House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

[ physical book, read in english ]

an old, blind man dies, and a junkie with mental health issues goes loot his apartment with his friend. he finds an extremely convoluted manuscript, left behind by the dead man who recited the entire thing to random people who then wrote it all down for him on any surface available. the junkie decides to compile the writings into a completed work and they turn out to be a full academic study, complete with footnotes from numerous academics and authors, on a found-footage horror film called the navidson record. the film is apparently one of the most critically acclaimed and culturally impactful product of its time -- in some fictional alternate universe, that is, which doesn't exist and neither do any of the sources cited in it. in this alleged box-office hit, a family of four moves into a new house in the countryside to start a new life only to one day discover that a brand new doorway into nowhere has appeared in the house. behind the door is only a pitch black hallway, and despite the mother's objections, the father of the family begins exploring it. he manages to pull in a family friend, his estranged brother, and eventually a whole caver group into the mix, resulting in exponentially escalating quests into the depths of the evidently never-ending and ever-changing house. while compiling the navidson record, the junkie keeps adding his own anecdotes and life stories between the story, gradually losing his own grip on reality in the progress as he starts thinking some monster is after him. oh, and apparently the junkie's work was then taken by a DIFFERENT editor who put it together into a book titled house of leaves with THEIR own footnotes.

➕ no way to adequately summarise this book in any fewer words tbh. it's a story in a story in a story that loops back to itself. i was so not prepared for this book, it's the strangest one i've ever read -- not for the layered storytelling (cloud atlas says hello) but for its form and for feeling more like some kind of experimental performance in text than a novel. it was a rollercoaster in both the good and the bad, but the good part was definitely never knowing what you're about to get. sometimes you have two pages of footnotes that have all been striked through, sometimes text starts crawling around the page, sometimes it's backwards and/or upside down, sometimes in an increasingly tiny rectangle in the middle of the page. i enjoyed all the creative ways the form of the text reflected what was being said. never before have i been spinning a book around in my hands just to read what a page says. and the chapter talking about labyrinths where you have to go hunting for the footnotes and go back and forth the pages and sometimes it takes you back to what you already read. that was so fun.

➕ surprisingly quick to read despite all the Big Words Whose Meaning I Don't Even Know (and was too lazy to use a dictionary, i can more or less deduce the meaning from context in english). when i first picked this up from the library i was like, no way i'm going to be able to finish a 700-page book in four weeks. but i finished it in two. that's partially thanks to all the pages that only had like 1-5 words of text or just tiny quotes or whatever, but partially because i genuinely couldn't stop reading some days.

➕ i'm so impressed by the author's imagination and dedication to all the details with all the footnotes and their sources. i mean the contents are absolute horseshit pretentious gobblygook but you have to admire the consistency. does danielewski perhaps have autism

➕ this whole thing reads to me like a criticism and satire of academic publications and their long-windedness and grandiosity and excessive use of unnecessary sources, i don't know if that's the purpose but i want to think it is. i'm also very enamored by this fictional universe where professionals all over the world are obsessed with studying a found-footage horror flick. like, this is the equivalent of if paranormal activity was a critically acclaimed piece of art in our time that has a thousand-page academic studies written on it. it only charmingly adds to the absurdism because it's so fucking silly that this would ever happen

➕ finland was referred to like, four times. on the page-long lists of names. there were some alvar aalto mentions in the architecture part. yes i read all of it

➕ that all said, by far the best part of this, the navidson record. that's what i read this book for.

➖ what i did not read this book for is johnny truant. in the first half of the book, his narration keeps cutting the actually interesting parts with his dumbass stories, which clearly is a deliberate choice that comically stretches the excitement with cliffhangers and suddenly inserting two pages of random shit in the middle. but god how little i was interested in reading about him having sex with random hookers. like truly. honestly. sincerely. i Do Not Care and do not want to read it. in the latter half his parts turn into some kind of pseudo poetry and it's not much better than reading about his thoughts on some old woman's breasts and vagina. there's a point where the funny gimmick of cutting the actually worthwhile part of the book off with this gunk stops being funny or interesting.

➖ speaking of which, the gimmicks in general, while entertaining, got old fast. more than five pages of the same, tbh, and you lose me. this author didn't understand to stop when things were still fresh.

➖ i also didn't super care for the chapters where the point is just going on tangents about some minor detail in the navidson record, like pages and pages of what academics have written about echo and, what, greek poems?? about it. only because there's an echo in the hallway that's appeared in the house. and also the entire chapter for what researchers and writers have said about navidson choosing to return to the house. it's insane and not in the good way some parts of this book are. and why so much french

➖ maybe it's intentional since there's apparently ""pages missing"" in that chapter but [spoiler] WHY DID WE NEVER GO BACK TO THE FACT THAT SAMPLES TAKEN FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE HOUSE APPARENTLY DATED BACK TO BEFORE THE UNIVERSE WAS BORN ??? JUST CASUALLY BRUSH THAT ASIDE HUH

➖ i almost forgot one of my biggest criticism of this book. it was another one that i picked up because some thread on "books that are actually scary" mentioned it many many times. many people said this is the scariest thing they've ever read. was it scary at all? no unless you're scared of french-- alright to be fair the concept of the house was plenty spooky, but there's so much everything else piled on top in this that it's impossible to be scared at any point. the only moment that i could say i got some minor Horror Tingles from was towards the end where [spoiler] johnny suddenly says that his friend is dead, and his death is described in extremely gruesome detail, and then a couple pages later he's talking about his friend again as if he were alive. i liked that one.

➖ the appendices are so boring and disappointing and unnecessary. too many letters from the dead mom. and i was ready to give this book a four but when i had to live through the fucking insufferable pelican motherfuck poems i decided this is a three because fuck you i fucking hate poems, FUCK you

⭐ score: 3½ -- well it was an experience. memorable in both the good and the bad. this after throne of glass, my reading habits are so unhinged

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

[ physical book, read in english ]

set on a fantasy continent where a tyrannical king has conquered and oppressed nearly all the regions, he sets up a game of survival for several candidates who compete and duel against each other and the winner is set to become his "champion" for four years. the main character is a notorious young assassin who's been imprisoned to work as a slave at salt mines for the rest of her life, and the king's son decides to make her his candidate in his father's competition. the girl moves to the royal castle that's made of glass and starts training in order to win. mysterious things start happening in the castle when some of her competition starts dropping dead, as if attacked by a wild animal.

