Holiday Reading Spree

1st: 400 points
2nd: 300 points
3rd: 250 points

Awarded to the merry reader who read the most pages during this event!

Awarded to each merry reader for participating in the Holiday Reading Spree! (Read a minimum of 2 books or 400 pages)

Title: Calamity
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Pages: 420
Star Rating: 4.5/5
Content Warnings: 16+ (violence)
Book Review: This is the third book in a series. I read the first two books (Steelheart and Firefight) yesterday and the day before. The premise of the series is somewhat unique among superhero stories in that having an ability appears to immediately corrupt people (though there's more than it seems at first glance, of course!). The plot was fun and I could hardly put the book down haha. I think the worldbuilding and plot were overall not as complex as the Stormlight Archive, but it was still a solid, satisfying series.

Title: Erasure
Author: Percival Everett
Pages: 272
Star Rating: 4/5
Content Warnings: 18+ (language, violence, mature content)
Book Review: This is a book assigned for my English class next quarter. It did make me think about writing and society and choices we make shaping or erasing the self, but a few things were a bit hard to suspend my disbelief on, even though I know they were necessary for the plot and the point. Still, this is a book with enough depth that I could write an essay on it (which is more than I can say for the usual fantasy and sci-fi I read, haha).

Title: Trainspotting
Author: Irvine Welsh
Pages: 344
Star Rating: 2.5/5
Content Warnings: 18+ (language, substance abuse, mature content)
Book Review: The frequent POV switching often left me floundering until a clue to the narrator was slipped in. While that could be intentional (indeed, the entire novel seems deliberately wandering and tangled), it felt overdone, and some scenes seemed only tangentially related to the core characters. I did think the code switching between Scottish English and standard English was interesting.

Title: Embassytown
Author: China Miéville
Pages: 368
Star Rating: 3.75/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: I enjoyed reading and thinking about Language, the language that a species referred to as the Hosts speak. It is spoken by two mouths speaking simultaneously, and at the beginning of the novel, the Hosts cannot lie. Of course, things change, especially as similes (some of which are made based on humans like the main character) come into play. However, I did not like the main character, who appeared to do nothing for most of the novel. Supposedly she had lots of contacts, but I have no idea how she maintained them, seeing as half of her dialogue seemed to be either asking what was going on or asking where some other person was. (This is an exaggeration, lol. But I do feel rather disappointed at what I see as an intriguing concept ruined by an underdeveloped, two-dimensional, incompetent main character.)

Title: The Anubis Gates
Author: Tim Powers
Pages: 400
Star Rating: 4.5/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: This was a cool book that combined time travel, body swapping, clones, and Egyptian mythology. But it never felt fragmented or overly confusing; the author tied all the threads together neatly. While it didn't challenge my worldview or shift my perspective like I think excellent sci-fi does, it was a fun read and explored an interesting combination of technology and magic.

Title: And Then There Were None
Author: Agatha Christie
Pages: 272
Star Rating: 4.5/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: I don't often read mysteries or murder mysteries, but I was recommended this by a friend, and I really enjoyed it. I kind of wish I'd stopped before the epilogue to figure out the culprit myself, but it was still quite clever and fun. I think I'll have to start reading more mysteries. c:

Title: A Clockwork Orange
Author: Anthony Burgess
Pages: 176
Star Rating: 3.75/5
Content Warnings: 18+
Book Review: Another book for my English class next quarter. It explored ideas of choosing to be good versus being forced to be. While some elements were interesting, I felt that it could have gone deeper and had more nuance. The title is awesome, though.

Title: Ancillary Justice
Author: Ann Leckie
Pages: 386
Star Rating: 4.5/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: This was recommended to me by Tikaya, and it was a great read! It explored the interesting concept of ancillaries, which are human bodies operated by some other entity (in the case of the protagonist, an AI). Though the protagonist didn't seem to have the most clarity of thought sometimes (whether as to why she did certain things or what she wanted to do), overall it shaped up to be a fun story. The linguistic elements like the language of the Radch not marking gender and how that affected the protagonist's worldview were pretty cool too.

Title: Riddley Walker
Author: Russell Hoban
Pages: 220
Star Rating: 4/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: Think post-apocalyptic England with Iron Age technology and puppet shows. This was an intriguing mix of apparent folklore and hints of past technology (like star boats and pictures on the wind). The language was also written in a potential future English, with different spelling and words like "catwl twis" for catalyst and "wud" for both wood and would. I didn't think the language was particularly realistic for the setting of over 2000 years after nuclear war (think of how Old English, only around 1000 years before us, is basically incomprehensible to the average English speaker), but it was still interesting.

Title: City of Bohane
Author: Kevin Barry
Pages: 288
Star Rating: 3.5/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: It was fine, but lowkey a waste of time, in my opinion. It focuses on the city of Bohane, which is run by a gang called the Fancys. The novel covers the time when the previous leader of the gang arrives as simultaneously other families threaten the peace. I suppose there was a twist which was interesting, but overall it didn't seem super original or noteworthy to me.

