Books: First Quarter Review
Covering my book life so far in 2025, as I tell you about how far behind I am. Plus my initial foray into audiobooks!
Books Read, Fiction
- All Fours, Miranda July
- Afterworlds, Scott Westerfeld
- Aru Shah and the End of Time, Roshani Chokshi
- Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Malinda Lo
- My Ántonia, Willa Cather ⭐
- The Anthropologists, Ayşegül Savaş
- Raising Raffi, Keith Gessen 🎧
Books Quit
- Daddy, Emma Cline
- I'm a Fan, Sheena Patel
- Mistborn: The Final Empire, Brandon Sanderson
- You Are Here: Connecting Flights, Ellen Oh
It’s mid-March and my stated goal of forty fiction books this year is off to a pretty putrid start. With only six books under my belt, I’m barely on pace to make half that goal. And it’s not like I’m not trying, there were just a lot of quits in February, including a few hundred pages of Mistborn: The Final Empire that I’d like to take back. The good news is, I’m currently really enjoying Fonda Lee’s Jade City, and reinvigorated about fantasy after the sentence-by-sentence disaster that was Sanderson.
I’ll let individual reviews pop up on @somewhatnovel but for now, the only book I’ve really loved so far is My Ántonia, which was just as wonderful as I’d hoped it would be. Willa Cather rules! However, I can’t think of who to recommend it to because it’s likely not for everyone. If you’re into literary Little House on the Prairie, this book is for you.
The book I discussed the most the past few months has been Afterworlds, by Scott Westerfeld. Released in 2014, half the book is a behind the scenes of the New York YA world, the other half is the main character’s actual novel, which is a supernatural romance about a teen who can cross over into the afterlife. At 600+ pages, this was literally two books in one. (Also, new word learned alert: psychopomp!)
Westerfeld—who I rather like, because I’ve read a lot of his books early on when first reading YA—is a middle-aged straight White guy. His main character is Darcy Patel, an eighteen year old, lesbian, Gujarati female. That raises alarms doesn’t it? My friend—who I made read it after me—went in heavy on all the ways Westerfeld failed depicting an Indian-American character. I was semi-defensive, and while acknowledging a lot of her points, looked for reasons why Westerfeld chose and could write this specific character. “He’s doing it as satire! He’s skewering the YA scene!” That sort of thing. In the end, I’m likely wrong, clouded by how much I liked the inside baseball aspect of the book. There is a lot in Afterworlds about Darcy’s process of writing, revising, and publishing her novel. Anyway, Afterworlds had my mind spinning in every direction and I read it pretty fast.
Also with this friend, we started basically a one-to-one Discord to just talk books, as our text messages were getting too unwieldy. I might have been overzealous in creating channels and categories, but trust me, the level of detail is needed! Do you respond to long texts on your computer? I do, because some messages require long responses and I just can’t do it on a phone. (Related, I also joined the Subtle Asian Book Club Discord as well, reviews pending.) At this point, I encourage all book groups to do a Discord, as it’s free and easy to keep organized.
Actually, another friend is starting a feminist sci-fi book club—currently called “Intergalactic Book Baddies Unite”—and the first book up is Parable of the Sower. If you’re interested in such a virtual gathering, do tell!
As for IRL book stuff, I’m using Threads to look for San Diego based book clubs but so far no luck. (There seems to be a thriving book community on Threads, so I’ll like to use it more for that purpose.) The good news is that my partner and I recently went to a platonic speed friend dating thing a few weeks ago and met many bookish people there. I’m hoping our next hangout will transition into a book club type thing, even if they don’t know it just yet.
The ideal book club member for me is… well, I better post about that separately. For one, I want a book club that actually reads books. I don’t need the social aspect of it, just read read talk talk read. More on that later.
We also just returned from two weeks in Mexico, one directly on a beach in Zihuatanejo where there was much time spent reading for everyone. Of the five adults there, everyone was engaged in a book of some kind. The list of things people either finished or were in the middle of: Wellness, Kaikeyi, Convenience Store Woman, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, What My Bones Know, Fourth Wing, Lion Women of Tehran, and my ill fated Mistborn. The two kids were reading Pocket Peaches by Dora Wang and The Nightmare Before Christmas--the latter being read to the three year old because she can’t yet read. That’s an audio book right?
I’m experiencing some audiobooks as well, by starting with Keith Gessen’s Raising Raffi. It was quite good and I heartily recommend it for any parents, especially of the New York / Park Slope variety. I hoped that enjoying Raising Raffi in this format would lead me toward using audiobooks to ingest more non-fiction. However, I tried listening to Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History next and that was a complete and utter no-go. I'm not sure if it was due to the narrator or the style, but I had to quit... Being able to passively ingest a book would be a nice shortcut but so far I'm still not into it.
One point AMR did make about Sanderson’s pedestrian writing was that it was easy to consume as an audiobook. When you repeat things over and over and use the simplest of writing structures, I guess that is easy to digest as you thrum down the highways of Southern California.
Okay that's all this month, maybe next episode: Best books to read on flights as I'll be on a few very very long ones. Going around the world in sixty-one days!
