Every Book I Read This Year, Kinda Reviewed

I read a lot of shitty books

I was brutally hungover yesterday writing this sitting in an airport Whataburger and a fire alarm went off for 10 minutes and nobody did anything. Aalarms have rendered themselves useless by going off all the time for no reason. When I saw Top Gun this summer, an active shooter alarm went off 20 minutes in and nobody did anything except for a bunch of teenagers who started screaming. What if there was a real active shooter? We’d all be dead and it wouldn’t be our fault, it is because the purpose of loud, blaring alarms has failed us.

Anyway, here is a list of all the books I read this year and a review that may have something to do with the book, but maybe not. Merry Christmas. The iguanas in Miami are all in comas.

Artemis - Andy Weir

I listened to this when I moved to Florida. I liked The Martian. This book sucked. The Martian was, like, crowd-edited, right? Didn’t he write it and post it online and a bunch of nerds told him “that’s not how science works” and he changed it? Well, he clearly didn’t do that with this book. It’s about a city on the moon and it sucked. Rosario Dawson read it outloud. I do like Rosario Dawson’s voice. Soothing.

Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell

This book is about Shakespeare’s son dying and everyone is sad and his wife is like a manic pixie dream girl? Do minions fuck? Hard to tell how they procreate, or if they do. Is that answered in any minions lore I am unaware of.

Pachinko - Min Jin Lee

Read this over a weekend in Tampa. I liked it. It’s all about how everybody is racist towards Koreans and how much it sucked to be Korean in Japan and it’s honestly pretty depressing, but I like depressing books. Lots of death and people’s skin peeling off because of nuclear bombs. Ambitious book. I asked my Korean friend Joe what he thought about it and he said he didn’t read it but his mom hates this book because it makes Koreans sound whiny and as a Korean she objected. I guess they do whine a lot in the book but also it seemed like shit sucked.

The Cartel - Don Winslow

Man, never look up an author you like on Twitter. You will find out that they have something called a “Digital Army” that they lead against Donald Trump and it will just taint everything you ever read by them. It’s like oh this is a good action scene but why do you act that way online? Some people should not be allowed on the internet. Like, do these people think that their “digital justice” does anything at all? I guess it must make them feel like they’re a good person for doing nothing. I actually saw him do a book reading this year and the panel interviewing him was Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer and his wife, a very drunk Real Housewife of Miami.

Emma - Jane Austen

I was so proud of myself for finishing this book because I’ve never finished a book labeled as a “classic.” Turns out I like books where people want to kiss and then some misunderstandings happen and they don’t think the other person wants to kiss (but they do!) and then they finally figure it out and get married at the end. Thank you for that plot, Jane Austen.

Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates

So much bad stuff happens to Marilyn Monroe in this book that it made me depressed for three full months. Men are truly awful. I did find out that Arthur Miller was actually a hot person????? I didn’t realize writers could be hot. That was encouraging. I heard the movie sucked which is a shame because it’s a great book.

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothkuss

I really liked this book but I will never recommend it to anybody for two reasons. 1.) It’s nerdy in such a profound way that even the biggest nerds I know wouldn’t like it. It is so slow-paced. Great worldbuilding and clever writing but God damn. It’s called the Kingkiller Chronicles and it’s supposed to be three books and I’ve finished two of them and I don’t even know who the king is 2.) Patrick Rothkuss has major George R. R. Martin energy and will never finish the third book. 

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith - Jon Krakauer

Mormons are fucking crazy. I would love to believe that fervently in a religion where you get a planet when you die. On a bigger level, It would be really nice to just stop thinking critically and listen to whatever a local bishop said as gospel. I personally hate thinking critically. Overrated and ultimately pointless. I am developing this theory that at the core of human nature is an unflappable, unredeemable sense of hypocrisy. It’s useless to call anyone out on it because deep down the very SOUL of the Earth is dynamically opposed to itself. Glenn Greenwald is wasting his time owning the libs because we are all already owned by our own humanity. 

