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Non-fiction books i read in 2024

i don't write about non-fiction on this blog, for several reasons really, but simply put i don't feel the need to do so. i rarely score them on goodreads since there's no need to judge the things i typically evaluate in fiction. but the purpose of this blog is to document and shortly describe things i've read, for myself so i'd remember their contents better, so here's a simplified list of non-fiction books i have read this year.

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy [ audiobook, listened in finnish ] the life story of an ex child actress who only started acting because her narcissist mother made her. she eventually broke through in a popular kids' show and suffered from bulimia and other illnesses throughout the experience. i didn't know jennette from before, i don't know if icarly was ever a thing in my country at all (or then i'm just too old to know it), but by the end of the book i felt like i thoroughly knew her. read in january.

Pienin yhteinen jaettava ("The smallest common dividend") by Pirkko Saisio [ physical book, read in finnish ] the author's memoirs about her childhood. a collection of small moments from her life. i don't recall liking anything about this much but it was a fast read. read in january/february.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote [ physical book, read in finnish ] a work of true crime about a murder case from 1959 when two men murdered a 4-member family in kansas. i had no idea this was true crime when i went in, i thought i was reading fiction. only realised the truth at the end lol. read in february.

Luonto pakastimessa ("Nature in a freezer") by Anu Silfverberg [ physical book, read in finnish ] a collection of the author's columns. i think she's an activist and has a provocative tone on purpose and i'm not really into that. some articles i agreed with (mostly criticism of religions), some i didn't. there was an especially dumb text about how all zoos are evil when in reality they do nature reservation work in my country. read in february/march.

Afghanerne ("The Afghans") by Åsne Seierstad [ audiobook, listened in finnish ] a deep dive into the contemporary history of afghanistan, including the birth of taliban and the events of 9/11 from the other side, through the lives of a selection of afghan people. this was very story-like, sometimes i wasn't even sure if we're still going non-fiction. i learned a lot about afghans and the history of afghanistan. read in march.

Solkattens år ("A sun cat's year") by Merete Mazzarella [ physical book, read in finnish ] a collection of the author's thoughts on aging and finding a new romantic partner in her later years. most of the book is short memoirs about things that have happened to the author, or her thoughts on books she's read, or other such things. it was pretty mundane, a fast little read, but just a bit bleak for someone in their 30s like me. read in june/july.

Ruumiin ylittävä ääni ("A voice that surpasses the body") by Tuomas Aitonurmi [ audiobook, listened in finnish ] a collection of essays about different topics: bullying and self-esteem, masculinity, music, writing, horses. the only thing they all had in common, apart from the author himself, was that there's a ton of references to other people's works. another fast little book, but all the vague referencing of the randomest things seemingly for the joy of referencing kinda reminded me of house of leaves tbh which made it unintentionally comical. but this made me realise i rather enjoy non-fiction where you just get to learn the author and their thoughts and life. kinda feels like getting a new friend. read in september.

Ulkopuolisuudesta ("About being an outsider") by Elina Kujala [ audiobook, listened in finnish ] several different angles to the experience of feeling like an outsider, mostly through examples from the author's own life, but she has also interviewed other people for variety. the topics vary from social anxiety and general introversion to being LGBT, being disabled, being a woman, being neurodivergent and such. i relate to a lot in here but it was also just a decently interesting, short listen that i picked up from a magazine article. the interview parts feel very brief, and sometimes she goes a bit off-topic with her diary entries. also this is a storytel original i.e. made for the subscribers of an audiobook app, probably as a direct commission from the app to the author, so… well, i don't know if that means anything really, but yeah. read in september.

Sex substanser som förändrar ditt liv / High on Life by David JP Phillips [ audiobook, listened in finnish ] a swedish cishet family man tells me i can get more oxytocin by stopping at the door when returning from work every day and listening to a nice song before i go home so i can feel the hugs of my children and hear the loving words of my wife better. it's a self-help book about how to have more dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and all the other good stuff in your life. though the majority of the examples are unrelatable to me, this was quite informative for being a short little self help, to be fair. this also made me realise i'm actually doing pretty great and don't need to deliberately cook up "angel cocktails" to feel good. read in november.

Kaksipäinen koira ja muita eläimiä Neuvostoliiton tieteessä ("A two-headed dog and other animals in Soviet science") by Iina Kohonen [ audiobook, listened in finnish ] the title is misleading, there are no other animals. just dogs. about 2/3 of this was about the russian surgeon who experimented with dogs, the rest was about soviet space dogs. morbidly fascinating in a way and i'm always here for more reasons to hate russia, but i wanted more animals and less trivia about old russian scientists or meta about the writing process and the author talking about her own thoughts. read in november/december.

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Konbini ningen (Convenience Store Woman) by Sayaka Murata

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

the story of a japanese woman in her late 30s who has worked part-time in a convenience store for eighteen years. she's perfectly happy with the job being her entire life and she's become basically the perfect worker, but literally everyone else, who all live according to the strict conservative japanese societal norms, seems to have a problem with it. they keep asking when she plans to "get better" and finally find herself a husband, stop working in a store, and become a more valuable contributor to the society.

🏪👩🏻🌸

➕ there's a really solid message here about what's "normal" and what isn't -- because the answer is that there is no such thing. the main character here is very much established as being "not normal" ever since she was a child, she's very autism-coded in that she navigates the world not understanding what the "appropriate" emotional response to anything is, and even as an adult she keeps copying how her coworkers at the store dress and talk and carry themselves because she doesn't seem to know what being a regular person is. and yet, it's her who seems like the only sane person out of everyone featured in the story. why is everyone so obsessed with heteronormativity and marriage and sex? and why are they jumping into crazy conclusions based on nothing but what they expect the other person to be saying? especially considering i myself am a forever-single, forever-student queer with a job that hardly makes me any money, all the "normal people" in this book were not only annoying and idiotic but also seriously delusional. how do keiko's life choices affect them at all? they don't, but they act like they do.

➕ a very short book so fast to read.

➖ for the same aforementioned reasons, this made me rather uncomfortable. i wished keiko would have been a bit more self aware of her situation and defended herself against everyone else's delusions, but she never does, she's very robotic and takes everything by self value. it's especially bad with shiraha, an incel character who abuses her lack of agency and basically becomes a bum living in her apartment and eating her food (while complaining about it), and she never even seems to realise any of this. it's uncomfortable that there's no voice of reason anywhere in the story.

➖ i'm ultimately not really sure what this book is about, tbh. there's a bit too much of the incel and his nonsense. keiko's friends and family never accept her way of life, the book just ends.

⭐ score: 3 -- thought-provoking, and i liked the parts of her working in the store. they were comfortable. everything else i could have skipped.

[misireads]

Sang by Elina Pitkäkangas

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a story set in a fictional rendition of east asia that follows an orphan boy who, together with his brother, works as a bianfu -- a sort of black market ninja courier who's also able to use qi powers to create a "bridge", a psychic connection with other living creatures.

in the relentless post-apocalyptic world they live in, every person gets a smartwatch permanently attached to their wrist at young age, and the watch not only embodies a person's value as a human being but also records their every movement to the government internet (or skynet, literally) plus comes with the delightful feature of burdening every citizen with a national debt that they have to pay off before turning 20 or they'll be sent to this world's equivalent of gulags.

unable to pay his debt, the story starts off with the main character's brother going into hiding and forcing the little brother to partner with a stranger for some work errand instead. the stranger ends up taking him on a personal vengeance trip where she murders some merchant guy, then gets caught and proceeds to rat him out as a partner in crime almost immediately. for punishment, he's sold to be trained as an elite soldier to protect the royal family of a foreign country, led by a cruel matriarch who doesn't give a shit about human lives and loves torturing the soldiers for entertainment.

the main character decides to endure the training in order to eventually reunite with his brother, who has at this point been sent off to the slave camp. he ends up befriending one of the princesses and gets caught up in crazy court drama.

