What books did you read in 2023?

Mine:

• Jade City (DNF - got stuck on this one for months)
• Rivers of London
• The Golden Enclaves
• Empire of Silence
• The Will of the Many
• Light Bringer
• A Witch's Guide to Fake-Dating a Demon
• Babel (DNF - garbage)
• The Eye of the World (DNF - super dull)

Overall, my book of the year was between Will of the Many and Light Bringer. Personally my preferred book was Light Bringer but I can see why some might prefer Will of the Many.

 

In more or less the order in which I read them:

• The Honorable Company - a History of the British East India Company by John Keay. Good overview, though probably missing a bunch of details. Same style as Keay's other books, which are fairly lively.
  
• Ashes of the Sun and Blood of the Chosen (Burningblade & Silvereye #1 and #2) by Django Wrexler. Everyone in these books except the male protagonist is just terminally horny. Everyone. Otherwise mediocre fantasy fare.
• Hand of the Sun King, by J.T. Greathouse. DNF.
• Scarface and the Untouchables, by Max Allan Collins. Pretty decent book on a subject about which I knew nothing. Led into the next book.
  
• Empire of Deception, by Dean Jobb. Fun story about one of America's more notable grifters, who's kind of forgotten about, unlike that loser Ponzi who couldn't pull anything of this magnitude.
• In the Shadow of Lightning, by Brian McLellan. DNF. I just can't take "glassdancers" seriously.
• The Path to Power, by Robert Caro. The first of his LBJ biography series and the work of a true, dyed in the wool hater. I didn't expect to read through a long exposition on why exactly a particular part of Texas was super fucked, but hey, that's life. Good stuff.
• Four Princes, by John Julius Norwich. Popular history of the years in which Charles V, Henry VII, Francis I and Suleiman of the Ottoman Empire were all jointly in power. As well-told as JJN's usual stuff but his biases are pretty clearly on display, as I recall.
• The Broken Room, by Peter Clines. Special agent finds himself tasked with little girl around who freaky shit has happened. The agent part is somehow the most boring part of the whole thing, though the freaky shit isn't exactly a pageturner either. Boring, wouldn't rec.
• Dead Things, Broken Souls, Hungry Ghosts, Fire Season, Ghost Money, Bottle Demon, Suicide Kings, Hate Machine, Cult Classic by Stephen Blackmoore. Urban Fantasy about a necromancer who does a lot of drugs, has a bunch of interpersonal drama, and manages to fuck up each of his problems in such a way that it leads to the next book in the series.
• Fred the Vampire Accountant #1 by Drew Hayes. It calls itself the Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred and it's not lying. Boring slice of life.
• Will of the Many, by James Islington. Good stuff, though the end wasn't great and sapped my enthusiasm for the next book.
• The Bladed Faith, The Sapphire Altar (Vagrant Gods, #1 & #2)by David Dalglish. Finished the first book but dropped the second when chapter after chapter was soap operatic drama with characters just spewing monologues at each other, or that's what it felt like.
• Magic's Mantle, by Bruce Sentar. Bad harem fantasy. Like really bad.
• The Clothes Have No Emperor, by Paul Slansky. Comedian goes through news archive month by month during the years of Reagan's grip on power and skewers the topic of the day.
• Blood and Fire, by Ryan Cahill. Went from WoT knockoff to Eragon knockoff and I dropped it.
• Hexologists, by Josiah Bancroft. Occasional polemics with which I would've agreed if not for their smug arrogance don't incline me to reading, and neither do mysteries being repeatedly dragged out only to get resolved unsatisfyingly. If the genders here were reversed this thing would get cancelled in a heartbeat.
• An Inheritance of Magic, by Benedict Jacka (the Alex Verus guy). Orphaned protagonist finds that he does have a family; family finds him a commoner with who they won't deign to interact except to have him assassinated. Meanders more than a little but not a bad read.
• Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. One of the shittiest endings I've read in years.
• Twenty Palaces #0 by Harry Conolly. I remember why I stopped reading these, mainly the frequently waffling protagonist.
• Edward I: A Great and Terrible King, by Marc Morris. Back to the history here; good book, doesn't excuse the things that Edward got up to especially wrt the Jews. I don't want books to excuse the terrible things people get up to, to be clear.
• Grimoires of London, #1, #2 & #3 by D.B. King. Self-published books by a serial Kindle publisher. AC repair guy becomes apprentice to a wizard who's Dumbledore by nurture but Hagrid by nature. Comedic, mostly; exaggerated Britishness drips off the pages. Not a bad read, though.
• Malevolent Seven, by Sebastian de Castell. Wanders around more than a little bit but more or less lands where it needs to in the end, though the fact that it ends on the title drop really blows.
• Justice of Kings, by Richard Swan. Would've been a far better read if not for the female POV character, who's treated as being the speciallest, toughest broad ever to walk the not-Roman street but who the narrative shows to be kind of a bint instead. Also regularly flashed forward to "oh if only we'd known how bad things would get!" which I don't approve of. Will be reading the sequel.
• The Petralist series by Frank Morin (#1 - #7). Book by a guy who worships at the altar of Sanderson but can't quite manage it. Far more referential, for one thing, and the fact that half of the PoVs are from a dude who only ever thinks about food is maddening. I don't know why I stuck it out to book 7 because god this series blows.
• Trysmoon Saga, #1 by Brian Fuller. Self-published and it shows. The protagonist is a bard who gets trained into a killer for shits and giggles. Ends abruptly and so did my interest in the series. Also features Elf Karate.
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson. The title is literal, the book opens with Roland Knox's ten commandments for mystery novel fair play, and the narrator talks to you directly and promises to be reliable and honest Ernest. That's all fine, but the protagonist is a useless lump of shit who's waited years to ask literally any questions, the author writes in a very annoying, very smug meta way ("in five chapters I'll kiss her and be nude") and the title's not even true. Worst of all: it's set in a ski resort that could be either American or English to my mind but is, in a stunning example of dishonesty, Australian.

