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Book Log

Book Title Author Date Notes
Throne of Jade (Temeraire 2) Naomi Novik Apr 2026 Has a bit of 'second book of a slightly unexpected series' syndrome, spending a lot of time to get not necessarily anywhere. Climax comes out of nowhere. Learning about China's draconic integration was fun. The ship journey around Africa was fun (especially the surprise sea serpent and Temeraire's feelings about wild dragons). The political machinations in China... meh. I still like the characters, but this book has a lot less of the characters I love, and a lot more of pointless meandering through China. I'm hoping the next book returns to deeper character arcs for Laurence, Temeraire, and a few of the surrounding characters; everyone in this book was a shade too wooden for me.
His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire 1) Naomi Novik Apr 2026 It is what it says on the can: the Napoleonic Wars, but with dragons. Naomi even makes a strong effort to write character speech with some period correctness. The main character, Laurence, has plenty of internal dialog and struggles that is clearly backed by solid historical research, from his family relationships, to the politics of the time, to the experience of running a Navy ship during that era. If you enjoyed the Dragonriders of Pern series, this has similar depth for dragon subspecies and abilities. The main characters, Laurence and Temeraire, are wholesome and lovable, despite some flaws and growth throughout the book. There are a surprising variety of side characters, some you'll hate, some you'll love, all with more depth than I expected. Gaining an understanding of the dragonriding Corps through Laurence's experienced Naval eyes is a real treat. And the plot keeps the pages turning. Strong recommend, as long as you can deal with somewhat-period-specific dialog (think: outer chapter of Cloud Atlas)!
The Honeys Ryan La Sala Apr 2026 Reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History; a youth peels away layers of mystery surrounding a cultlike upper-crust community. The first 80% of this book had it all: a compelling mystery, a detailed, even attractive setting, several complex (but likeable) characters, non-token queer representation, good growth for our protagonist, and just enough magical realism to keep things interesting. The last 20% of the book tried to do too much: substantial late-in-the-game worldbuilding, Scooby Doo Evil-for-Evil's-Sake villains, Mary Sue protagonist plot armor, magical realism abilities with far too much power, and a far too neat ending given the roundabout storytelling of the rest of the book. Still a good read, but I wish the editor had chopped the last 20% off and asked Ryan to write a sequel instead. Recommended. Minor spoilers: I wish Ryan had done more with the 'splinter hive', and less with the 'deep state overclass', because the adults are absolutely the weakest part of this story, and the three lead Honeys are the most compelling part of it. A good editor would have nixed the entire 'drone' part of the story for being a little too messy and overpowered. And for goodness sake, flesh out at least a couple of other female characters if you're going to kill so many throughout the story!
Klara and the Sun Kazuo Ishiguro Apr 2026 recommended for those who enjoy a slow, character-driven story; see review
The Magician's Nephew Clive Staples Lewis Apr 2026 Incredibly short, given the space this occupies on my childhood memory. But Polly, Digory, the Witch, and even the Uncle have far more depth than I expected in this short read. Polly and Digory have such a rich and relatable relationship, I really wish we'd gotten more of their lives together. Fledge is the real hero of the story.
The Return of the King John Ronald Reuel Tokein Mar 2026 I even enjoyed the Scourging of the Shire this time around. Sam and Frodo's chapters sailed by. The defeat of the Witch-King and the sheer despair and dread of the initial assault on Minas Tirith were far better than I remembered. But the Paths of the Dead and the assault on the Black Gate were far more brief than I remembered.
Heartwood Amity Gaige Mar 2026 This book claims to be a thriller and a mystery. But it's mostly actually about mother-daughter relationships. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic. The best character, Lieutenant Bev, is basically the police chief from Fargo, but a game warden in Maine. Every man in this book is a giant piece of shit (except Santo, a massive cliche stereotype), and most of them are mentally ill or conspiracy theorists. Everyone is racist and sexist, except our Heroic Protagonists who are So Much Smarter and Kinder and More Loving and Deep than everyone else. The conclusion to the core mystery of the book is rushed almost as much as the conclusion to Bev's internal conflict. The best part about this book? It's short, so you'll only waste a few hours of your life reading it.
