Books: Fourth Quarter Review
We wound up 2025 with a total of about thirty fiction books read, so let’s take a review of the last two months shall we?
Books Read, Fiction
- Bring the House Down, Charlotte Runcie
- Central Places, Delia Cai ⭐️
- Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
- The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin
- Notes on a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin
- Strange Houses, Uketsu ⭐️
Books Read, Non-Fiction
- On Class: Field Notes from a Working Class, Deborah Landau
Books Quit
- A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar
- The Berry Pickers, Amanda Peters
- The Darkness Outside Us, Eliot Schrefer
- Frankly in Love, David Yoon
- Ports of Call, Amin Maalouf
- The Vagrants, Yiyun Li
Overall November and December were good reading months, as I cleaned up some books I had wanted to read and finally caught up on some stuff I’d been intrigued by for some long time.
Let’s start with the hits, which were Central Places and Strange Houses. The latter is a unique mystery book that I’ve been pushing to everyone, as I love the concept of a book that is focused around a house’s floorplans and bizarre architecture. After actually reading it, it wasn’t a series of stories but rather one interlinked story, which surprised me. Overall it was still a tremendously fun time and I can’t wait to read Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, which many people like better.
As for Central Places, I’ve been following Delia Cai’s very popular Substack, Deez Links, for most of the year and been wondering how her fiction is. The short answer: her writing is good! Very observational, very easy to read and literary at the same time. While the story of Central Places—Asian woman brings white boyfriend home to meet traditional immigrant parents—is nothing new, many of Cai’s small observations are spot on and as she says in her acknowledgments, she wrote this as a fish out of water book, but about a small town Midwesterner moving to New York, which was the main thing she realized she hadn’t seen before. Whether that’s true or not, I eventually overlooked the tired trope of AWWM and the book got better and better as it went along.
Actually lemme segue into Frankly in Love here, as I wanted to read David Yoon’s book right after Central Places. A (male) Substacker I read was singing the praises of Frankly in Love, which depicts a Korean American boy who pretends to date his Korean American family friend in order to secretly date his white crush. While this sounds like a good setup, the actual way the book spun out, with a main character that was very annoying boy vibes, was too much for me to suffer through. I’ve been wondering how Yoon’s books are for years, as he’s one of the rare hetero male authors writing contemporary romantic young adult, but this one I had to quit. I’ll try another though!
Notes on a Crocodile is a Nineties coming-of-age book from a Taiwanese lesbian author, Qui Miaojin, who committed suicide at twenty-six, and her two books were published posthumously. If that sounds interesting to you, you’ll like the book. It’s painful and heartfelt and we had a scintillating book club discussion about it.
I really really want to like N.K. Jemisin, but unfortunately I just don’t. Her style of writing does not work for me and while the worldbuilding in The Fifth Season is all kinds of interesting, I’ve now given two of her books an honest shot and have to admit defeat. She is the favorite fantasy author of some of my friends and to have a Black female author win so many awards is outstanding, but sadly, Jemisin is just not for me.
What sort of worked for me however, in the speculative space was Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Half the story is a ho-hum “last humans on a ship to terraform and survive” while the other half is about an evolving civilization of spiders. Yes, super spiders! This six hundred page chunker had me staying up late and flipping pages—some of it was to skip the human chapters, as the story is broken up into distinct human and spider POVs—and overall I really enjoyed it. It’s been awhile since I’d been so caught up in a sci-fi world. I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend it though, as it is a door stopper, half of which I mostly rolled my eyes through.
And finally, onward to Bring the House Down, by Charlotte Runcie—not to be confused with the Vegas blackjack book by Ben Mezrich which is Bringing Down the House. This one started off quite well as it dropped me into the world of theater criticism, specifically at Edinburgh Fringe, a world I knew very little about. It had interesting nuggets like this:
“Theatre, Alex once told me when I made the mistake of saying I wasn't all that into it, because exhibitions were more my kind of thing, is different from any other form of art. It isn't like a film or a TV show where everything's been recorded and cut and edited, and someone has already seen it before you. It's nothing like a painting, which is a single, preserved moment of perspective. Theatre is happening to you right now, made real by the people in front of you, never seen before, not quite like this, and never again. Stage performance is the only storytelling art form created in the present tense…”
And then by the end, I was so angry with where the story went, and how the characters and situations unfurled, that I was fuming by the way it wrapped up--and not in a good way. Still, I finished Bring the House Down and well, I’d recommend the first half before demanding you stop there and move on.
The Quit List 🚫
I gave A Guardian and a Thief an excited try but realized it was going nowhere and then when I saw the acknowledgements from the end of The Berry Pickers, realized that Megha Majumdar and Amanda Peters knew each other and had supported each other through their writing and that might explain why neither worked for me...they are very similar in setup. Mainly I realized that dual POVs are hard to pull off and neither Guardian nor Berry Pickers had the compelling enough story to compensate. AGAAT was a finalist for the National Book Awards though, which big congrats but also tells me to probably avoid that award's books. Of the two, Majumdar was pretty well written at least, but I quit halfway through. Question: What is the best / most reliable major book awards? Investigation ongoing.
Also, another thing I hate—yes, I’m compiling a list, it's called "Reading Red Flags"—is frame stories. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. In Maalouf’s Ports of Call, it definitely didn’t. I’ll start scouring around for examples of frame stories that worked for me and get back to you. Frankenstein?
And finally, while I loved Severance, Yiyun Li’s Vagrants was a quick quit. I really wanted to like it and dive into a story about 1970s Beijing Spring, but I gave up, possibly too fast, I’d admit. But I gave the old "read till twenty-five percent" try and I stopped.
Overall, I think my 2025 reading went off pretty well, even if the numbers were lower than my stated goal of forty books. I'll return with a "how am I changing it up for 2026 post" later!