🦅🐯🌩️

➕ SIGHS what a difficult book to assess again. i'll go with the obvious pluses: it's fantasy with a lot of worldbuilding, love that. and a lot of the fantasy worldbuilding draws from the real world mixed with mythology, fantastic. it includes several fictional countries with their own cultures and languages, wow tell me more. and though the main influence is china, the main character is clearly from a fictional version of tibet (edit: actually in the acknowledgments the author mentions nepal so maybe it wasn't tibet like i thought.), and other characters are from other east asian countries if you pay enough attention. though i would have preferred if the story were a bit more explicit about whether this is like a post-apocalyptic version of our world far in the future, or if it's just an alternate fantasy version altogether. it seems to hint that a world war and an environmental disaster in the past destroyed the old version of the world, but then there aren't enough references to a place named china ever having existed instead of fusang, so.

➕ there's queer romance. or more like just queer drama but anyway, i respect any fantasy story where things other than heteronormativity exist

➕ i guess i'll give this a plus for being unpredictable. truly i never could tell where the fuck any of the events were leading me

➖ aaand now i'm gonna be a sack of pessimistic shit for a bit again. i have two main reasons for not liking this book very much; one is 100% petty, one is more sensible i think. starting with the petty thing: this fucking book reminds me way too much of my 4kingdoms and renders it impossible for me to like, because i don't in fact enjoy reading something that feels like it's been copied from my fic even though i don't actually think it's copied because that's frankly impossible. the PoV is obviously different, but this takes place in a world ruled by four royal families named and designed after the four symbols of chinese mythology. i'm aware it's not that rare a source to draw inspiration from in any fiction related to china but that doesn't make me like it any more. there's just no way for me to look at this objectively and in any way feel good about it. i'm aware i maybe should? like yaay a real ass finnish fantasy novel that uses all these elements i like so much that i use them in my own fanfic!!! but i'm not that kind of good-hearted person. i'm an annoyed kind of petty person who hated reading it all. also by the way, in addition to this being a shounen-ass story in general, the main characer's name is kong dawei and he has thunder magic powers. like. you know. a certain kon rei i know

➖ second reason i don't like this: it's just not written very well. even though this book is heavy on visceral violence, the writing is flat and straightforward enough to give it a juvenile sound fitting a book for teens. it's not bad or anything, just that it reads like a script for a television show, it's not exactly a work of finnish word art. the writing is also extremely exposition-heavy, very light on the "show, don't tell" department. but in addition to all that, it took me almost the whole book to put my finger on why exactly the story wasn't resonating with me -- i mean apart from the aforementioned 4kingdoms reason because there are many good things in here too, and it is entirely possible for me to also look at it while ignoring the fic-related discomfort, and yet i still didn't like it. the plot meanders a lot and with it comes the problem of there really being no story arc to speak of. starting from the beginning, it was really difficult for me to think of a summary of what this is exactly about. because it's about the main character ending up in situations against his will and. ending up in some more situations. a lot is happening, but i think too MUCH is happening, actually. something is happening too much, all the time, without the main character having much agency over it. there are points in the story that you think will be the pivotal moment that spurs the rest of the story in motion… and then another moment comes that you again think is the pivotal moment, and another. and ultimately most turn out to be inconsequential, because these things just happen and you could take probably half of them out and it wouldn't affect the progression of the story all that much, except that the MC maybe wouldn't end up in the next situation where he has no agency again. it's just a whumping fest where we break break break the character so that he can angst and angst some more. it's exhausting and makes the story difficult to wrap your head around. the author is probably a shounen anime fan and packed the book full of those tropes, because shounen is so full of hard battles that leave the characters gravely injured but then they just heal like it's nothing and continue on to the next fight and stuff. i'm probably being too harsh here but that's how i felt reading this honestly

➖ what in turn was TOO "show, don't tell" was the system of magic powers in this world. dawei can go on and on describing some detail in the universe but how and why exactly he and some other people here have supernatural powers is just "and then i channeled my qi and it flowed in my meridians". or he sees a god in his dream and is suddenly able to summon thunder. dude WHAT? what is the framework for this??? bro.

➖ actually i have a third major problem and that's the main character. it's not that he's unlikable, but he's just a bit too perfect in that shounen protag way where he can be hurt and hurt and hurt and yet he comes out being this perfect warrior who again out-does himself in the next scene, and all the good guys like him and all the bad guys dislike him. also, the author has given him way too many people to care about/be his main motivation in the story. there's the brother who's like super duper important, but then there's the boyfriend (and later, a new crush) who is super duper important. but then there's the orphanage that's super duper important, but oh there's the hawk that's super duper uber important to him. when you have too many of those things fighting for the character's attention, you end up with me not resonating with any of it much. absolutely the author should have stuck to just one thing, two things max that are most important to him. also^2, unlike most shounen heroes, dawei is already skilled at the beginning of the story. there's no real sense of payoff in his soldier training at the royal castle because he's just great at fighting already. i think this story would have benefited if it started earlier on the timeline and introduced us to how dawei learned to fight, how he worked as a bianfu, his everyday life with his brother (but the book is already 500 pages long so clearly it's already stretching it as is). oh also he randomly gets even more powerful because some fucking god randomly connects with him for no real reason other than that he's just somehow special for suffering so much and so very talented and good without doing anything for it as far as i know

➖ way too many drops of random chinese words all the time. extremely weeaboo and leaves most readers scratching their heads

⭐ score: 3½ -- i thought i would like this more than i did, but it's still a three and a half because i did go on a 500-page journey with this book and it rewarded me with a rich world full of interesting details, and i liked that the main character returned to his home at the end because i really love stories that close a loop like that. the end is a cliffhanger because there's a sequel. i don't think i want to bully myself more by reading it

[misireads]

Vilpittömästi sinun (Cold Courage) by Pekka Hiltunen

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

the story of lia, a finnish woman living a sterile career woman's life in london. one day she has a chance meeting with another finnish woman, mari, who seems to have a borderline supernatural sherlock holmes-like skill to read people and their thoughts and intentions. mari introduces a whole new world of excitement to lia by showing off her company, a troupe of four super talented people who pretty much do whatever mari wants, usually stunts that are just barely legal (or not at all).

at the same time, there's a grotesque case of someone having brutally murdered a woman and left the mushed remains in the middle of london, and lia becomes obsessed with the case. lia wants to solve the murder and proposes the case to mari, and mari agrees with one condition: lia in turn needs to help with their on-going case of trying to bring down a trump-esque right wing character who's trying to take his white supremacist party to the parliament.

🇬🇧🏢🔎

➕ there's a lot of layers here, it's a hard one to summarise concisely. this is a very Female Empowerment kind of novel, the two main characters are women and everything they do throughout the story is for other women, there are a couple of male characters helping them out but it's the women who are in charge, and all the bad guys are men. i can't say i've read many crime novels with this big of a female focus -- and it's written by a man, actually.

➕ i thought the premise of finns living in london was fun. this author clearly really really loves london and flexing with london trivia.

➕ i also like novels where the premise is laypeople solving crimes.

