Cover illustration for Eliza Chan's Fathomfolk! I enjoyed working on this piece so much.

Most anticipated 2024 books!

I am anticipating a lot of books. To keep track of them, I made a 2024 tbr shelf. It has 123 books. I certainly won't be reading all 123, but since I can sort the list by release date it helps me keep track of new releases. Unfortunately, 123 is so many that half of them I don't even remember adding them or what they're about, so I decided to boil it down to 10 most anticipated new books and 10 sequels.

New

Faebound - Saara El-Arifi - Jan 18

Voyage of the Damned - Frances White - Jan 18

Fathomfolk - Eliza Chan - Feb 27

A Botanical Daughter - Noah Medlock - Mar 19

Otherwordly - FT Lukens - Apr 2

The Sins on their Bones - Laura R. Samotin - May 7

Not for the Faint of Heart - Lex Croucher - May 7

The Honey Witch - Sydney J. Shields - May 14

Running Close to the Wind - Alexandra Rowland - Jun 11

Swordcrossed - Freya Marske - Oct 10

Sequels

The Cursed Rose - Leslie Vedder (book 3 of the Bone Spindle, final book) - Feb 6

The Eternal Ones - Namina Forna (book 3 of Deathless trilogy) - Feb 13

Merciless Saviors - H.E. Edgmon (sequel to Godly Heathens, final book) - Apr 16

Heavenly Tyrant - Xiran Jay Zhao (sequel to Iron Widow, final book) - Apr 30

Mirrored Heavens - Rebecca Roanhorse (book 3 of Between Earth and Sky trilogy) - Jun 4

Hearts that Cut - Kika Hatzopoulou (sequel to Threads that Bind) - Jun 4

The Unrelenting Earth - Kritika H. Rao (Book 2 in the Rages trilogy) - Jun 18

The Lotus Empire - Tasha Suri (book 3 in the Burning Kingdoms trilogy) - Jul 18

Celestial Monsters - Aiden Thomas (sequel to the Sunbearer Trials, final book) - Sept 3

Alecto the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir (book 4 in the Locked Tomb series) - release dat unknown, likely late 2024

Today's library reservation pick-up 📚

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett & Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan ✨️

Can't wait to dive in!

ARC Review: Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan

**The links in this post are for the book’s StoryGraph page for reference. I do not receive any compensation for clicking links!** Book: Fathomfolk  Author: Eliza Chan  Pages: 432  Source: Orbit  Publisher: Orbit  Genre: Fantasy  Publication Date: February 29, 2024  Summary:  Welcome to Tiankawi – shining pearl of human civilization and a safe haven for those fleeing civil unrest. Or at…

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April 2024 TBR

Hello friends!! Welcome to the April 2024 TBR. A post where I will attempt to intuit what I feel like reading for the month of April. AJDNFBDJFSKNAJKBCH… How in the world is it almost April already?? Honestly I think this year just needs to calm down. Also, this means that I really need to write up my quarterly check ins and a bunch of other posts… Maybe it’s a long weekend job… Maybe I can get…

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Fathomfolk | ARC Review

Thank you to Orbit and Netgalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest review. This does not change my opinion in anyway. Book: Fathomfolk (Drowned World 1) by Eliza ChanRelease Date: March 5th Tags: Fantasy | Supernatural Creatures | Mermaids | Dragons | Asian Mythology | Underwater Life Trigger/Content Warnings: Violence | Terrorism Welcome to Tiankawi – shining pearl of human…

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Welcome to Tiankawi – shining pearl of human civilization and a safe haven for those fleeing civil unrest. Or at least, that’s how it first appears.   But in the semi-flooded city, humans are, quite literally, on peering down from skyscrapers and aerial walkways on the fathomfolk — sirens, seawitches, kelpies and kappas—who live in the polluted waters below.   For half-siren Mira, promotion to captain of the border guard means an opportunity to reform. At last, she has the ear of the city council and a chance to lift the repressive laws that restrict fathomfolk at every turn. But if earning the trust and respect of her human colleagues wasn't hard enough, everything Mira has worked towards is put in jeopardy when a water dragon is exiled to the city.   New arrival Nami is an aristocratic water dragon with an opinion on everything. Frustrated by the lack of progress from Mira's softly-softly approach in gaining equality, Nami throws her lot in with an anti-human extremist group, leaving Mira to find the headstrong youth before she makes everything worse.   And pulling strings behind everything is Cordelia, a second-generation sea-witch determined to do what she must to survive and see her family flourish, even if it means climbing over the bodies of her competitors. Her political game-playing and underground connections could disrupt everything Nami and Mira are fighting for.   When the extremists sabotage the annual boat race, violence erupts, as does the clampdown on fathomfolk rights. Even Nami realises her new friends are not what they seem. Both she and Mira must decide if the cost of change is worth it, or if Tiankawi should be left to drown.

