Fireblooms (by Alexandra Villasante)

This was my Read Harder Choice for a YA book by a Latine author, although for some reason I kept bouncing off the title and the cover. (Turns out I definitely do judge books by their covers.)  But I am so glad I had the little nudge to read it because not only is it a great YA, it's also speculative fiction!

Both characters are Latine and Spanish is interwoven beautifully in the book in a completely organic way. You have enough context clues to understand, and at least a tiny bit of familiarity with Spanish helps, but it is done incredibly well.  It's a dual-perspective novel from two kids who live in a Tech Utopia/Dystopia type of town - one is there to help his mom, who was abusive and has cancer, and wants nothing to do with the surveillance state - the other is nonbinary and appreciates the Big Brother aspects of the Utopia/Dystopia to help save him from harm. 

One of the characters is nonbinary and it's a better example of a novel with a main character who uses they/them pronouns than the one I actually read for this category; it feels way more organic here for some reason and was very easy to adjust to. I think it's just really, really well written all around, and if you enjoy YA speculative fiction, deserves a read! 

Parade of Horribles (by Matt Dinniman)

Officially caught up with the Dungeon Crawler Carl series with book eight.  (I must say I'm in the subreddit and whenever the books are discussed, based on the titles, I can barely remember which book is which. But this one is the one about the various heats.) 

The beginning with the heats was a little too frenetic for me and I wished for some slower pacing in those parts. But the ending of this was just so good, I loved it. Would have loved a bit of a slower buildup to it but damn, the ending, and all of Carl's insane plans... incredible. 

I'd love to rank all the books to date but it's all a blur. Excited for the next part of the blur, though!

This Inevitable Ruin (by Matt Dinniman)

This is the seventh book in the series and I am now on book eight but I am also back to work so assume I will be finishing these a bit more slowly now. (Also, I swear I am reading other things - I have two more books in progress, they just take longer than these propulsive, candy-like books.)

Book seven was a particularly good one, with huge emotional stakes as well as the trademark humor of the series. I don't have much new to say since I've already blogged about this series twice and this is the seventh book I've read! Except to assure you that I do know other books exist.  

Candy!  

 

Dungeon Crawler Carl (The Next Three) (by Matt Dinniman)

The next three books in the series were #4, #5 and #6, The Gate of the Feral Gods, The Butcher's Masquerade and The Eye of the Bedlam Bride.  They definitely all start to blend together after a while (as evidenced by the fact that I had to revise this post because I forgot #4) but I do know I enjoyed both 5 and 5, as the lore of the world keeps expanding.   (And the books keep lengthening; I just started the next one and it's like 850 pages long.  Dinniman has also started putting in recap chapters at the beginning to help keep track of everything. It's a lot.) 

So far my least favorite has still been number four because I didn't love the setup of the dungeon level very much.  I enjoyed five and six although with Bedlam Bride, I found the card mechanic a little confusing.  And Dinniman is starting to overly rely on the "flashback to fill in what you missed" technique which is confusing because I can't keep track of what he's mentioned and what he hasn't mentioned. (I'm using the "look up in book" feature on my Kindle a lot.)

Still, the humor and characters and Princess Donuttyness of it all continues to make for a fun reading experience.  Princess Posse 4 Life. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl (The First Three) (by Matt Dinniman)

My friend group (with whom I play tabletop games and RPGs) has all been devouring this series and insisting that I need to read it because it is my type of humor and also Princess Donut (the cat) reminds everyone of me.  Now that I know how magical Princess Donut is, I take this as a profound compliment.

I was also told to read it as an audiobook since it has an amazing narrator, and that's what I did for the first one, which allowed me to check off the 2015 RHC category of "an audiobook" and thus "pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat."  I didn't love the choice for Carl's voice and audio isn't fast enough for me, so I switched to downloading books in text format. It took me less than a day to read book two and about another day to read book three. I need to slow down.

As you might imagine, it is in fact propulsive and very entertaining. The humor is very juvenile and there's some problematic elements; you can definitely tell a guy wrote this. The way fat female bodies are repeatedly described as monstrous isn't amazing. But there is enough delightful worldbuilding, action, humor, and heart to keep me wanting to read on. Just be forewarned. 

Also it's pretty gory because there's a lot of monster-killing and creative murder. So be forewarned! But as you can tell, it's also very addictive. 

Constituent Service (by John Scalzi)

I bought this (fancy signed edition) as a Christmas gift for my child, who loved Agent to the Stars so much that I felt confident she would also enjoy this novella, about a human who goes to work in city services for a cosmopolitan district where she is pretty much the only human around.

