[review pending]

This was a hard book to read. Coming on the heels of reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, any shred of hope you had for the dignity of the people portrayed in the book, for them overcoming their situations of desparate poverty and lack of education, is dashed when you read about the next generations. Some people did quite well, a few. Most are sort of middling in the in-between areas, not quite desparate but definitely not someplace where they feel happy and settled. And some people -- most specifically one of the older daughters of one of the tenant farmers, who he took as his wife, confirming decades of bad stereotypes (or possibly starting them) -- are still miserable and wretched, having been passed by, both by advances in technology like plumbing and cost of basic goods, but also by advances in society where there is at least some of a social safety net in place for people who are destitute.

This book is a return to Alabama to see what happened to the 128 descendants of the three tenant families that were portrayed by James Agee and Walker Evans in 1936. We get to learn what they thought of the portrayal of themselves, how being written up in a book affected the lives of their grandparents, parents and themselves. We also get a less dashing view of Agee and Evans, who slickly call themselves spies and instigators in the list of characters in the original book but were really in some ways no more than subculture tourists. Evans spent no more than one or two nigths with the families and seemed to have a distaste for them mostly, while Agee romanticized them in the way writers do where he held them up as noble members of their class, but promptly forgot about them once he left Alabama (though to be fair he was embroiled in his own terrible life at the time).

The most poignant part of the story, though to be sure, there are many poignant parts, is the opening scene of the book where one of the women who was beloved and doted on by Agee when she was a little girl, commits suicide after a long hard life at the age of 54. One could see after reading just this introduction, that new writers nosing around the place might not stir up happy thoughts. It is helpful for people who were interested in the earlier book, to get follow-up on how the people did, what happened to them and how they fared and their childre and children’s children. Ironically Agee himself was the first to die, due to his own set of hard-luck lifestyles and circumstances. For anyone who read and appreciated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men this Pulitzer Prize winning book is necessary follow-up reading.

My appreciation for this book as a whole was totally overrun byt the fact that one of the chapters takes place in my neighborhood about 20 years ago. Turns out there was an art collector, more of an art hoarder really, who had a disused church that was totally jam packed with old [and in some cases valuable] early American portraits. When the author was just starting out in his illustrious career, he made a trip to Vermont to check out this guy’s stash. This chapter made me all twitchy and jittery “Hey that happened HERE!” "Hey I want to know more about THAT"

I did manage to sit down and actually read the rest of the book, but it was a little tough to do. This book is totally enjoyable. Mould has a good writing style, an ear for a good story, and apparently an eye for seeing a diamond in the rough. This book talks about discovery. Paintings found in an old church, a picture bought on eBay for a song and restored to become a work of art that command a great price, the detective work, generally, that goes into figuring out whether a painting that looks like it might be by someone famous actually IS by that person. It’s a great set of stories complemented with photos that help you see what Mould is seeing.

[review pending]

If you like Cory Doctorow’s writing and general angle, you will love this book. I finished reading it as I was on a series of airplanes travelling to give my own talks to librarians about licensing, open source, technology and whatnot, and this was good food for thought. This book is only sort of a “book” which is part of the point Doctorow is trying to make. I got an actual print copy of it from his publisher [one of those “hey do you want to read this?” "yes I want to read it" exchanges] but I could have just as easily downloaded it from the web, legally and easily. In fact, thanks to the open licensing on the book’s “content” (again, this is the point) I can download a Braille version and RTF version, or even an audio version of a lot of the chapters. These aren’t created by Doctorow or his publisher, they’re created by fans. When we talk about user-generated content, and we do a lot, I don’t so much mean “you do work for us for free and in return we re-sell your freely given work for our own profit” what I mean is things like this.

Now, this sort of in your face free culture stuff really only works if you’re not living hand to mouth and if people like what you say enough to want to follow you around and remix your content. However, it does work. It doesn’t implode because authors don’t get paid -- a point that Doctorow makes frequently through this series of essays -- and it doesn’t fall apart because there’s no quality control of the sort that (allegedly) only top down business can give us. As librarians, we’re some of the original free cultists. Paying attention to what is going on in the world of copyright and the world of content licensing should be the most important part of our jobs moving forward as we watch more and more content become digital, redistributable, and literally uncontrollable. This collection of essays has advice, advocacy and a lot of useful metaphors all tied together with Doctorow’s oddly cheery dystopian predictions combined with a great grasp of both the language and the issues.

In a talk I gave to a bunch of Kansas librarians I used Cory’s cite of William Gibson’s quotation “The future is already here it’s just not very evenly distributed” to start talking about digital divide issues. We’re still loaning, and loving, print books while many people are getting digital books beamed directly to their portable devices with or without librarian assistance. Understanding the system is the minimum possible work we need to do to grok our role in the system. When I was done giving my talk someone asked me “What’s the name of that book again?” and I was able to just hand them the one from my backpack “Here, you can keep it.” and I was able to both give it away and keep it at the same time. That’s the future.

The only thing I did not like about this collection of short stories is that I’m a pretty serious an of Millhauser already so I had already read a few of these stories when they were originally published. Thus the book went by too fast and I was left at the end of it sooner than I would hav eliked. Millhauster is an amazing master of several types of stories -- the meticulous explanatory stories, the teen coming-of-age Bradbury-esque stories, the almost-normal-but-not-quite stories -- and it’s always a joy to see what he comes up with. Starting a story of his I’m always wondering just how he’s going to manage to turn the idea on its head just a little bit and I’m always surprised and delighted. Fun book, wish it had been longer.

So weirdly complex and good! I rarely read thrillers that don’t feel somehow like they’re specifically making up a scenario to be as stressful as possible. This odd science-y tale about a guy who sort of figures out how to move around in time--or does he?--scratched an itch for a good “What the heck is happening here?” story that wasn’t also coy or frustrating. Sort of like the way watching Orphan Black took you along with it, giving you enough information to remain involved but not so much that you got bored. Do not want to give a lot away here but I really enjoyed the two nights I read this.

This book was great. Well-researched and outlines with a marvelous arc that you could only think you could get from fiction, Puelo has done an amazing job reconstructing what it was like in 1916-1925 Boston in order to explain the events leading up to the molasses flood which is a thing a lot of locals make jokes about but few really understand. I particularly enjoyed the extra outlining of the political climate of the time describing anarchist activity that was going on in the area and also describing how the tank owners tried to pin the blame on political rabble rousers instead of their own cost cutting measures.

This is one of my favorite books that I’ve read lately. I have to apologize to Johnson because she sent this to me graciously a long time ago and it’s been on my “to read” pile for an embarrassingly long time. It was worth the wait. Johnson’s look into obituaries and the culture that has grown up around writing and reading them is a wonderful well-researched look at a subculture that most of us probably know very little about. Her compassionate look at the touchy subject of death and dying and people who immerse themselves in it for a living is interesting and funny without being too funny. Johnson has just the right amount of stories about other people and self-reflection [she is a freelance obituary writer herself] to make this book captivating and compelling. The addition of an appendix of URLs and a photo section really takes it beyond what you’d expect in the standard “New York writer talks about weird things other people don’t know have a cult following” vein. As someone who enjoys those types of books but is frequently left wanting more details, less New Yorker anxiety and more depth, this book completely delivers. Can’t wait to read her next one, also on my nightstand.

this was an amazingly poignant book about a boy who grows up under somewhat impoverished circumstances in that UK carries this with him his whole life, through a trip to the US and back again to the UK. It’s a very provocative and interesting set of stories within stories. Beautiful and sad.

I’m always looking for big graphic novels because I read quickly and I want them to last. This was on the shelf at the library where I was working and now I want to read everything that Greenberg has done. It’s based on a storytelling sort of structure. Characters who are in a story and the stories they tell within the story. Maybe even one story in a story in a story, I wasn’t quite sure. There’s a calm at the center of this book that I found really appealing as well as all the other stuff that is good about it.

Its hard sometimes for me to read Mosher because he’s got this sentimentality to his writing that pushes all of my buttons exactly right. So if I’m not in a place in my life where it’s okay to be transported somewhere else, I sometimes stay away from his stuff. But this was the right time for the right book and I enjoyed this collection of loosely connected vignettes from the people who inhabit Mosher’s just-barely-fictional Kingdom County.

I was given a reader’s copy of this book by the publisher before its actual release date, fyi. That said, I loved this book and I’m not even a foodie. Kurlansky is someone who I know via his history books about the Basques and European Jewry. Apparently he’s also been a food writer for quite some time. He also makes decent woodcuts which this book is illustrated with. This book is a collection of food writing that was created for an ambitious WPA project called America Eats that was assembled, mostly, and never published. Kurlansky’s book both talks a lot about the project and also reproduces the essays, poems, stories and recipes from the files that have been languishing in the Library of Congress archives. Just the dscussion of poring through these files at LoC was enough to make my heart race. There is meta-discussion about the America Eats project and the WPA writers projects in general as well as some discussion about the individual regional food writing projects.

The fascinating part about reading these pieces is how much the world if food and eating has changed in the sixty-plus years since most of it was written. Regional differences in food and eating habits and food celebrations have been vanishing, supplanted by predictability and standardization. There is good news and bad news to what has changed, of course, but this book highlights the richness of regional food cultures in an almost poignant way. The fact that the book opened up with Vermont cuisine -- some of which is still around today like sugar-on-snow celebrations -- was probably the clincher for assuring I would read this book avidly from start to finish.

Gosh this book was wonderful. I kept it on my nightstand well past the overdue date because I kept swearing to myself that I would re-read it and ultimately haven’t. On the other hand, I haven’t returned the book either...

Coffin has a way with words and in this small collection of sermons he manages to put togehter a lot of good words about justice, poverty, our societal obligations to one another and why there’s no decent biblical reason for anyone to be predjudiced against gay people. It’s a really life-affirming set of essays, all of them both humorous and weighty, accessible and yet learned. For anyone who is looking for inspirational reading that’s a little deeper than the standard love yourself" platitudes, this book is a good starter tome on getting to love each other. Read it.

I love these spookyweird books with mysterious families and oddball children who live in these left-behind towns. This book is right up there with We Have Always Lived in the Castle in the “haunted isolated families” section. One of the things I liked about both books is that unlike what I perceive to be the general vibe of today, these families don’t all kill or rape each other. There’s no gore or sensationalism, just an unfolding set-apartness that seems to imbue the entire narrative. It’s a matter of fact retelling which occasionally drops little chestnuts like the parlor being floor-to-ceiling full of newspapers and cans. The narrator, the younger daughter is so matter of fact that these little revelations almost seem like an afterthought and you’re left thinking “gee, if I lived with thirten cats, I might have mentioned it sooner” and the odd feeling continues.

This book is about a few generations of odd women and a grandfather who dies in the water, and his daughter who follows suit. it mostly follows the awkward path of the two daughters as they return to the town to be raised by their quirky transient aunt in the house their grandfather built which is in the town that he died in, a town called Fingerbone. The tale unfolds like a fever dream as the sisters choose different paths and each tries to move forward in her own way.

It’s been a long time since I’ve put a book in my Best In Show category but I really enjoyed this book despite the fact that it takes place mostly during a global pandemic (not this one, a different one). A perfect example of one of those “stories which overlap but you’re not quite sure how until much later” novels. It’s about people trying to do their best despite living through really extraordinary circumstances, in a few different time periods. Can sometimes be a trick to link all the stories together. Incredibly poignant in a few places and I’m sure it’s not for everyone. One of my favorite reads of the past 12 months.

This book was terrific. Tana French manages to put together a book that is part mystery and part... nostalgia bit without any of the parts really screwing up the other parts. The modern day part of the story is about a detective who has to investigate a child who was murdered in a local woods. The kicker is that this cop was himself the victim of a crime in the same area. He has a female partner who he has a super close relaitonship with and they have a sort of nice thing going. And then, as you’d expect, things fall apart. I loved the writing and I loved the story and unlike other books I’ve read this month, this one did not have a sadistic streak in it which meant that dealing with difficult topics [childrens' death, possible child abuse and child sexual abuse] was okay reading.

Oh this book! Saw it on a table during National Library Week and had to have it. I’d heard about it and wasn’t sure there would be anything in it for me... don’t I know all the librarian stories? I DO NOT. This was a great tale of the fire that gutted LAPL but also a history of the library itself, all lovingly told by Orlean who loves libraries. I enjoyed every minute I got to hold this book which was itself a nice work of art, great attention to detail spent on the binding, end pages and everything else. Made me want to go look things up. Such a great book. Best of this year.

