Got my first bingo on my 2026 Book Bingo Card.(Click here if you have no idea what I’m talking about)

As always, I’m going to take some time to share my thoughts on these five stories. There are a few highs here, but also some mehs. Overall though, there is nothing I hated to read, and so far the highs have been really high. I’ going to be touching on some very good stories with these reviews.

Without further ado, let’s get to my reviews.

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Challenge: Written in the 1980s

Book: The Long Habit of Living – Joe Haldeman

Rating: 2/5

The only other book by Joe Haldeman Id ever read before this one was The Forever War, which had a huge impact on me and is one of my favourite books. Therefore, I was bitterly disappointed with The Long Habit of Living. This was not a very fun book, and it took me ages to get through it.

In this book, there is a medical treatment that can restore a human body to a healthy, youthful state. The organisation that performs this procedure charges one million dollars minimum, and requires the patient to give all their money and assets to the organisation. The idea behind this was that the mega rich would give up their riches for longer life rather than passing it on to their heirs, and since the rejuvenation process only lasts ten years, this would eliminate the mega rich class. Instead it just created a class of mega rich immortal people, who will do anything to make back their one million every ten years. Our protagonist is Dallas Barr, who uncovers a conspiracy amongst this immortal class that puts the life of him and his love interest, Maria Marconi, in danger. We follow the couple through the solar system as they run from this shadowy enemy.

This is a book that tries to be a non-stop, action-packed chase to lawless parts of Earth and then off into space, but it just didn’t feel exciting to me. I think the biggest problem was Dallas as a protagonist. He’s a very flat character, with very little personality and I didn’t care what happened to him. Maria on the other hand was a potentially interesting character. She’s religious, and at the start of the novel has made the decision to not undergo another cycle of rejuvenation. She also lies to Dallas about how long she has left before she starts dying because she knows he won’t understand her decision to die naturally and will pressure her to rejuvenate. Towards the end though, she changes her mind and wants to live. This could have been super interesting, and I know this situation would have been excellent for exploring the fear of death, but unfortunately the potential is wasted because Haldeman sucks at writing from a woman’s perspective and all her motivation for everything, including changing her mind about dying, is tied to her relationship with Dallas.

This book does still have a lot of cool ideas. I liked the worldbuilding; anarchist islands off Florida, massive space hotels, private spaceships and asteroid mining settlements, there were a lot of cool settings here. Haldeman also does a lot of interesting things with the formatting of the book. For example, this is a conversation Dallas and Maria have with Eric, a digitized person who can think much faster than a human. We see the convo from Eric’s perspective, with Dallas’s words to the right and Eric’s thoughts as he hears them to the left.

I thought this was a really cool way to do a scene from a computer intelligence. I wish we’d spent ore time with Eric. There are also a lot of charts and some drawings of signs. There are so many interesting, clever details in this book that I appreciate a lot. Unfortunately I couldn’t connect with the characters, the villain’s conspiracy was a bit too vague for me, and I just couldn’t get into this book. I feel like it had a lot of potential, but didn’t come together.

Challenge: Own Voices

Book: Sovereign – April Daniels

Rating: 4/5

I reviewed the first book in this series, Dreadnaught, last year in another Book Bingo Challenge. You can read that review HERE. I absolutely loved Dreadnaught, and if I wasn’t trying so hard to finish last years Bingo card I would have read these two back to back. I almost read them back to back anyway, but I made myself wait. Dreadnaught makes you want more, but still provides enough satisfaction that you can stop with there if you want.

I didn’t want to stop though. I wanted more of this world and Sovereign delivers. We continue to follow Danny, our teenage superhero who gets an instant transition (MtF) when she inherits the powers of Dreadnaught, the world’s most powerful superhero. She’s in the public eye now, and as well as dealing with supervillains regularly, she also has to manager her public imagine, go through the court system to get emancipated from her parents, and deal with the fallout from the end of the last book. On top of that, the threat of Nemesis, which was hinted in the last book, hangs over her. Into all this comes a new supervillain who actually finds a way to hurt her, in multiple ways.

