Does listening to audiobooks count as reading? Here it does. Let’s discuss your favorite reads — or listens.
Eight books into "Dungeon Crawler Carl," I've come to think of the bonus material — the "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret" short stories included in the Ace hardcover editions, the audiobook extras from Soundbooth Theater and a recently released graphic novel — as the series' extended universe.
If you read “Never Whistle at Night,” you'll find a lot to like here as well, but I actually preferred this one. The original was more interested in what lurks in the dark, both literally and figuratively. “Back for Blood” still has plenty going on beneath the surface, but it also remembers that sometimes you just want the thing lurking in the dark to jump out and scare you.
There are worthwhile observations scattered throughout "The Brightness," and occasional flashes of the writer I admired. But after nearly 700-pages, I was left wondering why we needed to return to Westish at all. I wanted these characters to have grown into something more interesting, not simply repeat variations of their old mistakes with considerably less insight.
Ultimately, "Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng" is a novel with far better ideas than execution. I wanted this to work, and for a while I thought it might, but by the end, I was disappointed by how thoroughly the book squandered its potential.
A love story, family drama, stalker thriller and supernatural fantasy all loosely stitched together, with an invented private language that starts out charming and ends distracting. A deep cut for Constant Readers only.
Adapted from portions of "The Zombie Survival Guide," "Recorded Attacks" takes us around the world and across history to document humanity's encounters with the undead. It's creative, gory and fun, illustrated by Ibraim Roberson in a traditional comic-book style. Unfortunately, the digital edition wasn't optimized for Libby, which made some of the artwork and text frustratingly difficult to read.
What began as exactly the kind of strange, melancholy family horror story I love, ended as conventional mishmash of horror tropes. I don’t understand why Stephen King agreed to blurb this.
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.