I picked up this book because I heard a bit of trivia about it on a podcast. Did you know that eggs grow inside a bird the opposite way, in many species, from the way they come out? Truth! And no one is quite sure why, but they rotate right before they are laid. I learned that any many other fascinating things in this book which is written by a bird biologist, Birkhead, who just happens to also have a good sense of humor. Took a long time to read since it’s not all the time you’re looking for a good nature book about how eggshells get made, but when that is what you are looking for, no other thing will do.

Best book I’ve read all year, a story of Old Vermont (1930’s) and the quirky folks who live in a small town in the Northeast Kingdom. This was one of those books that makes me wistful for a time and era I never really saw in Vermont in that sort of nostalgic way that people up here sometimes do. It tells the story of a woman who grew up on Kingdom Mountain. She’s a bit eccentric but isn’t everyone. One day a man in a biplane crash lands near her and she takes him home and the tale begins. He is looking for some lost treasure. She is sorting out family stuff and trying to fight the people who want to build a road over her mountain. The language and characters seem real and the pages turn easily. Recommended for anyone who has ever loved Vermont.

Another absolute delight of a book. Such a great story of a possible (and future) history of witchcraft and the (mostly) women who wield it. This turn of the last century long-form fable is a classic tale of good vs. evil but also a lot more than that. There are a lot of fun things to discover in this book under a close read but on its own it’s a very woman-centered tale of intrigue and problem solving.

Lefèvre was a photojournalist how took a trip into Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders in 1986 during the Soviet War. This was in a pre-technological era where he carried all of his cameras and lenses over miles and miles of inhospitable terrain and through locations with inhospitable (and hospitable) people. His photographs, many of which weren’t published until this book originally came out in 2003, shows a part of the world that many of us know (or knew) almost nothing about. Lefèvre discusses the world that DWB do and explains in some detail how they manage to do the jobs that they do. This is a graphic novel (published in this country by the always awesome :01 and put together by Emmanuel Guibert) written around Lefèvre’s story and his photographs.

Why is this book so good? Hankin looks at the history of how we send and receive mail with an eye towards looking at whether certain postal regulations seem to have had effects on how we communicated and even how society works. He makes a case that lowering postal rates in the 1840s dramatically changed the way we interacted and the varying way newspapers were priced affected how we got our news. He has done a ton of research and you can look into the epistolary lives of people who lived over 150 years ago. Along the way he has illustrations and a lot of amusing reports of the way society worked or failed to work and how that was interwoven with the history of the postal system in the US.

A kid told me to read this and it was great! Sort of like Daemon but without the overarching awfulness and war of all against all. I really enjoyed this book about a near future world where most people spend their time interacting in an online space, and then the guy who builds the online space--a fan of all things 80s--dies and there is a contest to see who will win his vast fortune. Just futuristic enough to be interesting but with enough pop culture references to seem really here and now, maybe it’s just because the setting for the quest covered a lot of the same spaces that I used to populate when I was a kid but it all felt so fun and familiar. The quest is quest-y enough, the characters are believable, good at games but sometimes bad at life, and there’s a lot of low level hackery and back and forth action. Loved it. You should read it.

There’s something about the Shakers that inspires almost an insta-nostalgia for me, some sort of road not taken. I grew up near Harvard MA, the site of one of the Shaker communities and remember learning about them when I was little. I’m not much into organized religion but I love their furniture and believe, sort of like they did, that there is attainable perfection in design. This book is full of photos of Shaker communities with stories about the people in them. The Shakers used to pretty much keeps themselves entirely separate from “the World” and at some point they decided to shift this approach somewhat. These photos are in some sense promotional materials and in some other sense sort of a glimpse into a world most of us know very little about. The research that has gone into this volume, from Pearson and his two co-authors, is impressive.

Randomly picked this up at a library booksale. It’s fascinating to read this long and thorough analysis of both the birth of ecology and also the growing concerns about extinctions written for an age where if you didn’t go to Madagascar to see Tenerecs, you might not ever get to see them. Quammen travels to may remote locations in order to get a peek at niche populations of various animals and along the way gives you a primer on how we know what we know about evolution, biology, extinction and finally island biogeography or how animals evolve and/or go extinct in tightly bounded populations which can be islands or it can be isolated stands of rainforest if you happen to be an animal that gets around by going from tree to tree.

This was a hard book to keep going with. I must have started it six weeks ago. It has a lot of interesting (to me) expositions of different animal situations and Quammen going to inspect local populations and then less interesting (to me) discussions of the general field of evolutionary biology and various infighting and a lot of personality stuff that I was less interested in. Also I would get distracted looking up these animals on the internet to see what had happened to them in the last 15 years. Now that I’m done reading it, I may try to see if there is a companion site so I can see what happened to all of those animals. This is one of the best books I have read this decade. Quammen is an amazing writer and researcher as well as having a wry sense of humor that occasionally (but not too often) finds its way into the pages.

Such a fascinating multiverse book! Often multiverse books get too bogged down in paradox-resolving situations or explaining the sciencey science; but this is a really human story about power and class and a woman trying to figure out how to balance what she is with what she wants. There’s a lot going on but it doesn’t get overly confusing. The characters have depth and more is revealed over time, it’s such a well-written story.

Not my usual read but it has a librarian in it so I figured “Why not?” Her library was sacked and burned in a governmental coup. She took as many books as she could carry and went back to the island home she hadn’t been to since she was a child, a community suffering from a lack of magic. She brings a talking spider plant and opens a jam shop. She meets a man who knew her when she was a child. A very cozy cottagecore romantasy I guess? I was surprised how much I liked it and all the parts that I might find a bit goofy (talking plant? merhorses? wizard who lives under the waterfall?) seemed to work.

So good and not just because a lot of it takes place in Vermont. This is a fantasy story but only sort of. The basic conceit" what if there were doors to other worlds that you could get to but they were hard to find. What if some people wanted them closed? What if other people wanted them open? How could you move among and between them? There’s a LOT going on in this story which mostly happens through the eyes of a young, female protagonist. A nicely complex story that nonetheless both wraps up and leaves a door open for more story to come.

This is the type of non-fiction I love to read. Very nature-bound, not so venerable as to be a little precious. Good stories, learning things I haven’t learned before and taking me places I haven’t been. I read this after getting Lost Words from a friend for my 50th and wanting to know more about Macfarlane who I know vaguely on Twitter. The book goes a lot of places that are hard to get to either because of geography (caves on the sea coast of Norway) or politics (the place they’re building to deposit Nuclear waste deeply underground). Macfarlane seems to show the proper reverence for these places and the people who inhabit the world around them. It was a joy to get to go to these places with him and I’ll definitely go check out his other works.

This was a gift from some friends, totally unexpected and I read it all almost immediately. One of the things that is great about Vermont generally is how the whole state can seem like a small town. Reading about all these real and possibly apocryphal monster reports and sightings in towns I’ve heard of and/or been to was super fun. I like Citro’s work generally and this combination of his research and humor combined with some great illustrations by talented illustrator Stephen Bissette made it a really fun read.

Such a great book about back to the landers who wound up in Vermont and what was their deal anyhow. Told by one of the children of the original back-to-landers, this well-researched and well-told story follows a group of people as they leave their comfortable lives for a decidedly less comfortable life (but much more free, or was it?) in rural Vermont where they made all their own food, built or rehabbed all their own houses and tried to build a new world. Daloz makes the compelling argument that freedom for some was not freedom for all (men would work til dinnertime while women would work til bedtime, as one basic example) and even though many of their experiments ultimately failed (the original communes are mostly not still working today) a lot of the values of the original folks are still imbued in Vermont and the rest of the country in very important ways. Institutions in Vermont such as food co-ops, organic food choices, and the community college system came out of the hard work of some of the original Summer of Love expats. This is a story beautifully told, a great read for anyone interested in hippies, the sixties, Vermont’s DIY culture or general permaculture ideals.

Sibley is a huge name in birding and this attractive book is a compendium of interesting bird facts as well as some details about various species. One of my favorite things about it besides the gorgeous illustrations is how much Sibley lets you know what the science says about birds and their behavior including some of the things we don’t know (why some birds do dust bathing) or can only guess at. You can either read the facts straight through in the front, or read them alongside lovely illustrations of birds that they reference. A great book for people who like bird facts.

This book was written before MAD’s demise. It mostly tells the story, illustrated by Jaffee, of Jaffee’s bizarre childhood. He was born in the US and then stolen back to where his family was from in Lithuania by his mother. She had some sort of mental illness and he and his brothers grew up being severely neglected. He came back to the US as a teen and always had an odd time being adjusted. This book is a lot more about him than it is about MAD, though people interested in the inside baseball of MAD will find stuff to occupy them in the last few chapters.

By the time I knew about Steve Martin, he was already famous and doing SNL. This biography covers his lie from when he was born to basically when he became stupid-famous and talks a lot about how he chose to do the stuff he did. It’s a neat look into someone who is often pretty private about a lot of his life and is a great behind the scenes look at what sort of work it takes to become not only a comedian but a sort of unique one with a very narrowband audience appeal. Martin come across like a really nice guy and is gracious about all the people he mentions even though he definitely had a bit of a rocky upbringing. A bunch of old photos really make this a book worth reading.

This was a great book about someone I’d always wanted to know more about. I grew up reading Ripley’s books but Ripley himself had been dead since long before I was born. This is a meticulously well-researched biography of a man that even his biographer didn’t seem to like much even as he accomplished becoming a household name and the best paid cartoonist in the world. I also learned about Norbert Pearlroth, Ripley’s researcher who had a full time+ job going to the downtown NYPL every single day to find material and never got any credit. I enjoyed this book but was a little bummed that larger-than-life Ripley was just in a lot of ways a normal weirdo.

A story about this woman’s life told through a lot of anecdotes. I liked hearing about what she went through, I was surprised at some of the things she knew and did not know (such as disability accommodations and her legal rights) and wanted to hear more about her day to day life being at Harvard and being in a relationship (she seems to be in but it’s actually unclear). I very much enjoyed her perspective especially since she is also a woman from Ethiopia (and culturally Eritrean) which put a bunch more spins on this story. Worth a read, was looking for more of a “warts and all” story but her voice is not like that.

Got this at a library booksale and it was simultaneously an interesting frog-boiling story of a woman from Switzerland who wound up living as a veiled woman in Saudi Arabia and a wife to a very wealthy man who happened to be one of Osama Bin Ladin’s 20-someodd brothers. It’s more her story of what the world is like in Saudi Arabia for women and very little political stuff except as those two things overlap. It’s a weird book to read because she is simultaneously incredibly privileged but also incredibly oppressed. She eventually leaves and she talks about what was involved in that as well. Very interesting read.

This book is more fun than you expect it to be. It’s a semi-autibiography written by Linus and David Diamond who seems to have done a lot of the legwork to keep the book going. It’s a fun book that gets inside the head of a true techie geek and explains how single-minded determination to solve tech problems led to him spending long amounts of time inside, living with his mom, tying up the phone line and creating Linux.

Despite the title, it’s not a “blah blah open source is the only way” title. Linus of course is a fan of open source, but this book isn’t his soapbox for OS, this is a book about him. He talks briefly about the differences between Stallman’s GPL and the open source model Linux was released under, but doesn’t get too into the various pissing matches, or open source politics much at all. He tries to set the record straight about his own personality -- he was always out to be well-known for Linux, he just wasn’t expecting a band of geeks to propel him there -- and what he’s been doing since RedHat’s IPO. The book was written in 2001 and there have been a lot of changes in his life since then that aren’t mentioned, but as a readable and inteersting introduction to a tech.legend, this book is worth the read.

What a fascinating book. This book was well off the beaten path of what I usually pick up and I don’t even remember how I got it. It’s a story told by the grandchildren (or other relations, I don’t think she had kids) of the woman portrayed about how she went north to Alaska to help with the education efforts there. Alaska in her day was a near total wilderness and the US Government was involved in trying to Christianize and Americanize the native people living there. Accordingly they send schoolteachers to this not-yet-state territory to set up establishments and generally keep an eye on things. Hannah Breece was a spirited woman, up to the challenge, whose story is told through letters and research done after the fact by Jane Jacobs who followed some of her paths through Alaska years later. It’s illustrated with several great old photographs including a few taken by Breece herself.

Rebekah Taussig has put together a great book about growing up as someone using a wheelchair & how she experiences the world, going from her super-supportive family to a not-very-supportive world it’s a great explication of the social model of disability

This book was almost unreadable. I stuck with it because I liked getting at the SNL anecdotes but it was a rambly non-chronological memoir piece that was mostly about drugs and women. Davis has an interesting backstory but is a terrible writer. This book appeared to not have even been edited. I’m not sure I would recommend it for anyone but the most fervent of SNL (or Grateful Dead) fans.

