focused on for the right amount of time. It just works on every level and makes this a rare book that is both very interesting to analyze on a deep literary level while also being really fun to read from a casual perspective. So often I complain that some books are really deep but not fun to read or the other way around but this one is both. It’s just wonderful.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Sometimes a story becomes so ingrained within the culture that it feels impossible to truly read it for the first time. That is absolutely how I feel about Fight Club. This book and its movie adaptation are so ubiquitous that I felt like I already knew everything about it before I started listening to the audiobook. I knew the memes. I knew the ending. I knew the big twist. For a book that is largely centered around that twist, you’d think that would be a bad thing. And yet I can honestly say that reading Fight Club for the first time in 2024 is still a damn good time. Palahniuk is a really cool writer who is oftentimes very heavy handed but leaves enough room for interpretation that the book is still fun to read. I can see why David Fincher read this and figured it would make for a good movie adaptation and I also see why said movie adaptation became a big hit. Tyler Durden is a truly wonderful character who is able to elicit all manners of jealousy and distaste from any reader and it makes sense that he is an icon. There’s just so much to like about this book and I consider it to be a genuine classic.