 

• The Last Wish, by Andrzej Sapkowski. Quite enjoyed it, but not so much that I've felt like I want to carry on with the series.
• Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami. A short story collection - lovely writing, with a range of relationship focused (not necessarily romantic) stories. Didn't go down well at the (predominantly female) book club I go to, but I quite liked it.
• The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. Another book club read, about a woman who takes revenge on her unfaithful husband over a number of years, to basically insane levels. Morbidly enjoyable, decently written, wouldn't whole-heartedly recommend.
• The Silver Pigs, by Lindsay Davis. A reread, the first in the Falco series of detective stories - private eye books set in Ancient Rome (or, partially, Britain in this one). Well worth a read, although it's old enough now that I think some of the historical detail has been disproven.
• Shadows in Bronze, by Lindsay Davis. Sequel to the above, also a reread.
  
• The Red House Mystery, by AA Milne. The author of Winnie the Pooh does an Agatha Christie style crime story; super lightweight, but quite good fun.
• Gardens of the Moon, by Steven Erikson. First in the Malazan series, which I probably don't need to say much about at this point. Another reread.
• Deadhouse Gates - Malazan book 2. Another reread.
  
• Memories of Ice - Malazan 3, reread.
• Madness of July, by James Naughtie. A post Cold War thriller, which was pretty bad. Wouldn't have read if it hadn't been a book club pick, wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't been reading it on holiday.
• The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett. First of the Tiffany Aching books, aimed at younger readers. Another reread.
  
• A Hat Full of Sky - sequel to the above, reread.
• Sabriel and sequels, by Garth Nix. YA fantasy about necromancers that I read years ago and picked up again. Pretty good, but not classics IMO.
• All Our Hidden Gifts, by Caroline O'Donaghue. YA fantasy about a teenage girl in present day Ireland developing magic powers based around a pack of tarot cards. Another book club book; pretty readable with some interesting ideas, but not fussed about carrying on with the series.
• Pale Lights 1, by erraticerrata. Web serial by the guy who wrote Practical Guide to Evil. A decent first entry in the new series, focusing on a ragtag group trying to survive an island overrun by monsters, mad gods and cultists in a bid to join the local equivalent of the Men in Black. Book 2 is ongoing, updates every Friday.
  
• Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree. Pretty fun, lightweight read about an orc who gives up the adventuring lifestyle to open up a coffeeshop.
• Harrow the 9th, by Tamsyn Muir. Book 2 of the Locked Tomb series, sequel to Gideon the 9th. Didn't like it as much as Gideon, but still one of my favourite books of the year.
• The 100 Foot Journey, by Richard C Morais. Novel about an Indian family who move to rural France, open up a restaurant opposite a Michelin starred place, and the son's subsequent journey through the culinary world. Wasn't quite what I expected, but I liked it nonetheless.
• Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace. Essay collection, which I haven't finished yet. Some of the essay topics were hit and miss, but there aren't many people who write like he did. Needless to say, the aforementioned predominantly female book club did not care for the opening essay, of reasonable length, concerning DFW's trip to the annual porn awards.
• Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Kinda sorta reread, via the Dracula Daily site, which rearranges the story by the dates given on each diary entry or letter or whatever. Obviously a classic, and an interesting way of rereading it.
• Jamaica Inn, by Daphne du Maurier. A pretty solid read, but not as creepy or thrilling as we'd expected. Another book club read.
• Ithaca, by Claire North. The first in a series detailing the life of Odysseus' wife Penelope during his ten year trip back home. Another book club read, it got panned a bit for being yet another feminist retelling of a Greek myth, but I've not (yet) read any of the others in that genre, so can't really comment on that front. I did thoroughly enjoy it though, not that I expected anything else given North's other work - comfortably my book of the year.
• Three Moments of an Explosion, by China Mieville. A short story collection, not yet finished. Really enjoying it so far though, although I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone not already familiar with his work; it's just as wild as you'd expect from him.
• Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe, by Melissa de la Cruz. A modern retelling of...well, guess, that flips perspective and gender, so we follow Darcy Fitzwilliam, one of the youngest and most successful hedge fund managers in New York, as she slowly falls in love with Luke Bennett, a guy she hated in school. Another book club pick, I fully expected it to be shit, and I was proven right. Didn't finish.

There's a couple of other book club ones I'm forgetting, but that suggests they weren't much good. More rereads than I'd like, given my TBR pile, but hey ho.

 

Finished my 100 book reading challenge for this year literally just today.

In reverse order (and rereads in italics):

