book blog 2025

Yeah, so the ender's game is really good. It manages to succeed at being both a great wish fulfillment book for kids, and deeply aware that all of this child soldier shit is super messed up. It is a brilliantly clever book. I think I would mostly be ambivalent about it, if not for one scene at the end, which is not gonna leave my brain for a long time. It’s a super quick read so I think that scene is enough to make it worth it on its own. That is the part I can not talk about, because I would hate to spoil it.
God, Ender’s Game is such a good book and Orson Scott Card is such a piece of shit (for context he’s super homophobic). Ender’s Game is a fundamentally empathetic book. It is about how a failure to understand others leads to massive tragedy, how can you write that and be super homophobic? In summary, Ender’s Game is very good and I want to hit Orson Scott Card with several hammers.

An absolutely gorgeous comic full of detached cruelty, most of the characters seem to not even register the suffering of others. Baby birds being fed is officially ruined for me. Also art pretty.

Foe is a really good thriller that I can’t get into without spoiling . It does an excellent job making you feel like your home is being invaded by a stranger, and all you can do is grin and bear it. It also does an excellent job implying a strange wider world that we don’t get to see.

At the start of this book our protagonist is following her brother, on a christian missionary trip in the fey realm. This is the perfect premise for me, reading The Sparrow earlier in the year put me in the mood for christian suffering at the hands of the fantastical. I’m an atheist but I really like reading books where a character's faith is a large part of their perspective. I also am a little bit obsessed with fey. This book did completely deliver on faith being one of the major lenses through which the main character views the world, but I didn’t really do anything interesting with it. Also I just didn’t belive that she wanted to fuck her brother.
I should probably add context. This book has an incest plot line, my problem is not that there was incest but that I did not know why the characters seemed so intent on committing it, they did not have chemistry. I do not think incest by itself is an interesting sin. The world building was interesting though.

Embassy Town Another sci-fi novel about linguistics. The aliens in this one have two mouths and speak by transmitting ideas with words on top of it. It’s really hard to explain but it makes sense in the book. I speed through this one. I do feel like some of my expectations for the way the aliens were a bit too high. I can’t tell if I just didn’t get some of the concepts or if they just weren’t that deep. I was also way more intrigued by a secondary aspect of the world building then the one the book is actually about . The formatting of the alien language is really clever. They put the words in a fraction to represent two things said at once with different mouths. It is always my shit when a word with a capital means something slightly different then the word not capitalized.
New words
Proem- a preamble not poem spelled in dumb sci-fi way
Best quotes ( spoilers)
“I felt that as shocking an act as he’d committed should change someone; that he should emerge either better or fully a monster. That he could kill someone and remain the pathetic figure he was previously shocked me.”
“Phases spoken by wrecks of speakers out of nostalgia for meaning.” “In soundless solipsisms unable to talk, hear, think” using solipsism literally like this is making me jump up and down with joy.
“ I liked them, admired them. They’d known about this.”

This review is long because the book is also long. This book is about wizards reviving the art of magic in England during the Napoleonic wars. Everything is very routed in the time it takes place, I feel like I learned a lot about that period in history from this book, though I'm pretty sure the parts with wizards weren't historically accurate.
The magic in this book feels magical. At least at the start of the book a lot of time is spent describing acts of magic in detail, not the process but the effects. The book spends time making a lot of these uses of magic seem whimsical and beautiful.
This book is also crazy long so I'm proud of myself for getting through it. This book also surprised me by having fairies and the fairies being really good. This book is very good at making magic seem magical, and this applies to its fairies. They were the right mix of beautiful, volatile and threatening.

Some of the best/funniest lines
“True, his features were all extremely bad;”
"But as tightrope -walking is not a trade that combines well with drinking”

My Favorite parts
-at one point mr norelle goes to a party and reads a book in a corner instead of talking to anyone and that was relatable.
-using magic in war primarily to make roads (the mundane fantastic)
-at one point real lifes historical figure lord byron shows up and dosn’t really effect the plot at all

"Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell’ is also accurate in the percentage of English men named John at the time. I present to you a list.
John Segundus, Jonathan Strange, John Copperhead, John Brassfoot, Johnson, John Uskglass,
Notably 3 of these Johns are important characters that do stuff

THE GONDOLA INCIDENT

Okay so this is a young adult book in verse about a girl failing down a doomsday conspiracy pipeline. Which is definitely a weird pitch. I really liked it. I was unsure at first because it’s not really clear how much you're supposed to agree with the protagonist. I got really into it when I realised to my relief that the answer to that question is not at all.

If you are a content warning person I would look up content warnings for this one before reading. this is a book that tells you from the start that things are gonna go wrong. They are going to go more wrong than you expect them to. It’s sci-fi that talks about god of course I enjoyed it. Another win for linguist sci-fi protagonists. I truly believe that the protagonist of this novel is one of the most beaten down by the plot characters of all time, Tumblr would love him.