Jason’s Year in Books

What did you read this year?

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2023

27,187

pages read

101

books read

Jason Pettus

Shortest Book

pages

Longest Book

608

pages

Average book length in 2023

269

pages

Most Shelved

1,161,247

people also shelved

The Adventures of Catie and Connor by Steeve Simbert

Least Shelved

people also shelved

Jason’s average rating for 2023

3.3

Trading Experts Getting Started A Beginner's Guide to the Sto... by Bennett Robert Zamani

Highest Rated on Goodreads

it was amazing

5.00 average

Jason’s first review of the year

it was ok

2023 reads, #1. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, e 2023 reads, #1. A growing amount of my freelance clients are the authors of cheap quick genre novels, meant to be consumed by their audience through the Kindle Unlimited program (a relatively new feature of Amazon, in which for one flat monthly fee, members can read as many quick cheap genre novels as they can possibly get through in 30 days); and so that has me starting to heavily read in these specialized genres for the first time in my life, especially when it comes to crime, fantasy and romance books, since I've never been a natural fan of these particular genres myself in my personal life, which means I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to service my clients as well as I can. So for example, early this week I got the latest promotional email from marketing company BookFunnel.com, which a couple of my clients use, letting me know of the latest hundred or so romance books that I can now download for free through their service, in return for signing up for these authors' newsletters; and instead of ignoring it like I usually do, this time I went over and actually downloaded seven titles from the unending page of identical overly Photoshopped covers of shirtless hunky badboys, and thought I would try blazing through them as fast as possible just to get an idea of what the average KU customer goes through when hunting and pecking through these endless slush piles themselves.

This is now my fourth book of the run (see also Cecelia Mecca's The Blacksmith , Candy Quinn's Shipwrecked Beauty , and Bella Beaumont's Can't Stop Won't Stop ), and the first to cover the well-known romance trope known as "fated mates," which is when some sort of magical or other paranormal contrivance brings our two romantic leads together in a way so that no free will or rational choice is involved, but rather that the paranormal contrivance is literally forcing the two to be the kinds of soulmates the universe is demanding of them no matter what the individuals themselves think of it. Probably the most well-known example is the phenomenon of "imprinting" among werewolves in the "Twilight" books (or at least this is what Google is telling me -- I've never read the books myself), which as far as I can tell is a kind of play on animals going into heat, but in the case of werewolves involves not only an irresistible compulsion to have sex with the woman in question but also to mate with her for life, to protect her and take care of her and wash her hair in the bathtub and all the other sometimes eyerolling kinds of details that are found in romance novels. And we've got a similar thing going on here in Mate Exposed, except this time the werewolves are actually eight-foot-tall blue-skinned space aliens, and the "imprinting" is just one aspect of a whole formal mating ritual they have back on their home planet, which our female hero, grade school teacher Victoria, learns all about when one of them saves her from a gang-rape among the tattered survivors of an apocalyptic event on Earth that is rapidly turning its victims into a planet full of flesh-eating zombies, a side effect of an interstellar war going on between our hunky Ajnarans and one of their alien rivals.

That's a whole lot to cram into a small romance novella being used as a free magnet for getting people to sign up for a newsletter, and a big part of the problem here is that author Pearl Tate is simply not up to the task, not giving any of these elements enough time and space to be developed on their own, leaving us with lots of tantalizing ideas that we can only examine briefly in the rearview mirror as we rush our way to the next plot point. Plus, I don't know if this is specifically because I'm a guy or if this is a universal problem, but I simply had a hard time connecting together the elements I expect from a romance novel with the strange, outre tale being told here about hulking monstrous space aliens and what feels to me like a thinly veiled message about how great sex slavery is, and how a lot of our problems in our modern world would easily be solved if we simply got rid of the idea of women having free will, and instead let the big strong men just fight it out over who's going to own any particular "seed receptacle" among the women-folk. This might be a gender bias of mine, in that I simply can't understand the nearly universal appeal I've found so far in the romance genre of men "owning" women and women getting just unbelievably turned on by such ownership (an aspect that's shown up now in every single romance novel I've ever read, no matter what its genre or tropes), and the inherent unsolvable contradiction this creates with our modern notion of female equality and empowerment. (Jesus, no wonder dating in your twenties is so fucking difficult.) Or, you know, it might be simply because this particular book isn't very good, which I half-suspect is the case since all the other fundamentals of storytelling are only being accomplished in a mediocre fashion here too. Whatever the case, more research is warranted, so I'll be exploring this "fated mate" subgenre more within romance in the coming months, to see if I can get a better handle on the subject and why it's apparently addictive like catnip to the women who happen to like this subgenre. For now, though, I recommend skipping this particular title, and holding out for a better fated mate than an eight-foot-tall blue-skinned alien who would gladly give it all up to wash his human girlfriend's hair in the bathtub. ...more

