books i read in jan-mar 2026
Mar. 20th, 2026 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositethe theme of this roundup is protags who are so so so so so gripless. spoilers for: idol, burning – rin usami, bunny – mona awad, katabasis – rf kuang.
currently reading: checkmate – tan, little eyes - samanta schweblin, two of swords – kj Charles. also i was craving romantasy slop so I started listening to the audiobook of alchemised senlinyu during walks but it is not a good book so when I ran out of spotify listening hours for the month I just never picked it up again. so I guess I am still in the market for romantasy slop to smoothen my brain to.
idol, burning – rin usami
so I actually just don't have anything to say about this. read it for book club and it is kind of the most #nothinghappens story ever and reminded me that truly I need sff to live. or at the very least dynamix. this book is about parasociality and specifically the experience of being an extremely invested fan of an idol who becomes embroiled in an alleged scandal (which is completely offscreen and is never explained), which I don't find a very interesting topic. like I could just open twitter and see 500 case studies immediately. girl is deeply depressed and obsesses over her onepick as an emotional crutch to compensate which causes her to neglect her real life to catastrophic consequences which causes her to bury her head in the sand and lock in even harder on her obsession so she doesn't have to deal with her life blowing up around her… groundbreaking... I feel like this is just such a boring and low hanging fruit depiction of idol fans. was surprised to see the ending a/n say that a big theme was meant to be the tension between the protag's shy irl persona vs bold online bnf persona because I did not feel that was the subject of much focus. I don't think anything was the subject of much focus. very slice of life but if the life kind of just sucked.
the book is a character sketch more than a story and that just does not work for me outside of a fic context when it's so grounded in mundanity, because I did not want to be stuck in this girl's head for 99 pages. hard to imagine anything more soul sucking than a whole book of hikikomori otaku inner monologue. I can't even really call her gripless because she's so passive and avoidant the topic of grip is n/a altogether. she cannot do anything successfully. it's a series of things happening to her while she staunchly refuses to grow or change in any way (I understand this is the point. didn't say I enjoyed it though) and then genuinely on the second last page she has this sudden revelation that she should get her shit together and live her life and then the book ends. like hello? disbandment was all it took to fix her? now i do think the vagueness and lack of resolution and general sense of stagnation and alienation from the self and from others was done on purpose but that doesn't mean that I liked it.
on the positive side the translation was lovely and read quite naturally, it didn't have the slightly stilted diction that can come out in translated works. overall i think this was fine on a technical level and I don't necessarily think it was poorly written or constructed, it was just not for me in terms of content. but it was pretty short so i'm not mad i spent time reading it, i'm probably just never going to think about it again. 3/10.
fave line:
Why did things continue to grow out of me no matter how much I cut and plucked? It felt intolerable.
bunny - mona awad
this book is so incredibly stupid oh my god. I can't stand books about writers why are they always written Like That. you think you are han sooyoung but you are nothing. pissed me off so much I don't think I can really engage with it in good faith so this is going to be a biasedly negative review. I understand that this is supposed to be satire and every character being a caricature is the point but i guess the problem is that people do unironically think and act this insanely pretentious? like that's exactly what I'd expect from a creative writing postgrad. we can't keep letting authors get away with absolute bs with the satire and unreliable narrator plausible deniability escape keys. I thought samantha's Not Like Other Girls hatred of the bunnies was part of the satire because literally all the bunnies did at the start of the book was be friends with each other and be a bit twee and frilly so samantha looking down on them so much was meant to reflect poorly on her and stem more from ingroup/outgroup envy than any legitimate basis for disdain. but then in the end it turns out samantha actually was right and the bunnies really were in fact these cruel vapid catty fake mean girls who only care about Stupid Girly Things and let boys come between them and aren't real friends and can’t make good art due to moral bankruptcy like ohhhh okay so we just hate women for real!
I'm choosing to believe that it was magical realism and everything Really Did Happen because the idea that it was all just samantha's schizophrenic delusions is unbearably annoying. the even worse version of It Was All A Dream. I do think samantha has schizophrenia as is heavily implied throughout the book but that doesn't mean the magic wasn't also real. the animal→human transformation magic is a pretty clear metaphor for the creative process and I think it's so corny that Samantha can make perfect humans while the bunnies can't (even though again I understand this to be The Point that the book is making) like I really do think the narrative reinforces samantha's objective superiority to the bunnies over and over again in a way that is so uninteresting to me because it feels so juvenile revenge fantasy? aww you felt left out by the popular girls should we call bella hadid.
