This is the transcript of my latest podcast episode.

 

Hello and welcome to Resurrected Reviews Revisited, part of the Will You Still Love It Tomorrow podcast. I’m Annie and, usually, in each Reviews episode, I pick something I’ve reviewed sometime since 2005, reread or rewatch it, and then compare my reactions. Fair warning: there will be spoilers.

 

This time, though, I’m doing something a bit different.

 

Over the last few months, I’ve started following a few creators on YouTube who review books and talk about their reading. And there’s one type of video they do that I really like – reading a particular subset of books until they find a five-star read (or lose the will to live…).

 

Even in their normal videos, they give five stars to books they read far more often than I do…

 

I tracked through all my ratings (which unfortunately only go back to the start of 2019) and the results were as follows:

 

2019 – eight five-star reads – one of which was a re-read

2020 – five five-star reads – one of which was a re-read

2021 – one five-star read

2022 – one five-star read – which was a re-read

2023 – three five-star reads

2024 – one five-star read to date

 

So that’s only 16 new five-star books I’ve discovered in five and a half years – which makes me a bit sad! Don’t get me wrong – if I was including four-star reads, this would be a much, much longer list (as I have 220 of those across the same period) – and me giving a book three stars means I definitely enjoyed it. So I do read a lot of good books! But very few seem to be real stand-outs…

 

Maybe I’m not choosing my new books in the right way. Maybe I’m too harsh in my ratings. I don’t know.

 

Out of the 16 five-star reads, six are fantasy, four are sci-fi, two are nonfiction, two are contemporary, one is historical and one is a book of short stories. So that’s quite a range and it’s difficult to identify characteristics that link them together.

 

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to select my next few books to read in a very particular way, with a view to finding some new five-star reads to add to my 2024 list.

 

A few months ago, I put out a survey, asking people to tell me one of their favourite books of all time, and also the last book they read that they considered a five-star read. And, from the 29 responses I got (thank you to everyone who filled it in!), I’ve put together a list of twelve books, which I’m planning to work my way through until I find a five-star read!

 

I’d only heard of four of them and only one is a book that’s been recommended to me before. I’ve got three sci-fi, two fantasy, two historical, two romance, one magical realism, one contemporary and one book of short stories, so it’s a good range and I’m really looking forward to diving in. And remember, there will be spoilers, though I’ll try to keep the major ones a bit vague, in case anyone is inspired to pick up any of these books after listening to this.

 

My first pick is the one that’s been recommended to me a couple of times before – Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, which came out in 2019. All I know about it before starting to read is that it’s about a café in Tokyo where customers are able to travel back in time, but only for as long as it takes for their coffee to get cold.

 

Here’s what I thought as I was reading it:

 

It wasn’t a great start – either for this experiment or this book in particular…

 

The opening scene is a conversation between two people simply described as ‘the man’ and ‘the woman’, which is never a good way to make characters engaging. Then, once we do get to named characters, there are suddenly a lot of them all at once, with big chunks of background exposition but no context to tell me why I should care about who they are, what they’re doing and what might happen to them. Plus, I don’t know if it’s the original text or the translation, but the writing is very clunky, everything is over-explained, it’s very repetitive, the viewpoint skips about all over the place, and there are a couple of glaring inconsistencies. For example, it says on the first page that Fumiko is Goro’s girlfriend of three years but, a few pages later, it says they only met two years ago.

 

I do like the concept, though – and the rules of the time travel are ones I haven’t come across before, at least not in this combination:

There’s only one chair in the café that allows time travel – and it’s only available once per day, but not on a predictable schedule.

You can’t move from the chair during your visit to the past.

You can only talk to people who were in the café on the day you visit.

Nothing you do in the past will change the present.

You only have as long as it takes for your coffee to get cold.

And, in order to avoid being trapped in the seat forever as a ghost, you have to drink the entire cup of coffee within that unknown timeframe.