I’m not sure why this collection didn’t do it for me as much as the others. I feel that part of it was presentation.... some of the comics are presented in landscape and some in portrait so you wind up turning the book sideways and back. Some of it was the way Brunetti referred to all cartoonists as “he” in his introduction. And some of it was that I just don’t think our comic preferences overlap that much. There were some great classics in this mix, but a lot of comics that were just long and weird and not really my thing. It’s rare that I skim a comics collection.

What fun! This just arrived on my mailbox from Jacob and I enjoyed it a great deal. It’s a collection of illustrations of beasts, some of which you have heard of (vampires, unicorns, werewolves) and most you haven’t. Lots of different illustrators have created full page images next to beautifully designed text. Great for flipping through on a grey morning with a mug of coffee next to you. (and a great palate cleanser from the last book I read)

Such mixed feelings about these books! I tend to love the :Best American Whateveritis" books because there’s a good assortment of curated stuff. But the comics ones are weird. Because a lot of what is in graphic novels lately is longer form some of these only tell part of a story. And, I have to be honest, a lot of what I am coming for in these is the story. So a piece of a story I find intensely aggravating. And I’m sure this is partly just me, I don’t think this is a BAD way to do things, only that I find it difficult. I also think Barry, though a certified comics genius, likes some different stuff than I do. So there are a lot of familiar faces in here which is great, but also it has a same-y feel to some of what I am already reading. And a lot of stuff that seems needlessly conflict-bound. However, one of my favorite comics is in here (Turtle Keeps it Steady) and it always makes me grin to see it. I’ve got a bunch more of these to read, we;ll see how it all goes.

There’s some pretty edgy stuff along with some pretty great stuff in this book. More than the last one, I found myself flipping back and forth to the author bios to figure out “Why did they do this?” Sometimes there are good stories, sometimes, there is nothing. Burns has an interesting vision for all of these and I think this issue coheres maybe a little more than last years'.

This one was both the best and the worst of the bunch. I love Bechdel’s stuff when it’s telling stories (Fun Home, Dykes to Watch Out For) and less when it’s sort of more navel-gazey (Are You My Mother). SO this collection has some great long form stories which I really liked, but some of them are incredibly upsetting (totally OK, just not my speed) including some massacres and a child rape. So! On balance another good one and a great addition to the series, but also had some mixed feelings.

These are all different, I enjoyed this one more than the last. Mouly was a great editor. Comics for kids included are in the back which is something I haven’t seen in this series before. Panter cover, what’s not to love? ARC was choppy but I bet the final is grand.

I always love these but they can be tough to read when they contain a lot of excerpts from larger works that don’t always stand on their own. I was surprised to see a lot of pieces I didn’t know about, but starting it all off with a piece Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother” started everything off on a slightly wrong foot. Great collection but I’d love to see more emphasis on complete pieces.

Finally done with this series in terms of what I have at home. This one was interesting in that it included a bunch of “outsider” comics. Some of their work didn’t translate well at small sizes, but as always, a good assortment.

I did a sprint through a lot of these over the summer and I have some left. This was an ARC so it wasn’t in final form which matters more for graphic novel types of things than novels. So,slightly uneven but basically okay. Some great stuff, some creepy stuff, and some weird stuff (or all three!) which is exactly what I’ve grown to expect and enjoy out of this series

It bugs me sort of unreasonably that these are published in October. Because the year is not over! I have been reading these since the beginning and what’s been odd is seeing the changing themes as different editors take over, More cancer one year and more global warming the next. Some issues are full of bloggish style posts and some are a lot more epic longform stuff that goes on seemingly forever. This year’s seemed to be a pretty good mix of stuff and even though it took me a long time to get through this, I liked nearly every article in it which is often not the case.

A really interesting and eclectic set of essays, possibly none of which were on the pandemic? I read this series from time to time and often there is a lot of gloom and doom writing about climate or about diseases or some such. No big deal, I get it, but this collection is more varied than most. Not too samey, not too grim. I learned some things and enjoyed reading it.

As you might imagine, this collection by Ed Yong is terrific, encompassing the urgency of COVID and global warming, among other science and nature-y things. It felt like the authors were mostly female writers, with a thread of hopefulness not typical of these books. I did get the vibe that many of the essays were from the Atlantic which was the only real “sameyness” about the collection. Compared to last year’s collection which was notable in the absence of COVID coverage, this was a nice return to the types of collections I am used to finding in this series.

I love these collections but usually there are at least one or two stories that I find wincingly terrible. Not so this year. Brooks has assembled an interesting assortment of very different stories that don’t all have that “Written for the New Yorker” feeling to them. While there are a lot of the same themes threading throughout--bad marriages, Rome, quirky childhoods, lost loves, the usual--the stories don’t all feel “of a type” the way these collections usually do. I raced through this set and really enjoyed the range and variety of writing.

Great stories but a few too many with people with Serious Problems for me to exactly say I enjoyed this. Kids with cancer, cheating parents, criminals, child abuse, bad relationships, terrible families. For every story that was just some people going about their business there was one with depths of unimaginable awfulness. Diaz is a super smart dude and I presume this was stuff that resonated with him but as much as I thought there was a lot of great writing here, I approached it with trepidation every day I read it.

A great collection of slightly off-kilter cartoons that were too weird to go into the New Yorker. I( like dthe cartoons but, as with many New Yorker stuff, I didn’t always like what was in-between them. In this case it was a lot of “funny” inter5views with cartoonists that were not as good as the cartoons they bookended. Occasionally I’d learn a thing or two but a lot of times it was just weird jokes that didn’t quite land and then some REALLY good cartoons.

This book was on the NEW table at my library. It had one of those “what did you think?” cards in the back of it and one of the other patrons from my library had written “A little oversexed...” in the back. I’m not totally sure I agree but there are a lot of stories of love, loss, romance and a few other things. I’ve read most of Alexie’s other works, though not recently, and some of these stirred my memory but most were either new or seemed new to me. And they’re SO great.

Alexie has a way of writing about Native American issues (he’s from the Spokane nation) without seeming pedantic or, more importantly, prescriptive. Like, his characters are Native but the point of a lot of the stories is that they’ve got the full range of winners and losers and no-shows and everything else. You get this even more by reading 15-20 stories with differing characters than I have by reading his pieces with the same characters all the way through. Really enjoyed this. Not oversexed.

An amazing arrangement of stories from people who you’ve heard of that all have Vermont as one of the extra characters. So great. Perfect for underblanket winter reading.

This was a graphic novel compilation with different artists responding to the pandemic. The time it covers was from early 2020 til October, so taking place during some of the bleaker pre-vax times. It’s not an easy read, but has a lot of different takes on a collective public health disaster and people’s personal responses to it. I really enjoyed the overview it gave me of people’s individual struggles and the interactions they had with people experiencing a thing that was kind of the same but also kind of different.

Richard Brautigan willed his unpublished writings to his friend Edna Webster. They were not doscuvered and published until long after his death. It’s mostly a collection of poems and short fiction but also has two introductory essays which give a bit more Brautigan background, stuff that I as a casual fan never knew. It’s not the most cohesive group of stuff, but it was a lot of fun to find and read.

A great and beautifully illustrated book on naturalists and their field notes, talking about the how and the why. Canfield has assembled a wide variety if people, most of whom do their note taking in paper format and they discuss what they do and why they think it’s important for them for science and for future generations.

It’s really unusual to get a book that is a collection of short stories by various authors and have the collection be uniformly good. There was, towards the end, one story that I didn’t like as well as the others, but this collection is basically uniformly excellent. I’m sure this is because Sharyn November, who is a friend of mine, is a genius. However, it may also be because she’s especially clever at choosing fiction and cultivating authors to write what they might not otherwise have written. This book has the added bonus of little blurbs by the authors at the end of every story which include web addresses for easy lookup if you’d like to find more by them. It also has the authors describing why they wrote the stories, what inspired them and what they were thinking about. Some of the pieces in this collection are clearly parts of larger works which was good news if I really liked the story/characters but bad news if I felt that I was coming in to a story partway through. People who read YA or just enjoy a good compliation of fantasy/scifi are sure to enjoy this thick book of good stories.

I was super hot and cold on this collection. Many of the stories are interesting turns on what w world of the future would be like if we started paying attention to our environment (in both utopic and dystopic ways) and some were more typical sci fi stories in a more ecosystem-intentional setting. The few times I started reading a story and was asking myself “What the hell is going on?” were the two times when Robinson had included chapters from longer novels. These pieces read as not-short-stories and were less engaging to read. I found a few of these stories really lovely--one about a near future where fortune-telling is part of the social and political fabric of the world and one about an injured bird god king--but a few other ones I found too uneven or unclear even as I read the back matter and saw, after the fact, what the authors were trying to get at. Ultimately not for me but I’m going to try to track down some similar books on related themes.

A really engaging book of essays by trans, non-binary, and intersex writers of various backgrounds talking about the times they felt RIGHT in their bodies and happy about who they were and/or where they were in their lives. A lot of different stories. There is definitely some trauma among the good news stories but it’s not the overarching dynamic. Joyful and a good read.

A long book of super-short essays, all under five pages. I put this book down for a long time and just picked it up again and really enjoyed it (possibly b/c of my new shorter attention span). Some authors you’ve heard of--Sherman Alexie, Barry Lopez, Michael Ondaatje--some you probably haven’t. Good biographical blurbs in the back and a truly terrible index.

What a great book! I picked it up at a library book sale thinking it would be good to bring on a trip and sort of wondering how crime fiction was going to translate into short stories. I read a lot of mysteries and have read some true crime in my day but it was all book length stuff. So I went into this collection --an attempt to sort of show off some of the best short crime writing from 2008--with a bit of skepticism but it was all so good. All the stories were succinct, gripping and many stuck with me for days afterwards. Most of the stories also have introductions from other crime writers which was a really nice touch. All in all it really gave the crime writing genre a palpable feel as a thing in addition to being a great collection of readable stories which I think was part of the point.

This book was one of those rare finds and exciting also because it was newly printed. It is an attractive letterpressed book from a small press of excerpts of library stories. If that weren’t enough, it is illustrated by custom woodcuts by Frank Eckmair. Some of the excerpts are already well-known to the library community, such as Borges' library story and Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Others are just small excerpts from other well-known texts like a few paragraphs from Don Quixote or Voltaire. The overall result is a book about books and reading that is in and of itself wonderful to read and look at. A tour de force!

I really enjoyed this colelction of essays and other contributions to the long-running Morbid Curiosity magazine. From encourters with the supernatural, to fascinations with bloodplay to euthanizing a friend dying from AIDS these stories all share... something that is either something familiar or something offputitng depending on your take on the whole wide weird world of stuff. I especially enjoyed the “value add” of extra tidbits, tips and trivia about the article subjects that Lauren added at the end of most of the selections. People who enjoy weird stuff will enjoy this, I’m glad I read it.

So interesting! Authors writing stories that are evocative of Lovecraft, only written in this century. Some of the stories were fairly traditional and/or somewhat derivative (which was sort of the point) and others did really interesting things with the style and content to create all new interesting-in-their-own-right tales. Some of the bits did get a little repetetive and I felt like some authors did a little too much gorey explosition instead of the creepy horror-by-implication which Lovecraft was really famous for. My faves were stories that dealt directly with alienation and some of HPL’s more problematic personality issues at the same time as they wrote great stories.

Not sure what category to put this book into. It’s a collection of blog posts from the effing librarian, a library blogger who has a witty irreverent blog that I sometimes read. This book was given to me during one of my many travels. And I read it on the way home. Some of the text doesn’t really lend itself to being ported outside of the hypertext millieu, but some does. Some of the jokes don’t quite work but many of them do. I was pleased to see that the book is offered via Amazon [complete with ISBN] or for free via Scribd, so if you’re dying to get more of the effing librarian or just want a nice looking book to put on your librarianan shelf, this one might just do the trick.

Started reading this last year. Finished it this year. Enjoyed getting just a bit more Adams stuff that I hadn’t read even though some of it is a little loose-ended or seems written for a purpose that’s not “read this after I’ve been dead for a decade and the whole world of computers has changed” Even though, fun read, learned a bit more about Adams and got to read just a bit more fiction even if I’ll never know how that particular story ends.

Even though a lot of Seinfeld’s early stuff can sound dated, I was surprised how funny parts of this book were. It’s just random observations about stuff, a lot of it nothing special, but none of it is off color and some of it is laugh out loud funny.

