1. MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards (started 12/7; finished 1/18): B

This is a book clearly written by authors who bore Marvel Studios no ill will, and I wouldn't necessarily want them to, except that it might otherwise have included a lot more juicy content than what actually made it to print. Mind you, it has plenty of content representing criticism of Marvel and some specific executives among certain sectors, but it still plays out in a pretty warmed-over way. In short, although this book got much more interesting to me the more recent its coverage got (specific chapters dedicated to Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: No Way Home are especially good reads), this book just overall wasn't that exciting to me.

Mind you, that's more of a "me problem," because, probably unlike most readers of this book, I approached it as someone with a love of cinema and the film industry overall, rather than someone with any direct love of Marvel movies, which I have long felt have, with a few notable exceptions, become rote, carbon plot-copies of countless superhero movies that came before them. I'm just generally bored of them—but, I can also acknowledge the unprecedented achievement of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," connecting a couple dozen separate movies over the course of fifteen years. The book barely touches on how this very same approach is now becoming a liability, and even the most ardent fans of yesterday aren't as interested anymore (thank god).

Still, the book is extremely well-researched and a generally fun read, if a bit long, with 432 pages before nearly 50 pages of endnotes. Speaking of which, if you do read this, don't miss the clever "mid-credits sequence" of a couple of pages they insert into the middle of those notes.

2. America the Beautiful? One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled by Blythe Roberson (started 1/18; finished 2/5): B

A curious experience with this book: I found it flawed, and I really enjoyed reading it. Blythe Roberson regularly makes me laugh out loud, while I also found her tendency to wear her white-liberal guilt on her sleeve to be a little insufferable. She writes a lot about the environmental impact of driving a car literally all over the country to visit land meant to be protected (specifically, national parks), as though to shield herself from readers criticizing her for that very thing. I can't say she's super successful there. This book sure taught me about a bunch of national parks I'd love to visit, though. Maybe I can get a book deal out of my own multi-month road trip! This book is overall fine, but I feel confident that my own book about the same thing would have been better.

3. Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work by Jesse David Fox (started 2/6; finished 2/20): B

This is a sort of curious book, esoteric in a way: I really devoured it, just because I love standup comedy, and comedy in general, and most "inside baseball" type conversations about the industry of comedy. Fox is the host of a podcast I have listened to intermittently, called Good One, in which he interviews comedians abou the construction of specific jokes—and then he was a guest on the podcast I have listened to the longest, WTF with Marc Maron, to promote this very book, that being how I learned about it. But, here are two pertinent questions: 1) did I really learn anything useful from this book that I didn't already know? and 2) would I recommend this book to anyone, unless I knew them to be as into comedy as I am? I must admit that ultimately the answers are no, and no. I sure enjoyed it though! Even though I do have one major complaint, which is actually about the book cover design, with the phrase "Comedy Book" printed several times in different fonts, all of which give the misleading impression that it's a silly book rather than the deeply academic exercise it actually is. But, inside the cover, it really worked for me, at least.

4. A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them by Neil Bradbury, Ph.D. (started 2/21; finished 3/12): B+

In spite of it being written in a sometimes distractingly, incongruously wholesome literary voice, this is a really fun, fascinating read. It's a little like reading true crime as reported by Pollyanna, but the great amount of specific and sometimes unsettling detail makes that easy to look past—I'm not sure I'll ever look at hospital visits the same way again. (A stunning number of murders and attempted murders recounted in the book were carried out by health care professionals.) The stories in this book run the gamut, from the aforementioned hospital workers to disgruntled Victorian-era spouses to 20th-century international espionage. This is a great book for the person with equal amounts of educational and morbid interests.

5. The Future by Naomi Alderman (started 3/12; finished 3/24): B+

"On the day the world ended," these are the opening six words to The Future, with several more references to the world ending in the early pages of this book. If I had any actual complaint about this book, it would be that it's nearly three quarters of the way through before we get even a hint as to exactly how the world ended. On the other hand, I have to hand it to author Naomi Alderman: it sure is an effective way to keep you turning the pages. Soon enough we are introduced to the CEOs of three megacorporations: one a social network; one focused on e-commerce and delivery; one a computer company. Gee, I wonder what the real-world analogs are here? They all have bunkers and they have a coordinated plan for how to get to them in case of the world ending—and in my view having them all wind up on the same escape plane stretches plausibility, but whatever. This book covers a lot about tech and the environmental crises and how the two can either be at odds or work to mutual benefit, contextualized with a kind of intrigue that made it hard for me to put it down. Everything ties up in the end perhaps a bit too neatly—but also, somehow, very satisfyingly. If you liked Alderman's previous novel The Power you'll definitely like this one—which isn't quite as good, but it's close.

6. Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson (started 3/24; finished 5/7): A-

With this wonderful fantasy novel, about a simple, cup-loving young woman leaving her island home to sail across the dangerous "spore seas" of her planet with a band of pirates on a quest to confront the sorceress who kidnapped the man she loves, the best point of comparison is The Princess Bride (more so the spectacular 1973 William Goldman novel than the 1987 film)—a comparison so obvious, in fact, that Brandon Sanderson makes it directly explicit as an intentional inspiration in his postscript. It's difficult to summarize this novel's story in a way that does justice to what a great read it is, largely because of its narrator, who is mentally compromised due to a curse from the aforementioned sorceress. I suppose there is a distinction to be made, because The Princess Bride, particularly the novel, goes to some surprisingly dark places that Tress of the Emerald Sea does not quite sail into. And yet, the characters and the world, where air-churned spores that fall from several moons in stationary orbit are what make up its seas, are both vividly realized, making this a world that is a delight to inhabit, and sprinkled with whimiscally offbeat, laugh-out-loud humor. As of reading this novel, it was easily the best I have read this year, and I would easily recommend it to readers of all ages.

7. Dune by Frank Herbert (started 5/12; finished 7/12): A

This is the most monumental, enduring, spectacular novel I have read in a very, very long time. A great many years, it could be argued. I know I have recency bias going on here, but I'm feeling confident about my opinions if for no other reason than my enduring love of the Denis Villeneuve film adaptations, which have been out a while now, I have watched several times, and I never tire of. I can count on one hand the number of novels I have re-read, and I can easily see myself re-reading this one day. For now, I must share this excerpt from Frank Herbert's son Brian's Afterward in the 2005 edition of the novel that I had checked out of the library:

Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel's layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again.

This passage really stands out to me as I come away from finishing the novel for the first time. I have noted how I long felt an aversion to even trying to read this novel, mostly because I heard that for decades it was regarded as "unadaptable" and I was put under the impression that it had this impenetrable narrative. Between that and how long I also knew the novel to be, it sounded like a chore to read that I doubted was worth the effort. Much to my surprise and delight, once I finally picked it up, Dune became one of the very few novels that truly hooked me with its narrative literally on page 1. What I discovered was that, yes, the narrative is incredibly dense—but, to Brian's point, that is only one layer, and this book can be read easily as simply gripping science fiction entertainment without having to drill too far into its density. Just as already happened to me with the Villeneuve films, I know that I can return to it and glean more from it that I did not the first time around.

The detail of this universe, as fully realized, is astonishing, and I am in awe of it. It took me a solid two months to read this book from start to finish, and I'd have been happy for it to take longer: I loved just picking it up and spending time simmering in its world. There is another incredibly useful factor in how the story is set 20,000 in the future: it hardly matters that the novel was first published in 1965, 59 years ago as I write this—in the lore of the novel, humanity has long ago destroyed machines as we currently think of them. Given the rise and fear of AI today, this is more prescient and relevant than ever. In any case, the novel is set so wildly far into the future that almost nothing about it feels implausible or dated, regardless of how long ago it was written, and in all likelihood it never will in any of our lifetimes. To call this novel "ageless" is an understatement—and, given that this is one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time, I realize I'm coming rather late to this party. But, that's the beauty of this novel: it is never too late, nor can it ever be. I absolutely adored this book—and I say this even with the caveat of its subtly homophobic depiction of the Baron Harkonnen (maybe the one thing in it that could objectively qualify as dated)—and I would recommend it to any and everyone.

8. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (started 7/13; finished 8/8): A+

What better book to follow up Dune than with what remains both my favorite science fiction novel and my favorite novel overall? I'm not sure how often these two novels are mentioned in the same conversations, but for me they both have lasting and deep cultural impact with a lot of overlap, and it's quite possible that if I had to rank all of my favorite novels, I could put Dune at #2—and Brave New World still at #1.