 

It feels like, despite these heavy restrictions – which actually make the time travel very unpopular and which explains why the café isn’t the most famous venue in the world – there’s a lot of interesting stuff an author could do with this set-up. So I hoped it would get better as it went along…

 

Fumiko’s desperation to go back in time is well-portrayed, as is her subsequent fluctuating conviction once she fully understands the risks. If nothing can really change, is it worth going back at all, given the risk of getting trapped? And then the way her trip to the past plays out is really satisfying, in that it doesn’t change the present but does, of course, change what she’s going to do in the future.

 

But we’re constantly told exactly what all the characters are feeling and why, as well as the detailed significance of every tiny occurrence and how it affects them all. Which makes the narrative very blunt and entirely lacking in subtext. It also makes it all less emotive somehow, because it feels quite clinical and didactic.

 

The history of Fusagi and Kohtake’s relationship provided in the second chapter is very sweet and quite affecting. But I was confused as to how Kohtake could bring something back with her from the past and how that wouldn’t change things. It doesn’t technically change anything in the present, for various reasons, but it seems like it would break the rules somehow. I also found the way Kohtake treats Fusagi after her trip to the past not very believable for an experienced nurse, and also frequently upsetting for him, which makes it seem very mean.

 

Then, in the third chapter, there’s a convoluted explanation about how events conspire to make sure nothing done in the past affects the future and it lost me a bit, because it made things too complicated, when the way it worked in the first two stories largely made sense without it. It also means that actually lots of things might happen that didn’t happen before, which would necessarily have a knock-on effect in lots of aspects of future events, so it no longer makes sense.

 

And then it all falls apart – something incredibly horrible happens and the consequent trip to the past definitely changes things because it gives someone information they didn’t have before and also stops someone writing a letter they wrote before. I guess those are only very minor changes that don’t affect the big picture of the future, but it still feels like the rules are unravelling. It also prompts one of the characters to do something for what I think are entirely the wrong reasons, so the whole third chapter really went awry in my view.

 

In the fourth chapter, there’s suddenly the possibility of going to the future as well, which feels like a massive shift in the rules and something that couldn’t possibly avoid changing things in the past. Somehow, if there’s an immutable point in the present, after which it’s okay to change things based on travelling to the past, it feels like being able to travel forwards from that point as well adds on a layer that breaks the premise altogether. Which is why I don’t usually like time travel stories, because it always gets too complicated and gives me a headache!

 

There is a good reason given as to why there’s little point travelling to the future within the café’s rules, though. But then a whole new rule is brought into play that’s never been mentioned before, even though it seems like it would have needed to be emphasised very strongly to people who wanted to use the time travel, along with all the other rules.

 

This happens quite a bit throughout the book – certain things happen and then the narrative drops in extra information to explain them after the fact, in ways that change the whole perspective of the story and feel very jarring. It’s a bit like when I’m introducing people to a new board game and, part way through playing, I say, “Oh, I forgot to mention this other rule…” and they very understandably get really annoyed with me!

 

I loved the flashback to how Kei and Nagare met – their first exchange of words is really great. And the setup for the main plot of the fourth chapter in the book is well done, as it’s seeded early and referenced a few times throughout the rest of the book. This shows that the author does know how to do this well, which makes all the other instances of sudden retro-active explanations all the more jarring.

 

The time travel visit in the fourth chapter is very affecting and well-written. And I like the overall message of the book, even if it is over-explained at the end and even if I didn’t necessarily agree with the decisions made by the characters as a consequence of their visits to different times. Also, there was one part of the story and one aspect of the rules that I was particularly interested in but that was never explained, which was a bit annoying.

 

Diversity:

All the characters are Japanese, which makes sense in the context.

There are varied female characters, who take on important roles in the story and everyone is layered and complex.

But there’s no queer representation in the relationships.

 

Final thoughts:

Overall, I didn’t think it was a bad book, though I had a lot of issues with different aspects of it and I definitely didn’t connect with it in the way I’d hoped. Three stars for this one!

 

On to the next one!

 

 

My second pick is Outdrawn by Deanna Grey, which is apparently a ‘sapphic rivals-to-lovers romance’ published in 2023. I don’t read a lot of romance, especially not contemporary, but I do like queer love stories, so I thought I’d give it a go and see if it’s any good.

