Does listening to audiobooks count as reading? Here it does. Let’s discuss your favorite reads — or listens.
It’s hard to judge “Carl” as a standalone, because it barely wants to be one. This is a long opening act. Still, I’m impressed by Dinniman’s imaginative reach and curious how many of the seemingly throwaway details will later reveal themselves as deliberate groundwork. As the first entry in an eight-book (and counting) series, it’s clearly doing foundational labor but that doesn’t always make it enjoyable.
Often labeled feminist horror, the book’s sharpest menace isn’t supernatural but social: rigid expectations around marriage, reputation, and female behavior, and the quiet normalization of violence against women. That tension works well early on, grounding the protagonist’s unraveling in her environment.
Even at under 200-pages, it occasionally felt longer than it needed to be. Some of the deeper historical sections dragged, especially when the narrative moved away from Henry and into more abstract history. I found myself most engaged when Green leaned into the anthropological and human rather than the historical.
This isn’t an easy read, even in graphic form. It’s confrontational and, at times, exhausting. But it pushes back against the comforting fiction that racism is episodic or aberrational. The book argues that racist ideas are adaptive — that they evolve to protect power. Addressing them requires confronting the structures and narratives that sustain them. As an entry point, this is a solid place to start.
Earlier on, I felt like I had stumbled onto a hidden gem, one that was sharp in its observations about Reconstruction without being preachy or sentimental. Instead, the novel veers into revenge-thriller territory and loses much of its credibility. Had this been published after Percival Everett’s “James,” I might have assumed Fancher was trying to chase the same idea.
This isn’t a thriller in the traditional sense, and it isn’t interested in justice or closure. It’s a story about complicity, self-erasure and the lies we tell ourselves in the name of family. Perfect for fans of “Dexter” or “Yellowjackets.”
This isn’t an easy book, nor an unimportant one. Rashad has strong ideas, clear anger and real imagination. But too many concepts are crowded into too few pages, and the novel ultimately lacks the polish and focus needed to make its themes land with full force.
An uneven but occasionally rewarding listening experience, “The Book of Delights” is structured as a yearlong project in noticing joy, in the form of short essays—some only a paragraph, others a few pages—each documenting a small delight from Ross Gay’s daily life.
For a novel dealing with reproductive justice, eugenics and coerced sterilization, “Take My Hand” was surprisingly compulsive. It moved quickly without ever feeling careless. Readers drawn to emotionally grounded historical fiction — Kristin Hannah fans in particular — would likely move through this fast, even though it was in no way a light read.
By the end, “Sink” felt like a polished diary – confessional and a little depressing, but largely more meaningful for an audience of one.
There are meaty ideas at work here: the spiritual cost of survival, the fragility of utopia, how protection slides into control and how power corrodes even well-intentioned communities. The rotating perspectives allow Saint to be seen as both savior and tyrant, loved and loathed in equal measure. Yet too many of these threads are buried beneath excess.
“Year” is not simply a memoir of grief; it is an exploration of how the mind bends and folds in the face of incomprehensible loss. In just over 200 pages, Didion maps the terrain between shock and mourning with a precision that is at once clinical and devastating.
I still had a few annoyances, but they felt minor because the overall tone is charming in Marvin and Olan’s love story. This is a low-stakes romance that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I’m still not ready to say I “read M/M romance” as a genre category, but this was a good test case of what works for me and what doesn’t.
A poetic Japanese novel about a married couple whose quiet life in Tokyo is transformed by a visiting cat, “The Guest Cat” explores love, grief, routine and impermanence with quiet beauty and cultural depth. Perfect for fans of literary fiction and animal stories with emotional resonance.
The plot itself is straightforward, almost austere, and not particularly original – May/December and power-imbalance relationships have been de rigueur in literature for centuries. What gives the novel its spark is McCurdy’s refusal to sand down the uglier edges of either character.
Ashley Elston includes all the hallmarks of a genre potboiler: a protagonist with a murky past and razor-sharp instincts, a shadowy organization running black-market jobs, a love interest who might not be what he seems and a series of twists that stack so high they nearly collapse under their own weight. However, she pulls it off – not because she avoids clichés, but because she leans into them with just enough self-awareness to make it work.
Ultimately, “Hamnet” is a moving examination of grief and the quiet costs of ambition. By keeping Shakespeare himself mostly offstage, O’Farrell centers the family left behind. Not for everyone, but worth the time for readers who enjoy dense, atmospheric historical fiction.
Curious who the best and worst audiobook narrators are? I’ve compiled a hall of fame and shame based on five years of audiobook reviews.
If last year was about proving I could still balance being a reader, hobby writer and professional, this year was about trusting that I am one. Reading didn’t compete with the rest of my life – it moved alongside it. That feels like real progress.
With audiobooks making up nearly 80% of my reading this year, what I observed is that great audiobook narration isn’t about performance, range or theatrics – it’s about restraint.
