Reading

Read

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  You Shouldn't Have Come Here

  by Jeneva Rose

  Finished 2026-02-16

  This was … not good. A good 60% of the book had no plot movement, no tension except for a mild will they/won’t they. The writing was extremely corny. I enjoyed Jeneva Rose’s “Perfect” books for what they were, but this – written, I think, before those? – was not even that. I’m not entirely sure why I don’t rate this lower, but I suppose a few points for the mildly interesting “twist” that came about five minutes after anything resembling plot started taking place and ten before the end of the book. But even then, from the beginning, it did seem pretty likely that they were actually both the bad guy – if there was even going to be a bad guy, which was not clear for most of the book. Both, or neither! But yep, both.

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  Lessons in Magic and Disaster

  by Charlie Jane Anders

  Finished 2026-02-11

  I had less fun reading this book than others I’ve read by Anders. Which is not to say it’s a bad book, because it’s not. It’s just a different kind of book. There’s a lot of pain in this one, a lot of reckoning with a world full of hate and bigotry. Not every book needs to be an escape, but I’m not sure I prepared myself for how tough some of this book would be. Still definitely recommend it, as with basically everything else in the CJA catalog.

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  First Lie Wins

  by Ashley Elston

  Finished 2026-02-05

  This one was a lot of fun. I think I went in expecting, I don’t know what to call it, a “domestic thriller?” And maybe it’s a spoiler, though the first “twist” happens quite early—it’s more of a heist or crime thriller. So I think for a bit I was kind of disoriented, my mind still trying to turn it into a different kind of book. But once I adjusted my frame of view, it was a fun ride. Lots of twists, many of which I didn’t anticipate. I’ll definitely pick up Elston’s next.

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  One Yellow Eye

  by Leigh Radford

  Finished 2026-02-01

  I really, really enjoyed this book. It’s very accessible, really keeps you coming back, but it’s also got a lot of layers to it. There is a point in the second act—when she starts trying to recruit for human trials herself—where I briefly felt like “wow, has this gone off the rails” but it’s resolved in a satisfying way that makes sense in-universe and advances the plot. I was not really prepared for how it would end, which was unexpected but actually a really great way to end it. The fact that this story was inspired by the author watching her father die of cancer really adds something to the overall impact of the story, to me.

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  The Last Thing He Told Me

  by Laura Dave

  Finished 2026-01-28

  For a book that I’ve seen everywhere, which has now been turned into a miniseries, this was a pretty standard, unsurprising kind of thriller. Not a lot happened; not a lot of red herrings or interesting side plots. And after it was revealed what had happened to the protagonist’s husband, I kept thinking what else there could be—what the next twist would be—because that couldn’t be it. But that was it! If you’d asked me to guess at a cliché after the first chapter, this would’ve been on the list.

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  The Poisoned King

  by Katherine Rundell

  Finished 2026-01-24

  I really like these books. They’re undeniably, overwhelmingly sentimental, but for me at least they pull it off so it just feels lovely, not saccharine or preachy. While the stories feel a bit younger, a bit more fairy-tale-ish, the experience of reading them definitely shares something with my experience of reading the Harry Potter series, before JKR took her castle of gold and became a cartoon villain. This series has some not-so-subtle allegories to real-life villains, and a central theme of this one is the corrupting influence of gold. I hope the author sticks with that and doesn’t turn out to be another disappointment. It would be sad, because again, I like this series a lot.

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  Some Desperate Glory

  by Emily Tesh

  Finished 2026-01-19

  After just two novels (this and The Incandescent) Tesh has immediately made my list of preorder/instant buy on release authors. This book starts off with a certain set of pretty familiar tropes but very soon it’s clear that there’s more to this world, and not just in that other trope-y way (although, yes, that too). At each stage of this novel’s plot I had no idea where it was going to go next, but each time I was satisfied with what did. Tesh set up a premise that, for me, didn’t have a clear morally-just outcome, and then navigated it through some captivating scenarios to a pretty satisfying conclusion.