 

Here’s what I thought as I was reading it:

 

We were off to an even rockier start than with my first pick, since I nearly DNF’d this one on the second page…

 

There are multiple instances of run-on sentences, the tenses are all over the place and I had to read several lines more than once even to figure out what they meant…

 

But I like the concept of a rivalry between webcomic artists and the voice of the protagonist came through quite strongly, so I decided to give it a bit longer before deciding.

 

I liked both the sister, Liana, and the best friend, Amaya, on their first appearance – the author does a good job of crystallising their characters in only a few lines, managing to make them distinctive and not stereotypical, which is impressive.

 

The next few pages made me laugh out loud more than once, thanks to Amaya’s snark, and I was definitely invested by the end of the first scene, so I’m glad I kept reading.

 

I have to admit I’ve never come across the name Noah as being gender-neutral but the internet reliably tells me it is, so I stand corrected.

 

Once Noah gets to the comic headquarters, I liked all the other characters on the team, especially Seline, the colorist, who made me laugh several times in her first few pages.

 

But the tenses are still a bit of a muddle and that’s one of my pet peeves in writing.

 

I like the fact that Noah and Sage, the rival artist and clear love interest, have a prior history, having overlapped at art college and apparently had at least some kind of connection (and the way that connection is described is adorable). But I’m not sure about the initial power imbalance, with Sage being the established lead artist, who clearly looks down on Noah as inferior. I’m glad Noah talks back to her, though, rather than caving under her disapproval.

 

Even though I’ve edited a lot of contemporary romance and dual viewpoint is pretty standard, it took me by surprise when it suddenly shifted to Sage’s viewpoint in Chapter Two, but that engaged me with the story even more, since I was intrigued by getting her side of things, given how prickly and mean she is in Noah’s chapter.

 

And it turned out I really liked her too – perhaps even more than Noah, since I actually relate to Sage’s character more. Plus, Noah came across as a lot less sympathetic in Sage’s narrative, which I guess is inevitable in a dual viewpoint story where the two viewpoint characters start out antagonistic towards one another.

 

It’s good that Noah and Sage can still recognise each other’s talent and that they care about each other’s opinion – and they’re both refreshingly self-aware about their own failings and attitudes.

 

I was continually confused about hierarchy in the team, though. Sage and Noah are co-lead artists on the project, so I thought maybe Tyson, the editor, would have final say on decisions (to avoid stale-mate if they can’t agree). But in the first pitching meeting, Sage thinks it won’t matter what the others say because she has creative control – but then they vote on which ideas to go with.

 

And then we get the competition on the webcomic site, which left me wondering – do we really need the two protagonists as rivals in two separate arenas? Though it is a fun way to put them directly in competition with one another with an external judge of who’s going to win, rather than them just having to try to collaborate on a project at work.

 

The progression of the relationship between Sage and Noah is done really well. Their mutual and simultaneous attraction and annoyance is very believable and engaging. Characters misunderstanding each other usually really irritates me, but the dual viewpoint works well to show both sides here. It also makes sense that they’d each base their assumptions about the other on old misconceptions about their time together at college, exacerbated by their individual self-worth issues and suppressed desire for each other.

 

Sage’s insecurities, in particular, coupled with her deliberate attempts to push people away, are really well done. When it’s made clear that she desperately wants people to push at her boundaries and force her to open up about what’s bothering her, even while she’s outwardly brushing them all off forcefully, it felt very real.

 

The different issues Sage and Noah have with their families are also very well done. They both have complicated backgrounds in various ways and there are a lot of layers in terms of how they interact with their families and what attitudes they have towards the obligations or resentments they feel around that.

 

The way Sage and Noah gradually become closer over working together on the comic is a very natural progression and the segue into physically touching one another makes perfect sense in the context of the story, so it doesn’t feel forced at all.

 

They’re getting along much better already by the halfway mark, which made me wonder if it was going to get repetitive or annoying in terms of contrived conflict to drag the story out over the word count. But it continued feeling quite natural in terms of the ups and downs of their relationship progression.

 

The screw-up between Sage and Noah at the carnival is realistic and feels natural. And hurrah for Sage asking to talk about it afterwards and apologising, rather than them devolving into awkward avoidance!!

