#straydog's reading resolution

[straydog733]

2024 Reading and Watching Resolutions in Review

Oof, so 2024 was not my best year in book reading. With a lot going on in my work life, I ended up reading fanfic and not as much engaging with novels. But I still want to reflect on some of what I read, especially as I didn’t get around to writing as many reviews as I would have liked this year.

Books

Best Book: The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan

An accessible but still incisive look into a specific prison and the US carceral system as a whole, The Women’s House of Detention is a must-read headed into 2025.

Honorable Mention: Deaf Utopia: A Memoir- and a Love Letter by Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert

Worst Book: All About Yvie: Into the Oddity by Yvie Oddly with Michael Bach

I’m sorry, Yvie, you are a great drag queen, but you are not yet a good memoir writer, and Michael Bach’s style and tone are doing you no favors.

Most Frustrating Book: In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life by Amy Schneider

A mild example, as there is not much truly wrong with Amy Schneider’s memoir, except that she almost entirely skips over the main thing I know her from: a podcast she made with her ex-wife. This will not be an issue for most people, who presumably know her from her spin on Jeopardy and not her episode reviews of Downton Abbey.

Biggest Surprise: Odder by Katherine Applegate

I primarily knew Katherine Applegate from the series Animorphs, which I grew up on, but I was surprised with how much grit and drama she was able to maintain in a book for a much younger audience than that series.

Movies

In contrast, I did watch many movies this year, some good, many bad.

Best Movie: Society of the Snow (2023)

I have watched this two and a half hour movie three times in the last year, and loved it every single time. A gruelling survival story told beautifully, I would highly, highly recommend it.

Honorable Mentions: Hundreds of Beavers, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Love Lies Bleeding, Godzilla Minus One, The Thing (1982)

Worst Movie: Cuckoo (2024)

While Trap and Immaculate were also incompetent horror movies from this year, at least it was clear what they were trying to accomplish. Cuckoo seemingly exists because the filmmakers had a couple images in mind and Dan Stevens likes to do silly accents.

Dishonorable Mentions: Trap, Immaculate, Abigail

Most Frustrating Movie: Maxxxine (2024)

Just a fairly lackluster conclusion to what had been a very fun trilogy.

Dishonorable Mention: Dave Made a Maze, Sissy

Biggest Surprise: Night Swim (2024)

“Haunted pool” is a pitch that elicited a lot of snark when this horror movie came out, but it was far better than it had any right to be and told a very effective story about parents as people and family favoritism.

Also, a special shout out to the 2024 remake of Speak No Evil. It is a very different movie with different priorities than the 2022 Danish original, and suffers from the comparison as the original is far more ambitious, but it stands on its own quite well.

Honorable Mentions: I Came By, The Shed

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: “Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language” by Paul Baker

10. A book written in Europe: Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language by Paul Baker

List Progress: 7/30

Queer history has its own unique stories from all over the world. Queer people exist everywhere and they have throughout history, and different communities have developed in conversation with and in response to mainstream cultures. Britain in particular has an intriguing angle with Polari, a coded language that gay men in the 1950’s developed to be able to talk about their lives and loves while avoiding prosecution. Paul Baker is one of the most prominent academics to study Polari, and the entire story of the language is collected in his popular history book Fabulosa!. He traces it from early influences, through its heyday, into its rejection by the queer liberation movement, and finally to the modern rediscovery and appreciation of the 2000’s onward. The topic is a particularly niche interest, appealing mostly to fans of queer history or linguistic enthusiasts, but for those groups, this is a fun ride.

Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language sets out to give the full breadth of Polari’s history, along with a bit of Baker’s own personal journey with Polari. He was born decades too late to be a “native” speaker, but has spent most of his professional life studying it and interviewing the original speakers, dwindling as their numbers may be. One of the more intriguing aspects is how Baker has to acknowledge his own influence by the final chapters of the book. Many of his earlier works, like 2002’s Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang, have been major resources for the contemporary re-discoverers, influencing groups such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the writers of the Polari Bible. Linguists and academics are generally supposed to have a level of remove from the subjects of their study, but Polari exists in such small pockets of the world, and was always such an underground culture, that Baker cannot help but become one of the preeminent figures.

