playing the guessing game & failing
this is officially day #250 of reading for fun (again), and my dearest book review aggregator goodreads dot com and i are at odds (again).
as you've probably already gathered from how infrequently i post here, i'm not exactly a social media power user. the only platform i consistently engage with is youtube, where i can cycle between obscure japanese knife-making videos with satisfying ease, yearn for better taste in interior design, and watch a twentysomething australian guy recap a tv show i've never seen (and never will) for the umpteenth time.
in trying to get back into reading for fun over the past 9 months, i've taken to scrolling through lists of various award-winning, 5-star book recommendations on most evenings in lieu of actually reading any of the books i've already started. it's fun, mindless, and feels marginally less pointless than doomscrolling most other forms of content. i see the slight uptick in the number of books on my goodreads tbr and feel a small, misplaced sense of accomplishment in having identified a nonzero amount of literature i would likely enjoy reading at some unspecified future point in time. after basking in the satisfaction of my hypothetical good taste and prudent judgment, i click away from my tbr, all the while studiously avoiding eye contact with the 7 books languishing on my "currently reading" shelf.
it must needs be remarked that most of the books i've enjoyed this year did not come from my tbr, but from inexplicable spur-of-the moment urges. i particularly liked the river has roots (2025) by amal el-mohtar, which i finished while traveling across france in june. this was surprising given my tepid response to her longform fiction debut this is how you lose the time war (2019), with review as follows:
"it was my fault for hyping up this book so much (in my own mind) prior to actually picking it up. the prose was undeniably beautiful, but expectations truly are premeditated resentments."
unsurprisingly, i tend to enjoy books more when i don't carry a boatload of expectations into every reading experience, but emptying my mind of all preconceived notions re: goodness-of-fit is much easier said than done. furthermore, choosing to read a book i haven't already vetted (i.e. already sits comfortably on my tbr) introduces an element of risk that i'm not always willing to entertain, given how much brainpower it takes to actually finish reading a novel (as opposed to mindlessly binge-watching youtube videos) vs how little brainpower i usually have left to spare after a long day of work or class. thus, i often end up selecting something from my tbr—something the past version of myself had reasonable belief i'd tolerate, at the very least.
my evaluation of whether or not my future self would find a book enjoyable is primarily informed by the blurb and reviews, the latter of which are sourced from periodicals, real-life friends, and online strangers. periodicals are great for gathering the opinions of career critics, and my friends are generally pretty good at discerning whether a book they've enjoyed will satisfy my fickle tastes. the real problem lies in online reviews, which will declare in the same breath that pride and prejudice (1813) is "just a bunch of people going to each other's houses" while endlessly singing the praises of [insert title of booktok-famous contemporary sff novel here]. the first review is technically correct, but it misses the forest for the trees, and the sheer number of similar reviews under other titles makes it difficult for me to discern whether or not i'll personally enjoy a book. whether or not the book is objectively "good" is not my concern, as i will be the first to admit that i do not have objectively "good" taste (lol).
this is not about literary gatekeeping, highbrow vs lowbrow, or simply letting people enjoy what they enjoy; i'm glad that reading for leisure has become a popular mainstream hobby, and i think it's wonderful that barriers to access in traditional publishing have been lowered to bring a greater variety of voices to the forefront. the mark of a good reviewer/critic is not whether i think their opinions are 100% correct—it's whether their opinions across a range of works are internally consistent, thus becoming a reliable measure for others to evaluate those same works by. point being, i'm having a rough time finding consistent reviewers to calibrate my predictions with, and as a result, i've been reading a lot of books that i feel mostly lukewarm-to-cold about.
now for the mid-year reading wrap up portion! in chronological order, these are the books i've read thus far (in the year of our lord 2025), my ratings, and bits of my written reviews:
the sword of kaigen (2019) by m.l. wang
✦✦✦✧✧
"it was very much giving 'her eyes were brown, like milk chocolate that was the color of shit (that was also brown)'"tress of the emerald sea (2023) by brandon sanderson
✦✦✧✧✧
"brandon sanderson proves once again that he is incapable of writing teen girl protagonists who do not immediately trigger my fight or flight response"one dark window (2022) by rachel gillig
✦✧✧✧✧
"orithe willow having a hot topic kurapika hand chain was not on my bingo card // elspeth is a concussion magnet...girl just wear a bike helmet"the rage of dragons (2017) by evan winter
✦✦✦✧✧
"zuri remaining a pretty static character throughout aligned with my shounen-adjacent expectations for this book, but the conclusion of her arc was disappointing nonetheless"invisible cities (1972) by italo calvino
[unrated]
[unreviewed]the river has roots (2025) by amal el-mohtar
✦✦✦✧✧
"it meandered pleasantly before banking into a sudden murder that i was not at all prepared for"asleep (1989) by banana yoshimoto
✦✦✧✧✧
"what i really appreciate about yoshimoto's works is that she isn't afraid to portray messy, unlikable women in a realistic light—'weary, tomorrowless, smoldering', as she says"the fifth season (2015) by n.k. jemisin
✦✦✦✧✧
"i don't appreciate feeling as if my attention and/or curiosity is being held at knifepoint in order to sell more copies"the year of magical thinking (2005) by joan didion
✦✦✦✧✧
"it was whelming—neither under nor over, just exactly what i thought it'd be"six crimson cranes (2021) by elizabeth lim
✦✦✧✧✧
"six crimson cranes ended up being a very character-driven novel—which proved to be a problem, seeing as i didn't particularly care for any of the characters"blood over bright haven (2023) by m.l. wang
✦✧✧✧✧
"a long-winded cautionary tale about the dangers of bad faith racial and/or class allyship that feels overbearingly anti-revolutionary in its sentiments and resolutions"the ministry of time (2024) by kaliane bradley
✦✧✧✧✧
"coupled with the passage about the shapeliness of margaret's generous bosom and the (separate!) description of the protagonist's nipples in the midst of love-making, i think i may qualify for financial compensation on the grounds of intentional infliction of emotional distress"
and that's all for now! i'm 1 book behind on my reading goals for the year, but hopefully i'll learn to stop being such a hater and find books that better match my interests + preferences in the upcoming months. if any part of what i said resonated with you (or if our fiction preferences align), please leave a note in my guestbook or reach out on goodreads!
stay critical,
t