➕ i like high fantasy, it's my favourite genre. a world with many different countries, there's kings and princes and fairies and forbidden magic, nice nice. i also liked the details about the religion of this place. imaginary religions are the best ➕ i think the premise is kind of a banger, i don't dislike hunger games kind of competition settings. and the concept of a glass castle is so beautiful i might just steal that to some piece of mine tbh ➕ this was very easy, effortless, and fast to read. i wasn't like, super inspired by the writing itself, but occasionally the author dropped some killer line that stood out. just here and there. ➕ kaltain is the best character because first of all "kaltain rompier" what a name, secondly she was by far the most interesting one, probably because she's a female character clearly created to be unlikable. which means she is the best

➖ alright, now… where do i even start with everything i kind of hated about this book. maybe the most blaring problem of them all to me: the main character, celaena. i know it's become like socially unacceptable to talk negatively about "mary sues" but she is one if i ever fucking saw one in literature. there are basically no flaws -- definitely no BELIEVABLE flaws -- to her character. she's beautiful (blonde, of course) and sexy, the two main boys immediately fall for her. she's "an assassin" so she has like superhuman powers and speed and dexterity and every skill possible, yet she's perpetually presented as a pure-hearted and innocent, sweet girl, so lovely, could do no wrong (which leads me to wonder what on earth assassins really are in this universe, she's called the deadliest assassin in the world yet there's very little detail of whom she actually killed and for what, how, when. there's a line of the princess of eyllweldfssdfjk telling her that the "most important thing is that endovier[the mines] didn't make her cruel" SO SHE'S A GOOD LITTLE CINNAMON ROLL AND ASSASSINS AREN'T CRUEL? ALTHOUGH THEY KILL PEOPLE FOR MONEY? i'm…….. it feels like an accessory stamped on top of her character more than anything just to have a plot device that allows her to be skilled at everything possible) all the most powerful characters (on the GOOD side, of course, not evil ones!) immediately fall in love with her (evil ones hate her!), including some ancient fairy queen who only exists in some magic hallucination dimension which celaena of course has access to because she's also Super Special in some forbidden magical way. wow, what an unlikable, unrelatable, unconvincing character. she somewhat entertained me in the first couple of chapters when she was constantly thinking of how to kill anyone she met but that characteristic was dropped pretty fast when she became the princess type of character in the castle.

➖ when the two main guys were immediately set to fall for the girl i was like, alright this book is for children, the target audience here is heterosexual teenagers and not my queer 30-something ass, i'll try to read this from that perspective. but the thing is that i'm quite the shipper myself and this fucking book gave me nothing. the prince and the guard boy are first of all entirely uninteresting as characters (chaol got his only interesting trait at the very very end) and they both have the exact same dynamic with celaena, there's this peak heterosexual stupid banter tsundere chemistry thing going on with both. i guess i liked her with chaol marginally more if only for the reason that every scene she had with the prince was just that he walks to her bedroom and they have the most unnatural dumbass conversation ever that's clearly just sort of forced interaction between them from storytelling standpoint so that there would be some base for them to like each other. also his character was introduced as like a playboy who sleeps with all girls all the time but when he meets her he does a 180 and suddenly says oh i only like one woman and it's this one. what a bunch of botched nonsense, i can't even.

➖ the plot was so, so, so, so, so predictable. this may be for 13-year-olds but even harry potter and the philosopher's stone has more interesting development than this. there was pretty much only one thing that came as even a moderate surprise to me and that was [spoiler] chaol killing cain at the end, but then i felt like the consequences were veryyyyyy non-existent. i hope it shapes him more in the sequels because that truly was the only interesting thing about his character

➖ very weird to read about a love triangle where the characters don't seem to be aware they are in a love triangle. there were several occasions of the guys clearly being aware of the other also going to see celaena but there's no acknowledgement of either really feeling anything about it. and she never once addresses in any way that she's doing both boys simultaneously. it's like she's some fucking horny zombie who just switches to whichever boy is in front of her eyes at any given moment.

➖ a lot of this just read like a fic posted one chapter at a time tbh. as a fic writer i know very well how that's like. is this based on a fic? because sometimes the chapters just kinda feel stacked atop each other and the build-up feels thin at best. also the entire beginning of the book is just celaena's PoV but then all of a sudden at some point we start getting other characters out of nowhere.

➖ the most heterosexual nonsense line i ever read: "He didn't know why, but seeing her made him feel like a man."

➖ i could go on and on (i started doing daily notes while i read so i remember everything i thought along the way) but i think that's enough.

⭐ score: 2½ -- i would have gone three because i did in the end enjoy this enough to finish this very fast, but then i saw that this has a really high ranking on goodreads and decided that i hate this actually. so three is way too much but i reserve 2 for books that i kinda didn't even feel like finishing, and as nonsensical as this is, it's still fantasy romance garbo that's entertaining to read at the end of the day.

if i end up reading the rest of the throne of glass series, i'll make just one post for all of them together instead of each book separately. at this point though i think it would be like a hate-read

taivaanpallo by olli jalonen

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a coming-of-age story (well, almost anyway) about a boy who spends his childhood on the small island of saint helena in the 1600s. he's taught to observe the night sky by the british royal astronomer edmond halley who visits the island and then to read and write by a local priest. at around the half-way point of the story, he's sent off to deliver news about unrest on the island to halley who lives in london, and now the country bumpkin boy has to learn the ways of a big city. there's also a shitty boat trip to the UK in the middle there

➕ i do like stories set in real places and name-dropping real historical figures so i can read about them on wikipedia. ➕ there's an interesting theme of religion vs science in here. (at least implied. not very explicit but it's there) ➕ it felt good every time angus got to own some rude asshole with his superhuman eyesight or reading skills. ➕ there isn't anything wrong with this book per se, it's beautifully written in finnish…