The book ends up being a nice blend of linguistics and history, with the opening being a debate about what makes something a language, as opposed to a dialect, a collection of slang, or an “anti-language”, a term for when a type of speech is formed to deliberately keep out the mainstream. Academics would have to go into Baker’s other works to find deeper analysis, but for lay people, this is a lovely, warm introduction to a chapter of British and queer history. This book is positively bona.

Would I recommend it: Yes.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: "Darkly Dreaming Dexter" by Jeff Lindsay

16. A book you’ve seen adapted: Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

List Progress: 19/30

When it comes to a guilty pleasure, style is key. Everything related to the Dexter franchise is gory and morally twisted, but the upbeat style of author Jeff Lindsay (and the television show inspired by his books) keeps the story of a vigilante serial killer from being too grim. Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the first book in a series, follows Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. His foster father was a policeman and realized from an early age that Dexter was going to become a killer, so instead of trying to curb that instinct, he instilled a strict moral code within him. Dexter works as a blood splatter analyst with the Miami police, where his foster sister Deb is trying to make her own name and reputation. But Dexter’s rules are challenged when a showy new killer begins staging murder scenes that seem to speak to Dexter and his internal Dark Passenger personally.The book is told in the first person from inside Dexter’s head, so the reader gets to see his perverse amusement and joy at finding another monster like himself, and that is mostly enough to carry the story along, if not quite enough to stick the landing.

An issue that both this book and the television show contend with is that Dexter and his serial killer opponents are the only truly interesting parts of the story. So much attention and care is put into developing Dexter that the people around him end up feeling like caricatures and chess pieces, exactly as stupid as needed to let him keep getting away. When Dexter gets a sort of psychic premonition that leads him to a confrontation with the other killer at four in the morning in an isolated area, literally none of the trained police detectives have any questions about what he was doing there. Detective LaGuerta gets the worst of this, a Cuban woman positioned as an idiotic backbiter with a crush on Dexter seemingly just to play into Spicy Latina stereotypes. The prose keeps saying that his sister Deb is developing into a smart investigator, but her brother is holding her hand every step of the way. Dexter is an interesting character in the middle of a wasteland. 

Enjoying the Dexter franchise involves turning off a lot of parts of your brain, the ones that suspend disbelief and the ones that suspend moral thoughts about vigilantism and justice via retribution. But if a reader can turn those off, Darkly Dreaming Dexter is an undoubtedly fun ride, even with a bit of a rushed ending. Lindsay has a way with atmosphere and action, and the development of a strong narrative voice for Dexter himself. Perhaps later in the series, the world around the star fills out in a more satisfying way, but even without that, it makes sense that audiences keep coming back for more, even across mediums.

Would I Recommend It: Soft yes.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: "The Harrowing of Hell" by Evan Dahm

29. Wild Card: The Harrowing of Hell by Evan Dahm

List Progress: 14/30

In much of Western culture, Christian stories have become so rote as to not invite much analysis. Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, and three days later rose from the dead. But what happened in those three days? The graphic novel The Harrowing of Hell, created and illustrated by Evan Dahm, follows Jesus as a character, as both a man and a symbol, descending into Hell and enduring those three days. The text is taken from both canonical and apocryphal Christian gospels, but the art is what the reader comes to this work for. Bold, huge illustrations done entirely in black, white and red give the story a grand scope and feel like descending into the pit along with Christ. 

The Harrowing of Hell meets Jesus at the moment of the crucifixion and follows him into Hell, where he is mocked, taunted, and attacked by the denizens of the pit. Flashbacks show him teaching his gospel on earth, but Hell is where he has to struggle to live that gospel, staying true to his message of love and resisting despair when it seems like all of his work has come to nothing. The reader really feels it when this Jesus asks God “Why have you forsaken me?”. The big-eyed, expressive design of Jesus works well for this story, forcing the reader to see his fear. When compared to the horrible grandeur of his surroundings, he is one small, beaten man. But he also fears the opposite: the Devil’s most effective threat is when he predicts that the followers of Jesus will reinterpret him as a warrior and go to battle in his name. This small man will have an eternity of blood shed for him, and nothing could be further from what he wants. And when he emerges from the pit, will he ever really escape that future?

The Harrowing of Hell isn’t going to hold much interest to readers who do not already have at least some investment in Christian mythology. This comic isn’t going to convert anyone to religion or atheism, and it’s not really trying to. It is just setting out to tell a very over-told story in a unique way, with some truly beautiful art to deliver the message. A simple story, a simple text, and a simple color palette all work together here to make something exquisite. 