The Two Towers John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Feb 2026 The Faramir and Isengard sections really carry this book. I thought Frodo and Sam's journey would be a slog, but it turned out to be my favorite part of the book. Helm's Deep took me longer than expected to get through, though I did chuckle quite a bit at the Gimli/Legolas bromance, which is even more endearing than it is in the movies. Even Gandalf tosses a joke out there about how Gimli won't shut up about the Glittering Caves!
The Fellowship of the Ring John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Feb 2026 Even better than I remembered.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Mary Ann Schaffer & Annie Barrows Feb 2026 A cute story, full of literary and cultural references, told through a series of letters (aka an epistolary). While most of the book is fun and even a bit silly, the author doesn't shy away from the cruelties of World War II. But somehow it all works together. A quick and fun read that makes me want to visit Guernsey.
The Hobbit John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Feb 2026 My favorite book.
Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky Jan 2026 An original science fiction concept; ultimately, it questions how special humans truly are, and whether we deserve the luck that's earned us sentience and intelligence. Written as a two intersecting stories, one following the dregs of humanity searching for a new planet to call home, the other following the rise of a planet's worth of arthropod civilizations due to a science experiment gone wrong. The human half of the story is classic sci-fi, with mostly flat, mostly male characters, plenty of high sci-fi concepts like human-brain uploads, long term thinking onboard a generation ship, our main character being The Only Sane Person Who Questions Authority (But Never Gets Offed). The arthropod half repeatedly follows historic spiders, often called Portia, Bianca, and Fabian, as spiders gain sentience, intelligence, and ultimately develop a spacefaring civilization. At the end of the story, those stories intersect as both factions vie over a single habitable planet. The arthropod half tends to get bogged down in a lot of justifications for spider advancements -- be prepared to read a lot about programming ant colonies and spider politics. A thought-provoking science-fiction tale, with a few imperfections, but largely worth your time. Contains a few odd phrases that seem like either artistic license or genuine word misuse, like "louring face", "slanging match", "look just like pique but he's got a reason". Or maybe my version contains unfixed typos?
The Neverending Story Michael Ende Jan 2026 recommended; see review
The Snow Child Eowyn Ivey Jan 2026 A fairy tale plot stretched into a 388 page book. Ending is awfully depressing, even if Eowyn tries to spin it as hopeful/circle-of-life/bittersweet. I didn't find the main characters, Mabel and Jack, endearing whatsoever; Mabel is dreary and depressing and constantly thinking back to a 'time when her womb brimmed with life' or something like that. Jack has literally zero personality besides being a grumpy old achey man who isn't that capable. Side characters are a little less depressing, if still deeply one dimensional (a shopkeep! a farmer! a farmer's wife who's mildly feminist and empowered for the 1920s! their rambunctious children!). When half of the plot relies on the protagonists being dumb (farming in Alaska when you don't know how to hunt or know even the faintest wink of outdoor survival skills?), it's hard to keep my interest. Skip the first two parts, since the first two paragraphs of part 3 do a fine job summarizing the incredibly thin plot that Eowyn padded 200+ pages with. Or better yet, skip part 3 because it's depressing and pointless. Read this book if you want to experience the 'vibe' of incompetent depressed people occasionally getting excited by snow in Alaska. Tedious, full of literary cliches (good lord what is an 'icy egg', Eowyn?), with occasional beautiful imagery. Awkward hybrid of magical realism and real-world explanations for the Snow Child herself.
