I’m going to see if I can keep it up this year, so if you want to follow, join me on StoryGraph*!
With a little sleuthing (and trawling through various book-related accounts I have in different places) I think I’ve managed to mostly reconstruct last year’s list, so before we get into this year, please enjoy: Books I Read in January 2021.
(1) Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell (2018, 359 pages). In 2020 I really came to adore Lisa Jewell. This domestic crime/mystery/drama alternates between ten years ago, wherein Laurel’s brilliant teenage daughter Ellie suddenly disappears one day without a trace, and the present, where Laurel–still searching for her missing daughter–finds herself falling in love with charming Floyd. Things get weird, though, when Laurel meets Floyd’s young daughter Poppy–who is the spitting image of Ellie. What does it mean??? I really loved this book. It was both well-written and engrossing but also just so heartfelt and earnest in a way that could have fallen flat had it not been so skillfully done.
(2) The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem #2) by Cixin Liu, translated from Chinese (2008, 512 pages). It’s hard to say much about this series without getting into spoilers, but what you will very quickly figure out is that some folks on Earth have kind of accidentally found themselves in communication with a race of aliens called the “Trisolarans,” so called because their planet is part of a three-star system whose chaotic gravitational interactions mean the planet experiences unpredictable seasons of pleasant climate (in which civilization thrives) and extreme cold/darkness or catastrophic heat and dryness (in which civilization is destroyed). In desperate need of a stable home world, they are now coming for Earth.
Even though they’ve been around for years, The Three-Body Problem and its sequels (the “Memory of Earth’s Past Trilogy”) started getting a lot of press in 2019 because someone was going to make a TV show (but then someone involved was maybe assassinated???). I like smart, original sci fi and the series had won a bunch of awards, so I thought, why not? Let me just say: This series is one of the strangest and most bizarre I have *ever* read. Smart? Yes. Unique? Yes. Totally unpredictable? Yes. Thought-provoking? Yes. Sticks with you? Yes. Enjoyable? Well….YMMV. The series was all of those things, but it was also VERY serious, VERY dense, VERY dark and depressing at times, and definitely not a quick read.
(3) The Broken Kingdoms (Inheritance Trilogy #2) by N.K. Jemisin (2010, 384 pages). I read the first book in this fantasy series (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) years ago but it took me a while to get around to the sequel. In the first book, outcast Yeine Darr is summoned to the capitol city of Sky when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances. She learns she is a possible heir to the king there–if she can survive a power struggle with her two vicious fellow heirs. Though Yeine makes an appearance in the second book, it actually centers around another key player from book 1, with the POV protagonist a blind artist living very far from Sky. While not as life-changing as the Broken Earth series, Jemisin is a smart and scintillating writer who seems to never run out of original, thought-provoking stories.
(4) Never Ask Me by Jeff Abbott (2020, 356 pages). This domestic crime thriller alternates between the present (where a mother and international adoption agent has been found dead under suspicious circumstances) and the past (where the same agent is helping another desperate family in town pursue an international adoption). Reasonably entertaining, neither the best nor worst I’ve ever read in this genre.
*Real talk: I've been on Goodreads for like 14 years or something ridiculous at this point, but over the years I’ve found the platform to be more and more annoying and problematic. Related, I have also been trying to slowly but surely divest myself and my data from the Amazon ecosystem, so in 2021 I finally got on board the StoryGraph train. I created an account, downloaded my entire Goodreads history from the site, uploaded it all to StoryGraph, and in a few hours all my reviews and other data had been shifted over to StoryGraph.
Why ditch Goodreads? Here are my reasons, YMMV.
- Amazon is an evil company that's ruining the world and destroying lives. Seriously. Take your dollars and data literally anywhere else whenever you can. Like I said, I am still working on disentangling myself completely (I do still have a Prime account, and breaking my audible habit has been an extremely difficult idea to contemplate), but I have managed to go from defaulting mindlessly to Amazon when I need something random to using it only a couple of times this last year when I really needed something specific ASAP and couldn't find it locally. I still don't feel great about it but, y'know, progress not perfection.
- From a technological standpoint, the platform itself is just a mess. It's clunky, slow, old-fashioned, and a lot of the features do not and have never really worked right.
- Sexism and harassment, woohoo! (Goodreads’ response: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
- Publishing has started to use Goodreads reviews in ways that seem shady at best and unethical at worst. (The fact that you can leave a one-star review before ARCs are even available is just wakadoo.)
- Extortion scams, review-bombing, & bullying of authors, particularly writers of Color, which, again, Goodreads refuses to acknowledge or do anything about.
- There are just sooooo many users with sooooo many invisible incentives you will never know anything about that the place had become completely unusable to me as a recommendation/review source. If there are reviews from people I actually know, great, but that is rarely a large enough sample size to be useful.
Why StoryGraph?
- A woman-owned small business.
- Not poisoned by Amazon and its API.
- A much more modern and updated interface with features that actually work. 🤯
- A subtler review system (you can use half stars! Or quarter stars!) and the ability to tag your reviews not only by shelf but by theme and content warning. This is a lot more useful than pages of reviews from people who may or may not have even remotely the same criteria as you for what counts as a good book.
- A really nice set of free features AND a cool suite of 'plus' options ($5/month or $50/year) including cool data viz features, scarily-accurate personalized recommendations, & the ability to find community members to follow based on the similarity of your tastes
- No ads (There are no ads in the free version either but honestly just that would have made the $5/month worth it for me)
It’s not perfect and definitely still a work in progress, but thus far I'm really enjoying it and SOOOO happy to be free of Goodreads. Come join me if you want!
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