Would I Recommend It: Yes

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: "Dumb Witness" by Agatha Christie

21. A novel by a famous author, other than the one(s) they are best known for: Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie

List Progress: 1/30

There’s an old saying that goes “Sex is like pizza; even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good”. While that is not in fact true for either sex or pizza, it is true for Agatha Christie novels. Christie’s 1937 novel Dumb Witness, starring her famous detective Hercule Poirot, is competently written, has enough engaging character moments, and moves along at a decent pace. But there is a reason that this one has not stood the test of time like Poirot adventures Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Death on the Nile (released the same year as Dumb Witness). It is a perfectly readable book, but for someone introducing a person to Christie’s work, it would be fairly far down the recommendation list.

Hercule Poirot receives a letter from elderly spinster Emily Arundell, suggesting that a recent “accident” was actually an attempt on her life. Her nieces and nephew have been chomping at the bit to get her inheritance, and she believes one of them set her up to trip over her dog’s ball and fall down the stairs. Poirot is intrigued, but by the time he and his compatriot Hastings arrive to investigate, Miss Arundell has already died by natural causes. Hastings thinks this means that their work is done, but Poirot points out that attempted murder is still a crime, and that just because the attempt failed does not mean that they should reject the case. Arundell’s relatives and members of her staff all had reasons to want her out of the picture, and it’s up to Poirot to sort out who actually tried their hand at the killing. Unfortunately, the novel feels like it is still setting the stage well into the second act, and it takes far too long for Poirot and Hastings to even agree that there is a case to solve.

The suspects are fairly stock characters, and a subplot about a pair of spiritualists feels tacked on to the central mystery. And the smoking gun piece of evidence ends up being a bit of a contrivance, someone wearing and doing things in a very strange manner in order to leave a set of intriguing clues. But nothing about Dumb Witness is outright frustrating or incorrect; it’s just more lackluster than anything. Agatha Christie wrote a total of 66 novels and 15 short-story collections; unless someone is doing a complete read through of her bibliography, or of just the Hercule Poirot novels, there are bound to be better choices than Dumb Witness.

Would I Recommend It: Not really. My personal Christie recommendation is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

[straydog733]

2023 in Books and Movies!

Another year of books and movies! I didn’t complete my full lists in 2023, but I still read and watched a lot of good things that I would like to talk about.

Books

Best Book: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

A weird and chilling look at the world of content moderators, We Had to Remove This Post shines a bright light on the people working in the background of every part of the internet, and will stay with you for a while to come.

Honorable Mentions: My Sister, The Serial Killer by by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada

Worst Book: Money Shot, Vol. 1 by Tim Seeley and Sarah Beattie, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs

Maybe this comic gets better in later volumes, but I will not be reading in order to find out. A story that loudly proclaims itself to be raunchy and weird has no business being this mundane and pedestrian.

Most Frustrating Book: Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař

A book that wants to use the trapping of sci-fi to tell a literary fiction story, but just ends up failing at both genres.

Dishonorable Mentions: Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth, Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Biggest Surprise: Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada

This was a random grab in the library, but ended up being so gripping and rich that it topped my yearly list and will stay with me for a while. 

Movies

I saw a lot of older movies this year, but for my recommendations I will mostly focus on those from this or last year.

Best Movie: Talk to Me (2022)

Just a truly exceptional horror film.

Honorable Mention: Polite Society (2023)

Worst Movie: Silent Night (2023)

This almost feels unfair to put here, as my wife and I walked out of the theater halfway through, but I highly doubt the ending redeemed this incredibly boring “thriller” with its twisted vigilante morality.

Most Frustrating Movie: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

If a novel has one central question, A or B, it is a bold choice for an adaptation to choose B when the novel chose A. Bold, but not necessarily good.

Biggest Surprise: Theater Camp (2023)

The trailers did this indie comedy no favors, but I ended up laughing out loud in the theater several times, and I would put it right up there with several Christopher Guest movies.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: "Money Shot, Vol. 1" by Tim Seeley and Sarah Beattie, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs

28. Wild Card: Money Shot, Vol. 1 by Tim Seeley and Sarah Beattie, illustrated by Rebekah Isaacs

List Progress: 13/30

In the not-too-distant future, humankind has withered. After being contacted by, and then rejected by, intelligent life from across the universe, humanity has turned away from the stars and given up any sense of exploration or curiosity. Even carnal pleasures have lost their intrigue. So when a group of scientists need to get attention and funding for their cutting edge stargate, they come up with the one thing that could entice a planet-wide audience: sex with aliens. Money Shot, Vol. 1 by Tim Seeley and Sarah Beattie follows the intrepid XXX-plorers, scientists determined to fund their research with intergalactic pornography broadcast back to Earth. But for a premise where the skies are the limit, the results are often pretty mundane.

