Red Rising

What it is

Brutal, fast, and the series gets substantially better after this first book.

Audiobook or print

Both links are below, and for some books on this shelf that choice genuinely matters. Narrative and memoir usually win on audio. Anything you will want to flip back through — frameworks, diagrams, protocols — is better in print, and I say so on the pages where that applies rather than pretending every book works both ways.

Who should skip it

The cons above are the honest version. If two or more of them describe you, this is not your book, and there are forty-four others on this shelf.