Asking the Wrong Questions

I read 190 books in 2024. That is, I think it's fair to say, a lot of books. And yet somehow, when I come to make my year-end summary, all I can think of are the books I didn't get to. The series I meant to start. The reading projects that I've been putting off for months. The awards contenders I still haven't given a fair shake. The impulse buy I haven't gotten around to. The ARCs that are piling up in my kindle. So what did I end up reading in 2024? I caught up with a lot of 2023 publications (but not, of course, all the ones I wanted to get to). I read all of Patricia Highsmight's Ripley books (some of them are decent, but you can stop with the first). I went a little deeper than I previously had into Tolkien marginalia (one good thing to come out the increasingly turgid Rings of Power ). I started Ryoko Kui's delectable manga Delicious in Dungeon (I have almost reached where the first season of the excellent anime adaptation lets off). I read a lot of G...

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I write about comics rarely, and about media tie-in fiction not at all, so I hope the fact that my latest review at Strange Horizons is of a book that is both of those things will, in itself, be a sign that this is a book worth looking at. Written by Ryan North, with art by Chris Fenoglio, Warp Your Own Way is a story set in the world of the just-concluded, animated Star Trek series Lower Decks . Also, it's a Choose Your Own Adventure-style story. The reader follows series lead Beckett Mariner on her day off, making decision as trivial as what beverage to order from the replicator, and as momentous as how to fight off Borg invaders. Which might sound amusing but slight, but before long Warp Your Own Way begins to hint that there is a meta-narrative at the root of this branching decision tree, and by its end the book reveals itself as a puzzle the reader must solve. I was so excited by Warp Your Own Way 's ingenious use of the CY...

As climate fiction becomes a more dominant flavor in the literary field, a common set of tropes and preoccupations seems to have emerged. Often, these books are about middle class people experiencing sudden, vertiginous downward mobility, losing the financial (and eventually, physical) security they had taken for granted, discovering the indifference and cruelty that the poor and working classes are routinely subjected to. At first glance, Julia Armfield's second novel Private Rites seems to have this topic as its focus. Our first introduction to the Carmichael sisters stresses their professions and living situations, in a brief but impactful illustration of how quickly life and career expectations for people of their class have shifted, in a near-future UK in which rising sea levels and changing weather patterns have produced near-constant flooding. Isla, the eldest, can still work in her chosen profession of therapist, but has little to offer in the face of her patients' ove...