Volume 1 of Money Shot finds the explorers already on the distant planet Dry Reef, with flashbacks to show how they concocted their porn plans. Their adventures have a very Star Trek-feel, with humanoid aliens and very human-like cultures, and it works well enough as a broad sex comedy. But the story’s aspirations seem so modest, especially when it claims to be trying to shake up all of humanity. All of the scientists are conventionally attractive, and even the aliens involved in sex scenes are shaped like attractive humans with one or two cosmetic differences. And the sex scenes are trying so hard to be sexy that they cycle around and become sterile. There’s no vulnerability, no flaws, no weirdness even when humans are copulating with fish-people, just conventional sex and screaming orgasms. The aliens even have human-style genders and sexual characteristics, which is just the most boring route to take. Among the five scientists, the three women and two men, there are at least plenty of same-sex match-ups, but they interact like naked dolls being knocked together. The most interesting pairing is between the two female scientists who dislike each other, as it forces tension into their dynamic, but by the end of the volume, even their edges have been softened too much to have much spark.

If Money Shot didn’t purport to be such wild, weird sex, it would be a lot easier to forgive the comic’s shortcomings. For a broad planet-hopping comedy, it’s a fun idea with some interesting points and very polished, professional art. But it lacks heart and heat, and falls short of what should have been a galaxy’s worth of possibilities.

Would I Recommend It: Not really.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: "Camp Damascus" by Chuck Tingle

25. A book released in 2023: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

List Progress: 20/30

Religion has been used as a weapon against so many people, and those who have been victims to it can find themselves adrift as they try to sort out their feelings about faith, belief and their own place in the cosmos. Rose Darling, the protagonist of 2023’s Camp Damascus, has spent all twenty years of her life in the Kingdom of the Pines community, peacefully living as a member of this conservative cult in small-town Montana. When she learns a twisted truth about the cult’s titular famous gay conversion camp, her whole world shifts on its axis and she has to reevaluate everything she has ever known. The emotional impact has to come together very quickly to keep up with the fast-moving plot, and the end results feel a bit rushed, but the journey of faith is still an engaging one to take with Rose.

Chuck Tingle is internet-famous as the pseudonymous author of scores of self-published gay erotica, such as My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass  and Bigfoot Sommelier Butt Tasting, and parody works like Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus: An Adult Romance Novel. Camp Damascus is his first mainstream publication, and the novel takes itself seriously while still having a sense of both fun and the surreal. The imagery of the first half of the novel, as Rose’s eyes are gradually opened to the horrors around her, is haunting and creepy, and the most effective scare is by far the most subtle (“What door?”). 

But the returns are somewhat diminishing when Rose makes a break for freedom at the middle point of the book. She is startlingly clear-eyed for a twenty-year-old who just deprogrammed herself from a lifetime in a cult, and it would have been more poignant for her to still have the cobwebs of the conformist mindset lingering even after her break away. And a late-arriving character who is still strongly religious after escaping Kingdom of the Pines feels like a blatant attempt to “have it both ways” and deflect accusations of the book being anti-religion. The build-up to the climax manages to both over- and under-explain a lot of the rules of this world and that is more than a bit frustrating.

Camp Damascus is not the tightest novel in the world, and it does feel like Tingle’s first time having to wrangle this long of a page count.  But for all its flaws, it is easy to fall in love with the blunt and awkward Rose and go on this journey with her. And the more pieces of media that call out the absolute cruelty and evil of conversion therapy, the better. Tingle’s mainstream novels may evolve with time, but the spirit is already there.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: "The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3" by Kira Yarmysh

9. A book written in Russia: The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 by Kira Yarmysh

List Progress: 12/30

When we as a society hold someone captive in a prison, jail or detention center, what are we trying to achieve? The main character of Kira Yarmysh’s The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 is sentenced to ten days in a detention center in Moscow after she participated in an anti-corruption rally. Is society safer without her in public life for ten days? No, because she was never violent. Will she learn a lesson from her time in prison? No, because she was protesting corruption in the first place, and exposure to the prison system certainly won’t change her mind. Will anyone’s lives be better because of her ten day imprisonment? No, and yet carceral systems all over the world are based around holding people for various lengths of time for no real purpose. The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 is at its strongest when it is investigating this system and the assumptions built into it. Unfortunately, these messages get buried in a lot of lackluster character work and some underdeveloped attempts at magical realism, making the novel as a whole a bit of a jumble.

