 I was dying and dreaming of release. So zero points for creativity. It was a dumb plan, it was a really dumb plan. Yeah, I hate it a bit. It's that time of year. Time for me to rant and rave. Today we're doing the ranting. Worst books of 2021 according to me. And these are worst books of 2021 that I read in 2021, not necessarily that they came out in 2021. I've done my best to actually rank them so they are in a particular order. That said, my number one is definitely my number one. And the least worst one is, I don't, yeah, I think that deserves to be least worst. But everything in the middle is, it could be moved around, but it's not hard and fast. Don't take those rankings too much to heart. But number one is for sure, number one. So anyway, let's do best of the worst to the worst of the worst. Once again, I do have to apologize if you can hear noise outside because they're doing landscaping outside, which I did not know would be happening today when I sat down to film. So thank you so much for that, I love that for me. So 10th worst, therefore the best of the worst is, I'm sorry, Alan, Shadow and Summer. I don't know if we're ever actually gonna have our chat about the books that he chose for me, but so here you go, Shadow and Summer, the first book in the long price quartet that I was very hopeful about, very excited to read. I plan to read it even if Alan had not chosen it for me because of Alan hyping it and him saying that it was to experience his tragedy. So I was hyped to read it. Now it's been several months since I read it and I never actually, part of it kind of helps to cement my kind of recollection of what I thought about a book is talking about it, explaining it, but I never did because I didn't talk about it in my wrap up because I was like, I'm gonna be talking about it with Alan and then I never talked about it with Alan. I've been trying very hard to keep it in my mind for the day that Alan finally decides to talk to me about it, which will never come. So here we are, so Shadow and Summer. Okay, so basically I just thought it was not very well written. I feel like the characters were, it's a lot of the complaints that I have very frequently, the characters felt wooden, they felt like plot devices rather than real people. The plot itself, it's spoilery so I won't say, but there was some, the thing that it ends up being sort of behind everything and how that all shakes out, when it was revealed sort of like, there's multiple things going on, right? And you're started following different perspectives and kind of trying to figure out who's behind what and whose agenda is this and what exactly they're trying to accomplish. So when you finally get to the end and you kind of finally see what was the thing going on all along and who was behind it and how they were going about trying to get that done, when it was revealed, I was like, I'm sorry, your plan was what? Like it happened to work out the way that you wanted it to because the author decided that it would and that's what makes a good plan, but I'm sorry that is the dumbest plan I've ever heard and there's absolutely no reason that you should have thought that that would actually work out. Like it's the type of plan where like that might work, but there is no guarantee. So for you to like decide that's your plan, like there's a dumb plan, it's a really dumb plan. So I was already annoyed with the writing style by the time I got there. And then when I got there, I was like, are you for serious? That was your plan. But then also there's just like a lot of weird choices the author makes where the opportunities to actually delve into what a character is thinking and feeling are just not gone into. And okay, so it's one of the most bizarre versions of telling over showing that I've ever seen, but so in theory, in a perfect world, you show what your characters do and there is gonna be some telling of course. You can't, I mean, you're telling a story. So there's some telling of like, they feel a certain way about something. But for them as much as possible in a, it's ideal to show them behaving in a way that makes you think they feel this way, if that makes sense, as opposed to just saying they feel this way. So instead of saying they are angry, I mean, sometimes for efficiency or if it's not that important, you can just say that. But ideally you get the sense for how angry they are, what type of anger it is, what they are angry about and how angry they are based on what you see them do, what you hear them say. And again, part of that is colored by speech tags that are like, he said angrily. But so in this world of this book, there are these elaborate hand signals that are sort of like the culture of this world that are invented by the author where you kind of do all this posturing and these physical ways of showing what you are thinking and feeling or to indicate like, to like ornament your speech, I guess, or to indicate to somebody how you've meant it. And so like, I already hate when books are, someone will say something sarcastically and then the author will be like, they said sarcastically and they're like, okay, I get it that that was sarcasm. I'm so glad you thought that I couldn't pick up on that. But here, almost everything, all this dialogue that there is, accompanied by he said in a posture that indicates that he means it both referentially but a little bit sarcastically. And they're like, so there's actually no nuance