lottpoet's 2024 reading

Last year, I did my own sort of NaNoWriMo and ended up writing several drafts over the course of the year of a post-apocalyptic vampire novel. This year, I got a scholarship at our local literary center to write and revise the second novel (in what is now a series) with a cohort of eleven other students. I'm pretty excited! I was going to write it over the course of this year anyway, but now I get company and help. I also left my day job in early December and, having been certified as a Targeted Group Vendor for the State, I'm going to try to only be self-employed in 2024. I just tussled with our state's Affordable Care marketplace and successfully signed up for health insurance.

My reading loves are fantasy, science fiction, and romance. I also deeply appreciate good short story collections. I'm on a journey of Black liberation and have been reading a lot of nonfiction by Black writers in the last couple of years. I've also been reading nonfiction about nature, gender, and feminism. I'm still trying to figure out what I like in graphic novels and manga. So far, I've really enjoyed Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Monstress. I almost want every manga or graphic novel to read like those.

I usually read close to 100 books a year. I'm very good at picking my sort of books so I end up loving lots of books.

Favorite reads 2023 (ordered by earliest read to latest read)

1. Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
2. Black Love Matters ed. Jessica P. Pryde
3. The Crucible of Time by John Brunner
4. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
5. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
6. Redeployment by Phil Klay
7. All That She Carried by Tiya Miles
8. Chasing Me to My Grave by Winfred Rembert
9. A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow
10. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
11. The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs
12. Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs
13. Transformation by Carol Berg
14. The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be by Shannon Gibney
15. I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories by Kim Bo-Young
16. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
17. How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith
18. The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
19. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

2023's thread
2022's thread
2019's thread
2016's thread
2015's thread
2014's thread

Books I've completed Jan.-June 2024 (favorites are bolded):

1. The Year of the Crocodile by Courtney Milan, ebook, 1/2/2024
2. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, audio, 1/4/2024
3. The Dare by Harley Laroux, ebook, 1/4/2024
4. The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, audio, translated, 1/9/2024
5. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, audio, 1/20/2024
6. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, audio, 1/22/2024
7. The Night Hunt by Alexandra Christo, audio, mytbr, 1/24/2024
8. Black Futures ed. Kimberly Drew, paper, Santathing, 2/3/2024
9. You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson, audio, 2/6/2024
10. So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo, audio, 2/14/2024
11. Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, audio, 2/19/2024
12. Among Others by Jo Walton, ebook, 2/23/2024
13. System Collapse by Martha Wells, audio, 2/25/2024
14. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, audio, 2/27/2024
15. Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler, audio, 2/27/2024
16. The Taste of Sugar by Marisel Vera, audio, book club, 3/1/2024
17. Translation State by Ann Leckie, audio, 3/5/2024
18. The Governess Affair by Courtney Milan, ebook, 3/9/2024
19. Men of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong, ebook, 3/17/2024
20. Jephte's Daughter by Naomi Ragen, ebook, 3/19/2024
21. Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, audio, 3/23/2024
22. Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, audio, 3/27/2024
23. A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton, audio, 4/12/2024
24. The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood, audio, 4/21/2024
25. The Perfect Find by Tia Williams, ebook, 4/22/2024
26. H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, audio, 4/24/2024

Books I've completed July-Dec. 2024 (favorites are bolded):

Books I'm reading right now

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, mytbr
Her Name Is Knight by Yasmin Angoe

I've decided to continue writing capsule reviews/notes for last year's (2023) reads in that thread, mainly for my records. I might lose interest in a few weeks, but I think I can get most of them done. In the meantime, I want to try to stay caught up here.

1. The Year of the Crocodile by Courtney Milan
ebook

This was a lot of fun but way too short. I liked getting some POV from Adam. I also read the time travel short story on Courtney Milan's website. I can't wait to read his book in the series (and others as well), but we've been waiting a long time. I might re-read the first two Cyclone books at some point this year, because I did really enjoy getting back in to the world with this short story.

4/5 stars

2. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
audio

This felt a bit different than other racial justice books I've been reading lately. If pressed, I would say it felt like the author wrote it with people of color in mind and if white people got something out of it, great, but that wasn't the focus. If everyone who reads this book feels that they or their race (or race-class, etc.) group are being talked to directly, then I say, well done, Ibram Kendi. It was hard not to feel defensive reading the book. It's so funny because he talks about feeling hopeful once he got a handle on what being antiracist really means, but I felt pretty far from hope. I decided to get my own copy that I can pull out and revisit every 6 months so that I can take in more of what he's trying to say. I appreciate getting a DEI/racial justice book that is further ahead than I am on the journey and that challenges me to get moving.