➕ i like lia… mostly. there are aspects of her that i relate to in uncanny ways, specifically when she gets so obsessed with the country of latvia that she immediately wants to google everything about it for knowledge lol. she was not a believable character in the slightest otherwise, the whole story relies on her accidentally stumbling on the right information and everyone loving and respecting her on sight, except the evil latvian gangster men of course

➕ i like the way hiltunen writes, it's straightforward and pleasant to read without being too simplistic or anything, and he's very good at creating these small moments that stick with you. when i started reading this, i was momentarily super excited about the writing and how it took off with the mushed remains of the murdered person and all, so initially i was thinking this is the kind of novel where i can just immediately tell i like it. or that i like how it's written, at least. because a lot of time i don't get that feeling

➖ well… that feeling didn't exactly last. the plot is alright, and i wasn't thinking of dropping the book out of boredom at any point, but i kind of lost that initial spark of interest when mari's company the studio was introduced. it felt really… like, a band of super talented superhumans working under this superhuman lady in an office building in london and doing whatever they want.. it feels like something i would have come up with when i was 15, except the characters would have all been teenagers then but anyway. something about the premise is a bit childish. then later on i found myself less and less interested with all the latvians introduced and whatever, i truly just didn't care about them and all the detail put into lia befriending them. some parts of the plot also had gaping holes, which doesn't help with the credibility exactly. for example, [spoiler] you're telling me that these perfect studio superpeople would screw up with such an elementary thing as not checking they have all the latvian women with them when they did the rescue mission?? lol? so stupid. and why did lia not start screaming or smth when fried hit her and she was lying on the floor in the hotel room, the guard would have come catch his ass immediately. in both cases it feels like it just needed to go this way for the plot to work. bad bad plotting.

➖ mari is my worst nightmare, i don't think i like her. or in a way i do, because she's a boss lady with grey morals and gets shit done in her own unique ways. but she first of all has a horribly tiny part in the plot for being supposedly such a crucial element of it, AND i would absolutely fucking hate someone like her existing in real life because i do not want to be perceived. her miraculous riches are a huge deus ex machina for every single plot point of the story, like, the reason anything can even happen here is that mari has endless pockets. again not very credible.

➖ a big part of the plot deals with mafia gangsters and their prostitutes from latvia. i'm not a big fan of this kind of rep for eastern europe. ESPECIALLY because the two main women are from finland and there's this kind of perverted comparison of finnish women being super independent, super talented, fantastic and beautiful, need no man superhumans, while eastern european women don't have any other prospectives than becoming whores for a living. i vomited a little in my mouth when i read the back cover and its title is "DO NOT MESS WITH FINNISH WOMEN". uugh…. yeah.

➖ this is more just my queer ass reading a very heteronormie not-queer book but this would have been so much better if there was romantic and/or sexual tension between lia and mari. instead this does this very Man Writing Women kind of thing where it's unnecessarily dropped here and there how both have one night stands with men like the Independent Strong Wumyn they are. if i'm asked, the only practical reason to have those sex scenes (AND them both pining for the same man, apparently) implied is because lia is trying to fill the lesbian yearning for mari in her heart by sleeping around with men, ugh GET A CLUE! what wasted potential

⭐ score: 3+ -- this is neither plus nor minus, but this book is from 2011 and feels like a relic from the past. it's pre-brexit and pre-2016 and among other things relies heavily on the idea that it would be ludicrous for a white supremacist rightwinger who's been charged for sexual assault to ever have a successful political career. haha. hahahahaha. hehhe! i guess on one hand i could give this credit for predicting the political scene so accurately.

[misireads]

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

[ physical book, read in finnish & english ]

the story of a man who starts off as stale as if the colour beige was a human. he's a diligent office worker in a government department that evaluates orphanages for magical children. he's so good at making bland, objective reports that the stuck-up management of the department decides to send him to an orphanage for particularly troublesome monster children, hidden away on a remote island in the middle of nowhere. the man takes a train there, fearing for his life because he's pre-emptively so scared of these children.

on the island, after a rough start, he befriends the children and begins to learn how he's been living a stupid, prejudiced, boring life with no colour in it whatsoever all this time. also he falls for the leader of the orphanage and they have a gay little romance.

👨‍💼🌊🧚‍♀️

➕ obvious first things first. this is a gay love story, i'm all for it. a really soft and sort of mundane one about two middle-aged men too, where them being gay isn't a big deal, actually it's probably the smallest deal of them all. lol the romance was incredibly cheesy but you never see THAT in literature

➕ it's a hearty story about prejudice and acceptance. magical beings in this world are so viscerally hated that nobody cares about your sexual orientation or skin colour, but if you're a dragon or some shit then YUCK! EW! STAY AWAY FROM THE CHILDREN YOU HEATHEN! it's kind of amazing. this is also completely void of any mention of religion which i enjoyed. all the bigoted hate and prejudice in the entire universe is truly just packed into there existing magical people in this book. i personally felt it first and foremost symbolised the lack of empathy for people with disabilities (both physical and mental) because there are so many nudges towards that, but it's probably just in general also. angry goodreads reviews are saying it's a very poorly executed nudge towards native americans actually but i'll run with my own interpretation anyway

➕ hands down my favourite thing in the entire book is lucy. he's the reason i originally kept reading at all because i was so enamored by a little 6yo satan. i could have read a whole book just about him really.

➖ well this is a tough one to review. basically what happened was that i took the finnish translation from the library. and i kind of fucking hated it. it's a very literal-feeling translation, a lot of the dialogue is so stiff you barely understand what the characters are sometimes talking about, the language felt very infantile. i don't think the magical creature translations really work. they turned talia into a goblin instead of a gnome, that's a whole fucking different creature? there are just many many things i don't like about it. then i suddenly had to return the book to the library so i put a reservation on the original english one, thinking if i'm gonna finish this, it has to be in english. so i got that one and had no issues with the language or anything else whatsoever. i should definitely have read in english from the beginning. i didn't return it to the library yet so i might go back to the beginning and revisit some of the scenes in english to actually understand what happened

➖ this is like.. well it's not a very small children's book, and not exactly for teenagers either because the contents are so softcore, i feel. it's either for rather childish adults or for pre-teen children, maybe. edit: actually i don't see anyone call this a children's book online, just "YA" which it fucking isn't. much confusion. are you telling me this nonsense is a book for adults. either way, although the message is very good and all, the whole book is hopelessly childish in a way that made me feel like it didn't need to be. it's just a bit too simplistic at times, like helen's character, she does a 360 in a matter of a couple of lines with very little basis. idk how to well put it, maybe that it felt like there's ingredients for more here and that the characters are built in such a way that they could have been so much more if only the book took itself more seriously and went deeper at all instead of staying so surface level and turning everything into a joke. the entire plotline was also very predictable, basically you can tell what happens as soon as linus it sent to the island and that doesn't make a very exciting book to get through.

➖ i hated linus so fucking much in the early chapters lmao i get it that it's all about his growth but man. the premise of his character is that he's excellent at his job, very good at being objective, does his background work super well. then he goes to this island job and is immediately mad prejudiced (although working with magical kids is literally his job, this job he's supposedly so good at, but now he suddenly can't take them anymore), proceeds to not even read the files of the children. he goes to this orphanage that HE KNOWS from THE INFORMATION HE GOT has been as it is for some time, and the first thing he does is hate all the children on sight and decides that lucy will kill everyone in the house any minute now and he's the only force stopping him. although he knows perfectly well from the beginning that lucy has been living with the other kids all this time already without anyone dying. the only difference is that he's there now so why would lucy suddenly blow the place up (other than to kill linus because he's so insufferable, which would have been 100% fair). it was so nonsensical, it felt like the story was just made up on the go without any thought put into if it makes any sense how linus is reacting to things. actually i just hate reactionary characters in general like stop being a fuckign buffoon imbecile and use that brain of yours that's so big. he's literally even complaining about his fucking cat all the time, jesus christ let her be a cat. is it supposed to be funny? then mark down the humour as another minus because it's not

➖ i seem to be the only person on earth who thinks this (edit: goodreads says i am not, in fact) but i wasn't that big a fan of how hard this kept hammering in the EVERYONE!!SHOULD!!BE!!ACCEPTED!!! message, i prefer subtler ways of storytelling tbh not every single scene needs to be about this.

➖ the world building could have had a bit more substance. not much was said about the system of magic existing in this universe so it was all a bit vague.

