The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances

The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances

By The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman)

This is not just a book about running. It's a book about cupcakes. It's a book about suffering.

It's a book about gluttony, vanity, bliss, electrical storms, ranch dressing, and Godzilla. It's a book about all the terrible and wonderful reasons we wake up each day and propel our bodies through rain, shine, heaven, and hell. 

From #1 New York Times best-selling author, Matthew Inman, AKA The Oatmeal, comes this hilarious, beautiful, poignant collection of comics and stories about running, eating, and one cartoonist's reasons for jogging across mountains until his toenails fall off.

This one was kind of a gimme, as it's not technically about a running club, but it is very much (except for the digression on Japanese murder hornets) about running. And I picked it up as I've started running again as well and thought it might be helpful, humorous, or thought provoking. Unfortunately, I don't think I would say it's any of those three, but it was easy enough to read and inoffensive.

I'd read, and reasonably enjoyed, the book he did on Why My Cat is More Impressive Than Your Baby, but this one wasn't nearly as amusing, probably intentionally. It ends up reading more like illustrated diary entries than comics. The best part is the story about the vending machine and the hornets, but there's no punchline, just an attempt to make sense of the force that drives us to run, and that's just not what I want from The Oatmeal. 

The good news is that it was very short and easy to read, so it's not like it was a waste of time. And fwiw, people I know who love his work were also chortling at this one too, so I think we'll just chalk this up to the wrong book at the wrong time.

 

17: A Book About A Run Club

The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King
By Carissa Broadbent

In the wake of the Kejari, everything Oraya once thought to be true has been destroyed. A prisoner in her own kingdom, grieving the only family she ever had, and reeling from a gutting betrayal, she no longer even knows the truth of her own blood. She’s left only with one certainty: she cannot trust anyone, least of all Raihn.

The House of Night, too, is surrounded by enemies. Raihn’s own nobles are none too eager to accept a Turned king, especially one who was once a slave. And the House of Blood digs their claws into the kingdom, threatening to tear it apart from the inside.

When Raihn offers Oraya a secret alliance, taking the deal is her only chance at reclaiming her kingdom–and gaining her vengeance against the lover who betrayed her. But to do so, she’ll need to harness a devastating ancient power, intertwined with her father’s greatest secrets.

But with enemies closing in on all sides, nothing is as it seems. As she unravels her past and faces her future, Oraya finds herself forced to choose between the bloody reality of seizing power – and the devastating love that could be her downfall.

Finally finished! This wasn't agonizingly slow, like Curious Tides, but nor was it zippy and short like Beneath the Star Cursed Skies. In retrospect I don't know that it was worth the effort, but the previous book ended on SUCH a hook, and it came so fast from the library, that I couldn't resist, and, since we're talking about PopSugar now, I feel like I can't just stop books halfway through when I'm bored, the way I've been doing more and more often lately.

It's fine. It's fine! I really shouldn't complain, I could have simply stopped at the first one, but, like I said, the revelation that they had to get married! To a former love who has betrayed them! was like trope catnip. Alas, while it makes the most sense for plot and characterization that the hatred only lasts about, oh, 15% of the way into the book, and then it turns to lusting and banging, I was really hoping for more angst.  Angst with a capital A!

This book is all about mood. Everything is dark and seductive, fire flashes in people's eyes, the glimpse of a city from far away is all ancient beauty, yada yada yada.  What ashes and star-cursed king are we talking about? Who knows, baby, it's all about the mood. The first book was all about rising to power and this second one is all about holding on to it through, gosh, at least two, if not three attempted coups. We gently gloss over torture and the hunting down of rebels. At the end, Oraya and Raihn unite the two vampire tribes who have been warring for thousands of years (because they have an unbreakable bond now! Everyone else gets to forget aeons of historically founded hatred and opposition. And I guess humans are living peacefully with the vamps now too, even though they are literally vampire food. Whatever! Oraya has wings now and that's super cool!), they bang a lot, and we leave the book having nicely set up the next duology, featuring Mishe and her trauma dump. 

I know it sounds like I didn't like the book, but I didn't hate it, I just... once again, am finding these romantastic stories of tyrants overthrown to be childish and sanitized in the wake of The Feast of the Goat, and that's obviously a me problem more than a book problem, but the stakes just never felt high. Admit it: was there ever a point at which you, dear reader, thought that either Oraya or Raihn might die? No matter how badly they are beaten (and they are crucified multiple times, not to mention both getting beaten by some sort of god-like avatar) they manage to heal themselves up just fine and come back to fight another day! Gosh! Vincent slaughtered thousands, if not millions of people, but in the end, he did love Oraya, so that's okay!

