books i read in 2021
Dec. 27th, 2021 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositemy ass was not reading this year (in english) literally all i was reading was doujins but i just went back through my twt archive and was shocked that some of the things i thought i read last year were actually this year. anyway this list is 5.5 entries long and umm Oops All YA but when is it not. i am an average romance enjoyer...
the inheritance games - jennifer lynn barnes
i picked this up on a whim and was jumpscared by how much i loved it like i was rolling around kicking my legs screaming into my hands I LOVE YA HET ROMANCE SO BADDD... this book is often described as knives out x cinderella but as i haven't seen knives out, i would describe it as 39 clues x cinderella. it's basically girl protag gets thrust into the toxic elite cutthroat world of high society when a random billionaire she's never met leaves everything to her in his will, and she has to navigate the internal politics of his cucked family and the mystery of why she was chosen and the various secrets of the past that come to light.
ofc the important part is the love triangle between the protag and two of the billionaire's grandsons. one of them is the cold ruthless repressed business major primed his whole life to be the family heir who instantly dislikes the protag. the other is the younger brother, an adrenalin-addicted self-destructive loner bad boy with zero purpose in life who is instantly fascinated by the mystery the protag represents. the romance was very heartfluttering to me i loved seeing the business major older brother slowly defrost and come to respect and trust and fall for the protag via cost-benefit debates over asset management (!!!) and unexpected moments of emotional honesty... i'm businessmajor4businessmajor supporter! there were also some deeply fucked up and delicious interactions between the girls, protag and the ultra popular queen bee who blames the love interest brothers for the death of her best friend and uses the protag as a weapon to hurt the brothers had some truly amazing horrible manipulative interactions. 10/10 everything i could ever ask for from a ya book.
favourite line:
Another look—and more emotion, heavily masked. "Will you show me where you were hurt?" Grayson asked, his voice not quite strained—but something.
pathfinding! - nicole kornher-stace
this is a short story, not a book, but absolutely my favourite read of the year and probably one of my favourite short stories ever. i skimmed back over it while compiling this post and was instantly bodied again it's so me bait it's unreal. being prodigy child soldier partner-rivals in a military project involving time-dilated war simulations run by artificial intelligence where they fight and kill and die over and over again and all the while their cohort is slowly dying in real life from complications with the technology... stupid teen bravado and competitiveness underscored by desperate we-are-all-we-have-left codependence and a painfully clear understanding of the other person underneath the violence and badly-concealed coping mechanisms... "of course they love each other. just not in the way you think" AGH!!!! there's even cutaways to the outsider pov of the project director and i really liked seeing her (somewhat sunk cost fallacy?) resolve that torturing and traumatising children is the best way to protect the greater good, but the like mildly detached guilt she feels over it nonetheless, though not enough to stop.
the ending is also pitch perfect to me, the stubborn idealism despite the horrific bleakness and hopelessness of the entire situation, and it may be false hope but more importantly than that it's still a small moment of beauty and peace to hold onto. surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something, you know? 100000/10 please read this.
favourite line:
ender's game - orson scott card
manali recced this to me after i posted about being obsessed with pathfinding! and as Guy Who Loves Military Academies and fucked up haptics proxemics especially between siblings and psychological mind games and prodigies shaped into weapons by their mentor figures despite ambivalent feelings about violence... i did enjoy it! absolutely banger concepts that i love to see. there was also so much racism in every possible direction it was almost impressive. i mainly remember feeling soooo miserable agfkjdsgsfk ender's constant loneliness really got to me even though i know it was intentional because the teachers subscribed to the theory of exceptionalism necessitating isolation. but i really would have liked more ensemble dynamix :'( overall there was some really great rotational material that i promptly appropriated for rikkai. 8/10.
