Does listening to audiobooks count as reading? Here it does. Let’s discuss your favorite reads — or listens.
Six books of buildup, and the Faction Wars arrive with a whimper. "This Inevitable Ruin" is overstuffed, repetitive and 300-pages too long — a GoT "Long Night" moment for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The emotional beats that define the series are still here, just buried under dungeon mechanics and escalating conflict from gods.
Book six of “Dungeon Crawler Carl” doesn't match the highs of its immediate predecessor, but the emotional core — Carl's devastating backstory, character sacrifices and Donut's vulnerability — keeps the series humming. An off-kilter audiobook narration and a slow first third test patience, but the back half delivers.
Five books in, "The Butcher's Masquerade" is the entry that finally earns the series' promise. As a literary fiction reader who came in skeptical and stayed cautious through four uneven installments finally found the payoff — cohesive, thrilling, genuinely funny and more emotionally sophisticated than the ridiculousness would suggest.
Greg Marshall wasn't diagnosed with cerebral palsy until he was 30 — despite a lifetime of surgeries, a limp and parents who knew all along. "Leg" is funnier than it has any right to be given its raw material, occasionally recalling early Sedaris, and sneaks up on you with genuine emotional weight by the end.
A West Point history professor and combat veteran makes the case that indigenous dispossession, racialized slavery, hyper-capitalism and militarism built modern America — and that questioning our national mythology is the most American thing we can do. Dense, deliberately uncomfortable and relentlessly bleak.
I came into Rasheed Newson's sophomore novel with high expectations after his electric debut. The Golden Age Hollywood premise delivers, with real-life cameos, studio system intrigue and a fixer with the era's most interesting vantage point. But the urgency that propelled his previous novel only arrives in the final third.
I judged "The Fantasies of Future Things" by its cover and went in expecting a queer love story. What Doug Jones is actually writing is far more political and ambitious — a gentrification novel using the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as a litmus test for Black progress. Uneven but worth it. A debut that bit off almost more than it could chew.
I saved Ocean Vuong's debut for last — after both novels and his second poetry collection. Reading "Night Sky With Exit Wounds" in reverse revealed just how fully formed he was from the start. Ambitious, occasionally imperfect and unmistakably Vuong throughout.
RuPaul's memoir is part origin story, part philosophy manifesto — and at its best when he finally drops the motivational-speaker polish. The hustle is real, the narration is excellent and the final chapters are genuinely moving. But the warmth that makes him so compelling on TV occasionally softens the harder truths this story deserved.
A queer basketball novel set in the early 2000s should've been a slam dunk. Instead, "A Sharp Endless Need" squanders a brilliant first chapter and a timely premise on repetitive teen self-destruction tropes that clash with everything we're told about these characters.
Edward Cahill's debut novel follows three very different men caught in the same pre-Stonewall police raid — a Wall Street banker, a Columbia professor and an Irish kid from the Bronx with nothing left to lose. A character study disguised as a mystery, with strong writing but some issues with pacing and repetition.
Douglas Stuart's third novel returns to familiar Scottish working-class terrain — religion, repression, queer identity and small-town suffocation — but with a maturity and balance that makes it his most nuanced work yet. A slow-burning character study built around sacrifice, self-destruction and a confrontation between two people who know exactly where to cut.
Patricia Highsmith's landmark 1952 lesbian novel is radical in its courage but punishing in its pacing. Carol's opacity is the central problem and a single letter shows what the novel could've been.
Here's my annual reading list — eight books I'm attempting this June, plus recommendations from years past.
Grant Ginder's multi-decade friendship novel is funny, honest and quietly devastating — a sharper, more literary take on the terrain Steven Rowley covers.
Kathryn Stockett spent a decade in literary exile. "The Calamity Club" is her case for a second act — and it delivers. A feminist Depression-era novel about eugenics, found family and three women who need each other to survive. Better written than "The Help," anchored by two exceptional narrators and one of the year's most resilient protagonists.
"Kin" follows two motherless women raised side-by-side in Jim Crow Louisiana whose lives diverge sharply but whose bond never does. Tayari Jones at her most immersive — a story about platonic love, chosen family and the friendships that shape us longest.
Maria Semple's "Go Gentle" arrives disguised as a madcap Upper West Side comedy and pivots into something far darker and more resonant. A Stoic philosopher, a stolen Greek statue and a third act that retroactively reframes everything — including what it cost one woman to rebuild her life after losing it completely.
It’s an intergenerational family saga, yes — and that structure is familiar — but Hakes integrates real historical and political texture more convincingly than many sprawling historical fiction attempts. It left me more emotional than I expected, and I would absolutely read Hakes again.
One of the more interesting side effects of reading the entire “Game Changers” series straight through is that you stop thinking about the books individually and start thinking about the relationships as if they exist in the same ongoing world. Here’s my take on the best couples in the series and if they’ll make it to their tenth anniversary.