A Wrinkle in Time Madeleine L'Engle Jan 2026 A weird, fun, if simplistic, science fantasy tale for children and young adults. Weird, in an imaginative sense: viewing the Black Thing from a mountaintop on Uriel while sipping oxygen from flowers, the sheer personality of the Happy Medium, the sprawling uniformity of Camezotz. Fun, because the plot moves pretty quickly, so even if a passage doesn't totally capture you, you won't get stuck with it for too long. Simplistic, in that the main characters (Charles, Calvin, and Meg) are shallow tropes with no personality and next to no character development: Charles is a Mary Sue (until he isn't), Calvin is 90% useless (but supposedly good at communicating? and very popular and good at sports but secretly a nerdy weirdo who quickly decides the Murrys are his true family because his mom is mean and (literally) toothless)), and Meg is a normal, slightly unhinged, unusually good at science and math, child. Supporting cast, including the quite famous Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Which, and Mrs Who, are curious, but also poorly developed (and subject to both power creep and bizarre, unexplained power limitations -- why, for instance, can they tesserect right past the Black Thing, but not actually do anything meaningful on Camezotz, until they eventually save Charles at Meg in the finale?). Plotwise, very little happens, despite our protagonists planet-hopping for 2/3 of the book: they save Mr Murry, recover, then Meg returns to save Charles. Lots of questions go unanswered: why can Mr Murry tesserect at all, particularly on Camezotz, and why do the glasses help him? Why do Meg and Charles get saved from IT at the end, but the 3 Mrs couldn't simply save Mr Murry themselves? Why is Charles, a 5 year old, smarter, more intuitive, and capable of reasoning beyond the capabilities of all adult humans? A neat concept, and I can certainly understand why it captured (and continues to capture) the hearts and minds of kids all over the world. But as an adult, this book left me with more questions than answers. May continue the Time Quintet simply to get answers.
Cloud Atlas David Mitchell Dec 2025 6 novellas, spanning hundreds of years, each separated into two halves, except for the innermost story. The ultimate takeaway about doing what's right even if you know it might not work out in the short term or even in your lifespan is something I try to live by every day. The first story about Adam Ewing starts a bit slow and hardly does justice to the rest of the novel, though on re-read I very much enjoy the story of Adam and Atua. Push your way through to the Frobisher story, which IMO is where Cloud Atlas turns into a genuine page-turner. The innermost stories about Sonmi-451 (Bradbury reference?) and Zach'ry are my personal favorites, but I think Cavendish and Luisa are incredibly fun reads as well. I remain impressed that Mitchell manages to write 6 different stories with 6 different voices, 6 different settings, 6 (sometimes wildly!) different dialects of english, but you can still detect that deep down some of these characters are the same soul. A beautiful and unique book, and one that frequently has me exclaiming "Cloud Atlas already did it!" like the South Park joke whenever books feature overlapping stories. Worth your time if you enjoy connected story collections, science fiction, speculative fiction, historical fiction, linguistics, and the evolution of language.
North Woods Daniel Mason Dec 2025 A surprising number of books can be described as "Cloud Atlas, but worse" (Sea of Tranquility, looking at you). This doesn't necessarily mean the book is bad. But it does mean that the central gimmick of interconnected stories doesn't impress me as much as it might impress people who haven't read Cloud Atlas. As a resident of the North Woods, I appreciated a lot of things about this book. The prose is high quality. The characters are compelling (if sometimes a bit too simplistic). Generally, the stories and characters get better as the book goes on; the first couple of chapters are a slog, but the final chapter left me wanting more. Some of the stories are a bit silly (True Crime!, anyone?), but I appreciate the easter eggs and connections between all of the different characters. It's fun to see a single setting evolve over the years, until the very end, where things get a bit... bleak. But also hopeful, I guess. Overall a recommended read, if you can slog your way through the sometimes-opaque chapters that cover: an astonishingly lucky young couple roughing it in the woods; an 'apple man' (not a man made out of apples, but instead a man inflicted with pomomania); a young colonist abducted by natives. Like many writers, a good editor could cut 50% of this book, particularly some of the more indulgent bits like the apple man and the ending.
The Path to Power Robert Caro 2025 Exposes the state of politics and democracy in the USA in the 20th century like no other book. This is the first book I've read that makes me critical of The Power Broker in any substantial way: after all, if Caro could write this many books about LBJ, why couldn't he write at least one more about Robert Moses? My favorite parts are the bits that expose LBJ's less-than-accurate romantic stories about dating as a youth, his time working in Washington before he joined Congress, and of course his first (failed!) Senatorial run. I'd very happily take a college course on this book.