Mina adored this. "I love this so much, tell John Scalzi to write more, I need more, I just want to live in this world, I love it, I love it, I love it."  So please turn this into a series, John.  

It's very fun, light, fluffy, and unfortunately quite alien-poop-centric which is not my favorite type of humor but obviously it did not bother my child. So I'll have to decide which to try next - Starter Villain? Redshirts? Old Man's War? We shall see!

The Stars, Too Fondly (by Emily Hamilton)

Read for the category "a book set in space" and I think I would have DNF'd it otherwise. An easy read - it reads like YA, which is a problem since allegedly the characters are all postdocs - but right from the get-go, it's ridiculous.

A group of four friends (which conveniently includes an Asian man, a nonbinary person, and a Black trans woman - very YA-coded) accidentally steal a spaceship that blasts them into another solar system. This ship w" as supposed to go into space years before and "something went wrong" with the "dark matter engine and the entire crew disappeared, and then everyone on earth decided to just leave the ship lying around and not investigate it at all.  Definitely how science and humanity works! 

Then our lead character falls in lesbian love with the AI avatar of the captain, they watch a lot of 90s movies (very YA coded), and work to try and get back to earth, in implausible fashion. Sacrifices are made that have no real stakes attached to them. None of this is grounded in anything, or feels real whatsoever. It's just a light, breezy, very young adult read. 

Metallic Realms (by Lincoln Michel)

One of my favorite novels of all time, as you may know, is Pale Fire. So when I realized this is essentially "if Charles Kinbote was an awkward nerd and John Shade was a sci-fi writing collective" I was so in.  

So many fun twists - I loved the sci-fi stories that are presented here as the products of the "Orb 4" writing collective, which vary wildly in style and quality but are always fun to read.  The narrator (and "lore-keeper") is named Michael Lincoln (not Lincoln Michel) and the author himself is referenced as a case of mistaken identity (and possibly makes a cameo at the end). The clueless unreliable narrator is both sympathetic and terrible.  There are so many inside jokes and references I'm sure I didn't get.  

I did my usual "check the Goodreads reviews" and as always there are people who take it all literally and don't seem to understand what Michel is doing. But if you are a Pale Fire and sci-fi fan, this one is for you.

Record of a Spaceborn Few (by Becky Chambers)

The penultimate category in the Read Harder Challenge was a hard one. "A book based solely on its setting." I really wanted to read a book set on a generational starship and I downloaded a bunch of them.  None of them really hit right. I think I made it like 30% into Ark and they still hadn't gotten on any sort of ship and I was bored. 

Finally I chose this one, a Wayfarers book set on a generational ship, following 5 different point of view characters who live as part of the Exodus Fleet.  And, well, it was a bit boring. The point of view keeps switching and I kept forgetting who was who, and there was really no plot. Like each of the point of view characters has a very paper-thin plot, I suppose, most of them.  But everything worked out mostly great in the end because this is the coziest of cozy sci fi.

I really want Andy Weir to write a book set on a generational ship.  Can someone give him a call for me? Thanks. 

Crosstalk (by Connie Willis)

I tagged this "give-up" because I definitely would have given up on this book had it not been for the RHC category "a genre-blending book."  But so many of the other suggestions I'd looked at were a blend of fantasy and something, and I don't really love fantasy, so I stuck with it.

First off, Crosstalk is a blend of romcom (really, romantic farce) and speculative fiction.  The premise is that a woman named Briddey agrees to get a new procedure to get emotional closeness to her boyfriend - and it accidentally connects her to someone else. She has a really intrusive family with absolutely no boundaries (they call her constantly and show up at her work and at her house) and she seems really stupid at the outset - her boyfriend is obviously a douche (he's even named Trent, for god's sake) but also she doesn't even really seem to like him all that much? Why is she getting brain surgery!?

Between her family bombarding her and the results of the brain surgery, she's constantly feeling massive anxiety and the pace of the book is frenetic and it gave me secondhand anxiety to read.  I also think her sister, a massively neurotic helicopter mom, is supposed to be a funny character but honestly she came off as so awful and abusive to her child, it wasn't fun to read.  

Once Briddey finally started to figure out stuff that had been obvious to the reader for like THE ENTIRE BOOK, it got less annoying (happened at around the 70% mark, so, not ideal) and the ending was definitely better than the beginning. The romance was semi-problematic but whatever, it was cute.  I didn't hate it the whole way through, but I didn't totally enjoy it either. At least another category is checked off - only 5 more to go. 

