Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about a character with chronic pain.
The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal.

This is a murder mystery set aboard the space equivalent of a luxury cruise liner. Scientist Tesla Crane is the sole survivor of a terrible accident that left her with chronic pain and PTSD, she has a pain-suppressing implant (this is a real thing, the author mentions in the afterword), and an irresistible service dog named Gimlet. Tesla's varying levels of pain and her techniques for managing PTSD are a natural part of the story.

Although it's set in the future, the book has a very 2020 feel. Travelers from earth are accustomed to using "courtesy masks." It's the norm for people to include their pronouns when introducing themselves, the generic title is Mx., and everyone is referred to in the narration as "they" until they specify otherwise.

Tesla is on her honeymoon with Shal, a retired detective. Then there's a murder, and Shal is framed. Everyone has a secret, there are multiple crimes involved, but the how and why of the murders turn out to be pretty straightforward. Now, if they could just get that hostile security chief to listen... 

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book mentioned in another book.
Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is set in a bookstore, and includes several lists of favorite books at the end. This book isn't on the list of Native American poets, but on a separate list simply called "Sublime books." I'm inclined to agree.

Diaz writes about being Indigenous in a country where Native people are being killed in horrifying numbers. She writes about her brothers' addictions, described as an anthropomorphized bullet in "Catching Copper."

My brothers feed their bullet
the way bulls fed Zeus -
burning, on a pyre, their own
thigh bones wrapped in fat.
My brothers take a knee, bow
against the asphalt, prostrate
on the concrete for their bullet.

She tackles real-world spirituality, not the romanticized Hollywood version. If you believe "Water is the first medicine," she says, you need to be on the ground protecting the water supply.

There are grief counselors of site for those who realize
they have entered The American Water Museum not as
patrons but rather as parts of the new exhibit.

Best of all were the love poems. Sexy, passionate, powerful, and very lesbian. From "These Hands, If Not Gods:"

Aren't they, too, the carpenters
of your small church? Have they not burned
on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: Second of two books with the same title.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann.

David Grann's best-known book, Killers of the Flower Moon, was history that read like a thriller. This is history that reads like an adventure story. Grann reconstructs what happened from the journals, letters, and eventual testimony of the survivors. The accounts sometimes contradict each other, of course, and Grann gives what he believes to be the most plausible version of events. 

In 1740, five warships, including the Wager, departed England to capture a Spanish galleon bringing treasure back from South America. The mission was ill-fated from the start. While press gangs kidnapped any man they saw with tar on his hands, figuring he had sailing experience, they still didn't have enough crew. Elderly and disabled sailors were dragged out of nursing homes to fill up the numbers, and those men were the first to fall to scurvy and other illnesses along the way.

Two ships had to turn back on stormy seas, one sank, and the Wager wrecked on a small island with little to eat besides wild celery. (Apparently even fish were scarce.) As months passed and hunger took its toll, infighting grew among the sailors - to the point where the increasingly erratic captain, David Cheap, shot an unarmed man.

Eventually, a plan came together to build small boats with the remnants of the ship. But while almost all the men wanted to find a way back to England, Captain Cheap remained fixated on somehow completing their mission. When the survivors met up back in England, the court martial was a bit of an anticlimax.

Grann gives a clear look at men in desperate circumstances, struggling against each other, an unforgiving sea, and their own psyches. The story raises questions about law and chaos: Navy law was the one thing providing order for the marooned men - but what happens when the person in charge of that order no longer has their trust?

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: First of two books with the same title.
Wager, by Adele Elise Williams.

My first preference for poetry is that it be understandable. Especially at the beginning of the book, I could tell she was talking about some form of trauma, but it wasn't clear to me what. I'm still not sure what the "wager" in the title refers to. The collection came together more for me with this one:

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO WRITE PRETTY POEMS

about being an addict. I keep trying but the moon
won't show, and holy colors refuse their help. It is all
puke and blah, sad mom and sad me and blah, blah and
drunk sex, blah and the details are stark and dark and 
failures...


Some of the poems use visual effects, like "Violence," in which the word "red" repeats over and over to form the shape of a gun.