 

And then Noah explains her reaction too – wow – adult communication!! Unheard of in most fiction and really awesome!! I love how self-aware they are and how attuned they are to each other. And also how they don’t immediately turn into perfect humans when they get together – they still fall into old habits, say the wrong thing, react defensively. But they’re aware of it, call themselves and each other out on it and both make conscious efforts to control their initial reactive impulses better.

 

I love how the conflict shifts from the antagonism between Sage and Noah, to them working together for both the competition and the relaunch of the comic at the company – and that the threat moves from them pushing against each other to them worrying about each other regarding different things they’re each struggling with independently. The progression is really well done.

 

They both hold the other one at a distance, still wanting to deny their issues and keep everything together on their own, which is very realistic, even with how close they’ve become in some ways.

 

When we finally get to the inevitable sex, the scene is long but it’s combined with the thoughts and feelings of both of them about what’s happening, so it stays interesting and involving in terms of plot and character, rather than just being the physical details. I don’t read a lot of explicit books, but I enjoyed the sex in this one because it had depth and meaning.

 

And then the further progression of their relationship gets wrapped up in their competitiveness with each other, both at work and in the competition, in yet more realistic character detail. But the way they come back to each other and talk through their feelings and all the potential issues and how they’re going to work on them together is just great. I’m so impressed by how everything in this story is handled so well.

 

I love how it all comes together at the end, too – no contrived conflict, just the right amount of predictability, gorgeous found family vibes, and a very satisfying conclusion with a very sweet epilogue.

 

Diversity:

A lot of the characters are Black and quite a few of them, including both first-person protagonists, are queer.

I love the fact that Sage is bisexual because there isn’t nearly enough good representation for that, even in queer stories. And the presentation of that here is really good.

Seline, the comic colorist, is a runner with a prosthetic leg, though that’s only mentioned once on her first introduction and never referenced again.

For several of the characters, their ethnicity isn’t at all clear, but I don’t suppose that matters.

 

Final thoughts:

I really enjoyed this book – the writing is good, especially in portraying the layers of the two protagonists and how their internal thoughts and feelings contradict how they see each other from the outside. It’s funny and heartfelt and not nearly as predictable as I’ve come to expect from romance. And the way the ups and downs of the relationship are portrayed in such a realistic way is wonderful – plus, the communication between the two protagonists is fantastic and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done as well before. The found family aspect is beautiful too, always a favourite trope of mine.

 

Definitely four stars, but I unfortunately can’t ignore the editing issues and technical errors enough to go higher.

 

 

My third pick in my search for a five-star read is The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. I had heard of this one before the recommendation but it wasn’t on my list of books to read.

 

Aaaaaaaand – I only got 16 pages in and had to stop, so that wasn’t a great choice! I normally try to give a book 50 pages before giving up, but I really hated the stream-of-consciousness style narrative and the constant head-hopping. It was also incredibly unpleasant on multiple levels right from the start – and the little boy hearing his dead father’s voice coming from the cardboard coffin just before it was sent into the furnace at the crematorium tipped me over the edge.

 

Ah, well! Onto the next one…

 

 

My fourth pick is The Ferryman by Justin Cronin, which wasn’t a book I’d heard of before sending out the survey.

 

And it has a very encouraging start, with a prologue that spans multiple time periods within the life of a woman named Cynthia, who rows out from shore of an island in the early morning and apparently drowns herself in the sea. The prose is incredibly compelling, pulling me along and raising many questions about what’s going on and how it all links together.

 

And then the setup, when it is laid out in a multi-page dump of exposition, turns out to be almost exactly the same as that of The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton, which came out a year later, but which I read before this one…

 

An island of people, cut off from the rest of the world by a barrier that protects them from whatever horrors have taken place outside, served by people of ‘lesser biological and social endowments’, with no knowledge of how they arrived there.

 

There are differences, obviously, and the plot is likely to diverge considerably, but the initial similarity is a bit annoying.