BAD GIRLS

My Top 5 Best Books of 2023

Scrolling through bookstagram's endless reels of folks bemoaning the state of readerly types - new publications are disposable crap, everyone else is reading too much, etc - it might seem like 2023 was a terrible year for books. But, of all my longlists, this one was the longest, and the one I had the most trouble cutting down to only six. I read 119 books in 2023 (you can read my round-up of my five worst here), and here are my five favourites. Every single one of these books deserves to top your tbr for 2024.

Read the post on my blog!

Honourable Mention: Yellowface - R. F. Kuang

R.F. Kuang has figured out how to use irony and its a good look on her. Kuang’s political messaging is great — I particularly enjoyed her depiction of the publishing industry’s white fragility as deeply stupid — but we already knew that. I would expect nothing less from the author of Babel. The think that elevates Yellowface in particular is Kuang’s self-awareness in depicting Athena, the Asian writer whose novel the protagonist steals, as a talented literary wunderkind, but also as frustrating and not necessarily innocent in the problem of who is allow to tell ethically-loaded stories. I’m definitely looking forwards to her next project.

Fifth Place: Small Worlds - Caleb Azumah Nelson

This is the diverse romance novel you’ve been looking for. This is the inspiring hopepunk novel you’ve been looking for. This is the insightful and emotional coming-of-age novel you’ve been looking for. Small Worlds is all the more comforting and heart-warming because it is primarily about persistence and joy in the face of crushing personal failure and devastating systemic violence. Caleb Azumh Nelson’s motif of relationships in which both partners must break up in order to become the kind of people who can be in a long-term relationship with each other is a kind of romance arc I unexpectedly love. This entry in particular gets extra credit for its incredibly good audiobook adaptation. The audiobook is narrated by the author, whose southeast London accent and obvious emotional connection to novel make it the ideal way to read.

Fourth Place: Breasts and Eggs - Mieko Kawakami

After a couple of truly miserable memoirs this year I declared that I simply did not want to hear writers talk about motherhood. I spoke too soon because then I read this. Breasts and Eggs is in incredible reflection on being a woman that has something to offer if you love being a woman, if you hate it, or if you feel ambivalent about it. I don’t like children and can’t imagine ever wanting one — to the point that I find the endless angsting about the conflict between writing and motherhood faintly nauseating — but I found that this was the first book about being a mother that had something interesting to say even for people who never want to be mothers. Kawakami’s novel-in-translation has (for the anglophone reader) a sense of strangeness both in form and content. The book’s approach to gender and family is often intimately familiar, but just as often introduces a perspective that is deeply strange to a western reader, provoking us to think about our own assumptions about the importance of family. I particularly liked the scene in which protagonist Natsu visits a bath house and encounters a woman in a relationship with a trans man in the female section of the bath. Natsu struggles through a long thought process of whether she ought to be offended or not. Would she be similarly offended if she encountered cis lesbian PDA?

Third Place: Penance - Eliza Clark

For me, Penance was intensely personal, like looking back on my own teenagerhood. I also grew up as a deeply strange child, something that was immediately recognized by the other children. That feeling of somehow being a different species from other kids, not doing anything right and not understanding how it is wrong, is something that this novel absolutely nails. That might be a strange association for a true crime story about a horrible schoolgirl murder. This is the dramatic extension of what could happen to five people who were once very lonely little girls, and I think reading too much into the ‘how could they do something like this?’ of it all is missing the forest for the trees and playing into the true crime gaze that the book criticizes. Clark is interested both in true crime that dehumanizes its subject matter, and true crime the aspires to humanize and platform them. Is it any more ethical to demand access to someone’s life out of love?

Second Place: He Who Drowned the World - Shelley Parker-Chan

Shelley Parker-Chan’s The Radiant Emperor duology is the best queer fantasy series out there. Period. He Who Drowned the World takes its engagement with gender and sexuality to another level. At least for me, there is something much more meaningful and impactful to the theme of gender as something performed in spite of difficulties, distrust, and lack of acknowledgement. Parker-Chan understands that gender is often unpleasant or even hateful. This isn’t a book for a brave new utopia where every bra fits on the first try, it’s for the present, where the wrong bra gives you a fibrous lump. If She Who Became the Sun was Zhu embracing her gender, the sequel is about Ouyang’s often deeply upsetting ability to accept his. His hatred of any femininity, first and foremost his own, isn’t an easy read, but I found there was something incredibly resonant in it to my own ambivalent feelings towards femininity. No one else depicts self-hatred this well.

