Books, Books & Books

My 2024 reading summary

Kind of forgot to update this blog for a while, so here's how it was.

Finished Shuggie Bain on my train ride to Cambridge. I read Young Mungo (Douglas Stuart's second book) first, so I kind of read them in reverse order. You can definitely tell they may have once been part of the same writing project once upon a time, but they are definitely different.

I really struggled to engage in the first half of the book, I felt like it was bumping around a lot and I didn't feel totally involved in it, it felt like a bit of a struggle to work through, but the second half of it I really enjoyed. The differing dynamics of the family are drawn so well, all of the different relationships and how they manage things and how they are with each other were all so interesting. Shuggie growing up and becoming more active was so interesting to see. Particularly heartbreaking was Agnes's arc of recovery. It was nice to see her as fully complex, full real. You felt for her, as well as the family she was effecting around her.

This more than made up for this difficult start.

Darius the Great is not Okay is a coming of age book about Darius, a half-Persian teenage boy who takes his first trip to Iran with his family to meet and spend time with his grandfather who has been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

This book is written with so much love for Iran and Persian culture. Every description of the neighbourboods, the land, the history there, the parties, food, holidays, are all described so tenderly, you can feel the writer's love for all of it. The careful way the family is depicted is so beautiful, with all of their different facets.

The book focuses on Darius's friendship with Sohrab, which was refreshing. There's not a lot of YA (or at least I haven't come across many) where there is no romance. I did feel it was a little "love at first sight", in that the certainty they were going to be best friends was incredibly immediate, but that's probably a personal taste thing.

I also liked the focus on the relationship between Darius and his father, the way it changes throughout the book. Parental relationships are also something that tends to take a backseat in YA, so that was nice to see.

I think unfortunately reading it also cemented that my reading style has moved on from YA books in general. The story felt simplistic in a way that it took me a little while to get through because the pacing wasn't so great. But I think. Had I read this earlier, I would have loved it more.

Well. A short, fun little horror that can easily be read in one sitting. It's the story of a class of children who become lost in the woods and all die. Has some horrific images and deaths in it, is a pretty tight book, but I didn't really feel anything when I read it. I had no investment in the characters and their peril, I don't really remember any of them, and it hasn't stayed in my memory at all. Thinking back on books I read this year, this one easily slips the mind. I think I got this book from a recommendation tiktok of short horror, and yeah, it's a short horror and it's not badly written, so I guess it gets the job done.

I heard about the story of Ada Blackjack on the podcast My Favourite Murder, and this was the book that was written about Ada's experience, with the collaboration of her son. Ada was an Inupiaq woman who was hired to work as a cook and seamstress for an Arctic expedition, and became the lone survivor. She had to live by herself, teaching herself how to hunt in order to survive.

One thing in looking at the book was how badly Ada was treated the entire time. She was subjected to a lot of cruelty before, during and especially after her ordeal, she was taken advantage of and was not reimbursed fairly for her stort or her experience, and it is an incredible shame. The way different men went about trying to own and profit from her story was horrific but not at all surprising.

The book delves into more than Ada, it discusses at length the men who went with her on the expedition, and their deaths. Incredibly troubling is the slow death that came for Knight, a previously fit and healthy man who became bedridden, wasting away from scurvy. It shows a complicated view of them, and their choices for survival, the book details their highs as well as their lows, showing them as the complex multifaceted individuals they were.

Ada is an interesting figure that stands out in the world of Arctic exploration and I did enjoy reading more about her.

In exploring more horror and knowing that I like ocean themed horror, I got this book. I know the more classic one from Nick Cutter is his first book, but I was more interested in these themes.

Unfortunately I think it was great concept but not so greatly excecuted. The writing kind of lacked for me, it wasn't as tightly edited as I would have hoped: the biggest issue is that the chocolate labrador turns into a golden one and no one picked that up in editing.

Mostly the pacing for me, I feel like the whole concept would have been better as a video game. There's a lot of backwards and forwards between areas of the station, rooms that haven't been uncovered yet, and finding of diaries.

There was a real good amount of horror and dread in the descent. I liked the horror more the less explained it was. I think that tends to be how I like most of my horror.

At this point I don't know whether I'd get on with his other works, maybe we just don't line up.

I so wanted to love this book.

I ordered it as the rewards for finishing my essay, and when I got to it, it immediately lost a star off the rating because it had an incredibly awkward dump of information about the renaissance which was only there to inform the reader about the situation in, and it was. Tough. I immediately skipped it, and it really did pull me out of the story. I dont really like being lectured at, and if it was important information, at least come up with a more creative way than a character just doing a verbal essay on the basics. I wouldn't even say that any of the information was necessary. I did not find myself missing it.

From there it didn't really get better. I didn't find the characters particularly engaging. They were very one note. Lavelle was just irritating. The brother was stuck up. I thought the plot was going to be more about uncovering their mother's history but it was just 1 note and then we're done with that.

And then again, Lavelle's backstory was just monologued. I ultimately didn't really care about any of the characters, and I just kind of ended it with an indifferent shrug.

It felt like a less successful, obviously less magical version of the Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue.

I bought this book as soon as Laika announced it as their next movie, it's still over a year away from coming out but I like to be prepared.

