Ramblings of an Old Kweer

Recently Finished
Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For
This is an Audible original adaptation of the early comic strips. It has an all star cast including Jane Lynch and Roxanne Gay, and I felt like the audio play format worked really well for it. It's a lot of fun and at only three hours, it's a good listen when you want to finish up something quick. It's also free if you have an Audible subscription.

The Labyrinth House Murders
This had an interesting framing, but overall felt weaker than the other two books in the series that I've read so far.

Wake Me After the Apocalypse
YA post-apocalyptic story about a girl who is one of the few people chosen to go into cryosleep and be awakened in two hundred years when a massive asteroid is predicted to hit earth and wipe out all life. But when she wakes up, she finds that a cave-in in their underground bunker has damaged all the other tanks near hers and completely blocked off the rest, so she's all alone. This sounded cool! It reminded me a bit of 7 Seeds. But there were too many flashback chapters in the first half to boring stuff about her falling in love with a boy in her group. If I am reading a post-apocalypse story I want the focus to be post apocalypse. Once the flashback chapters disappeared and the focus stayed on the future, it was more interesting, but still a bit disappointing. And this is the beginning of a trilogy, but the second book focuses on a different character in a different bunker, and from a review I saw, 99% of the book is pre-apocalypse, making it even less interesting. Then the third book has the two protagonists meeting and dealing with people from a third bunker, but the reviews made it sound like it wouldn't really be up my alley, so I'm not going to continue the series.

Silent Sister
A teenager wakes up in the hospital with no memory of the past few days and is told that she was found injured by the side of the road and her sister is missing. The story is told in alternating past and present chapters telling the story of the days leading up to the incident in the missing sister's POV and in the remaining sister's POV, the quest to find out what happened to her and her sister. ( spoilers for something that should be no surprise to anyone who starts reading this book ) The story itself was fine, but the gimmick just felt annoying.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
This took me three and a half months to read but I finally finished it! It was very interesting, but also had a lot of in-depth detail about each head of the CIA that was a little on the boring side, which made it a slower read for me. But I went into this knowing virtually nothing about the CIA. It was never really touched on in school (most of my history classes ended after WWII) and in terms of popular culture I just had a vague "these guys are spies" association. As an adult, I osmosed that the CIA was responsible for a lot of shitty stuff around the world, but never really got into the details. So this was good for that! It turns out that the shittiness was not an exception, and that's pretty much all they did, but what most surprised me is that from the CIA's inception, these guys were pretty much Trump regime level incompetent. No one had any idea of what they were doing, and any successes they had were pretty much flukes. Anyway, I rated it a three due to the boringness of parts of it, but it really was a good overview and I'd recommend it for someone who's looking for something like that.

My Home Hero vol. 23-24

2025 Reading Roundup
For the third year in a row, I finished one book* per day, so I read a total of 365 books this year. That seems to be working well for me, so while I set my GR goal at 320 to give myself some leeway, I will be aiming for a book a day this year as well.

*I count manga, comics, audiobooks, and short stories along with full-length novels and non-fiction.

This year's tally of the categories I keep track of:

Comics: 58
Manga: 144
Adult fiction: 106
Young Adult: 9
Middle Grade: 31
Non-fiction: 17

Of those, 6 were short stories and 55 were audiobooks.

I read exactly the same number of non-fiction books as last year, but more adult fiction and middle grade and much less YA, as I am finding YA more and more annoying these days.

The combined total of manga and comics is less this year as well, and the audiobook count higher.

There were 10 rereads, all of which were comics or manga, and the reason for rereading was to refresh my memory in order to read a new volume in the series. (Two of them were for stuff I am scanlating, and I always count it as a reread when I finish translating a full volume.)

72 books were added to my to-read list before 2025, which is more than in past year (though not by a ton). The majority of manga and comics I don't add to my to-read list before reading, though, and same with the short stories, so as percentage of full length books, that's 46% coming from the to-read list, so that's pretty good!

I've been going through my to-read list recently and doing some pruning, since some stuff has been on there for almost ten years, and my tastes have changed, plus there are a lot of books that I added (especially YA stuff) because it was like "ooh, a [insert minority] character!" when that was more rare, and the plot or genre isn't really my thing, or I've already read several variations on the same theme by now and don't need another.

If you're curious to see the full list of what I read last year, this should take you to my 2025 tag on Goodreads.