Does listening to audiobooks count as reading? Here it does. Let’s discuss your favorite reads — or listens.
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.
Lauren Groff's nine-story collection reads like a series of abandoned novels — and that's a compliment. The longer stories, particularly the near-novella "What's the Time, Mr. Wolf?", are genuinely captivating. The shorter ones are uneven, and Groff's own narration is flat.
There is so much going on in "Fruit Fly," a novel that starts as a publishing satire, morphs into a character study about addiction and exploitation, takes a hard turn into a domestic thriller and somehow finds its way back around to where it started.
Sarah Damoff's multigenerational family novel has a genuinely strong first half and a gift for turns of phrase — but peaks at 50% and never fully earns the devastation it's reaching for.
Susanna Clarke's beloved, award-winning novel was lost on me. A beautifully written, exceptionally narrated slog that I regularly considered abandoning.
"Cat Love" has genuinely interesting ideas about empathy and desensitization buried under so many digressions it never comes together. I still can't fully explain or understand half of what happened in this novel.
A morbid road trip comedy with a death-predicting therapy cat, two traumatized kids and a lottery winner with three heart attacks trying to win back his high school sweetheart. For two-thirds of the novel, it's genuinely funny and surprisingly moving. Then it jumps the shark and doesn’t know when to stop.
Ann Patchett's latest is less about plot than about how memory, grief and perspective shape the stories we tell ourselves. My husband was "bored, but interested." I was taking hit after hit of literary catnip. A warm, occasionally too-precious novel that reminds you ordinary lives are worthy of extraordinary attention.
Lisa Lee writes about the Korean immigrant experience with genuine precision — the model minority myth, mobility as poison, cultural inheritance — but the present-day narrative is relentlessly toxic and the single POV leaves little room for connection.
Eight books in, "A Parade of Horribles" is the course correction "Dungeon Crawler Carl" needed after the bloat of book seven. Chapter 57 — Carl and Donut dueting to A-ha's "Take on Me" — is the most purely joyful sequence in the series.
Six books of buildup, and the Faction Wars arrive with a whimper. "This Inevitable Ruin" is overstuffed, repetitive and 300-pages too long — a GoT "Long Night" moment for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The emotional beats that define the series are still here, just buried under dungeon mechanics and escalating conflict from gods.
Book six of “Dungeon Crawler Carl” doesn't match the highs of its immediate predecessor, but the emotional core — Carl's devastating backstory, character sacrifices and Donut's vulnerability — keeps the series humming. An off-kilter audiobook narration and a slow first third test patience, but the back half delivers.
Five books in, "The Butcher's Masquerade" is the entry that finally earns the series' promise. As a literary fiction reader who came in skeptical and stayed cautious through four uneven installments finally found the payoff — cohesive, thrilling, genuinely funny and more emotionally sophisticated than the ridiculousness would suggest.
Greg Marshall wasn't diagnosed with cerebral palsy until he was 30 — despite a lifetime of surgeries, a limp and parents who knew all along. "Leg" is funnier than it has any right to be given its raw material, occasionally recalling early Sedaris, and sneaks up on you with genuine emotional weight by the end.
A West Point history professor and combat veteran makes the case that indigenous dispossession, racialized slavery, hyper-capitalism and militarism built modern America — and that questioning our national mythology is the most American thing we can do. Dense, deliberately uncomfortable and relentlessly bleak.
I came into Rasheed Newson's sophomore novel with high expectations after his electric debut. The Golden Age Hollywood premise delivers, with real-life cameos, studio system intrigue and a fixer with the era's most interesting vantage point. But the urgency that propelled his previous novel only arrives in the final third.
I judged "The Fantasies of Future Things" by its cover and went in expecting a queer love story. What Doug Jones is actually writing is far more political and ambitious — a gentrification novel using the 1996 Atlanta Olympics as a litmus test for Black progress. Uneven but worth it. A debut that bit off almost more than it could chew.
I saved Ocean Vuong's debut for last — after both novels and his second poetry collection. Reading "Night Sky With Exit Wounds" in reverse revealed just how fully formed he was from the start. Ambitious, occasionally imperfect and unmistakably Vuong throughout.