Intermezzo Sally Rooney 2025 Sally Rooney writes characters and dialog (internal and external) like nobody else. I'm not always in the mood for her style, but when I'm feeling introspective, it absolutely hits. This book focuses on the relationship between two brothers and their significant others, in the year or so after their dad passes away. Fortunately I haven't lost any immediate family members in my life, so the grief bits don't resonate as much as they might for other people. But the interpersonal love-conflict between brothers is astonishingly accurate, impressively so for Sally, who has never had the firsthand experience of brotherhood. Every male author who fails the Bechdel Test and botches female perspectives should be ashamed, because Sally proves it is entirely possible to write the opposite gender in a believable and powerful way. As is typical for Sally, there's a lot of sex, so be warned. Somewhat unusually for Sally, after the first couple of chapters, the sex isn't particularly important for character or relationship building. If you haven't read any Sally before, I would describe her as "Literary soap opera with minimal plot, top-tier characters, and non-gratuitous (but often quite graphic) sex scenes."
The First Witch of Boston Andrea Catalano 2025 A hilarious psychological experiment: what if someone wrote a bunch of bodice-ripping ahistorical smut, renamed all of the characters after actual historical people, then pitched the book as a 'historical fiction' novel? You might convince some book clubs to commit to reading it before they knew any better. Cardboard cutout characters. Dialog rife with contractions and other non-1600s speech patterns, not even consistently lazy old-timey. A disturbing amount of rapes for a smut book. Oh, and the smut isn't even that juicy: for an author who claims to be writing about the non-Puritan, feminist, sexually empowered Boston settlers of the 1600s, you'd think the dozens of sex scenes would at least experiment with something besides missionary position and oral sex. Where is the creativity? 0/10 would recommend only for a book club that intentionally reads bad books to make fun of them. You have been warned.
The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson 2025 recommended; see review
Cryptonomicon Neal Stephenson 2025 recommended; see review
Anathem Neal Stephenson 2025 recommended; see review
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Robert Heinlein 2025 recommended; see review
Artemis Andy Weir 2025 Ever wonder why every popular Andy Weir novel features a male narrator isolated from all other humans? This book explains it. Every character talks and thinks exactly like Andy Weir. Everyone is weirdly horny for the main character/narrator (including the narrator herself?). Everyone is a meme (have you ever actually heard someone say 'barkeep' to a bartender in reality?). The plot makes no sense, until it makes un-sense, until it stops being a plot and eventually evolves into a Reason for Every Side Character to Help the Main Character. The science fiction worldbuilding is mostly fun. The action sequences are impossible to follow. Andy knows how to build a world and talk about every nerdy facet of a science-y plot device. Andy does not know how to build interpersonal relationships, develop characters, write convincing dialog, or get inside the head of anybody but a middle aged nerdy guy. Because obviously young people in 100 years, living on the moon, will still like the same shit a middle aged nerdy guy likes today (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Star Trek). As a nerdy guy, the humor mostly lands. But I'm not sure most people want to spend this much time in Andy Weir's head. Please, Andy, never try to write a female character or flirty dialog again.
Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It Daniel Knowles 2025 More than just a reiteration of ideas I've already heard. Knowles' international life experience as a reporter for The Economist in Africa, India, and the USA combine with his upbringing in the UK for an unusually nuanced perspective of car-dependence. Knowles has experienced many countries in various stages of car-dependence, from the moderately car-dependent UK to the recently-ruined-by-cars Indian coast to the decomposing car-dependent empire of the American Midwest. At his worst, you can see his passion for walkability and bikeability shine through. At his best, he brings a fresh perspective to a very old problem. At this point it seems unlikely that any country will escape the Car Trap, but it's refreshing to read about the isolated experiments that have gone well, like Low Traffic Neighborhoods in the UK, congestion pricing, and Paris' bike transformation. We can only hope that developing countries will learn from our mistakes.