now to be fair I liked some of the prose but in aggregate it was kind of imageryslop like there was just too much going on and the point became incoherent. maybe let's let the thing stand on its own every now and again. I liked some of the absurd horrorcomedy. I liked the shift to plural first person when samantha gets assimilated into the bunnies, I always find it very fun to play around with pov and I'm always going to have a soft spot for a mean girl clique although i think the bunnies' queen bee and henchwomen relationship dynamic/power structure was rather simplistic and boring for how central it was to the story. I thought it was pretty compelling that samantha's creations who she is ambiguously in love with and who embody parts of herself she feels unable to express fell in love with each other. I think if you just treat the book as a bunch of words it's not too bad, like I did think it was a waste of my time but it went by quite fast. if it had leaned in harder to the chuuni elements I would probably have liked it a bit more but I think it took itself too seriously. I guess 2/10.
fave line:
All the doors in her face will close one by one. But right now, she’s looking at me the way she did that day when I first approached her, her face saying Come in, Come in.
katabasis – rf kuang
first of all I must disclaim my authorial bias as a certified rfk hater who reads her books to ensure I am a well informed hater. however, I do try to approach her with an open heart in the hopes that she has improved because I think she is quite good at coming up with cool fantasy premises and she has been known to create compelling dynamics on occasion although the more of her work I read the more I'm starting to suspect that was entirely by accident. it did take me like half a year to finish this book because I just really didn't want to read it and every time I saw the word "magick" my eye began twitching, which is not even rfk's fault I just associate the spelling with a certain group of annoying ass practitioners who think that putting the k on the end legitimises what we do in the eyes of others like my sister in hekate at the end of the day we are all still fucking around with rocks and candles and cards. anyway. I did not like this book, but I thought it was vastly better and more enjoyable than babel, and also mostly read as a book with events that happened instead of a summary slideshow. didn't say those events were good though.
things I liked: magic being generated by the power of self-delusion through the weaponisation of paradoxes is very cool, I will always give rfk her flowers for banger magic systems. the general aura of oxbridge elitism and pretension read quite accurately and reminded me of academia coworker clique environments I have loved before, although I have problems with the content that I will discuss later. in particular alice's memory of going to the pub with her cohort and drunkenly discussing silly questions with total earnestly intellectual seriousness was very nostalgic and warm, and it was nice that she had one moment of actual happiness amidst the absolute trenches of her grad school experience. personally I enjoyed that the action was constantly interrupted by flashback because I think it's so chic to cut away just before the climax, it didn't affect the pacing for me and it's also a neat structural reflection of alice's magically eidetic memory where sensory input is always uncontrollably triggering associated memories and images. in theory I like academic coworkerivals and think it's a beautiful and touchingly romantic dynamic IN THEORY. I'm aware my own experiences and positive associations are doing a lot of heavy lifting here but I might as well throw this book a bone. some of the prose was nice as well and reminded me that rfk does know how to cook every now and again.
ok now that's out of the way. it is so fucking stupid that the solution to pretty much every challenge they encounter is to Just Walk Away. like hello? why are we hitting the bricks instead of engaging with the story beats YOU set up? literally what is the point of setting up philosophical checkpoints like the meaning of good deeds or how to truthfully confess to sin if the characters aren't going to grapple with those ideas at all and instead simply leave. and nobody stops them from leaving or entering anywhere. I thought it was egregious that alice crossed violence/cruelty/tyranny in the span of like 3 paragraphs it really felt like rfk couldn't be bothered to write any more of the levels of hell and just wanted to get to the end of the book. everything is resolved so easily it's ridiculous: 2/3 of the main antagonist group straight up kill themselves, peter comes back to life no problem, elspeth forgives alice for her betrayal and simply hands her the mcguffin that she needs to leave the underworld for free, the king of hell brings grimes to alice for free and lets her enact her revenge on him. nothing feels earned. nothing has consequences. none of the conflicts mean anything. also i assume john gradus's real identity is a reference to something that I don't recognise because otherwise why the specificity of the elm tree image in his memories? but I couldn't find the answer on a quick google. and how come he got to sidestep the sin dissertation requirement for achieving reincarnation by simply helping out alice one time. like what about the sin that put him in dis in the first place. did that get cancelled out just cause he was nice to alice for a bit. because it was lowkey sounding like he was a serial killer in life or something so I don't know how that equation works.