This is a collection of comics about being autistic. Like any collection, it’s a bit uneven--segments range from advice for allistic folks, to journeys of self-discovery, to metaphors about the autistic experience--but also engaging and informative. I’m someone who has always had some “spectrum-ish” traits and it was interesting for me to see a lot of different autistic people’s perspectives on some of those traits. This book was originally published out of a Kickstarter campaign and then found a major publisher. I learned stuff from reading it and you probably will too.

Part of my “make an effort” prgram this year. This collection of essays by young (11-20-ish) black girls in America was a good read. Lots of different perspectives, some that I could get my head around and some that I couldn’t. I tried to silence my inner “Huh?” voice and just listen to what these girls had to say, about being girls growing into women, about America versus other countries, about whether they had white friends, how they got along in school, etc. Eye-opening and well-curated by Carroll, this book is well worth a read, especially if you think it’s maybe not for you.

This was a great collection of poems and short fiction and what I think are essays by Alexie. They are all good, mostly make you think and all show off his great writing sense and his humor. I’m not sure how I missed this when it first came out but I am glad I found it.

Loved this. A lot of thoughtful and interesting looks at different sci fi scenarios, just like you read about elsewhere except these stories all happened to be about women. I really enjoyed every story in this collection, though the LeGuin story started out pretty rapey which was essential to the story but pretty difficult to get through if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing. On the bright side, the Octavia Butler story was NOT rapey which was terrific. Don’t know how I managed to not see this when it came out; glad I found it now.

Picked this up at a library booksale because I liked the cover. Was a bit disappointed when I found out it was from 2001 because I figured some of the stories would be pre-internet. I should not have worried. This is one of the best sorts of anthologies. Dozois has carefully selected stories, they’re arranged well and fit together nicely, and he gives enthusiastic introductions to almost all of them, intros that make you want to read more. I enjoyed every single story here, and they are all over the map from family tales with incidental terraforming to heavy science stories talking about ecopoesis. Reading this collection was a delight and I’m hoping to be able to track down his other collection about transhumanism.

[review pending]

A multiverse story by Max Barry about a spurned man who becomes a murderer and the pursuit of his target... across worlds. And some people who try to stop it. Some somewhat difficult (for me) violence, because you see the main female character getting brutally killed over and over again, but a complex story that wraps up well

Hadn’t really read anything by Robinson before but when I read the collection he edited I vowed to track something down by him. And then forgot about that until I saw this on the “new” shelf at the local library. It’s big. And thick. And sort of a world-building book so you have to be sort of into that aspect of it to plow through the actual plot which is sort of spare (but interesting) and is much less central to this book than the explanation of the world in 2312 and how we got there. I liked it but I was reading it at a time when I was flattened by a cold and could focus a lot on it and it didn’t have to move me along. I’ll try reading another book by Robinson but maybe one that is a little shorter next time.

I almost did not pick this book up. It looked like one of those typical torture stories where a criminal sociopath decides to make a family’s life a living hell, most likely by torturing and/or nearly raping all their female characters. This did not come to pass. The book is more interesting than that, though Isles is still a little tawdry for my tastes. This family fights back. So when the daughter is kidnapped at the same time as the husband -- away on a business trip -- is held hostage until the kidnapers get their money, the family fights back. It’s not super predictable but it’s not a bunch of new twists and turns either. Isles has set up an interesting scenario with some predictable Iles flavor (the little diabetic girl. we cringe as she eats Captain Crunch and wonder if she’ll get her life saving insulin in time... does Iles do this just to get a tax write-off for medications?) and a decent resolution.

Continuing to enjoy this series. This one gets a little weird (for me) with the injection of religion and a bit too much (again, for me) ruminating of the nature of evil and forgiveness and whatever. The rest of it continues to deliver although I can sort of see the writing on the wall, people you know and like in the series are going to die and get ready for it. Looking forward to see what happens next.

I wanted to love this book, a book about books, which I was sucked into from the very beginning. However, I wound up only liking it. It’s a great story, but it takes a pivot about a third of the way through. At first you are kind of bopping back and forth between the “real” world and a fantasy world alongside the real world. This was fun. However, after that 1/3 point, the book inhabits almost exclusively the fantasy world from that point forward and it’s not as interesting. A lot of those fantasy encounters where both people are basically magical and so the outcome of whatever scuffle they have is completely based on their powers etc. The human parts of this book were great and if you’re less ruffled by fantasy world stuff, you’d likely like it a lot.

This book was recommended to me by people who I told that I enjoyed .. I think The Passage? I had a hard time getting into it. I enjoyed the first chapter or so which seemed Gibson-esque, sort of cyberfuture sort of thing but then it went WAY off into future tech sorts of things and it kind of lost me. When everything is taking place in sort of some sort of sim or another, it can be hard to keep track of what is real and what is not real and I wound up not really feeling connected enough to the book to stay on top of real vs. sim stuff. Maybe a great book for other people, did not do it for me.

This is the finale in the trilogy about the weird Area X in the Southern Reach which, once you read more about the author, you know to be somewhere in Florida. I didn’t get a lot of closure but I wasn’t expecting much. I got to learn a lot more about an unsympathetic character from the first book and lost sympathy for some of the characters from the second book. Overall this was a great trilogy and I liked how each of the books was a little different in its approach to the same weird stuff.

A sequel to his other book, this pone follows the protagonist after she blows up the wifi and wins a temporary victory against the people who try to charge you for every (copyrighted) word you say in this dystopic novel. I thought this story was a little more interesting--they leave the dome, they learn more about other places, some of it takes place in Mexico--but there’s a lot of really grim stuff happening to some pretty young characters which, for whatever reason, I found a little tough to take. Loved it, but be warned, parts of it are heavy.

I love time machine stories! And this one started off pretty good. Guy at MIT finds an accidental time machine, tries to figure out how it works as he deals with a bunch of other things in his life. But then things get weird. He goes so far into the future that things are weird. And then SO far into the future that things are unrecognizable. And there’s this naive gal the protagonist meets along the way who you’re worried he’s going to have an inappropriate relationship with (this is scifi after all). It wraps up neatly but I didn’t like the second half of the book as much as I enjoyed the first half.

More sand! This was a years-later sequel to the earlier Sand stories and I liked this bunch a little bit better. It’s got more people from different parts of the world within the story, with different backgrounds who have some perspectives that were missing from the first book. Some nice resolutions, feels a bit more hopeful, an odd change of a few characters and less time at the Honey Hole (a sex worker establishment that Howey just didn’t do justice to) make for a better reading experience, but one that probably requires someone has read the earlier book.

I liked but did not love Noumenon. Lostetter is clearly a great writer, just wasn’t my story. This was a sort of Murderbot readalike in some ways and very much not in others. A cyborg is part of it. There are a lot of non-binary totally normal characters. It was enjoyable, kind of a slow burn of plot development (I was worried at the beginning that it might be a little too hard sciencey for me and this was not the case) and otherwise too easy to spoil so I won’t get into it. A good read.

Such fun! I’d seen this comic online but didn’t know it had turned into a book. I laughed out loud at a lot of these comics which are basically short vignettes about trying to be an adult and also being incredibly awkward. Enjoyable and relatable.

Second book in the Planetfall series, this one looking at one person who has been “left behind” when the whole last book happened. He has a kind of rough backstory and is now basically an indentured slave to one of the megacorporations that runs the world. But! He is also highly trained and has to investigate a murder which brings him right back in to the community (the cult!) that he left behind. A good read and has a lot of weird and complex parts to it, not a lot of tie in with the other book, works fine as a standalone, but fleshes out some of those stories a wee bit more.

This book was just fine. A light mystery in a small town with a female heroine who is lumpy and not at all sure of herself. I enjoyed getting to know the quirky townspeople and I’ll probably read a few more of these. The only downside for me was that it’s from the 90s and there’s some pretty backwards stuff in terms of gender and race issues. Like even if you have a backwards townsperson, I don’t think you’d put semi-racist words in their mouth in a book in 2019? I found it took me out of the story somewhat and if it keeps up too much would probably turn me away from the series.

I neither love nor hate these cozy mysteries that take place in a small village in the Cotswolds. Agatha Raisin is a not-super-likeable woman who is independently doing her thing and things happen around her. In this case, a mystery death of a person she thought was one type of person but turned out to be an entirely other type of person. Lively enough and not super challenging but I like the small-town vibe to these books.

Waited as long as I could to read this and am now predictably sad that it’s over. I had forgotten basically all of The Peripheral and it did not matter! Though I did read up on it again after I had finished Agency just to get a little more depth into the story I had read. I can always read them again in tandem. “If you like Gibson, this is one of his books” is all I need to say.

Any book with evil librarians in the title is going to go right on my reading list. This was an enjoyable romp with a main character who swears he is unlikeable but who isn’t really. It’s the start of what will hopefully be a series of books of a vaguely magical kid, raised by normals, waging this sort of war where the evil librarians are the bad folks. It’s fun and sort of meta for a YA novel and I enjoyed it a lot.

If you like Tchaikovsky, or Van DerMeer, you’ll like this. Yet another novel including hte phrase “fruiting bodies” which I always took as a Van DerMeer thing. This story takes place on a prison planet, it’s an exploration of a whole new ecosystem where what we’ve come to know as “organisms” are true symbiotic colonies. Lots of ruminations about individuality vs. the whole and the concept of sell outs, takeover, and ultimately, revolution in the face of extreme resistance. A somewhat brutal book (it’s a prison planet) but I liked the protagonist and enjoyed thinking about the science

This was the second book of Willis’s two-parter that began with Blackout. Unfortunately I did not know this when I started Blackout and so I got to the end of it and then realized the story would be wrapped up in a second book, a second book that was only held by three libraries in Vermont. I am a bit of a pill about buying new books, I just don’t do it, so I was immensely grateful when a friend gave me an advanced reader copy of this book. It was terrific. It actually resolved without killing off too many main characters. I enjoyed the story. Willis’s theme of missed messages makes a lot of this book -- the main plotline of which involves time travelers from 2060 going back to the Blitz and getting a little stuck there -- really tensemaking. Sometimes almost too much so. Every time chatacters walked past each other or just missed eachother I was reading it going AAAAAAAAGGGGHHH. So I guess htis means it was well-written and I love Willis’s writing generally, but I find the ongoing tension in this pair of books somewhat tough to deal with. So well written, so much great historical information, but a little nail-bitey for my tastes.

A student gave me this book when I told her I liked mysteries. I have no idea why the cover has dominoes on it or what the title is about. I enjoyed it, but it seemed to hit all the hot-button issues: sexual abuse, kink, lebianism, lady cops, sisterhood, a bunch of others. It was fine, I wasn’t unhappy that I read it, but sort of made me appreciate the regular authors I enjoy more than I already do.

This may be one of my favorite time travel books. I hope it becomes a movie. The author is a screenwriter and there’s definitely some movie-like pacing in this book where you have to turn a page in the story to figure out what just happened. It’s complex and not worth explaining in detail but it’s basically a modern day time travel novel where “mistakes were made” that tries to look at the question about what would happen if you went back in time not too far and made some fairly large mistakes. Enjoyable read.

A college friend wrote this book! It’s a dystopian YA novel about a future world where everything is copyrighted, even the words you say out loud. It’s an interesting premise and the lead character opts out by refusing to say anything. Chaos ensues. Sort of. I liked a lot of the specific bits of social commentary in this book--food for poor people is made form 3d printers and one of the most coveted things you can get is a real orange--but I felt weird about the overall environment. I mean it’s tailored to me since there’s a climactic scene in a Very Rare Library but the whole thing was just super-bleak. If bleakness is your thing, this is a well thought out and well implemented cautionary tale about copyright and the increasing corporatization of everything.

Set in a small Vermont town this is a classic townie versus jock story that Lonergan does a great job at explaining and showing without telling you how to feel about it. As someone who lives in a small Vermont town and deals with some of the same issues, it rang really true to me.

Librarian friend on Twitter told me to read this and I’m so glad he did. I felt like I was stuck in a web of sentient-life-form scifi books which I did not enjoy entirely and I kept wanting stuff more like... I wasn’t sure what. Single POV, preferably something robotic or human. Not a book I felt was smarter than me. With characters who weren’t too whiny. So this book, subtitled, The Murderbot Diaries #1, is a great book about a neurotic humanoid robot and how they became, sort of, free. And it’s all one POV the whole way through, and the books have some humor but not tons of it. And the socially anxious robot feels, to me, like a totally normal character who I enjoyed tromping along with. Hooray for this book, so glad I read it.

[review pending]

Loved this book by a friend of a friend about an unlikely friendship between a witch and a mad scientist at the end of the world. Also: birds!