While a lot of the images are grim, some defiance and triumph shows through. My favorite poem in this volume was "Matriarchy":

I come from a lineage of beast women.
Women who cannot sleep at night but obliterate the day.
Nana stole a stick shift in 1948.
Mother walked a mile to and from school alone at age six. 
Epigenetics - it's not just genes that make us.
The sea spray of the Gulf Coast can whittle a railroad tie into stale ribbon.
We have an affinity for the underdogs, the crazy dogs, the dogs
​with one leg that bite and won't let go.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book rated below 3 stars on Goodreads.
Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie.

Some of these Popsugar categories are head-scratchers. In addition to this category, there's one for "a book you've always avoided reading." I get that part of the challenge is to expand your horizons, but it seems weird to choose books that I'm not expecting to like.

I did like this one, but in a campy, so-bad-it's-good way. Agatha Christie is the queen of mysteries because she knows where she's going, and all the clues come together to give us a satisfying and  believable (even if wildly improbable) conclusion. With spy novels, however, she just gives us a shadowy enemy, and the story wobbles around without ever really going anywhere. (I had the same problem with The Big Four, but at least that one had Poirot.)

I'm going to include spoilers, but not the identity of the villain, because it really doesn't matter.

Passenger to Frankfurt starts with a mysterious woman approaching a British diplomat in an airport. She tells him that her life is in danger. Noting that they have similar faces, she asks that he hand over his wallet, passport, and bulky cloak, so she can impersonate him. How will he get home? No problem, she'll put something in his drink, and he can tell the authorities he was drugged and robbed. He says sure, why not.

After his return to England, they have a couple of furtive meetings (pass each other in the crowd, pretending not to know each other while she slips him a note, etc). But then they meet at a party, with her using her real name, so the secret meetings simply added risk for no discernable reason.

There's a subplot where it's claimed that Hitler survived the bunker, by a scheme too harebrained for me to describe, and escaped to South America and fathered a son to be the new Aryan champion. Mercifully, this gets debunked.

Then the book veers to a whole other plot, in which a scientist has created something called Benvo, which causes people to want to make others happy. The inventor isn't sure anyone should have it, but the good guys want it, and so do the bad guys, helpfully identified in a Venn diagram that...

​...you know, it really doesn't matter. Just suspend your disbelief and go with it.

Popsugar Reading challenge category: A book by a neurodivergent author.
Take a Hint, Dani Brown, by Talia Hibbert.

This is the second book in Hibbert's Brown Sisters trilogy, which started with Get a Life, Chloe Brown. Each can be read as a standalone, as each sister plays only a minor role in her siblings' stories.

This one makes good use of the friends-to-lovers and  fake-dating tropes. Zafir is a security guard at the university where Dani teaches. He rescues her when she's stuck in an elevator, and the romantic-looking video of him carrying her goes viral. It occurs to him that pretending to date would generate good publicity for the children's charity that he runs. How can she say no?

As with Chloe's story, Hibbert addresses some serious issues, even while her characters are having fun. Zafir suffered a tragic loss that led to severe anxiety, which ended his promising career as a rugby player.

I wondered about the religious difference, which kinda got glossed over: he's Muslim, she worships a traditional African orisha. While Zafir doesn't seem all that devout, idols are very much frowned upon in Islam, and she has a large idol of the love Goddess Oshun.

What I enjoyed most was the role reversal: Dani is looking for a fling, and Zafir is looking for a relationship like the ones in the romance novels he reads. Zaf is so much not the stereotypical macho hero: his charity uses rugby coaching to teaches boys about healthy, non-toxic masculinity. And that, of course, is bound to win Dani's heart.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book that reminds you of your childhood.
Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey.

I grew up reading about the dragonriders, harpers, and other inhabitants of Pern. Although this is a prequel, set centuries before the Dragonriders of Pern and Harpercraft Hall trilogies, the culture seems less sexist: the dragonladies ride alongside the men, armed with flamethrowers to destroy the deadly "thread" that rains down on the planet.  There's a prologue that explains some of how Pern's culture and the dragon riders came to be, and the story itself explains why certain certain important facts were unknown to the later dragonriders.

The story is about a pandemic, so you could say I picked the wrong time to read it, but that's not McCaffrey's fault - the book was written in 1983. The Pernese people are mostly a lot more rational than our world's: they want vaccine, and mostly listen to the healers around quarantines and other protective measures.

McCaffrey's world building is always amazing, and there's a touch of romance that I enjoyed. Unfortunately, the story itself has a lot of repetition, with characters telling each other things the reader already knows. The ending has a stunning, moving twist - but it takes a long time to get there.