Tracy Flick Can’t Win - Tom Perotta

I don’t fucking get it. Boomers and Gen X had it so much better than we did. They won the economy lottery, got paid a lot with very little effort, were able to buy houses because they cost like $30,000, and failed upward while raping the Earth to death and then they write books about how horrible it is to get old. Like shut the fuck UP. You know what is horrible? Generally being alive. Just enjoy the fact you have a house. This book also has a mass shooting in it, kind of stapled to the end of the book. It’s so interesting that mass shootings are so important and a problem we need to solve until everyone forgets about them two weeks later because January 6, or Donald Trump, or Putin, or whatever. Speaking of January 6, what a joke. I can’t believe we had to hear so much from that stupid committee all. year. long. It drives me insane that we have to hear so much about how a moron vaped in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Maybe solve mass shootings instead of endlessly rehashing the dumbest event in American history that will make exactly 0 history books. In good news, at least we will get an equally long Hunter Biden hearing which will be hilarious. I brought that up to my dad and he looked so mad. The worst thing about January 6 is that it put the final nail in the fun coffin. No more fun for anybody! Humor is cancelled! Why would you laugh about anything when our democracy is at stake??? 2023 prediction: Hunter Biden’s penis will be shown on C-SPAN.

Hurricane Girl - Marcy Dermansky

We need to normalize bullying people for their traumatic brain injuries. For this entire book, this girl is traumatized because some guy she went home drunk with hit her on the head with a flower pot and gives her brain damage. Then everyone is really nice to her and she fucks her brain surgeon and STILL is like “Oh my God my life sucks because some loser hit me with a flower pot.” Like get OVER it. That flower pot is the best thing that ever happened to her.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac

I love hustle culture. Always be hustling. Gotta hustle. I didn’t realize how evil Uber is and now I know they covered up rapes and murders and like tracked politicians to more efficiently break laws, but you know what? Sucks you have to tip now. The Uber guy was right about that. Tipping sucks. I mean I do it, but man, wish I didn’t have to! That was his whole VISION- a tipless society, which is evil, I know. I personally still use Uber so much that I have a credit card that gives me special points for Uber purchases. I support all the legislation against Uber and I feel bad for the overworked underpaid drivers, raped passengers (which I got an Instagram ad for the other day - “WERE YOU RAPED BY YOUR UBER DRIVER? CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE!”), and think Uber is a horrible company. I am an informed person making a decision to use a service I know is morally bad. See? The core of humanity is hypocritical. 

Wuthering Heights - Charlotte Bronte

Ok. This book sucks. I thought it was going to be like Jane Austen because they are like “romantic” authors but it is not. It’s about people with bad personalities who scream at each other and then die, and I guess there are ghosts, who cares. What the fuck? Fuck this book. I don’t know why Bella Swan liked it so much.

Very Nice - Marcy Dermansky

This book was OK even though Hurricane Girl sucked. There is this whole genre of literary fiction by white people where their white characters all live nice lives and they think about it all the time and comment on their privilege and also comment on the race of every other person in the book and how the character should act around that person because of their race, which seems kind of racist, but I guess it’s actually antiracist? All in all, what I’m trying to say is there is a whole market of white people who feel bad that I could probably exploit and make a lot of money by writing a book about a good-hearted liberal who is on dating apps with BLM in the bio and feels bad about swiping left on black people. 

Throne of Glass - Sarah J. Maas

We need to bring two things back to YA. 1.) Hot people. Stop normalizing ugos in YA books. 2.) Love triangles. What is everyone’s problem with love triangles? Half the fun of being in love is feeling awful, soul-crushing angst. I wanted to shoe-in this take somewhere, so I guess it has to be here because I have no further comment on this book: since when do people actually care about Ukrainians? I bet that Stephen King can’t point out Ukraine on a map. These poor Ukranians. Our nation’s obsession with Russia is going to kill every last one of them because we won’t let Ukraine (and honestly Zelensky is going to milk this war for as much as he can) negotiate a peace. 

It’s fucking maddening that the West is all “why is Russia so pissed about NATO omg” when our government nearly went to nuclear war over a poor island nation kicking out the rich people and becoming communist, thus threatening our national security or whatever. 2023 prediction: the most corrupt world leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will win a Nobel Peace Prize for simply trying to maybe stop the war. Remember when the USA blew up the Nordstream and started an energy crisis in Europe and probably fucked the North Sea environmentally?I love our climate change warrior politicians!!!

