my year of writing and reading

yet another review post for the year, with book and substack recs

Dec 20, 2024

Sorry i’m going to be as cliché as everyone else and write that exact same post. Hopefully you’ll find some value in my favorites of 2024. Feel free to jump around to the sections that interest you, and please share below any recommendations you have for me! This email is too long for your inbox, so click on the title to read the full thing in your browser!

I’ll do a quick retrospective on my first 3 months here on substack (because the self-promo has to come first), then I’ll talk briefly about my favorite books and favorite substacks (and which ones i pay for).

This is a yearly wrap-up, which means it’s the dullest, most egocentric thing i’ll ever write. So to entice you to click and read the whole damned thing, i’ve included a section on how much money i spent on my various writing endeavours at the bottom…

On writing

I started this publication in the middle of October, because i was starting a writing course. I have lukewarm thoughts on it (see the money section below), but it worked wonderfully as a forcing function. In the two and a half months i’ve been here, 50 of you have decided to join and i thank you dearly. I wouldn’t have imagined i’d get so many eyes on my writing so soon, and it’s been a blast.

For those of you who joined recently, here is an exhaustive list of the stuff i’ve written so far (complete with a clickbaity comment so you read them, i am writing for fame after all!):

Harry Potter became a cop, Percy Jackson fixed the system, or how when you look back into things, only one of our childhood heroes actually did anything to fix the system.
Escaping Goodread’s Gravity Well, or why you should go meet me on the Storygraph instead, and an exploration of the forces that make Goodreads still stand even though it hasn’t been updated for 10000 years. Surprisingly, it’s my most read post!
Don’t Show me your Spider Aliens, my least viewed post, which is a shame because i love it! It’s a plea for scifi writers to stop describing their aliens in terms of known animals, because that takes away all the alien-ness of them!
I D.A.R.E you to put your name on the Internet, or a telling of that time when the French government sent the Army to scare us kids from putting any identifying info on the nascent web.
I hate my doctor parents for not diagnosing me sooner, a more personal and emotional piece about my struggle with endometriosis and the pain that comes with it.
AI is not a toy if you kill me with it, the obligatory anti-genAI piece of the day, in which i make the groundbreaking comment that LLM and image generators being used disproportionately to harm women, and how that danger is being minimized by pretending it’s just a toy.
and my latest one: Dreaming up the threats of the future (on the French Army’s payroll), a book review of that novel i mentioned earlier, a collaboration between the army, university, and a bunch of French scifi writers to predict what could hurt France at the 2030 horizon. I promise i made it funny!

To be fully transparent in terms of stats, each post gets between 40 and 180 views (that one was an outlier, average is 110), and a few comments.

My favorite has been without question the endometriosis piece because it was so cathartic to read, and so lovely to hear about other women on that same subject.

Reading books

This year was my true comeback into reading. I graduated from my master’s degree in September and so i had my first taste of freedom in 5 years. I have read many good science-fiction and fantasy books, my genres of predilection; and i’ve made my first foray into non-fiction which i’d never read before (apart from books assigned in class).

I read a total of 49 fiction books (at the time of writing), and here are my favorites:

S tier (5/5):

My absolute favorite book of the year was The Spear Cuts Through Water. It had everything from excellent plot, deep characters, emotional catharsis, superb prose and interesting narrative devices.

Some Adrian Tchaikovsky books: Alien Clay and Ogres. Tchaikovsky was also a great disappointment this year, Service Model and Shroud were mediocre, and Elder Race was just plain bad.
I finally got started on Malazan with Gardens of the Moon and i loved it! It’s a very dense read, and a long one at that, so i’ll slowly work my way through the series in the next few years.
The Will of the Many was a very promising first book, and i’m excited for the sequel to come out in 2025!
In terms of YA, i read The City Of Brass and the other 2 books in the Daevabad trilogy and they were great. Old school YA from before the romantasy craze, with sone nice world building, decent writing, and enjoyable characters.

A tier (4/5):

The Ministry of Time was a funny and interesting read. Enjoyable until the end, and doesn’t fall into the time travel pitfalls you could expect.
I started the Sun Eater series with Empire of Silence and i’m excited for the rest! It was very derivative and the pacing lacked a bit in the middle but it was fun. It’s a temporary rating, based on the assumption it’s setting up a great saga. If book 2 disappoints i will relegate it to B tier though.

I read the first two books in the Green Bone Saga: Jade City and Jave War and i had a good time. Not necessarily in a rush to read the last one in the trilogy, but i recommend them for some nice Asian-inspired fantasy.
Also got through A Psalm for the Wild-Built which was a nice reprieve from all the dark and bleary books i mentioned above. Hopepunk is indeed an excellent way to speak about the genre, and this one came at the right time for me.

I won’t bore you with the other books since i don’t recommend them. You can check out my storygraph if you want more details :) – and this post if you want to know why i like Storygraph so much better than Goodreads (and know why i still won’t delete my Goodreads account anyways).

The 1-star category was a bit too big for my liking, but i’m proud that they mostly come from the first half of the year. I made a commitment in July to stop following the trends, because i’m a picky mean Frenchwoman and i tend to hate them all (but also my magpie brain wants to collect all the pretty special editions…). I gave up on romantasy because i don’t like romance that much (how shocked are you that i rated most of those 1-star then?) and focused on hard-ish scifi and fantasy that suits my tastes better.

In terms of non-fiction, i read 3 books. I only started reading non-fiction in October after i graduated from college, in hope to not rot my brain away in the corporate world. I’ll focus more on that in the coming year!