iron widow - xiran jay zhao
this was so bad it was actually really funny so i don't regret reading it. essentially this one is fantasy historical fiction about pacific rim au wu zetian. things that were good: i liked the idol industry Image Is Everything focus on the jaeger copilots. i liked that this book's version of drifting was conceptualised as mortal combat because i love gratuitous violence. i was pleasantly surprised that the hints of canon poly were followed through on and the love triangle was resolved jealousy-free via ot3, except that one of the love interests was so boring to me i actually wish it hadn't gone that route. i'm generally a fan of war criminal girls fuelled by rage and vengeance and delusion. and i'm not immune to epic girlboss moments yk.
things that were bad: aghkjfdsgkfdskfdsgskdfdskfdsksd. the feminism girlpower (tm) monologues every three pages oh my god it was soooo heavy-handed and yet every other woman the protag interacted with was either a one-note bitch or a backstabber to her like at least put your money where your mouth is and write some female relationships with depth then?!? though really the depth issue plagued all the relationships except maybe protag x her government assigned cp co-criminal drift partner, i thought their dynamic was quite heart touching because i'm extremely easy to sell on bad boy with secret heart of gold romances. the prose was so bland and exposition-heavy... generally really clunky on a technical level, every time anything with Thematic Resonance happened the next few paragraphs would be like explicitly pointing out and explaining the thematic resonance and narrative implications just in case we didn't get it the first time around but things literally weren't deep enough in the first place to even warrant it. and i know it was for like historical verisimilitude and tonesetting and Misogyny Bad reasons but i could not handle the constant disgusting body horror descriptions of the foot binding. also this is a personal preference but i don't like reading stories that are largely about Societal Oppression in general. overall 1/10.
favourite line:
There will be no redemption. It is not me who is wrong. It's everyone else.
the inheritance games - jennifer lynn barnes
i picked this up on a whim and was jumpscared by how much i loved it like i was rolling around kicking my legs screaming into my hands I LOVE YA HET ROMANCE SO BADDD... this book is often described as knives out x cinderella but as i haven't seen knives out, i would describe it as 39 clues x cinderella. it's basically girl protag gets thrust into the toxic elite cutthroat world of high society when a random billionaire she's never met leaves everything to her in his will, and she has to navigate the internal politics of his cucked family and the mystery of why she was chosen and the various secrets of the past that come to light.
ofc the important part is the love triangle between the protag and two of the billionaire's grandsons. one of them is the cold ruthless repressed business major primed his whole life to be the family heir who instantly dislikes the protag. the other is the younger brother, an adrenalin-addicted self-destructive loner bad boy with zero purpose in life who is instantly fascinated by the mystery the protag represents. the romance was very heartfluttering to me i loved seeing the business major older brother slowly defrost and come to respect and trust and fall for the protag via cost-benefit debates over asset management (!!!) and unexpected moments of emotional honesty... i'm businessmajor4businessmajor supporter! there were also some deeply fucked up and delicious interactions between the girls, protag and the ultra popular queen bee who blames the love interest brothers for the death of her best friend and uses the protag as a weapon to hurt the brothers had some truly amazing horrible manipulative interactions. 10/10 everything i could ever ask for from a ya book.
favourite line:
Another look—and more emotion, heavily masked. "Will you show me where you were hurt?" Grayson asked, his voice not quite strained—but something.
pathfinding! - nicole kornher-stace
this is a short story, not a book, but absolutely my favourite read of the year and probably one of my favourite short stories ever. i skimmed back over it while compiling this post and was instantly bodied again it's so me bait it's unreal. being prodigy child soldier partner-rivals in a military project involving time-dilated war simulations run by artificial intelligence where they fight and kill and die over and over again and all the while their cohort is slowly dying in real life from complications with the technology... stupid teen bravado and competitiveness underscored by desperate we-are-all-we-have-left codependence and a painfully clear understanding of the other person underneath the violence and badly-concealed coping mechanisms... "of course they love each other. just not in the way you think" AGH!!!! there's even cutaways to the outsider pov of the project director and i really liked seeing her (somewhat sunk cost fallacy?) resolve that torturing and traumatising children is the best way to protect the greater good, but the like mildly detached guilt she feels over it nonetheless, though not enough to stop.
the ending is also pitch perfect to me, the stubborn idealism despite the horrific bleakness and hopelessness of the entire situation, and it may be false hope but more importantly than that it's still a small moment of beauty and peace to hold onto. surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something, you know? 100000/10 please read this.
favourite line:
He tilts his face back to the false starlight, oblivious to 06’s incredulity. So who has the weirdest story? The people who lost the kids or the people who found them?
