These Are The Books I Read This Month While I Had COVID-19

Vampire semi-erotica, a hockey team of teenage witches, one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and more.

1. From Blood And Ash, 2. A Kingdom Of Flesh And Fire — Jennifer L. Armentrout (3/5)

2022 began on an inauspicious note for me. About two days into the year, I fell ill, and it turned out to be COVID-19. In those early days, I had a 103-degree fever and the debilitating weakness and hazy sense of unreality that accompanies a high fever. It was under these circumstances that I read the first two books of the Blood And Ash series.

To be honest, even though it was less than a month ago, I have no idea what went through my mind when I decided to read these books. I remember hankering to start reading more fantasy, and I found the first book in the series as the winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards for either fantasy or romance (I can’t remember and I am not going to bother looking it up. It doesn’t matter). By know I’m well aware that if a book has won a Goodreads Choice Awards, it’s not going to be any good, but the winners tend to be really entertaining, at the very least. All signs pointed towards this book just not being for me, but I blundered ahead anyway.

As far as I can remember, this series follows Poppy, a young woman who is very important to the Empire. I don’t remember why. She’s called the Maiden and she is cloistered away from the world. Into her life comes Hawke, a super handsome, super dashing soldier man who becomes her personal bodyguard. In the very first chapter, while sneaking out of the palace to experience life, Poppy has an…intimate encounter with Hawke at a tavern although he doesn’t know it’s her because she’s wearing a mask. Eventually, Hawke and Poppy escape from the Palace because of politics and monsters and the series basically follows their adventures and more importantly, blossoming romance.

The first two books are baffling for me to talk about now. There is really nothing good to say about them. The plot basically exists to facilitate Hawke and Poppy’s romance. The worldbuilding is so shallow that I have no idea why it exists. The romance and sex scenes have out-of-nowhere sentences that were so cringeworthy, I’d have to put the book down and take a nap. Spoilers from here on out, but if I knew going in that these books were a vampire romance, I would not have bothered.

And yet. And yet I read two of these. Why?

I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure. Maybe it was just the high fever. But for its many, many flaws, I found the first two books oddly endearing and compelling. The plot merely existing to be in service of the romance is one of the best things about this book, because the romance is easily the most compelling aspect of the book. I basically skimmed through anything that wasn’t about the romance. Even the vampire romance aspect felt like a way to exorcise the demons of the Twilight series. These books are very sex-positive, and unlike Twilight, the characters just seem like they are nice to their friends. There’s something very endearing about how horny the two leads are and how often they get intimate in the most inappropriate places. I’m never reading these books again, so that way I can keep alive the mystery of whether they hooked up in a closet of a field hospital or if that was just a fever dream I had.

I did have to give up on the third book, The Crown of Gilded Bones about quarter of the way through, because it began focusing far more on the plot than the romance, and as I have hopefully made abundantly clear by now, I’m not here for the plot. Giving the plot that much of a spotlight didn’t do the book any favours, and so I had to bail. Maybe balance was restored later on in the book, I have no idea. But I wasn’t about to slog through vampire politics and the umpteenth plot twist about Poppy’s heritage to get there.

Would I recommend this series, at least the books in it that I read? Logically, I shouldn’t. There are better romances out there. There’s tons of better fantasy out there. But speaking from the heart, the next time you have a high fever, consider giving these a shot. You won’t feel any better, but you might have delirious fun.

2. The Marriage Plot — Jeffery Eugenides (1/5)

So I’ve already mentioned that I think the Goodreads Choice Awards winners are generally duds, but can we also talk about the Pulitzer Prize? It’s worse for a Pulitzer Prize winner to be bad than it is for a Goodreads Choice Award winner, because the Pulitzer has the kind of prestige that the Goodreads Choice Awards just doesn’t have. And between this book and The Goldfinch, which I found to be a massive disappointment, I think the Pulitzer Prize is tainted. The Goodreads winners at least tend to be fun to read, if nothing else. What can I say that’s nice about this book?

Think about all the common criticisms books by Sally Rooney tend to get. The characters are self-absorbed and unlikeable. Nothing happens in the book. It’s boring and pretentious and takes itself too seriously. I don’t believe that about Rooney’s books, but this book is the embodiment of all of those criticisms and then some. The plot loosely follows three people as they graduate college and begin to find their place in the world. I’m someone who is very favourable to plotless character-driven fiction. Half of the books that I read last year were like that. So believe me when I say that genuinely nothing of importance happens in this book. Any changes the characters go through during the course of the book feel surface-level. The appeal of the ‘plotless novel’ for me is the insight you get into characters and the world, and the self-reflection and self-recognition it can provoke. This book has absolutely none of that at all, and thank God for that. If I saw myself in any of these characters, I would isolate myself from society permanently.

