January was a strong month for me for reading! I caught up on all of my ARCs (which several of these were for), and I read a few other things in my backlog that I was happy to finally get around to reading.
This month, I read a total of ten books, which is Very many for me! Several of them were graphic novels and manga, one was an audio book, and a few were novels:
- (not speaking on due to the St. Martin's Press influencer boycott)
- The Mushroom Knight (vol1) by Oliver Bly
- Brynmore (collected volume) by Steve Niles and Damien Worm
- (not speaking on due to the St. Martin's Press influencer boycott)
- Hypericum by Manuele Fior
- Animal Crossing vol3 by Kokonasu Rumba
- Walking Practice by Dolki Min (in audiobook format)
- The Forest Demands Its Due by Kosoko Jackson
- Tender by Beth Hetland
- Bad Dreams in the Night by Adam Ellis
I'm sure you'll notice two of these are marked out; currently, influencers are boycotting and not promoting books published by St. Martin's Press due to an employee they associate with promoting anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and queerphobic viewpoints. You can read more about that here: SMP Influencer Boycott and Readers for Accountability. These arcs were accepted months in advance, and during a point in time where I was unaware of the boycott and going further, I will not be accepting SMP book arcs for review and I will be actively reading from other publishers in this time.
While we're on this conversation topic, please consider offering vocal support for Palestine, and perhaps help in a financial way if you are able. Here are some various resources you can take a look at, and here are some resources that you can donate to for Palestinian aid.
I think my top three for this month were Walking Practice, followed by The Forest Demands Its Due, and then The Mushroom Knight.
I plan to write a reflective piece about Walking Practice at some point, written by Dolki Min, translated by Victoria Caudle, and with audiobook narrated by Nicky Endres. It chronicles the life of an alien life form that has escaped the destruction of its home planet and landed on earth. In it, Dolki Min's protagonist questions what is actually so good about binary, generally cis-centric viewpoints of human life and how if you're anywhere outside of that binary (primarily from a nonbinary point of view). It focuses on aspects of life through being disabled and what it means to feign being able bodied. It touches on so many aspects of queerness and isolation and starving for love.
This was the standout book for me for January. I plan to also buy a physical copy to re-read, so that I can acquaint myself with the unique typesetting style present in the text. Victoria Caudle went above and beyond in translating this text from Korean, as well as coming up with some rather impactful and ingenius ways of translating emphasis in Korean through lineweight and text spacing in English, and Nicky Endres was a fantastic voice for the audiobook, who provided some of the most enigmatic narration I have ever heard.
It left me with a lot of feelings after and I found so much solidarity and love and empathy and pain for and about this creature who is the protagonist of the book. I feel alienated from society so much, and knowing that there are others out there who are so much like me and feel so much like I do gives me a warmer, stronger feeling of strength that I have never felt before.
rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
Moving on, The Forest Demands Its Due by Kosoko Jackson was a fantastic read to start out the new year, too. I read it primarily during a time where we were snowed in, with freezing and below temperatures, which really put me in the mindset of this academia, winter focused story. It features our narrator and protagonist, Douglas Jones, a 17 year old black boy from Washington DC.
An accident happens, and he's forced to move across state lines with his single mother to the esteemed Regent Academy, where he begins to learn long-held views of the town he moves to, and how ancestry and family ties can make or break entire towns. It is a sci-fi/horror fantasy with several sweet queer romances, and for fear of spoiling too much, I won't be going into details, but Douglas Jones is such a star, and such a hero. My only complaint for this novel is how the horror element shifted midway through into scifi. I wish the horror had persisted through the whole novel, but I enjoyed it so much regardless of that.
If you like young adult scifi/horror, with a predominant forest horror theme, fae, and more starring a gay black boy and his bisexual boyfriend, please pick this one up.
rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
The last book I'm going to spend time talking about is first volume of The Mushroom Knight series, written and illustrated by Oliver Bly, which I read for an ARC, and I found it just... so charming. The world building pulls you right into these parallel universes seamlessly, and leaves you asking a lot of questions about how the human world and these faefolk of sorts intertwine. The art style is beautiful, melancholy, and bright all at once. From my review, I wrote:
Oliver Bly’s art style is a mesmerizing concoction of color, detail, and whimsy that is equal parts hypnotizing and addicting. Described by Oliver Bly as “David the Gnome meets David Lynch”, the first volume opens with an immediate need to know more about both worlds, both familiar and strange, while offering a slow trickle of information that keeps you coming back for more.
I am very much looking forward to reading more about this universe, and I intend to pick volume one and subsequent volumes up in the future.
The Mushroom Knight volume one is being released by Mad Cave Studios on March 5, 2024.
rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
I already have a handful of books picked out for February's reads, and I'm excited to dig in to those! One that I'm starting is the Emily Wilde series and I can say I'm obsessed.
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