September reads
Oct. 6th, 2025 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mozaikmageSeptember books! I read 18 but some of them were graphic novels and some of them... were not good.
Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories by Torrey Peters
This one was great: Three shorter stories and one longer story, all different genres. Each story was in a very different voice that really established the sense of time and place in a short amount of words. I think I liked “Infect your friends and loved ones” and “The Chaser” the most. Stag Dance was interesting.
Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (novel), Vol. 1 by singNsong: Got it FROM THE LIBRARY and it is much more readable than the fanTL I must say. I understand the appeal now, the characters are fun and the several layers of metanarrative are interesting. Also if anything bad ever happens to the kid with the bugs I will drop it forever btw.
Spent by Alison Bechdel: She’s back! I like how this felt kinda like a sequel to DTWOF, and I really liked the bright, flat colors that are such a departure from the watercolor washes of her previous books. I did find it very funny.
Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine: Also very funny in a different way, recommended by my internship supervisor. I forgot Douglas Adams was a real hitchhiker before he wrote H2G2. Surprised he drew the line at century eggs when it came to trying new food in China. I like how open he was to all sorts of wild experiences, but also wow was it depressing to read about some of the endangered animal situations they saw. Glad the kakapo’s doing better now at least.
The Pretender by Jo Harkin: Very funny and still believably historical (following an imagined life for a Lambert Simnel, purported to be the last of the Plantaganets in the late 1400s), very tragic endgame, I like that there were lesbians in it.
The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands: A Novel by Sarah Brooks: This did not at all work for me, which is kind of annoying because I expected to love it. A trans-Siberian railway crossing with dark fantasy elements? Sounds like my jam! Alas. There were a lot of POVs but all of the narrative voices sounded the same, and I kept confusing The Professor, The Cartographer, and Henry Gray because of this. A lot of descriptions of things and not as many character interactions as I would like.
Voice Like a Hyacinth by Mallory Pearson: Someone has beaten me to the art school dark academia idea! The central conceit of a senior class competing to see who is allowed to do a full solo show was dismissed by my former fine arts major friend as “so outrageous why would anyone even apply to a school that does that to you”, but even discounting that, the friendship dynamics between the core group didn’t work for me... Amrita is always 100% perfect and nice and always 100% on Jo’s side no matter what, while Jo, Caroline and Finch are all allowed to have flaws and multiple dimensions to them. Which felt a little weird, to me. Also, though all five of them are supposed to be queer, only Jo and Finch have any romantic entanglements (with each other), Saz kinda checks out halfway through and Caroline just fully loses it for some reason all on her own. I was kind of expecting a twist that Amrita’s so sweet to Jo because she’d been secretly crushing on Jo the whole time, at least that would be a fun complication. I felt like only Jo and Caroline really went insane from the pressure, but it seemed like all five of them should have been going insane, together. Perhaps melding into a hive mind of some sort. Instead they all drifted apart. Could’ve been messier! Could’ve been gayer! That’s my review.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: This book read like one of those Reddit stories where you’re not sure if the OP is the good guy of the situation.
Tokyo These Days, Vol. 3 by Taiyo Matsumoto: Somehow forgot to read this when it dropped and caught up now. Man.... no one’s doing it like Matsumoto... I wanna make comics forever and ever or else.
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff: Somehow extremely absorbing. I started reading it and then couldn’t put it down. Maybe because it’s all relatable twenties problems, maybe because of the lit-world stuff. Inspired me to place some libby holds on some Salinger titles. One of which became available for me to read before the end of the month!
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross: It was fine, I guess. The way the war stuff was handled seemed. Weird. It was like a fantasy riff on WWI but in an attempt to avoid any geopolitical references made everything depend on gods which, within the universe, are extremely real? There should be geopolitics in your war book I think. The romance was fine. I guess. I dunno. It was fine.
The Comeback by Lily Chu: I did not intend to read three of her books back to back, that was the timing of the holds. I liked all three, obviously, otherwise I would not have read three of them back to back. This one was really good at making me believe the protagonist had never heard of the equivalent of a BTS boy. But also the main character was kind of infuriatingly reluctant to leave her shit job where no one appreciated her and take the nice new job she actually wanted to do. Like girl come on.
Drop Dead by Lily Chu: impeccable scene-setting and good balance of two povs, which is rare for Chu. Also a mystery plot! Fun and also rare for Chu. I liked it.
The Takedown by Lily Chu: the core romantic relationship was great, actually, the career stuff was kind of stressful though. I like the deconstruction of toxic positivity, that was interesting.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: Well. the first half was beautifully described internet memes I remember seeing years ago, the second half a very intense personal tragedy, I don’t know if I’d call this a novel. I did like Lockwood’s criticism on the LRB a lot more than her book. It doesn’t feel like it has a lot to say about the internet besides “everyone was talking about This One Post, do you also remember this one post” and I did in fact remember all of the posts.
Paris Letters by Janice MacLeod: As a memoir I liked it less than the Salinger Year because it had less scenes and more summaries. I like my narrative books to have scenes. She did have some interesting approaches to life that I cannot replicate due to not starting from an advertising executive salary, but it did motivate me to at least try the damn morning pages everyone else seems to do.
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly: Okay this ruled. Funny, dense, interesting, I love gay people and Russians and half-Russians in New Zealand. Such a good time.
Society of Lies by Lauren Ling Brown: Eh. See substack post for more thoughts on this one lol. (That's right I have a substack now).
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger: Ok reading this one after Society of Lies was kind of like following up a frozen pizza with filet mignon. As established two reviews ago, I really love a good scene, and that restaurant dinner in “Franny” was so vivid and well-described it blew most of the other scenes I’d read this month out of the water. I also wasn’t expecting Salinger to be so funny. I never read Catcher in the Rye for school and cultural osmosis led me to believe it was just angsty teen stuff like The Outsiders. I also put a hold on Catcher in the Rye.
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Date: 2025-10-07 01:35 am (UTC)I hadn't heard of several of these! Definitely intrigued by Stag Dance and Greta & Valdin in particular. I'm curious now about Divine Rivals in that fantasy takes on WWI are relevant to my interests, but I agree that it really seems like there ought to be geopolitics in there! Even if it's a situation where the POV character is a low-level grunt who doesn't pay too much attention to them, one ought to feel that they're happening, I think.
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Date: 2025-10-07 03:29 am (UTC)Stag Dance was great- it's by the same author as Detransition, Baby of you're familiar with that one, and Greta & Valdin might have been my favorite of the month. I would recommend both!
Ok so the protagonist and love interest in Divine Rivals are... Reporters... Working as War Correspondents... Who quit their previous newspaper because it wouldn't let them write about The War... AND THERE'S STILL NO GEOPOLITICS GOING ON the course of the war is entirely determined by magical beasts and gods and not political decisions made by people and I don't even remember if their country is a monarchy or not.
But I mean the romance was pretty cute...