The book gets its title from plots in novels where characters’ fortunes would depend on who they married. I have no idea what that has to do with this book, which despite having two leads get married, doesn’t seem to be about marriage. It doesn’t seem to be about anything at all, in the worst possible way.

If anything about the premise of this book interests you, you’re really better off reading anything by Sally Rooney, who I think succeeds at making you care about complicated, unlikeable characters who are in bad relationships with each other and make truly bad choices, is better able to get at the points she’s trying to make, and is really good at capturing that sense of alienation and of being adrift that people feel in their twenties. Also, as another plus point, Rooney has never described a character’s “normally proud” breasts as having “withdrawn into themselves, as if depressed” which is a real sentence from this book and also worse than anything I read in the cringy erotic vampire romance series I just read before.

I genuinely believe any other book in this list would be more deserving of the Pulitzer Prize than this one. It’s a sign of how deeply ill I was at the time, for me to have completed this book.

3. Piranesi — Susanna Clarke (5/5)

By the time I read Piranesi, I was starting to feel better, less feverish, but much weaker and more exhausted. This book is a really short read that even in my debilitated state, I was able to finish over the course of a morning. What’s it about? Don’t worry about it! In fact, just as with the Blood And Ash series (which casts a long shadow over all the books I read this month, in case you couldn’t tell) you shouldn’t care about the plot too much here as well. Even though it has a plot that does at face-value seem worth investing in.

I finally read this book after reading rapturous praise for it for years now. And when I finished it, I was left with a sense of disappointment. “That’s it? This is what everyone has been praising to the high heavens?” and yet I now think this is a 5/5 book. The reason for that is twofold.

First is the truly distinctive atmosphere the book has. It takes place in a strange world, and a lot of the early book is devoted to helping you understand it, in simple terms to really help it come alive in your imagination. In some ways, it reminds me of House of Leaves, another all-time favourite of mine that features a weird space. The second reason, and this is the big one for me, also comes back to House of Leaves. The house in House of Leaves is maybe, or maybe not an evil place, but it is definitely not a good place. In Piranesi on the other hand, practically every page is soaked in the love that Piranesi has for the weird world he’s in. I don’t want to say any more and ruin the experience of you discovering exactly how for yourself, but believe me when I say that above all else, this is a feel-good novel. Colouring strange places with fear can create an unforgettably tense and horrifying atmosphere. But Piransi asks, what if we loved the strange place instead?

4. The Inheritance Games (3/5), The Hawthorne Legacy (2/5) — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Yet another YA Goodreads Choice Award Winner that I picked up to come down from the intense high of Piranesi. The Inheritance Games is about Avery, a financially struggling teenage girl who is unexpectedly named the sole heir of a Texas billionaire’s fortune, on the condition that she spend a year in his sprawling mansion with his now-very-pissed-off family. Said family includes four hot brothers who are the billionaire’s grandchildren that Avery spends a lot of time with, as they discover that the old man basically had a whole high-budget scavenger hunt game planned out for them.

I’m really getting older, because the character I related to the most wasn’t any of the teens, but the old billionaire grandpa. I love rich old characters in fiction who leave large sums of money to unexpected people provided that they follow some convoluted stipulations that exist to engineer romances. I want to be that relative when I become old.

The first book is pretty fun with its tight focus on the game that Grandpa laid out and introducing his dysfunctional family of rich entitled people who are now at the mercy of a 17 year-old billionaire. And of course, Avery gets into a love triangle with two of the hot brothers, and of course I think she should be with the boring older one and of course she’s actually currently with the hotheaded bad boy younger one.

The first book ends on a cliffhanger that I should have seen coming, but I still laughed out loud anyway when I got to that part. I got got and I liked that. The second book isn’t as good as the first. It has an even more high-budget scavenger hunt than the first (I think Avery gets caught in a bomb blast at one point?), and more mysteries than the first. The scavenger hunt shenanigans, I’m ok with. But the multiple mysteries in the book, coupled with weird pacing and switching between them made it hard for me to follow what was happening. I probably could have followed the plot better if I put effort into it, but with a series like this, that’s supposed to be a rompy fun YA suspense thriller, I don’t think I should have to put effort into understanding it. I’m still going to read the third and final book, obviously, but it’s mainly to see how the love triangle gets resolved.