• Robinson Crusoe
• Heart of Darkness
• Five Children and It (Five Children, #1)
• The Railway Children
• Three Parts Dead (Craft Sequence, #1)
• Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1)
• This is How You Lose the Time War
• The Martian
• Adventures of Pinnochio
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• The Malevolent Seven
• The Engineer (The Last Horizon, #2)
• Mother of Learning: ARC 4
• Mother of Learning 3
• Mother of Learning 2
• Mother of Learning 1
• Gulliver's Travels
• Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1)
• The Darkest Part of the Forest
• Amongst Our Weapons (Rivers of London, #9)
• The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London, #6)
• Lies Sleeping (Rivers of London, #7)
• Broken Homes (Rivers of London, #4)
• Foxglove Summer (Rivers of London, #5)
• The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (Left-Handed Booksellers of London, #1)
• Waybound (Cradle, #12)
• Dreadgod (Cradle, #11)
• Reaper (Cradle, #10)
• Bloodline (Cradle, #9)
• Wintersteel (Cradle, #8)
• Uncrowned (Cradle, #7)
• Underlord (Cradle, #6)
• Skysworn (Cradle, #4)
• Ghostwater (Cradle, #5)
• Blackflame (Cradle, #3)
• Soulsmith (Cradle, #2)
• Unsouled (Cradle, #1)
• Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London, #3)
• Stray Cat Strut 3
• Stray Cat Strut 2
• Stray Cat Strut: A Young Lady's Journey to Becoming a Pop-Up Samurai
• The Tyrant Riot (Virtuous Sons #2)
• The Notorious Scarlett and Browne (The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, #2)
• Virtuous Sons (Virtuous Sons #1)
• Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3)
• Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)
• The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)
• The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne (The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, #1)
• The Captain (The Last Horizon, #1)
• Silmarilion
• The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)
• The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2)
• The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
• The Hobbit (The Lord of the Rings, #0)
• Snakehead (Alex Rider, #7)
• Ark Angel (Alex Rider, #6)
• Scorpia (Alex Rider, #5)
• Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain
• The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings
• Eagle Strike (Alex Rider, #4)
• Skeleton Key (Alex Rider, #3)
• Stormbreaker (Alex Rider, #1)
• Point Blank (Alex Rider, #2)
• Journey to the Center of the Earth
• A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes, #1)
• The Return of Tarzan (Tarzan, #2)
• Tarzan of the Apes (Tarzan, #1)
• The Gods of Mars (Barsoom #2)
• The Warlord of Mars (Barsoom, #3)
• A Princess of Mars (Barsoom, #1)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)
• A Christmas Carol
• Around the World in Eighty Days
• I Am Legend
• The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle, #6)
• On the Road
• Treasure Island
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1)
• Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp
• The Art of War
• The War of the Worlds
• The Farthest Shore (Earthsea Cycle, #3)
• The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Tehanu (Earthsea Cycle, #4)
• Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, #2)
• A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• The Time Machine
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London, #2)
• If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things
• The Great Gatsby
• The Invisible Man
• Grimm's Fairy Stories
• The Lighthouse
• Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)
• Troy (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #3)

Waybound, the conclusion of the Cradle series by Will Wight, was my highlight of the year.

But if I had to pick one without any influence from books I'd read beforehand, This is How You Lose the Time Way by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone caught me by surprise.

 

Roughly in order:

• The Black Company book 4-6 by Glen Cook
• The Hunger of the Gods by John Gwynne
• The Emperor's Blades by Brian Stavely (Dropped)
  
• Defiance of the Fall by J F Brink
• Ordinary Monsters by J M Miro
• Drachenfels by Kim Newman
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• An Empire of Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  
• He Who Fights with Monsters by Shirtaloon (Quick drop)
• Cradle book 10 by Will Wight
• Kingfall by David Estes (Dropped)
  
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
• Mythology of the British Isles by Geoffrey Ashe
  
• Malazan book 6 by Stephen Erikson
• Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher
• Drizzt book 1 by R.A Salvatore
• Bloodring by Faith Hunter (Very quick drop)
  
• The Primal Hunter books 1-2 by Zogarth
• Unruly by David Mitchell
  
• The Justice of KIngs by Richard Swan (in-progress)
  
  

 

Rivers of London was my big disappointment of the year. I went in expecting/hoping for "Dresden Files, only British and without the Butcherisms".

But I ended up enjoying it rather less than Dresden Files.