Antimatter Blues Edward Ashton 2025 Mickey 7, but more. If you want more chapters of the first book, this is great. Unfortunately, this book does little to expand the universe or deepen the existing characters. If anything, this book doubles down on some of the worst attributes of Mickey 7 -- shallow side characters, shallow story, blink-and-you'll-miss-it plotting. I'd love to learn more about supporting characters Berto and Cat and Nasha, and develop side characters like Marshall beyond cliches. I'd love to learn more about our alien friends. But most of all, I utterly refuse to believe that our main character just ignored aliens on this planet for 2 years in between books. Seriously, Mickey has insane object permanence issues -- and he might be a psychopath. He claims he'd let everyone else in the colony die to save Nasha (not particularly charming, just scary). But when Nasha is injured towards the end of the book, he completely forgets about her. He nearly sentences Berto to death repeatedly, concluding that his (former?) best friend is plenty capable of taking care of himself and scaling a 500 meter rock wall without any safety equipment, despite having no climbing experience. And for some reason the head of the expedition (who passionately hates Mickey, considering him subhuman for religious reasons) trusts Mickey with a mission to save the entire colony. Oh, and during the climax of the book -- a showdown between two alien factions and our plucky human settlers -- Mickey seems entirely prepared to sentence his supposed ally aliens to death and all of the human settlers, until he's saved by an eleventh-hour plot development. In Mickey 7, our protagonist was dumb, but charming. In this book, he's a complete nincompoop, a bad friend, and a psychopath.
Mickey 7 Edward Ashton 2025 A fun sci-fi tale with just enough philosophy, good enough characters, and enough 'hard' science concepts to keep me turning page after page. One of my quickest reads of the year. Funny as hell, but with heart and soul. I guess this is Scrubs: the book?
Shadow of the Torturer Gene Wolfe 2025 Flat characters. Imaginative, but incredibly sparse setting. Incredibly misogynistic view of women. Literally none of the women are characters. We get no sense of individual perspective or thought, just boobs bouncing boobily and lots of internal dialogue explanations about how they're different (and worse) than men. I understand that Severian has a problematic worldview, but Christ, Gene. This was the 80s, not the 60s!
Even worse, most of the action in the book (whether it's a fight, a... car chase?, or a play, or a breakfast) is described in a deeply fragmented way that's difficult to follow. Typically action starts right in the middle of the protagonist postulating about something important to the overall plot of Book of the New Sun. I'll try the next book, but so far I'm not impressed. Enough people seem to like this series that I can't dismiss it entirely, but jeez, this just does not feel like good writing to me yet.
Oh, and did I mention that every woman falls in love with the protagonist within 12 hours of meeting him, and their clothes literally just keep falling off of their bodies?
The first third was great worldbuilding, but the flimsy characters and setting were barely enough to keep me interested for the rest of the book.
Blindsight (complete series) Peter Watts 2025 Full of creativity and brilliant ideas. Also has a few not-so-brilliant ideas (I'm still not sure Watts did enough to sell me on the 'vampire' plot device, or maybe I'm just thick). Either I'm too dumb to comprehend it or Watts rushed the hell out of the last quarter of this book. The conclusion the characters come to seems a little too neat and clean (I'm not convinced that the rest of the universe is guaranteed to be like these aliens, surely there are some other backwater sentient meat computers like ourselves?), but is ultimately a novel idea I haven't seen in much sci-fi. Read this for the ideas, not the plot. Oddly, the first couple of chapters had me expecting characterization to be a strength... that did not pan out, and upon reflection, may have ultimately led to the weak final quarter.
The Books of Earthsea (complete series) Ursula Le Guin 2024 Starts as a very simplistic fairy tale; if you're turned off by the first book, the second completely changes tone, and is likely worth your time. The third ties everything together. The second trilogy follows a similar arc, but the books have a tendency to wander and navel gaze quite a bit more. Still great reads, but if you're in it for the epic fantasy story, Le Guin's 2 paragraphs of action (or less) in each conclusion is unlikely to satisfy you. The final conclusion is, however, worth the read if you enjoy the slower bits.
Sourdough Robin Sloan 2024 Every bullshit-steeped corporate worker fantasizes about abandoning their pointless soul-sucking job to bake bread or something. This book explores what that might look like if you did it with magic sourdough starter. Like every Sloan book, deeply charming and difficult to put down. If you squint hard enough, you might realise that this book is saying the exact same thing as The Circle, except in a competent way!