⭐ score: 4- -- a lot of negative thoughts again but overall i rather liked this, despite my ranting (and being shocked that this isn't for children). i guess something about this touched me deeper than i realised because i was AGAIN crying at the end. what's with me crying at the end of books these days??? what's happened to me. i don't cry at things. i'm probably ill and should call in sick to work

[misireads]

Misery by Stephen King

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a writer gets in a car accident while drunk driving in the middle of nowhere and finds himself both legs broken at the mercy of a woman who has taken him to her house in the remote countryside. she's an ex nurse, the NUMBER ONE FAN of his best-selling book series (named misery), and, as he very soon realises, crazy mentally……. challenged. the woman is beyond mad that he kills off the main character of misery in the final novel of the series, makes him burn the manuscript of his newest novel which he was on his way to get published before the accident, and forces him to start instead writing another sequel to the misery series where she comes back to life.

this turns into a psychological game of the author knowing she'll keep him alive for as long as the new misery novel is still in the makings, all the while knowing that he needs to find a way to get out of the house eventually.

💊📖👨‍🦽

➕ misery is one of my favourite king movie adaptations, so i went in knowing this is a story i like. this kind of despaired slow burn setting with complete helplessness involved is one of my favourite psychological horror tropes. (and i mean actual helplessness. like physically unable to get out of it. i guess there's also a body horror aspect there that i enjoy)

➕ i don't remember the film version super well, mostly just that it's the setting i liked about it. in this book version, it's A Lot about all the quirks of the main character's inner monologue, i realised while reading that that's the thing giving so much life to this story. this may be my favourite king novel for the prose, honestly. i don't remember any other giving me this kind of entertainment with words.

➕ the first novel in a long time that made me genuinely queasy

➖ how should i even put this thought. this is a long book, the audiobook is twelve hours long. that's a lot of hours about a man being stuck in a room. i realised kinda early on that this is going to drag, and that the setting actually kind of.. bores me…. or it doesn't but it does, at times. maybe five hours in i felt like i was really tired of listening to the story already and there's so much left still. definitely The most boring part were the new misery novel chapters. it's only a few short-ish(too long if i'm asked) segments of the whole book but it just… went on for too long anyway. and somehow managed to get racist later also, the finnish translation makes the african man speak totally incomprehensibly, my god. then when at some point i was like, alright clearly all the story points have now been handled and this is about to come to an end, i noticed there's still 5 hours left. and after the storyline really was over, it's STILL way too much left. it was one of those.

➖ this iiiiiiis… well it was published in 1987 so in many ways it's a work of its era and this is VERY pervasive in the genre anyway. but it's very definitively the "mental illness = evil" type of horror. annie never has any motive for anything she does, she's simply "crazy" so she's "evil" and therefore does bad things to people. yeaah…. i didn't feel super great about that.

⭐ score: 3+ -- i went to read the movie synopsis after i finished listening and while i don't remember the film super well, i feel like that one was more about the horror of annie in a trimmed-down package, while this book is like, at heart, about writing books, and in a very drawn-out way at that. it's a LOT more about, well, words. i think i like the more condensed movie edition better in this case. it just seems like i can't make myself like stephen king novels no matter how much i try. also i kind of picked this up at the wrong moment, this was my october halloweeny season read (one of them), and i realised at some point that this really isn't a halloweeny spooky book so i was feeling kinda meh but also like i needed to keep going. fgdklgmkdfmgf

[misireads]

I am Legend by Richard Matheson

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

one White American Man(TM) is apparently the only remaining human alive after a virus pandemic has turned everyone else into vampires (or just killed them). he has barricaded his house against the undead creatures and come up with all sorts of more or less clever ways to deal with the situation. eventually he starts scientifically researching why exactly the generic garlic, wooden staves etc stuff from fiction seem to actually work against the vampires. he has his ups and downs throughout the story, sometimes coping better, sometimes worse.

🏚️🧛🦠

➕ it's pretty fun that reading this you think, ah okay, one of the run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic survival zombie virus stories we all know. but this here is THE original zombie apocalypse novel! fascinating. and the zombies aren't zombies, they're vampires. i actually always thought this was a legit zombie story, all i knew about the book before was an edit of the will smith movie poster saying "i am leg: the last man on earth is not a toe." i haven't seen the movie by the way and don't intend to watch

➕ this is short and concise in a way i like. you get the feeling of time passing and robert's moods coming and going without hundreds and hundreds of pages. this took me like, four days to read. exactly what i like for my horror novels

➕ apart from already being the first ever of a lot of genre things, i thought it pretty innovative for an ordinary guy to try to scientifically prove all the generic vampire banishing stuff.

➕ i liked the ending, nice title drop as the last line there.

➖ this is so hopelessly american, reading as a european you just go, and the rest of the world? what happens in the rest of the world?? is this america only??? since it's never addressed in any way and one american town is consistently called the entire world in this, i assume americans are just out there dying and killing each other while the rest of the world is watching like yeaah… amurricans huh.

➖ the main character is just kind of… well. i felt no connection to him at any point, he's very White American Heterosexual Man coded. and i felt a lot like, for the sake of feeling the feelings that this story is trying to evoke, you are meant to relate to this man. so the story didn't do much for me in that sense. i was the most immersed in the dog part. then when ruth came in, it was very Whatever.

➖ speaking of the dog, why the fuck is he feeding it bowls of milk. who the fuck feeds dogs bowls of cow milk. it gives just about any animal diarrhea. you give animals water. idiot

➖ the details of just about anything are vague at best. i mean i came here from frankenstein that completely skips describing anything about how the monster even happens so i almost let it slide. almost. but it's very true this never goes into the specifics of where exactly robert gets all his supplies. how does he have so much food. so much garlic. how literally all the circumstances just happen to be so perfectly right for him.

➖ the finnish translation is another abomination, and it's not supposed to even be very old… but idk. the punctuation mistakes are out of control here. like, after a point it becomes more of a rule than exception that the punctuation is incorrect. i can not like nor respect a book like that

⭐ score: 3 -- another checkmark for my horror classics bingo card, but other than that… eh, it was nice reading another genre origin novel and i appreciate the "OoOoOoOO MAN IS ACTUALLY THE REAL MONSTER" theme in here (again coming here from frankenstein) but i wasn't hugely into the story. BUT i can't believe i read hell house from matheson before this. that's someone's fault for sure. like some "actually scary horror novels!!!" reddit recommendation thread's (neither is very scary IMO but this by far more than fucking hell house. jesus)

[misireads]

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

an occult scholar doctor invites three people to join him to look for solid evidence of the phenomenon of haunting in an 80-year-old mansion named hill house that's said to be haunted because people keep dying around it.

the central character is a young woman with fragile mental health who steals a car to go to hill house in order to escape her own life. she's scared of the house, but things get bearable when she quickly befriends another woman who's been invited to the house. during the day, they seem to be enjoying the house. during the night, it's scaring them out of their minds. gradually, she starts to sense things that the others apparently don't.

🏡👻🚗

➕ i very much like the boo haunted house genre where a group of strange people go stay in a house to prove it's haunted, or to appease it or whatever.

➕ the real horror here is eleanor's mind, clearly. i enjoyed her unreliable narration a lot, this bitch got some issues. (what i liked a little less is that i related to a lot of it in the earlier chapters. she's overthinking every single thing, and thinks of theodora as her bff after knowing her for two hours because she's being nice to her, gets worried that theodora might start disliking her, then ends up disliking theodora herself for some petty little shit she says that can be interpreted as her making fun of eleanor. bonkers and unfortunately relatable for anyone with poor self esteem)

➕ i liked the prose… mostly. it's very poetic which i think works great for creating an atmosphere in horror.

➖ for an iconic work of the haunted house genre this sure had a lot of filler-y scheisse outside of the house being haunted. the characters just kind of go around doing random things. sometimes i wasn't really sure what they were even talking about anymore because the dialogue and their random actions go so off the rails. but it's like this from the beginning, eleanor does a couple of random stops on her way to hill house so the story takes a very long time to get to the point, and nothing really happens during those stops. like she looks at a child drinking from a cup and talks about the cup for five minutes or something.