• Magic: very MOR-esque, "let's try to understand magic in terms of physics" type of magic. Especially annoying as this was a near miss - every other aspect of the magic system is done quite well, albeit it is probably too easy for the MC to use without any prior indication of talent.
• Bestiary: The supernatural beings lacked something essential. The sexy ones didn't feel particularly seductive. The ancient powers lacked gravitas. Partly I think this was because of the choice to base them on personification of rivers rather than any more pervasive mythology (as Dresden did) such as fairies or ancient polytheistic religions or Jewish mythology. But partly it was also a matter of presentation. The supernatural beings all have a rather mundane physical existence, living in houses within London, etc. You just turn up and knock on the door.
• London: despite being praised by critics as a book which has a detailed and loving description of London, I found it to be quite shallow. The London detail was all largely added via narrative description of the history of places, name dropping locales and events that had happened there in the past. I found this to be quite an ineffective way of giving the city character. History is too dry. The city didn't feel alive in the manner of e.g. Ankh-Morpork.
• Plot: the mystery just didn't work for me, on several levels. The first level was emotional investment. Our character stumbles upon the mystery but other than that has no real personal connection to it. Solving it is just a matter of doing his job. The second level is in the mechanics of the mystery-solving. There was no real through-line where the reader feels like one clue is leading to the next in a causal chain resulting in the answer. The clues all felt disconnected and random, just falling into the character's lap as he stumbles from one situation to another. And because of that, as a reader you never really feel like the mystery is one you can solve for yourself. Of course, in reality most mystery stories the reader has no hope of solving the mystery, because some piece of information is missing. But in the well-written ones, the reader at least feels like in theory they could, if they just had the right information: the reader is fully briefed on what the mystery is, what the clues are and what they mean, how those clues shape the deductive process, and what kind of information is needed to close the gaps. But in Rivers of London, you never have that sense.

 

Tangentially, unread books on my shelves that I hope to read in 2024:

• Gallant by V.E. Schwab
• Upgrade by Blake Crouch
• Witherward by Hannah Matthewson
• Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter
• The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
• Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio
• The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow
• Consider Phllebias by Iain Banks
• A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
• The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
• The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
• The Prior of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
• Killing Floor by Lee Child
• Dune Messiah

 

Published traditionally:

• Illborn saga
• Ashes of the Sun
  
• Murtagh
• The Will of the Many

Self-published:

• Super Supportive
• Elydes
• The Game at Carousel
• The Last Orellen
• Mother of Learning

Best book? Mother of Learning
Best book that's not a reread? The Last Orellen. Super Supportive if you had asked me a month or two earlier.

I'm disappointed by the published books I have read. Illborn saga has its high and low points. Murtagh's start had its problems, but they could be ignored. It completely messes up later.

Will of the Many? I liked most of it, but loathed the worldbuilding. A society that trades creativity and willpower for beating people up - it's a wonder they went beyond sticks and stones (

Spoiler

They didn't. They play with the stones of a prior civilization

). I find it hard to believe society can survive in any fashion with the sort of control rulers exert here.

I've started a lot of published books (not here because I barely went a chapter or two), but DNF'd most of them.

 

I had a pretty bad year for reading;

Washington by Ron Chernow, Hamilton by the same. If you enjoy reading about historical characters, rheres a reason theyre best sellers.

The Scholomance 1 and 2. Technically DNF 2 yet, but that's because real life reasons more than me disliking it and me trying to find the time to get started from the beginning again. I get the feeling it would've loved it if I read it in my harry potter years but the main character bores me nowadays. The school is the most interesting part of the setting for me.



Red Rising 1; most recent and favorite one on this list. Literally finished the book today, one of the few books that made me genuinely tear up once or twice during certain moments. I really really dislike socialist undertones in fiction, and I definitely got that sense from this but it didn't bother me; in no small part because of how hilariously up to eleven the dystopia is for low reds.

Lord of the flies and Rosencrantz and guildensternare dead are classics I finally got around to reading . Nothing to say, there's a reason theyre classics. R+G are dead made me laugh more than once, and not a nose exhale either.



I properly DNF babel, the latest dresden book, and the first Harry Flashman novel. No single reason for any. Real shame about Babel, I had a lot of people irl and online recommend it

 

ONE OF US

 

Only real book I read this year was Snow Crash. Mostly read it because I needed some inspiration for the cyberpunk 2077 fic I was working on (didn't help). It's really good, but it does kind of come off as a parody (for a genre I've never read) and the deep-diving existential metaphors with all the Sumerian nonsense fell flat with me (it's a lot of unnecessary exposition, many chapters of incremental handfeeding to explain the author's idea, and the aha! payoff is basically nothing because the reader figures it out half a book earlier) The one aspect of it that I really appreciated is how the story is 30 years old and never felt that dated to me. There's a few things here or there, but for the most part, it felt like a modern story and honestly that's impressive.