➖ …that said, i really really really didn't like this book, for several reasons. most notably, this is part of this genre of finnish literature that's exclusively Very long stories, in a historical setting, and nothing really happens in it. i've read three of these books now. i have not enjoyed any of the three. this is not a genre for me. i literally knew from the very first sentence that i wouldn't like this ➖ second biggest reason and partially tied to the first, is because this book makes me feel stupid for not liking it. it's like ohhh this… epic whatever the shit… wonderful gorgeous language ooh aah so many details, literary genius, what a deep book what a contemporary classic. and i'm like… so i'm stupid for not liking it? is that it? am i too stupid and rotten-brained to appreciate it??? and that's why i hate this book ➖ but also just fucking nothing happens. there is no plot. there is no story arc. there are no highlights. things just happen. sometimes the first-person narration of angus talks about animals on the bible for half an hour (since i listened as an audiobook). i guess this is the sort of story that's meant to evoke thought rather than tell an adventure, or even tell a story really. but i'm not fucking interested in thoughts on god or how filthy people were in 1600s. i'm not interested in random details that go on and on and on and on and you can stop paying attention for an hour and don't miss a single thing about the story because that hour was probably about angus thinking about how he's learned a new thing and how he and his life are now forever changed because he learned the new thing, or going on and on about how he needs to be polite and in what specific ways he needs to be polite and how. i found myself spacing out listening, wondering which ass this author even pulls this shit out of. like, so many details in this book are just so mundane, this is nothing but a flow of mundane scenes and thoughts, and my own experience as a writer and just my writing process in general is so different from this. of course i'm partially in awe that someone's brain works like this that they'll casually drop in all these completely needless details about side characters we hear about once and then never again. but it's exactly that, needless. i didn't need any of that information for anything. another two-star reviewer had left a comment on this saying it felt like it was written with a literary award in mind and that's exactly how i feel too. like sort of pretentious blah blah I'm So Deep whatever garbage ➖ more of a neutral thing but i learned that edmond halley was a real person literally yesterday (and finished the book just now today). so that trivia brought very little to my reading experience.

⭐ score: 2 -- i have nothing more to say. this is the first part of a trilogy and i will now proceed to pretend i didn't know that

karsintavaihe by maarit verronen

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

the first-person narrative of a woman living in a dystopian future(??) version of finland(???) where people are categorised according to a colour status that defines everything about their lives. she has a good, a.k.a green status and has plenty of honest work, unlike some of her less fortunate friends who one by one either begin to disappear or grow more distant in some other way. she starts dating a 70-year-old man and takes care of the child of one of the disappeared friends.

➕ well… this is a celebration of worldbuilding and i'm all about that. lots of details to stop at to think "hmm, huh, so it's like that in this world." ➕ the child character was cute.

➖ what a confusing book. i disliked this from the beginning but not enough to stop reading, i guess? mainly i kept going because i wanted to know what the heck is going on. i didn't really get an answer in the 300 pages. if the housemaid was way too explicit, this one was way too ambiguous. while i do like the worldbuilding in theory, that world felt hollow to me because the entire book is so vague and refuses to go into detail about almost anything. there are no countries (other than "africa" as a generic area) in this world, no city names, no ackowledgement of this taking place in finland or even in this area of the world to begin with, nobody has a surname, nobody has a race. everything, literally everything is referred to by some very roundabout expression or pseudo name. i really disliked that. and why does nobody, like, rent a house in this? am i just a simpleton when i wish things were explained?? this is clearly some kind of surveillance dystopia but i didn't understand from any of the storytelling who is actually benefiting from the world being the way it is in this story. the main character seems to be in a good position but doesn't have a fucking house. why? ➖ there were too many characters. at the beginning, the main character has like 15 roommates, and none of them are really described in any substantial way because again, everything is vague. and i forgot their names Immediately. and when they're referred to again later, there's no allusion to any past mention at all, so i didn't know who was who. ➖ this book has no plot. it's just a stream of thought, slice of life kind of thing that vaguely tells about this world i guess. like… the plot consists of the main character moving (houses). literally. at any point of the story, she has either just moved into a new place (which half of the time is a car) or is in the process of moving, or is going to move soon. i really just. that's not interesting nor entertaining in any shape or form. i truly didn't understand any of this, what's the point. this is some kind of abstract form of philosophical storytelling that i wasn't invited to understand

⭐ score: 2 -- low key waste of my time tbh but i guess it was nice reading a very different kind of finnish novel.

the housemaid by freida mcfadden

[audiobook, listened in finnish]

a young woman is fresh out of prison, lives in her car and is in desperate need of a job. to her surprise, she's hired to be the housemaid and babysitter of a wealthy family of a millionaire husband and his gorgeous wife. she moves into their house and is given a mildly claustrophobic room in the attic that can only be locked from the outside. very quickly the mother of the family turns out to be a gaslighting psychopath and the newly hired maid ends up having an affair with the handsome husband.

➕ here's a book that's really not very good, but. how do i even explain this. there was something charming about it anyway, something comfortable in the use of tropes and shit? i don't know. there's a lot of classic victorian suspense story elements here. a suspicious rich family, a big house with secrets in the attic, a strange little girl in frilly dresses, a (seemingly) damsel-in-distress type of protagonist who goes through all sorts of hardships. a secretive but handsome gardener. to me all these tropes are positive ➕ the concept of this little room that can be locked from outside immediately has you intrigued like oooo wonder what happens there. i guess that was a little exciting early on and got me a bit hooked. ➕ this is silly but i actually really liked the ending of this book. it wasn't perfect buuut it was very satisfying regardless. i had to go take an unplanned walk just because i wanted to do nothing but focus on listening to the climax. i guess the net positive from the likeable ending was just that much more considering that…

➖ …the first half is so insufferable that i was really close to dropping this for a bit. the entire plot is so so so so predictable. like i can't express just how predictable this book is. it got better from the half way point when it moved to nina's perspective, but my god millie is a dumb shit up to that point. the entire plot would just not have happened if any of these bitches knew how to keep records and take evidence of what happens to them. this takes place in modern time, they have fuckign cellphones. and not. a single. attempt. at recording, screenshotting, taking photos of things for evidence. really? and although i liked the finale i also don't understand why [spoiler] millie didn't just fucking. lock the guy in the room and leave. just leave. leave him there to die just go, if there won't even be any kind of "so have you reflected on your own behaviour at all now" exchange then why drag it on, just fuckng leavJKGNsdjgvbjsdfgbjkdfgldfhngjkdfnjkgdj. though honestly as predictable as this was, i didn't see the perspective change half way through. i knew that the husband would be the bad guy all along but didn't expect that nina had also just been pretending. this only made her character less believable though. really hard to suddenly think of her as a likeable woman when she's been absolutely horrible to another person ON purpose the whole time ➖ the writing itself is fucking infantile, i'm sorry freida whoever you are but it's like a 15-year-old's first attempt at writing a story. sooo much pointless exposition and things are repeated SO many times when they've already explicitly happened and made clear and obvious and understood, my god it's not necessary to repeat the same things over and over, i thought i was gonna have a stroke. the tone is almost misogynistic (at least before the end), the men are conveniently perfect hunks and the protag's first thought at seeing them is wanting to have sex with them? like really now. i know she [spoiler] turned out to be one shady bitch herself but still. i guess it kinda fits that she acts like a horny teenager when she's been in jail since she was 17 but it annoyed me anyway

