As my formidable undergrad professor, Dr. Nina Auerbach ob"m, used to say: Every gothic novel can be condensed into a three word summary. Girl meets House.
It's true.

I was absolutely here for this book as soon as someone mentioned Rebecca because I have a complicated and messy relationship with the gothic novel - itself a complicated and messy genre. It's my favorite form of...not precisely horror but something related to it. And what Khan does here with her haunted house that has also kind of become a haunted apartment building with a somewhat absurd supporting cast creates a novel that successfully lives as a genre intersection and those are not easy.
Khan also really gets that the gothic is the genre of self-and-other and that the axis along which "other" moves is - to some degree - always about who is not merely other but Outside. (In that respect it's a genre that can only exist in an era of Empire even when imperialism is not explicitly the topic the way it is here and in Jane Eyre.)
This book is also super interesting because, as with any book in the shadow of Edward Rochester and Max De Winter,

the question of how you portray the master of the house is going to be crucial. Is he a good man? How does a good man come to own a gothic house? Is his goodness real or in his own estimation? Is it ever possible for the owner of a gothic house to be a good man? I think this book comes the closest to successfully answering that question yes (assuming you say either that setting him on fire in order to reform him is beyond the pale OR that Rochester is not fundamentally a better person at the end of the book, he just has fewer resources with which to be a dick). In doing so, Khan gets gorgeously into the role that privileged women play in oppression across race and class lines and the degree to which the men who "transgress" societal norms are hauled back into line by the hurt and pain caused to those they love because they are not themselves touchable. It's complicated and she does a good job making her characters sympathetic without asking us not to judge them.

If this doesn't sound like a 3.5 star review, you are correct and my main critique is that I finished the book and still have no idea why the djinn needed to be a part of the story.

I love these and I desperately need to a do an audio reread the next time I feel like the world is very on fire and new books are unimaginable. (So like...Thursday?)
McGuire continues to do a fantastic job with the pendulum nature of these stories that swing back and forth between the children at the school and their backstories and she's just really good at reminding you what happened despite encountering them once a year or so. 
It was around...three books ago that I started REALLY getting the sense that there's an arc and, while she *could* keep writing, she has a specific place she wants to get them to reach and that's making it even more interesting.
Escape. Recovery. Consolation. McGuire gets it.

I love Eliot and have loved her since my first encounter with Daniel Deronda because it is a perfect and wonderful book and "only liking the Gwendolen parts" is on my list of "things that feel like they should be antisemitic even though they aren't really" alongside unboiled bagels.
This is not about that. I'm not sure how this book lands if you aren't deeply invested in Eliot already and what made her tick. But the story of her relationship with GH Lewes was always presented as either salacious or iconoclastic, but Carlisle's investigation here goes much beyond that. She sets out to treat Eliot like a character in an Eliot novel: what is the fullness of this person, her drives and dreams and flaws and situational complexity. Who does she long to be and how is she shaped by the people around her. The way Carlisle interweaves the books with the biography is either brilliant or contrived; I'm leaning towards the former, but not actually sure. But the final chapter where she gets to life post-Lewes is probably my favorite part. 
The book can't entirely stand up under what it's being asked to bear; to do that, it would need to be a novelization of Eliot's life, not an exploration through letters and philosophy and Carlisle seems to know that as well. It's not - quite - trying to be and the fact that Carlisle can't resist making it also a story about marriage and becoming in the way that Eliot's books are cannot be said to be the fault of the author when it is manifestly the influence of Eliot. I'm so glad I read it.

You know the feeling when you want to both inhale and savor a book at the exact same time?
Yeah, this was one of those books. Thank you to the person on Bluesky who recommended this by saying it was a memoir through ocean life because I could not have put it on my TBR faster. I love what Imbler does here, I love how the deep sea life runs through and illuminates every aspect of their own experiences and life...and the reverse is equally true. 
Also the purple octopus.

I love Roxane Gay's writing and her ability to be extremely honest while still situating her experiences within the world and tying together the link between the two remains wonderful. She's astute about everything and her approach towards media in particular - that art should not be censored, but absolutely can deserve censure and - is formative to the way that I think.
I'm bad at reading slowly (she says, in an understatement) and I can see the way that Gay returns to specific topics over an over again, sometimes in a way that deepens her discussion of a theme, but sometimes because the nature of opinion writing means that you say the same thing every year. I suspect Gay also wishes she had fewer articles in a row about the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police. In a collection like this, that's part of the point. While the specific presentation of sadness and frustration and relentlessness is the choice of the author's, the world that makes it an important artistic choice is not. Sometimes good art also makes us feel bad and it's on us to do something with it.