Mr Penumbra's Twenty-Four Hour Bookstore Robin Sloan 2024 A Daniel Pinkwater book for adults. Fun characters, intriguing hook, legitimately difficult to put down. I also highly recommend the prequel novella.
Moonbound Robin Sloan 2024 Charming. Starts very slow, but the plot is compelling, the universe has plenty of depth, and the characters are charming. I could spend a lot of time in this universe; hopefully Sloan will deliver more books in this series soon!
The Circle Dave Eggers 2024 What if Orwell wrote 1984, but didn't understand capitalism or communism? What if JD Vance and Donald Trump wrote a book about the evil of social media? Eggers understands that Big Tech and the social media panopticon are a bad thing. But beyond that, he understands very little about the tech world, having never worked in tech. Despite clearly feeling like Big Tech is a bad thing, Eggers presents the anti-tech argument in a deeply clumsy way. The main character is a complete idiot who seems to understand tech just about as much as Eggers. Overall the plot is just too simplistic to provide any meaningful criticism of the real world. The 'twist' at the end is something you'll probably figure out in the first third of the book. Eggers writes symbolism like I wield a rapier; poorly. Wins my 2024 Gold Medal for "worst written sex scenes I have ever seen in my entire life ever".
Use of Weapons (Culture book 3) Iain M Banks 2024 A third of this book was clearly written on drugs. The reverse-chronological chapter ordering is a complete gimmick that added very little to the story and only served to confuse me; when I reread this, I will slice and dice my ebook into a better order. The moral and message of the book is thought-provoking, and the universe is deep and well-considered. But the ending is over-reliant on a single twist that doesn't pack as much punch as the author seems to think it does. Characters are largely flat and uninteresting outside of one character who is pretty flat throughout the events of the book. I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I'd known the twist from the beginning, because the author has to twist several chapters into confusing and convoluted shapes to maintain the twist. I really wish Banks would occasionally attribute lines of dialogue in conversations, because all of his characters sound the same and it's really easy to lose track of who's saying what.
Player of Games (Culture book 2) Iain M Banks 2024 Takes some time to catch your interest. Like most Banks tales, the main character is a total unlikable douchebag. Universe-building is top-tier, and quite progressive for a book written in the 80s. The ending feels a bit rushed, but overall the story is satisfying and thought-provoking. A great entry point for the Culture series.
The Mercy of Gods James SA Corey 2024 Excellent characters. Gloomy, but captivating story. Clearly a deep universe with lots of thought put into it. Some of the character writing reminds me of the first third of Dune: full of internal dialogues and beliefs that peel back the motivations of each character like an onion. The first chapter is especially full of this. From another author, I might be skeptical that this story will land someplace satisfying. But the Corey duo has already landed one epic 9-book, 10+ novella-spanning science fiction story.
The Vela: Season One Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, S.L. Huang, Rivers Solomon 2024 Political commentary is clumsy and far too on-the-nose. Characters are interesting, but I didn't like any of them much. Authors wrote separate chapters, and it's very obvious in continuity and characterization. An interesting idea, but not well-executed.
Legends and Lattes Travis Baldree 2024 Fun. A good story. A hilarious title. A short and uplifting read about friendship and hard work.
The Expanse (series) James SA Corey 2023 One of the finest works of science fiction this decade. Lovable characters. A believable universe (most of the suspension of disbelief is based on a single development). Good pacing throughout. Lows and highs. Reminds me of the science fiction TV shows I used to love. If you enjoyed Star Trek: The Next Generation and Firefly, you should absolutely check this out. Try to read it in order, including the novellas.
Pirate Cinema Corey Doctorow 2023 Every character sounds like Corey, but the story is compelling, the characters are lovely, and the overall message about media and freedom is something everyone should understand (and hopefully agree with).
Monk and Robot (series) Becky Chambers 2023 Sometimes, you just need a book that gets you excited about the future. Toss in some philosophy to help us get to that future, and you've got this series. If modern life and technology ever make you feel a smidge too pessimistic, this will fix you right up.
