2023 re read: 3 years later and I still really adore this book. It is very organic, steeped in female solidarity but with characters with very present flaws. It’s quietly subversive, quick, and perfectly performed as an audiobook. I recently watched the show, which fell pretty short of the book, but was still descent. Much of what makes this works is its tapping into mythos of that time period, culture, and now defunct kind of documentaries; as well as the projecting of a particular notion of an audience onto musicians. I’ve read, literally, over a thousand books since last coming to this—much of it literary—and was very glad this provoked exactly the same feelings in me it originally did.

I don’t even like rock and roll stories. For me, they always miss the point. This does not miss the point. I had written it off as hype last year. But when it popped up as a suggestion on Libby, I thought I’d give it a shot. I listened to the audiobook with the full cast almost straight through. I could not stop listening. I loved everything about it. Idyllic about how a story like this usually ends, somehow presenting it in the documentarian way, especially from the lens of the interviewer, just worked for me.

I don’t give a fuck about that time some rocker died from drugs and then came back alive or whatever. Tell me about why they’re so broken. Not how pretty some broken thing is or was. Everything I never knew I wanted from a story like this.

2023 reread: I still feel this is the weakest book in the series. A 3.5, that would have been a lot more had the wheels not come off in the later half. Miller gets a bit too wild with his storyline and the whole zombie, love story combo just makes it feel too melodramatic. However, on the flip side, if you measure it against typical commercial fiction in this category, the characterization, setting, and especially the start of the plot, blows them out of the water. So, it still is above average, and therefore clearly above a 3, for me.


Glad I got around to reading the book after enjoying the TV show quite a bit. The book has some of the same major plot beats but otherwise is pretty different. This book alternates chapters that focus on Holden and Miller with frenetic, thriller-like pacing.

There’s a more thorough explanation for the technology that is explainable. The group dynamics are fairly different for the main crew, even. They’re much more tight-knit and, I would say, better written than the characters in the show.

Some back story elements in the show aren’t present just yet in book 1. But they also aren’t put together in a way that makes each of them suspicious of one another like in the show. They jive better and are more giving people.

This books ending is halfway through season 2, but elements of book 2 are present from the jump almost in season 1. It’s pretty different and well worth the read. This book was fun, I’m reading the second now and the writing gets much better and introduces Avasarala, Bobby, and Prax, none of whom are present in this book. All of the character work gets better in the next book, this one is mostly a highly enjoyable action thriller, with the writing to match.

A brand new therapist takes on a patient with schizophrenia that she doesn’t do very well by, though her intent is do so. When the patient goes missing she goes in search for her, unable to let it go, and this leads her own spiral, extrapolated into a horrific experience.

I haven’t really read any eldritch horror before and I can’t say that particular aspect did much for me. I really liked that it treated mental illness quite well in that context, which I think is hard to do. And I liked the characters and the arc quite a bit. The art style wasn’t my favourite and the binding in this paperback is wildly tight, so it’s actually a difficult book to rate. I ended up with a 3.5 rounded up, because I’m mostly positive on it!

It’s so great that stories like this are coming out and exist within the DC continuity. It’s not a typical super hero plot, more of a pretty quiet story, which wasn’t what I expected. I thought maybe it would be a new hero origin story and going to school and crime fighting to boot. I didn’t have any problems with the change in expectations though. It’s a nice change of pace to have the conflicts not be what you expected, and I thought how each are resolved were also great. It’s charming, genuinely funny and earnest, and a quick read. Great stuff. It’s about time expressly queer, trans narratives were incorporated into DC and Marvel in just this type of way.

A really quick read that encompasses about six years of Lewis’s life, predominately pretransition, to illustrate the his personal journey with even realizing he is trans, and what coming out was like for him, and finally how he managed to transition. Even in 2008 it seems like a wildly difficult process, I hope now that things are more in the mainstream people have more support.

The tone is very comedic and meta, and Lewis is open about his struggles and what form they took. The style isn’t personally to my taste but I think that doesn’t matter as much with memoirs. Took me a minute to get used to the accents. Didn’t realize this was a UK book at the start hah!

If you’re a fan of Walden, this is an easy recommend. A few stories of varying quality, but all intrinsically her, and the most interesting to me: a series of short assignment about her process and who she is, her development, and things like that. I think other works stand above this one in terms of her style, but this captures Walden as an actual person, which some of the others may do by extrapolation, but not expressly.

This made quite a few top of the year lists, and I can see why. The character arcs are good, the illustrations are excellent, and it has an important message told through a non-western-centric point-of-view. It is an underdog story about othering and propaganda and history, imperialism. It accomplishes quite a bit in a short time.

It also could have used a bit more time to really make every aspect of it sing, I think. Time and place, or worldbuilding beyond the necessity of the central themes being communicated, aren’t a concern. And so as a result, a lot of things that feel like it should take a while to feel really earned, end up feeling like they’re accomplished immediately. Especially the battle prowess of the protagonist. Then, when things do come to a head, it was difficult to ascertain how large a victory it actually was, because the unit they trained in and under was never slotted into worldbuilding. Basically, the predominate concern was character arcs and themes, and that’s fine. I was just expecting maybe a bit more meat on the bone for a fantasy story as long as this. But it also seems like possibly more is coming, though that’s not clear. There’s room for a sequel but I didn’t see a to be continued or anything either.