Thanks for the thread @Southeastdweller, and sorry you're feeling low @Piggywaspushed.
I'm not bringing my list over but have a few recent reviews.
39. Carrie Carolyn Coco, by Sarah Gerard. Very absorbing, but strange and disjointed; I have no idea what she was trying to do here. This is the non-fiction account of the author's friend Carolyn, an aspiring poet who was murdered by her roommate. Carolyn's friends are mainly young writers and artists and everything is very intense. There is an enormous web of interlinked characters, many of them centred on Bard, a liberal arts college in upstate New York, and the author takes long digressions into the history of Bard, early #metoo conversations, race relations in Florida, and other topics. Very late in the telling, we are introduced to Carolyn's stalker, who is mentioned several times in close proximity, and then vanishes as quickly as he arrived. We are told this is a 'whydunnit' but I'm no clearer at the end about what the author does and doesn't believe, and I'm not sure if that is deliberate or if she is trying to avoid being sued. The form is very confusing, hopping around all over the place. If I were to give her credit, I'd say she's trying to represent the complexity and rootlessness of Carolyn's life - or it could just be that her material got away from her. One goodreads reviewer said "DNF. If a distant friend wrote a story this pretentious about my senseless and brutal murder I would haunt the shit out of them" and I must say I sympathise.
40. Evenings and Weekends, by Oisin McKenna. The blurb says "London, 2019. It’s the hottest June on record, and a whale is stuck in the Thames River. In the streets of the city, four old acquaintances want more from life than they’ve been given. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, their paths will intersect at a party that will change their lives forever…". This makes it sound much more exciting than it was! In reality there is a lot of Sally Rooney-esque navel gazing and I wanted to tell most of the characters to grow up and get a grip. Ultimately this was less than the sum of its parts and I found it underwhelming.
41. Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti. The blurb says: "Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries." The concept of this sounds straight out of Pseud's Corner, but it was absolute poetry. It has the authentic feel of a journal, but a really enjoyable juxtaposition of the profound and the mundane.
Once I've voted I'm going to rock back and forth while reading Sandwich, which is so far a light, funny novel, and A Walk in the Park, which is non-fiction about a disastrous hike in the Grand Canyon.