Cherry - Nico Walker

This is probably the best book I read this year. It taught me that it’s okay to talk shit about your friends and family and how that’s just part of the human condition. I love fiction about junkies and I also love fiction about shitting on being in the army. There is a great line in this about how the army is a bunch of doofuses pretending to be tough. This book hated the troops and I loved that. I once dated a guy who went to Iraq and every time I told him it was an illegal war, he would be like “But we built hospitals!” and once almost hit me over it in a bar parking lot and then tried to fuck my roommate. I also once had a writing teacher (Phil Klay, who joined the army because he was so boring and he wanted something to write about, not because of any sense of patriotism or bravery) who told me that my characters were all soulless, vapid, and evil because the main character happened to be mean to a troop. Man, fuck the troops. I also regret googling the author of this book because he seems like a total loser. Like Don Winslow except instead of “digital army” it’s “dirtbag hipster dating a chick with big tits oh man look at her tits they’re so big we have extreme forms of sex look at us its paper magazine.” Great fucking book though.

A Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes

I love this subgenre of“the FEMINIST retelling of [insert ancient text here].” It’s never actually a feminist retelling it’s just for women on vacation in St. Barts who want to read about some mythical characters having gay sex. Anyway, this was the FEMINIST retelling of the Iliad. Not enough fucking. The actual Iliad seems good though. 2023 prediction: I might read the Iliad but probably not. I’ll think about reading the Iliad, for sure.

Women Talking - Miriam Toews

Good premise: Christian patriarcal cult whose male members raped women and children in their sleep, then as the title promises, the women talk about it. I know it’s objectively, like, GOOD. A good piece of literature. I recommended it to my mom. Honestly, kind of boring though. Wish they did more than just talk lol? Read it on a cruise during Hurricane Ian. We were supposed to go to Honduras but the boat had to go around the hurricane so they canceled that stop which I was pretty pissed off about because I wanted to go snorkeling. I did go snorkeling in Cancun a few days later but it kind of sucked (no sting rays) and then I got stung by a jellyfish on a floating waterslide. The boat circumvented Cuba and I saw the bright shining lights of Guantanamo Bay while the rest of Cuba was dark, probably because of the stupid fucking embargo that fucked their entire country forever simply because Fidel Castro was just too hot and cool.

Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

This book was just fine. It had “Middle school teachers will assign this as summer reading” vibes, which, honestly, good for Kazuo. Every writer in their career needs to write one of those so they can get that sweet, sweet summer reading “on the syllabus” money. The plot was simple. The themes were easy to identify. Very teachable. Someone’s kid is reading this right now and so pissed they got assigned a book over winter break. 

The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell

Italian princess marries abusive man and is sad. O’Farrell is good at writing sad. (Author’s Note: I just took two clonazepam and I don’t think my flight is taking off any time soon.)

This Time Tomorrow - Emma Straub

This book SUCKED. I also made the mistake of googling the author who also sucks so bad. She owns a terrible book store in Brooklyn called, I kid you not, “Books are Magic!” She is a nepo baby of some scifi novelist that was barely famous in the 80s or something and she clearly has HUGE daddy issues living up to his very mild fame which is basically what this book is about. I hate time travel books, I don’t even know why I read this. I thought it was going to be about this sad 40 year-old woman going back in time to fuck her high school crush and then becoming rich and hot in the future but no, it’s about this sad 40 year-old woman coming to terms with being a sad 40 year-old woman. She also wouldn’t write a sex scene between two teenagers because one of them had a 40 year old woman brain in a teenager body and I guess that makes the character Jeffrey Epstein. Weak and cowardly. 

Back to time travel, it’s only good if it’s funny. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Back to the Future only. I know what you’re going to say. BUT LOOPER. Looper sucked. All serious time travel art sucks. It’s overly confusing because of poor writing but they try to make it come off as some puzzle to solve so that some incel can write a Reddit post about how he “got” the overly complicated stupid movie and nobody else did. Outlander? Awful. I can’t even get behind kissing time travel plots. I learned my lesson with this terrible book. Never again. 

The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Rothkuss

In this book the main character goes to a fairy dimension and just fucks a fairy for literally six months who teaches him how to eat pussy (it was literally maybe 200 pages of the book) and then comes back and fucks nearly every single female character in the book, which, based. Like I said, Patrick Rothkuss will never finish this series so we will never find out the king that Kvoathe kills in the Kingkiller Chronicles (I think it’s Ambrose, which doesn’t matter because the third book will never come out, but DM me if you actually read this book and want to talk about it).

