My friends, you have before you a Bingo Queen, a Melomaniac who finished all 30 Songs for the Reading Rhythm Challenge, the person to come first to finish the Shine and Shadow Double Down Challenge, the person to come first to finish the Horror Aficionados A-Z book title challenge, and someone who barely made the Spooky Bingo too - although I cheated a little bit and changed the books I want to read along the way. So I'm very happy about my overall reading, but I have to say that I did struggle this year, as it was a little too much.
On the other hand I did not complete the Mount TBR challenge and I'm envious of my fellow readers who report they read 40-50 books off their library. And I failed the Halloween challenge too. I almost failed the Spooky Bingo but the other readers said it's OK to cheat a little bit, so I re-interpreted the witch trope in a wider sense in order to be able to finish.
Since I did struggle to finish, I will take it a little easier in 2024 and I won't participate in challenges which require too many categories. I will definitely do the Goodreads yearly challenge, but here too, I want to pledge for less books and go for quality over quantity. Thus I will pledge to read only 100 books throughout the year (This year I have read 155 so far, maybe I can squeeze in a book or two yet).
I already joined the Mount TBR 2024 challenge with twelve books, one book a month off my physcial library.
The Horror Aficionados organize a Song Title Challenge, which luckily consists of only 7 songs, so I'm confident I can finish that pretty quickly.
Shine and Shadow really upped their game this year and my co-mod Q has created a Zombie Challenge in which two groups read against each other (the two teams have leaders who are slightly differing in character so the prompts for the books they need to read also differ), but I'm not taking place in that one, because a) I'm a perfectionist and I would want to finish all prompts, which, seriously, are a lot, and b) I don't want to be in a competition with anyone while reading, I want to challenge myself only. Plus, the losers get eaten by Zombies and I don't want that either.
A challenge I do take part in is Deep Dark Depths (what a title!) for which I need to read 15 books of different horror/dark fantasy subgenres like Grimdark, Splatterpunk, Classic Horror etc. I'm very excited about this, especially because it calls for interaction with other group members in that there are many prompts where someone else should tell me what to read. I can still choose my people, though, so I'll ask other horror fans to recommend me a book.
The last ShiSha challenge is Let There Be Light, and this is a nice one because it requires me to do things I will do anyway, so the prompts go like "Join two different buddy reads" or "Join a ShiSha Dark Read". I think I can ace that. If you're using Goodreads and want to read more, you should come and join our ShiSha challenges, they really are fun.
As I said before in a previous post, I also really want to concentrate on my owned books this year, let's see how far I can go!
Finally, I also made a movie plan for the beginning of the year with exciting titles at Final Girls Berlin, Creepy Crypt and Berlinale, but I'll post that in the new year, when the complete FGBFF program for February is published.
So here you have the last short reviews of the year, nothing spectacular, I hope you survived the festive time and I hope even more we all have a wonderful year 2024 ahead of us. Enjoy!
Christmas and Other Horrors, ed. by Ellen Datlow
Still, the tropes tackled were pretty common to the festive season and the horrors we imagine along with it; home invasion in manifold variations, strange traditions, ghosts...
My highlights, Gravé of Small Birds by Kaaron Warren about a weird ceremony being held on an island, almost a touch of fairy tale but crooked, and The Lord of Misrule by M. Rickert which follows a young woman who, under the influence of the titular lord, can't help but kill children – Christmas is such a child and family focused holiday that this was a breath of fresh, brave air – could unfortunately not erase the feeling of slight wishy-washiness and lack of consistency of concept among the stories.
We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen
My last prompt to complete the yearly book bingo challenge was to read a book set in space and so I chose Lena Nguyen's debut We Have Always Been Here, which revolves around a starship crew turning mad, except for one of the ship's psychologists, Park.
The
character Park was in fact the kind that should have spoken to me, with
her being misanthropic, closer to android robots on the ship than to
her human team mates, but I unfortunately failed to feel any sympathy
for her, or any other character here. I was pretty indifferent, which is
not really a good thing in a book.
In fact, I see many
reviewers described this book felt like a mediocre TV show episode and I
have to agree. It dragged too, even though I listened to the audio
version. So I'm actually very happy to have finished it. But kudos to
the author for writing such a big debut, it must have been lots of work.
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
I am not at all a fan of any kind of mythology, really, and neither do I
particularly like to read the re-tellings, re-imaginings, adaptations
and whatnot thereof. And YET I really enjoyed reading this! Haynes is such a master
character writer! I was genuinely interested in these figures and I
loved the little snarky comments spread throughout the book.
I
still can't believe that Hephaestus during a fairly normal
conversation would suddenly go on and jerk off on Athene's leg! These
Greek gods are something else, really!
Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba
Little Marina loses both her parents in a car
accident and ends up in an orphanage. The girls there are as hostile
towards her as they are fascinated by her, her past middleclass life
with parents and the accident scars on her shoulders, making her look
like a fallen angel. Their constant bullying undergoes a sort of
metamorphosis when Marina starts taking control of them and shows she's
indeed the creepiest of them all. Their reaction just might take
uncontrollable and lethal dimensions.
The fact that all orphanage
girls speak in one Greek chorus versus Marina's sole point of view
makes this a very odd reading experience, it gives a menacing,
foreboding tone. The actual plot never lives up to that tone though,
maybe it shouldn't. The style is really detached, there are exactly zero
emotions shown here, although it is clear how traumatized at least
Marina should be, and maybe the weirdness of this all may be a result of
her not being able to respond to this situation with proper emotions. I
don't know. It's a quick, captivating read in any case.
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
I really preferred
the first half of this book, mainly because I loved the transcribed
therapy sessions, not only with Flavia, but therapist “Om”s other
patients too. They were a little crazy and lots spicy. Since I didn't
really warm up to the character Flavia, aka Big Swiss, but really
liked Greta, the book gradually lost its oomph, but still stayed
interesting enough to hold my attention until the end. I'd say it's a
fun romp, totally readable during a calm festive day with not much to
do. The audiobook production was really well done with different narrators for different characters.
Comments
Post a Comment