and subtlety to the speech, to the dialogue you've written. It's actually very wooden and plain and boring dialogue. But you think you've solved that problem by instead telling us what an elaborate amount of nuance is going on in the ways that they are posing. And I was like, okay, well, for one, like that sounds hilarious to me, just imagining the ways these people are contorting themselves. Because nowhere is it described what a pose like that is supposed to look like. So for there to be that many different poses that can be that many different things, they've gotta be like moving around like nobody's business. And then again, like it takes away all subtlety because part of what makes dialogue interesting to follow is you sort of following how somebody might be saying one thing and meaning another. But then if you were like, here's the dialogue that they said, but they said it in a posture that indicated they didn't really mean what they just said. It was just so obnoxious and stupid. And then no, it's literally all the time. And sometimes they didn't even say anything. Sometimes they just like took a pose and that is their response. And the pose is again, leaving you in no doubt as to what they are thinking and feeling because there is a very specific pose to convey that particular combination of feelings. So I hated it. I thought all of that was stupid and dumb. And then I think there's a way to incorporate something like that where that's a unique feature of real building, right? To have a culture that uses more of a physical element, of a codified physical element to convey either information or feeling. But for example, in the wise man's fear by Patrick Rothfuss, there is a culture that does this. And it is not, it does not come across the way that it doesn't shadow in summer. There is a culture that shows no expression like on their face. And if you don't know anything about their culture, you're gonna be like, wow, they feel absolutely nothing. But then you come to learn that they have hand signals for how they feel about something. So this, again, the book isn't just like nonstop, you pose in a way to indicate that, it's an interesting feature of their culture and how that works. And there's still nuance to it and it's not constantly cheating by like instead of actually showing you the character you're thinking and feeling, it just tells you instead with a pose and a hand signal. So I think, I don't think it's impossible to do something like that. That could actually be quite interesting. This was not it, this was stupid. So it's the worst of the best because I feel like, like there was an attempt. Like that's, that could be a cool thing. And he definitely committed. Like we did not forget about, there wasn't a piece of world building that was introduced in the beginning and then kind of abandoned halfway through. We committed to the posing thing throughout. So I just, I feel like, I feel like it's like a recipe that went wrong. You know, like it's an idea for a really good dish but like you done fucked it up and it does not taste good. So again, there was an attempt. Number nine on my list is Vesperteen by Margaret Rodgerson which was just the most methane that I have read in a long time. Probably since Sorcery of Thorns. The last Margaret Rodgerson book that I read. I really liked Enchanted Ravens and ever since then it's just been not that. So I guess Enchanted Ravens was a fluke, a one-off but Vesperteen was like literally everything that I've ever hated about YA except there wasn't really like an angsty romance so much. So like not that, but everything else. Like really shoddy world building, really painfully obvious things going on. A character that is an inch deep, a story that is kind of non-existent. It's kind of like just stuff happening and a main character that you're just like supposed to root for because reasons I guess. This book promised to be, I mean, if you don't know what it is, it's this young woman who's like, I guess a nun is the vibe, but so they're basically dealing with like the spirits of the dead and that's kind of her job. And so then the rest of the story is kind of to do with having spirits of the dead and corralling the spirits of the dead and her like in lieu of an animal companion, she's got a sort of like a spirit riding along in her mind, which is dumb. It was so cringy and the moments that were supposed to be the sort of like deeper, more poignant moments about feelings of inadequacy or depression or whatever. They were handled so ham-fistedly, so obviously, so boringly, so without nuance. Have you seen it done so much better, so many other times? It's not like books haven't done this before. If this was the very first book to tackle these topics, I'd be like, you didn't do it good, but you did it first, so good on you. But so many books have tackled these topics with so much more care and while still telling an interesting story. And this just was not, and it felt like it wanted credit for credit's sake, just like it wants you to root for the main character because it's the main character. None of it was interesting or sympathetic or engrossing or atmospheric. For a book about, you know, spirits of the dead, it was zero spook, zero vibe, zero mystery, zero suspense, zero darkness. It was the most flaccid thing that I have read. Oh my God, I hated it so much. Next up, I have Deal With The Devil by Kit Rooka. This was a Plays and Bodice Rippers book