This is the second book I’ve read this year with the same general theme: generations of women living in a rural farm setting having something vaguely magical about them which makes the locals distrust them, also the main character is a woman with an absent mom and a lot of questions. It’s a lot of similarity! This one is more of a time-loop type of story and so has some of the potentially confusing aspects of time loopery but I really liked watching how the story was gradually revealed.

This is the 2nd in a series of Vermont-based mysteries. I didn’t love the first one but I figured I’d see if they improved. This one was similarly just okay (and I had to ILL it from Florida!). There’s a maker fair type thing in Charlotte and then a murder happens, and then another. Stella, the textile consultant turned erstwhile investigator, tries to figure out what happened along with her forest ranger husband Nick. Totally OK book but not a great one.

Monteiro helps people become better, ethical designers who do good work and get paid. This is the “shitty pulp edition” which was FINE for my purposes. I appreciate Monteiro’s principled stance on things and how he spells it out with humor and just the right amount of rage. General thesis: designers should be more involved not just in the “how” of designing things but the “why” and should push back when the answer to “why” is something bullshitty and unethical. Ultimately he has hope for the future of design, even web design, and he explains why and maybe how.

I will read any book about time travel. This one is good but also a little all over the place. There’s a lot of “Let me explain the SCIENCE to you” parts which were less interesting to me than the human drama, but that part was a bit trauma-filled. The basic conceit: you can only sort of time travel, consciousness only, and only for about 90 seconds, and only into the past. Or... are the supposedly immutable roles in this universe more malleable than that? One of those books where I had to Google the ending because I wasn’t totally sure what happened, a book that rewards close reading.

A fun book suggested by a friend. If you like the title you will probably also like the book. These are a few sequential short stories with the same set of characters that take you through Fred’s first little while as a vampire, getting used to the whole thing, meeting people (and parahumans) and making friends. Then once he had a little band of folks, things start getting really interesting. It’s funny and does not take itself too seriously.

I don’t love how the cover shows the main Big Deal Event in this book but otherwise it was a delight. Maisie is a queer nerdy girl who had a leg amputation after a cancer diagnosis. She deals with some chronic pain and general crap at school from other kids. Ollie is a non-binary nerd who likes to draw and is volunteering (with their dad) at the comic con that Maisie goes to with her (also very nerdy) mom. A lot of people will feel seen in this very sweet story about what you can see on the cover.

A graphic novel, translated from French, about the destruction of a library in Spain in the year 976 when “radical clergy” swept in during a power vacuum. Some books are secreted away by a ragtag group: one enslaved black woman, one enslaved eunuch, a random thief and an ornery mule. This book is about their travails and has both a cautionary warning about the destruction of books but also an essay about the actual political situation of that era at the end. The essay was good but I might have liked to have seen more of that information in the story that was being told. There’s some hopping around in time that made me not entirely clear sometimes which part of the story I was in. The illustrations are stunning.

If you liked the Thursday Murder Club books, you will probably like this. It’s a new set of characters but a similar theme--people who are not really in the murder-solving biz get thrust into a situation and have to rise to the occasion. Little bit more violence. It looks like it will definitely become its own series. There’s a wider age range of characters. but the same sort of humor. I enjoyed it and you have to love Osman who thanks booksellers and librarians FIRST in his acknowledgements section.

Marcus and I went to college together and were in the same program, so it’s fun to see some of the things we learned in college show up in this exploration of the foibles of the human brain and human cognition. Marcus uses sensible real world examples as well as citations from real science to explain some of the weird things our brain does and offers some ideas about why it might be that way. He wraps up with some suggestions for ways to think your way out of some common problems which seemed useful if a little overly-optimistic.

I’ve enjoyed Mosher in the past, he writes about Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom in a way that really gets at the heart of the place without feeling inaccessible or clubby. This is his first novel, a tale of a Quebecois family who wind up in Vermont but not too far into Vermont. Over generations they support themselves with a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Some of them disappear and then return in the strangest of ways. A paean to a place, and a way of life which I enjoyed but found a little confusing at times.