4/5 stars

3. The Dare by Harley Laroux
ebook

Woah! I was not ready for this novella. I asked for a recommendation from mytbr.co for a why choose romance that foregrounds the emotional connection over the physical connection. I got recommended a book Losers that this is the prequel for. I was not ready for how steamy this novella was, within a few pages. It's tough because I was bullied (mildly but persistently) throughout my K-12 years, and this features a bullier getting together with a person they bullied when they were in high school. I definitely can feel sympathy and empathy for a bully's background and how they got to where they are, but I still will default to being on the bullied person's side and worrying about their safety and well-being when they are around their (former) bully. I also wasn't sure I liked how her bullying behavior was (being retconned, it felt like to me) part of her need to be degraded and humiliated as a part of a kink she didn't have the label for back then. I got really uncomfortable every time she talked about her bullying behavior in the past being the reason why she needed to be punished and humiliated now. I think I get what the text was trying to say, it was just hard for me to stay on board this particular kink train. Which, yes this book features bdsm and kink, which are completely not my thing with erotic romance. I am intrigued by the characters enough to pick up the next book which picks up a few years after this story.

4/5 stars

Happy reading in 2024, April, and good luck with your writing!

Happy New Year, April!

>7 FAMeulstee: Thank you!

>8 norabelle414: Happy New Year!

4. The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo
audio, translated

I like to read fictional books about assassins. This one, for me, was a bit of an odd duck. I already knew going in that it was about an elderly assassin who struggles with their physical decline and their cognition/emotional space, so this book wouldn't fit what I usually enjoy about assassin stories which is their uber-competence. One thing that was hard for me is how often she got caught up in memories and rumination, often at what seemed to me to be dangerous times. I spent the book feeling way more paranoid and suspicious of circumstances than she did. This may have been her numbness or resignation. I did feel like some things that got across by the end (how you have to keep moving forward & file away old contracts even in your mind, how you keep missing human connection and participation because of that, and how organization/teamwork in such a profession is ephemeral and it's safety mechanism illusory) were deftly and subtly communicated. I also felt that things that were painted in the book as age gap romantic feelings on her end or by society were really more about her yearning for human connection and community. I did enjoy this quite a bit.

4/5 stars

5. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
audio

I had started this about a year ago, I think, and got about 1/3 in before I set it aside. I was frustrated by the peril the enslaved boy was in and how clueless the white man 'in charge of' him seemed about it. At one point the boy is disfigured because he cannot disobey another white man. Coming back to it, I actually really enjoyed it this time around. It's interesting because it has chunks set up like adventure stories of the time period (say, Jules Verne, with flying machines and arctic journeys and sea-faring voyages), but they seem quickly to deviate from the romanticism of said stories. I thought this was a pretty realistic story of a young boy who escapes slavery on a sugar plantation: fear & running from a slave catcher, colorism, where (literally, geographically, because slavery ended in Barbados before it ended in the U.S.) is freedom, how freedom isn't the same as equality, how can he make his mark on the world when his intelligence must be presented as a white man's work. I wished aloud at book club that we had read it so we could talk about it & they decided to read it for March book club. I'm really glad I came back around to this book. I'm interested in other work by her.

4/5 stars

6. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
audio

This was an enraging and demoralizing read. I already knew some of the things about the criminal justice system in the U.S., especially around felons and not being able to vote, being barred from renting by certain landlords, and being barred from many types of work, and also around the huge overrepresentation of Black men in the system, but I learned a lot about the 'War on Drugs' and how much this jumpstarted mass incarceration. I came away from the book being pretty disgusted by the court system, with the whole apparatus feeling like a clever semantics game. I enjoyed the last chapter or two where she talks some real talk about what we have settled for (race bribes for Whites and for Blacks) and how we will have to decide that we will not be satisfied with gains for a small percentage at the expense of writing off a whole swathes of people. My only real complaint with the book is that there is a lot of repetition, not just in stats but also in rhetoric. However, it may be that she expected people to read the book more modularly, rather than cover to cover. I still think some of it shows up as being under-edited.

4/5 stars

Readalike:

Executed on a Technicality by David R. Dow for more about racial bias in the criminal justice system (here about the death penalty) and a whole lot more on court cases and the judiciary system, particularly around habeas corpus.

>6 lottpoet: I have The New Jim Crow on my TBR shelf but didn't quite get to it last year. I hope to do so this year. I did read and enjoy The Old Woman With A Knife a while ago.

>14 arubabookwoman: Thanks for visiting. I'll come over and say hello.

