Another year done and this last year brought a lot of reading! I am pretty surprised, but the year has been pretty mediocre if I’m being honest. But it has also been a year of more random reads without properly vetting them first. Here are my favourite reads of the last year!

House of Hollow

Probably the most entertaining of the surprising amount of books I read this year involving the concept of cuckoos.

Bad Blood

My non-fiction favourite! And with the trial happening, it was great to know what led up to it.

Feeder

I didn’t know I needed an eldritch horror novel, but I am happy that I got one.

Hench

After putting out a whole trilogy about heroes and villains, it was great to see how other people did it.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking

This one was so cute and I think you should also check it out. I’m on the hunt for more by this author after checking out this one and I’m looking forward to reading more.

Last book review of the year and I opted for something that I’d been hearing good things about! Cult stories and a hint of something supernatural sounded just about right for me, so I figured this one would be great.

The story follows Lo, a young woman who has not seen her sister since a tragic accident killed her parents and left her scarred. Lo has been working for a journalist and aspires to be one herself, but has also been trying to get in touch with her sister who has been stuck in a cult for the last several years. When the cult leader, Lev, offers to give her exclusive access to her, she has an opportunity to achieve both things: Find her sister and get her byline at last. But the cult is alluring and her sister is far more elusive than she bargained for.

This story is slow and makes the choice to not include many chapter breaks, which is a new trend that I’m not fond of. It’s meant to show how cults trap desperate people in them, but it takes a very long time to get there. We have shifting perspectives between Lo in the present and her sister, Bea, in the past which… well, I figured out one of the twists pretty early on from that context alone.

I think I would have liked this a lot more if I didn’t already have an interest in cults and a general understanding of options. There was a point early in the story where I wondered why, when Lo wasn’t able to get her byline, she didn’t just pay the $6 for a Medium subscription and publish there. That she is completely isolated without even an online community, and the only communities talked about are Instagram and Facebook, which she explicitly does not have ((Instagram, at least)) for reasons that are not listed felt bizarre. It feels artificial and like a lot of the circumstances around her actions are contrived to make the story work.

And don’t get me started on that turning point where the cult is suddenly good actually because there is a child. The last third of the book felt like things were happening because there was a place this story was meant to go and didn’t feel like the logic connected with the first half.

Overall, it was probably fine. I think I was just not in the mood for it and found myself poking holes in the premise where I wouldn’t if I was. The writing is still good, so it might be more for you.

Since I’ve dipped my foot into the writing superheroes ring, and because I fully intend to go back to it again, I have been wanting more superhero novels. And when I can’t find those, I’ll happily take a recommendation for a villain one instead.

The story follows Anna, a temp henchman who ends up taking a job that goes horribly wrong. When she is actually brought into the field, she ends up injured by one of the heroes so poorly that she loses the job and ends up out of commission for months. In this time, she starts to put her spreadsheet skills to the test, doing the math on how destructive heroics really are in terms of the cost of the lives caught in the crossfire. Her skills are eventually uncovered by another villain who brings her into his employ and gives her the resources to bring the heroes down with the power of math.

I really enjoyed this book. It feels like it hits a sweet spot between Powers and Doctor Horrible in the portrayal of the mundane elements of superheroes that can be taken to an extreme with the right motivation. You do have to accept the premise of the universe, which I’ve seen a lot of reviews unable to do, but if you can it’s really a lot of fun. Anna is not someone who is supernatural and portrayed very much as someone who is working a corporate job that just happens to be evil.

I will grant you that I work in tech, so evil for hire is just something I find relatively believable. I would still say it’s a great read if you’ve liked something like The Boys or Invincible or any of those other 2000s comics that are being made into media franchises now. It has a lot of the same ideas, with a few small updates.

I used to go into the library and start series in the middle, usually because my library was really bad about actually having the first one available for me. I always used to like the feeling of being able to understand what was going on in a story even when I didn’t have the full context. And so I feel a bit of nostalgia with this, book 7 of a series I have never read.

The story follows primarily Irene, a Librarian who has apparently been dealing with a long string of assassination attempts that have no intention of stopping. The people targeting her shift throughout the book, and we follow as she and her companions try to understand just who wants them dead of their past foes and how some of them continue to come back after they have most definitely been killed in the past. There’s also a lot to do with the relationships between the Library, the Fey and the Dragons, which I don’t think I ever fully grasped.

I am fully aware that this is the second to last book in the series, and therefore is mostly setting up the climax and conclusion in the final installment. Regardless, there’s a lot of very interesting ideas in here. I was hoping for something like the Thursday Next series and I think I was pleasantly surprised. It’s significantly more straightforward and less surreal than that series, but there are a lot of elements in it that I found hit that sweet spot of fiction about fiction that I like.