Kira Yarmysh is the press secretary and assistant of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and The Incredible Events is her first novel. While it is a piece of fiction, Yarmysh shares a lot of backstory with Anya, and has spent time in detention centers after protests and political actions. The novel shines when it is just about Anya navigating the absurdity of the detention center. She is held in the titular Cell Number 3, the only women’s cell in an otherwise male facility, with five other women from various walks of life, each serving similarly short sentences for petty crimes. The inmates serve as a cross-section of contemporary Russian culture, from an older woman who has spent time in an actual prison camp and considers the center a cake-walk, to a young sugar baby who wants to get back to her life of thinly-veiled sex work with rich men. They are all tossed in together, but no one is around long enough to develop a real prison culture, so it is just an odd break from the rest of their lives. 

Unfortunately, Anya ends up being the least interesting of the inmates, and the novel spends long periods of time flashing back to formative parts of her life. It is notable that she is a queer woman in Russia, and she navigates some difficult situations throughout her life, but none that feel especially worthy of close study. She also starts seeing visions while in the detention center, the supposed incredible events, and it is unclear whether there are supernatural elements at play or if some latent mental illness is coming to the surface in the face of the stress of incarceration. But the book keeps with this ambiguity far too late into the run, making the final conclusion feel very abrupt and tacked on. Moving some of the revelations earlier and cutting some of Anya’s story would make for a tighter, more powerful book, rather than the slightly bloated final product.

Yarmysh has a good sense for atmosphere and dialogue, which will hopefully be honed in later works, but The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 still needs a fair amount of tweaking in the plot and character departments. But the parts that are powerful still work, which all adds up to a bit of a shrug.

Would I Recommend It: Soft yes.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: “We Had to Remove This Post” by Hanna Bervoets

27. Wild Card: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

List Progress: 11/30

On any social media site, or truly any website that accepts user submissions, there is a team of people working behind the scenes to keep some basic rules in place. The anonymity and sheer volume of the internet can bring out the worst in people, and professional content moderators spend their days wading through hate speech, pornography, spam, abuse and violence. Moderation cannot and should not be left entirely to machines and algorithms, but what about the impact on the moderators themselves? We Had to Remove This Post, the 2021 novel by Dutch author Hanna Bervoets, follows one such moderator, Kayleigh, as she reflects on what working at the moderating company Hexa did to her, her friends, and her relationships. It is a bracing, disturbing, sometimes unpleasant read, and if the book were much longer than its novella length, it would be too much. But for a story about the very concept of “too much”, this book is just the right amount.

We Had to Remove This Post is framed as Kayleigh’s tell-all, her interview with a lawyer to explain why she won’t join her former coworkers’ lawsuit against Hexa for unsafe work environments. Kayleigh knows that working at Hexa damaged her, but she also sees her own actions as shameful enough that she won’t publicly take a stand against them. Because Kayleigh started a relationship with her coworker Sigrid fairly soon into her tenure at the company, and with the combination of a toxic relationship dynamic and the trash they pumped into their brains every day, they brought out the absolute worst in each other. Sigrid starts to see the appeal of the conspiracy-theory videos they have to watch for content violations, and Kayleigh starts to crave the rush and revulsion of seeing incredibly depraved acts in a constant stream. They both think they are handling things better than the other and don’t see the rabbit holes they’ve gone down. Their whole job as moderators is to evaluate things from the outside, so of course they are better at that than the introspection to see their own actions. It’s a canny dynamic that Bervoets sets up, one that is easy to get sucked into.

