Does listening to audiobooks count as reading? Here it does. Let’s discuss your favorite reads — or listens.
I came to Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” series backwards – starting with the TV adaptation of “Heated Rivalry” and then working my way through the books and every piece of bonus content I could find. What started as curiosity quickly turned into a full two-week binge. Here’s my take on the world Rachel Reid created and Jacob Tierney perfected.
Chris Jones, a scientist and blogger turned reluctant activist, connects those dots. “The Swine Republic” examines how agricultural runoff – largely from excess fertilizer and animal waste – has poisoned Iowa’s rivers, lakes and drinking water for decades and why that should concern us all.
Leigh Stein's influencer-age Gothic has sharp ideas about technology and self-image — but ambition outpaces execution.
Audiobooks are a form of translation – one that converts the written word into a lived performance. Like all translated text, there’s an art to getting it just right. When it works, it feels like the story was meant to be heard all along.
Overall, this was a quick, thoughtful crowd-pleaser with enough emotional depth (keep the tissues nearby in the final pages) to feel earned rather than gimmicky. Book clubs will eat it up.
“A History of Loneliness” is a powerful literary novel exploring the Irish Catholic Church abuse scandal through the eyes of a well-meaning but complicit priest. Set across several decades, this character-driven story examines faith, silence, and moral responsibility with John Boyne’s signature emotional restraint and sharp prose. Ideal for fans of historical fiction, complex character studies, and books like John Williams’ “Stoner” or the author’s own “The Heart’s Invisible Furies.”
The drama escalates to a level that strains credibility, particularly around the Olympic fallout and the Sochi scheming. At a certain point, the twists feel less sharp and instead repetitive bloat. I kept thinking this could have been 100-pages shorter. It’s not high art, but it’s also not trying to be.
The first half may test some readers’ patience. The characters can be a little grating and the story wanders. But if you stick with it, the back half becomes something much more endearing and honest.
“The Gate of the Feral Gods” is probably the most video game entry so far, in both good and bad ways. For once, it feels like there’s an actual structure holding everything together – even if everything inside that structure is, naturally, pure chaos. I’m also increasingly convinced that the even-numbered books are just better.
Overall, this feels like a step back from book two’s momentum. Dinniman is inventive and occasionally brilliant, but he could use a firmer editorial hand. If not for Donut – still the emotional and comedic engine of this series – I might have tapped out here.
While picking up exactly where “Dungeon Crawler Carl” left off, it almost immediately becomes clear that Matt Dinniman had settled into this world. This was a better book: better paced, better structured and more willing to let scenes breathe instead of sprinting from gag to gag.
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.