club pick, which I kinda suspected I wouldn't love when I picked it up because it's an urban fantasy, or paranoid urban fantasy romance. And I don't really like urban fantasy or romance. I can like those things, I suppose, although I can't think of any urban fantasies that I liked. It's usually like in spite of it being that or because it does something to kind of transcend that or does something more than that. And romances, again, like I don't seek out for their own sake. I can like a romance that like by itself because it did a thing I really liked because it had really good characters. It had a good story. But like as a genre, it's not something that I just derive satisfaction from generally. So I suspect that wouldn't be a favorite. And then it was just, it was similar to Vesperteen and that like this is supposed to be, it's like the first in the Mercenary Librarian series. There is no library to speak of and it isn't a very exciting or adventurous plot. The love story in it was exactly as like sort of insta and ridiculous and unbelievable as I feared. And it didn't, I guess I hoped that if it's the Mercenary Librarian series that okay, it's an urban fantasy, okay, it's romance, but it'll have a cool atmosphere, a cool vibe, cool setting and I'll at least be on for that ride. But there wasn't one. And the part of it that was like, because it was pitched to sort of like being like orphan black, the one part of it that is where I believe that comes from is almost nothing like orphan black and it was both dumb and predictable. So I was just irritated with the entire time. And yeah, I knew it. Next up I have a book that I have a very lengthy video on so I'll link that down below, Half Sick of Shadows by Laura Sebastian. Laura, I forgot now. A lot of these books have gotten rid of. This purports to be an Arthurian retelling but from the perspective of the Lady of Shalott. And it was already a limp and bad story. Like it wasn't a new and grossing one. It wasn't an interesting one. The strange handling of timelines where it's telling it both in the past, the present and the future because she can see the future but she also has memories. So it's kind of like going back and forth between what she foresees, what's currently going on and what she remembers which removed all suspense and the lack of attention to any kind of cohesive historical detail. Like it wasn't even that she'd said it in a different time from Arthur's time but was like cohesively within this other time period. It was just a wibbly wobbly mess of just old timey time things that are from no particular era, no particular. Like it's, I mean, I attacked it for the fact that Arthur's story, unless you specifically said it in a different time, by default it takes place in the fifth and sixth centuries. But yeah, no. It was neither taking place in the fifth and sixth centuries nor was it specifically taking place in any other time period because the stuff that people were wearing, using, saying, having access to the modernity of their social norms and customs and practices. Just all of it was just such a mess. And like part of it's not even just like a being sort of pedantic about, I mean, I have admittedly pedantic about historical accuracy but part of what that type of thing helps you establish is picking even in a fantasy world. You're obviously like, you're making it up as you go but it all has to fit cohesively together. So the person has a cohesive sense of what type of world we're in. What types of things are acceptable and not acceptable. What is the, like even if you're not going into detail about how governance operates, how the economy operates, how it's a taxation and property ownership, even if you don't go into those things, you're still gonna have a general sense kind of of how all of this works. And therefore a sense of what is possible for the characters, what is looked down upon if the characters do it, what is encouraged for characters to do it, like what world they are operating in. And if you have no clear sense of how patriarchal this is or how communist this is or how agrarian this is, if you have no sense of that, then all of it is just kind of like a mess that you have no sense of stakes or world or place for. So with Arthur in particular, that takes place in a specific time unless you say it doesn't. And this, like in addition to being wrong for Arthur was just also like on its own, if you forget when Arthur's supposed to take place, okay, forget fifth and sixth centuries, just take it on its own merits. Does this cohesively make sense within itself? It doesn't. It's all over the place. So it was horrible, boring, stupid. It was just, I don't understand how people can even just like do some minimal Googling for this, but anyway, do not recommend. Next up I have The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones and other Blades and Bodice Rippers book club take. And this book is written kind of like a screenplay, but not actually a screenplay. Like it's not written like a script, but it is written kind of like, maybe like a storyboard for a movie where it's saying this character says this thing and then the camera pans over and you see the thing they are looking at. And then we jump cut to the place they were before that this thing made them think of. And then we do a montage. And like that's how it talks the whole time. And so in addition to that being a jarring and frankly stupid way to tell a story, like