Silence. It stretches long enough that he turns to regard her. Distantly he realizes he’s hijacked her story and is about to meet the consequences. Knowing 06 the way he knows the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, he’s aware that these consequences will come with all the quiet devastation of a blade so sharp you don’t feel the cut until you’ve bled out: subtle and exacting and neither more nor less than he deserves.
However:
Trick question, 06 says at length. The kids do.
Silence. It stretches long enough that he turns to regard her. Distantly he realizes he’s hijacked her story and is about to meet the consequences. Knowing 06 the way he knows the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears, he’s aware that these consequences will come with all the quiet devastation of a blade so sharp you don’t feel the cut until you’ve bled out: subtle and exacting and neither more nor less than he deserves.
However:
Trick question, 06 says at length. The kids do.
ender's game - orson scott card
manali recced this to me after i posted about being obsessed with pathfinding! and as Guy Who Loves Military Academies and fucked up haptics proxemics especially between siblings and psychological mind games and prodigies shaped into weapons by their mentor figures despite ambivalent feelings about violence... i did enjoy it! absolutely banger concepts that i love to see. there was also so much racism in every possible direction it was almost impressive. i mainly remember feeling soooo miserable agfkjdsgsfk ender's constant loneliness really got to me even though i know it was intentional because the teachers subscribed to the theory of exceptionalism necessitating isolation. but i really would have liked more ensemble dynamix :'( overall there was some really great rotational material that i promptly appropriated for rikkai. 8/10.
favourite line:
"We have to go. I'm almost happy here."
"So stay."
"I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it."
chain of iron - cassandra clare
i completely forgot i read this book this year... generally pretty forgettable all around, this was not a great year for sequels. i barely remember what happened in this umm... i think overall tlh is vastly inferior to tid and most of the cast and the dynamics are really boring, like we have already seen the 2 parabatai in love with same girl love triangle done in the best possible way so of course the tlh take on it is worse. grace is perfect and the carstairs siblings killed me again but other than that there's like nothing going for this book. and everyone being so awful to grace is increasingly getting on my nerves, if book 3 doesn't resolve this issue properly i have an event planned. um...1/10 it gets 1 point for being a book in which grace blackthorn exists.
favourite line:
But that love had to go somewhere, or Grace might explode, like a river bursting a dam.
the hawthorne legacy - jennifer lynn barnes
sequel to the inheritance games. i was SO excited for this off the first book which as you can see i really really loved. but this was sooooooo bad my god. i know that the bad boy love interest usually wins but i was feeling tentatively hopeful off book 1 that business major love interest would win because he was actually genuinely connecting with the protag as a person, whereas it was like bad boy love interest was only surface-level interested in her because she was a puzzle he couldn't figure out. but all that went down the drain in this book and in the most contrived way possible?? business major love interest barely existed at all, 90% of the book was bad boy and protag, and then business major's character was randomly assassinated right at the end in a move so offensively He Would Never Do That it was clearly just intended to take him out of the romantic competition.
and then bad boy and protag got together on the pretext that apparently he really did now care about her as a person except like... there was no indication of that at all in the text? he said he didn't just see her as a puzzle anymore but he literally spent the whole book hanging around her because there were more puzzles to be solved and that was the entire basis of their dynamic. i mean yes i am pressed about my romance pick apparently getting nuked but even objectively speaking the way it was done was so insulting and out-of-character it's like ok this may be "canon" but it's stupid as fuck and doesn't align with the text as previously established!! we take the textual integrity of ya romance books very seriously here at dw user rhodochrosite.