➖ i wasn't really sure what luke was doing here. he didn't do much anything (until the very end anyway) nor did he have any personality or notable character traits. you have a cast of only four main characters and you couldn't even come up with a personality for one of them. the doc's wife also, she just appears and.. is a bit bitchy and.. nothing happens to her.

➖ relatedly, the pacing is weird. the only consistent is eleanor's succumb into madness but the rest was like see-saw where aooohh a spooky thing happenin!!! hehe never mind, we were just silly now we frolic in the sun. ouuuhhh now a spooky thing happenin again!!! hahaha never mind how silly it is to think there would be ghosts. there's no escalation or tension or progression of any kind and i found that very weird. actually just no plot. eleanor is the only character that matters and has any progression, the rest are just "shrug i guess i was a bit scared back there! but it's okay."

⭐ score: 3 -- a lukewarm three because i'm not really sure if i liked this or not. i zoned out a lot but then found the rare creepy parts decently entertaining, and i didn't mind that there weren't all that many of them, but this really did lack escalation. i've also watched the netflix show and liked it but don't remember it being like this book at all lol

[misireads]

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a swiss boy named victor frankenstein moves to germany to study science with the ultimate goal to create life artificially with his own hands. after a manic episode of hyperfixating on the task, he creates a humongous man with an ugly face, then immediately regrets the decision and runs away from his own creation. he proceeds to pretend he never created anything until the creature catches up with him, explains that he's lonely and sad because humans all hate him for his looks, and asks the doc to create him a partner. frankenstein says Nope and runs away again. the creature keeps following him and murdering the people closest to him as revenge.

oh and this is actually all told by frankenstein in past tense in one sitting to some british guy who travelled to the arctic to study science and saved frankenstein from the ocean (and is real fucking gay for him also. is shelley aware she wrote a gay man in 1818)

....WHICh is actually told by the brit to his sister in letters that he's writing her. and i kind of forgot about all that already in the middle

👨‍🔬🧟✍️

➕ well! it's franksenstein. it's a classic. it's the first sci-fi novel in existence, written by a 20yo woman. it's got legacy. i feel a bit bad i have so few good things to say about it

➕ i'll give credit for the social commentary about ostracisation which probably honestly was pretty striking for its time.

➖ i can see why that legacy equates "frankenstein" with the monster and not the doctor. the doctor is a pussy. a bona fide unlikable Woe Is Me asshole who repeatedly makes the dumbest fucking choices and then runs away and moans like a bitch and never faces nor resolves any of them. this book would be 50% shorter if you cut out every mention of him feeling sorry for himself. i'm not sure if shelley wrote this thinking she's making a sympathetic character or if she was fully aware that the reader is just gonna want him to die? my questions immediately started from him apparently spending so much time making the monster, and very deliberately choosing how it's going to look like, spent YEARS AND YEARS on it, and apparently he not even once during those years gave it a single thought like hmm this is turning out a bit scary-looking! a bit spooky i'd say! why am i making it so grotesque? oh well here it comes anyway! and also not for a second considering what the creature will be like, and what he'll do with it once it's done. and then he's just eeeek D: and runs away from his house as soon as the creature comes alive, and he.. doesn't.. uhh.. go back? doesn't care that it's now in his house and just leaves it there i guess?? i was already done at that point, that's such nonsense, i'm sorry mary shelley i appreciate everything you've done for us but you wrote one dumbass incomprehensible imbecile fucker of a main character who is so thoroughly unbelievable and unrelatable that this is one of the most comical horror novels i've ever read.

➖ that's pretty much all my thoughts summarised. i could go on and on about how every single thing frankenstein does is stupid as shit but i think you get the idea already. (just make the fucking partner!! you are literally the one making it, you can make a guy or a woman without a womb. because the fucking monster just told you very elaborately that he's lonely and he just wants a friend. also why is victor literally so fucking unimpressed by the monster knowing how to speak french?!?? no???? we just gonna be like ahh noo here is the horrible monster of my creation oh noooo poor me… alright. alright….. i'm so normal and calm about this.)

➖ i know this is a literary style from ye olde times but i'm so done with novels with a frame story where it's apparently one person telling the entire story to someone else and then the narrative is nothing like a person telling someone a story. it breaks my immersion completely and i don't like it. there's also a part in the middle here where it's the monster telling his own story inside frankenstein telling his story to the british scientist. look me in the eye and tell me if our lovely victor here would really ramble on and on about the monster's backstory to this extent if he didn't give a single shit about him otherwise yES I KNOW YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TAKE IT LITERALLY…. BUT THEN WHAT'S THE POINT OF A BOOK IF YOU DON'T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY AND JUST KIND OF PRETEND AHAHA EHEHE WELL WE'RE PLAYING TELLIGN A STORY HERE IT'S NOT REAL NONE OF THIS HAPPENED ACTUALLY aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa KABOOOOOOM

➖ i am supremely. SUPREMELY annoyed. that this story takes place in switzerland. and. the characters' names. are in english? the fuck is "henry clerval"? shouldn't he be henri or henrik or something?? and victor's brother is "william", not wilhelm??? an italian girl named "elizabeth" instead of literally any italian name??? not to mention that "victor" isn't a german name either like frankenstein is. he should be viktor. you can't give me a book that does this nd tell me it's a very good book, a good classic you should enjoy. NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WILL NOT

➖ a lot of this sounded like flexing with geography trivia which, i mean, yes very good from a female writer in 1818. but. it's flexing with geography trivia. in places where it wasn't really needed. cut out this and every line of frankenstein feeling sorry for himself and the book would be like 100 pages long

⭐ score: 2 -- good, i read one of the ultimate horror classics for halloween season, great…. now i crave euthanasia

[misireads]

Lohikäärmeen värit ("Colours of the dragon") by Pasi Pekkola

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a story spanning two generations that's actually three (or four!) different stories set in different times.

in chronological order, the first story is that of a small girl named xiaolong, born to poverty in a remote village in rural china in the era of mao zedong. she's raised by her sickly father, but their life is alright until mao's campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries fucks the whole village over.

the second story is xiaolong's adulthood, starting from her moving to finland in the 80's with a man named tomi, they move to helsinki together and are about to have a baby. she knows that finland is a far better environment to raise a child, but she struggles with the culture shock and the loneliness brought with it.

the third story is that of the child as an adult, kimi, born and raised finnish. he has never met his mother because she disappeared when he was only a baby and has spent his entire life wanting to know why she left. he has a strained and distant relationship with his father who travels for work a lot. after his long-term relationship with a woman falls apart, kimi decides to take his father's offer to travel to shanghai to go look for his mother in china.

this is the starting point of each story, and the book keeps jumping between all three to fill in the details and the gaps in time. the recurring theme carrying through the whole book is the clash of love vs money, as well as momentary personal fulfillment and greed vs the harm it causes in the long run. or something such

🐉🇨🇳👶🏻

➕ said this so many times on this blog but i really enjoy layered books with many intertwined stories, where you only get the big picture of each by finishing the book.

➕ i also enjoy stories about cultures and places (and their history) other than finland and USA, china in this case. this one also compares china and finland to each other and highlights their similarities and differences in an interesting way. that's of course supremely entertaining to a finn because we love comparing finland to anything

➕ what i liked early on was that kimi is half chinese but has never had any connection to china because he's born and raised a finn. which is relatable to me as a half ukrainian with no connection to ukraine. the relation was kind of short-lived but i still jotted that down as a positive so it's something

➕ the book very thoroughly and successfully established why the characters are the way they are, what their motivations are and what's the impact of their respective environments….

➖ …but they are aggravatingly unlikable. i mean they're well written and fleshed out but that doesn't make me like them any more. xiaolong is naive and her story is basically just a sequence of making poor stupid decisions [spoiler] and then she dies. while kimi is vividly painted as an unlikable guy from the beginning and it never gets any better. it's the sort of book that's well written but everything is extremely unrelatable to me and i just keep thinking the characters are fucking stupid in everything they do and you just want to scream HOE DON'T DO IT at the book.