7. The Night Hunt by Alexandra Christo
audio, mytbr

I asked for a novel that deals with monsters and monstrousness and how sometimes that is what's needed for survival. I was thinking of something like Trail of Lightning or Monstress. This was a perfect recommendation, just what I was looking for.

The main character is a monster who instills fear in people and then feeds off that fear to sustain her. She is the last of her kind. Monsters have been exiled by the Gods from this world's version of a sort of Valhalla. Now they're mostly stuck in the mortal realm, having to live a very restricted existence. If they break the rules they are hunted and killed by the Gods or their heralds, even though most of the rules make it difficult for the monsters to live. The main character's parents were killed for some infraction when she is young (maybe the equivalent of a tween or teen?) and she has been in hiding ever since because she thinks she was supposed to have died with them. As far as everyone in the different realms know, her kind are now extinct.

She meets and has disdain for a herald. This herald isn't quite like the other heralds. He yearns to know who he was when he was mortal: what was he like, what was his name, what could he have done so wrong to force him into service as herald. Heralds are those who when they die, their lives are equally balanced between going to the good place (their version of heaven/Valhalla) or the bad place (their version of hell, which I think was called The Never). They have to serve the Gods for one hundred years with no memory of who or what they were, just left with a desire to serve. It was already pretty clear to me that that is a setup for abuse. If they can't remember anything and they love to serve, why would they be released from their contract in 100 years, or ever.

This is an enemies to lovers romantasy. It also has the trope of enemies working together to achieve a common goal (which is how the main character and the herald get to know each other). I thought the balance was really good between the romance/relationship/feelings/angst and the fantasy. The worldbuilding was very impressive, especially considering how little space there is in the book for laying it all out properly. I got sketches of a lot of things very quickly, and the things I didn't know or understand, I mostly felt I could extrapolate what this thing was probably like (like the sort of university the taverner's son attended, the main character's friend). I got a little lost at the end when the bigger picture of what was going on was revealed, but I honestly, at that point, cared more for the romantic relationship and the emotional well-being of the main character and the found family that had gathered throughout the book. I just needed everybody to survive and be together and be happy, so, blah-blah a big war with shifting sides, just sort it out already.

As far as I know the book is a standalone although I would totally read sequels or other books set in the same world. I was impressed and want to read her other stuff. I thought the narrators did a great job on the book, especially the guy who narrated the herald's POV. I looked at the reviews on GoodReads and they're pretty mixed. I just want to point out that my love of the book is not universal love, if you're considering picking it up.

4.5/5 stars

Readalikes:

The Coward by Stephen Aryan for secondary characters with a romanticized/naive perspective being eager to go on a heroic quest. I didn't quite finish this book yet, but I will because I've loved the bits I've nibbled at.

The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin for a god not knowing he is a god and for how mortals and others get entangled when the Gods decide to bicker or war among themselves. This is the second book in a trilogy, but the whole trilogy would probably be a good rec.

8. Black Futures ed. Kimberly Drew
paper, SantaThing 2023

This book came from my extensive Christmas wishlist. I think it's a very thoughtful selection, fitting in very well with all the nonfiction by Black writers I've been reading and with my project of Black Liberation. I got the trade paperback of what was originally a hardcover. It's a 500 page book of all things Black. There are essays and conversations and interviews and art and playlists and poems and tweets and recipes (of all sorts, not just food). The editors said they wanted to have a 'zine feel in something that was more durable, and they wanted to range across the diaspora of Blackness.

I took my time with this, reading and admiring it a few pieces at a time. There is some color coding of pages (green being recipes, very broadly; yellow being social media/internet), and each entry has a cross-reference at the bottom of the page to 2-4 other entries in the book. I loved the cross-referencing. It was not always the obvious choice of what to group together & it did not repeat across cross-referenced works (so entry 1 leads to 5, 18, and 77, but 5 doesn't lead to 1, 18, 77, but to completely different entries in the book). I read it starting at the first entry (at least once I got the hang of how to tell what discrete entries were) and reading the cross-referenced entries and thinking about how they played off each other. Then I read the second entry (if I hadn't already read it yet by it being cross-referenced earlier) and read its cross-referenced entries. I did that till the very end. By within a few pages from the end of the book there were still entries I hadn't read yet.

