darkanddreary

Read Lovesick Falls by Julia Drake, a modern, queer YA retelling/remix of As You Like It in which best friends Celia, Ros, and Touchstone spend the summer working at an outdoor theater festival, navigating crushes and friendship drama. This one was slightly less my cup of tea than her first novel (The Last True Poets of the Sea, a modern YA take on Twelfth Night), mostly because of one major plotline in which main character Celia meets/befriends/briefly goes out with her celebrity crush Oliver, an actor on the endearingly bad TV show she and her friends are obsessed with, a trope I find so viscerally embarrassing it's fully a squick. (Like, people actually want to meet their celebrity crushes/idols/blorbos?! Can't relate.) Overall, I liked it a lot, though— more than I'd initially expected to when it seemed like it was taking more of a cutesy best summer ever! YA romance angle, because it was ultimately a bittersweet coming-of-age: ( ... ) As a retelling of As You Like It, specifically, Drake works in some fun nods to the original play, including a very grumpy cat named for the melancholy Jaques.

I appear to have read 87 books in 2025, my first year recording <100 books since 2018, although this just might be due to shoddy record-keeping; I didn't write down any of my 2000s YA re-reads, so that's at least 9 more? Top niche this year was memoirs— 12-15, depending on whether you count non-fiction with an aspect of tying the narrative to personal experience (Caroline Fraser's Murderland, Alexa Hagerty's Still Life With Bones) and/or autofiction (Patricia Lockwood's Will There Ever Be Another You)— followed by 2000s YA/MG nostalgia and People Having Bad Times on Boats.

My first book of 2026 was A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, which I finished in an afternoon: a solarpunk novella in which a human and a robot meet for the first time since, centuries before, robots gained sentience and disappeared into the wilds to live as they pleased and humans moved to a post-industrialized, post-scarcity society. Oddly enough, it kind of reminded me of Gail Carson Levine's Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg, a childhood favorite— it was the world-building through charming descriptions of physical objects, but also something in the stories' shape and cadence, and in the main character's struggle to find their place in a world where people seem to have pretty specific callings...? (Here, the human, Sibling Dex, is a monk who travels from town to town serving tea and as a shoulder to cry on.) None of which is necessarily unique to either book, or used in the same way - for one thing, Chambers pushes back against the idea of people (or robots) having a specific purpose that they need to fulfill - but for whatever reason, the comparison popped into my head and I couldn't shake it. This book also checked the box of first character who's canonically my age that I encountered after turning that age in the record time of one week: early on, there's a line about how Dex - struggling in their vocational change from garden monk to tea monk - "now, at the age of twenty-nine, would like very much to return to the safe shelter of their childhood for an indefinite amount of time until they'd figured out just what the hell they were doing." What a mood.

2025 has been a fabulous year for Batshit British Crime Thrillers: shows that can be best described as why must TV be good? Is it not enough to watch a haggardly hot, grumpy British guy have a really bad week?, with a tidy 6-8 episodes, really good actors, and wildly implausible plots.

Dept. Q stars Matthew Goode as DCI Carl Morck, an acerbic police detective in Scotland reassigned to investigate cold cases with a misfit team while recovering from physical and emotional trauma. The plot is completely bonkers and impossible to talk about without major spoilers, because the first episode ends with the reveal of what happened to ambitious prosecutor Merritt Lingard, whose disappearance Morck and co. are investigating: ( ... ) There's also definitely a vibe of maybe the real mystery was the friends we made along the way; the fact it closes with an instrumental cover of Radical Face's "Welcome Home, Son" really captures the emotional tone. So, yeah, 10/10, had a great time watching this.

Lazarus stars Sam Claflin as Dr. Joel "Laz" Lazarus, a forensic psychologist who is either having a mental breakdown in the wake of his father's apparent suicide and unresolved grief over his twin sister's unsolved murder twenty years earlier, or is being haunted by the ghosts of cold-case victims from his home town, leading him to investigate their deaths and whether they were related to his father's and sister's. ( Spoilers! ) This show is, objectively, not very good - it ends with multiple twists so stupid I did laugh out loud - but I actually really enjoyed the timey-wimey-ness of it, between the concept of flashback-based hauntings - the ghosts, when they appear to Laz, seem to think they are a. alive and b. having therapy sessions with Laz's father - and the way the show cuts between the characters as adults in the present day and the teenagers they'd been when Laz's sister was murdered. The big names in the cast are, of course, Claflin, and Bill Nighy as the late Dr. Lazarus Sr., but I was delighted to see Edward Hogg as the twitchy town loner who has lived under suspicion of Laz's sister's murder for decades, and David Fynn - who I've mostly seen as the goofier characters in Shakespearean comedies - in a more serious role as Laz's childhood friend, now a local police detective; I was unfamiliar with Alexandra Roach, who stole the show as Laz's wounded, woo-woo surviving sister.

Black Doves is technically stretching the definition a bit, as it's from 2024 and more of a spy thriller, co-starring Keira Knightley as a spy ten years' deep into her cover as the wife of a rising politician and Ben Whishaw as an assassin with a broken heart; I'd procrastinated on watching this for a full year, which actually meant I watched it at the best possible time (i.e., last week, over Christmas) because it is specifically set at Christmas. (Move over, Die Hard!) Absolutely spaghetti-at-the-wall plot - it's conspiracies all the way down, ( vague spoilers ) - and everyone in it is, like, so bad at the first rule of Being A Spy (don't freaking tell people you're a spy!!!) but both Knightley and Whishaw act the hell out of their roles and the writing is fun and there were a bunch of other great characters, including the incomparable Kathryn Hunter as a London crime boss and a delightful pair of snarky zillennial hitwomen.