Wayfarers (series) Becky Chambers 2023 Firefly or The Expanse, but with 2020s politics. If you're not used to the recent wave of alternative pronouns, this is immersion therapy. Some of the best characters I've ever read in science fiction, especially of this length. Like Monk and Robot, this series will make you feel happy.
Bobiverse (series) Dennis E Taylor 2023 The writing is not very good. The science fiction is about as well thought-out as OG Star Trek. Most of the characters are literally the same person, who seems to pretty much be the author. But it's fun sci-fi. Pure pulp, but sometimes that's what you want.
Mistborn (series) Brandon Sanderson 2023 The characters are all complete cliches. Sanderson wrote a good story for book one, then got a decent deal to make a second and third book, and wrote an entire book of filler for the second book while he figured out what he was doing with the series.
Dune (series) Frank Herbert 2023 The first half of book one is amazing. The second half of book one is a worthy conclusion of the first half. The second book is kind of awful, but the concept is a thought-provoking continuation of the plot of the first book. Characters develop a lot, but none are fundamentally likeable. The writing is excellent in book one, but goes downhill quick as Frank Herbert takes more and more LSD. Let's not even pretend that the Brian books are canon. They should show Frank's last book to kids as part of 'scared straight' to convince them that drugs are bad.
Scholomance (series) Naomi Novik 2023 Pulpy, but solid fantasy. I don't think the third book entirely sticks the landing, but overall it provided a satisfying conclusion. Very similar structurally to the Hunger Games series: the first book is a worthy bildungsroman, the second book stretches the bounds of what the author possibly imagined as a backdrop for the first book, and the third book spends an awful lot of time in 'moody main character' mode to pad the book length before we reach a conclusion.
Hyperion (series) Dan Simmons 2023 The correct way to expand a book universe through 'unreliable narrator' retcons. Excellent writing, spellbinding storytelling, wildly imaginative universes, and though the characters are a bit flat, they're surprisingly loveable. The ending is pretty out there, but the conclusion is ultimately satisfying. You'll feel a bit confused for the first few chapters, but trust me, it's worth it!
Broken Earth (series) NK Jemison 2022 I'm not sure the conclusion lives up fully to the promises of the very first chapter, but the first book absolutely sucked me in and trapped me in a vortex of reading until I finished the series. Deep, varied characters. Lots of fun sci-fi and fantasy concepts; one of the most imaginative series I've read in the 2020s. Progressive in a way that really stands out.
Normal People Sally Rooney 2022 Charming. Delightful and unique writing style. I never thought I would say this, but Rooney really knows how to write sex scenes in a way that develops characters.
Beautiful World, Where are You Sally Rooney 2022 Very relatable as a member of the MillenialZ generation in the 2020s. It makes me think, but I'm not sure it challenges any of my existing worldview. But god damn does Rooney know how to write great dialogue, even in email form!
Termination Shock Neal Stephenson 2022 If you want someone to convince you that climate change will probably start World War III, read this book. Also, plenty of the usual Stephenson descriptive porn (that seawall!).
The Ministry for the Future Kim Stanley Robinson 2022 If you want someone to convince you that terrorism might solve climate change, read this book.
Permanent Record Edward Snowden 2022 It's a shame that simply having a conscience got Ed kicked out of the USA and exiled to Siberia. If you don't think the surveillance state is an issue, or you don't grasp the extent of it, you should read this book.
The Wheel of Time (series) Robert Jordan & (eventually) Brandon Sanderson 2021 Pure pulp fantasy. But a fun world nonetheless. You could probably read the first three books, synopsis the middle, then read the last three books and miss out on pretty much nothing. But what would you do with all of those hundreds of hours of your life instead?
Priory of the Orange Tree & A Day of Fallen Night Samantha Shannon 2021 Fantasy, but with compelling non-male characters? Dragons? A country that is definitely not England? A country that is definitely not Japan? A country that is definitely not Norway? The ending to both books feels rushed, probably because Shannon runs out of pages that will fit in a modern hardcover book. Someone should really tell her that you can write a series instead of a single book.