Iceland Books

I got a bit caught up on my reading goal and finished six books while I was on vacation. As per usual, here they are in vacation roundup format. 

We Solve Murders (by Richard Osman) 

My friend sent me a picture of this book on the recommendation shelf of a local independent bookstore, because it's written by Richard Osman, who has been on Taskmaster UK, a show he introduced me to. This is the moment I realized the Taskmaster Richard Osman is the same Richard Osman who wrote the Thursday Murder Club series! We Solve Murders is the beginning of a new series from him, and thanks to my friend, also meets the criteria of "a staff pick from an indie bookstore" for the Read Harder Challenge. Apart from that, it's a great kickoff to a new series - funny, unpredictable, cozy, with charming characters. If you liked Thursday Murder Club, you'll enoy this one too.

Shampoo Unicorn (by Sawyer Lovett)

The novel is about a queer podcast in rural America, shown from three points of view. I think the exploration of small town homophobia and transphobia will resonate with its audience, but it was not quite successful for me. Of the three point of view characters, one is kind of shoehorned in unsuccessfully, and another is in second person for seemingly no reason. More a book I'm glad exists for today's kids than one which landed with me.

Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic Over Role-Playing Games Says About Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (by Joseph Laycock)

As the title suggests, this one is pretty academic and definitely reads like someone's published thesis (not that there's anything wrong with that). Read this for the RHC category "a book about a moral panic."  I did find it very interesting, as Laycock talks about how fantasy serves similar functions to religion in society and how that overlap can lead to moral panic. It also talks about how the secret to averting a theocracy is allowing people to explore imaginary worlds and alternative frameworks like art, fantasy, science, and religion (apart from the hegemonic one). A slow read but enjoyable.

Leo Martino Steals Back His Heart (by Eric Geron)

A queer YA, of course. On the plus side: had a real story of self-discovery that felt authentic, and wasn't formulaic.  On the negative side: the tone is confusing, a lot of plot is unresolved (like okay, his dad is a cartoon-like cheater and abuser, but his mom's family takes the dad's side? And that's not ever explained or resolved?), some of the side characters seem more like plot devices than actual people with motivation, and the central romance didn't work for me. So, an author with a ton of potential but a book that didn't quite work. 

A Psalm for the Wild Built (by Becky Chambers)

Sci-fi novella for the category "a queernorm book."  To me, reads like the prologue of an actual book. This is about a discontent "tea monk" named Dex who meets a sentient robot and they become friends and set off on an adventure. It's a classic Becky Chambers cozy sci-fi in a casually queer world but really feels like the story has barely begun. 

The Examiner (by Janice Hallet)

I loved the premise of this one - like The Appeal, a novel told through text messages and emails being reviewed by a third-party - in this case, an examiner (a grade-reviewer) for a master's degree art course populated by some deliciously unlikeable characters.  Also one of them might be dead.  First half of this was terrific, up to the first twist (which I loved) and then the denoument ended up being super long and convoluted, and I didn't quite follow everything that was even going on, what people's motivations were, or what the Maguffin even was. Maybe it was just because I was jetlagged by this point but I saw similar feedback on Goodreads so I didn't feel too alone. 

Two Weeks, Six Books

I went on back-to-back work trips to New York and Austin, and in the process, finished six books that were across the board pretty good! And two of them covered Read Harder Challenge categories: queer mystery and standalone fantasy.  Here are the books:

Murder in the Dressing Room (by Holly Stars) 

A fun cozy mystery about drag culture. I was convinced I knew the murderer the whole way through the book, to the 99% point, but turns out I didn't! The murderer wasn't really the point though, more an endearing story about a cute, nonbinary main character and an exploration of the world of drag. This is the only book on the list that didn't get a + next to it on my list, but it was cute!

Magic for Liars (by Sarah Gailey)

I was dreading the fantasy category until I found this, detective fiction set in a magic school! (I could call this "genre blending" too I suppose, but it's going to be harder to get standalone fantasy out of the way so I'm sticking with that one.) This is so well done. A woman whose twin sister is a mage - but who isn't magical herself - investigates a murder at a magic school. I loved the main character (in spite of her unlikeability) and really enjoyed all the characters, the treatment of magic, and the way it all played out.  