First Place: Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

As soon as I finished Chain-Gang All-Stars I knew it would be my book of the year. I read a lot of great books but this blew every single one of them out the water. It is Gladiator by way of The Shawshank Redemption by way of professional wrestling. It’s the scifi sequel to The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay’s 13th. It’s the best love story of the year. Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exploration of the humanity of inmates, who, in this world, are objectified both due to their involvement in the criminal justice system (as in ours) and from the gaze of sports and reality entertainment. It’s hard to decide which aspect of this book is most technically impressive. I usually don’t like when a political novel tries to comment on too many different issues, but this book deftly balances deep and effective discussions on a huge range of topics. I especially appreciated its engagement with an inmates’ personal feelings of guilt and culpability within a carceral system that doesn’t care at all about remediating the harm they have caused. This deft political messaging is combined with an insightful depiction of the ambivalent success of professional athletes, multidimensional characters, and a touching romance. My favourite part of the book was how effectively it traps the reader. I understand and agree with all the condemnations of the exploitation inherent to entertainment in watching primarily BIPOC athletes destroy their health (this is about wrestling but also boxing and American football), but I still found myself thinking about just how incredible this book would be as a TV series. The use of complicity as a theme is unparalleled.

Year of Lists

February Books

Penance by Eliza Clark * 3/5 - would recommend for anyone who's into true crime: podcasting, documentaries, reporting. It's an interesting study of how we approach tragedies, with all the expected questions of what is truth, who has a right to tell a story, is there a respectful way of writing about tragedy, etc. It feels like a book born out of the question "what would In Cold Blood be if it was written today"? It's more like an exercise or a project than a gripping story. For those willing, there is a lot to unpack.

Beloved by Toni Morrison * 5/5 - Toni Morrison was an exceptional writer. From Zadie Smith's introduction to this edition: "All readers and writers are indebted to her for the space she created". Beloved is one of those books that deserves all the praise and hype it got, if not even more. I can't even begin to explore the nuances of the narrative, language, characterisation. I will just say that it reads urgent, dreamlike, true, affecting. And, from the foreword by Morrison: "To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way".

"I husband that moment on the pier, the deceptive river, the instant awareness of possibility, the loud heart kicking, the solitude, the danger. And the girl with the nice hat. Then the focus."

Flèche by Mary Jean Chan * 5/5 - it's often I rate poetry collections a 5*, but it's rare it's so clear a 5*. It's just superb.

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara * 3/5 - Yanagihara's books could all be studied. The craft is always incredible as is the depth of the storytelling. I just wasn't crazy about this one, but, she writes, I read.

Open Throat by Henry Hoke (ToB Read) * 5/5 - a moving, hungry, feverish dream of a book

i’m gonna repurpose an old and make a k p*p alt pls look away

《女人俱樂部》 | 《Never Dance Alone》 (2014)

Had a recent rewatch after a good number of years. Still as enjoyable as ever. I was not wrong to include this as one of my favourite series from TVB, if not the ONLY one still, from post 2010 back then!

Eight years ago (has it been so long?!) when it first aired, this series pleasantly surprised me with its strong script, better than usual production standards and strong performances from almost everyone in the cast, even the young rookies playing the younger versions of the seven main female characters.

(TVB series were already steadily becoming irredeemable rubbish a few years prior, so going in with low, very low expectations and finding myself actually truly enjoying this series came as an unexpected welcome!)

That this series boasted the return of some actors — namely, Carman Lee 李若彤, Rachel Lee aka Loletta Lee 李麗珍, Fennie Yuen 袁潔瑩, Angie Cheong 張慧儀, Gloria Yip 葉蘊儀, Elvina Kong 江欣燕 and Flora Chan 陳慧珊 — who hadn't been seen onscreen for some years then, actors of whom I have fond memories of from my childhood, that was icing on the cake!

(Sadly, what was thought to be a second wind for some of these actors was not to be. With the exception of Carman Lee who had been and still is active in the Mainland China market, the others have more or less gone back into oblivion…)

And now, eight years later, this series' themes of time and friendships found, lost, and found again (if really lucky), are still as relatable and as relevant as ever.

Perhaps more so now than before, as I get even closer in age to the characters on the older side in this story.

