Books Read in 2025 Post The First: Now With 71.17% More Books!

 191 books as of 9:21 p.m. on December 30th. I don't think I'm going to finish anything tonight, and we're having a party tomorrow. I like prime numbers anyway.

I read 111 books in 2024, which was my lowest total since 2019. In comparison to that, I ate books in 2025. I mostly blame Sarah (because I was trying to be more like her, although I only read stuff with my eyes, I am bad at ear-reading.) I think the fact that I read more paper books than in recent years meant that I clicked away to look stuff up or follow texts or news articles that popped up on the screen while I was reading on my iPad. Maybe there was just nothing good on tv. "Have you ever cracked 200?" Eve asked. "Nope," I said, and she hastily added "I"m not saying you should try. In fact, probably don't." 

The vast majority look to be four-star reads, so I either selected well or rated generously, both of which are fine with me. Then again, I have six one-star reads, which is more than usual, so maybe I've gotten more willing to dole out the single-star rating too. I have a tab opened for a book called "On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books". I remember seeing someone mention it and opening the tab, but I have lost track of where it was mentioned. I'm not sure I have, in fact, found the Great Life through Great Books, but I feel okay about that because if I did find it I probably would have lost it by now. 

I did largely read books that I combed the library catalogue for and requested based on good reviews. I do still read, though, more for pleasure than for any other reason (filling in gaps in my knowledge, looking for examples of how to live a more efficient/more virtuous/more admirable life). Should I change this up? Maybe. Will I? Probably not this year, although I did just read Engie's book post and have requested How to Read Literature Like a Professor from the library. 

My usual format: Title and author, Synopsis from Goodreads, notable quotes if I pulled any (my sentiments sometimes follow the quotations in brackets), my review. Let me know if any of it is formatted in a confusing manner. 

One-Star Reads i.e. "I Didn't Like It"

Hunting Game (Embla Nystrom #1) by Helene Tursten, Paul Norlen Translator: Synopsis from Goodreads: From a young age, 28-year-old Embla Nyström has been plagued by chronic nightmares and racing thoughts. Though she still develops unhealthy fixations and makes rash decisions from time to time, she has learned to channel most of her anxious energy into her position as Detective Inspector in the mobile unit in Gothenburg, Sweden, and into sports. A talented hunter and prize-winning Nordic welterweight, she is glad to be taking a vacation from her high-stress job to attend the annual moose hunt with her family and friends.

But when Embla arrives at her uncle’s cabin in rural Dalsland, she sees an unfamiliar face has joined the group: Peter, an enigmatic young divorcé. And she isn’t the only one to take notice. One longtime member of the hunt doesn’t welcome the presence of an outsider and is quick to point out that with Peter, the group’s number reaches thirteen, a bad omen for the week.

Sure enough, a string of unsettling incidents follow, culminating in the disappearance of two men from a neighboring group of hunters. Embla takes charge of the search, and they soon find one of the missing men floating facedown in the nearby lake, his arm tightly wedged between two rocks. Just what she needs on her vacation. With the help of local reinforcements, Embla delves into the dark pasts of her fellow hunters in search of a killer.

I had read An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good by this author on Engie's recommendation and enjoyed it, so I decided to take a flyer on this one. Here's my recommendation: strap on your snowshoes and tramp away from this as quickly as possible. It is dumb, dull, drivelly dreck. Fancy cars and posh hunting cabin decor were lovingly described in excruciating detail, while characters had less sparkle than the copper kitchen accessories. Enjoy such scintillating passages as: ”She’d gone into Peter’s secret room. This was her punishment. He had beaten her and tied her up. Hung her from the ceiling. Her body ached. Crazy. He was crazy. What did he intend to do with her? Kill her? Was it really possible that he could? Why hadn't he killed her yet? Must gain time.”

He had beaten her and tied her up and all evidence pointed to him having murdered several people already but was it really possible that he could kill her? Probably not because the title of the series is her name and this is only number one. More's the pity.