 

Some parts of the setup here don’t make a lot of sense. For example, our narrator, Proctor, says the citizens of Prospera dedicate themselves to the highest aspirations of creative expression and personal development. And yet he is a civil servant with a relatively modest salary (I’m wondering where those who dedicate themselves to more esoteric pursuits get their money), working for the Department of Civil Contracts, essentially forcing reluctant elderly citizens to take the ferry to be reborn with a clean slate. So, there doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge over and above the Prosperans and they apparently police themselves. It also says they’ve been released from material concerns – so why do they still have a capitalist system with salaries and shops at all?

 

However, I do like the concept that, even though physical life expectancy has been extended, people’s mental capacity to deal with the ‘weight of time’ means that they still elect to take the ferry to be ‘reiterated’ when they get two or three decades past a hundred.

 

I have many questions about the society and the worldbuilding – but I want to let them go and just accept the book as it is because the writing is so good, and the character and emotional detail is so affecting.

 

Dave and I had an interesting conversation after I read an extract to him. He said he likes his sci-fi and fantasy to be thriller-esque in style – sparse prose and a fast pace, because dense writing is too much when you’re already having to take in all the information about how the world of the book functions. I can see his point, but this is exactly the kind of writing I love – writing I can lose myself in and that forces me to read a book properly and allows no temptation to skim.

 

By the end of the first chapter, I’m in it for the long haul and I feel like none of my questions really matter.

 

And then we get two more viewpoint characters – a woman who has contacts among the servant class and is apparently involved in some kind of religious resistance against those in power – and another woman who is one of the main people in power, which makes things a whole lot more interesting.

 

There are lots of layers and hints about things not being what they seem and it’s all very intriguing, but the ins and outs of the individual scenes and progression of each storyline are compelling enough that I don’t want to skim.

 

A few more chapters in, and I’m finding I don’t really have much to comment on – but I think that’s more to do with me than the book. By this point, in my reading purely for pleasure, I’ve DNF’d six books in the space of two weeks and I’m starting to wonder what’s going on. I’m still enjoying The Ferryman, but I’m not reading a lot of it each day and I don’t feel I’m giving it the attention and energy it deserves. In the midst of a concerted effort to find a five-star read, it’s interesting to consider whether my lack of superlative reading experiences might be down to me just being incredibly picky or not often capable of giving myself up to books in a way that allows me to enjoy them to the full.

 

Still, it does seem somewhat idiotic, when the main character, Proctor, has overheard something he feels he needs to hide from those at the top of society, and he chooses to go and look it up on the central computer system in the library…

 

Then he agrees to meet a woman he flirted with at a concert a few days before (who is the one with contacts among the servant class rebellion and is actually targeting him because of what he’s overheard) and spends some time in the narrative talking about how he’s grown apart from his wife. He emphasises that he’s not trying to justify his potential infidelity, but that’s exactly what he’s doing and it feels quite disingenuous. Particularly since I was already sympathetic to his unhappiness in his marriage because of the masterful way his wife has been portrayed – overtly loving and seemingly fully invested in his wellbeing, but with strong undertones of shallow insincerity.

 

Proctor doesn’t approach the assignation with much sense, either. He doesn’t seem concerned about being seen and recognised at a restaurant he’s been to before. And then he takes Thea out on his boat and gets close enough to the Nursery (the island where old people go to be reborn) to trigger the surveillance drones of the security forces, when he already knows those in charge are suspicious of him.

 

Which made me realise I have no sense of how big the islands are or how many people live there, or whether or not it’s reasonable for Proctor to think he can be anonymous.

 

The storm that seems to target them and then abruptly disappears really reminded me of The Truman Show, and I guess it’s very possible those in charge might be able to control the weather in that way.

 

And then it gets suddenly, briefly, shockingly violent, which I guess shouldn’t have been a surprise. It also starts getting a bit wibbly towards the halfway point, which doesn’t necessarily bother me but I think I’d prefer it if there are eventually rational explanations for everything.

 

I do find it amusing that the Prosperans are encouraged to pursue artistic expression but all their paintings are incredibly dull.

 

I also like the fact that, when Proctor starts thinking about the servants as people for the first time, his automatic instinct is to offer his housekeeper a massive raise. It’s a very believable reaction for someone in his position but it just emphasises the difference in their status even more.