I don't know quite what I was expecting when I came to this. I guess a fun fantastical middle grade book about a magical woodland world. What I know I wasn't expecting was quite a complicated discussion of colonialism and social injustice, along with the flat out amount of brutality and death within it. I also wasn't expecting to love it.

Wildwood is about a girl, Prue, who is forced into the Impassable Woodland after her baby brother is abducted by crows. Her and her companion Curtis get drawn into the politics of Wildwood and the systems working to overthrow each other from within.

It's quite a long book, and it's quite meandering in it's tale. Some parts were quite long, others surprisingly short. But the story continued to surprise and intrigue me throughout as I continued in. I found a lot of it quite thought provoking. I was very shocked by the amount of just straight up murder that occurs within it.

I would recommend it as an interesting read, and all throughout I could imagine what a beautiful Laika movie it's going to make.

I really did want to love this book. It has all of the things that I love: the arctic, horror, and queer vibes.

But I struggled to connect with the story very deeply. The sections are all very short, and they are sectioned off from each other in a format choice that made me feel like I was jumping around a lot, it also kind of felt at points that we were jumping over the actual interesting points to the aftermath. It left me struggling to connect very deeply with the stories.

I also felt like the side plots weren't given enough depth. For example, the Leviathan subplot felt like it disappeared partway through and then was somewhat wrapped up by the end. Also there were a Lot of characters to be aware of, and it is quite hard to keep track of them all and all of their back stories.

The characterisation of Day was great though, I really enjoyed him. Not enough main characters are useless, emotionally broken incredibly repressed middle aged men. Also I don't know if I was reading into it but it felt like he had sexual chemistry with like 90% of the men in the book. I feel like that was just a part of how deeply repressed he was. And the slow pulling back of Stevens' character built very well.

I do wish it was more streamlined or more even in the details for all of the subplots. I think it teetered on the edge of leaving things to the reader's imagination and just not giving enough information, and for a few points it tipped over.

A little bit of a backlog for my reviews, I finished this book back in February.

I picked this book up after a recommendation on a podcast, I think. And overall I think the book was okay. It wasn't bad, but I don't think it ever moved me, either.

Before the Fall is about an ordinary man who finds himself one of two survivors of a plane crash into the ocean, and finds himself at once a kind of celebrity, a hero for saving the only other survivor, a four year old boy. But it isn't long before people begin to ask the questions: why was he on the plane to begin with, and what exactly caused the plane crash?

So yeah. It was okay. Scott as a main character kind of felt very beige. I genuinely had to look up his name to remember it because I could not recall it on my own. And the mystery of why the plane went down, I kind of knew what it was by like, page 200 but it's "revealed" on the final pages and I was kinda like "Yeah, thought so." I know not all plots are meant to be twist endings but it felt like that was what the writer wanted to build to, and there was just one scene which felt out of place and really clues you in to the real culprit.

A big portion of the book is about Bill who is a right wing news anchor who takes it upon himself to be the avenging angel of his boss who died in the crash, and asks these conspiracy theories of why and how the plane went down, pointing all sorts of fingers and he is about as crooked as he sounds. And that was a big frustrating point to me. He's a right wing news anchor and he might be tapping phone lines, I already know he's not good, but I wanted more dimensionality to him. I wanted him to have Some kind of complexity for the amount of the book we spend hanging out with him and he just didn't. Like even scenes where he's with his godson it's clear he's trying to muscle in to get some kind of story, when these could have been gentler moments that showed his humanity. For him to just be. Exactly what you think he is. It kind of meant he just didn't change and I didn't know why we spent so much time with him.

That being said, I liked the sections of the book that showed you the history of the characters who died, up until the point they get on that plane.

But then there's a lot of the book that is like, long monologues about media and how its an invasion of privacy ect ect which just felt very self indulgent of the writer.

So yeah, well written, but the characters were very static.

For Reasons not specified I found myself at a bus stop in Richmond at like 1:30am in mid February which was a pretty good place to finish The Left Hand of Darkness.

I found this book very slow to get through, not in an unenjoyable way, but it just felt like I had to take my time with it, reading a bit of it at a time. I enjoyed the world it set up, and I enjoyed Genly's movement through it, and how he analysed the people he found himself with. I also enjoyed Estraven's point of view chapters where you could kind of make sense of Genly in the context of the world as well.

Obviously the high point of the book is Genly and Estraven's walk through the ice together. It really developed their characters and their relationship and this sense of sadness in the looking back from Genly. It was very tender, their interactions together.

I'm still kind of getting used to reading science fiction, I struggly sometimes to fully embrace the world to begin with, but I think I will be reading more of Ursula Le Guin

Little bit of catch up for my reviewing.

I read this book around this time last month, I got it because I put it on my gift list but I do not remember where I got the recommendation for it from. It feels like it just showed up.

And it was a very odd little book, about a woman who takes a sudden holiday from her life, waiting to meet a man she knows she's going to meet but doesn't know who he is. You become aware fairly early on this woman ends up being murdered.

It's a strange book and like the title, you wonder who is really in the driver's seat for the whole time.

It has made me more curious in picking up more work by Muriel Spark, it was strange and distinctive and a very unique style, and I'm interested to see if it is so throughout the rest of her books.