there's a reason people don't do this. I mean, I guess credit for innovation, but I feel like as a writer you should have like tried it out and then been like, yeah, no, there's a reason people don't do this, crap that. But we committed. And then so in addition to just like, I don't think being a very good way to tell a story, the entire thing was utterly composed of references to slasher films, which I'm not intensely familiar with. I have seen a couple of slashers and I'm generally familiar with the tropes of the genre, like on a pretty surface level familiar with kind of what a slasher like the kind of beats that one has. And but these, this book is entirely composed of specific references to specific slashers. The dialogue is entire almost verbatim quotations from these things, the things that people are doing are again, references or homages to all of these other slasher films. And if you already find the story structure jarring because of the format of it, and then you don't get any of these references, like this book is literally designed to be only comprehensible to a select few people of the people who are this familiar with all of these slashers and who don't mind the format of this. Like you have, that is a small then diagram. And I am not even in either of these circles. So it's a real quick note for me. Next up I have Destiny's Captive by Beverly Jenkins. This is one of the books that Bethany made me read for our TBR swap and I did it. I've vlogged about it, so I'll leave that link down below. I'll leave the Blaine's and Potter Shippers show for our last final girl linked down below as well. Half of the vlog I did for the books that, the vlog I did for the books that she picked for me, at least half that vlog is just Destiny's Captive because again it's a romance, it's a Potter Shipper so you're not gonna be an automatic fave for me in the first place. And then everything about it. I just hated it more and more intensely as it went on. From the jump, the way this couple gets together is he black mails her into marrying him, which I'm like, well, that's a deal breaker and we have just begun. And then just from there out, the hypocrisy, the selfishness, the bizarre choices, with like completely unsympathetic behavior of particularly the male main character. The female main character is no great shakes, but the male main character, the love interest is, who is fantasy is this? Is what I wanted to know the entire time. I was just like the point of a romance. It's not even that like, you know, there is a questionable romance in a book but the book has other things going for it. But in a romance book, the thing you are there for is the romance, is the love story. And if the romantic hero that you are here to escape into a fantasy of being with is so just reprehensibly, off-puttingly unpardonable, well, that's the whole book. There isn't anything else to it, it's just romance books. So yeah, no. Next up I have Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness. This is the second book in the All Souls trilogy, which is, it begins with the discovery of witches. I think when I did worst books halfway through the year, I might have put this Destiny's captive as worse than this and I might have swamped them now. Again, I said the middle bit is kind of, I'm not super married to these, to this order. But in any event, Shadow of Night took what was a lukewarm but somewhat promising beginning to a series in discovery of witches and just, so in the second book, we follow the same main characters, the witch and the vampire that we met in the present day in an Oxford in the first book. And they have now traveled back in time to the Elizabethan era, which was what I was excited for. I was like, well, the first book was okay, but I sure am excited to see them in the Elizabethan era and I should not have been excited for that because it was worse. The couple, their love story itself was much more insufferable in the second one than in the first one. It was already absurdly insta-lovy in the first book where you're like, you all just met, you know that, right? But they're like, I would die for you. And I'm like, a month ago, I didn't know who this person was. And then, so in this one, like that is turned up to, it was already turned up to 11 in the first book. It's like turned up to 21 now. And they, so they're not with the nonstop, you know, where are you going? I would die for you. I can't live without you. I'm just like, oh, we got it. It loses all impact when it's constant. But then the weirdly, both intensely accurate and intensely inaccurate historicity of it where the author is, I believe a history professor. So she has like a great deal of knowledge when it comes to this. In the little things, in the clothing, in the food, in that kind of stuff, like lots of accuracy. And she's playing with, you know, encountering real historical people, like Marlowe. So that obviously, like there's a wealth of knowledge she's drawing from on that, but it is pointed out in the text how difficult it is for Diana to understand what they're saying, because back in the day, people talked way different. Even if you aren't in England where they speak English, they talked way different, not just the vocabulary, not just the words they're using, but their pronunciation of them all would have been wildly different. So it's pointed out that they find it difficult to understand Diana. Diana finds it impossible to