5. We Ride Upon Sticks — Quan Barry (5/5)

This book was love at first sight for me. It’s about a down-on-their-luck girl’s field hockey team in the 80s whose fortunes take a turn when they turn to witchcraft. That’s the dry plot summary anyway. The reason I love this book so much is that I think it’s perfectly tailored to match my sense of humour. It features a Dark Magic Emilio Estevez notebook (that was given to the tomboyish goalie by her parents in the hopes that it would ‘steer her towards the right port’), an anthropomorphized hairdo and at least one humorous occurrence on each page.

After their initial victories, they seem to be losing their mojo, and so the girls realise they’re going to have to fully commit to witchcraft to keep their streak going, and those attempts to commit more ‘evil’ acts form the bulk of the book’s plot as we follow them through their hockey season all the way to the finals.

The other reason I like this book so much is the camaraderie among the girls. The book uses third-person narration when focusing on a specific girl, but otherwise uses “we” pronouns which really gives you the sense that they all see themselves as a team. As someone who went to an all-girls’ school, many of the scenes of the girls spending time together really brought back memories and felt very authentic. In other words, it’s not a book where a character’s sadness would be described in terms of their once-proud breasts withdrawing into their body. The second last chapter, in which the story’s climax takes place, had me laughing out loud. Go read this book, it’s great.

6. When No One Is Watching — Alyssa Cole (3/5)

Maybe it’s shallow to admit, but what attracted me to this book was the cover. It did such a good job of conveying the premise and atmosphere of the book that I didn’t need to read the summary to know that it was going to be a suspense novel. The book follows Sydney who has recently moved back to her mother’s home in Brooklyn after a divorce to find herself a stranger in a familiar land. The neighbourhood she grew up in is rapidly gentrifying, but Sydney and her white opposite-house neighbour Theo gradually realise that all this gentrification has a sinister edge to it.

Maybe I’m just not suited to thrillers, but I found the last quarter of the book to be really over-the-top, something that I normally welcome, but I felt it clashed with the relative, depressing grounded-ness of the rest of the book. Part of me thinks I’d have liked this book a lot more if it dropped the conspiracy angel and was a full-on literary fictional book about the death of a neighbourhood, or leaned into the depressing and absurd aspects like Convenience Store Woman.

7. Kudos — Rachel Cusk (5/5)

Each book in the Outline Trilogy is slim, but packs a punch. I bought all three books in early 2021, but it’s taken me a year to finish something that in terms of page length at least, I could knock out in an afternoon. These books aren’t really about anything other than conversations with people, but chances are, whatever those people are talking about, you’re going to see something of your life reflected in at least some of them. And thanks to Cusk’s sparse, blunt writing style, you’ll see your life reflected with unnerving clarity. These books aren’t going to make you feel any better — the characters Fay talks to don’t ever have any eureka moments while laying out their life stories and there’s no resolution of any sort for most of them. But these books make you feel Seen.

Kudos specifically is based around Fay’s time at a literary conference in an unnamed European country that’s strongly implied to be Mediterranean. Italy or Greece perhaps. It’s maybe the most meta of the three books since a lot of the people Fay talks to are involved one way or another in the writing and publishing of books. There’s a lot of conversations about the writing process, themes of books, mass appeal, the publishing industry and so on. They were compelling as per usual, but I think that they’d have resonated more with me if I myself were involved in the literary circuit.

There was an interesting anecdote about a Countess who hosted numerous authors in her large home so that they would have a nice place to get some writing done and she would have some interesting company. I think the Countess is meant to be evocative of Fay, a perpetual listener, except that the Countess seems to place pressure on the authors to act like stereotypical artists providing enlightening conversations. I’m far too stupid to understand exactly what Cusk meant with this, but I wonder if the point here is that even though all the people Fay has talked to so far have spoken so frankly about things going on in their lives, we’ll never truly and completely know any of them, or even, anyone other than ourselves.

Most of the other conversations took place with women and focused on what it takes to live life on your own terms as a woman in a deeply patriarchal culture. A running theme among those conversations was that making sacrifices and compromises is inevitable once you are married with children and your old dreams will no longer make you as happy as you once thought.