Shrines of Gaiety - Kate Atkinson

I can always be sure Kate Atkinson will come out with a readable book. This was about London gangs in the 1920s. I like reading about people traumatized by World War I, which seems actually traumatic, especially considering that the WOKE MAFIA makes EVERYTHING traumatic THESE DAYS. I miss 1921 when people were just trying to numb the memory of watching their best friend die slowly in a poison filled pit begging for mercy next to a maggot-ridden horse corpse with heroin! Now, the only thing people are numbing with heroin is how they couldn’t go to bars during the pandemic. 

An Ember in the Ashes - Sabaa Tahir

This YA book was bought for millions of dollars by Paramount and nothing ever came out because it’s just a ripoff of the Hunger Games except Roman Empire-coded and by the time it came out everybody was over the Hunger Games. My question is: how can I get a seven figure movie deal and not have to actually watch the shitty movie or have it associated with my name?

God help us when there are poly people in these YA books. That will truly kill the love triangle and also my soul. 95% of poly people are thoroughly cursed. They are typically going around brutally hurting each other’s feelings while using this clinical language about what good people they are for being honest. 

Oh, this author- loves a good thesaurs. I’m not saying that’s bad, but she used archaic versions of words from the 9th century to avoid saying “shining” or something.

A Torch Against the Night - Sabaa Tahir

You know what I hate? Death dates. In this book, the couple finally gets together and then he is poisoned and is like “I will die in six months so we can not kiss because you will be too sad when I die” and then she kisses the other guy in the love triangle, and then fucks him, and he turns out to be the LITERAL DEVIL in disguise. Whenever a book or show puts a death date on someone, we know they won’t die, so what’s the fucking point? A waste of my time. I had my boyfriend check spoilers because I wasn’t going to read the book if the hot guy died.

More on death dates: I was also watching Manifest, a Christian procedural masquerading as a science fiction show, where all the main characters have a death date five years in the future and, like, you know they won’t die so it’s just tiresome. Eliminates any stakes the plot might have and makes it so no characters kiss because they’re going to die anyway and it would be amoral or something. Snooze. Stopped watching the show and read the wiki for it. It’s bad. Apparently, it’s one of Netflix’s most watched shows which is proof that Netflix really only makes shows for the evangelical right. I watched Virgin River this year and that’s just a polemic on how  a woman’s sole purpose is being a mother and how great it is to CARRY YOUR BABY TO TERM AND HAVE IT NO MATTER WHAT.

A Sky Beyond the Storm - Sabaa Tahir

I can’t believe I made it through three of these books. This woman needed an editor. I thought I was losing my mind because she would use the same sentence to describe different things pages apart. She’d be like “The sunset was whispering ashes to Laia” then be like “The great library whispered ashes into the skyline” six pages later. It was bizarre. Never read a book with so many typos. By the way, she made the hot guy (who predictably did not die) into the grim reaper chained to some dead people forest in this book so now the two main characters couldn’t kiss for MORE reasons and, God, tiresome. The main character also was terrible at everything- not good at fighting, or strategy, or anything except being hot (which is described by every character numerous, numerous times) which I suppose it’s kind of refreshing to see a fantasy/scifi YA protagonist who isn’t good at fighting but make her good at SOMETHING lol. There is also so much violence in this book. She writes an actual holocaust of a race of people called the “Scholars” (lol, btw) complete with mass graves and concentration camps. She also kills maybe 20 children brutally in the three books I read. I’m basically okay with gratuitous violence but every character’s motivation is that they feel guilty about killing people, like GET OVER IT! It’s so boring to read about guilt in fiction. It’s a tiresome emotion in life and even worse in art. If you’re going to have that much violence please don’t spend just as much time on characters feeling guilty about it. Boring. “I can’t have more people die because of my actions.” - the main character before killing literally 10,000 people at a sea battle. 

That’s it! I’m reading Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk right now which is very good. I’m also kind of reading a Dennis Lehane book because my current project is about a missing girl and I’m trying to get a feel for mystery plot structure as I plot the book. That’s not as good. 

Next year, read MY book Kill the Rich and nothing else. I guess you can follow me on Goodreads to see what I’m reading but I’m not sure that social media does anything. I just use it to keep track of my own shit.