Unofficially ‘inspired’ by the 2011 Korean film, “Sunny”), the story is well paced, the two different timelines of the late '80s and 2013 are interspersed well and complemented without over-shadowing each other.

A TV series also allowed for more development of the main characters (of which there were more than usual too) in this story and gave an audience time to know them better.

In all honesty, I thought this adaptation was better than the original movie in a lot of ways; I much preferred the lighter set up of “Never Dance Alone” for one, unlike the original where things tethered on the imminent passing of one of the friends, and the resolution for the friends in the movie had too much of a ‘fairy godmother saves the day with monetary and other tangible rewards’ cliché to it.

NDA's happier and more relatable conclusion resonates better with me.

I also appreciated the fact that efforts were made to cast younger actors who physically resembled their older counterparts. For one, it made relating between the past and present that much easier, and two, it also indicated that if someone in production cared enough about a not-too-crucial detail like that, it probably meant this production had more sincerity and earnestness in delivering a series to be remembered (which they succeeded, in my opinion).

In a culture where there is little room for fussiness, and TV series are churned out in quantity over quality — most meant to be watched and quickly forgotten as soon as the next one comes along — and certainly made more for entertainment value than any real artistic merit, “Never Dance Alone” stands out in being not just another ‘time-filler’ series but a series that strived to tell a good story and has much heart in it, even if its heart was transplanted from a donor named ‘Sunny’.

↑ Third bar from the top shows one of M Club's competitors to be a group called ‘Sunny’! Easter egg? :)

TVB may not have officially acknowledged ‘being inspired’ by the Korean film, but someone in production seemed to have stealthily done so through a blink-and-miss-it shot of the scoreboard from the dance competition the characters took part in in the finale episode.

Expone estudiante de la UAG investigación en Nueva York

Expone estudiante de la UAG investigación en Nueva York #PeriodismoParaTi #SociedadNoticias #IngenierosCiviles #Egresados #UAG #PabloLemus #Guadalajara #Declaraciónanual @GuadalajaraGob @PabloLemusN @UAG_Oficial

Estudiante de la UAG expone investigación en Nueva York Daniel Reséndiz | Corresponsal Guadalajara, Jalisco.- Christhopher Diego Nicholson Becerra, estudiante de cuarto año de la licenciatura de Cirujano Dentista de la Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (UAG), presentó una investigación desarrollada en esta institución en el Greater New York Dental Meeting, en los Estados Unidos. El alumno de…

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Today's booktography Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan 🌊

January Wrap-Up & February TBR

**Links below are for the books’ StoryGraph pages for reference. I do not receive any compensation for clicking links.** The first month of 2024 is already behind us, and now, it’s time for a recap of what I read in January 2024.  I also want to take this opportunity to review where I am on keeping up with my reading goals, compare what I wanted to read to what I actually read in January, and…

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Happy February! Here are bisexual books out in February!

Books listed:

An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson Mewing by Chloe Spencer Hannah Tate, Beyond Repair by Laura Piper Lee The Friendship Study by Ruby Barrett You Had Me at Merlot by Melissa Brayden Sunbringer (Fallen Gods, #2) by Hannah Kaner Signals Volume 2 by Nika (can be read online on Tapas too) A Vicious Game (The Halfling Saga, #3) by Melissa Blair Breaks Volume 1 by Emma Vieceli, Malin Rydén Mortgage of Convenience by Dani McLean Letters to Her Love by Katherine Grant Projections by S.E. Porter Truthfully, Yours by Caden Armstrong Rupture in Total Eclipse (Sun & Moon Duet Book 2) by Sem Thornwood It's Ours to Write by Blanche Maze The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1) by Robert Jackson Bennett Big Date Energy by Bethany Rutter Tune Me Up (Bisexual Sing Team Book 3) by Renée Dahlia Snowed In With Summer by Tiana Warner Witch Boyfriend Wanted by Colette Rivera The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat by Camille Gomera-Tavarez King Cheer (Arden High) by Molly Horton Booth, Stephanie Kate Strohm, Jamie Green Prove It by Stephanie Hoyt Falling For You by Mariah Ankenman Disciples of Chaos (Seven Faceless Saints, #2) by M.K. Lobb Wine Ghost Goes to Hell by Sage Coffey In Plain Sight: A Summit Springs Novel by Siobhan Muir Who We Are in Real Life by Victoria Koops Fathomfolk (Drowned World, #1) by Eliza Chan The Absinthe Underground by Jamie Pacton

Please me know if I missed any books 💖