2025 Reads

Is it possible to review an interview transcript?? It's just a conversation...between a talented journalist and a literary giant I have never bothered to engage with. This book's biggest success was making me want to read Infinite Jest. Eerie how prescient DFW was about short-form entertainment, I put down a lot of what he wrote in my journal:

"Like, at a certain point, we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die. (Passionate)"

Read for a book club - enjoyed this!! The lesbian lit fic crowd is small and this was such a good addition. Both of the characters really stuck out to me, and it was a suprise that this book combined flowery language with explict langugage. the sexual tension was sooo palpable, and while I don't normally go for historical fiction, I enjoyed the setting here -- the book focuses on what happened to jews who tried to return to thier homes after the holocaust. However, the POV switch felt like a cop out to me, and I wasn't to thrilled by the ending. Great to see 1950's lesbians get a happy ending, but not convinced these lesbians would have gotten one

A beautiful relay race of a novel. Takes place in the 90's on the music scene, and Jenny Egan succeeded in making me interested in every character. Was emotionally moved by a PowerPoint chapter. Gave me a mysterious feeling.

they killed my girl!! ....andddd I kept reading. Mick Herron just keeps getting better and better. Clown Town has all of the classics: scathing political satire, river cartwright contiously flopping, and lamb's incredible oneliners. My gut feeling is this novel is the penultimate one -- the lamb tavner conflict gets tighter, and we are starting to see more of Slow Horses mysterious boss. FUN!!!

Since this is one of the biggest books of the year, I put off reading it for a while. When I finally got around to it I devoured it in a day. Percival Everrett is one of my favorite satirist's writing today. Seen through the eyes of Jim, the man who escapes slavery to run away with Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain's novel, this book hits on code-switching, the hypocricies of enlightment thought (jim and locke have words) and the power of literacy. At one point, Jim hides on a boat with a man who conitunes to behave as if he's enslaved even when it's obvious his master is gone. The oppressive force of slavery is revealed as a smokeshow. Deserving of the praise.

Read on the Beach. If you need a shift from 21st century lit fic because it all starts to sound the same, switch countries. First story was my favorite -- hilarious and tragic autoficition from a gay guy in Seoul (reviewing 4 months later, the details are fleeting!!) Goes through a series of men our narrator Park is unforunate enough to fall in love with. Ends ambigously. I spelt that wrong. I hope I get some of this heartbreak in my 20s.

You know those books that are compelling and easy enough to read, but you still hate where you're going? Yeah...This was another book about that followed two girls through childhood to adulthood. My main driving thought throughout this book was, Elena Ferrante did it better! The men in this book are nothing characters, and while that always bothers me, at the end of this book, Vix's switch from one guy to the other made no sense. Neither of the leads made sense as characters, and Vix's family did not get enough attention. Really frustrated of all the coming of age stories that revolve around medicore men, but that's not (all) Judy Bloom's fault.

A graphic memior about freshman year. The story meanders on and doesn't really go anywhere, but that is the point. The story telling is not linear, and that's what Freshman year felt like. Who knows what even happened. If you're looking to pick up a graphic memior, this was fun and quick!

The cover and the premise had me hooked: a girl's boxing tournament. The omnipresent narrator was clever, and I liked the way the author narratored the matches. But once I finished, I realized I never got fully in one character's mind. I wanted more! This book lacked the grit of the sport, I actually wished it was less concise.

Elisa Gabbert is so fascinating to me because she has the most conventional opinions about literature while also writing sentances that felt stunningly vivid...duality of man! Favorite essays were on rereading and why we write.

"I think I write to think--not to find out what I think; surely I know what I already think--but to do better thinking. Staring at my laptop makes me better at thinking. Even thinking about writing makes me better at thinking. And when I'm thinking well, I can sometimes write that rare, rare sentance or paragraph that feels exactly right, only in the sense that I found the exact right sequence of words and punctuation to express my own thought--the grammar in the thought. That rightness feels so good,like sinking an unlikely shot in pool. The ball is away and apart from you, but you feel it in your body, the knowledge of causation. Never mind luck or skill or free will, you caused that effect--you're alive!"

Set around a 19 year old lesbian in a dead-end town drafting her suicide note (really all the trigger warnings on this apply), this book had a Night in the Woods vibe that hooked me.

I have never been a sports person, so I've always been into media where sports is a metaphor for something else. Beartown and Ted Lasso come to mind. But interestingly, pieces of media where sports is used to tell a story always focus on the players, not the fans. Fever Pitch is about what it's like to be a fan, and football isn't a metaphor, it's the princple organizer for Hornby's life. Seriously, this guy thinks of his entire life in terms of games: each section of this memior is an Arsenal match.

