books i read in 2022
Dec. 25th, 2022 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositethis year i managed to beat my 2021 record of 5.5 books in the negative direction by only reading 2.5 new books! once again i was in the readings for class mines so i just didn't want to read anything else in english. anyway this post will contain spoilers for babel by r. f. kuang and nona the ninth by tamsyn muir.
THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES - SUZANNE COLLINS
i got bored halfway through this book and just stopped reading. i didn't care about snow in the original series and i didn't care about him as a protag, like i've read sooooo many amazing novel-length thg fics exploring the lives and backstories of the victors that severely outsold this book, and not to sound up my own ass but i think even i did a better job writing a villain protag in rtfbt lmao. i don't know if it's ethical for me to give this book a rating when i didn't finish it but i will anyway, 1/10 for expanding the worldbuilding and history of the early games and i do really love the thg universe.
favourite line: n/a
BABEL - R. F. KUANG
i knew i would hate this book on every front from plot to tropes to prose to technical writing aspects and predictably i did, but i was vaguely hoping rfk might have improved a little since tpw but ummm sadly not. the subjective element of my dislike is that rfk clearly really loves writing stories that are quasihistorical deepdives focusing on the systemic inequalities and injustices that oppressed groups experience... and i seriously hate these kinds of stories. that's just a personal taste thing, i know that lots of people like stories that explore the real-world power dynamics of eg racism and misogyny, but i am not one of them. SO far from one of them. however, since it's pretty common to include in fantasy fiction and i love Stories About Magic, i have built up a decent tolerance so long as 1) the dynamix 2) the magic parts are sufficiently slayeristic. i managed to get through tpw because i thought the insanely intense soap opera cast dynamics were so sexy and the god conduit magic was cool.
unfortunately, while i do think the magic system in babel is really really epic (ever since i started doing translation stuff for fun on tenipuri and detective conan, the difficulty of conveying all the right nuances of meaning and tone and association and rhythm when translating from one language to another have been on my mind, and i actually love the idea that this not-quite-perfectly-bridgeable gap between languages could be a source of power), the characters were uniformly so boring and the cast dynamics just gave me nothing... griffin/robin replacement goldfish resentment-adoration brocon was the only mildly compelling part because it reminded me of the vastly superior echizens dynamic but griffin like barely existed, did very little, juuust scraped past the bare minimum of appropriate Pet Sociopath Older Brother Love For Younger Brother No Matter How Difficult It Is, and then died. his cool killer 1 archetype stats supplemented by the ryoga comparison i was giving him for free in my mind hardcarried...
my other personal problem is that iiiiiii super hate it when elaborate systems and institutions get dismantled like i guess the point is that the system was Bad and A Tool Of Violent Oppression so it Should Be Deconstructed but it was so juicy ): like i'm aware that rfk is like, gundam firing IMPERIALISM IS BAD over my head while i'm staring at robot like Wow Cool Magic System but i think just this ties back into me hating it when stories are steeped in real-world oppression, i'm only interested in the fantasy worldbuilding part so it sucks to have that pulled out from under me.
the objective element of my dislike is that i literally just do not think rfk is a good writer. having an Imperialism/Colonialism/Racism Bad message is one thing, but she absolutely beats you over the head with the message soooo preachily like DO YOU GET IT NOW?? DO YOU SEE??? IMPERIALISM.... BAD!! because she doesn't know how to do subtlety and never has, even in tpw her idea of foreshadowing was like random infodump about minor worldbuilding detail ten pages before this detail suddenly showed up as part of something plot relevant. i haven't read dark academia genre books before so maybe this is just a genre thing because i don't think it was that bad in tpw, but literally the entire book was written as a recap montage of things that happened plus heavy worldbuilding infodump tangents rather than like........... the actual things that happened. like it's all summary, no events, and when there are real actual events happening in real time it's mostly people monologuing at each other (i presume this is a hallmark of dark academia though. but i would have thought the monologues would be more interesting? i love monologues, i love guys who lecture other guys, i just couldn't stand the execution in this book).
the other problem stemming from the mediocre cast and cast dynamics is that the narration repeatedly emphasised how much everyone loved each other but it was really kinda footage not found due to the slideshow summary writing style, i just did not buy that they cared about each other so much. ability to portray heart-touching and believable character relationships is something that rfk was already kinda losing her grip on in tbg which is weird because she slayed the fuck out of them in tpw so i don't know what went wrong there. maybe i'm letting my personal grievances re: tpw colour my opinion but... well... it's my post. all in all a miserable slog of a book with basically no redeeming qualities except for the lines i stole for echizens rotations out of context, rt myself: honestly that wasn't even a book that was an abridged summary of a book in the middle of some detailed research notes about the 19th century. 1/10.
favourite line: "So I need you, darling brother." Griffin reached out, ruffled his hair. His touch was so forceful it hurt. "You're the real thing. You're indispensable."