➖ could have been more compact with the storytelling overall. there's a lot of verbose rumination of the same things over and over by both xiaolong and kimi, i found myself going "yeah yeah we already know you feel like this, let's move on" many times. i didn't feel like the stakes here were high enough to warrant keeping up some kind of tension so much between the three different POVs.

➖ speaking of stakes [spoiler] the whole existence of wu jiang in the story was kind of… it just felt flat to me. considering that it's an enormous drive for xiaolong's character to be in love with this character. but that love wasn't based on anything? or it was based on him being a murderer? lol. i don't know, i just thought this great gatsby character would turn out to be something much more dramatic for the way his character was foreshadowed, but then it was just. he's just some guy. there's nothing likable about him. he doesn't do much. he's the biggest influence in xiaolong's entire life, basically. and then he just sucks

➖ why so much sex. it was so unnecessary. yes i get it, girls from rural china end up as prostitutes in the big cities because they have no choice. i didn't need all these sex scenes to hammer the point in really, truly.

⭐ score: 3½ -- a good book but a depressing one. the kind that i'll think back to as a well constructed story but one that didn't evoke a single positive feeling in me really.

[misireads]

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

[ physical book, read in english ]

set in a (post-apocalyptic??) world with nine planets, or "houses" that basically function like countries in this universe, gideon is a grumpy sword-wielding butch living as a servant on #9 which is a dark planet inhabited by old people, animated skeletons, and some sort of skeleton cultists. gideon has tried to escape the dreary place numerous times, but her attempts are always thwarted by her childhood nemesis, harrowhark, who is the princess of the planet and a necromancer with bone magic powers.

this time, harrowhark promises gideon her freedom if only she accompanies harrow to planet #1 to participate in some sort of intergalactic event where the heir of each planet has the opportunity to become a lyctor, i.e. some sort of immortal hero who serves the necrolord emperor of the whole universe. but the heirs are supposed to have cavaliers fighting for them in the game, so harrow wants gideon to be hers. gideon reluctantly agrees, and they take a space shuttle to #1 along with the other necromancer&cavalier pairs from planets #2-#8. all of them are strange characters, but gideon befriends a few.

little by little, through some budding cooperative friendships, it's revealed that the trial they're supposed to conduct is made up of solving necromantic puzzles with the help of the cavaliers that then grant them keys to open doors to new spaces in the enormous delapitated mansion they're staying at where they find more clues to what they're actually there to do. it's all necrofun and swordgames until one heir&cavalier pair is found dead, and nobody knows who killed them.

💀🦴⚔️

➕ this is like, the (gay) gothic body horror YA fantasy of my dreams. this book was made for me. i'm superglad for my habit of not reading the covers or nothin because all the contents came as a COMPLETE surprise to me. well i knew this was fantasy but other than that. nothing prepared me for the very first pages talking about gideon "walking down to her mother's nameless catacomb niche" and "skeletons going to pick at the snow leeks in the planter fields." i had to take a double take like wha wha WHAAAAT exactly did i read just now? but you get used to it. the whimsy never ends but you get used to skeletons cleaning houses and bones growing from unexpected places in this book

➕ the language. oh i am a lover of words. this book has so so many strange words, and strange ways of using those words. i didn't look all of them up because that would take forever, but i feel like every time i did look a word up, the meaning was somehow related to death, graves, or bones. delightful! also just a lot of looking up how something is pronounced because i need to be accurate for my audience (which is me)

➕ related but this is SO VISCERALLY VERBALLY VIOLENT, doesn't shy away at all from the main characters almost bleeding to death several times.

➕ what is there not to love about a setting with character pairs who work in tandem tbh. this also did everything right in this regard that fucking throne of glass did wrong lmao. even with the mild romance undertones. of which there weren't super much, mostly gideon being gay over some of the ladies. and gideon and harrowhark have a kind of an enemies-to-lovers thing going on which i am so fucking here for. the male characters really took a back seat here, it was all about the ladies. and the main ladies walk around in black robes and skeleton face paint. man. the aesthetics are so good. i don't think anything can top this anymore, i'll now forever be thinking "this is good but it's no locked tomb"

➕ although guys took the back seat i still managed to get a fucking cupid's arrow through my heart, i was so oooooooooo in love with palamedes, like, from the moment he and camilla first appeared, love love. i even managed to have dreams about him already i'm not joking, i fell hard, him and his beautiful eyes……… guh. i've never been so worried over a character's fate while reading a book!!!! [spoilers] but then i rather enjoyed how he went out anyway so.. i wasn't super mad… it was also becoming evident at that point that the rest of the trilogy does not feature this set of characters anyway so i knew he'd just fucking die any minute now so it wasn't so bad, i was emotionally prepared. writing love letters since he was a tiny little child tho. UGH I LOVE HIM!!!!!!! PLEASE WRITE ME A LETTER TOO I'm DYINGH

➕ gideon is so… like i just really enjoyed her being like this metal as fuck gal who's constantly cursing and goofing around and shit but then she surprises you by being so kind about other characters, mostly girls. she's surprisingly sentimental also. her characterisation is amazingly strong too for a story in third person instead of first, it's very effortless to be in her shoes here.

➖ the eccentric language wasn't just all positive, sometimes i didn't really follow what the dialogue was about. it all came together from context and just character actions in the end but i feel like a lot went over my head anyway. the beginning also confused me so much before i really grasped the vibe here. this prolly warrants a re-read

➖ relatedly a lot of this felt like... well basically the characters didn't really explain themselves much, which read a bit weirdly sometimes. like they just know things and that's it. there's almost under-exposition here, where things are just already known by the characters and the reader (and gideon) is always lagging a bit behind. it made me feel stupid

➖ i really became quite attached to the characters and was hoping the whole trilogy would be about them… alas……. they started dying

⭐ score: 5- -- VERY nearly a full five. but. i have this unspoken rule to myself that there needs to be a ship for a book to be a five to me. i mean, gideon and harrowhark… yes they are good. buuuuut… did i get The Doki Dokis? not really, more like i just, appreciated them? yes.

[misireads]

The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a suspense story told on three layers.

in chronological order, the first layer is an 18yo teen mom's PoV where she struggles with not wanting to be in a relationship with the baby's father but feels pressured to stay, then she falls in love with an eccentric artist girl from her school who lives in an ancient mansion and the two start a secret relationship.

the second layer is the teen mom's mother's PoV during/right after the girl and her bf both have disappeared during a pool party at the aforementioned mansion, and the police starts a lazy investigation into it but are mostly just "well maybe the teens got tired of being parents and ran away" and the search is eventually closed.

the third PoV is that of an outsider, a young woman and cozy crime novel author who moves to town after marrying a guy who starts as the local school's new headmaster, and she ends up doing some real life detective work trying to solve the disappeared couple's mystery. there are also the rich family's daughter's suspicious friends involved and whatever else

➕ i don't have a whole lot to say tbh, jewell's novels feel like a well oiled machine, every piece of the suspense puzzle is very calculated and neat and it just works. i also liked how nobody was a particularly good person here, everyone was a bit guilty and/or wrong. it wasn't a story of, like, one psychopath treating everyone else badly boohoo.

➕ bonus for girls kissing girls i guess

➖ i started this in a mood of craving more suspense mystery stories and ended it not feeling it anymore. i didn't find myself caring about the story much, i didn't care about the characters and what happened to them, i'm kinda done with these family-focused tragedies. i think the reason i tend to be more entertained by YA (and anime) is that nobody has babies and husbands. kinda at a point where i'd want something else from my books.

➖ this one also just rang a bit hollow with all the different PoVs in general, i would have preferred just a story about sophie the mystery book author who moves to the countryside and ends up solving a real mystery. now she and her story felt like just an afterthought plastered on top of thalula and scarlet and kim's more weighed story. which didn't really work for me because sophie was the one i was interested in

⭐ score: 3 -- so inoffensive that it got no flavour whatsoever. i think i'll put suspense stuff in the back burner for a bit now.