It’s a crazy ride. It did take a bit to get going, but once it did it was as un-putdownable as the first book.

Sovereign also expands the world in cool ways. Sometimes it did feel a bit like a superhero parody, but a lot of the sillier bits were still within character, so most of the time it felt like realistic behaviour despite making me laugh.

The final book in this series isn’t out yet, but that’s okay. Like Dreadnaught, Sovereign manages to deliver an ending that still makes you want more, but is still satisfying. I could be happy if this is where the series ends, but there is just enough unresolved that I want more. And besides, Danny still has a lot to learn about herself and about wielding such destructive power, and I’d love to see her go through that arc.

Challenge: Post Apocalyptic

Book: Sand – Hugh Howey

Rating: 3.5/5

I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for years. Actually, I’ve had this book since before I bought my current bookcase. I got it not long after reading the Silo series, which I loved, but I just never got around to reading it.

Finally though, I have read Sand, and you know what? It was okay. t’s set in a world that is completely buried in sand, and there are special dive suits that let people swim through the sand like its water, and these divers go underground looking for relics of the buried old world. I loved the concept of the sand divers. Diving feels dangerous, and the idea that there are all these mysteries and we can piece together what happened to the world by diving was so promising. Even better, the first few chapters open with divers finding a massive lost city hundreds of metres down. I was so excited to find out what was down there in ancient Danvar, and how it related to our protagonists; a family of four siblings whose father disappeared mysteriously twelve years ago.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t go in that direction. In fact, I’m not sure the story knows what direction it even wanted to go. Howey seems torn between making a n intimate family drama set in a desert on top of the ruins of civilisation on one hand, and between a story of injustice and poverty leading to senseless violence on the other, and as a result he does neither well. A shame, because the Silo series had a lot of stuff going on and Howey pulled that off well, but here things just don’t work. The problem is made worse by the pacing; I felt like we were just done setting up everyone and then we were moving into the climax of the story. Definitely not enough time to get to know the siblings and see them interact enough.

We also don’t get any answers in this book. I know there is a sequel, but I’m not interested enough to continue. Not after this amazing buried ended up playing such an unimportant role in this book. Despite all my complaints though, I don’t think there was anything bad about this book. I didn’t have to force myself through it, and the ending was pretty good. I think someone who likes Howey’s style, or who is a big fan of post-apocalyptic stories, might really enjoy this one. To me though, it seems like a waste of some really cool worldbuilding.

Challenge: Start or Continue a Series with Six or More Books

Book: Saga Vol. 12 – Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

Rating: 5/5

I love Saga. I’ve written about the series as a whole before, so I’ll make this post pretty short. You can read my overview of the entire series by clicking HERE. Basically, Saga is a massive story about two people, Marko and Alana, who fall in love despite being on opposite sides of an interstellar war, and their journey to protect their daughter from a galaxy that wants her dead. Along the way we met a ton of other characters caught up in this war, and follow the young family and all the factions that are after them for years as the political situation in the galaxy shifts. It is indeed a saga, that tackles a range of issues and has a lot of spectacular art.

At the time I made that Saga post, the series was on book #9 and was on a hiatus that would last for four years. Vol.9 was also a major turning point for the series plotwise, and when Saga returned in Vol.10, there had been a time skip that had allowed some of the child characters to grow up a bit, and everyone had adjusted to the huge upheavels at the end of Vol.9. The story is beginning to shift from the story of Marko and Alana, to the story of their now teenage daughter Hazel, and her little brother as they grow up in this hostile galaxy. Not that they don’t still need parental protection.

Vol.12 is continuing this trend of the kids becoming bigger players. Of course, I’m being vague, because I’m not just avoiding spoilers for this book, but of the 11 that came before it. If you’ve never read Saga before, this is a series you need to start from the beginning. If you are up-to-date, then Vol.12 continues the high quality of the series, though it does feel like a bridge between separate arcs. Vol.11 ended with the family moving on to something new, and Vol.12 is mostly them settling into this new life, processing the traumas they have faced, and setting up the next arc of the story. I suppose the only thing wrong with that, is that all the other subplots with other characters also seem to be in a ‘in-between’ point at the same time, which can make this volume feel a bit uneventful. But in a story as long as this one, I think that’s needed sometimes. It feels like the next book will be building up to something huge. I just wish there was some indication on when it’ll be ready.

