i hated reading logs as a kid.
They made me write down the book I read, which pages, when I read it, what genre it was (d-y-s-t-o-p-i-a). Then when they let me leve elementary school I was put on Goodreads, where you write reviews and put shiny stars to try to measure the inscrutable nature of literature. Boring! Anyway, I love to read, I hate writing book reviews. I do use stars here, sometimes. For my purposes, anything above 3 compelled me enough to finish the book, 4 means well written, and five is great. Five means I thought about the book for a while. Some don't have ratings. Highlighted in dark blue are my favorites. Go to the library and pick something up.
2025
January
Joe Country
London Rules
This was so much fun. Might be my favorite, but that might be because the show hasn't gotten this far and I was finally in the dark about the plot. I love Roddy's delusions, I love how River thinks about his father twice in the whole book and all he thinks is "the next time I see him I'll kill him". Shirley and Coe were highlights, Coe espically. Emma Flyte and the slow horses is fantastic. I loved how both River and Louisa are both certain that "the only sane person in this office are me and my bestfriend. definitley me." (which is true for Louisa but not River). Fun and sharp as always.
2024
I read 38 books in 2024. Looking back over the list it's cool to see the range of picks. I read some great stuff this year. I'd say top 5 are Close to the Knives, American Pastoral, Written on the Body, Say Nothing, and Lucky Jim. I abandoned a lot - the black hole of this list in the summer came from the weeks where I was finishing nothing. Graveyard includes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Bonfire of the Vanities (would read more Wolfe, this is just not my thing), Foreskin's Lament and unnamed others. Coming back to the site, I decided to write some reviews. It's not something I feel super confident at, espically since I like most of these books, and I'm much better at articulating why I hate something than why I love it. The truth is, "it's so interesting!" means nothing. Got impatient and didn't finish the list, but expect more reviews this year.
December
Slow Horses + Dead Lions + Real Tigers + Spook Street by Mick Herron
Grouping these 4 together because they're a series and also because I read them all in the span of 4 weeks (Joe Country is sitting on my desk but I'm trying to savor it - about 9 months until Slow Horses s5 drops). Read after watching the series, and oh man, are these fun. Speies who suck at their jobs is SUCH a good premise, and it is always nice to read good genre fiction after living in literary fiction for months. Herron is so good at snarky dialouge - so many lines in the show are directly quoted from the book. The satire of the series shines harder in these books - I love how Herron digs into the ineffiency of burocracy.
Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe
Read this in 3 days, one of my favorite books of the year. A merticously researched account of the Troubles, framed through the murder of Jean McConville. Less interested in the question of "Was the IRA good or bad?" and more interested in investigating what drives people to violence and what the long term effects of that violence are. 100 pages of this book are notes but it reads like novel.
Novemeber
Black Wave - Michelle Tea
Weird and strange and kind of tender. Focuses on 1990's lesbians in San Fransisco and also the apocolypse. I liked that the climate crisis that leads to the end of the world didn't lead to total socitial shut down, but rather our main character, Michelle (it's just occuring to me now that this book could be autofiction) holing up in the book shelf she works out. Funny and orginial. Sometimes you just have to move.
Two of Three Things I know for Sure - Dorthy Allison
90 page memior. I liked this one a lot (okay, yes, "liked it" means virtually nothing, but I'm coming up short on things to say). 90 pages. Would like to read her novel
October
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Adams
I love this book. Ok - I love just about any book about disillusionment in academia, but this was spectaularly fun. Our main character, Jim, is a pretty normal guy, who hates his job. To me this book was a love letter to being a hater. It's hilarious, and biting, and really goes into what the long lasting effect of boredom can do to a man (man, yeah, you really have to get over how the women are written in this book). The small things can kill, and as Jim as told at the end of the novel, "You don't have the qualifications, but you don't have the disqualifications either". You can really root for the main character, even though his situation is hardly pitable - job teaching history, etc, because of how everyone else in this novel acts.
September
Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner
Basically a book about a woman spy inflitrating a leftist commune with neolithic influences that is essentially a book about nothing. I liked this at the time - Kushner is a good writer, but writing this is December I haven't thought about this book since I read it.
Picked this up in September after reading Olivia Laing's essay on Wojarnowicz in The Lonely City. What struck me most about this book is how awake Wojarowicz was. His rage is focused. You can read the statistics about loss during the AIDS crisis, about the failure of the US government to do something about it, and then you can read the passages of this book, where Wojarnowicz photographed his best friend's body, Peter Hujar, after he died. You can read about what Wojarnowicz thought as was dying - "IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA." I've never read anything like this - the essays are sharp and vivid and like nothing you've ever read before. Essential to the queer canon
Close to the Knives: A Memior of Disintegration - David Wojnarowicz
Those who leave and those who stay - Elena Ferrante
I tore through this one, because again, Ferrante is great at getting me into her characters heads. I hated every decision they made, but I could not put it down. The protagonists are full adults now, both married with kids, and the middle age marital problems started to lose me - espically since Lila and Elena pass around the same guy. Might pick the 4th up later.