⭐ score: 3+ -- the first half was a 2, the second a 4, we land at a strong three. apparently there's a sequel? i bet it's horseshit

if it bleeds by stephen king

[audiobook, listened in finnish]

a collection of four novellas.

mr. harrigan's phone: a kid befriends a rich old man and teaches him to use technology. when the man dies, the boy starts receiving messages from him from the grave.

the life of chuck: i honestly can't summarise this. it's about a guy named chuck.

if it bleeds: a sequel to king's novel "the outsider". i think. turns out actually the same characters are in several novels but the outsider is the only one i've read

rat: a writer decides to travel to an isolated cabin to write what he believes will become his masterpiece, he ends up sick and snowed in and sees a talking rat.

➕ i liked mr. harrigan's phone and rat. the former is a pretty solid spooky story, latter took forever with setting up the scene but in the end i rather liked it, it was very surrealist in style. i'm not a big fan of king's honestly, and one of the reasons is that i think his stories always fall flat towards the end. but novellas are short enough that they work better IMO. these two stories were actually some of the most memorable of king's stuff i've read.

➖ okay so. i don't read descriptions or back covers when i pick a book. i use recommendations, i trust whoever decided it's good (well obviously sometimes they aren't but). i did not sign up to read a novella collection. i went into mr. harrigan's phone fully expecting "if it bleeds" to be a book about this story (and wondered what on earth the title could refer to bc nothing was bleeding in it). and then it ended and this chuck shit began. i was so confused. disappointed. i was so invested in that story but then again, it really had nowhere to go anymore from where it ended so i guess i was also wondering what the rest of the book is going to be, someone digging harrigan's body up? lol

➖ i was really really close to dropping this at if it bleeds (the story) because the outsider was one of the worst king books i've read, completely forgettable for me, i didn't remember the characters nor much of the plot and i didn't care, what a drag. i don't say this often about books but that was really a waste of a few hours of my life that i could take back. there were some entertaining elements in the story but eh

⭐ score: 3- -- i wouldn't have read this if i knew what it was.

hell house by richard matheson

[physical book, read in finnish]

four people set out to an infamous haunted house that has already claimed several lives of previous expeditions with its hauntings. they intend to live in the house for one week, find out its secret, and cleanse it. however, the four begin to quickly drift apart with their motivations and intentions about the house.

➕ again, haunted house setting. classic. ➕ there were some good bits… though i can't quite elaborate what they really were. maybe that the goody two shoes wife of the professor man turned out to be a lesbian? idk (then again i'm not entirely sure, like… was that supposed to be a horrific thing of horrors on par with murder here) ➕ goes straight to the point. like immediately. on the first page.

➖ such a boring book. like really. most days i could hardly bring myself to even continue this because i was just so intensely not interested in the story. it's slow, it's uninteresting, the characters aren't likable. it dragged on. most of it was back and forth between two characters arguing whether ghosts are real or not. the ending was stupid and anticlimatic and idk i was only skimming through at that point because i wanted to return this to the library ➖ very unnecessary sexualisation of the female characters. the men are hardly described, one is old and crippled. ➖ another finnish translation that's just an abomination. the punctuation is so terrible in this one that it's difficult to read. there were tons of typos all the time. the translation seemed extremely literal because every she and he had been written as "hän" which any sensible translator will find a way around because you won't know what character we're talking about without the gender marker, so i was lost probably once on each page. really just almost unreadable garbage. based on reviews, the prose of the original is also pretty elementary and bland so it's not just that the translation is boring.

⭐ score: 3- -- maybe almost too high a score now that i look at my impressions. i mean.. it's still a spooky scary ghost story, about a haunted house. i think part of why i grew so bored was that october was over and i was kind of fed up with horror books by then. yeah that does happen, shockingly. so the book itself inherently maybe isn't so terrible, i was just bored. also kinda over haunted houses at this point

the house on the borderland by william hope hodgson

[physical book, read in finnish]

two men go spend their 2-week holiday at a remote location in rural ireland. there they follow a river and find a strange place with a waterfall in an enormous sinkhole and what look like the ruins of a house. from the ruins, they find a manuscript written by a man who used to live in isolation in the house once located above an enormous hole in the ground. the manuscript recites the man's strange experiences in the house and the surrounding area.

➕ if the exorcist felt old, well here we have a horror novel from 1908. i think that's fascinating on itself, and considering that the passage of time is a major element in this story, kind of real life mindfuckery too. ➕ there's something haunting about the whole thing even if nothing much happens. the main character (of the manuscript) is mostly a passive observer which is rare for almost any book but especially contemporary horror. this book is almost like one long visual description of… well… weird things. ➕ i found myself particularly fond of the part with the mirror version of the house in the middle of mountains, with egyptian and indian gods looming in the distance. really powerful image and such a weird one. there's elements and concepts here in this book that you really just don't conjure these days.

➖ that said, something being old and a classic does not inherently make it good to me. this is a confusing book with no real plot. it feels experimental above all else. and i bet it was a hundred times more experimental in its own time. ➖ one third of this entire book is taken up by a sequence where absolute fucking jack shit happens. it's, what, 50 pages (of total 155) of describing in a different way how time is passing and how the sun is going up and down and how this guy is looking at floating spheres in space. i'm serious. this is one third of the book. hodgson must have been really in love with the visual imagery of space and like, planets aligning with each other, because that's all this sequence is. there were also very weird footnotes throughout that part, and there weren't any in any other parts but here there's suddenly these totally pointless "NOTE: IT SEEMS THAT HE MEANS [BLAH BLAH]" whatever, they add nothing to anything, what is the purpose, this part was so lost on me. i get that this author's stuff has been like, a major inspiration for lovecraft for being The Original cosmic horror, but wow it's nonsense. i also don't really like lovecraft so maybe that explains it ➖ all pets in the story die. two dogs and a cat. for no reason ➖ why does the sister character exist. she also does nothing

⭐ score: 3 -- this left a very "wtf did i just read" kind of feeling to me in both a positive and negative sense simultaneously.

home before dark by riley sager

[audiobook, listened in finnish]

a 30-year-old woman's father dies and leaves her a house that their family used to live in when she was five years old. the woman's entire life has been defined by this house and the highly popular "based on a true story" horror book that her father wrote about their life in it, none of which she believes to be actually true. she returns to the house in order to renovate and sell it but also to find out the truth of what happened in this supposedly haunted house and why her family abruptly left it after only 21 days of living there. this also leads her to the path of solving the unsolved disappearance of a then-teenager who occasionally babysat her during those 21 days and vanished on the same day as they fled the house.