This is a book about obsession, and Horby has a good sense of humor about it. I was completely unfamiliar with british football before this, and now I know about the craze it can inspire. Read most of this on the train

Read almost exclusivley on the train. Execution did not work for me, would probably be a great screen play.

short novel, read in a day. Somehow manages to take out all the stakes of an incredibly high stakes siutation.

I stayed up until 2am reading this book. It's been a while since I've felt so compelled by a story that I've stayed up to find out what's gonna happen, and it feels so good to read like I'm back in middle school.

Atmospere is kind of a romance, it's there in the tiny subtitle "a love story" (a queer one even!), but it's not marketed as that. This book had me hooked from the beginning with my favorite plot structure of start with the opening disaster and then tell me how we get there.

While the characters absolutley needed more development (more on this later) the romance between Vanessa and Joan, two Astronauts in training at NASA in 1985, was compelling. Short novel, but the slow burn was there. Reid sells their attraction to each other, and I did understand why people like Romance so much when Vanessa tells Joan "Don't confused my admiration with patience." Yes! I can be a sucker for tropes, and Joan having to talk through Vanessa landing a spaceship while the rest of NASA listens in was so awesome.

That being said, both the characters and setting of the novel feel underdeveloped. Vanessa is a bad girl and Joan is a good girl. While I enjoyed being in Joan's head, and loved that she was an unconventional woman without shame, she was also too perfect. You could maybe say that her growth is in becoming more confrontational, but I dom't think she had seriously confidence issues to start with. There's her first serious relationship with a woman, but Joan is also a perfect girlfriend.

There's a hilarious conversation in this book where Vanessa tells Joan that she likes people who aren't perfect, because they have an edge that makes them interesting. The edge Vanessa is talking about is that Joan wants to leave a party to go read a book. Crazy!

I wish Vanessa had been butch. No f/f leads are allowed to be butch, they just have a masc vibe. On that note, no one says the word lesbian in this book. Or gay. Or queer. Or AIDS, or Stonewall, or you-get-the-point. It's 1984 and all we get are illusions towards how women can't be together. T he cold-war gets a one off mention. There are dicussions of sexism (like sexism 101!) with no mention of feminist movement that got women to NASA in the first place.

I also wanted grit in this novel, about the physical impact all the training has on a person's body (the Martian was great at this).

Okay that was so SO much complaining but I do it because I enjoyed this book and I saw the potential it had to be great.

Carl, a long island factory owner, gets kidnapped and held hostage for two days, and is unable to talk about it forthe rest of his life. If I had two words to describe this book it would be Jewish Succession.

A satirical memior about the Bechdel's life in Vermont, with a cast of friends. I thought this was the weakest book I've read from her, but Alison Bechdel's worst book is by no means bad (because it's Alison Bechdel!!). I loved the coloring and some of the scenes made me laugh out loud. If you like Bechdel, I'd still pick this up, if you don't, this will make you hate her mom, and if you've never read her I'd pick up Dykes to Watch Out For

This book has haunted me for years, and for years I have resisted. I felt no need to read a romcom between the Prince of England and the Presidents' son. But I have a friend of is really into McQuinston, and I was going to the beach, and my sister had a copy lying around. The stars had aligned.

The romance in this book is fine, though after reading a couple of these I'm starting to believe "banter" is not a concept as sexy as I thought it was. The problem is that the politics have to justify the romance, which is where shit gets truly crazy. This is fanfiction of the 2016 election, where an alternate, civil-rights lawyer, Texas Single Mom won the Presidency and went on to give her son lectures on the presidental implications of bisexuality. Democrats are saints and Republicans are the devil. Fairy tales are the implict politics of romcom, so to draft them onto US politics means writing a plot that leads to gay love turning Texas blue.

And yes I sound like a buzz kill, the romance genre has never been for me, I have skulls under my bed etc etc, but if I have to read bad dialouge it should not also be paired with bad politics!! my friend said to ignore them but politics are the plot!

A libby train read. Portraits of Alienation at a midwest college town. Every character here knows deeply what it is like to feel completely alone, making watching them connect cathartic, even when it goes horribly. Brandon Taylor, I will check out your other novels.

A poet's novel. Follows a lesbian poet in New York. Inscrutable at times, like a poem. Also brilliant and true, like a poem. Not really a plot here, and if I wasn't told otherwise I'd slot it into memior-literary-nonfiction. Will come back to this one.