understand them because she's, you know, a modern day American. And so that said, well, it goes out of its way to point that out, which like kudos, because that's how it would be. You can't just travel back in time and then just talk like normal because people didn't talk like that. All the dialogue between the old and day characters is weirdly modern and weirdly anachronistic and casual. And I just, I was like, you can't point out that they talk different and then have them talk more modern than anybody, you know, in an Austin novel, even though this is the Elizabethan era. And so I just, I mean, maybe that's the problem. Like you cannot have a time travel story like this for that reason, because especially not if you're gonna actually point out how this actually should work, which I would have thought to myself anyway, like if everyone had just like immediately talked, just find out, I'd have been like, well, they probably wouldn't. But the book points out that they probably wouldn't and then just proceeds to have them talk fine anyway. And I was like, what? So yeah, I hated that a lot. It was all, it was just mostly, it was boring, but it was also all those other things. So no. Down to the top three, which yeah, I think these are pretty solid at the top three. So number three is From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout, another blades and blaster book club fake. This was the worst. It is, it purports to be a sort of more like epic fantasy, historical fantasy type of setting and story from an author who has predominantly only written like urban fantasy or paranormal romance that takes place in the modern day. So it is written exactly in this style of a paranormal urban fantasy romance, except we now have corsets and daggers. But the vibe, the dialogue, the way the characters behave, it is all straight out of something modern. And I was told that, well, that's where the author came from. And I'm like, cool story. She's writing something else now. So if you're gonna change, like if you've always written sci-fi and you're gonna try your hand at medieval European inspired fantasy, you can't just have laser guns and be like, well, you know, that's the thing you started sci-fi. Like no, well, that's great. Go back to writing sci-fi then cause you clearly still want to write sci-fi. If you've decided to change that, you've decided to try your hand at something else with that comes some changing of what you've normally done, but apparently not. Not if you're Jennifer L. Armentrout. And if you're a fan of hers, apparently you don't mind this either. But that was painful. And then the story itself like didn't make a lick of sense. The characterization was so absurdly overdone and over explained and the metaphors that she would use. I have a whole vlog for this as well. So I'll leave that link down below if you wanna hear. All my nitpicks and all my gripes and all my hatred for it. I ranted about it at length in that vlog. So that's available to you. But it was like pretty much everything I hate. And the love story was like, in addition to just being kind of like insta-lovy and just like not a thing that I'm interested in reading incredibly toxic, but painted as like feminist and liberating. And I was just like, I don't think so. So yeah, do not recommend. Number two is Macbeth by Joan Esbo, not William Shakespeare. As you may or may not be aware, I have been reading the Hogarth Shakespeare retellings of Shakespeare plays with my friend Heather. We've been having live chats about them. And Macbeth was one of the worst things that I've ever read. Heather actually de-enaftered it. She just refused to read it because it's also really long, which is ridiculous because Macbeth, I mean, already Shakespeare plays are fairly short. Macbeth is one of the shortest. So Joan Esbo wrote a book like this long that is supposed to be a retelling of Macbeth that he named Macbeth. All the other Hogarth Shakespeare books, they have a different title. Like the Winter's Tale is the retelling of that is the gap of time. The Hamming the Shrew, the retelling of that is vinegar girl. The Merchant of Venice, the retelling of that is Charlotte is my name. But Macbeth, the retelling of that, I don't know, it's called Macbeth. So zero points for creativity. And he wrote it as a sort of like cop drama. And I just, sir, I don't think you've read or understood Macbeth because not only was the book itself on its own terms, one of the most disgusting and boring and too long and self-indulgent and nail-gazy just awful books ever. Just by itself, if you forget that it's a retelling, it's just not good. But then as a retelling of Macbeth, so drawing the parallels and seeing which things are meant to be either direct translations of or mirroring or paralleling some part of Macbeth, either it's plot or a particular characters or whatever it is, as recreations of something out of Macbeth, I was like, I don't think you understood Macbeth. And this is not only like just not good. It's also low key offensive at times to the point where I was like, are you trying to ruin Macbeth on purpose? It was, anyway, Heather and I ranted about it at length during the live for it. Cause it was shockingly bad, frankly. I was like, who let this person retell Macbeth? They are clearly not qualified. I don't think they know Macbeth or they've entirely misunderstood Macbeth. So I do recommend Macbeth, the play. But Macbeth by Joan Esbo is one