A Story of a New Name - Elena Ferrante
This was my favorite out of the quartet (though I only read the first three.) It was great to read about Lila and Elena as girls, but reading about them as teenagers kept me up into the night. As a young adult, I am always hungry to figure out how other people go through it. What I loved about this one is how Elena, the narrator and only one of the girls to go to Unviersity, struggles with growing up politically and intellectually. Reading about the politics of Naples was interesting, and I really loved the depth of thought Ferrante gives her female characters.
August
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
Had to read this one after it got the number one spot on the NYT Best Books of the 21st Century, possibly the most presumptous list in the world. I thought this list book was good, but it didn't cross into great for me. I think the century could do better, but wow, is Elena Ferrante great at getting into the heads of her characters. Worth the read.
Into the Woods - Tana French
Pass!! The mystery was interesting but left open-ended, which sometimems works, but when paired with the main characters hooking up ("Men and women can never be friends!") and ending with the female detective marrying a side character out of nowhere, this didn't work for me.
In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machando
An expiremental memior about domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship. I flew through this when I had broncitious. Machando writes in a way that makes the time fly, and I really liked how she told this story through different lenses - the choose your own adventure angle was my favorite.
Transit - Rachel Cusk
A writer tries to rennovate her apartment. Don't remember much from this one. Nothing happens in Cusk's novels. You just stick around for a piercing level of anaylsis at human behavior told through conversations that still manage to sound like things people would say.
July
The Lonely City - Olivia Laing
Read this book while I was feeling hopelessly alone, and it did help. Looks the problem in the eye by looking at the lives of lonely artists. Introduced me to Wojarnowicz. Would have appricated a more personal touch - I wanted to see how the writer approached the problem in her life, but the topic was left for the concluding paragraphs.
May
Eleanor Oliphant is perflectly fine 3/5
Do not like in the December retrospect.
1984 - George Orwell 4/5
Suprisingly did not have to read this in high school, though I tried to and quit because I hated Winston. Orwell writes novels like an essayist, but he is a very good essayist, so I think this works (works, she says, about one of the most famous books of the 21st century). Was motivated to read this after reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it he asserts that's Huxley's dystopia - where our addiction to pleasure and distraction stops us from rebellion more relevant than Orwell's. I agree with this, but this book still feels relevant. This a novel that shows the full force of the state.
Birnam Wood - Elizabeth Catton 4/5
A better enviormental thriller than Creation Lake. The plotting on this gets implausible at the end but it's a lot of fun. A question a character poses that stuck with me - "Would you rather be forced to say I'm sorry or thank you?" I would agree with Shelly on the answer: being forced to say thank you is worse.
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
APRIL
Outline - Rachel Cusk 4/5
The Searcher - Tara French 2/5
Ulysses - James Joyce (ask me my thoughts about this book and I run)
Okay here are my thoughts on this book.
MARCH
Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson 4/5
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter - Simone de Beauvoir 5/5
We Had to Remove This Post - Hanna Bervoets 3/5
A book about a woman running content moderation for a social media company. Short, disturbing, and forgettable.
The Hunter - Tana French 4/5
I'm a sucker for the atmosphere of heat - the tension, the lack of relief, the haze it creates. Tana French zones in on this perfectly. This book also has a found-family dynamic I liked, so hook, line, and sinker.
Another Country - James Baldwin
I think this is the best Baldwin novel I have ever read (out of Beele street, Giovanni's room, The Fire Next Time , and half of Tell it to the Mountain). It is also the Baldwin essay that made me the most angry, probably because this book has the largest focus on female characters. I don't think Baldwin is good at writing women - their lives revole around men, and their acts of agency are limited to deciding which man to sleep with. The books strongest female character, Ida, the only woman artist, is given a cheating plotline that I really wanted to be a lie, but it was true. It's a testament to Baldwin's writing that despite all of those flaws, this is still one of the greatest novels I've ever written. James Baldwin can write about the human-condition like no one else. He's at his best when he's writing about race, sexuality and the resulting feelings of alienation. This book is the longest one I've read, with the biggest cast of characters, set in the Village and Harlem.
American Pastoral - Philip Roth 5/5
What surprised me about this book is how I went from hating the first 70 pages (I do not care about this high school reunion Mr. Roth!) and then went to staying up until 2am reading it. Focusing on the story of an all american jewish father whose daughter bomb's a post-office and then disappears, this novel as some of the most hard hitting paragraph's I've ever read. If you can get over the scene where Swede kisses his daughter, Roth's decpition of interpersonal relationships is unmatched. I do think they should have given him some kind of Nobel Prize for this book, espically since he wanted it so bad (or maybe that's the reason he was denied...)
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Why be happy when you could be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson?
FEBUARY
To be taught, if fortunate - Becky Chambers 3.5/4
Marytr! - Kaveh Akbar 4/5
JANUARY
Don't Look at Me Like That - Diana Athill 3/5
Stay True - Hua Hsu 4/5