 

Prometheus Bound
The Square and the Tower - Niall Ferguson
The Shortest History of China - Linda Jaivin
NATO and Europe - Andre Beaufre
Great Founder Theory - Samo Burja
The Cradle series - Will Wright
* Unsouled
* Soulsmith
* Blackflame
* Skysworn
* Ghostwater
* Underlord
* Uncrowned
* Wintersteel
* Bloodline
* Reaper
* Dreadgod
* Waybound
Japan's Longest Day - the Pacific War Research Society
Chinese Poems - Arthur Wakey
Brocade River Poems - Xue Tao/Jeanne Larsen
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese - Kenneth Rexroth
The Jade Mountain - Kiang Kang-Hu/Witter Bynner
Three Chinese Poets - Vikram Seth
Stalin - Stephen Kotkin
All the Skills - Honour Rae
* Book 1
* Book 2
* Book 3

Probably about a thousand fanfics.

Some unspeakable number of xianxia words.

I know I'm forgetting a lot of things. I think 2024 I'll properly spreadsheet everything going forward.

 

Terrible book, not worth it. Read the wikipedia entry and you'll have about as much enjoyment. Just skip ahead to Children of Dune.

 

In no particular order for 2023. Except for Victory City, which came out in 2023, I didn't count the rereads for Rushdie for my dissertation. The rest was primarily focused on my research interests (postcolonial literature), the seminars I gave (e.g. a seminar on Oscar Wilde, after having binged his work early in 2023), and works that roused my interest in general. Some general recs down below.


Oscar Wilde – De Profundis and Other Prison Writings

Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde – The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose

Oscar Wilde – The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics)

Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities

Salman Rushdie – Victory City

E. M. Forster – A Passage to India

Ngugi wa Thiong’o – Petals of Blood

Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe – Arrow of God

Chinua Achebe – No Longer at Ease

Edward Said – Orientalism

David Lodge – Changing Places

David Lodge – Small World

David Lodge – Nice Work

Tara June Winch – The Yield

Sophocles – The Three Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone)

George Elliot – Middlemarch

Ernest Callenbach – Ecotopia

David Lodge – The Art of Fiction

Amitav Ghosh – The Great Derangement

Amitav Ghosh – The Hungry Tide

Hanif Kureishi – The Buddha of Suburbia

Philip Roth – Portnoy’s Complaint

Amitav Ghosh – River of Smoke

Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen – Northanger Abbey

Alberto Manguel – A History of Reading

Jorge Luis Borges – Fictions

Kim Stanley Robinson – Pacific Edge: Three Californias

Marge Piercy – Woman on the Edge of Time

Abdulrazak Gurnah – Paradise

Celeste Mohammed – Pleasantview

Jack Mapanje – And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night

Aravind Adiga – Amnesty

John Milton – Paradise Lost

Pankaj Mishra – Run and Hide

Amitav Ghosh – Sea of Poppies

Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’urbervilles

As for recommendations . . . I kinda giggled my way through Portnoy's Complaint. It's just deliciously filthy. Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia is also a favorite - quite a funny novel. For a good historical romp, Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy is great, it deals with the British-Chinese opium conflicts.

David Lodge feels like intellectual masturbation, since the novels are largely set within academia, English literature to be precise. They're funny, but ymmv. The in-jokes are probably more humorous if you know some literary theory and how the discipline has shaped up over the past decades.

 

Do people here have here maintain a Goodreads account? I read quite a lot, and I'm always looking for recommendations.
Feel free to add me: https://www.goodreads.com/friend/i?...hNTJhMDEtNmU2OS00MGY3LWFmMGQtZTZjODc4NzczN2Ji
I have pretty much everything I read there, even the often very shitty LitRPG I unfortunately tend to read a lot of. I mostly read fantasy/scifi/historical ficiton with a few instances of biographies or other non-fiction.