I liked this but didn’t feel like it was her strongest work, but maybe it just didn’t have enough of the things that I was looking for. It barely touches on Three Pines and many of the non-Gamache characters you’ve grown to love. It is in Paris however, if that’s your thing. And it’s very heavy. A lot of Nazi talk and maybe some retconning of Gamache’s background. Did we know his grandmother was Jewish? It’s got a lot of other Penny touches: some good librarian/archivist work, some family drama, people you think are dead. I was happy to see more of Gamache’s son and family but you still feel like there’s more going on there than was explained in this story.

Simply a great collection of short stories about all different things but one thing they seem to share is a sense of poignancy. Each story has some small element of magic, but not in a “watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat” way, but in a “What if mermaids were real?” way. I enjoyed every single story in this book and really look forward to reading more of whatever Sachdeva writes.

Not sure I finished this. It’s a “choose your own adventure” (ambitious). A note at the beginning says you can also just read it straight through. I made a “choice” near the beginning that propelled me close to the end and there seemed to be plot points I had missed. Was this because I was reading it on an old Kindle? I hit a few “error” pages saying go back. One chapter was there twice. Was this part of the story? Ultimately confusing, too bad because I really like Shepherd’s stuff. I may try to read it again in hardcover.

A great novel with the scifi premise "What would happen if you could put your consciousness in other bodies and an entire economy built up around that? Some of the results are cool, some of them are gross, many are in-between. A lot of it depends on who you are or what your status is. I enjoyed this because it’s a romp and I bet it makes for good television. I didn’t enjoy it because in some places it seemed gratuitously gruesome and was haunting. Will probably try to read the next one.

Hey this didn’t turn into some huge war book like it hinted that it might! I was expecting either a lackluster petering out of some of the topics (like Hunger Games) or some sort of over the top religious allegory that I didn’t understand (Narnia) but this was understandable and interesting and it wrapped up just fine. Perfect summer reading series.

So many highs and lows in this book. I reallty enjoyed his last trilogy but this one was really only batting about 500 and it was LONG. I reached the end of this epic three-in-one urban-gothic set of tales and really wasn’t sure what I felt. First book: mostly good. Second book: a slog. Third book: fave but also grimdark. Helped me get my head around life during wartime somehow. Not sure I’d really recommend it.

This book takes place during the Blitz which is a real organizing factor for a lot of what happens.Maisie and Priscilla are driving ambulances, the American Mark Scott shows up and is mysterious, people need to sleep wherever they wind up when the air raid sirens go off.I’d read a fair amount about the Blitz but it was nice to see your characters inside a bit of history to give it a little more rounding out. The central mystery to this book was better and more interesting than the one in the last book too which I appreciated.

A very straightforward YA graphic novel about a small town in Oklahoma that is dealing with some parents who want the popular fantasy series banned because it promotes witchcraft and is “obscene.” Spoiler alert: the book is not obscene. Even though the small town is not great for our protagonist, he finds some fellow travelers at the library and in places he doesn’t expect. I enjoyed it, a quick read. It really seemed like it could have been written just this year but in fact is over a decade old.

I enjoyed this book about colonizing a new planet with a cast of characters who just happen to all be women. There is a certain kind of female scifi novel that I enjoy which has conflicts but not war and the general premise that “another wold is possible” and this is the sort of world that Griffith outlines in her novel. As someone who can get tired of the endless conflicts that seem designed primarily to move the plot along, this character-based semi-worldbuilder book was gratefully appreciated.

Enjoyed this one more than the previous one. Maisie is coming to grips with her wartime service and is also deciding to try to be a better friend to Priscilla. Along the way she gets a camera, meets and works with the people at Scotland Yard and learns a lot about mental illness and chemical warfare.

I got really excited after reading Seveneves that maybe Stephenson was back writing things that I would enjoy reading. I’ve always liked even most of his older stuff but got off the train at Baroque Cycle. Turns out this story (some sort of possible future where the braniacs are split off from the normals for thousands of years) was more like BC than the other books and I struggled through it hoping against hope that it would turn into something a little more accessible for me. I have friends who LOVED this book so I don’t mean to put anyone off of it but MAN was it a slog for me.

My fave genre, the female-captained cargo spacer with a bunch of different species interacting as they delve into a great mystery on the outskirts of the universe. Psychologically interesting without being entirely trauma-centered. This is the first of a series and definitely worth continuing.

This was a hard one for me to get through. A little too many “weird” names and a little too many concepts that I wasn’t sure I was understanding. i feel like something was supposed to be understood about how the different cultures dealt with gender but I didn’t understand it and instead of it being freeing (hey you don’t know what gender any of the characters are!) I found it confusing. A good story told in my least favorite “alternating timelines where only one of them is truly interesting” format. A suggestion from an internet person, I think I’ll head back to the Expanse for when I need space war stuff.

Another totally fun book from Scalzi. This one was, I was sure, working its way to a shaggy dog story conclusion but actually it was much more satisfying than that. Equal parts silly and serious, this book about a future universe where the earth is just one of many inhabited planets and there’s some diplomatic intrigue that needs working out was engaging from start to finish.

Trussoni wrote another thriller that I liked just fine but did not love. This is a more ambitious book that is loosely about the history of angels, their odd position in modern-day society, and a group that is dedicated to both keeping secrets about them and also finding out the truth. It was good but the pacing was SO uneven (there’s a whole massive story-within-a-story that is sort of dumped into the middle) that ultimately it wasn’t my jam but might be someone else’s. I’m still going to try the next book in the series because I like Trussoni’s plots.

The sequel to Angelology, taking us a little further in to that story. However, it was more of a thriller and maybe trying to do too much? We didn’t get to know any of the characters much better and while the plot was complex and fascinating, a lot of it was told with one of the characters monologuing to the other characters who are often injured or tired or in a hurry. And there were a bunch ofdisparate threads which I felt didn’t resolve well. I liked it but was not surprised it didn’t have a sequel despite an ending that implied one was coming.

I will read any book with these colors on the cover. Got this from a Little Free Library. It’s about two Latinx women (one from Cuba, one with Puerto Rican heritage) in two different decades who interact with the weird fustiness of the American art scene which tokenizes them and expects them to slowly assimilate. They each have disempowering relationships with disappointing white men and learn to find their own value (and values) as they work within a system that barely accommodates them. There’s just enough magical realism and while the bouncing around between decades was a bit challenging for me, the story line was compelling and strong.

Apparently “weird fiction” is a thing. I loved this first-in-a-trilogy book about a spooky area in the US and the people who are part of an expedition to find out more about it. Except it’s not that simple, the leader of the group is some sort of control freak, one of the members had a husband who was (sort of) killed in a previous expedition, and everyone’s a little strange. It’s a lot of “show me don’t tell me” exposition which I appreciated. Looking forward to the other two novels.

A Goncourt-winning novel originally in French which manages to be both ethereal (in parts) and didactic (in other parts). There were a lot of long chunks of philosophy in the middle of what was otherwise a story about a really weird thing that happens. Hard to talk about without giving plot details away. I enjoyed it but went to Goodreads after reading to check “What did I just read?” and figure out how it ended because even though I was giving it a close read, I wasn’t sure I understood. Neat weird plot twists, big cast of characters. Would I recommend it? Not sure.

Not sure how I hadn’t read anything of Woodson’s before. This is a great coming of age story of a young black woman whose family moved from Tennessee to Brooklyn after what we (later) learn was the death of her mother. The book is told in a series of vignettes flashing back to periods of her upbringing from the perspective of what we know is an accomplished professional woman. She tells the stories of her thick-as-thieves and we eventually learn what happened to all of them. Her father at one point finds religion with the national Of Islam and there is a lot of slightly-removed influence of these various parts of her life. While the novel is not autobiographical Woodson did draw from her life experiences and this book does seem very very real.

Not totally certain how this wound up on my To Read pile but it was so terrific. Interestingly even though the book is 15+ years old a lot of the “tech"aspects of it did not read as old and dated at all. Ultimately, it’s an ecotopic novel about who owns Antarctica and "What is happening to the planet” with the veneer of Antarctica over the whole thing. Robinson has a tendency to go on sort of long about historical stuff (a problem I’m having with another novel of his I’m reading) but it mostly wraps up in a way the reader will like. Great imagery, great mostly-likeable human characters. I learned some things. I wanted to go there.

Sequels to great scifi books can often be terrible. This one was not, it was really good. We see our “expendable” character Mickey from the last novel actually getting to sort some things out while no longer (or is he?) being expendable. There’s reference to the last book without a lot of reliance on it. A little less colony desperation. Tales of friendship. Quick-paced and just a little funny, I enjoyed this.

This was an interesting take on various “surviving the apocalypse” scenarios. A “something happened, now there are only seven people alive in the world... maybe” story. I enjoyed this more than I might have otherwise because it takes place in Boston/Cambridge. Well-written characters, somewhat unsatisfying when you learn what the something is that happened. I liked the problem-solving nature of the early parts of this book a lot and have now gone on to read a few more of his books.

I’m a big Hadfield fan, but this was not the book for me. A mystery set in space, kind of. With astronauts, kind of. During the Cold War when the big enemies were the Russians. Too much engineering detail, like way too much. And not enough women, they’re mostly used as set dressing (and as comfort to have the book wrap up nice at the end) which I didn’t appreciate. The book is based on some real-life stuff and some totally made up stuff, and I wish I’d known more about what was real and what was made up before I’d read it, might have been more interesting. Skip it unless space data minutia is your thing.

I am learning that a book that is described by many reviewers as “ambitious” may not be the right book for me. I really liked this book generally, but felt confused by the ending somewhat and felt the author had a Big Idea that may or may not have really worked out. Sometimes I have to get all the way to the end of these “climate disaster” books to tell if it’s a story of hope or a story of doom, and gosh I’m still not sure about this one. A great read told in a before, during, after way. A little scifi, a little fantasy.

Picked up this book at the college library and couldn’t figure out of it was for adults or teens. Turns out a lot of people had the same question so I feel a bit better bout my confusion. this is an odd Regency/Steampunk mashup in a world where Mars is colonized but people still take horse drawn carriages. I’ve been reading so much hard science lately that my disbelief suspension was pretty difficult. It’s got an engaging plot and I was carried around by the story, but it’s confusing for people who really like scifi (they have ships... that go to Mars... sort of...) and I wonder if it would be a little confusing for people just looking for a YA romp. And, spoiler alert, it ends with a wedding proposal which... bleh. I enjoyed this well enough but probably won’t seek out the sequels.

One of those books that is more historical fiction than just fiction, this novel about a librarian and a student and his history and hers had some really captivating moments, many of them towards the end, but felt like a slog through a lot of it. It may just be that I’m not interested enough in literary history and/or the poetics of long doomed relationships but I found all the frosty characters that inhabited this book really tough to understand and get behind. The book is wonderfully written and probably better for someone who wasn’t me.

Once your generation ship makes it somewhere, then what? A really good exploration of the compromises that need to (maybe) be made in the name of survivability. A colony that is almost too small to survive, on a frozen ice planet, suddenly realizes they are not alone. Gets real creepy at the end in a surprising way. Mostly female characters, lots of interesting social dynamics.

It’s really hard to follow Ready Player One and I’m happy Cline finally did that. This book has a lot of the things that made RP1 terrific but a few downsides that made it not quite so much of a romp. It may be a character flaw with me, but I find endless battle scenes in text really difficult to follow. There were a few of these, one notable one early on and I was concerned for a big chunk of the book that the book was going to end in some epic fifty page battle. It doesn’t. The characters in this book are neat, the plot moves along and I mostly liked it but it took a while to get going and didn’t have quite the “Wheeee!” feeling of the first book.

One of those books I grabbed right off the shelf at the library because it looked like it would be interesting. A super-quirky interestingly complex tale of interwoven art crimes and the ten or so people involved in perpetrating and solving them. Odd writing style (a lot of one-sided expository convos which felt super weird) but easy to not mind. The author is a noted expert in this topic and kind of a polymath so a lot of that seemed to come out in the writing of this novel.

I love it when non-diverse authors make a serious effort to write a book with a fully diverse cast. And yet, it’s hard because as a member of one of those categories (Weir who is male is writing about a Muslim woman as a lead character) I felt like the character was unfamiliar to me. Which is probably fine, unless it isn’t. And it’s easy to pick nits so I’ll leave that be. Otherwise this is a Weir-ish (i.e. a lot of hard science within an actual story) novel about a colony on the moon and what the politics and practices of that sort of place would look like. Our protagonist is a non-practicing Muslim woman who just happens to also be a genius and a smuggler. And a great cast of other characters who are all on the moon thanks to the Kenyan space program. If you liked the Martian but wish it had some women in it, you’ll probably like this.