➕ interestingly written, there's a changing PoV between the woman (maggie) and the book written by his father, and the two seamlessly fill in for one another, explaining and introducing events and details about the house that the other can then continue expanding on. i thought this worked really well. ➕ haunted houses with creepy past(a)s are just my jam in general ➕ a thoughtful and enjoyable mystery overall. i was totally blindsided by the ending, i was really convinced about the solution from about the half-way point onwards like "it's soooo obvious that this character x did thing y, am i even gonna bother listening to the end?? i'm so gonna call this predictable" aaaand of course my theory was not only wrong but debunked by the story itself as if it was taking a piss on my shit deductive powers

➖ although the setting is good per se, it was also utterly not believable. well, i guess this story could be taking place in a parallel universe where horror is a very undeveloped genre, but a lot of the premise hinges on this book by the father having been suuuch a fucking success that literally everyone has read it, and this is rendered so thoroughly unbelievable by the father's PoV being the book in question and it's. not good. it's not even imaginative or very interesting. maggie's PoV does take a jab at this early on as if to cover this undeniable flaw by her saying that she thinks the book is like totally bad and nothing special. but this kept bothering me throughout, especially since there are parts of the father's book that are literally hyped beforehand, like maggie tells which ones are the most popular and exciting parts of it. and then those parts happen. and they're anticlimatic shit? i was left so disappointed like THAT'S IT? this aspect didn't deliver at all. even the ghosts manage to be boring and uninteresting, the only thing that was somewhat original was a ghost communicating by ringing service bells in the house but even that dragged on a bit much IMO, if this were an actual book nobody would fucking care to read about this shit like there's just no way this kinda garbage would be a bestseller, the more i think about it the less convincing this entire premise is ➖ maggie overall is just unrelatable, unlikable, and kind of.. stupid? as fuck? another thing that the entire premise hinges on is her not believing that any of what her father wrote is true because "she doesn't remember it" but she never ever addresses what she DOES remember about her life from being a five year old, then. like there's no counter for her absolute claims of this not being true because she doesn't remember. so she just has no memory of her childhood at all? but doesn't even once in the narration wonder that perhaps it's because of repressed memories because something bad happened to her?? the fact that she doesn't provide any alternatives to what happened instead of what her father claims happened, idk it annoyed me so much. there are other parts in the story too where she's just 100%sure of things for no real reason, it's like she can't think for herself and question things at all because she just jumps to conclusions at every given opportunity and rejects alternatives. this makes her sound fucking r-slur. both of these minus points overall give this story kind of an unfinished feeling to me. there's a lot of good in it but also some enormous holes in credibility. ➖ the finnish audiobook. jesus christ. maggie is ok but the father's reader is narrating this like he's reading a children's book that he's a bit bored of. while talking about gruesome murder and horrible things that happened to her 5yo daughter. it's. an. abomination. it eats away at the credibility even more and probably also affected the way i felt about the father's book bc it sounds soooo fuckiiing stupiiiiiiddd when read by this dude. really, usually even if i don't really like a narrator, i get used to the voice after several hours. but not this one. one of the worst i've ever listened to

⭐ score: 3+ -- still solid and enjoyable. this would have easily been a four if these minus points listed here weren't so blaring. but i liked being blinsided by the end a lot which made up for it some LMAO ah clearly i haven't read enough murder mystery novels yet if this is my reaction to a riley sager

the ruins by scott smith

[physical book, read in english]

a group of young adults on a vacation in mexico decide to go on an adventure to find their new german friend's missing brother and follow his message to a remote town inhabited by a community of mayans. from there, they follow the leads to the jungle where they find themselves stranded on a vine-covered hill that the natives won't let them leave anymore. after realising that they're stuck there, the group starts to prepare for long-term survival on the hill.

➕ i really like the structure of this book, the way there are no chapters so it all feels like one breathless marathon. the POV keeps jumping between the four american characters, seamlessly continuing the story from the perspective of each in turns. it's very well weaved together. ➕ especially the beginning is so delightfully ominous and builds up the tension very well. there's the innate horror of the constant heat, the jungle, travelling further and further away from safety against their better judgment, a town full of people who don't speak your language, tick-covered dogs whose shit is full of maggots. i'd argue this was the scarier part of the book, really, though i did enjoy the rest as well. then, once the characters are stuck on the hill, the way the situation just gets worse and worse no matter what they do or don't do. it all starts off so innocuous and keeps going wrong like a slowly progressing trainwreck. ➕ this belongs to the genre that i call the until dawn-esque horror and i very much love it. the characters are college students, especially the americans are so incredibly cringe and annoying or stupid or both. some people criticise that they can't enjoy a story if the characters aren't likable and relatable but i'm the opposite, when we're talking about horror where the characters are all doomed to be horribly tortured and probably eventually killed, the more annoying they are the better. but even then, i wouldn't say they're entirely unlikable. the way they try so hard to survive but nothing works made me feel pretty bad for the characters, even if they were stupid af most of the time. [spoiler] why didn't they just set the vines on fire if they had matches on them at all times like seriously ➕ LOVED the very end, the last paragraphs. [spoiler] not just the sense of the circle starting all over again but the fact that the greeks would have come in a couple more days but these stupid shits got themselves killed. love the sting of it

➖ we're always teetering on the edge of racism when the concept of a horror piece is Ooh Spooky Weird Exotic Native Americans (or an equivalent from other continents) Who Are Utterly Incomprehensible And Cryptic And Have Spooky Scary Native American Habits And Ritual Sites. wooo rural mexico, much spook, look how poor and savage they are and how they're not like us civilised white people at all, woah. like literally the mayans in this story are murderers. it makes sense in the context of the story and it's like, entirely the dumbass white kids' fault for going further and further, but context will not erase racism. ➖ this maybe dragged on a bit too long. after the promising beginning and the horrific shaft episode, things kinda slow down and get less interesting. especially [spoiler] once it's made explicit that all the horror is caused by the vines. but i did like how eric's character arc went down, his demise was so fucking gruesome, 10/10 ➖ i found out after i finished reading that there's a movie made of this (and the trailer looks like horseshit) and after seeing that i went like yeah… this did feel like a book written so it could be made into a movie. although i liked it, and i haven't really read books of this format, it's obviously the horror teen flick pattern here.