Lorne (by Susan Morrison)

It was fun to be reading this while I was in New York, and especially since I finally got to see Studio 8H on this visit! I knew many of the stories from being an SNL fan over the years but certainly didn't know all of them - and overall was a fascinating insight to the show and Lorne Michaels as a person.  Highly recommended for fans of Saturday Night Live. 

Newcomer (by Keigo Higashino)

Inventive! It's not only a murder mystery but functions as a set of linked short stories - Detective Kaga is a newcomer to this part of town, as is the murder victim, and as you explore different characters you see their connections to each other and to the victim. Often, the vignettes explore a storyline of a person in the neghborhood, as their secrets are revealed and characters loop in and out of the story. Another great offering from Higashino!

Lover Birds (by Leon Egan)

A queer retelling of Pride & Prejudice, wherein a posh London girl moves to Liverpool and meets Lou Byrne and her four best friends.  There are echoes of P&P everywhere (guess who the four best friends are intended to be) but the conflict between the characters ends up feeling organic, and the main character's struggles to manage her ADHD are really well done. Great chemistry between our main couple also! Just overall loved it. 

When the Moon Hits Your Eye (by John Scalzi) 

Last but not least, my pal John Scalzi's latest! I wasn't hugely into Kaiju Preservation Society but this one I really enjoyed. The high concept premise - the moon turns to cheese - becomes an exploration of shared humanity and how we find meaning in our lives.  It's often clever and funny (classic Scalzi) but also surprisingly meditative and profound at points too. Honestly exceeded my expectations! 

Service Model (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Justice for Annie Bot! This was a fun read (also about a sentient - or is he? - robot) but not nearly as thought provoking as Annie Bot. But this is the one that made the Longlist so here we are. And it was good, just not as good, to me.

Even so, I already had this checked out because I was interested in it beforehand. It's about a robot valet who murders his master (for a reason unknown even to him) and goes on a journey of self-discovery as a result. I particularly enjoyed the ways in which each part was a homage to a classic author - to copy the cheat sheet from Goodreads: Part I KR15-T: Agatha Christie, Part II K4fk-R: Franz Kafka, Part III 4w-L: George Orwell, Part IV 80rh-5: Jorge Luis Borges, Part V D4nt-A: Dante Alighieri). 

The Christie and Kafka sections were my favorites but the whole thing is very well done. Our protagonist, Charles (or Uncharles) is a naive narrator and he encounters his Virgil, a fellow robot (or is she?) named The Wonk.  If you're interested in speculative fiction and you wish Ishiguro had written a combination of Klara and the Sun and The Remains of the Day, this is the novel for you!

Airport Feminist Book Club

These are the four books I finished on a work trip to Austin last week; the theme of patriarchy was front and center in three of them.  The first two I finished had pink covers and I wanted to do a whole theme but I gave that up after looking at my library holds and realizing I didn't have any more pink books. Would have been cute in a pointless way though.  

Annie Bot (by Sierra Greer)

Contender for favorite book of the year (which I thought James had locked up).  Onstensibly about a sex robot who is sentient, but actually an exploration of the subtleties of personhood and emotional abuse.  Skin crawling and fascinating and unpredictable... I loved everything about it and re-read the ending like four times.

Plan A (by Deb Caletti)

About a girl who has to travel from Texas to Oregon to get an abortion. The way her pregnancy is discovered by the community is incredibly contrived and the writing takes some getting used to - a bit stream-of-consciousness and discursive. But once I adjusted to the writing and decided to suspend disbelief, I enjoyed it. (While, obviously, being enraged because women should have basic fucking body autonomy.)  It's a bit didactic but it's young adult and this particular kind of didacticism is badly needed even though it SHOULDN'T BE but here we are. 

This Time It’s Real (by Ann Liang)

This was an adorable YA palate cleanser about a girl living in China who has a fake relationship with a film star in her class. It's very cute and well-written with great chemistry.  I hoped it would be good because Ann Liang's I Hope This Doesn't Find You was also very good. Great to discover a new, extremely solid young adult writer!

The Secrets We Keep (by Cassie Gustafson)

Also a YA but this time about a girl whose father is arrested for abusing her friend, and the secrets she may have been keeping for him. Absolutely moving, utterly heartbreaking.  Weirdly has a similar ending to Annie Bot as both characters undergo a sort of liberation.  I also re-read this ending like four times for the same reason. And god I loved the fairy tales interspersed throughout too! A couple of moments when the inner voice doesn't quite work, but for the most part, great.

Another First Chance (by Robbie Couch)

You know I'm always going to run, not walk, to any queer RA speculative fiction. (As long as it's not fantasy.  It's a fine line.)