36: A Book With Silver On The Cover Or In The Title

Beneath These Cursed Stars

Beneath These Cursed Stars

By Lexi Ryan

Princess Jasalyn has a secret. Armed with an enchanted ring that gives her death’s kiss, Jas has been sneaking away from the palace at night to assassinate her enemies.

Shape-shifter Felicity needs a miracle. Fated to kill her magical father, she’s been using her unique ability to evade a fatal prophecy.

When rumors of evil king Mordeus’s resurrection spread through the shadow court, Jasalyn decides to end him once and for all. Felicity agrees to take the form of the princess, allowing Jas to covertly hunt Mordeus—and starting Felicity on the path that could finally take her home.

While Jasalyn teams up with the charming and handsome Kendrick, Felicity sets out to get closer to the Wild Fae king, Misha. Kendrick helps Jasalyn feel something other than anger for the first time in three years, and Misha makes Felicity wish for a world where she’s free to be her true self. Soon, the girls’ missions are at risk right alongside their hearts.

The future of the human and fae realms hangs in the balance as fates intertwine. Between perilous tasks, grim secrets, and forbidden romances, Jasalyn and Felicity find that perhaps their stars are the most cursed of all.

This was just what I needed as a palate cleanser after both The Feast of the Goat and Curious Tides. The first was way too heavy and the latter was way too slow, and this hit the sweet spot of being not too serious and a light, easy read.

Sidebar time: frankly any YA adjacent fantasy which involves despotic rulers feels so much more juvenile though, after reading The Feast of the Goat and all the real ways that people can be hurt and demoralized under a terrible regime. I happened to read two after The Feast of the Goat, and the feel so simplistic in how they treat tyranny. Tyrant=bad, resistance=good. Scars make you look tougher. PTSD is mostly nightmares that go away when you meet a hot guy. You've never given up on your humanity, and in the end all suffering is noble. I certainly don't think we need to get graphic in our fantasy, but it does add inauthenticity to the genre, which was already fantastical to start with.

Some reviews recommended reading this after the first duology in the world, These Hollow Vows and These Twisted Bonds.  Not only did I not realize this was set after a previous series and referencing the same characters, I also thought it was a standalone novel, and it very much is not.  So you could say I started with part 3 of 4. Nevertheless I was able to follow the storyline and setup decently well, although I did occasionally confuse the two female protagonists, which, since one is the princess and the other is pretending to be the princess, I don't take full responsibility for.

It's a good little book, moving quickly along, doesn't waste much times drawing out the central mystery of the resurrection of the aforementioned tyrant. The one thing that didn't make much sense, and is a critical plot point, so perhaps it will be explained in the next book, is why/how Felicity was inserted as the pretend princess without any apparent means for her to communicate updates to the rebels. She just had to wait for her contact to show up? Seems kinda like a problem waiting to happen, especially when they keep alluding to their spies on the inside.

The romances, while admittedly, ridiculously sudden and convenient, were both written well enough to get you to suspend disbelief and I appreciated the plotting behind both couples' splits- Felicity's was almost guaranteed as a result of her impersonation, but the idea of Kendrick being in cahoots with the tyrant was something I was surprised by, yet also felt pretty organic from the prior plots, so kudos on that. None of the weird sword/portal thing made much sense though, but it didn't bother me excessively since it was pretty obviously just there as a Macguffin.

I enjoyed it enough to consider seeking out the first duology and am kicking myself for reading a book which ends on such a cliffhanger when the next one won't be out for at least six months. We leave both Felicity and Jasalyn in danger, Felicity in King Misha's dungeons, at his mercy for having betrayed him twice over - once for impersonating the princess and the second time for impersonating Felicity, i.e., the woman who he's seen in his dreams (of course), and Jasalyn setting out for the Macguffin on foot by herself, feeling betrayed by Kendrick in her turn, for his having lied to her about his reasons for being in the dungeon to begin with (not to mention his long-lost fiance, who (of course) will make another appearance in the next book, I'm sure. There's not much mystery about the plot beats, but Ryan does a decent job with it notwithstanding. I will say that now I've gone back and read the first book in the series (well, the excerpt, anyway) and it is startling how different Jasalyn comes across. Is it wrong to say I prefer the depressed, killer version instead of the stupidly optimistic one?