⭐ score: 4- -- overall i enjoyed this, and especially the beginning was genuinely creepy with a great atmosphere. i would have preferred if the whole story had stayed more like that, where the horror is something very real and tangible, not [spoilers] spooky magical vines that can talk, i could have lived without the supernatural elements introduced here. even worse, the movie trailer talks about wow woah a sacrifice site of the native americans yeah ok i'm glad you left that out in the original, scott

the exorcist by william peter blatty

[physical book, read in finnish]

the young daughter of a famous actress starts displaying strange symptoms, and when doctors fail to give her any answers about the girl's condition, the mother starts to believe her daughter is possessed and wants a priest to conduct an exorcism on her. the priest coming to rescue isn't convinced about her being possessed at all.

➕ i'm way too much of a millenial to find the exorcist movie scary, rather i always found it a bit silly, and was pleased to find that the original book isn't nearly as unintentionally comical. there's no "your mother sucks cock in hell" in the book. it's a lot tamer about the possession scenes which actually makes it better IMO.

➖ that said, this is kind of a boring book. and yes someone had put this on a list of "actually scary books" or whatever for some reason, but since i don't find the movie scary either i don't really know what i expected. nothing, i guess. a lot of the plot consists of karras going back and forth whether regan is possessed or not, which i don't remember the movie being about to this degree. this book is like 50% that, 25% regan, and 25% the fat detective going around solving dennings's murder and feeling exhausted. there's no real dramatic arc, random things just happen, the possession scenes always end abruptly and anticlimatically by someone just leaving the room and that's the end. merrin just enters the book at some random point and immediately dies. i feel like he was much more of a dramatic character in the movie, i mean the whole thing is supposedly named after him but um yes. it's all really really mundane, which in a way is interesting, like this is probably how a situation like this would realistically go down, it's not dramatic in any way. but that's just not interesting to read in a book ➖ the finnish translation is abysmal, it borderline doesn't make any sense at times. it's old of course, and i'm not sure how much of it is just from the original english which is also old, but i got the feeling that the finnish translator simply didn't understand a lot of the english expressions and references and translated them literally, there's just so many lines that mean nothing. it's bizarre. especially dyer and the detective, they speak 90% nonsense in finnish, like wut. i couldn't even tell what impression the characters were supposed to give because nothing makes sense, it's like, dyer sounds like he's got a stroke all the time so you're like, this is a very off-putting character that i don't like nor understand, and then chris apparently finds him totally charming. okay ➖ speaking of dyer, why is he here. the more i think about it, the entire story makes so little sense. nothing's really explained or laid out explicitly. i'm not sure if this is worth even the three stars i gave it and it has nothing to do with the book being so "old" that it's "not scary enough". i don't mind old books. (though it's true that someone not being christian and having explosive diarrhea isn't exactly scary IMO) this felt like more of a study on why events that may seem supernatural at first sight can be scientifically explained. though those scientific explanations include that telekinesis and telepathy are totally real and not at all supernatural which sure was Interesting

✨ score: 3-

the last anniversary by liane moriarty

[audiobook, listened in english]

a young, divorced woman named sophie hears that she's inherited the house of aunt connie, the matriarch of a family famous for the mysterious disappearance of a couple who left a baby behind. sophie moves to the house and starts mingling with aunt connie's large family, not all of whom are happy that connie left the house to an outsider. the PoV mostly alternates between sophie and another young woman in the family, occasionally featuring other people too. (somehow the dead aunt connie is one of the PoVs as well)

➕ really pleasantly fleshed out characters ➕ i enjoy stories about one large family and its several generations ➕ captivating storytelling ➕ in a way i liked the Big Mysteries of this novel having been so mundane…

➖ …but i did not start this book because i wanted to read heart-warming chick lit about relationship problems and post-partum depression. i picked it because it was recommended in a list titlted something like "the best mystery novels to read this summer!!" or whatever. i've come to realise this was not a list of "who done it" murder mysteries or even anything similar. the "mystery" in this book was the munro baby mystery that the family is famous for that's eventually revealed (but again, even after the reveal there's 1½ hours left of the book, so it's not the main focus at all), and maybe the question of why connie left the house to sophie but that's never really answered so, never mind. so this was extremely underwhelming against those expectations. ➖ there are a lot of switching PoVs, sometimes in the middle of a chapter, and it's sometimes hard to keep track of who we are even talking about and when. especially in audiobook format where they didn't leave any gap between changes in PoV. so it just continues, and if i'm not listening sharply enough, i'll miss that there even was a change and nothing will make sense for a bit. i really dislike this lack of silent gaps in audiobooks with only one reader. ➖ one of the main characters, sophie, i found rather aggravating and unrelatable. or more like, she was portrayed as very relatable in the beginning, she's almost 40 and single and feels like shit about it and has a blushing problem, i thought she'd be kind of a socially awkward character and easy to relate to. the story then goes on to describe that oh she's actually the most beautiful girl in the world and adored by everyone and several men (AND a woman) in the story just fall for her extremely easily, even though [spoiler] she doesn't end up together with any of them, but still.

⭐ score: 3 -- not bad, just not what i wanted. i don't really even have anything else to say. this book would probably resonate a lot more with people who related to the two main women more.

chocolat by joanne harris

[physical book, read in finnish]

a young woman who's spent her entire life travelling settles down in a small town in france with her daughter. she sets up a chocolate shop opposite the church, angering the local priest who can't stand the thought of the townspeople suddenly indulging in chocolate instead of god. the woman, vianne, couldn't care less about the opposition she's facing and ends up becoming part of the community, helping many of the troubled people and forming friendships with them.

