This book reads like it was written by someone with a PhD and sure enough that’s what it was. It’s a “hopepunk” story about a future world ravaged by climate change and people trying desperately to create enough sustainable energy to power the planet. But something’s affecting the AI-managed power grid, and power engineer Lucia Ramirez is determined to figure out what is going on. A lot of explications of various energy options, wonky but ultimately a good story.

A regency period graphic novel about three young people who are getting close to coming of age where they have to figure out what their plan is. They are all expected to marry (a good match) and one of them does not quite feel that is the path they want, that being a recency woman at ALL is not the path they want. There is a lot of discussion of class and societal expectations as well as the usual regency “smoldering looks” and missed connection types of interactions. Better than I was expecting.

Claire is a kid who gets the “Are you a boy or a girl?” question a lot. They were raised Catholic and get a lot of bad attitude from family and most of the kids at school. They develop a drinking problem and wind up in youth rehab likely related to these things. Rehab works for them, and they meet other people there who have similar emotions, if not backstories. This is MUCH more of a story about rehab than a story about figuring out your gender but it is both. It’s raw and real and tough at times, well told if sometimes a little overly vague about things.

This is a fairly academic book about classification as infrastructure and it looks at a few specific instances (international death classification, tuberculosis classification, new nursing tasks trackers) and the way they both show and shape culture. It’s heady and interesting at the same time as it’s uneven and a little slow going. Most of the chapters were great but one in particular seemed out of place. The writers of the book have big vocabularies which was great but sometimes off-putting. This book gave me some new ways to think about edge cases in classification systems and the social assumptions that surround them.

I enjoyed this tale of, what it says, futuristic violence for its humor and curious world building. The future contains Blink an always-streaming network that everyone contributes to and people are always doing stunts to get more cred there. Zoey grew up in a trailer park, turns out her dad was one of the wealthiest men in Utah. He dies and she has a quest to deal with, one that isn’t entirely welcome. And she has all the resources in the world at her disposal. The author voice shines through as very white and male and not particularly socially conscious which is a thing you may not mind but I found sort of grating over time, especially with a female protagnoist.

How did I wind up with this book? Unclear. It’s an unthrilling tale of scientific intrigue (did someone cheat at science to make it seem more like their lab found what might be a cure for cancer?) which felt as slow-motion as the process itself. What saved it, for me, was that it takes place in and around where my partner works, real life places that I’ve been which FELT real. That said, if I read one more book by a Harvard grad talking at length about Cambridge.... A good book, maybe not a great book.

This was a sequel to a book I enjoyed. It’s a YA-ish tale about a young poor Black woman (in Scotland) who is trying to keep a caravan roof over her family’s head while also learning more about how to do magic. And this magic is not just the “ghostwalking” that she learned from her grandma, something we learn that “real” magicians don’t even consider magic. There’s a cool weird library and a lot of other interesting scenery and ultimately there is a narrative about class and who belongs. I was concerned the sequel might not be as good as the first but it was.

Book 1: The Midnight Club. What if there was a way to see the future when you were younger, or see the past when you were older? And what if there was a thing in your collective past which made you really really want to do those things and maybe see if you could get a better outcome? This is about a group of friends who went to college in Vermont in the late 80s and who get back together there in 2014, looking for answers. It’s about the fallibility of memory and the curse of nostalgia. I liked it and the Vermont-y parts seemed real.

This is an adaptation of a longer book. As you might expect it’s an absolutely harrowing read. Incredibly well-illustrated. I learned a few things from reading it, but maybe thanks to having gotten a good education and having done some decently self-educating, I did know a good deal about this ugly part of history. As a graphic novel, there’s a lot of telling not showing. I think the author wanted to use a lot of Dunbar-Ortiz’s words. The illustrations are amazing but it’s mainly text boxes down the sides telling you what’s happening, with a LOT of all-caps for emphasis which led to uneven reading. Definitely made me want to read the original text.

This was a story about a middle aged woman who burns out of a job and goes to an employment agency and takes a string of odd jobs: bus ad writer, poster hanger, Cracker package copywriter, surveillance footage reviewer, park hut space-filler. It’s quirky and goes places you wouldn’t expect. It’s translated from Japanese into British English which took me a few pages to get used to, but overall it was a good relatable read.