NONA THE NINTH - TAMSYN MUIR
CRIED. BLEW UP. love is real'd, life is too short and love is too long'd, lobstered myself, tinhetted and siscon'd in the lesbians book no problem *face holding back tears emoji* my main burden is that idgaf about the 9th house at all (guy who still doesn't even know who nona was supposed to be) but i really really really care about the 3rd and 6th houses and there was so much WAIT IT'S ALL LOVE there so that's all that matters to me and i was happy(?)... i'm just gonna c/p the important bits from my lt thread bc i can't be bothered to generate new thoughts rn.
RE: palamedes & camilla MY OTP... MY EVERYTHING... i love that their devotion to each other transcends death and the self and all kinds of definition it's just pure and absolute love but also just to be clear i strongly reject the notion that they are platonic life partners i think they are IN REAL TRUE ROMANTIC LOVE FOREVER.... AND THEY APPROACHED THE END STILL BELIEVING IN EACH OTHER....
also i reread ht9 and it made so much more sense to me on a second reading like i actually understood the concrete events that were going on and like... who was who... lmfao. i miss the hagline lyctors... augustine and mercy guys who hate each other but also don't have anyone except each other left blackrom was sooooo good )': i think i need to reread nt9 now that i kinda have a grip on ht9 and hopefully the interlude chapters will make more sense to me lol. 8/10.
favourite line: "Palamedes, yes," she said. "My whole life, yes. Yes, forever, yes. Life is too short and love is too long."
++ PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS - RICK RIORDAN
while procrastinating on writing my final assignments i decided to reread all of pjo and hoo which i hadn't read since primary school for pjo and like.... early/mid high school for hoo i think? basically i literally didn't remember anything about any of the books so it was like i was reading it all for the first time. but really funny and nostalgic reads even though i'm way out of the target audience now :') i enjoyed pjo a lot i loved reexperiencing the absolute terror that is 1) the titan's curse 2) luke/thalia 3) the way that thalia conclusively falls out of love with luke in the titan's curse 4) the grief ending and the love also ending. it kind of breaks my heart that luke's last words were for annabeth and not thalia but i do think it's narratively important that thalia wasn't there because annabeth was the one who couldn't let go of luke, thalia already understood the luke she loved to be dead and had steeled her heart and moved on, and i think it would serve no purpose to unnecessarily cast doubt on the resolve behind her hunter vows. but also...... my otp............. ): also fun fact thalia was one of my earliest ever onepicks, i have super vivid memories of reading sea of monsters (my gateway into pjo) when i was 8 and getting to the cliffhanger at the end of the book where thalia comes back to life and just instantly knowing she was The One <3 i have been SLAYERISTIC MAIDENLOVER9000 since birth etc.
hoo was much more of a mixed bag for me, i was joking that it really is kinda the shinteni of pjo (the shindemi...) aka the epic highs are pretty high and the epic lows are pretty low and there are a bunch of new highschooler characters including a retconned sibling of an original cast member and i think the camp that is introduced has bad vibes and is unpleasant to be around. i don't really know why i have anti-roman prejudice, i don't dislike any of the new roman characters and camp jupiter is literally a military academy which means i should automatically stan, but i think it's a combination of feeling cliquey about my beloved middleschoolers (camp half-blood) + only liking things i already like so i don't like new things + i thought it was so unfair of the romans to plagiarise the greek gods when i was like five years old with a passionately overdeveloped sense of justice finding out about greco-roman mythology for the first time so i guess camp jupiter was kinda doomed in my eyes from the start lmao.
anyway i don't have a strong enough impression of hoo the first time i read it to remember who i liked but REYNA is now my highschooler onepick for sureeeeeee her Bearer Of The Curse guilt/repression narrative parallels roadtrip with nico literally made all of hoo worth it... the other highlights were the piper/annabeth Girls The World moments like the offhand mention of their running joke of stealing e/o's breakfasts + percy/jason extremely funny men in men's business rivals bromance even though that should be THALIA which is why the titan's curse reigns supreme to me. i also have generally positive feelings about percy/annabeth and jason/piper but overall my opinion on hoo just ranges from neutral negative to neutral positive. i guess i can't rate pjo due to nostalgia bias but hoo is like a solid 5/10 for me.
favourite line: "Yield!" Thalia yelled. "You never could beat me, Luke."
THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES - SUZANNE COLLINS
i got bored halfway through this book and just stopped reading. i didn't care about snow in the original series and i didn't care about him as a protag, like i've read sooooo many amazing novel-length thg fics exploring the lives and backstories of the victors that severely outsold this book, and not to sound up my own ass but i think even i did a better job writing a villain protag in rtfbt lmao. i don't know if it's ethical for me to give this book a rating when i didn't finish it but i will anyway, 1/10 for expanding the worldbuilding and history of the early games and i do really love the thg universe.
favourite line: n/a
BABEL - R. F. KUANG
i knew i would hate this book on every front from plot to tropes to prose to technical writing aspects and predictably i did, but i was vaguely hoping rfk might have improved a little since tpw but ummm sadly not. the subjective element of my dislike is that rfk clearly really loves writing stories that are quasihistorical deepdives focusing on the systemic inequalities and injustices that oppressed groups experience... and i seriously hate these kinds of stories. that's just a personal taste thing, i know that lots of people like stories that explore the real-world power dynamics of eg racism and misogyny, but i am not one of them. SO far from one of them. however, since it's pretty common to include in fantasy fiction and i love Stories About Magic, i have built up a decent tolerance so long as 1) the dynamix 2) the magic parts are sufficiently slayeristic. i managed to get through tpw because i thought the insanely intense soap opera cast dynamics were so sexy and the god conduit magic was cool.
unfortunately, while i do think the magic system in babel is really really epic (ever since i started doing translation stuff for fun on tenipuri and detective conan, the difficulty of conveying all the right nuances of meaning and tone and association and rhythm when translating from one language to another have been on my mind, and i actually love the idea that this not-quite-perfectly-bridgeable gap between languages could be a source of power), the characters were uniformly so boring and the cast dynamics just gave me nothing... griffin/robin replacement goldfish resentment-adoration brocon was the only mildly compelling part because it reminded me of the vastly superior echizens dynamic but griffin like barely existed, did very little, juuust scraped past the bare minimum of appropriate Pet Sociopath Older Brother Love For Younger Brother No Matter How Difficult It Is, and then died. his cool killer 1 archetype stats supplemented by the ryoga comparison i was giving him for free in my mind hardcarried...
my other personal problem is that iiiiiii super hate it when elaborate systems and institutions get dismantled like i guess the point is that the system was Bad and A Tool Of Violent Oppression so it Should Be Deconstructed but it was so juicy ): like i'm aware that rfk is like, gundam firing IMPERIALISM IS BAD over my head while i'm staring at robot like Wow Cool Magic System but i think just this ties back into me hating it when stories are steeped in real-world oppression, i'm only interested in the fantasy worldbuilding part so it sucks to have that pulled out from under me.
the objective element of my dislike is that i literally just do not think rfk is a good writer. having an Imperialism/Colonialism/Racism Bad message is one thing, but she absolutely beats you over the head with the message soooo preachily like DO YOU GET IT NOW?? DO YOU SEE??? IMPERIALISM.... BAD!! because she doesn't know how to do subtlety and never has, even in tpw her idea of foreshadowing was like random infodump about minor worldbuilding detail ten pages before this detail suddenly showed up as part of something plot relevant. i haven't read dark academia genre books before so maybe this is just a genre thing because i don't think it was that bad in tpw, but literally the entire book was written as a recap montage of things that happened plus heavy worldbuilding infodump tangents rather than like........... the actual things that happened. like it's all summary, no events, and when there are real actual events happening in real time it's mostly people monologuing at each other (i presume this is a hallmark of dark academia though. but i would have thought the monologues would be more interesting? i love monologues, i love guys who lecture other guys, i just couldn't stand the execution in this book).
the other problem stemming from the mediocre cast and cast dynamics is that the narration repeatedly emphasised how much everyone loved each other but it was really kinda footage not found due to the slideshow summary writing style, i just did not buy that they cared about each other so much. ability to portray heart-touching and believable character relationships is something that rfk was already kinda losing her grip on in tbg which is weird because she slayed the fuck out of them in tpw so i don't know what went wrong there. maybe i'm letting my personal grievances re: tpw colour my opinion but... well... it's my post. all in all a miserable slog of a book with basically no redeeming qualities except for the lines i stole for echizens rotations out of context, rt myself: honestly that wasn't even a book that was an abridged summary of a book in the middle of some detailed research notes about the 19th century. 1/10.
favourite line: "So I need you, darling brother." Griffin reached out, ruffled his hair. His touch was so forceful it hurt. "You're the real thing. You're indispensable."
NONA THE NINTH - TAMSYN MUIR
CRIED. BLEW UP. love is real'd, life is too short and love is too long'd, lobstered myself, tinhetted and siscon'd in the lesbians book no problem *face holding back tears emoji* my main burden is that idgaf about the 9th house at all (guy who still doesn't even know who nona was supposed to be) but i really really really care about the 3rd and 6th houses and there was so much WAIT IT'S ALL LOVE there so that's all that matters to me and i was happy(?)... i'm just gonna c/p the important bits from my lt thread bc i can't be bothered to generate new thoughts rn.