Cockroach by Rawi Hage: Synopsis from Goodreads: Cockroach takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal’s restless immigrant community, where a self-described “thief” has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naïve therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator’s violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal. Bold, haunting, and emotionally trenchant, Cockroach is a powerful story of immigrant experience, indignation, and unrelenting fortitude.

”I watched Matild’s firm ass bounce towards the kitchen.” (ew)

-”Had she waited for the bus like those girls I saw walking in short plaid skirts in forty-degree-below temperatures? Had she giggled when she saw cute boys? Had she, like my sister, played with herself under her bedclothes,  had she bitten her lower lip as she ejaculated rivers of sweaty men?

But really, how naive and innocent this woman is, I thought. If she only knew what I am capable of.” (ew)

-”That was when I realized how grown-up she was, how pretty and how attractive she had become. It saddened me, but also in my confusion and in her presence I felt an embarrassing erection.” (ew - his SISTER?)

This isn't actually the only book we've read in book club called Cockroach. The other one was spelled with a K and was a reversal of Kafka's Metamorphosis, and I really liked it. This one I hated. I have accepted that I don't like Hage's writing. I get that it is illustrative of the way people who immigrate are dehumanized. I was a little curious to see how the Kafka reference would work. I got less of a sense of 'immigrant experience, indignation, and unrelenting fortitude' than smugness, misogyny and gleefully-written icky sex stuff. I find the way he writes about women really off-putting. I made one last effort, and now I'm done.

Ink Ribbon Red by Alex Pavesi: Synopsis from Goodreads: A wickedly plotted new thriller, in which a group of friends play a deadly game that unwraps a motive for murder, from Alex Pavesi, the author of The Eighth Detective.

Anatol invites five of his oldest friends to his family home in the Wiltshire countryside to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. At his request, they play a game of his invention called Motive Method Death. The rules are simple: Everyone chooses two players at random, then writes a short story in which one kills the other.

Points are awarded for making the murders feel real. Of course, it’s only natural for each friend to use what they know. Secrets. Grudges. Affairs. But once they’ve put it in a story, each secret is out. It’s not long before the game reawakens old resentments and brings private matters into the light of day. With each fictional crime, someone new gets a very real motive.

Can all six friends survive the weekend, or will truth turn out to be deadlier than fiction?

This came available with my library holds at the same time as his first book, but I read this first. I sincerely hope this is the disappointing sophomore effort and that the first book is much better (edited to add: it was not). This is only 'wickedly plotted' in the sense of an editor being wicked enough to publish it and inflict it on the public. 
I often wonder with this kind of 'group of friends' novel why no one in the group of friends ever seems to like each other very much. They variously tell each other "you just like complaining", "you just like making things difficult", "it's your fault my father sexually harasses you because you tempt him" (pretty much verbatim). This is never balanced out with anyone saying what they actually like about anyone else.
The device would be really interesting if the stories (or the rest of the book) were written with any kind of spark or depth. An actual sentence that was written is "Dean's orgasm landed on his brain like an atom bomb." The formatting looks like the publisher shrunk the amount of text on each page to make it look like a full-length novel. The cover, admittedly, is killer.
If these were my only friends I would probably be tempted to kill them and/or myself too.

I Am Not Who You Think I Am by Eric Rickstead: Synopsis from Goodreads: One secret. Eight cryptic words. Lifetimes of ruin.

Wayland Maynard is just eight years old when he sees his father kill himself, finds a note that reads I am not who you think I am, and is left reeling with grief and shock. Who was his father if not the loving man Wayland knew? Terrified, Wayland keeps the note a secret, but his reasons for being afraid are just beginning.

Eight years later, Wayland makes a shocking discovery and becomes certain the note is the key to unlocking a past his mother and others in his town want to keep buried.

With the help of two friends, Wayland searches for the truth. Together they uncover strange messages scribbled in his father's old books, a sinister history behind the town's most powerful family, and a bizarre tragedy possibly linked to Wayland's birth. Each revelation raises more questions and deepens Wayland's suspicions of everyone around him. Soon, he'll regret he ever found the note, trusted his friends, or believed in such a thing as the truth.

