@festiveandrestive.bsky.social
Words and letters kind of person. Sorry, can't help you.
12. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. More climate fiction from the author of Migrations, this a family drama and kind of a mystery, set on an antarctic island with a failing seed vault. I enjoyed it, dark and haunting like her other works.
bookshop.org/p/books/wild...
11. Tilt by Emma Pattee. A pregnant woman navigates through Portland Oregon after the Big One hits. A very well-paced book, weaving between drama and thriller. While overall optimistic, there's a lot of sadness and anxiety throughout.
bookshop.org/p/books/tilt...
10. Underspin by E.Y. Zhao. The story of a table tennis prodigy who dies young, each chapter from the perspective of a different character in his orbit. Some really shining moments of prose and pacing, but I cannot fucking stand the main character and don't know why I should. DNF after two-thirds.
01.02.2026 06:40 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
9. Bunny by Mona Awad. Academic horror, summoning and transformation magic, exploding heads, cliques. I get why this is a cult hit, and I read it in preparation for the followup, but I might take a break from the Bunnyverse for a bit.
31.01.2026 17:52 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
8. God's Middle Finger by Richard Grant. A British journalist takes a thoughtful, frank, and at times harrowing trip through the Sierra Madres, dodging narcos, feuding neighbors, and bandits.
26.01.2026 18:16 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
7. Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Three young Tanzanian adults navigating the class and gender divides in a globalizing community. I didnt feel much engagement with the characters until the latter half, tbh
bookshop.org/p/books/thef...
6. Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran. A brief but interesting novel of a nanny for an upper class family navigating a corrupt world. Some genuinely funny moments but also well-drawn characters.
bookshop.org/p/books/wome...
5. Too Soon by Betty Shamieh. At first I just tolerated the narcissist main character because I loved the sections about her grandmother and her family's flight from Palestine after the Nakba. But the digressions and flashbacks muddied the plot and made this too frustrating to finish.
19.01.2026 16:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
4. The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy. A novel about five Black women and their friendships. Very well drawn characters which yield exceptional 1:1 relationships. A jarring closing scene in a near-future police state will sit with me for awhile.
bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
3. Silver Book by Olivia Laing. I really enjoyed this story of queer love in 1970s Rome on the set of a Fellini film. It's a good length, but it could've gone on longer and I wouldn't have complained.
bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
2. Swallows by Natsuo Kirino. A novel about a surrogate pregnancy in Japan. I really enjoyed the energy of this book, an interesting drama, frank sexuality, and an ending that truly surprised me.
bookshop.org/p/books/swal...
1. Proto by Laura Spinney. I loved the author's Pale Rider, and while this is impeccably researched and written, it got a little vague for me when it spent much of the book tracking all the migrating peoples.
bookshop.org/p/books/prot...
I won't list books here unless I get at least halfway through. I will probably use the Tournament of Books long list again this year as a general reading guide, despite some ones that really didn't work for me last year.
16.01.2026 16:53 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Starting my 2026 year in books thread here!
In 2025 I read 111 books, mostly in ebook and audiobook format, and mostly from Seattle and King County Public Libraries. Support your public library!
Whyte Python World Tour by Travis Kennedy. Trite and overly polished, hackneyed trope characters, and a plot that too conveniently overlaps with the Winds of Change podcast. Feels like AI played an outsized role in drafting this, which may explain why nothing about it feels relatable.
11.01.2026 18:04 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The Golden Bowl by Henry James. I might read this still, but I'd just read two books about death and dying and life's futility and wasn't t sure I could handle what feels like a luxury.
11.01.2026 18:04 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Invisible Hotel. Ok love me some creepy horror but I must be missing something because anything interesting seems to happen off screen and then never gets fully explained. I couldn't make heads or tails of the why of it all. So I gave up.
11.01.2026 18:03 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Speak, Memory by Nabokov - the main character in Brat reads this with his grandmother. I found it insufferable. A rich kid bragging about his lineage and how spoiled he was. I know, he's a genius, and I don't mean to dismiss it out of hand, I just couldn't stomach it. Some other time, memory!
11.01.2026 18:03 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West - Richard Flanagan says this book revolutionized journalism. Maybe, but at about 5x as long as your standard novel I just didn't feel in the mood. Perhaps another year.
11.01.2026 18:02 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Miss MacIntosh My Darling - the main character of The Accidental Tourist hopes people will see him reading it and won't bother him. Later in the book he hallucinates Miss MacIntosh. I could only find a physical edition and it was a 1200 page doorstop. Where am I gonna read that?
11.01.2026 18:01 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber - neurotic and florid, could have taken me somewhere perhaps, but I ain't reading a book-length paragraph with zero dialogue.
11.01.2026 17:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Us Fools by Nora Lange - slippery writing, jumping from memory to flashback to present day in a single sentence. I can't bring myself to care about these caricatured people. Why does a poor 6 year old living on a farm in the 80s know what an ethernet cable is? Why is she using it as a metaphor?
11.01.2026 17:59 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0What Maisie Knew by Henry James. Mentioned in Colored Television. I try not to be dismissive, but 5 pages in and I'm just desperate for a goblet, my heart's bleedin' everywhere. Please will somebody, for the love of Jaysus, think of the children?
11.01.2026 17:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I read 111 books in 2025. Favorite was Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. Least favorite was Claire Messud's.
There were a few I didnt list here because I didn't read very much of them. Here are a select few.
You could make them into actual art by throwing paint on them
03.01.2026 00:57 — 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
111. Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky. Graphic graphic novel about trying to stay neutral in a polarized and decaying future. I love Lubchansky's work!
Squeaked this in before midnight!
bookshop.org/p/books/simp...
110. Maurice by EM Forster. Loved it except for Clive Durham who can go suck eggs.
bookshop.org/p/books/maur...
The Unveiling by Quan Barry. I wanted to like this but...there's just no pacing. I don't know how any of the characters feel (scared? sad?) about the mysterious events and nobody seems to have any urgency or sense of what to do. There are too many digressions and flashbacks to focus on the present.
22.12.2025 14:00 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
108. Pale Rider by Laura Spinney. I hesitated to read a book about a global pandemic that was published in 2018, but this is excellent. The evolutionary science and epidemiology were presented well, but I really enjoyed the latter chapters about how art and literature responded around the world.
14.12.2025 22:07 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
107. Waterline by Aram Mrjoian. An Armenian-American family navigates a tragedy. The community insularity that once felt like a strength now feels toxic. The characters didn't give me a lot to engage or sympathize with, I liked the historical aspects of it.
bookshop.org/p/books/wate...