That ties into the conclusion of it all (Spoilers, even though caring about spoilers in this series means you’re reading it wrong) where Fay has a conversation with her son, in which he’s in a little trouble at school and resents his mother being away. For me, the climax of the trilogy was when he exclaims “Will you just listen?”. Kid, you have no idea…

8. The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay — Susanne Collins (4/5)

I first read The Hunger Games trilogy when I was 15, when I was squarely in the demographic these books were marketed to. All my friends at the time were fans of the series too, and so revisiting these books was a blast from the past. I’m finding revisiting books I read as a kid some ten or more years later to be a personally rewarding experience. It’s really interesting to come back to these books with an adult perspective, and to see how that changes how you view the books.

In the case of The Hunger Games, specifically, I really had to reassess my feelings about Mockingjay. Like many other people, Mockingjay was always my least favourite book in the trilogy when I was a kid. I didn’t like the looser focus, and I felt that the assault on the Captol at the end of the book dragged a bit. Coming back to it now, I still think the last third is a bit flabby, but I honestly think this is the best book in the trilogy. I think the series was always grounded and realistic when it came to Katniss’ character. Yes, she’s a badass archer and supports her family and is able to capably compete in the Hunger Games, but rereading the books highlighted just how much these abilities cost her. Katniss is a very unsentimental, pragmatic, almost unemotional person, and the strain of having to run a house from a young age has hardened her in a way that isn’t presented as aspirational at all.

By the time we get to Mockingjay, the trauma of the previous two books in addition to all the stuff Katniss was already dealing with has really taken a toll. She’s a complete shell of her former self. She nominally still cares about overthrowing Snow, but Katniss is jaded enough to not trust Coin either.

I am used to thinking of myself as being mature for my age, but I think in the case of Mockingjay, I had to grow up a bit to appreciate it. The first two books are easier to like; they’re tense, gripping and well-paced. Mockingjay is much more interior, cynical, and less straightforward. It ditches a lot of the previously-established conventions of the series: it takes place in a completely new setting, there’s no Hunger Games this time around, Katniss has completely lost interest in the love triangle she’s at the center of, not that she cared a whole lot before anyway, and most importantly for me, there’s no cautious optimism anymore. It’s a moody bleak capper to a phenomenal trilogy, and I get it now.

9. The Party Upstairs — Connell Lee (4/5)

The Party Upstairs focuses on two, really three people: Ruby, a young woman who has just graduated from college with a liberal arts degree, and has moved back home while she looks for work; Martin, Ruby’s dad who is the superintendent of the old New York building that the family has a basement flat in, and Caroline, Ruby’s childhood friend from the building who comes from a wealthy family. The book takes place over the course of a single day and focuses on Ruby’s crucial interview for a dream job at a museum, Caroline’s party in the evening, and the fraught dynamics between the three leads.

I didn’t really intend to read two books about gentrification in a month; as with When No One Is Watching I picked this up because I liked the diorama on the cover of the book. Whereas When No One Is Watching deals with gentrification through the lens of racism, this book puts class inequalities front and center. A big part of the book is Ruby being caught between the humbler background of her family and the wealthier people she’s fallen in with as a student, not to mention her childhood friend. It’s not a unique premise, but what makes it work for me is Martin’s character. There’s an undercurrent of gentle melancholy through his chapters that brings the premise to life for me, and helped me get through the slightly over-the-top conclusion of the book. You can’t fight the inevitable, rampant capitalism has created a fundamentally unfair society, life goes on and we just have to make sense of it all and keep going on.

10. Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd — Nick Mason (5/5)

You probably won’t get very much out of this book if you aren’t familiar with Pink Floyd, but if you are a fan, and like me, somehow you procrastinated reading this for years because you were worried it would suck, I’m here to say: it’s good. It’s really good.

I didn’t expect Nick Mason to be so funny. This book chronicles the band’s history from pre-formation to their goings-on in the social media age, all from the perspective of the band’s drummer. There’s a lot of insight into where the band were in their lives when they recorded their albums and I do think it’s going to enrich my experiences listening to them. I think he also covers the…fraught later years of the band in a way that’s fair to all parties while also not being coy and diplomatic about the details. I also want to highlight the photographs through the book. There was something really touching about seeing the band as fresh-faced twenty year-olds, and then towards the end of the book, there’s pictures of them as old men. I love this band.