I also looked up stuff referenced in the book because it seemed fun. I listened to the playlist from the book. I played a video game called Hair Nah designed by a Black woman where you are hitting people's hands away from touching your hair while they say things like 'ooo, fuzzy', 'is that attached.' I watched youtube videos and flagged some tarot cards to order (Dust II Onyx--they're gorgeous). There was so much interesting stuff in here. June Jordan designed a city of the future! My favorite entry was by Teju Cole. It was called 'A True Picture of Black Skin.' It talks about how Roy DeCarava photographed dark skin and how it went against the traditional hacks to get a technology that had been finetuned to work well for White skin to do decently with darker skinned people. He also talks about people now who seem to have been influenced by DeCarava. As a dark-skinned black woman, I loved it. My second favorite entry was a poem by Eve L. Ewing that is for youth living in prison. It makes me cry every time. I didn't understand everything I found in this book; sometimes I was confused about what an entry was (art? political? fictional?). But I loved being immersed in the large world of Blackness and found the whole enterprise extraordinarily hopeful.

5/5 stars

9. You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
audio

I loved this. This isn't the first fictional depiction I've read of someone with anxiety, but this is the first one I could see myself in, including dimming your light to avoid stressful (and hurtful) attention. This book fits in a sort of subset of optimistic books that I've read, published in the last decade or so, where the overwhelming majority of the people in the book are well-meaning and decent, and the conflict arises from the ordinary ways people can be hurtful to each other (misunderstandings, trauma, increase in stressors in their lives, etc.). It makes them feel gentle or cozy, even when there are real stakes. This one has a great friend crew, a delightful first romance, and people coming together to care for and support each other. I will definitely read more from this author.

4.5/5 stars

Hello! How are you?

>19 Owltherian: I'm doing pretty good, these months later. How are you?

I've been neglectful of my thread because I was unexpectedly away from home for a couple of months. I've been back home for almost two weeks & I'm still getting back into my routine. But, I'm not here to start writing back reviews. I'm here to talk about my Independent Bookstore Day book haul!

My sister came with me even though she doesn't read much and what she reads (like me) tends to be on audio. She found a few things, including some stickers. She gave me a sticker that says 'You are the Bert to my Ernie,' which is so sweet. Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez, poetry
Gumbo Ya Ya by Aurielle Marie, poetry, because I saw it won the Cave Canem book prize, and I was intrigued by the typographical and layout hijinks that seemed to be going on on the page (blurring, overlapping text, text falling off the page)
woke up no light by Leila Mottley, poetry

Moon Palace:
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha, poetry,
Return of the Chinese Femme by Dorothy Chan, poetry
General Release from the Beginning of the World by Donna Spruijt-Metz, poetry

Uncle Hugo's:
Kitaro's Yokai Battles by Shigeru Mizuki, manga, because I saw there would be a battle in a village with the villagers' hair
Black Butler 1 by Yana Toboso, manga, because I've been wanting to read this
Queenie: Godmother of Harlem by Elizabeth Colomba, graphic novel, because I knew nothing about this historical figure & I'd like to know, also it looks striking
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew, graphic novel, because I've been wanting to read it, and it looks so beautiful
FUN by Paolo Bacilieri, graphic novel, because the setup sounds intriguing, and it looks stylish and fun (ha!)

Magers and Quinn:
Our Life Grows by Ryszard Krynicki, poetry, because the first poem begins 'The truth is: at times I believe/in the existence of the other world, I believe in ghosts,/in vampires sucking your brain and blood,/perhaps in the end I fear even more than believe', SOLD!
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, non-fiction, because I loved it so much, I need to own a physical copy and study its structure (I also intend to get my own audio copy of it)
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, graphic novel, because I've been wanting to read this
Land of the Dead by Brian McDonald, graphic novel, because the premise sounds cool, and it looks gorgeous

Some books I looked at but couldn't afford this time around (added to the wishlist):
A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei
a used first edition of Lost & Found by Shaun Tan

It was fun to buy books in a physical bookstore again. I'd mostly given up on it because audio is my preferred method of reading. I usually just get my books from the library, partly for budget reasons, but partly that there are already too many books at my house that I thought I would read one day and didn't. It's rare, especially with inter-library loan that I can't get what I want, and then I just order for simplicity's sake, that one book every now and again, online from Powells or to pick up at Magers and Quinn. It was intensely crowded at the stores, which I applaud for the businesses, but made me pretty cranky and overwhelmed. I was very glad to be back browsing books in a physical Uncle Hugo's. Their bookstore burned down in the uprising.

I also found this list at Powell's Big Mood Sale ("Feel the love, or the angst, or the joy, or all the feelings, as long as they’re BIG.") I decided I need to read every single one of those books. I'm always talking about books that I loved and how so many of them give me big feelings. Added them to the wishlist.

>20 lottpoet: Im doing pretty good, also sorry for the very late response i just noticed this now.