rfk seems to think that namedropping 500 philosophers with a brief wikipedia summary counts as storytelling. this is one of her chronic problems, she is an academic first and wants to make sure everyone knows it. like yes girl we see the research paper now let's work on the narrative. the issue is not that the characters are pretentious—of course they are, they're oxbridge academics—it's that the things they intellectually pontificate about are actually stupid as hell, like what a person who is not a philosopher thinks philosophers consider to be very deep and meaningful. like there is a section from peter's pov where he's thinking about how alice is so cool and brilliant and thinks in such radical and unusual patterns and then the evidence of that is alice being like, If you teleport… are you still the same person? Really makes u think. like…………. please be serious rn. it's only impressive if you let yourself be wowed by the shiny wash of jargon and don't think about it any further. rfk's other chronic problem is her extreme tendency to overexplain herself because she thinks she is very smart and her audience is very stupid. it was so unbelievably frustrating every time she would make a halfway interesting point and then spend two pages repeating and belabouring it in case we didn't understand its immense profundity the first time so that by the end the image was so torturedly hammered in it was actively offputting. this annoyed me so much I went into my own wips and started mass deleting sentences. I think we should all explain ourselves less.
what else. I didn't think the social commentary re women in academia was anything insightful but it's not an aspect of worldbuilding I care for anyway and at the very least it wasn't cartoonishly over the top like in babel. also peter's dark secret being that he has crohns disease had me crying. imagine fumbling a baddie (definitions may vary) because of your chronic gut health issues. also I just did not care about a single character except for maybe elspeth and I'm not convinced that wasn't just because she had a halfassed butterfly motif which was lighting up the ningning oshi neural pathways in my brain. also the romance sucked. I did intend to elaborate on this but I don't feel like it anymore except to say the weaver girl plot point was sooo stupid and contrived like I was genuinely struck speechless, I understand that alice is an insecure terminal self saboteur but IT GETS TO A POINT. it always amazes me how rfk manages to squander compelling ship setups.
very self-important book in love with the sound of its own voice but with ultimately very little to say. 2/10 because I did enjoy some of it aesthetically.
fave line:
She let go when she was nearly at the top of a problem, or let her fingers slide off holds that were designed for beginners. These pleased her the most. They were so firm; convex so as to catch the curve of your fingers. It took real effort to slip off those. You had to want to fall.
currently reading: checkmate – tan, little eyes - samanta schweblin, two of swords – kj Charles. also i was craving romantasy slop so I started listening to the audiobook of alchemised senlinyu during walks but it is not a good book so when I ran out of spotify listening hours for the month I just never picked it up again. so I guess I am still in the market for romantasy slop to smoothen my brain to.
idol, burning – rin usami
so I actually just don't have anything to say about this. read it for book club and it is kind of the most #nothinghappens story ever and reminded me that truly I need sff to live. or at the very least dynamix. this book is about parasociality and specifically the experience of being an extremely invested fan of an idol who becomes embroiled in an alleged scandal (which is completely offscreen and is never explained), which I don't find a very interesting topic. like I could just open twitter and see 500 case studies immediately. girl is deeply depressed and obsesses over her onepick as an emotional crutch to compensate which causes her to neglect her real life to catastrophic consequences which causes her to bury her head in the sand and lock in even harder on her obsession so she doesn't have to deal with her life blowing up around her… groundbreaking... I feel like this is just such a boring and low hanging fruit depiction of idol fans. was surprised to see the ending a/n say that a big theme was meant to be the tension between the protag's shy irl persona vs bold online bnf persona because I did not feel that was the subject of much focus. I don't think anything was the subject of much focus. very slice of life but if the life kind of just sucked.
the book is a character sketch more than a story and that just does not work for me outside of a fic context when it's so grounded in mundanity, because I did not want to be stuck in this girl's head for 99 pages. hard to imagine anything more soul sucking than a whole book of hikikomori otaku inner monologue. I can't even really call her gripless because she's so passive and avoidant the topic of grip is n/a altogether. she cannot do anything successfully. it's a series of things happening to her while she staunchly refuses to grow or change in any way (I understand this is the point. didn't say I enjoyed it though) and then genuinely on the second last page she has this sudden revelation that she should get her shit together and live her life and then the book ends. like hello? disbandment was all it took to fix her? now i do think the vagueness and lack of resolution and general sense of stagnation and alienation from the self and from others was done on purpose but that doesn't mean that I liked it.
on the positive side the translation was lovely and read quite naturally, it didn't have the slightly stilted diction that can come out in translated works. overall i think this was fine on a technical level and I don't necessarily think it was poorly written or constructed, it was just not for me in terms of content. but it was pretty short so i'm not mad i spent time reading it, i'm probably just never going to think about it again. 3/10.
fave line:
Why did things continue to grow out of me no matter how much I cut and plucked? It felt intolerable.