 

The Green Bone Saga (loved it- so inventive and def my favorite fantasy trilogy oat)
The Rage of Dragons & its sequel
Poppy War (DNF- its bad lol tho the first half is kinda entertaining. The Green Bone Saga deserved the hype that this shit got)
The Will of the Many
Cradle series
Licanius trilogy
The Sanderson kickstarter novels
Gardens of the Moon (DNF- dull)
Contact
The Three Body Problem
The Lies of Locke Lamora
Dune (It's amazing but I could never really get invested in the perspective of Paul Genocide)

 

@Skeletaure what were your thoughts on Jade City?

 

Impressively tedious. Everything was executed with polish except I was never given any reason to care about the characters or root for their victory.

The only storyline I cared about was the disgraced daughter returning to Hong Kong from America. But she only really had the occasional interlude chapter.

In that regard I think the story has a certain literary fiction flavour. I don’t think the author intends for us to root for the characters or project onto them. We are supposed to observe as a neutral third party and say “how interesting”. But personally I need to emotionally invest in a character to find anything they do interesting.

 

Do visual novels count? Let's say yes, cause then I can post. They're a pretty good way to learn Japanese, so years ago I've read quite a few. Then I focused on normal games more, but in late 2023 I started reading VNs again.

I wanted to begin with something light, so I went with Sorceress * Alive! ~the World's End Fallen Star~. You know all those isekai light novels or anime? I enjoy series like that, especially when the author doesn't take the whole thing too seriously. Often they're guilty pleasures, like many HP fanfics can be. This is something like that, except in VN form.
The big gimmick is that there are two halves to the story with a genre shift between them. The first half is very "template eroge", with the MC becoming a coach to a team participating in 4 vs. 4 magic fights between girls. Each of the four girls on his team gets a route. Three are extremely similar and follow the usual pattern of "solve the girl's problem" > "get together" > "the end". The remaining one is somewhat different and hints at the second half of the story.
The second half is more serious, darker, full of plot twists and the stakes get raised to the fate of the whole world. Some of the plot twists were especially well done, with great fake-outs too.
Overall I enjoyed it. Though it's not without faults, like somewhat inconsistent tone in the second half (things get serious, yet MC fools around) and pretty heavy handed infodumping (there's a moment when it seems like MC will start looking into various secrets, but then a new character pops up and just reveals everything).

Then I read Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai, which is an utsuge and extremely non-template as an eroge. In fact I was surprised how courageous the author was with the story and its endings. It's about relationships, about love and about wielding the power to twist them. And there are some truly gut-wrenching plot developments in there.
I particularly enjoyed the story's handling of brother-sister romance. The sister was an extremely strong character. Both as in well-written and in regard to what she had to do in the story .

Next I read Sakura, Moyu. -as the Night's, Reincarnation-, which is a nakige. Years ago I saw this VNDB post and got interested in reading it. And recently I finally got to it, even if it wasn't during the right season (it's very much a "spring game"). Seeing reviews and discussions about it, I had high expectation and it managed to meet them. No, actually it managed to shoot past them. I tend to think I'm mostly cold-hearted, not easily moved, but I was crying in every route here. The poster on VNDB says something similar, but it's really crazy that all four routes are really good.
To sell a VN as a full price title, at least three, ideally four or more heroines with routes are needed, so usually you end up with some routes feeling like padding. Likely because the writer/s have an initial story idea for one or two routes and then need to add more.
Not here though. There are two main and two "less main" routes and even the less main ones are extremely good. The main ones just left me in awe.
The story is about kindness and self-sacrifice, there's a very strong fairy tale-like atmosphere and the writer has a distinct style. All of this I liked. There are flaws I could name, but the overall package is too good to care.

And now I'm reading White Album 2. It's a well known kamige. You can't miss it if you look into VNs. And this winter I finally decided to read it, so I can tell you it really is as good as everyone says it is.
Unlike the other three games, there are no supernatural elements.
It's about what it is like to truly love someone. Unfortunately, for the protagonist it's not just one woman at a time.