Overall, I really enjoyed it but I would suggest maybe starting at the start of the series. If this book is any indication, there are a lot of really interesting plot elements that would be a lot more fun if I had a fuller context of what was going on.

While I work in tech, I have no desire to work for one of the prestigious FAANG companies, and after this book I know for certain I do not want to work at Netflix. This is a book about how Netflix creates and maintains a culture of high-performing employees who have the autonomy to make decisions without the need for oversight. It’s an interesting look at how to create a culture that thrives on innovation and easily trims out those who are not performing as highly as the company needs.

There’s also a few uncomfortable things that happen in the book. The radical candour they talk about and the constant feedback appear to be entirely negative and involve calling people out in public settings, sometimes being placed in a room so that you and your coworkers can all do that to each other. There’s a part where a woman gets feedback from a man that she’s been talking too much. If you are a woman in tech, you know why that bothered me. There’s also the insistence that they are culturally sensitive, but then insist that other cultures bend to their way of doing things.

If you’re curious about what tech is like, the attitudes expressed by the voice of this book are not uncommon. The “We are doing everything right, if it’s not working for you then you are the problem, the people who left just couldn’t handle us or weren’t good enough for us” is what you’re walking into with the many companies.

I’m certain this book is full of embellishments and exaggerations to make Netflix sound more interesting and innovative, but there are a few interesting ideas. If you are in tech, it is an interesting read. If you think this is a book to live by, however, please lose my number.

So this book looked cute. The blurb described a young girl in Japan who was essentially a magical girl helping her stuffed animal. When she got older, she revisits those fantasies. It was a cute premise. It’s not even a little of what I got.

Let me start with all the content warnings that the blurb did not give: mental and physical child abuse, pedophilia, sexual assault, incest, cannibalism, and self-cannibalism.

A little warning would have been nice. Just saying.

The story follows Natsuki, a little girl whose immediate family neglects her and treats her like the least favourite child in an Asian family, ((If you know, you know)) and who is being targeted by the pedophilic cram school teacher, finds solace in an annual trip to see the extended family and her cousin, Yuu. When Natsuki pressures Yuu to go too far with their relationship, Natsuki’s trips to see her extended family end.

As an adult, Natsuki marries a man who has no interest in being married or in a relationship whatsoever, the pair of them living as amicable roommates as it becomes clear that not only has Natsuki’s coping mechanism of viewing the world as a baby-making factory and herself as an alien trying to assimilate to a society she doesn’t understand has spread to her husband. When an opportunity arises, they go to visit the old family home from Natsuki’s childhood, reconnect with Yuu who has been living there, and…

Well, the last bit of the book takes a hard turn into cannibalism.

On the one hand, this book has left me thinking for a while. I have not willingly tried to interpret a book since school, and I’ve been doing a lot of trying to give this the benefit of the doubt. There’s surely something I’m missing both in the translation and the cultural context, right? And if the book is a commentary on being asexual in Japanese society, the fact that all three of the asexuals seem to be that way due to childhood sexual trauma and all turned to cannibalism, so that’s probably not intentional, right? Maybe it’s just about othering and systems failing children, which leads to stunted emotional growth?

On the other hand, I did not enjoy the experience. There was a story I was expecting and it was nowhere in here. Instead, this was like something I would have read in a Uni English class, which is not ultimately what I’m looking for.

Today in trying out some new genres, something that’s a bit closer to home for me. I do love documentaries about cults and true crime, so a story about kidnapping and cults seems like it would be right up my alley.

The story follows “Esther,” a young girl who must maintain the persona of someone she has never met on a farm where her every move is monitored or she will be eliminated. The farm is the home of the Special Ones, four young people who have been kidnapped to live the lives of people they have never heard of before who are supposedly the reincarnation of older souls who are supposed to lead their followers to a better life.

It is a little slow at the start as life on the farm is established that quickly ramps up upon the need to replace one of the Special Ones and you get to see how the process actually works. The information gets revealed slowly for the first half and really well until you get the introduction of Him, the one who is controlling everything. His perspective provides a lot of context, though it’s a little jarring to get that second perspective so suddenly and without any indication. It helps to make sense of what’s happening beyond our lead, which is important because she does not ultimately find out much.

I don’t think this is a detriment because there’s a lot about it that feels unsettling because of the way the information is distributed. Things are not neatly wrapped up. I do like that not all is well at the end. The story ends, we know why, but the character relationships aren’t all brought to a satisfying conclusion and it feels uncomfortably realistic that it wouldn’t all wrap up nicely in the end.

Overall, I really enjoyed it! It’s a quick read with some interesting ideas. If you’re also interested in true crime and cults, this Is a fun read.