This book is not for the faint of heart. Slurs, hate-speech, racism, descriptions of violence, self-harm, animal abuse and child abuse are all to be found in this short page count, and no one would be wrong to decide that it is too unpleasant of a matter to engage with in their media. But for everyone on the internet, there are people working day and night to make sure that you don’t have to engage with it, and Bervoets does powerful work highlighting that. While Remove this Post is a work of fiction, it is based explicitly on several real sources, including lawsuits that content moderators have brought against companies like Facebook. It’s a rough job, and someone does have to do it, but those people deserve all the support they can get.

Would I Recommend It: Yes, with the large caveat that the reader be comfortable with the content mentioned above.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: “Space Invaders” by Nona Fernández

3. A book written in South America: Space Invaders by Nona Fernández

List Progress: 10/30

Even more of a threat than “may you live in interesting times” is “may you come of age in interesting times”. In all of the dramatic and tumultuous moments of human history, there have been children and adolescents growing into adults in the midst of them. Space Invaders, the 2013 novel by Chilean author Nona Fernández, tells the story of a group of youths coming of age during the Pinochet dictatorship. One of their classmates was the daughter of a government official, and one day she was simply gone. Their memories of this disappeared girl come in waves and bursts, and are threaded through with imagery from the video game Space Invaders, one of the only ways these children can conceptualize the horrors happening around them.

Space Invaders is subtitled A Novel, but that feels slightly misleading, with its very short chapters, non-chronological story and loose, impressionistic story. The book is quite light on plot, but dense in feeling and sensation, rich with the sense of being in over one’s head. Many of the experiences are based on Fernández’s own childhood, and she captures the feeling of looking back through the haze of time. There is not much to tell about what happened to the little lost girl Estrella, but it had a huge impact on her peers and bruised them for the rest of their lives. Space Invaders isn’t going to take the reader along for a mystery or teach them facts about Pinochet’s regime, but it is going to let them feel what it is to be a child in a big, overwhelming world, and sometimes that is enough.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: “My Sister, The Serial Killer” by Oyinkan Braithwaite

6. A book written in Africa: My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

List Progress: 9/30

How far can familial love go? Is there such a thing as unconditional love, love that has absolutely nothing that could stop or lessen it? Most people, if pressed, have some conditions they put on the love they feel for others, even their nearest and dearest. But Korede, the protagonist of 2018 Nigerian novel My Sister, The Serial Killer, has no conditions on her love for her younger sister Ayoola, the titular serial killer. She doesn’t particularly like Ayoola, she resents her and carries a lot of anger towards the ways she has hurt Korede and others, but at the end of the day she has a cold, fierce love for her baby sister that is free of any and all conditions. And that is truly a terrible thing, but makes for a tense novel.

Author Oyinkan Braithwaite tells the story of Korede, a meticulous nurse working in a small hospital in Lagos, and her gorgeous, charming, magnetic sister Ayoola, who holds the spotlight in every room she walks into. Bonded by a traumatic childhood, Korede sees it as her job to protect Ayoola, even when she calls her in the middle of the night to help her deal with a boyfriend that Ayoola killed in self-defense. But the novel opens with the third dead boyfriend, and the claim of self-defense is ringing more than a little hollow. Korede can’t turn Ayoola in without revealing her own role in cleaning up the crime scenes, but far more important than that, she can’t turn her back on her sister. Korede gets by by unloading her soul to comatose patients at the hospital, but things reach a boiling point when Ayoola sets her sights on the object of Korede’s affections, as her next conquest and potential next victim.

Braithwaite keeps the book moving at a fast clip and the tension high, with very, very short chapters that move as quickly as Korede’s harried thoughts. The plot itself is not complicated, so this tension carries the novel. For a reader who doesn’t click with Korede, this could be a frustrating book, especially as Ayoola is an intentionally-frustrating character, but both of them get under your skin in a very engaging way. You sometimes want to yell at the page, but in the same exhilarating way that you yell at the screen for someone not to go into the haunted house. The haunted houses in My Sister, The Serial Killer are people, but they are just as filled with ghosts.

Would I Recommend It: Very much yes.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: “Spaceman of Bohemia” by Jaroslav Kalfař

20. A debut novel: Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař

List Progress: 5/30

Science fiction can hold up so many metaphors and meanings, and has been used to do so since the very beginnings of the genre. But underneath the layers of larger meaning, the central story should still hold up as a narrative in its own right. The problem with Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 debut, Spaceman of Bohemia, is that it has so much to say about the Czech Republic, marriage, and the burdens of legacy that it barely finishes the space travel story that it starts. There are a lot of interesting things to say about emotional abandonment in a marriage, but it’s hard to get too engaged with them when they are taking time away from the cosmic refugee spider alien.