bunny - mona awad
this book is so incredibly stupid oh my god. I can't stand books about writers why are they always written Like That. you think you are han sooyoung but you are nothing. pissed me off so much I don't think I can really engage with it in good faith so this is going to be a biasedly negative review. I understand that this is supposed to be satire and every character being a caricature is the point but i guess the problem is that people do unironically think and act this insanely pretentious? like that's exactly what I'd expect from a creative writing postgrad. we can't keep letting authors get away with absolute bs with the satire and unreliable narrator plausible deniability escape keys. I thought samantha's Not Like Other Girls hatred of the bunnies was part of the satire because literally all the bunnies did at the start of the book was be friends with each other and be a bit twee and frilly so samantha looking down on them so much was meant to reflect poorly on her and stem more from ingroup/outgroup envy than any legitimate basis for disdain. but then in the end it turns out samantha actually was right and the bunnies really were in fact these cruel vapid catty fake mean girls who only care about Stupid Girly Things and let boys come between them and aren't real friends and can’t make good art due to moral bankruptcy like ohhhh okay so we just hate women for real!
I'm choosing to believe that it was magical realism and everything Really Did Happen because the idea that it was all just samantha's schizophrenic delusions is unbearably annoying. the even worse version of It Was All A Dream. I do think samantha has schizophrenia as is heavily implied throughout the book but that doesn't mean the magic wasn't also real. the animal→human transformation magic is a pretty clear metaphor for the creative process and I think it's so corny that Samantha can make perfect humans while the bunnies can't (even though again I understand this to be The Point that the book is making) like I really do think the narrative reinforces samantha's objective superiority to the bunnies over and over again in a way that is so uninteresting to me because it feels so juvenile revenge fantasy? aww you felt left out by the popular girls should we call bella hadid.
now to be fair I liked some of the prose but in aggregate it was kind of imageryslop like there was just too much going on and the point became incoherent. maybe let's let the thing stand on its own every now and again. I liked some of the absurd horrorcomedy. I liked the shift to plural first person when samantha gets assimilated into the bunnies, I always find it very fun to play around with pov and I'm always going to have a soft spot for a mean girl clique although i think the bunnies' queen bee and henchwomen relationship dynamic/power structure was rather simplistic and boring for how central it was to the story. I thought it was pretty compelling that samantha's creations who she is ambiguously in love with and who embody parts of herself she feels unable to express fell in love with each other. I think if you just treat the book as a bunch of words it's not too bad, like I did think it was a waste of my time but it went by quite fast. if it had leaned in harder to the chuuni elements I would probably have liked it a bit more but I think it took itself too seriously. I guess 2/10.
fave line:
All the doors in her face will close one by one. But right now, she’s looking at me the way she did that day when I first approached her, her face saying Come in, Come in.
katabasis – rf kuang
first of all I must disclaim my authorial bias as a certified rfk hater who reads her books to ensure I am a well informed hater. however, I do try to approach her with an open heart in the hopes that she has improved because I think she is quite good at coming up with cool fantasy premises and she has been known to create compelling dynamics on occasion although the more of her work I read the more I'm starting to suspect that was entirely by accident. it did take me like half a year to finish this book because I just really didn't want to read it and every time I saw the word "magick" my eye began twitching, which is not even rfk's fault I just associate the spelling with a certain group of annoying ass practitioners who think that putting the k on the end legitimises what we do in the eyes of others like my sister in hekate at the end of the day we are all still fucking around with rocks and candles and cards. anyway. I did not like this book, but I thought it was vastly better and more enjoyable than babel, and also mostly read as a book with events that happened instead of a summary slideshow. didn't say those events were good though.
things I liked: magic being generated by the power of self-delusion through the weaponisation of paradoxes is very cool, I will always give rfk her flowers for banger magic systems. the general aura of oxbridge elitism and pretension read quite accurately and reminded me of academia coworker clique environments I have loved before, although I have problems with the content that I will discuss later. in particular alice's memory of going to the pub with her cohort and drunkenly discussing silly questions with total earnestly intellectual seriousness was very nostalgic and warm, and it was nice that she had one moment of actual happiness amidst the absolute trenches of her grad school experience. personally I enjoyed that the action was constantly interrupted by flashback because I think it's so chic to cut away just before the climax, it didn't affect the pacing for me and it's also a neat structural reflection of alice's magically eidetic memory where sensory input is always uncontrollably triggering associated memories and images. in theory I like academic coworkerivals and think it's a beautiful and touchingly romantic dynamic IN THEORY. I'm aware my own experiences and positive associations are doing a lot of heavy lifting here but I might as well throw this book a bone. some of the prose was nice as well and reminded me that rfk does know how to cook every now and again.