➕ you can see from my goodreads scoring that i'm pretty picky with literature, but when i actually like a book i notice it early on, and this is one of those. this was a joy to read, not just because i love chocolate but i enjoyed the storytelling, all the little moments and poetic descriptions of food and drink. i'm also a sucker for these kinds of stories about small close-knit villages with a set of characters and archetypes who are all a bit strange in their own ways, and stories where the main character makes others' lives better. this also subverted pretty much all my expectations, i thought (especially based on the english-language cover on goodreads??) that this would be a romance story so i was expecting a tsundere kind of deal where the priest and vianne fall in love, but no. and i'm glad it wasn't so. i think the movie version might be that? i haven't ever seen it ➕ the language was so descriptive, this was the perfect book for reading out loud to myself because it was very easy to give life to the characters and their lines. i also had fun pronouncing all the french. i know that's not really about the book itself but it's about my reading experience so it goes here anyway ➕ i've read dozens of mystery/suspense/horror books in my life but this one had a much more thrilling ending climax scene compared to most of those. i never would have thought that [spoiler] it would be so intense to read about an embarrassing priest hogging a mountain of chocolate in a moment of frenzied sugar-lust ➕ i need a good cup of hot chocolate so bad

➖ while i mostly like this kind of poetic prose, i feel like sometimes the writing could have been more explicit instead because i didn't quite understand what some parts even meant. and i read the finnish translation. ➖ didn't fully understand vianne's character, she was unhappy that her own mother made her travel throughout her childhood but then when she had a child of her own, she decided to also drag her around instead of allowing her to settle down and make friends? so the little girl has to have an imaginary friend instead who [spoiler] is beginning to disappear towards the end because she's finally made real friends but "now pantoufle is coming back bc oops i'm deciding we're gonna take off again!" not really mother of the year material, and she's supposed to be like this holy angel of goodness so it doesn't really all add up. i didn't really get that part. ➖ the PoV alternates between vianne and reynaud without any implication which one we're talking about so the first few lines of each new chapter is a confusing mess. ➖ i kind of would have wanted the "evil" characters to have a redemption at the end but there was none. not even for caroline despite one good moment towards the end but no. ➖ they fed chocolate to a dog

⭐ score: 4- -- not quite a perfect four because of the extensive list of things that still bothered me. it's not a perfect book, but a charming little one regardless.

hostage by clare mackintosh

[audiobook, listened in finnish]

a story about a family of three. the divorced parents are a stewardess and a police, and they co-parent a small adopted daughter with special needs. they're victims to an ecoterrorist ploy by an activist group, and most of the story is covered by the mother boarding the first direct flight from london to sydney that's hijacked by the terrorists, and the father and daughter are stuck in their own home.

➕ i liked the daughter (sofia). ➕ also liked the aviation theme. a long flight does make a good claustrophobic setting for a thriller. ➕ there's a (minor) ukrainian character. yes that's a plus because it means the author was aware of ukraine existing even before 2022 ➕ i guess this was decently exciting, i did want to keep listening. interesting character dynamics, lots of little details to chew on.

➖ that said, i sure have read more exciting thrillers in my life. i think the biggest pitfall of this one for me is that the book tries to be all intelligent and clever and is just kind of dumb as a result. i don't know if the pacing was a bit unusual on purpose but it takes half of the book to get to the thriller part, and once it's over there's still one and a half hour left -- in other words, there's a whole lot of just the main characters' drama and stuff about the girl in there. at some points i felt like i was losing a sense of what the main point of this story even was. felt very preachy on social issues and global warming, at times the tone slipped to moralising territory that was very in-your-face and didn't feel like part of the story, just the author wanting to hammer in her points. ➖ this is what i call a clickbait thriller, there's a shocker opening scene that's designated to keep you reading because it's basically promising that something exciting is going to happen eventually, no matter how long it takes. in this case this opening cliffhanger was unrelated to the main plot. so.. like.. okay. yeah that's a clickbait novel for you ➖ as a person who writes a lot of first-person PoV, one of the most infuriating and just unrealistic and poorly flowing things you can do is repeatedly cut the person telling the story short from getting to the fucking point. like in this case, the many many many many instances of mina's PoV teasing that something Ooh So Horriblebad happened in her first training flight, but she's deliberately kept from just fucking saying what it was to keep the suspense until the end and then it's not even anything that interesting so it was like, okay so you just kept this from the reader all this time so they wouldn't stop reading because you had no confidence in your story being interesting enough. that's the signal i get from that. if you ask me, the reason a first-person PoV is effective is because it's basically totally unrestrained, it's the character's flow of thought as it comes in the moment. it shouldn't be used to drop some fucking breadcrumb teasers because real people don't think in teasers. they will just think about the thing, full stop. if you can't write that in a way that feels like it's a real person talking then idk don't use the PoV ➖ the whole ecoterrorist concept falls pretty flat because the facts were wrong. one of the terrorists' talking point is that if fewer people used airplanes and more used ships, the world would be saved, therefore all aviation should be stopped. i don't know if the author made these motherfuckers dumb fucks on purpose or maybe she should google which are worse, cruise ships or flights. ➖ there were also too many of these terrorist characters and i pretty quickly lost track of who's who. i feel like they were introduced very vividly but then the existence of them all was kinda inconsequential. ➖ especially the part with the dad and sofia being stuck in the house felt almost childish in its constant bombardment of uuuu but then there was ANOTHER DANGEROUS SITUATION!!! like it's the kind of juvenile storytelling where cartoon characters run from one trouble to another ➖ the end part… i dunno, i didn't really like where it went there.

⭐ score: 3- -- this wasn't a bad book……. but i just really didn't like it personally. my opinion was also heavily affected from the start because i thought i was reading a mystery and then this was more like just bam bam bam action action action (when it eventually got there after five thousand years, that is). that's what you get by using recommendations. the finnish translation was also very flat. i can't judge the original based on that but then again, sometimes a translation alone is enough to convey that a book is beautifully written.

the martian chronicles by ray bradbury

[physical book, read in english]

an anthology of short related stories about the human colonisation of mars around the year 2000. starts from a couple of first expeditions that failed, then (briefly) moves on to successful colonial life in space.