More Murderbot! I’d been slogging through a bunch of scifi lately wondering if i was just over it but it turns out I was just reading the wrong scifi. This story was fun, different from the first and made me want to read the third. Nice to be excited about scifi again.

This book took a long time to coalesce, for me. It’s a story about a young black man at the University of Vermont and goes backwards in time talking about his first (?) real girlfriend but also about his difficulties adjusting to college at UVM. Since I knew the author was also a young black man at UVM I was very curious how much overlap there was with the author’s own life and this sort of sidetracked me from the plot of the story which was always a little hard to get a handle on. I’d lke to read more by this author but this one didn’t really work for me and if it had been longer I probably would have stopped reading it.

Another spacer with a diverse cast but this one was a little too over into the “complex cast” side for me. The title character is a woman of color who wants to be a spaceship engineer. She’s trained but she’s a “dirtheel” and has never actually been in the sky. She’s also managing chronic pain and a weird sister who is some sort of a new age therapist and a judgey pain in the ass. Lots of people die. There’s a poly lesbian romance. I totally appreciated what Koyanagi did with this book, but I found that reading about someone who was experiencing chronic pain was actually just too painful for me (and some of the mushy stuff just went on too long, this is my issue not an issue with the book). Great for most people, not the greatest for me.

I feel like I need a whole new category here for genre fiction or maybe just summer reading. This was another summer reading book. It was okay. Moved along well, interesting plot. However, I felt that the writing wasn’t really up to the plot that had been devised. By the last few pages of the book I felt that there were a dozen loose ends to wrap up and I missed a few of them. The story is a somewhat complicated legal thriller about a guy at a law firm who thinks he has uncovered something unsavory about one of the law firms big pharmaceutical clients. It used to be that you could only have Nazis play the totally unsympathetic roles, now I guess you can have Big Pharm as well. The story is inteersting if somewhat far fetched and maybe I’m just slow but the wrap up at the end wasn’t quite obvious enough for me so some details remain a bit of a mystery.

This one was a little over the line for me in a few ways. Great story line, some characters you know, but a lot of consent violation and too much time spent in in-game “mersives” for my tastes. The character, like many of Newman’s other characters, has some mental health challenges, but unlike the other ones, it doesn’t work out for her. So given the things she has to endure all through this story, it’s a tough and kind of brutal ending. A great book, clearly, but to my read a very unhappy ending. Given that this may be the end of the series, it kind of gives a bad taste to the whole overall arc.

Picked this up on a libraryt’s booksale shelf which, I’ll be honest, an awful lot of my pleasure reading comes from. It’s a really interestingly complicated story of two sisters growing up without a mother in a somewhat rural part of India in a not very well off family and the different paths their lives take and how they come back together. I loved the different groups of people that sort of played off each other: Christian Indian people versus Hindu Indian people. Indian people who live in the West versus those who have come right from India. Older generations versus younger generations. Men versus women. Fulfilled versus unfulfilled people. Liars versus truth tellers. All of these groups dance around each other and figuring out who is in which groups and why is an interesting exercise. The actual plot here is almost secondary to watching all the interpersonal relationships play themselves out in various ways. So interesting.

I had a hard time maintaining momentum through this book even though i really like Stross and found the storylines pretty entertaining. Turns out I did not learn until after I finished the whole thing that it originated as two novellas that were sort of smushed together into one book. Which would explain a lot of things. I may try some other Stross titles but I think the Laundry series may not click with me.

I love Cory’s writing & have loved his other books but I wasn’t the right audience for this. It’s a great intro to the tech behind corporate/govt surveillance & also protestors/organizing. And yet, felt didactic & hopeless. Afterwords were the best part.

A short book of short fiction, much of it centered on weird little aspects of language. These stories all had a very gentle feel even as they covered some topics (relationships, break-ups, loss, bad people) which were not at all easy. Williams seems to delight in wordplay which is fun to read and makes sense in the short story format, might be aggravating in a longer book, even as I wished this one was longer.

I pretty much know what I am getting into with KSR novels. This one was about a massive generation ship and the issues they face seven generations in when it turns out the planetary system they are aiming for isn’t what they’d hoped. I guess for people who are more familiar with it, they see it as a long novel about why generation ships as a concept won’t work. This book is basically three novels in one. To my read, they don’t cohere so well and the one in the middle is mostly a stream-of-consciousness from an AI which I could have done without. The book has an odd ending, not really where you think it will go, but it’s still good reading.

Such a great creepy book. In this installment we learn more about the organization which has been sending expeditions into Area X. It’s definitely a lot more of a weird bureaucracy procedural than the previous book but I still found weird little bits that I enjoyed.

This book is so deliciously dense with things to think about. It takes place in a possible future where we have humans that are autonomous or indentured, and robots that are the same. Watching the interplay of these groups, overlaying a complex story of corporate greed and various kinds of responses to it (both legal and extralegal) is a fun and delightful romp of a sci fi novel

Grabbed it from a booksale shelf at a teeny library. I liked the cover and I wanted to read about a big spooky magician house and not be stuck in the Jonathan Strange universe which, quite frankly, I did not like. This was a great YA book about a girl being raised by her mother while taking care of a very old woman in a big spooky house after the resident magician had died. And there is a big birdcage out back with noisy birds. Fun to sort of see where it’s going, some nice friendship and a very female-centered novel. Enjoyable.

This was fun and complicated, a lot to take in regarding mental health, identity and what it means to be “who you are.” Psychological semi-mystery that leaves you looking for clues and retracing steps at the end. You’re never sure how the various characters are going to intersect and once you find out, it’s surprising. Compelling.

This book has a great plot with some thought experiments about cryogenic suspension and politics surrounding it, but the overall dystopian narrative (with a very sick protagonist who is struggling and in pain throughout) was not quite what I needed right now. Just an awful lot of struggle, too few places of comfort and a lot of confusion that could have been cleared up if people talked to each other more.

A follow up to Spin only with all new characters. The character that was the center of the last book is basically dead and one of the other main characters has a sot of side role in this book. I liked but did not love this story which had a new central figure, a quasi-interesting female dilettante who is trying to figure out what happened to her father. The plot is great some of the character development stuff (particularly with the female characters) is not so great but there’s less apocalyptic end of the world stuff which i appreciated.

If you’ve ever had “burn it all to the ground” feelings and you’d like a book that also shared your deep hatred for empire and colonialism, but you also like novels, pick this up. A singular book. There’s magic in it, but not a lot, and it definitely doesn’t turn into one of those wizard vs. wizard things where it’s impossible to tell who has the stronger defenses. Long and deep with complex friendships and rivalries.

I was pleased with my capsule Twitter review of this one: Am detecting loose theme. Stage setting, team building, new backstory to a central character, oops, something got fucked, let’s call in reluctant James Holden, wow it’s even more fucked than we thought, how will they make it out, they made it, denouement. In short this book has a little less of a “Everyone is nearly dead” ending and more of a “there is a terrible threat they need to neutralize” aspect. In any case, one of the ones I liked the most. Complicated family stuff going on.

I hadn’t read any of these books before so I started at the beginning. This one wasn’t bad. It’s got sort of a cloying narrator, three kids in sorry circumstances, and a lot of people around them who are making those circumstances worse. The illustrations are great, the plots develop, such as they are, and the sher depth of description alone makes these books worthwhile for an adult reader as well as straightforward enough for a younger reader.

Sara is a friend and I’d been meaning to read this for a while. It takes on some pretty heavy stuff, both general topics like addiction and bad parenting but also just STUFF. The things we have and why we have it. The central characters are two nearly-adults one of whom has a mom who is an estate sale organizer and other other of whom has a mom who is a hoarder. Things aren’t easy for either of them. They find each other. This book is beautifully illustrated by Carla Speed McNeil and all fits together as a really wonderful slice of life that is at once relatable but also contains people who we may have never met before.

This book was great. Then again, I had no expectations. My sister knew a guy who knew the guy who wrote it. She lent it to my boyfriend to read who then lent it to me. I enjoyed it. It’s a gritty cop story from Boston in the 50s and 60s, so while I recognized some of the settings, I didn’t recognize the culture at all. In fact, a major plot point revolves around the fact that Boston is NOT San Francisco and things that are obvious to any teenager now were unknown to cops even back then. The plot is straightforward cop story, and had a feel to it much like The Wire with a bunch of characters coming in and out of it at various points. For a short novel, a lot happens.

Not even sure how I found this book which is basically a “Grisham, but for political consultants who incidentally know how the internet works” It’s a sort of dystopian near future where we all have a feed that we can access which gives us information, news, friends communications etc. But what if the feed could be hacked? What sort of power would that give you, and not give you? The book is a little plodding, definitely written in a fast-thriller sort of way, but I stayed interested and I’ll be sure to read the next one.

I loved this book which took place in 1920s Bangalore. So many great colors, and so many rich smells described. There are real friendships between the women and the woman gets along well with her husband. She’s a female protagonist in a supportive relationship who likes to untangle mysteries which they eventually work on together. So good.

This was on my Kindle forever, I finally got around to reading it. A guy is depressed because his startup got stolen from him. But they pull him back for one last job, building an AI to go inside a lifelike humanoid that... only speaks Chinese? And then you as the reader have to deal with this completely incomprehensible cyborg and it just didn’t land right with me. Like I liked the idea in general, but the execution and especially a few specifics (like the Chinese thing, come ON) made it a really uneven read.

I wasn’t the right audience for this book, a social justice-aware spacer w/ a neuroatypical female couple working to defeat a murderous AI. A captain of uncertain gender. A lot of discussion of calming/soothing techniques.Had a hard time getting oriented, too much struggle/fighting, not enough plot. Likely a good book for someone else.

I am touchy about portrayals of activism and did not love the way it worked in this book. It’s always interesting, when you see people writing about activists, if at the end the activists are victorious or are not. This is a book, sort of, about chicken liberation. And the activists mostly don’t win, which makes a lot of the characterizations about them seem a little more mean-spirited than it might if they’d won out at the end. The chickens win, sort of. Got this because I was looking for new library books. Could not really figure out the throughline of the story. It starts in one place, it ends in a very difference place and the epilogue puts it straight into scifi. Didn’t understand character motivations. The plot, however, was tightly written and I could appreciate the author’s craft here even if I didn’t much like the story.

The only book that doesn’t take place in Three Pines and only contains some of the cops. This is a fascinating side story for Penny, taking place entirely in a monastery in the northern part of the country. The central question is about plainchant or Gregorian chants and a murder that takes place among a cloistered order. Interesting, and some of the same storyline with Gamache and Beauvoir and the director of the cops and their conflicts. I enjoyed this and plowed right through it.

This series is intense & keeps improving. It’s about a small Mars colony & a woman geologist/artist who’s maybe psychotic, maybe being gaslit about what she experiences? And you’re wondering for a while there while the story unfolds wondering what is real. It has a real Reach Trilogy feel to it, with a kind of background strangeness to it. Ties together nicely w/ the other two books. Very thriller-y. Interesting family stuff.

Just when I was getting comfortable with Watts and his ability to have terrific female characters who aren’t always just afraid in whatever dystopian night mare he has dreamed up for them, this book comes along. I liked it. I liked knowing what had happened after some of the stuff in the first two books but gosh the sadism was really hard to take. A much more central role for one of the awful characters and a lot of close-up sadist stuff including a multi-chapter rape of a decently liked character. Did not like.

Don’t know how this book wound up with me, it’s definitely more normie than what I usually read. It’s a tale about a house on Long Island in the 1700s and the family that lives there, juxtaposed against the same house which is now a historical museum in modern times. Some nice historical research, a tale of French and British soldiers, and possibly a ghost. You get glimpses of Manhattan. Schmaltzy but not in an entirely bad way, a happier ending than I’m used to. There are some didactic parts where the author is outlining things she’s clearly done a lot of research on (this is how you make snowshoes, this is how salt pork is made) which I didn’t exactly mind but felt a little obvious in places.

I may be at a stopping point with these for a while. I liked this book! I liked looking into the background of Bellows Falls and I thought the storyline was compelling and made me keep reading. I had originally checked out this book via Open Library and the version I got was full of OCR errors so I had to wait and get it the next day from the actual public library (which carries all of them) which threw off my rhythm. Happy to have been reading a lot more so far this year. Now I have to branch out some more.

I don’t think Iv’e read any of the books in this series before and I really should. Roz Chast was the editor of this year’s collection of graphic novels and comics. I was surprised how many of them I had read, but also slightly frustrated at how many of them were only excerpts which would drop you right in the middle of a story. Some, most, of them stood on their own but a few did not and I found them an odd choice for this volume.