This was the fifth time I have read Brave New World and I posted to social media only minutes after finishing it:

The 20 years since I last read it was enough time for the entire world to change and thus alter the lens through which it is perceived. And although I have since read other spectacular books that could have challenged its standing in my mind (DUNE came *very* close), I must say the depth of how impressed I am by this vision of the future from 92 years ago goes on unabated. What a truly spectacular book this is, so dense with provocative meaning and implication, more and more prescient with each passing decade. I just love this book so much, I am certain I will read it yet again one day—the only book I have read nearly so many times, a stellar intellectual exercise that challenges and stretches far beyond what its deceptively short length might suggest.

The key difference from Dune is that novel's evergreen effect due to its vision of a future tens of thousands of years from now. Brave New World is set in what would to us be the year 2540—all of about 3% of the time from now as Dune—and yet is astonishingly prescient, depicting elements of a world we live in currently that fit right into our current realities (society run by deluded amusements; social conditioning; rampant cloning). There's something deeply unsettling about the feeling of a current society visibly moving in this direction as opposed to the wild conjecture it no doubt seemed to be upon first publication in 1932, presumably deeply scandalizing readers. There's some real irony in the foreward Huxley wrote for the 1946 edition of the novel that I tend to read, in that he laments the story's lack of any reference to nuclear warfare; naturally anyone in the 1940s would assume nuclear conflict would play a big part in our future, but—so far at least—his original, unspoiled vision from before the atom bomb is proving to be far more accurate than he ever could have imagined. As such, there is a kind of deep, dark magic to the time traveling element to reading this novel, and I just love it.

9. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (started 8/11; finished 8/26): B

I was really wanting to read the second in the Dune series, Dune Prophesy, but predictably I had many other holds at the library to wait through. When I checked this book out, Seattle Public Library had only just been able to start accepting book returns, literally months after a malware attack that completely crippled their systems. Once I could return Dune, I went to the library with the vain hope that I could just find Dune Prophesy on the shelf, which of course I did not find. I was still very much in a science-fiction mood, though—I had just re-read Brave New World—so that's what I went in search of, among the books already on the shelf.

Then I remembered the CEO at work at recommended Sea of Tranquility many months ago, and I had put it on my list. I found it on the shelf, and was pleased to learn it was by the same author as Station Eleven, which I still have not read but really loved the HBO limited series adapted from it. All of these elements set up pretty high expectations for this novel . . . which honestly did not meet them.

This book is fine. I just wanted something better. I was fascinated by the premise, with time settings jumping from 1912 to 2020 to 2203 to 2401. But, maybe halfway through, a key character starts theorizing about whether we are all living in a simulation, and then it becomes clear that all of these time periods are connected by time travel. And I was just like: oh. That's what this is? Been there, done that. I'd have loved for there to be some other reason for these time jumps in narrative, some actually original idea that never quite materializes.

The author weaves in themes of loneliness and learning how to step away from the hustle and bustle of life by connecting all the time periods as either very near or during global pandemics. And to her credit, the writing is quite vivid for how relatively simple it is, which alone made it difficult for me to put the book down. The writing is excellent. The story didn't much do it for me.

10. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (started 8/26; finished 9/23): B

I know for certain that I read this novel at least once before—in 2006. I thought I read both this and Armistead Maupin's two follow-up books earlier than that, but my annual book logs I keep only go back to 2003, so I can't remember for sure.

This is a light, breezy, fun read, and I kept wondering what it must have been like when initially serialized weekly in San Francisco newspapers in 1974. And that's kind of just the thing: I gave this a B+ in 2006, but can't help but downgrade it to a solid B from the vantage point of 2024, when the way we look at things like race, gender and sexuality are (hopefully) a bit more sophisticated. None of the themes in this novel are tackled awfully, but it's still very much a product of its time, and some of what Maupin explores is done, let's say, slightly inelegantly. It's subtle, but there is a bit of cringe there that may not have been detected in less enlightened years passed.

Nevertheless, I intend to move forward in the series, whose very existence serves as a kind of historical record. It will be interesting to see how Maupin's characters eventually navigate a world with HIV, legalized same-sex marriage, intersectionality, or the mainstreaming of the fight for queer and trans rights—all within the specific setting of San Francisco, which itself is now an entire world apart from the city it was in the seventies, the eighties, or even the ninetes.