This one has a kid grieving the death of his best friend sign up for a mysterious weeklong experiment called the Affinity Trials. How he gets recruited into them is somewhat convoluted but then we watch the Trials happening, we watch him make new friends and wonder what the researchers running the trials are truly hiding and what their real agenda is. 

(When you find out the answer, you too may find the experiment design somewhat nonsensical.) This book had a slow start and setup, but I powered through (read this while getting my hair done for five hours) and enjoyed the reveal and the ending.  Wasn't at the level of More Happy Than Not, but still enjoyable.

Time and Time Again (by Chatham Greenfield)

A really fun time loop novel with a great central romance. Strong, organic representation of two disabled lesbians (one nonbinary) who get stuck in a time loop and, of course, complications ensue.

I loved our main character's arc over the course of the time loop, the main characters' communication skills, the diversity (including size diversity) that seemed purposeful and not shoehorned in, because the characters' diverse identities are actually explored.  Five stars! If I gave stars, which I don't. Man I should have been giving stars this whole time, huh?

The Final Season (by Andrew Gillsmith)

This was the most difficult RHC category for me this year, and still not sure if I nailed it, but I read this for a book that went under the radar in 2023." The question of course is what radar? Whose radar? Recommendations in the Goodreads group included a bunch of novels from the Tournament of Books short and longlist. They do find a lot of relatively niche books, but they are by definition on the ToB radar, so they're on the radar, so then they don't count! 

Someone suggested looking for books with a small number of reviews and ratings, and I think a random rec list had this book on it. Not only is it low on reviews and ratings, it isn't carried by any of my libraries, so I bought it. And as a humorous sci-fi book, I would fully expect it to show up on The Big Idea series on Scalzi's Whatever blog, which definitely counts as "the radar" for sci-fi, but it hasn't. (Dear Andrew Gillsmith: Scalzi readers would be so into this, you should get on The Big Idea when you publish the next one in the series.) 

Anyway, the book itself! It's a Douglas Adams-style book about a reality series that's been watching a doomed planet for 10,000 years. The planet's apocalypse is about to happen, and the showrunner has the opportunity to save the planet's inhabitants. But will she? A fun, funny read and really I do think it would be a hit with fans of Agent to the Stars or Hitchhiker's Guide.

To Be Taught, if Fortunate (by Becky Chambers)

This book marks the halfway point in my Read Harder progress this year, a sci-fi novella. It's about a group of four astronauts who are exploring other planets in between rounds of "torpor" and being adapted for the next environment via enzyme patches, and is narrated by the engineer, Ariadne.

It's very creative about what kinds of other planets and life forms may exist, and I think hinges on a sort of "Choose Your Own Adventure" ending.  But ultimately I didn't really love the characters, could have done without all the bed-hopping, and wished for this to be better fleshed out as a story.  The ending could have hit better if it was better developed. Ultimately a meh for me.

Boys Weekend (by Mattie Lubchansky)

Like Shamshine, this is a Tournament of Books entry; unlike Shamshine (in my opinion) this graphic novel has an undercurrent of real profundity.

It's about a trans-femme named Sammi who is invited to be the "best man" at their friend Adam's wedding, along with a truly horrifying group of tech bros, a cop, and one "not like the other girls" woman. The bachelor weekend is on a capitalist, libertarian hell island version of Las Vegas, with clone strippers, a party submarine, and an odd group that looks like it might be a cult. And as Sammie navigates dealing with their gender in this group, they are either seeing real monsters or having a psychotic break.

I loved everything about it, from the tiny world-building easter eggs to the central metaphors representing Sammi figuring out what vestiges of their old life are worth hanging onto and what may be worth leaving behind. A super quick read but I found myself going back to savor panels, and I think I will probably at least skim through it once more before I return it to the library.

Highly recommend! 

The Shamshine Blind (by Paz Pardo)

Speculative fiction that's weirdly a cross between Shades of Gray by Jasper Fforde and Thursday Next by Jasper Fforde. It's an alternative future where Argentina has achieved world domination by weaponizing color and most major American cities are in ruins. It is left to our hero, Kay Curdita, to unravel a conspiracy in Daly City, resolve her romantic problems, and save the day.

This is a Tournament of Books offering that feels, for the Tournament, relatively lightweight. It's definitely fun but more of a romp than a Serious Novel, and thus will probably not make it too far in the competition. But still, you never know. It's super enjoyable nonetheless, especially for Fforde Ffans.