This book is a LOT. I mean, I was in as soon as I got to “cloud atlas meets earthseed” but still. 
And I can’t stop thinking about religion in this book - who it serves, who serves it, how they happen, what makes them feel plausible, and the failure of dogmatism in every age. It is both integral to the plot of the book and also somehow completely irrelevant to the story. But it’s woven into the story of do/not change in a way that leaves it very firmly located on one side in a story that is about twos. 
What I appreciate about this book is that it needed to be this massive novel to say the things about sameness and difference and the pain of desire in other ways it was trying to say. Even if that does make it hard to talk about. 
The other thing I find fascinating, again in the future bits, is the way that Byrne imagines future religion evolving out of current situations (the echoes of the Christ story are very palpable in a way I find fascinating) both in terms of what makes a myth and in terms of what kind of religion would the world need. There are ways in which the religion is shaped by the needs of the story and its tensions, but I also think that the religious aspects throughout are handled far less reductively than the tensions between hold and change would have suggested. There’s something very strange about imagining how ordinary life becomes the template for ritual and god, but I suspect that’s ALSO part of the point. 

Happy-making books are all alike, but books that displease me sure do create content.
There are two possibilities with this book. The first is that it's doing something I don't like and I'm just not well equipped to judge whether it's doing it well or poorly. The second is that it's doing something I like badly enough that I don't like it.
I'm absolutely willing to grant that this is a Yellow Wallpaper book - another story I intensely dislike because the atmosphere makes me feel awful.

This book plays with the mind and agency in a similar fashion and is disjointed in a way that perhaps reflects the experience of the main character.

Having said that, it really didn't work for me. I question some of the narrative choices and how Fox chose to convey Ivy's experience to the reader felt not so much like breaking the fourth wall, but more like being trapped in a squishy fourth wall of goo and I just found it unpleasant.
Also the male characters in this book had...basically no personality

at least from the reader's perspective, given the storytelling choices

and at no point acted beyond stereotypical and, like, as a follow-up to Erik Hoel's comment in the previous book that thank goodness Freud discovered trauma so that creators had an extrinsic way to explain emotion, wow did this book go hard on uninteresting motives that make for uninteresting characters. Also incoherent! Ivy's choices and behavior are so fundamentally incoherent and the only excuse that I have for it is that everyone else is rolling 1s on every action.
I also just no longer find stories that present

the choice between people manipulating the main character for their profit versus the ones manipulating her for her own good

to be a decent choice anymore. Give people in books better options.

This book is basically my catnip, as shown by how much of the bibliography drew from all three of my quals. I love a good investigation into the nature of consciousness and I particularly love debunkings about how little the field actually knows. (Turns out most of the things that people thought we know about the brain are likely artifacts of small sample sizes. This is fun.)
I genuinely struggle to evaluate things I agree with but don’t know enough to fully defend or reject. The arguments Hoel advances for both the power and limits of science are interesting and match my epistemic sense, but what do I know? (Beyond what’s in the book and the overlap between my bibliography and quals. There’s a joke somewhere about quals and qualia.)
But I keep thinking about the importance of the openness of our systems. 
Also this felt like an interesting follow-up to last year’s read of Labatut. 
You would think by now I could do a better job explaining why I like things beyond they match the way my brain brains. Given my facility in articulating why I DON’T like things, this is a frustrating mismatch. 

Another book that I had COMPLETELY forgotten what it was about when I picked it up, although I suspect it would not have mattered because this book is so much stranger than any cover copy might suggest. 
I have no idea how to talk about this book because so much of what it is doing - beyond telling a story of loss and hope - is trying to talk about what makes us the people we are. 
It’s not a zombie book, but it’s not NOT a zombie book. It’s doing similar things as a zombie book in asking what makes humans hume and what makes us us. Only much more interestingly. Similarly high body count though. 

The twist at the end was…something I saw coming but I don’t think you were supposed to be surprised. It worked just as well as impending dread. And part of what I like about the book is that it does not take sides in the question of who Max is. And the implications for everyone else are…I dunno. But they’ll live. They’ll live. And that’s the point.

My goal this year is to read all 12 volumes of the history of middle earth. Also, like, other stuff. It's ALSO fascinating to me to see both JRRT's evolution in thought and Christopher's work to mediate and manage his father's ideas and legacy.
It's jsut super interesting. I'm not sure it's super interesting to people who are not very Tolkien-y but also seeing the ways that it *feels* more like mythology in these earlier stories is so cool. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but the way that he tells stories of tragedy and lament and...i don't know what it IS about this mode that grabs me but, well, if you're the kind of kid who read mythology anthologies cover to cover, do I have a book for you.