18: A Book Containing Magical Creatures That Aren't Dragons

Curious Tides

Curious Tides 

By Pascale Lacelle

Emory might be a student at the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar Magics, but her healing abilities have always been mediocre at best—until a treacherous night in the Dovermere sea caves leaves a group of her classmates dead and her as the only survivor. Now Emory is plagued by strange, impossible powers that no healer should possess.

Powers that would ruin her life if the wrong person were to discover them.

To gain control of these new abilities, Emory enlists the help of the school’s most reclusive student, Baz—a boy already well-versed in the deadly nature of darker magic, whose sister happened to be one of the drowned students and Emory’s best friend. Determined to find the truth behind the drownings and the cult-like secret society she’s convinced her classmates were involved in, Emory is faced with even more questions when the supposedly drowned students start washing ashore— alive —only for them each immediately to die horrible, magical deaths.

And Emory is not the only one seeking answers. When her new magic captures the society’s attention, she finds herself drawn into their world of privilege and power, all while wondering if the truth she’s searching for might lead her right back to Dovermere…to face the fate she was never meant to escape.

Curious Tides can be summed up in one word: it's boring. It was boring when I read the first few chapters, it was boring when I was halfway through, it was mildly interesting at the end, and when I finished it and read the teaser for the next book in the series, I found myself completely uninterested in following up. In fact, not only do I keep forgetting that I've finished it, I've been forgetting that I've read it at all. In fact, when I was writing this review, I kept typing the title as "Cursed Tides" because I was getting it confused with another book.

If you look through other reviews there's two common complaints: one, even by those who ended up liking it, is that it's very slow to start. I agree. Somehow the author has taken a scenario in which our protagonist washes up on shore with four dead bodies and made it ... uncompelling. 

Second, people find Emory, our ostensible hero, annoying. I also agree with this, and with the person who says Emory comes across super young, and possibly was aged up to 19 just so a sex scene could be included (although I have no idea why, since that was also boring to read). Emory is the kind of person who somehow inherits a mysterious power that we're told is incredibly dangerous and could lead to her destruction and the death of other around her, like a bomb, and when her friend Baz, whom she's harassed into helping train her surreptitiously, tells her to call it a night, she tells him he's being too cautious and she just starts using it willy-nilly. And it's all okay! Absolutely nothing happens as a result of this idiotic decision. She won't tell Baz crucial information about that night, but shares everything with Kieran, because he...keeps looking at her meaningfully, I guess.

I don't know if Emory was meant to be as annoying as she was, but she consistently uses Baz (and his crush on her) to get him to do things for her, she beelines for this secret society despite secret societies always being bad news, falls hard for this Kieran kid who is clearly using her, assumes her 'friend' Penelope has ratted on her to the dean even though Penelope literally knows nothing, MOPES about every damn thing, even the fact that her best friend got invited to this secret society and didn't tell her, like she isn't doing the exact same damn thing, and at no point is she written like these are the actions of an asshole. Does she get an indefinite pass because her friend disappeared after doing a stupid ritual for a secret society? Because Romie was Baz's sister and he didn't come across as an asshole. It's like the author has to have Emory do all this for the book's plot, but then didn't want to have her be an antihero, so instead we all have to pretend her actions are forgiveable.

The third thing I didn't like about the book, which wasn't necessarily something others agreed with me on, was the magic system.  Lacelle sets it up with four moons (full, waxing, waning, and new) and each of these has like four "specialties", like soultending and wardcrafting and purifying and lightkeeping and dreaming and unraveling and memorists and reaping and amplifying and wordsmiths and sowing and glamouring and darkbearing and shadow guiding and healers and seers, and then there's also eclipses which also have separate powers and now we're at, like 20+ random powers (and which is which and who is what are RELEVANT to the plot, so you gotta try to remember all this shit) PLUS there's some fairy tale book about the powers being taken over by shadow which is also important except that it was introduced in the first chapter with all this other stuff and I promptly forgot. So the whole villain's motivation is like, making a path between worlds and undoing stuff about the four original moon gods, but none of it ever made much sense to me. There's tides and water magic and fake magic that comes from siphoned off stuff from people who have Collapsed, but also apparently after you collapse you're super strong but this is a complete secret. Anyway, there was a lot to keep straight and I had no interest in doing so.

What else can I say? It's already forgotten.

16: A Book Set In Or Around A Body Of Water