Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros - 9/10

Very captivating and a terrific read. Definitely earned its place as the new hot fantasy series. Could a skeptic say it basically just smahes all the most popular fanasy books of the last 25 years into one? Sure they could. It works though. She lures you in with these fantasy tropes and uses those expectations against you. Usually at least. I totally saw the ending coming from a mile away.



Started Mick Foley's Have A Nice Day. 25 years late but whatever. So far its good, though Mick is understandably a little scatter brained. Mox's book was all "fuck you, this is what happened" but not everyone can be Mox.

I’m looking forward to reading Fourth Wing but will wait til the paperback is released… which might be another year based on how well the hard cover is selling. US publishers are stupid, give us paperback option from the start please.

Also how the heck did she release the 2nd book a mere 6 months after the first??

Glad you enjoyed it, Flava'd.

Steve, if you're interested, you can buy paperback out of the UK and likely other European countries (many of them release paperbacks at the same time as hardback, or only do paperback releases), but I imagine you'd want to buy from the UK for English.

The ISBN for the UK paperback for Fourth Wing is [978-0-349-43700-2] if you want to look it up. And the ISBN for the UK paperback of the sequel Iron Flame is [978-0-349-43703-3].

And Book Depository would have been the ideal website to buy from (it was based in the UK and offered free international shipping to basically every country), but Amazon shut it down last year. Amazon bought them back in 2011 so I guess it was cool they left them alone for 12 years, but still very frustrating they ended up closing them as expected in the end.

Amazon is also buying online secondhand/thrift book sites lately, so options are growing increasingly limited with buying books online.

thanks Corpse! I’m often tempted to buy international paperbacks instead of waiting the ridiculous delay for US printing, but I like to buy books in person at a bookstore and try to minimize shipping in general. So it’s a good practice in patience (and impatience).

anywho, I hit a personal “best” 33 books read last year. My ten favorites:

Top Ten Read 2023

1. Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
2. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
3. Once There Were Wolves, Charlotte McConaghy
4. Bewilderment, Richard Powers
5. The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jiminez
6. The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki
7. The Last Chairlift, John Irving
8. Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
9. The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Kelly Barnhill
10. Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson


all 33 in chronological order of reading:

1. Wanderers, Chuck Wendig
2. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
3. Bewilderment, Richard Powers
4. The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel
5. The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
6. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
7. Termination Shock, Neal Stephenson
8. Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
9. How High We Go In The Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
10. Miracle Creek, Angie Kim
11. Sea of Tranquility, Emily St John Mandel
12. A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers
13. Appleseed, Matt Bell
14. A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay
15. Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
16. The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jiminez
17. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
18. The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler
19. The Smell of Rain on Dust, Martín Prechtel
20. Fairy Tale, Stephen King
21. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins
22. The Last Chairlift, John Irving
23. Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson
24. The Furrows, Namwali Serpell
25. The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Kelly Barnhill
26. Once There Were Wolves, Charlotte McConaghy
27. Wool, Hugh Howey
28. The Celebrants, Steven Rowley
29. A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik
30. Tracy Flick Can’t Win, Tom Perrotta
31. This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
32. Armada, Ernest Cline
33. The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki

Well damn this took me a lot longer to read than I intended and now I'm probably gonna miss my yearly goal again lol.

1. Have A Nice Day by Mick Foley - 6.5

-This is a pretty good book, but I think I would have appreciated it much more back when it was released in 2000 vs today. Definitely feels of an era with Mick having about a 1:1 ratio of penis jokes per page. That's what pop culture was all about back then. While the behind the scenes look at his most famous wwe moments were a highlight, I was more interested in his rise through WCW, ECW and the Indies since I had never seen him in any of those (except for youtube clips and stuff.)

Was gonna jump back into Dune next, but feel like I need something shorter, thus the obvious answer became - finish the Space Odyssey series with 3001. Only 226 pages on kindle!

2. 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke - 7

-A step up from part 3, though I do think the title is rather misleading. This book feels more like the start of a new series than the end of a very old series. If Clarke had lived to see our current Age of Content (something he did not predict) then I am very certain we would have gotten a 4001. Still, what is here is pretty good. Bringing back a character thought to be dead from the original series was kinda corny at first, yet so very necessary to give the audience a proper viewpoint of this radically changed, though still very similiar world.

Next: I'm feeling a murder mystery. So either another one of the cat books, or maybe I'll forgive Agatha Christie for 1) being a racist and 2) Death on the Nile being quite boring.

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

3. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie - 7.5

-Pretty clever take on the murder mystery that doesn't rely on one guy solving everything. It really could have been anyone too, and while I thought the confession at the end was kind of corny at first, I liked it afterward as gives the reader closure while maintaining that the crime was never solved 'in real life.' Also clearly influenced Glass Onion, though now I think that movie could have used a bit more murderin.

4. Romance Costs Extra by Sarah St Claire and Danielle Aimie - 6

-Well I wanted a change of pace and certainly got one here lol. The author herself was at a bar and was letting people do shots out of her boobies if they bought her book ... so what was I to do? The book itself is pretty much just pure porn, as you might expect a book about a porn star to be. However, it mostly just focuses on her days as an escort. Lots of sex scenes, but not much insight into the porn industry like I was hoping for. Oh well, the book gave what it promised and thats enough for a passing grade.

Almost back on pace for my yearly 12 book goal ... and since I'm going on vacation in two weeks it'd probably be smart to pick another short book .. right? Not sure what that'll be yet though.

5. Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert - 5.5

-This one tested my patience and took forever to read. It did make me more fond of God Emperor and its go for broke craziness as a silver lining.

6. Coraline by Neil Gaiman - 8.7

-Neil sure picked a bad time to get cancelled since his style of gothic-fantasy storytelling seems to be back in style (or perhaps it never left?) Coraline is short n sweet, but still packs a punch even when you know whats coming. Great stuff. Not sure why I haven't already read all his books though. That's on me.


Started The President Is Missing as next book for a change of pace.

7. The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson - 8.8

-One might see Bill Clinton credited as an author and assume this was going to be a more realistic portrayal of what a terrorist attack on our nation might look like. Nope, not at all lol. This is a lost season of 24 where Jack Bauer has been elected president. But damn, it sure is thrilling and entertaining. Very easy read, a page turner as they call it.

Next up: Nuclear War: A Scenario. Then I'll go back to sci-fi/fantasy. It's been almost a year since I started Fourth Wing and Iron Flame is still just sitting there, waiting patiently.

8. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen - 8

-This is not technically a horror, but it kinda of plays like one. We all know how horrible and deadly nuclear weapons are, but what this book focuses on is how quickly we could go from normal to apocalypse thanks to these tools of mass destruction. The entire book takes place in about an hour (though there are occasional interludes to explain certain policies and history.) One hour from North Korea deciding to launch an attack on the US to the chain of paranoid decisions that leads to the destruction of the whole ass world. Its fucked up. Our one and only hope in this scenario is to be directly in the blast zone and die right away. Dying of radiation poisoning doesn't sound fun at all.



Next will be either Foundation and Empire (pt 2 of the classic series) or Saga volume 11 ... yes I'm gonna count comics towards my yearly goal. Will start Iron Flame as my final book of the year just like with Fourth Wing last year.