➕ the most beautifully written book i've read in a long while, very nice poetic prose ➕ people in this book behave exactly how white people would if they were suddenly let on a new planet, namely absolutely infuriatingly. it was a frustrating read but a great one because yeah, that's what white people would do. expect to be celebrated as heroes when they arrive, then proceed to wipe the ingenious folks' towns and expect them to be christians. ➕ since the chapters were short stories, this was a very fast read. ➕ this is apparently a fix-up novel, meaning the stories were originally separate and were later brought together to create a more or less coherent novel. there's still a few weird aspects that don't quite work if you don't realise it's a fix-up, but overall it's fascinating. ➕ i'm not really much of a sci-fi person and especially not fond of stuff situated in space, but i didn't find this one off-putting for the theme.

➖ so… this is an old book, originally from 1950s. i'm not sure if i just missed some cue or if that's part of the social criticism, but… why are all the people in mars americans ??? i feel like there was some implication in the early chapters that "because of course americans would be the first to do something like travel to mars, therefore they came from america" but, for the rest of the book we only see american characters throughout. not a single person from some other country came in? really? as a european reading this it really kind of broke the immersion for me throughout, but if that's the entire point, that americans are just so full of themselves that they hoarded space travel and colonialism and made the new planet just another america with cities named new new york and whatever, then i accept it. plus basically all the characters are either weird, crazy, or unlikable in some other way so i'm fine with them all being american, actually. but from the point of view of how space colonialism like this would "realistically" work, i just don't think it would be average american-only families moving there to make their white picket fences in mars, i think it would be the super rich from all around the world. ah well i guess this wasn't the agenda of these novels (which, again, were originally separate). it's still a minus from me tho because i dislike america-centrism and it felt lazy and like no thought was put into what world would actually be like in 2000. the use of n word as if the society would be the exact same in this year felt like no thought was put into whether things would actually change in this time, yeeaah. i feel like, don't set a story in 2000 if you're going to write it like it's the 50s still. some things just don't sit right with me ➖ i also haven't read much sci-fi and especially not older sci-fi for the aforementioned reason… but the martians in this book were way too human-like and. like. they had human genders, heteronormative lifestyles (and were very american to begin with.. the not-human shaped aliens talked about sins to the priest with the implication 'oh we're way ahead of you and have been good christians before you were even born' ???? ok. i'm not sure if i just misunderstood that?????) even if a book is from the 50s, i feel like authors surely had enough imagination to come up with something other than this? or maybe this was part of the colonial aspect and maybe the martians were very human-like because they're like native americans who get wiped out from their own planet when white americans come and take their lands, i don't know. i guess, as someone who doesn't usually read sci-fi, i was confused by whether this is more of a satire about how much white americans suck, or a story about outer space and what martians and their world and way of life in mars could be like. it was my over-arching problem with this book and persisted to the very end where [spoiler] apparently it's again just some average middle class american family that's the only, literally ONLY people who move to mars to escape nuclear war? really??? it's just not feasible. it was kind of really fucking stupid, to be frank. ➖ the story about the guy who lives in the mountains and one week finds everyone's gone down in the city and answers a phone to find a woman calling it, and he goes all horny for her voice and decides to find her and has all these fantasies, and when they finally meet she's described as having a fat face and she's eating chocolate and spends all her time in beauty salons and he's immediately disgusted by her and proceeds to run away so he doesn't need to associate with her despite them being the only two humans left in mars. this was the most blatantly misogynistic garbage i've read in ages? why is it in the book, why does it even exist??? what's the point

⭐ score: 3 -- the writing itself would have been a 5 buuuuuut i had way too many problems with the book as a whole to score it any higher than this.

the guest list by lucy foley

[audiobook, listened in english]

there's a murder at the wedding of a famous influencer and a tv star on a remote island. the first-person PoV chapters from the bride, her sister, her friend's wife, the bestman, and the wedding organiser gradually reveal how the seemingly perfect couple is all fucked up behind the scenes.

➕ classic murder mystery setting on a remote island in a storm ➕ the changing PoVs keep things interesting ➕ high re-read value for a murder mystery story

➖ i read this after "the hunting party" by the same author and it's basically the same book but worse. this one came first and has a smaller setting, so i assume this was a test run. in a way i have respect for an author choosing a format they'll stick to as their personal brand, but this was a bit too similar. the setting and location is the same (a remote location in ireland and a storm comes in so nobody can leave), the structure is the same (timeline jumping where it's established in the beginning that the venue hosts have discovered there's been a murder and instead of anyone solving it, we go back in time to reveal the events in first-person PoVs), the last 30 minutes or so of the book are packed with twists after twists after twists, even the characters feel the same and are rather basic charicatures and not exactly likeable or even interesting. these novels aren't very creative, and since all the twists and revelations are at the very end, there's little tension before those final chapters. it's a lot of just generic relationship drama in both this and hunting party. ➖ uninspiring writing.

⭐ score: 2½ -- although nothing special and too similar to hunting party, it was still a decently entertaining little murder mystery story. could have liked it more if it had been my first book from the author.

1827 by mike pohjola

[physical book, read in finnish]

a fictional novel about a real fire that burned almost the entire city of turku in 1827. consists of a first-person PoV frame story about the author writing the book based on some historical evidence he found. first half of the book sets up a "who gonna do it" mystery of introducing several parties who want to burn the city, second half is about the fire.

➕ takes place in turku, lots of historical trivia about the city ➕ historical political intrigue, name drops of real historical people ➕ easy and fast to read

➖ felt somehow naïve, the word that comes to mind from the storytelling is "boyish". kind of clumsy, some very campy fighting scenes, felt like a script for a dumb action movie at times (which is maybe explained by the fact that this was originally written for the manuscript of a rock musical or something??) ➖ some of the characters are totally irrelevant, especially one of the main characters which is kind of a problem in a novel of this length (500 pages). the main hero is this posh med student boy whom the reader is supposed to find sympathetic but the story starts with him dragging some guy in a bag across finland, and then the guy in the bag turns out to be some kind of weird väinämöinen-by-proxy and he does absolutely nothing for the story and i have no idea why he's there. ➖ i liked the turku trivia but at the same time it was a bit excessive at times. places described in unnecessary detail as if the author just wanted to flex his knowledge on the city. ➖ the frame story about the author feels incomplete and kind of irrelevant too

⭐ score: 2 -- not good, but not horrible either. decent if you don't take it too seriously, but then the topic of the story is serious so you don't know what to think in the end. my main takeaway is that i'm now inspired to go read some books on the history of turku, i hope they have illustrations from before the fire.