Spaceman of Bohemia follows Jakub Procházka, a Czech astronaut. A cosmic dust cloud, called “Chopra”, has mysteriously appeared near Venus and has resisted all mechanical attempts to study it from Earth. The Czech Republic has stepped into the global spotlight by being the first country to send a human being to study the cloud, and Jakub will leave his wife Lenka for eight months to embark on the solo mission. Jakub was raised by his grandparents, but lives in the shameful shadow of his father, an interrogator/torturer for the Communist Party, and seeks to rehabilitate his family’s name. But he doubts his ability to do that, as well as his sanity, when he meets a spider-like alien aboard the ship, who he names Hanuš. Hanuš is from a distant telepathic race and is on a mission to learn as much as he can about Earth and humans, and he is fortunate to have found a lone human with all the time in the world on his hands.

The space travel in the present alternates with memories from Jakub’s life, but it is clear that Spaceman of Bohemia cares far more about the “Bohemia” part than the “Spaceman” part. Hanuš is telepathic largely to facilitate in-depth flashbacks, and what the reader learns about his species and world is very loose and vague. For all that it is the instigating event, the Chopra cloud ends up playing very little importance in the book as a whole and just serves as a way to get Jakub away from Earth (and it is unclear why the mission needs to be a solo expedition). The journey feels like it could have taken place under the sea, in the center of the planet, or in a magical fairy realm, as long as it separated Jakub from Lenka for a long time and gave him time to reflect on his life. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, as that is clearly the story that Kalfař is interested in telling, and nothing says that a sci-fi novel has to hew entirely to sci-fi. But Jakub frankly isn’t an interesting enough character to build the majority of the novel around, so when the alien isn’t taking center stage, it feels like a letdown.

This book is sure to find its fans, most likely among lovers of literary fiction rather than sci-fi. But for a book that promises spacemen in the title, the narrative feels far too stuck on Earth.

Would I Recommend It: Not really, no.

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: "Lute" by Jennifer Thorne

27. Wild Card: Lute by Jennifer Thorne

List Progress: 4/30

Folk horror is a fairly specific genre with specific signifiers: small European villages, calls back to ancient history, mysterious cults and rituals, discussion of sacrifices and offerings to forces of nature. Lute, the 2022 novel by Jennifer Thorne, wears its inspirations on its sleeves, described as “Wicker Man meets Final Destination” in marketing. But while the original Wicker Man is a classic of folk horror, the Final Destination franchise is a much pulpier affair, a type of horror with very different priorities. Lute doesn’t feel at home with either peer: it lacks the atmosphere and commitment of Wicker Man, but can’t replicate the gory fun of Final Destination, and ends up adrift in its own little island.

The titular Lute is an English island and home of American protagonist Nina. Seven years ago, she was swept up in a whirlwind romance with the young Lord Treadway, and is now the Lady of Lute, complete with two young children. But she has never felt really at home on Lute, partly because she has never experienced The Day, a pagan tithing that the island apparently demands every seven years in return for their general prosperity and strong borders, the latter of which is vital as the Russo-American armies have started marching across Europe. Nina doesn’t believe in The Day and is sure that nothing will happen, but when her husband’s plans for the family to be away are foiled, she has to stay put as seven of her friends and neighbors are chosen to die for the greater good. 

It’s a nicely haunting set-up, but the story is unfortunately overrun with unnecessary subplots and messy dropped threads that distract from the overall product. World War III taking place in Lute’s back yard has surprisingly little to do with the plot, for as much as it is established in the beginning, and the story of Nina’s abusive childhood is set up like a mystery, only for the reveals to come about like shrugs. But the worst offender by far is a romance subplot that seems to only exist in order to give a happy ending, when horror is one of the few genres with almost no expectation of a happy ending. These extraneous threads clutter up the narrative, but considering that almost all of the rest of the action is spent with Nina running back and forth to her neighbor’s houses, maybe they are necessary purely for page count.