Last week I posted my nonfiction reads for 2024. Here’s the fiction, with links to reviews on my website.

Classics:
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Upton Sinclair, World’s End, Between Two Worlds, Dragon’s Teeth, and Presidential Mission
Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes and A Story of the Days to Come
P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

I’ve gotten thoroughly hooked on Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series, about an art dealer who becomes a WW2 secret agent by getting close to high-ranking Nazis. They’re long, but definite page-turners. And there’s a lot of insight about Americans and Europeans who sided with the fascists in that era — some of it scarily familiar.

Rebecca and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day are both great at conveying a mood (one sinister, the other light). I had to grit my teeth at the romanticization of domestic violence in both of them (but only when a woman “deserved” it, of course), both by women authors.

The two H.G. Wells books are set in the same future England, and were prescient about some things (like television), but were more about the situation than the characters.

Romance:
Byron Lane, Big Gay Wedding
Casey McQuiston, The Pairing
Courtney Milan, The Governess Affair, The Duchess War, A Kiss for Midwinter, and The Heiress Effect
Axie Oh, XOXO and ASAP
Nikki Payne, Pride and Protest

Big Gay Wedding was heavier than the description let on; there was a lot of dealing with homophobia, terminal illness, and pet death.

Straight romances included historicals with strong heroines (Courtney Milan’s Brothers Sinister series), young adult stories set in the world of Korean pop music (Axie Oh’s books), and a modern reimagining of Pride and Prejudice with characters of color (Pride and Protest).

The Pairing is a second-chance romance by the author of Red White & Royal Blue, and is arguably hornier and boozier than the latter. Both main characters are bisexual, and they’re on a vividly described food-and-wine tour through Europe.

Mystery & Thriller:
Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in Her Grave
Julie Mae Cohen, Bad Men
Janet Evanovich, Dirty Thirty
David Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye and The Girl Who Lived Twice
Karin Smirnoff, The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons
Spencer Quinn, The Dog Who Knew Too Much

I like mysteries with a side of comedy, which I found in The Sibyl in Her Grave, The Dog Who Knew Too Much (narrated by the dog), and Dirty Thirty. The latter book threatens to resolve the 30-book love triangle for Stephanie Plum, but I’ll believe it when she actually makes it down the aisle with Joe and/or Ranger. Bad Men is a dark comedy about a female serial killer.

The Lagercrantz and Smirnoff books are continuations of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series by the late Stieg Larsson. I enjoyed seeing the characters in action again, but feel like the new authors don’t quite grasp the feminist core of Larsson’s story, which was always about Lisbeth up against men who hate women.

Historical Fiction:
Ros Barber, The Marlowe Papers
John R. Gordon, Drapetomania
Jeff Greenfield, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics
Morgan Llywelyn, Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Drapetomania is an amazing love story between two men in the era of slavery. When one is sold, his beloved takes drastic risks to find him.

The Marlowe Papers is a novel in verse, about my favorite literary conspiracy theory: that Christopher Marlowe faked his own death and wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. You don’t have to believe it to enjoy the story (but Marlowe did have a very plausible motive for faking his death). There’s a memorable scene of him disguised as a woman.

The Book Thief is set in Holocaust-era Germany and narrated by Death, and still has some uplifting moments.

Then Everything Changed contains plausible scenarios: JFK dies sooner, or RFK survives the assassination attempt, or Ford defeats Carter. But the book has that over-researched feel: too much detail and not enough story. Similarly, Grania is based on a real pirate in the era of Elizabeth I (her nemesis), but gets bogged down in politics.

Miscellaneous Fiction:
Laura Esquivel, Swift as Desire
Benjamin Gorman and Zack Dye, eds., Shout: An Anthology of Resistance Poetry and Short Fiction
Erica Jong, Sappho’s Leap
Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz, eds., The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading
Tommy Orange, There There
Kevin Morgan Watson et al, eds., What Dwells Between the Lines

Not sure how to categorize some of these. Sappho’s Leap starts out as a historical novel about the legendary poet, but winds up as a sort of reimagined Odyssey with some love poetry thrown in. Swift as Desire is the fictionalized story of the author’s parents, with a touch of magical realism.

There There is told from the points of view of a variety of people traveling to Oakland for a powwow. We’re warned early that a gun will be used.