[misireads]

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

two women born on the same day, in the same area of london, have a chance meeting on their joined 45th birthday. one of them, alix, is a famous podcaster and the whole book is framed as a podcast and netflix true crime documentary series about the events that unfolded after the other woman, josie, asked if alix could do a podcast episode on her because her life is "about to thoroughly change" and she wanted alix to document it. josie is a bit unusual from the get-go, and alix is intrigued enough by her to agree. both women also have problems in their marriages, which josie tries to use as some bonding leverage, but during the recording sessions for the podcast, she gradually reveals more and more about just how fucked up her marriage and entire life has been.

things escalate when a badly beaten up josie appears at alix's door one night at 3am, saying that her husband attacked her. but this is only the real beginning of alix finding out what she's gotten herself into by connecting with josie.

➕ this was the first book in a long time that had me OBSESSED from the start, i couldn't stop listening for like three days straight. clearly a novel written for true crime documentary fans, which i am. the structure of the whole book follows the true crime doc format, with an innocuous enough introduction part and sinister hints dropped here and there, and then things start escalating little by little. this story even comes with baked-in descriptions of people saying something dramatic for a cliffhanger and then the screen fades to black and the netflix episode ends. jewell really nailed the mood with this one.

➕ given that the title literally says nothing about this is true, it was fun to try and guess which parts exactly were falsified. but the fucked up thing was that josie is written as a decently likable character in the beginning, so even the reader almost refuses to believe that she would be lying. she wouldn't, right?? the poor woman who's lived in an older man's shadow all her life and is only just starting to find her own spotlight!

➖ this too started dragging a little towards the end, it was on track to be a 5 based on the beginning because i was just that hooked, but then the excitement and momentum died a bit towards the end… the points were hammered in a bit too excessively during the uhhh climax. and the very end… could have lived without that.

➖ walter's character is so thoroughly disturbing, that left me feeling i have no idea what the fuck i just read. judging by reviews, everyone kinda feels the same way.

⭐ score: 4 -- i feel like i would have wanted to like this more than i did in the end. still, it was a really solid thriller experience, exactly what i look for. i think i'll try a couple more jewell novels next.

[misireads]

Myrrys ("Sage") by Anniina Mikama

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a charles dickens-esque story with a sprinkle of magic set in the kainuu region of finland in the famine years of early 1800s, niilo is an orphaned boy living in poor conditions as a slave in a wealthy-ish farmer family. his life is shit, especially thanks to the cruel master of the house, but he cannot complain since the family bothered to take him as a small child when his mother died.

one day, a local sage takes niilo as his apprentice as the payment for curing the family's son's leg that's mauled by a bear. niilo is scared of the sage at first because of his reputation as a witch doctor doing black magic in the middle of the woods, but the man turns out to be a fine lad and the first person ever who treats niilo as an equal human being. they live together for almost a year, going through all sorts of experiences and little adventures together, and become close friends.

➕ so this is a book for younger teenagers, it was in the children&teens area at the library, so it has a juvenile vibe that softens the harsh themes a lot. it's a mid-length book, almost 400 pages, and somehow felt simultaneously very long, like the story felt very big for a book of this length, but was fast to read because there's a lot happening all the time also due to the YA nature probably. there are several episodic chapters where niilo and martin go hunting, niilo helps a man out of a frozen lake, etc.

➕ martin the sage is a very sympathetic character, i liked him a lot. niilo has less personality but he's meant to be the young hero character coming from poor conditions and thriving when someone actually likes him and gives him the chance, i find that very dickens-like. there aren't exactly any flaws about him, he's perfect at just about anything he does in the entire book, his "flaw" is that the farmer family doesn't like him. the real MVPs of the story are the pastor who helps niilo to reconnect with his family and the farmer family's son who has the truest character development arc.

➕ the finnish mythology elements

➕ beautifully written, this author's commitment to descriptions of nature and especially the woods is no joke

➖ i don't really like stuff set in historical finland, like the aesthetics of this sort of old-timey living conditions shit are off-putting. i don't even care about museums with this theme or anything.

➖ i was expecting this to have more fantasy elements… the first spread before the real book begins opens with a spell in the archaic finnish style so i really thought that was supposed to set the tone, but it was just kind of a minor element in here after all. i mean it's important, niilo saves the day with his forest magic several times, but overall… just not as much mythology stuff as i expected. honestly my expectations got in the way once again because i was hoping this would be like teen lit about finnish mythology set in modern times so when i realised very early on it's not, it kinda flattened my mood and the start was very slow for me because i was like ehh… meehhhhh…. a farm house in northern(ish) finland in the 1820s….. bleh.... do i have to read this.....

➖ juhani the master of the farm house is such a comically evil character. but i feel like that too is a dickens-esque character archetype? there's the mean, wealthy man who turns out to be fradulent on multiple fronts and it comes down to the young hero to prove it to everyone. still, i just kind of wanted someone to grab an ax and toss it at his head like, five pages in

⭐ score: 4 -- i teared up reading the final page and am not even sure why, maybe some line struck a chord or it was just the story coming to an end. but i never cry at anything so that has to be the sign of a great book

[misireads]

What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

a woman returns to her hometown after becoming estranged from her teenage daughter, to work as a palm reader and live at a motel. she reunites with a highschool boyfriend, who has become a sombre man who's been grieving the disappearance of his baby son and the subsequent suicide of his wife for the past six years.

the woman agrees to help the man look for his missing son and their relationship is re-kindled, although he seems kind of weird. for a while she entertains all sorts of paranoid ideas of whether the missing boy is even alive anymore, that perhaps his mother or even his father killed him -- and is thoroughly surprised when one day the boy simply appears as if he was never missing in the first place. she soon realises there's something deeply fucked up about the boy, though.

➕ the main reason i kept reading, other than the sunk cost fallacy of "well i only have 5 hours left so could as well finish. only 3 hours left. just one hour jfc i can do this", was that there's uh…. aquatic?? horror? in here that was pretty entertaining to me. some goodreads reviews called it southern salt-water gothic. i like water-related horror and have no explanation why

➕ i'd say it's a plus that this is short but i've never listened to a book this short that felt so fucking long

➖ what a bunch of crazy ass nonsense. i went in thinking this would be a mystery about the missing boy but he appears like half way through. this book has no plot, there's no real story structure, no real mystery to solve. random things just happen. the PoV is mostly the woman but jumps to the man a couple times and both ramble on and on about the most pointless shit. nothing much happens here, the actual events probably took about an hour of this 8-hour book and the rest is the two main characters being fucking delirious, it was very hard to follow at times. i also have zero interest in or drive towards parental love-themed stories so there's that

➖ this reads like the script of a B movie. the "horror" was rather silly, and the body horror is rendered completely pointless by the main character being so unfazed by any of it. and i did pick this up for having been on a list of recommended horror… yeaaaah.