Challenge: Twenty Flash Fiction Stories

Book: Various

Rating: N/A

Damn, how to talk about this entry? Well, I read 20 flash fiction pieces, spread across a number of different publications. Some were good, some were bad. Here’s the full list of 20.

1. The Content of this Piece has been Removed – Alistair Robinson (F) (Dream Theory Media Jan 7^th)
2. Seen – Pamela Jean Herber (Cryptic Frog Quarterly Dec 21^st 2025) 
3. Error: Visual Database Defying Analysis – Jetse De Vries (Dream Theory Media Feb 4^th)
4. Cleaveland, Ohio – Mario Senzale (Cryptic Frog Quarterly Dec 21^st 2025)
5. Grandmother Firebird – Dawn Vogel (Small Wonders Feb 2024. Reprint from Breath and Shadow 2019)
6. Stop Thinking, The Kid Can Hear – Lucy Eller (F) (Small Wonders Feb 2026)
7. Drinking the Heron – RJ Aurand (F) (Small Wonders Feb 2026)
8. Grief Trawling – Suzanne J. Willis (F)  (Small Wonders Feb 2026 Reprint from Apparition Literature Magazine 2020)  
9. Seeds Travel – Beth Goder (F)  (Small Wonders Feb 2024 Reprint from Natures 2019)
10. Drown-Haunted – Corey Farrenkopf (Flash Fiction Online)
11. The Beauty You Cannot Buy – Marie Vibbert (Small Wonders Feb 2026. Reprint from Daily Science Fiction 2018)
12. The Memory Technician – Ian Li (Small Wonders Mar 2025)
13. 7 Things the Tychonaut Princess Elizabeth Did NOT Experience on her Marvellous Voyage to the So-Called Medicean Stars – M. J. Pettit (Small Wonders Feb 2026) 
14. A Simulacrum of Self – Aimee Ogden (Small Wonders Feb 2026)
15. Rest Stop – Pedro Iniguez (Nightmare Feb 2026)
16. Against the Lafayette Escadrille – Gene Wolfe (Again, Dangerous Visions 1972)
17. The Whole Beast – Kara Dennison (Dream Theory Media 11/3/26) 
18. The Message – Isaac Asimov (Fantasy House 1955)
19. Hell-Fire – Isaac Asimov (King-Size Publications 1956)
20. Words That Wither, Words That Bloom – Jules Arbeaux (Uncanny Jan 2026) 

Most of these flash pieces I read on the Small Wonders Magazine website. I read the entire February 2026 Issue of this magazine, as well as a few other stories from previous years that were shouted out on Bluesky. I really like Small Wonders, and they publish amazing flash fiction. Gives me the same vibe as when Daily Science Fiction was around. Of course, they do get a couple of reprints from DSF, so that makes sense.

Other online platforms I read from include Dream Theory Media (which full disclosure, I’ve had a story of my own published there), Cryptic Frog Quarterly, Nightmare Magazine and Uncanny Magazine. I also read a couple of pieces that I believe pre-date the term ‘flash fiction’ that I have in some anthologies and short story collections on my shelf, The Message and Hell-fire by Isaac Asimov and Against the Lafayette Escadrille by Gene Wolfe. They were all cool little pieces, but not the best examples of either authors work I feel.

My favourite two stories from this list of twenty are The Memory Technician by Ian Li and Rest Stop by Pedro Iniguez. I’d recommend all the magazines/online platforms mentioned in this review for short fiction, and I’d encourage you all to read more flash length stories.

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And that’s it for today’s bingo reviews, but I’ll keep on reading and reviewing. In the meantime, why not go grab your own boob bingo card and play along with me? I’ve realled a really fun mix of challenges this year. Click here for your own bingo card.