September 2023 Reads!

Friends, we will get back to the relatable running content you are here for sometime in the very very near future, never you worry. But we are behind on book reviews and that just will not stand.

Like August, September included a few lemons on the reading front, but also some of my favorite books of the year!

In case you missed it...

January 2023 Reads February 2023 Reads
March 2023 Reads
April 2023 Reads
May 2023 Reads
June 2023 Reads
July 2023 Reads
August 2023 Reads
Reads from previous years(70) 

 🪐🔍🗡️The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (pages, 2023). Audiobook. This book reminded me in turns of things I’ve read by Ian M. Banks and Nnedi Okorafor. We open in the wake of the Holy Vallbaran Empire’s failed attempt to conquer the Ominirish Republic. All this means little to Ominirish scribe-cum-tea mistress Enitan until her lover is assassinated and her sibling abducted by Imperial soldiers. She then proceeds to trade on her tea-making skills in an attempt to work her way up through the Vaalbaran capital in order to rescue her sibling and solve her lover’s murder, and soon finds herself at the heart of intergalactic intrigue and scandal. I am very picky about sci fi and this was smart, refreshing, and super well done.

(71) 🎭🔍🗡️ The Whispers by Ashley Audrain (336 pages, 2023). Audiobook. I can’t remember what prompted me to add this one to my TBR list because in retrospect it is really not the sort of thing I super enjoy. A flawless suburban hostess very publicly loses her cool with her special needs son in front of the entire neighborhood; soon after, the same boy falls from his window in the middle of the night under suspicious circumstances, his odds of regaining consciousness slim. This event precipitates the story of four neighborhood families and their various interrelated secrets, and how they have played out in the past and present. I dunno, I mostly found it sort of dark and depressing and not really all that interesting.

(72) 🔍🗡️ What the Neighbors Saw by Melissa Adelman (pages, 2023). Audiobook. This was one of the worst books I’ve read in quite some time. Soon after Alexis and Sam buy a large fixer-upper in an exclusive DC suburb, their handsome, successful neighbor Teddy turns up dead on the banks of the Potomac. Tensions in the neighborhood mount and drama ensues. Everyone in this book is a terrible person, the story wasn’t that interesting, and the story felt overwritten and full of cliches.

 

(73) 🔍🗡️ Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney (pages, 2023). Paper book. I’d say this is probably the first book by Alice Feeney that I haven’t loved. It opens with a baby kidnapped from a stroller, then twenty years later, the murder of a woman in a care home. We are presented with a number of female characters of various ages and relationships and not immediately told how they fit into the story of the kidnapped baby, including Edith, tricked into the home by her daughter and plotting her escape; Patience, a young worker in the home who has bonded with Edith who is clearly hiding things; and Clio, Edith’s bitter daughter who refuses to speak to her. Over the course of the book, their connections to each other, the kidnapping, and the murder are revealed. I just didn’t find the story or the characters as interesting and compelling as her previous books.

(74) ✨🪄🎭 The Endless Vessel by Charles Soule (pages, 2023). Audiobook. Same author as The Oracle Year, which I really enjoyed, though this is a very different kind of book. In the near future, an incurable sort of depression-plague called “The Gray” seems to be taking over the world, leaving people hopeless and numb. Hong Kong-based scientist Lily Barnes continues to strive for redemption, and in the course of her work comes across a faint sliver of hope for the human race. What she discovers has the potential to change everything. Sprawling and ambitious and incredibly earnest, I am in awe that he somehow managed to pull this story off.

 

(75) 🔍🗡️ I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (448 pages, 2023). Audiobook. I always enjoy a good psychological thriller-cum-murder mystery, but this one was a bit richer and more nuanced than many I’ve read. Bodie Kane has emerged from family trauma and the murder of her high school roommate Thalia in the spring of her senior year at a miserable New Hampshire boarding school a successful film professor and podcaster, doing her best to put the horror of her adolescence behind her. When she returns to the Granby School to teach a podcasting course, though, Bodie finds herself drawn back into the controversy surrounding Thalia’s death. Was the right person convicted? Or is there evidence out there yet that suggests things might have been covered up? Bodie wrestles with her moral obligations as well as the ethics of her position at Granby and profession as a podcaster. Super well done.

(76) 🎭🗡️ The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon (303 pages, 2023). Audiobook. I think if I had known the full extent of what this book was about, I probably would have skipped it. We get the story of Aiden Thomas, hard-working upstate New York family man, as told by his thirteen year old daughter Cecila, new girlfriend Emily, and–surprise!–the woman he’s kept imprisoned in a shed in his backyard and raped nightly for the past five years, Rachel. Oh and also the eight women he murdered before and during Rachel’s captivity. When Aiden’s wife dies and her family repossesses the property where they were living and Aiden and Cecilia are forced to move, he brings Rachel along, introducing her as a “family friend” who needs a place to stay. Rachel realizes this may be the only chance for escape she ever gets, and starts making plans. Incredibly bleak and dark and honestly made me sort of ill.

(77) 🔍👻🧨 The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni (pages, 2023). Audiobook. For the first few dozen pages, I was enthralled and had high hopes for this book, but once I kind of figured out what was going on it was kind of like…Oh. Not for me. A star football player in his younger days, Mike Brink is now a puzzle-solving savant thanks to a football-related traumatic brain injury. Then Jess Price, a woman serving thirty years in prison for murder who hasn’t spoken a word since her arrest five years ago, draws him a puzzle he can’t resist trying to solve. Brink starts to suspect there is something much deeper and more urgent to the puzzle and soon becomes obsessed with Price. As soon as things started getting supernatural, I got bored and just found the rest tiresome.