  One thing that struck me as I finished this book is that I am so often bored out of my skull by stories that are close to this: galaxy-wide stakes, hand-wavy sci-fi devices with minimal grounding rules, all approaching a big race-against-the-clock climax; these things tend to pull back from the characters, especially in the third act, and in doing so they lose my interest. I don’t think that happened here. Maybe because I was very bought-in; maybe because Tesh does well to keep the focus on the characters. Certainly because there are very few drawn-out combat scenes.

  I think it was really interesting to watch Kyr’s character develop slowly over the course of the novel, and especially in the end of the first act, when it kind of becomes clear that she is, at that point, not really a “good guy.” Her attitudes, her indoctrination, encountering the truths out there, is a fascinating thing to watch, and while I think it happened a little quickly, I think Tesh did very well to never make it so plain as “Kyr was wrong and now she’s learning what’s right.”

  My major gripe is not very major at all: as the end approached, and it looked like Kyr might die in accomplishing her goal, I was disappointed—but then, when she was snatched from that fate, it felt a little cheap too. But not massively. In the end, I absolutely loved this novel.

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  6:40 to Montreal

  by Eva Jurczyk

  Finished 2026-01-13

  I don’t know. I was very intrigued by the premise of this book, but the execution was underwhelming. Firstly, even with the aid of the fact that it’s winter where I am now, the book didn’t have that kind of cold feel to it, the “we’re trapped inside with the snow piling up outside” feeling. Something about how it was told. And then the resolution of the mystery was … disappointing. I had to go back and read it a few times to see if I’d missed something, but I hadn’t. It’s contrived, kind of out of left field, and with a lot of open questions. I still don’t get how or why the spider factors into it, and who the guy who died was to our protagonist – nobody? Her husband just killed a stranger to spice up their life? And there’s some implication that things might point at her as the culprit, but why would they? And all of this … with a few months left to live? Your husband murdered a guy so you wouldn’t have an affair before you die? Really? Honestly the more I think about it all the madder I get about the resolution.

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  The Toll

  by Neal Shusterman

  Finished 2026-01-09

  I think this wrapped up the series pretty well. I do feel like, at times, it was almost more of a kind of description of a possible ideal (with a big asterisk) future than a novel, and it almost left the characters behind as it did that. And I’m not actually sure I think the eventual state of affairs on Earth is any kind of improvement, all things considered. But it was internally consistent and thought-provoking. As I’ve said with the whole series, it takes some pretty interesting ideas and applies a kind of layer of cartoonishness to it all, but again, I think it stuck the landing for what it was well enough.

  It was interesting that at a certain point, I started wondering if the book was going to wrap up as an appeal to faith. There was a part of the book that very much felt like it was trying to draw parallels (beyond, obviously, the Tonists more explicitly) between The Thunderhead and some kind of deity—not just within the novels’ universe, which happened a lot, but more as a meta-narrative. In the end I don’t think it went that way.

  I do kind of wish we learned more about the world Citra and Rowan ended up building—we learned a bit about the Tonists through the theological interludes (and, disappointingly, learned how much information was clearly lost), but we only got a brief look at Citra waking up at the very end.

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  What We Can Know

  by Ian McEwan

  Finished 2026-01-04
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  The Last Session

  by Julia Bartz

  Finished 2025-12-30

  I picked this up after mostly enjoying The Writing Retreat, and so I knew going in that there was a risk that, like that novel, this one would be muddied by a layer of “is it real or isn’t it” supernatural/mystical elements. I didn’t love it either time—mostly because I think it’s just not compelling to not commit. In this book, like the last, everything supernatural could generally be hand-waved away (although there are a lot of “coincidences” in this one that don’t really get explained) as dreams, delusions, hallucinations, etc. But I feel like: do it or don’t. Either commit to the premise and let things actually be supernatural, or commit to the premise that they weren’t. The gray area makes for a much less satisfying thriller, for me, because thrillers are all about “what’s really happening here?” and leaving the answer as “who knows?” is just kind of frustrating. But it was an entertaining-enough read. I didn’t hate it, overall. I just think it could’ve been more satisfying when it was all over.