➖ i'm just gonna spoil shit because i don't care, this isn't a good book so you shouldn't read it anyway: so this woman has a daughter, feels sad that she's chosen to live with her father, is happy that she can meet her once a week or something at least. then some eldritch horror creature pretending to be a child she first heard about approximately 2 days ago appears and she's like omg!! must protecc!! at all costs!!! and the monster child attacks her real daughter and tries to like, bite her head off, and the mother is like: aww :( don't do that :( i love u :( sweet child!! and takes the boy and. leaves. and uuhh. yeah alright. so that's how many shits she gave about her daughter actually??? i truly don't understand what this story is trying to say. and what the fuck is a "peeler"???? it doesn't mean anythiiiingggg

➖ every time i thought, okay. this is approaching the end, there can't possibly be anything else to tell in this story, we're done. it continues. and continues. and nonsense shit happens. and happens. and happens. the crab child is eating something weird again, ok cool. the crab child is being all kinda weird and strange again ooooo oooo ok cool. are we done now? no? no we're gonna keep talking about crabs coming out of his ass for another hour? mm okay i see. dear god. i think 90% of this was the author's unauthorised stream of consciousness

➖ thhhee mmmaaaallle nnaarraatoooorr oooff thhhee auudiiiooboookkkk haaasss thhheee slooowweest drAAAWLLLlll iiiiive eveeeer hheeaaardddd. still slurring at 2x speed. which by the way, didn't make this book go by any faster

⭐ score: 2-

[misireads]

Detroit by Katri Lipson

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

the story of two young ice hockey players whose careers abruptly end at the height of their NHL stardom: one of them, timothy, is paralyzed from neck down after a particularly nasty tackle in one of their matches; the second, nathan, goes haywire after the accident and gets himself fired from the team. despite their prior closeness, nathan refuses to go see tim in the rehab facility for over a year. the story's perspective jumps between the two boys, tim's nurse at the facility, and a random hooker that nathan hires to keep him company while he's psyching himself up to go see his best mate and the love of his life

➕ wow wow wow WOW, this was the first book in a long time that took me on a genuine rollercoaster ride. no expectations, many low moments, and i was blown away at the very end. honestly there were so many spots where i was about to drop this, and the fact that i didn't and was thoroughly satisfied and enamored by the end is just positive positive positive to me. this is a very strange book. in a good way.

➕ it's LGBT! lots of very complicated LGBT feelings too. i went in having no idea i was about to get some very dramatic gay hockey boys. damn. like this was some kind of modern gay romeo&juliet tier shit. absolutely blown away, again. this is the main reason i wanted to keep reading let's be real

➕ this author has a mad way with words. sometimes i didn't quite understand the allegories but it's the kinda thing that you just go with the flow. there were also some interesting style switches between different chapters which i just might steal for my next fic tbh

➖ initially i didn't know at all whether i even wanted to read this and was kind of ready to drop it after 20 pages because it's confusing as hell and you don't even know who the main character is. it starts with descriptions about timothy in the rehab facility but there's a lot of stuff from his nurse's and control freak mother's PoV and other random gunk that you're not sure which one actually matters. in my notes i've written "i just hope the boy is gay." well the boy turned out gay but then the hooker suddenly comes in, with nathan who is not mentioned as nathan at that point so my mental image of that initial scene was that we suddenly jumped to talk about middle-aged bums with no connection to the first chapter, "what even." then it dawned on me that oh. oh that's the boycrush? and the hooker is 19 years old? um… weird but ok.

➖ that's where minus number two comes in, the way the dialogue is written is kinda insufferable at most times. that's why the 20yo characters sound like middle-aged drunks. or alternatively like edgy 13 year olds, which i'm more aligned to believe from young jock men, but reading it is annoying as hell.

➖ janet, the blind prostitute, is such a… like why is she even here. does her character exist just to be a plot device in the last couple of chapters? because i didn't get a thing out of her otherwise. she has no character arc like the boys do, no background, nothing. i thought there would be an actual point to her being blind tied to tim also being disabled but no not really.

➖ up until the end i was so confused what this book was even about, like plot-wise. it sure is vague and just kind of. meandering?? as hell. originally it's set up in a way that makes you think that the boys' reunion will be the grand ending and that's the story, but no there's quite a lot still left at that point. although the ending was worth it, it was still kinda… like the arc of the story is strange.

⭐ score: 4 -- this purely thanks to the ending. i just liked it that much. i really mean it when i say this is the only book in memory i remember closing and putting down thinking WOW! to myself.

[misireads]

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

on a stormy night, a young teacher is driving home from a party with friends and decides to take a shortcut through a winding forest path, where she sees a lone car parked on the side of the road. she gives the driver a chance to ask for her help but when they don't, she decides to keep driving and goes home. the next day, a story about a woman having been murdered in her car on the forest road is all over the news. weighted by the guilt of not having helped the woman in the car, the main character gradually spirals out of control with increased paranoia as she believes the murderer saw her that night and is now after her as well. at the same time, lapses in her memory make her worry she's on path to having early onset dementia like her late mother, and all of this combined is also making her previously happy marriage fall apart.

➕ yes i'm back giving ms paris another chance, because she was recommended to me. so did i like this better than behind closed doors? absolutely i did, here we have a genuine mystery thriller with all the cosy tropes and a plot with actual tension! i knew this was a superior book from scene one, it immediately set such a strong scene, i was just YEEHAAAW time to buckle in, finally. it's not the most masterful or unique story or anything and has a bit of a lacklustre deus ex machina resolution, but it's the good old thing. with an ending i didn't see coming, too! obviously behind closed doors immediately put me in the mindset of finding the husband suspicious but [spoiler] humouring that the best friend might be the bad guy was just a wild theory of mine, and i certainly didn't suspect two people. i thought it would just be choosing between the husband and the john guy, where either could be the culprit

➕ a spoiler-free plus point, more vaguely: there weren't a whole lot of suspects in here, but i think the story did a good job juggling with those it had and making you wonder which one it is, steering you this and that way as it went. i don't mind simpler mysteries like this because i'm not very smart so it makes me feel like i can actually participate in the guessing game GNDJGNDJ

➕ the main character is almost reminiscent of victorian era stuff, what a Woe Is Me dramatic bitch with larger than life emotions and melancholy. horrible but great

➖ these bitches be speaking all their stupid ass thoughts out loud in these books tho. sometimes you just wanna reach out a hand and put it in front of their mouths like shush…time to shut up. why are you saying these things in this situation. don't you have even a crumb of self-awareness. AND the fact that she immediately jumps into thinking the murderer is also after her (based on… umm… nothing???) because clearly she's such an important person, some real self-important buffoon behaviour. plus never once thinking the culprit could be a woman, not a man. heteronormative self-important buffoon behaviour?

➖ this isn't a massive complaint since i overall enjoyed the story but the pacing was a bit off. the beginning is a bangin' but then when we get to the silent calls and cass's dementia scares, well about half of those could have been halved or cut out tbh. and the SMS part in the end, it was not only some hyper turbo mode exposition stuff which seems to be a common problem in paris's writing judging by these two books, but also dear god, fucking insufferable to listen to in audiobook form LMAO

➖ speaking of phones. how are the characters in her books so dumb about phones? like, we are talking about mobile phones here, right? i had so many questions about the silent call sequences. why didn't she ever call the number back? track down where the calls came from? why didn't she just leave the line open to a forever stalemate/wasting the caller's time until they have to give up? how did she know the caller was a man? why didn't she just leave the phone be and only let the answering machine work when any important person needed to get to her? why do both the house phone and matthew's phone work but magically hers never does so she can't use it????? this all was some real tedious buffalo shit ass garbage plot-convenient turdmageddon stuff right here

➖ probably there was something else but i forgot because the phone stuff got me so worked up. oh now i remember! maybe the dumbest scene i've ever come across in any book (in recent memory anyway). the main character looking at a room, ""sensing"" that something is amiss (but not actually seeing a single thing, not going in to investigate, nuthin'), and proceeding to verbally freak out about it to the point of calling the police that someone has broken in, like, yes okay sure go ahead and have some fucking sixth sense, but did it not cross her mind for even a second that she could, oh i don't know, have like… evidence? to back her words up? and how it looks and sounds like that she doesn't??? i'm just, i can't. that scene was so fucking stupid, it made me second guess whether i like this book after all. like sure she's messed up from paranoia and drugs and whatever but that scene was very much set up as her being like, 100% confidently saying this shit and underlining how sharp she is feeling about it. well if you're so fucking sharp then put yourself in another person's position for five fucking seconds and think how what you're saying sounds like to them i beg you, jesus christ on wheels.

⭐ score: 3½ -- still, i liked it. maybe because i read it after behind closed doors, which i didn't like. so i was just so happy to have a genuine, atmospheric murder mystery to listen to that also managed to surprise me a little.