ok now that's out of the way. it is so fucking stupid that the solution to pretty much every challenge they encounter is to Just Walk Away. like hello? why are we hitting the bricks instead of engaging with the story beats YOU set up? literally what is the point of setting up philosophical checkpoints like the meaning of good deeds or how to truthfully confess to sin if the characters aren't going to grapple with those ideas at all and instead simply leave. and nobody stops them from leaving or entering anywhere. I thought it was egregious that alice crossed violence/cruelty/tyranny in the span of like 3 paragraphs it really felt like rfk couldn't be bothered to write any more of the levels of hell and just wanted to get to the end of the book. everything is resolved so easily it's ridiculous: 2/3 of the main antagonist group straight up kill themselves, peter comes back to life no problem, elspeth forgives alice for her betrayal and simply hands her the mcguffin that she needs to leave the underworld for free, the king of hell brings grimes to alice for free and lets her enact her revenge on him. nothing feels earned. nothing has consequences. none of the conflicts mean anything. also i assume john gradus's real identity is a reference to something that I don't recognise because otherwise why the specificity of the elm tree image in his memories? but I couldn't find the answer on a quick google. and how come he got to sidestep the sin dissertation requirement for achieving reincarnation by simply helping out alice one time. like what about the sin that put him in dis in the first place. did that get cancelled out just cause he was nice to alice for a bit. because it was lowkey sounding like he was a serial killer in life or something so I don't know how that equation works.
rfk seems to think that namedropping 500 philosophers with a brief wikipedia summary counts as storytelling. this is one of her chronic problems, she is an academic first and wants to make sure everyone knows it. like yes girl we see the research paper now let's work on the narrative. the issue is not that the characters are pretentious—of course they are, they're oxbridge academics—it's that the things they intellectually pontificate about are actually stupid as hell, like what a person who is not a philosopher thinks philosophers consider to be very deep and meaningful. like there is a section from peter's pov where he's thinking about how alice is so cool and brilliant and thinks in such radical and unusual patterns and then the evidence of that is alice being like, If you teleport… are you still the same person? Really makes u think. like…………. please be serious rn. it's only impressive if you let yourself be wowed by the shiny wash of jargon and don't think about it any further. rfk's other chronic problem is her extreme tendency to overexplain herself because she thinks she is very smart and her audience is very stupid. it was so unbelievably frustrating every time she would make a halfway interesting point and then spend two pages repeating and belabouring it in case we didn't understand its immense profundity the first time so that by the end the image was so torturedly hammered in it was actively offputting. this annoyed me so much I went into my own wips and started mass deleting sentences. I think we should all explain ourselves less.
what else. I didn't think the social commentary re women in academia was anything insightful but it's not an aspect of worldbuilding I care for anyway and at the very least it wasn't cartoonishly over the top like in babel. also peter's dark secret being that he has crohns disease had me crying. imagine fumbling a baddie (definitions may vary) because of your chronic gut health issues. also I just did not care about a single character except for maybe elspeth and I'm not convinced that wasn't just because she had a halfassed butterfly motif which was lighting up the ningning oshi neural pathways in my brain. also the romance sucked. I did intend to elaborate on this but I don't feel like it anymore except to say the weaver girl plot point was sooo stupid and contrived like I was genuinely struck speechless, I understand that alice is an insecure terminal self saboteur but IT GETS TO A POINT. it always amazes me how rfk manages to squander compelling ship setups.
very self-important book in love with the sound of its own voice but with ultimately very little to say. 2/10 because I did enjoy some of it aesthetically.
fave line:
She let go when she was nearly at the top of a problem, or let her fingers slide off holds that were designed for beginners. These pleased her the most. They were so firm; convex so as to catch the curve of your fingers. It took real effort to slip off those. You had to want to fall.
- ok I liked these lines and I do enjoy self aware self sabotage as a character trait generally but like. why would a person do this?
no subject
Date: 2026-03-20 02:39 am (UTC)im so giddy ur reading tan-nim's checkmate.... unforch that IS bl of all time to me so im going to eagerly wait for ur review op.
(p.s. if u need any recs, red rising will probably scratch that science fiction itch.... imo it's an incredibly solid story w a complex mc n delish dynamics :)
no subject
Date: 2026-03-23 03:17 am (UTC)thank you also for the red rising rec! i will see if i can source a copy, im ultimately an average grecoroman sff aesthetics enjoyer so this sounds really promising :)