I love these collections but usually there are at least one or two stories that I find wincingly terrible. Not so this year. Brooks has assembled an interesting assortment of very different stories that don’t all have that “Written for the New Yorker” feeling to them. While there are a lot of the same themes threading throughout--bad marriages, Rome, quirky childhoods, lost loves, the usual--the stories don’t all feel “of a type” the way these collections usually do. I raced through this set and really enjoyed the range and variety of writing.

This book seems like it might be a multiverse story but it mostly isn’t. I’m not sure how it wound up on my radar, but it’s about a few different and distinct types of humans who wind up together on a planet after the destruction of one of the race’s planets. There’s a lot of travel, exploration of other cultures on the planet, a little bit of relationship stuff (there’s a high value placed on marriage and also the destroyed planet’s survivors want to preserve their culture). There’s some good “where did this book come from?” explanation in the afterword. I liked it. It was sort of snoozy and not much happens but the world building and culture building are interesting.

I was a little concerned when I started this that it was going to be a LOT about the flood that happens and not enough about the general central mystery. I was wrong. This is a nice complex story, just like all the others. Some drama about what is going on in the Surete, a mystery involving people in or near the local town, and some stuff about the town itself, especially Clara and what she is up to with her painting. It’s a little odd because they never once mention her dead husband Peter which I thought might be part of this. No one major dies but there are some big changes, as always, and we’ll see how that goes.

Saying this is not as quite as good as the first book is only a small negative since I liked the first book SO MUCH and this one was a little less interesting and a little more high-body-count. Still good. Still keeping me flipping the pages and wondering what happens next.

[review pending]

An interesting book about a future Earth split into three major factions during a time when some of the factions discover faster than light travel (and don’t tell the other factions). A little uneven in bits and also one of those novels where there are three very separate storylines--one on Venus, one on a new planet, one on Earth--and one of them (imo) is more compelling than the other two. I liked the characters, sometimes found the story confusing to follow, will definitely read the sequel.

This was the first in this series which Jones wrote with his co-author Patricia Watts. The book seemed shorter and slightly more linear than some of the previous ones. There was more interpersonal stuff, maybe almost too much as one of the characters struggles with her feelings towards her pregnancy, and the usual cast of characters you’ve grown to expect.

A novel about what it means to be big and female and Black (and queer) in a Harlem that is rapidly changing around you. This was a book I had to read to the end of to be sure what message it was trying to send; I was pleased how it turned out. There’s a lot going on in this book and it’s mostly told through the interactions of a lot of the female characters including the main character’s mom and grandmother.

Joyce Carol Oates does YA! I liked this book a lot. The YA-ness of it made me pretty certain that it wasn’t going to be as over-the-top creepy as some of Oates' other stuff, and I’ve been on a YA kick lately. The loose story outline is about a loudmouth kid who gets in trouble (or set up) for “threatening to blow up the school.” The resident weirdo jock girl comes to his aid. They deal with a lot of crap from school and parents. Things somewhat resolve the way things in high school always sort of do, meaning not really and not definitively.

The story is told in alternating chapters, third person with Big Mouth and then first person with Ugly Girl. This is not difficult to keep up with and gives the story some depth especially when you’re looking at these kids and thinking “Why did he/she DO that?” it doesn’t have a lot of dangly parts that don’t make any sense. If I had one criticism it would be that all the supporting family for these kids seem a little two-dimensional, first bad, then good, then possibly bad again. This may be due to the fact that we mainly see the family through the eyes of the teenagers, but sometimes it’s tough to see them as fully formed characters the way two main teens are. This is a warts and all YA book that does manage to deal with complicated teen issues without feeling like an issue-oriented book.

Picked this up because it reminded me of the Wimpy Kid books.Enjoyed it but not quite as much as the Wimpy Kid books.

I’ve liked Winters' other books but this one (where all the narrative characters are female or non-binary) just fell flat for me. Great plot, interesting concept but the women just didn’t feel like women, they felt like television’s idea of women. Like, if you have a character who is a domestic abuse survivor and then she gets killed in an unrelated (and ugly) way, you’ve decided she is a plot device and that’s a very specific authorial choice. It seemed strange and all the female characters seemed two dimensional. The non-binary character also turned out to be a plucky smartie but also they were treated in a not-particularly-interesting way. I loved the plot of this book, it was inventive and different, but the way it was handled I just couldn’t get behind.

A great combination of inter-human and extra-human issues of assimilation and difference and a young female heroine of color who is up to grappling with it. There are a lot of parts of her young life in which she is told she must be a certain way or become a certain thing In some cases these choices are made for her. In some she has agency. Watching her figure out which is which is a fascinating process. I liked all of these different books (and the “bonus story” I guess, in the middle) but felt it was its strongest when she was learning about her talents and powers and skills, less interesting when it was just part of a big war of all against all sort of conflict. Having people of color, and especially women being the heros of their own story is just a great thing to read

Part book about birds, part book about plane crashes (and grief and loss and moving on) this book was a little tough for the first few chapters (Spoiler: everyone dies in the first chapter) but improved after that. Great Canadian setting, great bird stories, real feeling interplay between characters. I liked it. It was long enough. It was not too long.

Second in the series. Also enjoyed it. it takes a few books in a series to figure out if you’re enjoying them since there’s a lot of exposition that takes place trying to fill you in on what has happened in past books. Some authors are better at this than others. Winspear does pretty well.

I liked this book. It slotted in nicely with the other “moody seascape” books I read last year but this one is a UK story and it’s more of a mystery thriller than just some gloomy fiction. Had nor read Shaw before, picked this up because it was on the “new” shelf at the library. Enjoyed the story, the backstory and the general pace of the thing. Been reading a lot lately, glad to have good books to do it with.

Figured I’d try the next book in this series and see how I liked it. I liked it! This one involves the death of a wine reviewer with a fancy wine blog and a large number of people who could have done it. A lot of ins and outs but the same general cast of characters. Engaging. More good food descriptions.

I am always suspicious when a White author decides to summon the spectre of “Asian gangs” as part of their crime/mystery books. I think Archer Mayor did it badly and this one is somewhat better but still gave me the raised eyebrow. The food you learn about is truffles (appreciated it) and the drama in the background is Chinese gangs and their bullying of Vietnamese merchants in smalltown France.

[review pending]

No art restoration in this one! This book was a long treatise on how people get recruited to do stuff for ISIS and includes the recruitment of a woman from Israel to get recruited by ISIS. New character! But also a lot of terrorism stuff which is a little... not my thing. I enjoyed this book enough but I also felt more like I was paging through it more than hanging on every plot point.

This book is the first in a two-partner which I really really wish I’d known before I started it. It’s a great combination of some of Willis' earlier time travel sorts of books along with the weird missed signals theme that carries through a lot of Passages. This book takes us to the London area during the Blitz where three (possibly four) time travelers are doing different historical research topics all of which get a little messed up. The book is rich in history and Willis' excellent writing though it’s a little ... tense for me and especially now that I’ve gotten to the end of it and realize I have to start trolling the libraries to find a way to get the second book or wait for it to be out in paperback. Another great book by Willis, wish I’d had both parts.

This book was on the NEW table at my library. It had one of those “what did you think?” cards in the back of it and one of the other patrons from my library had written “A little oversexed...” in the back. I’m not totally sure I agree but there are a lot of stories of love, loss, romance and a few other things. I’ve read most of Alexie’s other works, though not recently, and some of these stirred my memory but most were either new or seemed new to me. And they’re SO great.

Alexie has a way of writing about Native American issues (he’s from the Spokane nation) without seeming pedantic or, more importantly, prescriptive. Like, his characters are Native but the point of a lot of the stories is that they’ve got the full range of winners and losers and no-shows and everything else. You get this even more by reading 15-20 stories with differing characters than I have by reading his pieces with the same characters all the way through. Really enjoyed this. Not oversexed.

This was a really heavy book and one of the ones that stuck with me the most of all the books I read this year. The premise is very basic: people start losing their sight for no reason whatsoever. A class system develops where the sighted quarantine the blind. The blind are left to live like animals in an institutional setting. Things degrade. One man’s wife is taken away with the blind, however she is sighted. She is the one who observes what is going on.

Saramago really spells it all out and this story is tough to read. There’s lots of weird sex and shitting in hallways and bad behavior all around. His writing is beautiful which is in stark contrast to the ugliness that is the human behavior in this story.

This book is super violent. It’s got a great premise about some nanotech blood manipulation that can cause horrible things to happen and it’s one of those thrillers that (mostly) takes place in a single compressed day where no one gets enough sleep and everyone gets the shit kicked out of them. Not for everyone. I mostly liked it.

My sister could not remember which Greg Iles book this was when I was talking to her about it until I said “You know, the one where the lead character is getting raped and she bit the guy’s throat out and killed him, that one?” and she said “Oh yeah!” Not for the faint of heart, this is another great whodunit by Iles which has a lot of disturbing sexual abuse in it. That is usually a total put-the-book-down dealbreaker for me, but for some reason Iles seems to have enough sympathy with his female characters that I don’t see his writing as rape porn and enjoy figuring out what happens at the end. That said, if this sort of thing turns your stomach, you will not like this book.

I like these medical mysteries. This one is by the same woman who wrote the medical space mystery that I enjoyed last month. This one is similar in some ways. Something is making the teens in a small Maine exceptionally murderously angry. A new doctor just moved to town to help her own teenaged son with his anger and behavioral problems afte the death of her husband, his dad. She finds the typical New England smalltown stuff a little hard to handle -- unfriendliness, reticence -- and this gets worse when she believes that there is something biological behind the temper outbreak.

There is a little too much weird medical dialogue that doesn’t add to the story, in both this and the other Gerritsen book I read -- seems to be a way for the author to establish bona fides early on -- but once you get beyond that (in this case an admittance to an emergency room where the doctors yell drug directives at each other for a few pages and you’re left thinking "huh?") and the story starts to unfold you appreciate that the author can also describe characters and not just diseases.

A sweet summer romance book with a kid who isn’t sure what he wants and a handsome guy in town for the summer with his own backstory. Lots of friend dynamics stuff and some family issues slowly working their way out. Plus lots of baked goods.

This was the most uneven of the pack, veering between a lot of complicated relationship stuff and walls of text about dust, weather patterns, the nature of memory, and then a tiny conflict wrapped up way too quickly. It follows the same general trajectory as the others but whereas the others, the final conflict is introduced significantly earlier in the novel, in here it felt jammed right on to the end. And the overall wrap-up seemed weird to me. Glad I read it, happy it’s over.

I’m getting a little tired of these, just as I am getting to the end of what’s been published so far, but they still hold up for low-end french food-and-cops books. This one doesn’t have a huge tactical shootout scene which is AOK with me though there is a little bit of a “Promising young woman gets killed in a somewhat brutal manner” aspect which does get old. Good mystery, some neat French history, not too much of the endless food narratives.

Read this book for a book club. It was okay but not my thing.

Thirty of these books! Even though there are some people who are killed in this one, there is a little less of the creepy terrify-and0torture aspects that have put me off some of the previous ones. I enjoyed this, we’re back with Joe Gunther and people are doing well and no major character dies or gets grievously injured.

Henry writes lightweight books you can read on vacation and they are fun and interesting. This book goes nowhere unfamiliar which is just fine. The author really enjoys Hallmark movies and wanted to write a book about the other side of the equation: the person back home whose significant other falls for someone in some cutesy small town. This story is not quite that, but close and it was actually a fun read.

There has got to be a name for these specific sort of Davinci Code type mysteries where there’s a historical asect, some hidden thing from long ago turns up and then there’s some sort of dash for the item with a lot of different people crossing and double-crossing in a race across continents to search for it. The item is, always, soemthing that could change the face of history. I like these sorts of books. I liked the Dan Brown books fine also. They’re genre mystery types of books, but they kept the pages turning and gave me something to read while flying and that’s all quite good

In fact, this book was better than most because while I felt like I was following the action pretty well, I still wasn’t sure I knew whodunit until the very last pages and I sort of cared. There are a bunch of likeable and unlikeable characters in the whole thing and they weave into and out of each other’s lives. Nothing got too heavy but the plot was continually interesting.

. What if any door were every door? A compelling story about a world mostly like ours except there is a set of magical books that have special powers for those who have them. The Book of Pain, the Book of Joy, the Book of Memories and so forth. Cassie gets given the Book of Doors and discovers that there is a huge shady underworld of people who want these books and will spare no expense to get them. And of course there is a hidden library. There are some pretty evil evil people and that was a difficult part of this, for me. Just the right amount of sentiment and an interesting story.