I Am Not Who You Think I Am is an ingenious, addictive, and shattering tale of grief, obsession, and fate as eight words lead to lifetimes of ruin.

Well this certainly ruined my lifetime for the time that I was reading it. Note: one star means I didn't like it. Not that it was bad. Not badly written, anyway. Sort of. I mean, it's probably the best "book that made me want to throw myself under a truck" that I read this year. It's a little overly gothic, and stretches credulity beyond even what I, who can suspend my disbelief with the strength of a neodymium magnet, could manage. Any hint of redemption given was immediately pulverized ruthlessly - not even just for the central "tragic thing", but for two or three corollary events also. Like the author went "oh hang on, I might have slept a sliver of hopefulness or humanity in here, just let me put on my steel-toed boots and drop-kick that right out the door." Reminds me of when I said "season 3 of Ozark is coming out" and my husband replied "oh good, I was just thinking I'd been feeling way too happy lately."

This Will Be Fun (This Will Be #1) by E.B. Asher: Synopsis from Goodreads: The Princess Bride meets People We Meet on Vacation in this cozy quest romantasy about a group of friends who once defended their magical land together but haven’t spoken since, reuniting to attend a royal wedding, and ending up on a new adventure to save the realm—and hopefully themselves.

Ten years ago, they saved the realm. It ruined their lives.

Everyone in Mythria knows the story of how best friends Beatrice and Elowen, handsome ex-bandit Clare, and valiant leader Galwell the Great defended the land from darkness. It’s a tale beloved by all—except the former heroes. They haven’t spoken in a decade, devastated by what their quest cost them.

I enjoy how the series title reflects my feelings: "This Will be....." And my enjoyment of anything here ends there. Why? Whyyyyy? Why is this billed as fantasy and not straight romance? I will put up with romance happening incidentally during a fantasy, but I will run a mile from a straight romance with a couple of magic spells thrown in (if romance is your thing, all good, it is not mine and I don't want to be tricked into it). The misunderstandings. The frosty glances concealing smoldering desire. The cutting comments and secret heartaches. I was SO interested to read a story about heroes that save the realm and how it is not all glory and goodness afterwards - I can imagine the problems that would result from having to settle down to normal life after the most intense and rewarding experience you are ever likely to have. This was not that book. I am vexed. I am irked. I am peeved mightily, friends.

Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, Robin Myers Translator: Synopsis from Goodreads:From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Written in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims—a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine—Death Takes Me unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the professor’s classroom into the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art, as it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

-”Everything would have stayed on track, which is often a track toward oblivion, if it hadn’t been for the messages under the door. In the beginning of the era I called the era of the Castrated Men, there was nothing but a generalized apprehension that made me suspect everyone, especially lovers of contemporary art.”

”Lynn is wearing a felt hat. Lynn is wearing a wool coat with two pearl buttons on its fitted waist. Lynn is wearing white cashmere gloves. Lynn is walking slowly, swaying her hips. …. A photo. Lynn pretends she’s being followed and makes a face of alarm. A photo. Lynn lifts the back of her skirt and leans her breasts over a bench. Lynn looks up towards the tall, tall ogival window as she spreads her buttocks.” (aaand I'm done)

”The penis penne-trates. Pen-’n-traits.” (sigh)

The good news: I'd finally read a book on numerous Best Books of the Year lists. The bad news: it was this one and I loathed it. I'm not saying it's a bad book. I just didn't like it. I don't love when authors play with the whole fiction/non-fiction thing, making themselves a character in the book, it comes across as cutesy to me.  I'm sometimes okay with an experimental format. I probably would have been more into this when I was younger and in graduate school and more willing to be charmed by non-traditional literature that took work and even then left me confused. This just ended up in a whirl of detached penises and shrinking women and detectives who did psychology or maybe psychologists who investigated crimes. I was determined to finish it, but it was a mighty struggle.