My favorite of the 3 was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which is a great book about writing, that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I found it enabling in many aspects, and infuriating in others (probably should take the time to write a post about it now that i think of it…)

I have to mention Ces guerres qui nous attendent (in french), a book in collaboration with the French army. It was honestly really bad, but it gave me so much to spit about and complain so in the end it provided a lot of joy. Don’t recommend (it isn’t translated anyways, but you can read my post about it here).

Next year i want to focus more on the 3 following topics. Those books have been randomly taken from some “best of the genre” lists, but they have dubious origins, so i’ll welcome any recommendations for substitutions, additions, or removals (please be a good friend and tell me if one of them is really really bad!).

There’ll also be some books about the craft of writing, i am a ~~professional~~ Substack writer after all :))

Reading magazines and substacks

I finally got some adult money, which means i can support some great publications! But i am also still just a baby, so i’ll stay on my parents’ Le Monde subscription a bit longer (it costs 500€1 a year!!, i know it’s quality, but still).

I subscribe to Clarkesworld, a sci-fi magazine that publishes short stories and essays each month. I’m on the digital tier so i get the pdfs (honestly i have no space to store the actual prints anyways), and it only costs 5€ a month so if you can afford it, please give it a shot! You can easily cancel anytime with a few clicks. I don’t necessarily read the stories, but i do read all the essays and always learn something new! Check them out here.

On Substack, i need to start paying for people’s writing. I don’t have enough savings to support everyone at the same time, but i’ve made a commitment to choose one every 3 months and pay an annual sub for them – the average cost seems to be 70€ so it should be maintainable for me. I still can’t decide so let me know if you’ve supported any of the above (or any other!) and you recommend them!

Here’s a little list of my favorites right now:

Obsidian Iceberg: i’ve been reading
Eleanor Konik
’s thoughts about Obsidian since before i was aware of Substack, and i’ve always enjoyed it immensely. From her About page, her interests also include “questions about how non-industrial people live” and it is indeed an excellent way to put it (and a fascinating subject).
in the women’s musings and thoughts about culture, what it’s like to live, …,2 i love Club Reticent by
Valerie
, Written by a Woman by
Elise Powers
, Digital Tinz by
tina zhang
, Notes On by
Hannah Connolly
and Postcards by Elle by
eleanor kang
.
- this is the section i want to choose from for my first upgrade of January, please share any thoughts and any other recs in the same genre!
My favorite so far has been Personal Canon from
Celine Nguyen
. Systematically smart, unexpected and thought-provoking (on top of being well written). I want to be her when i grow up!
In the culture section, i’ve enjoyed Culture Study by
Anne Helen Petersen
, The Etymology Nerd by
Adam Aleksic
(bite-sized word thoughts) and A Book Designer’s Notebook by
Nathaniel Roy
(a fascinating view into his work).
I think this section is the men’s equivalent of the “women’s vibes” one, and my patriarchal upbringing makes me want to call it “philosophy” even though the women are just as deep as they are. Anyways, i’m enjoying Escaping Flatland by
Henrik Karlsson
and i’ve recently discovered Sacred Tension in which
Stephen Bradford Long
talks about religion and especially his experience in The Satanic Temple.

the only one i pay for right now: Essay Architecture by
Michael Dean
for some interesting insights into essays and the craft of writing (more thoughts in the money section at the bottom, but the gist is i don’t regret it).

Did you enjoy any of those posts? If so, don’t hesitate to send them to your loved ones, by clicking the button, or copy-pasting links.

The Matter of Money

So, money! I can immediately tell you i haven’t made a cent from Substack, and i don’t really plan to (you can pay me if you want to, but all my work is out there for free).

I did however spend inordinate amounts of money on various stuff. I will not reveal how much i spend on books – they all go into my library and i loan them to friends and family, so it’s for the greater good after all!3

But in terms of writing, i made some questionable decisions:

I paid 900€ (1000 USD) on the last cohort of Write Of Passage. My experience was mediocre, but it allowed me to meet a few nice people, which i’m thankful for. One of them is my dear friend
Lily | 5459.eth
, who wrote about some of our qualms here. I don’t exactly regret the purchase, because it did force me to start publishing, but i’m relieved that i got a scholarship and only paid ¼ of the price (otherwise i’d be big mad). Would you be interested in a full review of the course? I can certainly expand on that if anyone is interested (although the company has now closed down so idk how helpful it would be)

I then made a much better decision and paid 285€ for Michael Dean’s Essay Club, his founding member plan on Substack. It’s a nicely managed writing group where some very kind people meet every week to exchange feedback and chat. My WoP friends are all there, and i’ve met new writers with interesting ideas and great editing minds. My ego is bruised but my essays are a lot better now.
Another compulsive buy was the iPad (1200€4 + some gadgets5). The Black Friday sale essentially got you a free pencil and i had been lusting after it for ages anyways so i splurged. Call it my Christmas gift to myself. I also bought 120€ of brushes which i totally didn’t need but they look cool af sooo… No ragrets. I plan on learning how to draw, and this is my forcing function for that. Plus i need some good illustrations for those posts instead of the usual Unsplash pics. I made everything in this post with Procreate! Hopefully you’ll soon see some better art if i find time6 over the holidays to practice and find a style i like.7

Endwords

And that’s about everything! Since this is an egotrip of a post, i’ll let you ask anything and everything8 in the comments. What do you want to know? I promise i won’t lie, but i don’t promise to answer (i am a mysterious anonymous writer after all!).

I’d also appreciate if you could take the time to tell me what you like or don’t like about my posts. I’m still a beginner so all advice is useful! You can either leave a comment on the app, send me a message (a private DM) or reply to this email (only i will see it). Do you hate my footnotes, do you love my snark, do you wish i was more this or less that?