also i don't care about plot except as a vehicle for character development and character dynamics, but some of the plot reveals this book were so unspeakably stupid that even i was like Girl What. anyway i'll still pick up book 3 when it comes out but i will be skipping to the end to check who the endgame is first before deciding whether i should bother investing my time. so disappointing. 2/10 for the incredibly random fanservice (me i was the fan) scenes of business major teaching protag how to swordfight (?!?!) and kissing her in a media interview for pr purposes.
favourite line:
"I am an expert at not wanting to want things." I held my sword up for a moment longer, then lowered it, the way he'd lowered his. "But I'm starting to realise that the person I need to be, the person I'm becoming—she's not that girl anymore."
"We have to go. I'm almost happy here."
"So stay."
"I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it."
chain of iron - cassandra clare
i completely forgot i read this book this year... generally pretty forgettable all around, this was not a great year for sequels. i barely remember what happened in this umm... i think overall tlh is vastly inferior to tid and most of the cast and the dynamics are really boring, like we have already seen the 2 parabatai in love with same girl love triangle done in the best possible way so of course the tlh take on it is worse. grace is perfect and the carstairs siblings killed me again but other than that there's like nothing going for this book. and everyone being so awful to grace is increasingly getting on my nerves, if book 3 doesn't resolve this issue properly i have an event planned. um...1/10 it gets 1 point for being a book in which grace blackthorn exists.
favourite line:
But that love had to go somewhere, or Grace might explode, like a river bursting a dam.
the hawthorne legacy - jennifer lynn barnes
sequel to the inheritance games. i was SO excited for this off the first book which as you can see i really really loved. but this was sooooooo bad my god. i know that the bad boy love interest usually wins but i was feeling tentatively hopeful off book 1 that business major love interest would win because he was actually genuinely connecting with the protag as a person, whereas it was like bad boy love interest was only surface-level interested in her because she was a puzzle he couldn't figure out. but all that went down the drain in this book and in the most contrived way possible?? business major love interest barely existed at all, 90% of the book was bad boy and protag, and then business major's character was randomly assassinated right at the end in a move so offensively He Would Never Do That it was clearly just intended to take him out of the romantic competition.
and then bad boy and protag got together on the pretext that apparently he really did now care about her as a person except like... there was no indication of that at all in the text? he said he didn't just see her as a puzzle anymore but he literally spent the whole book hanging around her because there were more puzzles to be solved and that was the entire basis of their dynamic. i mean yes i am pressed about my romance pick apparently getting nuked but even objectively speaking the way it was done was so insulting and out-of-character it's like ok this may be "canon" but it's stupid as fuck and doesn't align with the text as previously established!! we take the textual integrity of ya romance books very seriously here at dw user rhodochrosite.
also i don't care about plot except as a vehicle for character development and character dynamics, but some of the plot reveals this book were so unspeakably stupid that even i was like Girl What. anyway i'll still pick up book 3 when it comes out but i will be skipping to the end to check who the endgame is first before deciding whether i should bother investing my time. so disappointing. 2/10 for the incredibly random fanservice (me i was the fan) scenes of business major teaching protag how to swordfight (?!?!) and kissing her in a media interview for pr purposes.
favourite line:
"I am an expert at not wanting to want things." I held my sword up for a moment longer, then lowered it, the way he'd lowered his. "But I'm starting to realise that the person I need to be, the person I'm becoming—she's not that girl anymore."
- ok i've been like vein_kid.png trying to let my quote picks stand on their own w/o my commentary but like HOW COULD YOU HAVE THE PROTAG SAY THIS. TO THE BUSINESS MAJOR. WHEN THEIR WHOLE DYNAMIC IS ABOUT REPRESSION AND SLOWLY BEGINNING TO ALLOW THEMSELVES TO WANT EACH OTHER. AND THEN SOMEHOW MAKE IT ABOUT HER PICKING BAD BOY???????? LIKEEEEEEEE this line is LITERALLY a confession i'm absolutely baffled as to how op twisted it into a REJECTION? die then.