Title: When the Moon Hits Your Eye
Author: John Scalzi
Pages: 320
Star Rating: 4.75/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: The moon turns to cheese. As soon as I saw that part of the premise, I knew I had to read this. And I did not regret it; I had a smile on my face for much of the time I was reading this novel (I realize this may seem sadistic as there is a portion of the novel where the moon is a real threat to life on Earth, but Scalzi portrays scenes with such optimism that it never really feels like depressing-catastrophic-apocalypse-land). The book is formatted as short vignettes for different days, hopping across America and showing different people's reactions to the sudden cheesification of the moon. The cast ranges from astronauts to a billionaire to ordinary citizens and more. While I would have appreciated greater scientific rigor and perhaps a less-rushed ending, this was a delightful read that was unique (or maybe just zany) enough to satisfy me. (P.S. My fav scene is the slack channel of friends one.)

Title: All Systems Red
Author: Martha Wells
Pages: 150
Star Rating: 4/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: This was a short, breezy novel. A SecUnit (or Murderbot, as it refers to itself) hacks its governor and does the bare minimum for its security job, preferring to watch entertainment shows like Sanctuary Moon. That is, until it meets a certain group of clients that it actually seems to care about. There wasn't a ton of complexity or shocking reveals, but for 150 pages, this was a tidy and fun story.

Title: Artificial Condition
Author: Martha Wells
Pages: 158
Star Rating: 4/5
Content Warnings: 16+
Book Review: Murderbot befriends a research transport ship! Another fun installment in the Murderbot series. Not something I would read for its uniqueness and literariness, but a thoroughly enjoyable way to pass the time.

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Title: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Author: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Pages: 632
Star Rating: 4.5
Book Review: I wrote a lot about these jerks once upon a time. Deleuze and Guattari reject hierarchical, tree-like models of thought in favour of the "rhizome," a botanical metaphor that emphasizes multiplicity and non-linear growth - whatever. it ranges across philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, biology, music, political theory, etc, and it somehow manages to critique most (if not all) of those. few works so successfully make me think as much in retrospect as this one has. D&G haunt me both in this work and in its predecessor, Anti-Oedipus.

Title: Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Author: Susan Sontag
Pages: 336
Star Rating: 3.5
Book Review: a bracing, incisive challenge to the habit of over-interpreting art at the expense of direct experiences... ha, look at me reviewing it! can't you see I'm reviewing it?

Title: Specters of Marx
Author: Jacques Derrida
Pages: 258
Star Rating: 3
Book Review: notoriously dense, but I thought this was a thought-provoking meditation on Marx’s legacy after the Cold War. Marxism can't truly be declared dead because its "specters" continue to haunt modern politics - deemed "hauntology," fittingly. it offers valid critiques of neoliberal triumphalism (at the expense of its limited engagement with actual concrete political realities, of course).

Title: Moby-Dick
Author: Herman Melville
Pages: 720
Star Rating: 4
Book Review: one of those books that earns its reputation, but whether you consider that a positive or a negative is highly subjective. I ended up finding it far more playful and intellectually alive than its brick-of-a-classic status suggests. lots of valuable (and overindulgent, duh!) commentary on obsession, knowledge, labour, God, nature, race, capitalism, etc. Melville refuses to stay in one register for long; eventually, the book dares you to overanalyze every sentence. I mean, I don't care much for whales, but I, too, would strike the sun if it insulted me.

Title: Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso)
Author: Dante Alighieri
Pages: 928
Star Rating: 5
Book Review: this would've been way better if I could speak Italian, but alas, I had to suffer through a janky translation. it is an extremely detailed self-insert fanfic where all of Dante's enemies go to hell and his favourite poet becomes his tour guide. massive and name-heavy, but the sheer audacity of the project carries it through.

Title: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Author: Steven Pinker
Pages: 576
Star Rating: 3.5
Book Review: one of many linguistics books I've read, yet I remember this the most. the book is undeniably smart and often entertaining, especially when Pinker sprinkles in examples that make you feel briefly smarter by association. that said, he relies on museum-piece academic battles from the 90s to prove that humans are born with an "innate" understanding of grammar. anyone who disagrees is probably wrong.

Title: Autobiography of Red
Author: Anne Carson
Pages: 160
Star Rating: 5
Book Review: the whole pseudo-epic style is pretty clever, and Carson is one of my favourites, so it's only fitting I return to the book that started it all -- I really need to go back and reread The Iliad and The Odyssey for this.

Title: The Second Sex
Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Pages: 832
Star Rating: 4
Book Review: so yeah, obviously Beauvoir was writing this before second-wave feminism took hold and gender was theorized as socially constructed in the way we now take for granted. her work is destabilized by the fact it is outdated, particularly her reliance on psychoanalysis (hi Freud!) on theorize that women, as a whole, deviate from the male-centric norm in society. for instance, puberty is apparently easy for men, while it leads to "neurosis" in young women. oookay. though, I doubt anyone reads it as wholesale truth; it made later thought possible, for sure.

Title: V.
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Pages: 528
Star Rating: 3.5
Book Review: "If you say a man is no good for anything but jazzing around, he’ll go live in a cathouse, he’ll jazz it all over town." I found this to be an intriguing novel entering a greater conversation with the 20th century’s obsession with power. when Pynchon isn't making a cameo in The Simpsons, he's quite the author.