11. More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (started 9/24; finished 10/10): B

Infidelity. Pregnancy. Secret parentage. Amnesia. If anyone thought the first Tales of the City was like a soap opera, Armistead Maupin sure as shit pumps the accelerator with this follow-up. It still treats both race and gender in a way that makes it feel like an artifact—"It was a different time," you might say—including an older trans character who endures getting deadnamed by an ex. The fascinating element here is how progressive this was in the context of its first publication in 1980, an ensemble cast of characters navigating countless recognizable real-life landmarks in the "modern Sodom" of then-contemporary San Francisco. That city and Tales of the City are synonymous with each other, and its narrative flaws aside, the characters are just impossible not to get attached to.

12. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert (started 10/10; finished 11/14): A-

I was a bit surprised to discover Dune Messiah is only about half the length of Dune. It makes it feel a little less epic, and a tad more like an extended epilogue to the first novel, set 12 years later. I also had a feeling of even more of this one, also dense with layered meaning and themes, going over my head. And then, somehow, by the time I finished it . . . I found that I still loved it. There's just something about Herbert's Dune universe, I absolutely love spending time in it. And there are unusually vivid elements that I find difficult to shake, super cool narrative threads that continue to make these stories exceptional. There are many in both novels, but my favorite from Dune is the wisened knowledge inside of Alia as a little girl; in Dune Messiah, for me anyway, I fell in love with the character arc of Duncan Idaho as a ghola, particularly with his blank, metal Tleilaxu eyes, a persistently haunting image. There's a ton more of societies, histories and mythologies thrown around in this book that I struggled to wrap my brain around, and in the end I didn't care so much: the Dune universe is something you surrender to, and swim through, like a Guild Navigator in a tank of spice gas.

13. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (started 11/16; finished 12/24): B

I enjoyed this book overall, but also have somewhat mixed feelings about it. I really enjoyed Tova, the tiny grandma protagonist, and it was nice to spend the majority of the pages with her. My absolute favorite was definitely Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus living in the Puget Sound aquarium where Tova does janitorial work—and, much more specifically, the sporadic chapters that are narrated by him. The thing is, Selby Van Pelt has a particular talent for writing from an anthropomorphic viewpoint, by far the most novel (pardon the pun) part of this book, though she uses admirable restraint in engaging with it, as those chapters are the most infrequent and use up the least number of pages.

Honestly, the greatest challenge was with adopting the viewpoint of a straight young man, specifically Cameron, the irresponsible character who loses his job in California and heads to Washington in search of a rich man he assumes is his biological father (and we all know far before Cameron does where that is headed). There's just something about the way Cameron thinks, the things he says, the things he does—there's something about it all that feels like an author trying her best but not truly understanding how typical young straight guys like this are. Granted, this is a far more common effect with male writers creating young women characters, so I suppose turnabout is fair play, but the ultimate effect is still the same. It did get a bit better as the novel went along, but the male characters in this book had a real lack of authenticity to them, and often came across as rather contrived.

What's more, I'd say the first third or so of the book was so slow, with so little happening I wondered why I was reading about any of these people's lives, I nearly gave up on the book. I'm still glad I didn't; Van Pelt at the very least has a knack for slow-burn plotting, and by the final chapters I actually couldn't put it down, and was nearly late for an engagement on Christmas Eve. The way the mystery of Tova's long-dead son gets solved in the end is wildly implausible (even outside the involvement of a highly intelligent octopus), but so what? This is the stuff we come to these kinds of books for.

One final complaint: Sowel Bay is a fictional town on Washington State's Puget Sound. I'm totally fine with creating fictional towns, but Van Pelt sprinkles in distances and drive times from Sowel Bay to Bellingham to the north and Seattle to the south, none of which come even close to adding up. My best guess was that Sowel Bay would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of Tulalip, but the distances and local geographical references still did not fully match, and every time this came up it took me out of the book. I rather wish she had just found a point on the map, decided that was where Sowel Bay would be, and then took actual measurements for these references. This only matters to Puget Sound locals like myself, though; no one reading this from anywhere else in the world is going to care. For locals, however, it could be a bit of a different story.