If Lute were set up purely as a character piece, Nina’s personal journey, these plot cul-de-sacs might by forgivable, but unfortunately it is very hard to be invested in Nina as a person. She spends the first half of the novel dismissive of everyone’s rising terror about The Day, including her husband’s. It makes sense for her as a skeptic, but she is otherwise posited to be a caring and empathetic person, so her lack of patience for her loved one’s pain is off-putting. She bemoans being the idle rich, but only cares about her children as occasional distractions and hands them off to nannies and neighbors at every turn, even when bodies have started piling up. And when she does have her change of heart and accepts Lute’s ways, it happens very abruptly and quickly, like a switch was flipped in her head and she is now The Best Pagan. It only took an American to come and show everyone how it’s supposed to be done.

And yet despite Nina coming to peace with the customs, the epilogue off the book takes a baffling 180 degree turn, giving the characters an easy out that contradicts the whole journey they all went on. It honestly feels like Thorne lost her stomach at the last moment and couldn’t stand the decision her sympathetic protagonist came to through the course of the story. And at that point, an author needs to step back and ask themselves some serious questions about what story they are trying to tell and why.

Would I Recommend It: No.

(And in the smallest and pettiest of critiques, Nina is a terrible dog owner. Why would you include a trait of your supposedly-likeable lead that she does nothing to control her dog and frequently lets it loose across the entire island, where it not just destroys people’s gardens, but damages protected native bird nesting sites? Human sacrifice is one thing, poor dog training is another!)

[straydog733]

2024 Reading and Watching Resolutions

2024 Reading Resolution

A book written in North America:

A book written in Central America/Caribbean:

A book written in South America:

A book written in East Asia:

A book written in South Asia:

A book written in Africa: 

A book written in the Middle East: 

A book written in Australia/Pacific Islands:

A book written in Russia:

A book written in Europe: 

A biography or memoir: 

A non-fiction book: 

A collection of short stories: 

A play:

A book you’ve seen adapted: 

A graphic novel:

A children’s book:

A book older than 100 years:

A book older than 200 years: 

A debut novel: 

A novel by a famous author, other than the one(s) they are best known for: Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie

A sequel:

A book by an author you’ve never given a fair shot:

A book from a genre you don’t generally read:

A book released in 2024: 

Wild Card: 

Wild Card: 

Wild Card: 

Wild Card: 

Wild Card: 

List Progress: 1/30

2024 Watching Resolution

A foreign film: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

A black and white film: 

A silent or dialogue-free film: 

An animated film: 

A film based on a true story: Society of the Snow (2023)

A documentary:

A film based on a book: The Woman in Black (2012)

An award-winning movie: Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

A trashy movie: I Came By (2022)

Your friend’s recommendation: 

A children’s film: 

A film released in 2024: 

List Progress: 5/12

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: “Better the Blood” by Michael Bennett

8. A book written in Australia/Pacific Islands: Better the Blood by Michael Bennett

List Progress: 18/30

The detective crime novel is such a well-known format that it can be used as a structure on which to hang many different things. Cozy mysteries hang hobbies and niche interests on detective novels, many authors use them as a lens to investigate their detective characters, and some use them to tackle larger topics still. New Zealand author Michael Bennett uses his debut detective novel, Better the Blood, to investigate colonialism and racism against Maori communities, and eventually looks even deeper to interrogate detective novels themselves.

Hana Westerman is a Maori woman and a detective in Auckland, New Zealand, and the book does not shy away from how those two identities are in conflict. Eighteen years prior, she and several other Maori police officers had been pushed to the front lines to shut down peaceful land rights protests from the wider Maori community. She has lived with that shame for almost two decades, and hidden it from her politically-minded and rebellious teenage daughter. But everything gets pulled back into the spotlight when someone begins committing gruesome murders inspired by the 1860’s murder of a chief by British soldiers. Hana has to catch the serial killer while also dealing with her own culpability as part of the prison industrial complex, and it’s a rare police detective novel that will outright challenge the good of being a police detective.

Some parts of Better the Blood could afford to be streamlined or better integrated: the book begins with a subplot about a white rapist who has just evaded justice falsely accusing Hana of police brutality, but the plot is dropped so easily later in the book that it ends up feeling pointless. And considering how early the identity of the killer is revealed, the character work with them in the back half can end up feeling a bit overwrought. But these are ultimately small quibbles about a fast-paced, exciting novel that is not shy about making its points and challenging the fabric of New Zealand society. Better the Blood seems to be the first book of a series, so it will be exciting to see where Hana Westerman’s journeys take her next.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.