Does listening to audiobooks count as reading? Here it does. Let’s discuss your favorite reads — or listens.
For all the bodily fluids, "The Suffering" has the sensibility of an old-school slasher. There's something almost gleefully trashy about the whole thing, and after a relatively slow start, it moves fast. Unfortunately, the more outrageous things become, the less interesting I found the story.
Part supernatural horror, part found family drama, part political satire but all entertaining. Six college students summon a dragon and spend decades paying for it. Ari Fliakos delivers one of the year's best audiobook performances. My first-time reading Joe Hill, but it won’t be my last.
“Boys Weekend” ultimately gave me more interesting ideas than fully developed ones, but it's funny, weird and gory, with enough social commentary underneath the absurdity to give it some bite.
Chuck Tingle's latest swaps his signature pointed social commentary for spectacle. A fashion influencer, a not-quite-dead queer rock icon and a body-hopping parasite make for a promising premise that never fully delivers. The second half finds its footing, but the first is scattershot and the protagonist is nearly impossible to root for.
Although I initially feared I knew exactly where this was headed – a by-the-bootstraps story about a self-made minority woman navigating wealthy white spaces while trying to get her personal life together – both Olga as a character and the novel itself defied my expectations.
Elizabeth Strout's quiet, devastating novel follows a 57-year-old teacher and lifelong fixer whose accumulated heartbreaks — a secret, a silence and a world growing harder for empaths to survive — finally become too much. Robert Petkoff delivers a career-best narration.
Mandel takes her career-long preoccupation with intersecting lives to its logical extreme — what if the other version of you actually existed? "Exit Party" is ambitious and structurally inventive, with a Side A that delivers and a Side B that doesn't quite match it.
I was skeptical about spending more time in Emily St. John Mandel's early noir period, but from the opening pages it's clear you're reading the same writer who would eventually produce "Station Eleven" and "The Glass Hotel."
This is early work, and it shows. The fluid dialogue, character interiority and structural confidence that made her later novels excellent is absent here. What you get instead is a choppy, noir-inflected mystery that is competently assembled, occasionally interesting and populated almost entirely by characters who are, without exception, kind of dumb.
This is not a book for people who lived through it, at least not primarily. It's better understood as a primer for the generation that didn't — young readers who know 9/11 as a historical event rather than a lived experience, and who may not fully grasp the scale of what followed.
For a debut, "Voyagers" is impressive. Charlton has a real knack for character development, dialogue and world-building. I came expecting more science fiction and instead got a thoughtful, funny and occasionally unwieldy story that had shades of "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” which is high praise.
Howard Cruse's 1995 graphic novel is probably the best-drawn I've ever read — and the most demanding. Set in 1960s Alabama, it traces a young gay man's parallel awakenings around racism and his own sexuality, rooted in Cruse's real life. The artwork earns five stars, but the storytelling is closer to three.
Before "Still Life," there was "A Year of Marvelous Ways" — Sarah Winman's 2015 novel about a 90-year-old Cornish mystic waiting for something she can't name, and the traumatized soldier who washes ashore to give her a witness. Gorgeous prose and an unforgettable protagonist, but also a structure that doesn't quite hold together.
Lauren Groff's nine-story collection reads like a series of abandoned novels — and that's a compliment. The longer stories, particularly the near-novella "What's the Time, Mr. Wolf?", are genuinely captivating. The shorter ones are uneven, and Groff's own narration is flat.
There is so much going on in "Fruit Fly," a novel that starts as a publishing satire, morphs into a character study about addiction and exploitation, takes a hard turn into a domestic thriller and somehow finds its way back around to where it started.
Sarah Damoff's multigenerational family novel has a genuinely strong first half and a gift for turns of phrase — but peaks at 50% and never fully earns the devastation it's reaching for.
Susanna Clarke's beloved, award-winning novel was lost on me. A beautifully written, exceptionally narrated slog that I regularly considered abandoning.
"Cat Love" has genuinely interesting ideas about empathy and desensitization buried under so many digressions it never comes together. I still can't fully explain or understand half of what happened in this novel.
A morbid road trip comedy with a death-predicting therapy cat, two traumatized kids and a lottery winner with three heart attacks trying to win back his high school sweetheart. For two-thirds of the novel, it's genuinely funny and surprisingly moving. Then it jumps the shark and doesn’t know when to stop.
Ann Patchett's latest is less about plot than about how memory, grief and perspective shape the stories we tell ourselves. My husband was "bored, but interested." I was taking hit after hit of literary catnip. A warm, occasionally too-precious novel that reminds you ordinary lives are worthy of extraordinary attention.