I don't think romance is a genre I'm ever going to really enjoy, but this novel was fun. Bisexuals run around Europe having sex with other people that is actually about having sex with each other. I do like exes to loves, and I can be charmed by the romcom logic of Theo Flowerday, a nepo baby to famous directors and Kit lastname, who is a pastry chef in Paris. But, romcom logic lowered the stakes, and there was no one I got super attached to. Quick + Easy

I was so excited for this book, but I think being a fan of Johnston's work made this less enjoyable for me. A physical education is a memior about how Casey Johnston recovered from disordered eating and found her strength in weightlifting. When I read her lifting guide lift-off (highly reccomend!) this was revolutionary to me, but in this book, after reading so much about the benifits of lifitng, I really wanted to hear more about Johnston's personal expierence, instead of the socialist history of weightlifitng. I want to read more about the industrial gyms she worked in. The personal stuff really hit for me, and I would reccomend this book to people interested in weightlifting, as both a workout and a new way for women to think about our bodies.

A fast, forgettable read. Picked this up because I really liked I Am Okay, but maybe I've grown out of YA. There were a couple sentances I thought were gorgeous, but on the whole the characters felt surface level, and the heavy issues weren't really explore. Did feel good to finish a book in two days though!

I really liked this one, a satirical novel about a Viet Cong spy taking refuage in America with the Southern Army. Sharp and clever, even if the narrator keeps you at a distance. A novel with plot. It seems like 2025 is my year of spy novels.

Russian Doll of MFAs. MFA writer writes about MFA students expierencing alientation in New York City, nothing at all happens. Quick read.

This was on my radar for a while and I'm so glad I read it. Wanted to live in the lanugage forever. More to say later once I do a reread but this novel takes friendship seriously, like a space to be occupied, and I really enjoyed that.

I really like this! I'm definitley the kind of person who when dealing with a problem goes looking for an essay collection, and this was the only one I could find on chronic pain. What a great title. When the 1 to 10 pain scale fails you, how do you think about the problem? What's it like being in pain all the time? I think this essay collection gets it, and gave me new language to work with. The more vauge, poetic, expierental stuff didn't land as hard for me as the essays about wanting to make cupcakes, or using a cane for the first time, or screaming in the parking lot of a hospital. The collection wasn't written as a book, all of/most of them were written indepedently for publication, and that can get frustrating. The same idea gets repeated, but this is really, really good writing.

Finally finished the Slough House Series (now waiting for clown town) and I think I finally get it. This is spy Seinfeld. Nothing happens, which is a crazy thing to say about these books because a lot does happen. People die. Politicians act stupid. Etc. But nothing changes, and that did bug me. I (crazy) like character growth. But the best of these books show that this is just how it goes. It's cut off before the dramtic board meeting. These books are at their best with a fun plot that has the whole team playing, and I loved that this one had Di Tavener on the run. (Women's wrongs!) Less and Lousia were great. Claude Whealan teams up with Shirley. I mean seriously what else do you need. These books were so fun, I think Mick Herron could do this FOREVER!

Okay this one was...fine. Mick Herron is a good writer so every book in this series is a page turner. But...I did not care very much about River and Sid. I feel like real character development can't happen in these books, so the stories that focus on one character frustrate me. The mystery was...fine? Cool, I liked it. But yeah, did not feel delight

Checked out another genre I don't read often: the family epic. This one had me hooked from the first few pages. Prachett has a talent for drawing complex characters with a couple sentances. A favorite line of mine was

"My father had brought in a famous artist from Chicago on the train. As the story goes, he was supposed to paint our mother, but our mother, who hadn't been told that the painter was coming to stay in our house for two weeks, refused to sit, and so he hainted Maeve instead. When the portrait was finished and framed, my father hung it in the drawing room right across from the VanHoebeeks. Maeve liked to say that was where she learned to stare people down."

I loved the first part of this book, which is why the rest was such a disappointment. Maybe the family epic needs more pages, but I just did not see the point of this one. Maeve and Danny's bond was the center piece, but because this book covers fifty years, it misses the chance to zoom out on things. I would have loved to read a novel about Danny in college, forced to go through undergrad and medical school to train a trust. I would have read another novel about his decision to quit medical school to become a landlord, or one about his first semester at boarding school after being kickout of the house. The story keeps moving, with a small cast of characters that makes the world of the book feel small. That's fine in a childhood mansion, but this book moves to both New York City and Phildephia, and the pace made me feel like I wasn't really in those cities at all. Still, I read this in three days and stayed up until 2 finishing this novel, which means it did hook me. I just wanted to be reeled somewhere else.

The beginning of the end for me and banter...charming enough though