JASON’S 2023 BOOKS

Sold to the Master Vampire by Drusilla Swan

it was amazing

it was amazing

Beneath the Fallen City by Jamie A. Waters

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction by Amy J. Schneider

Circuit Train Your Brain by Molly M. Cantrell-Kraig

it was amazing

My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem

The End of Economic Man by Peter F. Drucker

The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster by Darren Hardy

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

really liked it

it was amazing

Lady of the Primordial Tree by Daniela A. Mera

really liked it

The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand

Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block

it was amazing

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion by Matvei Vasilyevich Golovinski

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

it was amazing

The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison

it was amazing

Mated to the Billionaires by Drusilla Swan

The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg

The man who owned New York by Osborn John Jay Jr

The Man Who Owned New York by John Jay Osborn Jr.

The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard

liked it

Sure, I'll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford

The House on the Cliff by Franklin W. Dixon

The Mysterious Caravan by Franklin W. Dixon

it was amazing

The Secret of the Old Mill by Franklin W. Dixon

The Millionaire Fastlane by M.J. DeMarco

Attraction Isn't A Choice - How To Use "Secret" Communication... by David DeAngelo

Attraction Isn’t A Choice by David DeAngelo

Jason’s last review of the year

2023 reads, #102. DID NOT FINISH. I'm going through a little mini-reading project right now, making my way through as many alternative-history novels I can get my hands on that share the "what if" concept of the Nazis actually winning World War Two. I have to admit, though, that my main interest in this subject is in finding action-adventure thrillers set in this world, very similar to Robert Harris' Fatherland (a murder mystery set in a mid-1960 2023 reads, #102. DID NOT FINISH. I'm going through a little mini-reading project right now, making my way through as many alternative-history novels I can get my hands on that share the "what if" concept of the Nazis actually winning World War Two. I have to admit, though, that my main interest in this subject is in finding action-adventure thrillers set in this world, very similar to Robert Harris' Fatherland (a murder mystery set in a mid-1960s Berlin full of skinny-tie-wearing Nazis), and that Daniel Quinn's After Dachau is most certainly not this kind of alt-history novel, but rather a slow and boring academic character drama that uses this alt-history setting merely as a gimmick to instead share the pedantic and platitude-filled message of "WHITE PEOPLE BAD!!!!," a particularly popular type of academic novel in the late 1990s when this was first written.

Ostensibly it's the story of an employee at a nonprofit in the early 2000s devoted to tracking down as many verified cases as possible of true reincarnation, a career that has so far been almost entirely filled with liars, cranks and con artists, and the story itself hinges around a person he meets who seems to have really gone through a reincarnation, supposedly as first a black woman in the 1940s. It's only then, though, that we discover the big gimmick behind this story -- that it's actually set in the year 4000 AD by our own calendar, that the world reset the calendar back to 0 after the Nazis conquered the planet in 1945 (after the decisive Battle of Dachau that gives this book its name), and that in the two thousand years since, the planet of white people who eventually became the global Nazi Party has managed to successfully kill every non-white person who ever existed, so thoroughly and so long ago that people in 4000 AD now generally believe that people of color never actually existed, and instead were fanciful inventions of fantasy authors like elves, dwarves and trolls are.

That's an interesting concept, I admit; but like so many badly written alt-history novels, Quinn's book here is all concept and no plot, with the storyline being basically a 300-page investigation to eventually learn the premise I just mentioned above, then with the story suddenly ending once he learns this information. Instead, the whole thing seems to just be an exercise in reminding people that white people are shit, that they will kill every person of color on the planet if ever given the opportunity to do so, and...uh, the end. That will have its fans, I'm sure (looking up his Wikipedia page now, I can see that Quinn is well known for his radical liberal politics, and I'm sure the usual MFA/NPR crowd ate this book up when it first came out); but as someone who is looking for "Nazis Win The War" alt-history books primarily to read genre thrillers, this snoozer fell flat on its face for me, a book I read the first 50 pages of and then skipped straight to the last chapter when I could see how molasses-slow the story was going to be. Fellow alt-history nerds will want to take all this into serious consideration when deciding whether or not to read the book themselves. ...more

2023 READING
CHALLENGE

Jason Pettus read 101 out of 100 books.

101%

What did you read this year?