The New Fuck You is a 1990’s anthology of lesbian poetry & fiction. Shout is an anthology from the (first, sadly) TFG era.

SF, Fantasy & Horror:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
Remy Apepp, The Blessed
C.J. Cherryh, Tripoint
Percival Everett, The Trees
Karen Joy Fowler et al, eds., The James Tiptree Award Anthology Volume 3: Subversive Stories About Sex and Gender
Cait Gordon, Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space!
Drew Hayes, The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant
Carol Hightshoe, The Dragon’s Hoard 2
Robyn Huss, ed., Hidden Villains: Betrayed
Mary Robinette Kowal, Shades of Milk and Honey
Ronald Linson, Agent of Change
Jacques Lob and Jean Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer 1: The Escape
​David Mitchell, Slade House
Deborah J. Natelson, The Land of the Purple Ring
Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
John Scalzi, Starter Villain
Rebecca Schmid, Askefise: Tales of Redemere
Wen Spencer, A Brother’s Price
H. Claire Taylor, Lucky Stars
Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance
Andy Weir, The Martian

If you like your SF and fantasy light and fun, there’s Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space!, set in a future where accommodating disability is the norm, with an optimistic Trek-like vibe. Fred, the Vampire Accountant reminds me of Robert Asprin’s Myth books, with an ever-expanding found family. Shades of Milk & Honey is Regency romance with a touch of magic. The Fifth Elephant is from the City Watch books (my favorite part of Discworld). Starter Villain has a fun plot, talking cats, and arguably the universe’s greatest book cover. And Lucky Stars is sorta like “The Cosmic Turkey, but naughty.”

If you prefer dark and dystopian, Snowpiercer is an allegorical graphic novel about income inequality. And Chain-Gang All-Stars is set in a near future where the most popular sport is watching prisoners in gladiator duels to the death. The reality-show aspect makes it almost believable, and the dark satire is pitch perfect.

I’m a wimp about horror, but did read a few for the challenge this year. The Blessed is an unreliable-narrator monster story that’s probably technically dark fantasy rather than horror. Slade House is a haunted house story by the author of Cloud Atlas. And The Trees (by the author of James) is a story of supernatural revenge on lynchers and other nasty racists. It even has a cameo appearance by a cowering TFG.

For fans of straightforward SF, there’s Tripoint (not Cherryh’s most memorable book IMO), Agent of Change (a time travel novella), and The Martian (which manages to be entertaining, despite the narrator being alone and having to explain a lot of science). On the fantasy side, Askefise is a dragon-shifter story with a whole lot of political intrigues. A Brother’s Price is set in a matriarchy with a 95% female population, but the matriarchy isn’t the story — it’s the backdrop for an entertaining, swashbuckling adventure combined with (polygamous) romance.
​
And if your preference is “books too weird for me to adequately describe in a single post,” try Radiance or The Land of the Purple Ring.
​
Hidden Villains: Betrayed and The Dragon’s Hoard 2 are themed fantasy anthologies….and each contains a story of mine. 

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book that takes place on or near a body of water.
Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome.

This is a comedic tale of the author's late 19th century vacation on the river with two friends (and the dog, Montmorency). The voice could best be described as "British Mark Twain."

Jerome relentlessly mocks the pitfalls of such journeys: overpacking (but somehow never having what they need), dog misbehavior, British weather, and the three men's utter incompetence at sailing. In the end, they shamefacedly take a train home.

There's a weirdly out of place scene where they encounter a dead body floating on the river. Jerome doesn't attempt comedy here, just matter-of-factly explains that they asked around, and learned that it was a woman who had taken her own life after being seduced and abandoned. I realize Jerome was writing about an actual trip they took, but this chapter was quite jarring in an otherwise lighthearted story.

I read 97 books last year, tying my previous record. (Didn’t plan it that way, just dove into a book on January 1st and kept going). I’m trying to get my physical TBR stack down in anticipation of moving (which just means my kindle TBR keeps growing, but at least it’s less likely to fall & crush me).

50 of the books I read were for the Popsugar Reading Challenge, a sort of literary scavenger hunt where the object is to read a book in each of 50 categories (an author’s 24th book, a horror book by a BIPOC author, a book where the title is a complete sentence, etc., etc.) I wrote short reviews of those 50, and linked the reviews below.