Title: Finnegans Wake
Author: James Joyce
Pages: 672
Star Rating: 5
Book Review: on the thinnest possible narrative level, the Wake circles around the fall and resurrection of two rather mythic characters that exist as the Joycean Adam and Eve. the novel is filled to the brim with linguistic play, reflections on guilt and grief, dirty jokes, all of human history, etc. these things, and love too, exist on a level that is reiterated time and time again. we all feel different things, but it is finite, ritualistic that we feel them.

Title: The Lover
Author: Marguerite Duras
Pages: 148
Star Rating: 1
Book Review: contrary to what the title suggests, there is no real "love" in this book - think of it like Lolita set somewhere in Indochina. it's unfortunate that such beautiful prose was wasted on such a grotesque storyline.

Title: Paper Girls: The Complete Story
Author: Brian K. Vaughan
Pages: 780
Star Rating: 4/5
Book Review: I read it in one sitting this weekend and reread it this evening instead of learning German (whoopsie). It's a page-turner with both great art style and characters! I love queer graphic novels, I love crazy worldbuilding where everything isn't explained, I love time travel, I love bunch of badass teens on bikes... Paper Girls had it all! TW: themes of internalised homophobia and sexism (it's set in 1988 so characters hold some options characteristic for the period, but it's handled realistically and well)

Title: Celestial Monsters
Author: Aiden Thomas
Pages: 415
Star Rating: 3/5


Title: The Raven Boys
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Pages: 468
Star Rating: (optional) 4.5/5
Book Review: Still one of my favourites

Title: Havraní kráľ
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Pages: 375
Star Rating: 5/5

Title: The Dream Thieves
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Pages: 448
Star Rating: 3/5

Title: Traja spáči
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Pages: 334
Star Rating: 4.5/5

Title: Witch Hat Atelier Vol. 8
Author: Kamome Shirahama
Pages: 176
Star Rating: 3/5

Title: Witch Hat Atelier Vol. 2
Author: Kamome Shirahama
Pages: 190
Star Rating: 4/5

Title: The raven boys
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Pages: 468
Star Rating: 4.6


Title: The dream thieves
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Pages: 448
Star Rating: 3.4

Title: The Fall of the House of Usher
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Pages: 488
Star Rating: 5

Title: Ominiscient Reader's Viewpoint volume 1
Author: singNsong
Pages: 250
Star Rating: 3.8

Title: charlieho malé tajomstvá (the perks of being a wallflower but in slovak)
Author: Sthephen Chbosky
Pages: 204
Star Rating: 5

Title: Ominiscient Reader's Viewpoint volume 2
Author: singNsong
Pages: 261
Star Rating: 4.2

Title: Ominiscient Reader's Viewpoint volume 3
Author: singNsong
Pages: 285
Star Rating: 4.4

The MC is an AI that controls multiple bodies and I like this unique point of view, of describing One Esk seeing itself and how it uses these many different perspectives to surveill its surroundings. I like the many different cultures explored and I like how you end up really, really feeling for this very inhuman main character.

Fantasy book that implies a vast, magical and dangerous world regarding normal human civilisation as beneath them (and being completely right). I like that the normal human gets to befriend a lion despite the language barrier :3

Security Unit manages to get rid of their control module and -now no longer forced to obey humans- decides to become a soap opera junky instead of a murder AI hellbent on human destruction. It still has to do OpSec to uphold the illusion that the humans are still in control. Its current clients just have a pesky interest in them...and then the entire operation goes sideways and the secret might get out...

Reads very... transformers-y. I like how the aliens are protrayed, even if the reason for the MC's involvement is tenous. Again, very transformers-y. Still like it and looking forward to the next installment. I mean, maybe she gets to eat another whole plate? =D

Title:Camp Prodigy
Author:Caroline Palmer
Pages:256
Notes: graphic novel, middle grade

Title:A Wizard Abroad
Author:Diane Duane
Pages:332
Notes: reread of a favorite book from a favorite series. Upper MG/YA? Published really before YA had a separate delineation, and really skews younger than more YA does today (which really is more adult than teen, now, which makes buying for a middle school library a freaking adventure /ramble).

Title:Riverside Chaucer
Author:Chaucer
Pages:50
Notes: I was looking for something, and read through about 50 pages looking for it. Did I find it? No. Sigh.

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Ok, I'm putting this one down here because I don't quite know how to count it. I alpha/beta read for a couple friends, and I blew through about 120k of a project for one of them, which is 400ish pages according to a very vague average number of words on a page according to le internet.

Title: El Tunel
Author: Ernesto Sabato
Pages: 155

Title: Broken Country
Author: Clare Leslie Hall
Pages: 303

Title: History of a Staircase
Author: Antonio Buero Vallejo
Pages: 50

Title: The TellTale Heart
Author: Edgar Allen Poe
Pages: 10
Star Rating: 5

Title: The Tunel
Author: Ernesto Sabato
Pages: 155
Star Rating: 3

Title: History of a Staircase
Author: Antonio Buero Vallejo
Pages: 50
Star Rating: 3.5