iron widow - xiran jay zhao
this was so bad it was actually really funny so i don't regret reading it. essentially this one is fantasy historical fiction about pacific rim au wu zetian. things that were good: i liked the idol industry Image Is Everything focus on the jaeger copilots. i liked that this book's version of drifting was conceptualised as mortal combat because i love gratuitous violence. i was pleasantly surprised that the hints of canon poly were followed through on and the love triangle was resolved jealousy-free via ot3, except that one of the love interests was so boring to me i actually wish it hadn't gone that route. i'm generally a fan of war criminal girls fuelled by rage and vengeance and delusion. and i'm not immune to epic girlboss moments yk.
things that were bad: aghkjfdsgkfdskfdsgskdfdskfdsksd. the feminism girlpower (tm) monologues every three pages oh my god it was soooo heavy-handed and yet every other woman the protag interacted with was either a one-note bitch or a backstabber to her like at least put your money where your mouth is and write some female relationships with depth then?!? though really the depth issue plagued all the relationships except maybe protag x her government assigned cp co-criminal drift partner, i thought their dynamic was quite heart touching because i'm extremely easy to sell on bad boy with secret heart of gold romances. the prose was so bland and exposition-heavy... generally really clunky on a technical level, every time anything with Thematic Resonance happened the next few paragraphs would be like explicitly pointing out and explaining the thematic resonance and narrative implications just in case we didn't get it the first time around but things literally weren't deep enough in the first place to even warrant it. and i know it was for like historical verisimilitude and tonesetting and Misogyny Bad reasons but i could not handle the constant disgusting body horror descriptions of the foot binding. also this is a personal preference but i don't like reading stories that are largely about Societal Oppression in general. overall 1/10.
favourite line:
There will be no redemption. It is not me who is wrong. It's everyone else.
- i'm sorry to end this post on a joke pick for fave line but this book is so nothing i was scraping the bottom of the barrel. but genuinely i was in tears reading this... literally the Am I Out Of Touch? .... No, It's The Children Who Are Wrong meme from the simpsons
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Date: 2021-12-27 06:32 am (UTC)i do not read books....i will probably never become a book reader....but i do love to see my beloved ash's thoughts on all media :)<3 honestly if i did tho inheritance games Does sound really good....unfortunately i fear i may be on the bad boy second lead's team if i did tho cuz i love zero purpose in life self destructive fuck ups but its kind of a toss up...more importantly tho the girls dynamics in book 1 sound truly slayful and amazing
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Date: 2021-12-27 08:44 am (UTC)hehe thank u for reading my reviews!! LOL when i was reading ur bl post i was thinking if u ever read inheritance games u would probably support bad boy lead except his name (JAMESON) is so stupid it really be putting me off. the girls dynamix in book 1 is so sexy its like
thea (queen bee girlboss, childhood friend of male leads) best friends with emily (super charismatic and reckless gatekeep gaslight girlboss both male leads used to be in love with, now dead due to accident she caused but the guys were involved, thea blames them for her death) + in love with emily's sister rebecca who doesn't quite love her back but thea is working on it
-> thea decides to sabotage protags relationship with the guys out of loyalty to her dead best friend by styling her exactly like emily at a party to trigger the guys into traumatic flashbacks
-> she also fucks protag over in order to protect rebecca later
-> zero guilt or shame over doing either
thea literally my 1pick i love bitchy cliquey elite private school girl 1s with dubious morals...
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Date: 2021-12-31 02:06 am (UTC)jsdkdshjkjsdhjk i forgot about the names ok well i am also very shallow so tbh that alone could work against my usual preferences...as i said in my own post having a good name is actually a very important trait in a 1. ALSO I VAGUELY RMB U TWEETING ABT THE GIRLS DYNAMIX.....SERIOUSLY SOUNDS SO SLAYFUL ITS UNREAL praying for thea lesbianas endgame 🙏🙏🙏 also my default 1pick based on this description alone she seriously sounds perfect. you know how i also feel about bitchy cliquey elite private school girl 1s with dubious morals<333
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