RE: palamedes & camilla MY OTP... MY EVERYTHING... i love that their devotion to each other transcends death and the self and all kinds of definition it's just pure and absolute love but also just to be clear i strongly reject the notion that they are platonic life partners i think they are IN REAL TRUE ROMANTIC LOVE FOREVER.... AND THEY APPROACHED THE END STILL BELIEVING IN EACH OTHER....
- its actually so sick and twisted to have the ultimate physical closeness of literally sharing a body with the person u love more than anyone else in the world but this is also stopping u from ever being able to meet them ever again, the complete absence of distance but also the absolute maximum of distance possible AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGHGHGH
- shaking screaming throwing up like no way they only just managed to transplant palamedes's soul onto a separate body so they could finally speak to each other again and now they stopped existing as separate individual beings altogether but also just like yugioh
- i TT'd over coronabeth making a promise to camilla sworn by her sister and camilla actually believing her....... despite everything its still LOVE
- sadge i think coronabeth would maybe love to be mutually exclusively bodysharing with ianthe, she loves ianthe as much as she resents ianthe and being in the same body would mean she never had to see ianthe again but she would also never be apart from ianthe
- BEING SISTERS IS THE MOST SPECIAL AND TERRIBLE THING IN THE UNIVERSE ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜
- ianthe being mad and feeling ntr'd about coronabeth bringing judith with her and nona mistaking ianthe in naberius's body as coronabeth's boyfriend made me laugh so much
also i reread ht9 and it made so much more sense to me on a second reading like i actually understood the concrete events that were going on and like... who was who... lmfao. i miss the hagline lyctors... augustine and mercy guys who hate each other but also don't have anyone except each other left blackrom was sooooo good )': i think i need to reread nt9 now that i kinda have a grip on ht9 and hopefully the interlude chapters will make more sense to me lol. 8/10.
favourite line: "Palamedes, yes," she said. "My whole life, yes. Yes, forever, yes. Life is too short and love is too long."
++ PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS - RICK RIORDAN
while procrastinating on writing my final assignments i decided to reread all of pjo and hoo which i hadn't read since primary school for pjo and like.... early/mid high school for hoo i think? basically i literally didn't remember anything about any of the books so it was like i was reading it all for the first time. but really funny and nostalgic reads even though i'm way out of the target audience now :') i enjoyed pjo a lot i loved reexperiencing the absolute terror that is 1) the titan's curse 2) luke/thalia 3) the way that thalia conclusively falls out of love with luke in the titan's curse 4) the grief ending and the love also ending. it kind of breaks my heart that luke's last words were for annabeth and not thalia but i do think it's narratively important that thalia wasn't there because annabeth was the one who couldn't let go of luke, thalia already understood the luke she loved to be dead and had steeled her heart and moved on, and i think it would serve no purpose to unnecessarily cast doubt on the resolve behind her hunter vows. but also...... my otp............. ): also fun fact thalia was one of my earliest ever onepicks, i have super vivid memories of reading sea of monsters (my gateway into pjo) when i was 8 and getting to the cliffhanger at the end of the book where thalia comes back to life and just instantly knowing she was The One <3 i have been SLAYERISTIC MAIDENLOVER9000 since birth etc.
hoo was much more of a mixed bag for me, i was joking that it really is kinda the shinteni of pjo (the shindemi...) aka the epic highs are pretty high and the epic lows are pretty low and there are a bunch of new highschooler characters including a retconned sibling of an original cast member and i think the camp that is introduced has bad vibes and is unpleasant to be around. i don't really know why i have anti-roman prejudice, i don't dislike any of the new roman characters and camp jupiter is literally a military academy which means i should automatically stan, but i think it's a combination of feeling cliquey about my beloved middleschoolers (camp half-blood) + only liking things i already like so i don't like new things + i thought it was so unfair of the romans to plagiarise the greek gods when i was like five years old with a passionately overdeveloped sense of justice finding out about greco-roman mythology for the first time so i guess camp jupiter was kinda doomed in my eyes from the start lmao.
anyway i don't have a strong enough impression of hoo the first time i read it to remember who i liked but REYNA is now my highschooler onepick for sureeeeeee her Bearer Of The Curse guilt/repression narrative parallels roadtrip with nico literally made all of hoo worth it... the other highlights were the piper/annabeth Girls The World moments like the offhand mention of their running joke of stealing e/o's breakfasts + percy/jason extremely funny men in men's business rivals bromance even though that should be THALIA which is why the titan's curse reigns supreme to me. i also have generally positive feelings about percy/annabeth and jason/piper but overall my opinion on hoo just ranges from neutral negative to neutral positive. i guess i can't rate pjo due to nostalgia bias but hoo is like a solid 5/10 for me.
favourite line: "Yield!" Thalia yelled. "You never could beat me, Luke."
- ok well i didn't mean for all my fave lines to be a speedrun of my main agenda picks but uhhhh ummmm