 

When Proctor talks about guardians sending new wards back to the Nursery, he says there are negative social consequences as others are waiting to become guardians. It makes some sense for wards (newly reborn people, who emerge from the Nursery as 16-year-olds) that have incapacitating accidents or are seen as defective in some way. But if there’s nothing wrong with them, other than that the guardians decide they don’t like looking after a ward, why not give them to someone else?

 

The people in charge claiming Proctor has a brain tumour is very clever, as it allows them to explain away everything that’s happened in a way that he can’t refute.

 

When he arrives at the Nursery, he’s told he can enjoy the luxurious facilities for several days before he is reiterated, which makes no sense at all. Whether people have been forced into ‘retirement’ or volunteered to do it, why go to trouble of providing luxury facilities for several days before recycling people? Wouldn’t it be much easier and less expensive to do it right away?

 

And then it all gets a bit thriller-y for a while, with running around, being chased, a gun battle and lots of action, which I have to admit lost me a bit.

 

When they finally decide to leave the island, why do they go past the Nursery and thus activate the drones to come and attack them? It’s an island, so there must be other directions they could go.

 

I figured out the main twist quite some time before the big reveal, but not why. The idea behind the island and its inhabitants is an interesting one, though the way it’s all set up (particularly the different in lived experience between the Prosperans and the people in the Annex) doesn’t make any sense.

 

Then there’s a massive exposition dump – but as mentioned just above, it doesn’t explain a lot. I had so many questions about how it all worked and why when I was 100 pages before the end, and some apprehension that they would never be answered to my satisfaction.

 

When the answers start coming, some of them are awesome and it does all start to make some kind of sense, though certain aspects are never fully explained. There’s also a huge amount of summary, describing what happened before the book started and covering quite a lot of very emotive topics, but in a dry way that failed to engage my emotions.

 

And then it goes all thriller-y again, with explosions and car chases and action-packed urgency, which is a bit annoying because it makes me want to skim just to find out what happens at the end.

 

Then, just like the aftermath of the previous thriller-y bit, there’s a dry summary of an epilogue, in which all the tension of the previous 500 pages is pretty much destroyed by more revelations. And the agency and importance of the protagonist is very much diminished. Which makes it all a bit pointless in some ways…

 

Apart from the overall sense that what the book seems to be positing is that, no matter the circumstances, the time, the planet or the surroundings, human nature will win out by creating a situation of oppression and inequality that leads to violence and destruction. Though, the decision that’s made to solve the problem of the inevitable conflict between the Prosperans and the Annex people is an interesting one.

 

I’m not sure the book wholly hangs together, but overall it’s a very good read, if a little self-defeating in terms of its own impact.

 

 

Diversity:

I don’t think any character’s ethnicity is described at all, though a smattering of characters have names that suggest a non-white heritage.

Every romantic relationship mentioned is male/female – despite the fact that the Prosperans don’t procreate.

There’s a range of really interesting female characters and several of them get the viewpoint.

 

 

Final thoughts:

I found myself considering the book quite carefully as I was reading it – and it is really good. It’s extremely well written, cleverly constructed and observed, intriguing and involving – cerebral in a way I really appreciate. But it only really touched my emotions a handful of times, and I find that’s an omission that’s important to me – though I also wonder if it’s more a fault in me than in the book. Different types of media do affect me deeply – books, films, TV shows, comics, music – but only rarely.

I gave this book four stars.

 

I’ve decided that four books is enough of an experiment, so I’m going to end my search there, before this episode gets too long.

 

I am sure there are more five-star books in my reading future, though perhaps not as many as I’d like, and unfortunately none in this particular search. But that’s okay.

 

 

And that’s it for this episode of Reviews Revisited.

 

Next month, I’m going to be revisiting Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

 

Many thanks to Cambo for our theme music. And thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts.

 

And if you have any comments, or if you want to tell me about a time you revisited some media, and whether or not you still loved it afterwards, you can email me at willyoustillloveit@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.

 

Lastly, please join us for the next main episode of Will You Still Love It Tomorrow in two weeks to hear what happens when I get Dave to watch Man on Fire. Will Dave like it at all? And will I still love it after our discussion? I’m looking forward to finding out!

 

Bye for now!