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  Manufacturing Consent

  by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky

  Finished 2025-12-29

  I think the central premise of this book is extremely compelling, and it gives a large number of examples to prove its point. I guess I was a little surprised, as well, that the general philosophy is not particularly interested in assigning intent to the press it’s criticizing, and at times (although I think this was less well fleshed-out) explains some ways in which the manufacturing of consent, the “propaganda model”, is almost inevitable simply because of how the information ecosystem is managed by those in power.

  It does spend a lot of time on specific events, which is fine but also I think left room for the criticism that there was an axe to grind. Even though it’s been updated and revised, it’s still largely focused on things half a century ago, and while I think the book made few excuses for the actions what could be considered ideological allies on the left (the main argument is generally “here are similar bad things that happened, one under a communist government, and one under that of a generally-right-leaning American ally, and here’s how coverage differed”) it did, at times, read as defense.

  And for me, as someone who was born after much of this took place, I didn’t have solid footing for judging how much of the information coming my way had its own ideological slant, so I was forced to take much of it at face value. That worked best in cases where direct quotes were at play—for example juxtaposing a right-wing think tank’s criticism of Vietnam War coverage with the actual things people inside the US Government had been saying at the time, and showing that if anything, press coverage was rosier than the internal narrative.

  I think that while the events discussed were from a different era, the most maddening thing in this book is watching how the right is still trying to work the refs in exactly the same way, and actually getting results—see, for example, the recent changes at CBS. It’s been longer than my lifetime that smart people have been pointing out the harm that things like access journalism can do, and the way in which the media is manipulated by the government and especially by right-wing and military interests; and yet we still have pillars of the news world standing firm on the idea that actually, the media has a left-wing bias problem. So much of the debate we’re hearing today was already well-trodden ground when this book was first published almost 40 years ago, and that’s … bleak.

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  The Second Death of Locke

  by V.L. Bovalino

  Finished 2025-12-26

  I really liked this book. The magic is interesting, the characters are sympathetic and compelling, and the romance is sweet and sincere. I think the third act lost me a little bit as action films sometimes do—I start to tune out when the conflicts get larger and less personal—but it never zoomed too far out, and I think it stuck the landing well-enough, albeit with a bit of a deus ex machina, almost literally, averting any significant stakes.

  The book also does admirably at injecting a pretty familiar Arthurian fantasy setting with some subversion of the Anglo puritanism you might expect, and I think it did it very naturally, and in a number of ways that allowed characters to simply be rather than needing to provide some narrative purpose in their identity. Though it’s probably worth noting that the central protagonists are by all appearances cis and though the characters are bi, the central romance is straight. Which is of course OK! But it does then leave the trans and nonbinary characters, and queer stories, in the background.

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  Thunderhead

  by Neal Shusterman

  Finished 2025-12-21

  Adequately entertaining. I don’t tend to red series immediately in sequence but I almost rushed to pick up the next. It’s a bit cartoonish, and I think probably the premise justifies that even if I do think some of the concepts introduced in this series, while fanciful, are fascinating and could probably be explored with a bit more seriousness. I’ll definitely read the next, soon.

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  The Atlas Complex The Atlas Book 3

  by Olivie Blake

  Finished 2025-12-19

  I loved the first two books in this series. I had read some other reviews of those books that were critical of Blake’s prose, but it generally felt apt for the story, for the characters. This one, right away, the prose seemed to go immediately up its own ass fast—not just whimsical and flowery, but disjointed and alienating. I pushed through because I wanted to know how this all resolved. The prose settled a little, for a while. But the book never really found its feet before it lost them again. The result of the experiment was both anticlimactic and perplexing. Maybe the writing style obscured the intent—not even just the intent, but the actual events that took place—but it seemed like that was the climax of the trilogy and in the end I don’t even really know what happened or why.

  And then it all fizzled out.

  From the perspective of “I like these characters and want to see them succeed,” there’s a number of obvious disappointments, but characters failing can absolutely be a compelling narrative. Here, though, it all just felt like a whole bunch of …nothing? No happy endings, but plenty of people working against their own interest, with little to no character growth and a completely avoidable tragic outcome on multiple fronts.

  I was really disappointed with this book, both as a piece of writing and as the resolution to a series I had really enjoyed.