Politics & Current Events:
Laura Bates, Fix the System Not the Women and Men Who Hate Women: The Extremism No One is Talking About
Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Michael Eric Dyson & Marc Favreau, Unequal: A Story of America
Barbara Ehrenreich, Had I Known: Collected Essays
Mike Hixenbaugh, They Came for the Schools
Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism
Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race
Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point
Dashka Slater, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives it Changed
Bon Tindle, Like the Air We Breathe

The Bates books are very informative but depressing examinations of sexism and misogyny. Bon Tindle’s essays are also about sexism; she has a gift for spelling out things that should be obvious but somehow weren’t until she put a name on them.

The Brown and Olou books are about racism and aimed at people who want to be allies. Unequal is a young adult history book on various aspects of racism (redlining, income inequality, the “war on drugs,” etc), and the people who stood against it. Accountable is also a young adult book, giving a very nuanced look at the fallout from the discovery of a high school student’s social media account showing racist images of his classmates.

The Ehrenreich collection includes the article that was later expanded into her classic book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. The Serwer essays cover a lot of topics, including the way cruelty helps bullies bond with each other.

The Came for the Schools examines the fate of one school district after school board takeover by Moms for “Liberty.” And Maddow’s book on fascism is all too timely.

Memoir:
Alvin Greenberg, The Dog of Memory
George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto
Renia Kukielka, Escape from the Pit: A Woman’s Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1939-1943
Chester Nez, Code Talker
Tina Turner with Kurt Loder: I, Tina: My Life Story

I tend to prefer memoirs that are about a larger issue, like World War II (Nez, Kukielka), queer life (Johnson), and domestic violence (no matter how bad you thought Ike Turner was — he was worse). The story of the Code Talkers is particularly fascinating, and the book contains an explanation of the code.

Poetry:
Kwame Alexander, ed., This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka, and Daniel Sluman, eds., Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back
Deborah Alma, ed., #MeToo: Rallying Against Sexual Assault and Harassment
Marlon L. Fick & Francisca Esteve, Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets
Charles Ades Fishman and Smita Sahay, eds., Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry of the Oppression and Empowerment of Women
Ellen Goldberg, ed., Of Course I’m a Feminist
Sue Goyotte, ed., Resistance: Righteous Rage in the age of #MeToo
Linda Hogan, Savings
Carla J. Lawson, Where Is My Parade?
Parker Lee, Espresso Shots & Forget-me-nots
Kristina Mahr, It’s Only Words
Honor Moore, ed., Poems From the Women’s Movement
Christopher Nelson, ed., Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry
Joan R. Sherman, ed., African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927
Clint Smith, Above Ground
W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems

I have two requirements for poetry: I like it to be (1) understandable, and (2) actually about something. There were some excellent themed anthologies about feminism (#MeToo, Poems From the Women’s Movement, and Resistance), queerness (Essential Queer Voices), disability (Stairs and Whispers), and Black joy (This Is the Honey). Of Course I’m a Feminist  was very brief, only about 15 poems.

Clint Smith’s first collection, Counting Descent, leaned toward political poems. His latest, Above Ground, is largely about parenting, both funny and poignant.

Xeixa was an unexpected find: I didn’t know much about the Catalan language or culture, but the poems were well chosen and accessible.

I was familiar with Yeats’s timeless love poems; he also wrote a lot about Irish mythology, and some about events in his life that required extensive footnoting to make any sense to me.

Miscellaneous Nonfiction:

Gai Ingham Berlage, Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History
Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, eds. The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Langston Hughes, An African Treasury
John Krakauer, Into the Wild
​Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala

Divine Horsemen was informative but overly academic for my interests. Women in Baseball had a lot that was new to me, going back to much earlier than the “League of Their own” era.

The State of Play is a collection of essays on everything video game related, from graphics to race and gender issues, including pieces by some of the women targeted by g*mer/gate.

An African Treasury is a collection by authors from Africa at a time when countries were achieving independence from colonialism. It includes articles, essays, fiction, poetry, proverbs and even lonely-hearts advertisements.
​
Killers of the Flower Moon is history that reads like a mystery/thriller. After oil was discovered on Osage land, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were briefly the wealthiest per-capita population on earth. Every opportunist around was looking for ways to swindle that money away from them, including the cold-blooded murders covered in the book. I’m not surprised that book-burners have been targeting this one.