Category: Fiction

(by Rachel Reid) OK, this one was more my speed than Game Changer was. And I mean, I liked Game Changer, but I feel like Scott and Kip both have such golden retriever energy. Like, so earnest and eager and wholesome. And that’s fun and all, but the Shane/Ilya dynamic of rivals who hook up…

(by Rachel Reid) I haven’t watched the Heated Rivalry show at all, but I was looking for a fun February read and this definitely delivered. At the start of the book we meet Kip, who’s working at a juice bar making smoothies (though he’d rather be doing something that actually uses his history degree). One…

(by Joseph O’Neill) Very close to the start of this book, the narrator gets a phone call in which he learns that someone he was friends with when he lived in New York is dead: and not just dead, but a murder victim. This is 2006, and the narrator, Hans, is back in London and…

(by Flann O’Brien) At the very start of this book we learn that the narrator is a murderer: he tells us in the first line how he “killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with [a] spade.” We then learn a bit more about the events in his life that preceded this crime: a…

(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani) The first book I read in 2025 was Suggested in the Stars, which is the second book in a trilogy by Tawada (I’d read the first book back in 2022), so it feels fitting that I closed the year out with this one, which is the third of…

(by Dave Eggers) At the start of this novella we meet Aurora, who’s been in charge of her dad’s whale watching business for the past two years, since his retirement. Business isn’t booming, but it’s steady, both for Aurora and for her friend Declan, whose “looser and boozier” tours leave from the same pier. There…

(by Charlie Jane Anders) I think the three storylines of this novel and the way the narrative switches between them made it a slow start for me, but once I was about halfway into the book I was fully invested. In one storyline we have Jamie, who’s working on her PhD dissertation and also trying…

(by Elizabeth Smart) I’ve been meaning to read this since, um, 2015, and I’m not sure what took me so long. I’m also not sure how I ultimately feel about this one: some of it felt like a slog—too vague, too much mythologizing. But at a sentence/paragraph level there is a lot I like, and…

(by Stephanie LaCava) You could say this novel follows its narrator, Bathory (Bath for short, pronounced Bat) from her childhood in the Boston area to her college and post-college years in New York, and it does, but that might imply something a lot more straightforward than this book. This book is elliptical, slippery, operating with…

(by David Mitchell) I first read Slade House back in April 2016, which was probably not the best timing: this is definitely better as a spooky season read than as a springtime read, especially because the action of the book takes place in late October at nine-year intervals, beginning in 1979 and ending in 2015.…