of the most garbage things I've ever been forced to endure. And it is also unpardonably long. My number one worst book of the year is the same as was my number one worst book, Halfwich of the Year. And that is Dreams of the Dying Maniclessly So. Which is a self-published book, which as I said before when I talked about it, I don't normally, I try not to go out of my way to crap on self-published or indie published books because it feels like picking on the little guy. But this book costs $40 in hardcover because the author obviously putting a lot of time, attention and detail and money into the aesthetic of the book. So the art that is outside of the Bumina cover art, the maps in the book, the BC area, like there's a lot of like bells and whistles and that's what you're paying for. The thing you did not spend money on is an editor because this book, again, in addition to not being a good story, having wooden characters that behave as plot devices and as vehicles for the author to not only info them, because he does info them, but to just spew his own philosophies and worldviews, which again, in addition to being painful to endure because that's not how characters should behave, they're also very basic and very not deep or fascinating hot takes on like the life or philosophy. These are like some super basic things that a middle schooler might be arriving at as conclusions when they're first beginning to ask existential questions. So it's just, it's painfully juvenile in what it thinks is deep and it spends so much time on these deep themes that I'm like, that's, are you kidding me? This isn't deep, this is the most amazing out of shit. Like if this was a middle grade book, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, you're introducing these topics to a young audience, but you sir clearly think you've arrived at some deep ass conclusions and you have spent pages and pages and pages using your characters to tell us this shit, even though it doesn't make sense for them to be doing that. So that was just like nauseating to read. But also it is so poorly written insofar as it is grammatically incorrect or there are idioms that are used incorrectly. Like that is not what that idiom means. There are weird, like not anachronistic isn't the right word to use since this is a fantasy world, but I don't know if there is a word for that. But so in a fantasy world, because you have invented this world, it is not our own world. There are things that people say that are based on things that are in our own world. So for example, biblical references. So if you're gonna have your characters using expressions that are in fact biblical references, you have to make that make sense. Either this is taking place in our real world or there is something equivalent in your world that is like basically the Bible. Because otherwise that doesn't make sense why your character's saying that. So that's not an anachronism. I don't know that there's a word, maybe they let me know if there's a word for that. But there wasn't a lot of that going on. So non-stop, even while I was like angry and irritated with the story itself, which I think was badly written, there was all these sentences that I was like, well that's grammatically incorrect or that's not what that idiom means, the way that you're using it or that came out of the Bible. Why are people talking about this? So just the entire time I was like, I don't think fixing all the things that are objectively wrong with it, i.e. this is not how that idiom should be used, this is grammatically incorrect. Even if you fix all the things and there were many that are objectively wrong about it, I still think it would be a shit story and not very well written because of all the author just self-indulgingly spewing what he thinks is a deep-ass shit. I'm just not deep. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but it's not deep. And it was so long, it was so long. Partly because of all the soap boxing this author does about his own deep philosophies. But in addition to that, the story, what story there is wraps up at around page 500. And then there are like 200 more pages of falling action where there isn't even a story to be had. It's just wallowing in this character's misery and philosophy and issues. And I wanted to die. Dreams of the dying. I was dying and dreaming of release. Worst book by far that I have read, certainly in 2021 and possibly ever. It was so painful to read. And then it cost $40. So if it was like 10 bucks for a paperback and that was just like the story in it, I'd have been like, well, this could have used an editor, but I guess you are on a budget. But clearly you had some money to burn. And instead of paying an editor, you paid some artists to make it real pretty. So it's an added layer of irritation on my part where I'm like, I can't even give you that pass because you have demonstrated that this was not a priority to you that you could have fixed this. You had the money to fix this. And you chose not to. Those are my worst books of 2021. Let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings about my thoughts and feelings. If there's any books you expected to see on this list or that you're surprised to see on this list. I want everyone to let me know. I post videos on Saturdays. Other other times as well, definitely Saturdays. So like and subscribe to my Patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see you when I see you. Bye.