This was a good summer reading by the river bank book. That is to say it moves fairly quickly, is not poorly written and is not totally offensive. Other than that, it was sort of “eh.” There is a big Masonic symbol on the book’s cover but unless I’m mistaken, Masonic conspiracy has very little to do with this book. This book also relies on one of my least favorite plot devices which is “crazy person with a gun and bizarre delusions” so that you really have no idea what he’s going to do, so whenever her showed up I’d sort of skim to the end of the section. Most of the rest of the characters were a decent combination of good and bad characteristics and the main protagonist was a decent sort. Good for beach reading, I wouldn’t even probably bother carrying it on a plane.

Second book I’ve read for the kindle! This one was not as interesting. Had a lot of characters I sort of couldn’t get into, no characters I really enjoyed. Interesting story about the history of Superman and the search for an ancient book, a lot of son-father imagery and exposition. Some good cameos by librarians but ultimately not that awesome, though still a great page turner.

I really may need to reconsider whether I hate ALL books with multiple storylines in alternate chapters or just most of them because I loved this book and it does that thing. I think part of it is that usually I find one of the stories so much more compelling than the other one (looking at you Diamond Age) that it’s like reading one bad story and one good one. Not for this book. It’s a great tale with a librarian at the center and the two stories involve past and current generations of circus performers--a traveling circus in the late 1700s and the descendants of a circus mermaid in the current day. Enter a falling down house left to the kids by their weird dad and I was hooked. So good.

I try to read most books that I notice which take place in a library. I got about a fifth of the way into this book and just could not handle the relentless struggle and fear and pain that the main characters (who were also all young people, late teens or even younger in flashbacks) had to endure. I’m sure there is a great plot in there, and I’m not against ups and downs, but this was too much for me.

This book combined two of my interests: packhorse librarians, and the Blue Fugates of Kentucky. Good. Stressful. Lots of rural small mindedness. A little too much of a foreshadowed romance which I felt sort of brought the whole thing into a less-interesting place. Best part was the author’s notes at the end where you can learn about why she chose these particular topics. Of particular note, the cover (which was how I decided to pick up this book) features a white woman’s hands; the main character in this book isn’t really white (which is part of the whole point). I found that one single bit obnoxious, but blame the marketers and not the author.

This is a sequel to the earlier book, with the same general vibe. A LOT of rural poverty and ignorance-informed trauma including both of the daughter’s parents getting ripped away to prison and getting abused in prison for being an interracial couple. Some vocational awe in there too for good measure, about how noble librarianship is and how you should do it even at great cost to yourself because it’s so important. Some good facts about 1950s Kentucky including some information about Moonlight Schools, the Pack Horse Librarians and women serving as fire lookouts. A decent ending, a good read but not my fave.

Not sure if it was the datedness of this book that caused me not to like it or just not my type of book. I won it in a library raffle with a bunch of other book-themed books and some cat food. I plowed through it despite sort of figuring out the angle of what was going on partway through. There’s a lot of publishing inside baseball going on here which is maybe interesting if that’s a world you inhabit but to me it was confusing and hard to keep track of. The book is at its strongest when it goes up to Nova Scotia but there’s such a wealth of description I sort of felt like the whole thing was a way to get the author a tax write-off for a vacation. Not great.

This was too much like a Dick Francis book and not enough like a John Dunning book. Very little old/rare book stuff, too much horse racing stuff. Still a good read, but better for Francis fans than Dunning fans.

Books on the cover! Expected to like this book more, a story about a woman who inherits a bookstore and there are a series of clues left by her deceased relative that give her clues about her life. While I did appreciate the satisfying (if pat) ending, I found a lot of times the characters were doing things that, to me, did not make sense. There’s a lot of drama, a lot of “things seem to be going fine and then one person flips out” interactions. Two-dimensional characters, including the main ones, led me to believe that maybe there was something deeper going on but no, the people were just two-dimensional. Plus there’s a librarian who does offer some good information but is basically shown as a woman reading at her desk. What? There were a lot of odd plot holes (man died and headstone is all there and carved in three days, impossible!) that just took me out of the story. I did read it til the end, but would probably not recommend it to anyone.

Another book series I started over the summer and picked back up again. Peper writes borderline tech bro fiction but this one had a female lead who I basically appreciated. The central conceit is really interesting: what happens when there are tech companies that make tools that are used worldwide which gives them power that eclipses traditional nation states? I liked Peper’s attempts at funding an answer. And didn’t miss out on much because I couldn’t remember the earlier book that this is a sequel to.

I think I am nearing the end of my patience with books that gradually mete out little bits of the story over time. This book is great, really terrific and Hoeg is wonderful. At the same time the combination of unreliable juvenile narrator, the jumping around of the timeline, and the “What is actually going on here?” aspect to the whole thing made this a bit less enjoyable than it might have been. Sometimes I think that this entire book list should be called “Books that were almost perfect except...” because there’s always a thing. In this book it was the above issues but also the ending which had pages and pages which were talking about the importance or relative issues concerning Time. Which were interesting but I was still struggling to pick up the plot line and it felt like a different essay by Hoeg that was tossed in here for reasons unknown. A good book. I read it in one sitting. I don’t really recommend that.

This was an odd YA book that friend gave me. It takes place in the late 18th Century and follows two dirt poor young women as they try to make sense of their world of violence and crime. One is a thief, the other is a whore. One doesn’t know how to read, the other is disdainful of anyone who would suggest that she might want to do somethign other than what she’s doing now. The book is full of bad sex and wanton violence and a lot of people in really destitute circumstances that don’t improve much at all as the book progresses. It was interesting enough to me, as an adult, but it seemed a little heavy to give to a teenager, though I readily admit that I may be out of touch with what teenagers are reading nowadays.

A great story of a generation ship approaching a new planet (after over 5 generations) and all the last minute stuff that occurs. Our plucky hero is in officer school (despite being from a family where that’s not the norm) has to work some shit out to both keep himself and his family from getting in trouble, but also to solve a weird mystery about why the ship isn’t behaving the way it’s supposed to. A lot of deconstruction of the various kinds of class/caste privilege and how they might shake out over a multigenerational voyage.

This was the book that had to tie the trilogy together and it did that. However it brought us back and into the mind of one of the characters who may be the least stable. In the last book we had a strong female lead,but one who had some nagging doubts about her path etc. In this one we meet another strong female lead with some really bad self-doubt and it feels like more of a trope.Like, I get it, but I’d love to see some other model for a protagonist other than one wracked with doubt.Some good comeuppances in this volume and a good overall wrap up.

Turns out I had read a bunch of book by this guy before but his name hadn’t rung a bell. This was an interesting, more classic time travel novel but surprisingly good despite that. An interesting take on the general trope, taking place in 80s PacNW and 60s NYC. Redemption for most of the characters, covers a lot of ground. A lot of complicated morality choices that people have to make during the course of this book which feels like a much longer story, in a good way.

Loved this book. Somehow missed it when it first came out. It’s the story of Oscar Wao a kid from the Dominican Republic whose family moves to New Jersey. But along the way we learn about his family’s cursed past, a lot of history about the DR and more about Oscar’s nerdy interests. Its hard to sum up this book because the different sections look at totally different characters and totally different time periods. The whole idea that there is a curse on the family is one that will be familiar to people who have read One Hundred Years of Solitude and even though this is a very different book, that theme is very familiar. I was really rooting for the Oscar character, the nerd character. You’re supposed to even though you know basically after reading the title that he is, in some way, totally doomed.

Suggested to me by a friend, this dystopian book is a bit like Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear. Suddenly for no particular reason people are being born smarter... a lot smarter. And what happens? The government implements a crackdown to keep these people under control. Which, as you might guess, backfires somewhat. A really good social type of thriller.

This is the first book in a while that I’ve really felt I had to drag myself through. The general storyline is good and French is a great writer but something about how she told this story, how long it went on and how many times the same stuff got retold in the course of figuring out whodunit made it super duper long and sloggish in a way that I am not usually used to from her. The interplay between the two detectives was the strongest part of this (and Scorcher and his sister) and the long long “But WTF was actually going on...?” discussions with the suspect(s) just seemed to go on forever.

I don’t know when I got off the Jeffrey Deaver train but I just decided I didn’t trust him to not have super creepy stories where the principals were tortured. But I do like Lincoln Rhyme, the disabled brilliant forensic scientist so I tried this one out when I saw it on the free shelf of the laundromat. It was worth it. Interesting and not too creepy. Talked about the world of data/information brokers and all the potential ways they could destroy someone’s life. I don’t think I’ll start up again with these books but glad I gave them another go.

Was sort of expecting a Da Vinci Code knock off here and got something that was both better and worse. Better because it was actually written by someone from Italy (in Italian and translated) which gives it a certain verisimilitude. Bad because it was a bit of a slog through religious history (specifically the history of the Shroud of Turin) with one of those dual plot devices which I always find a bit difficult. Bonus props for two strong female leads. Demerits for the huge swath of killings in the last pages of the book. Upshot: I liked it but I’d be a little more discerning about future books by this author.

Kind of a small-town cozy mystery in a small village in France. Lots of eating and drinking and trying to work things out in small-town ways. Enjoyed it enough to try the second one but not so into it I’m going to get all 18 As far as cozies go, it’s really nice to read something that isn’t US or UK and Bruno’s an interesting guy with a good backstory..

I swear I have been reading books other than these, but I just haven’t finished any of them yet. This is another in the series, a bit more close to home. Murder in the village! A villager suspected! Has a very dissatisfying resolution which winds up getting better resolved with the book after this one. On its own this book was a lot of bad mojo without the better feeling of a resolution where you felt the good guys won.

Actually I read this book years ago but I somehow forgot to write it down. I really liked it. Its a story about tech development and (sort of) start up culture or what passed for it in 1984 and the havoc it wreaks on the psyche of the main character.

This may be the first large print book I’ve read. It was the version they had at the library so it’s the one I took home, I enjoy this series a lot. Another great book in this mystery series, this one has a slightly lower body count than the last one. More gratifying relationships between people and a littler less lying and skulking about.

An adorable graphic novel about a young woman who is going into deep debt to go to art school in Georgia and thinks she’s found a loophole and a way to get a scholarship by running a softball team. And things don’t work out like she was expecting, in some cases because she keeps her problems to herself. This is a very queer-and-furry friendly story which is ultimately about friendship with a few side critiques of capitalism and private education.

There is a lot going on in this novel - there’s a health scare at the hospital, Willy gets on pain meds, a woman is killed and tossed in the woods, someone is messing around with a local grocery warehouse. Mayor ties it up nicely as usual and this book has slightly less of the stress-points of some of the past novels where you worry about someone being in trouble or getting hurt (there is a little of that but not much). I enjoyed it, it’s a little dry a times but overall good and what I was expecting.

Probably my favorite so far and not just because it has a library in it. This book is a great weaving of a few stories that all come together nicely. The loose threads from the last book’s mystery, a now-in-the-past terrible thing that has happened to Inspector Gamache in between that book and this one, and a new mystery about a murder in a library. The usual friction between the anglophones and the francophones is at a peak in this book which takes place largely outside of Three Pines.

I love the Cabinet of Curiosities concept but after reading three of the Agent Pendergast series I have concluded that these books are a little too creepy for me. I guess I like my thrillers with a little less horror? This book is an excellent romp through not just the Museum of Natural History but also creepy weird old curio collections and random odd falling down houses of New York. It also has the occasional surgery on living humans which ... too creepy!

I had this suggested by an online simlar-reader and it took me a while to track it down since there was one (1!) hard copy of it in Vermont and the ebook was going to take a while (thanks TOR). Anyhow, I loved it, Having a lead character who is not just female but also Jewish felt like it had been a long time coming in any book not about the Holocaust or Nazis. And this book is about another sort of terrible mess. I love post-apocalyptic fiction but this book has more of the slow burn of climate change (thanks to a meteorite) and less of a sudden “Half of everyone dies” situation. I was hoping for a bit more “this is how we cope” but as it was I mostly enjoyed this look at Dr. York’s attempt to become to first woman in space in a slightly alternate future where Dewey really does defeat Truman.

I know there are a lot more of these and I am already concerned about when I am done with them. Epic space stories along the lines of Becky Chalmers (maybe not quite so evolved) where there is a lot of space stuff but also full realized female characters that aren’t all someone’s love interest. Lots going on in all of them and the second book was better than the first.

This book, a scifi classic, was made up of three short stories. I liked the first one very much and the second two less so. The end is basically suffering porn and I was annoyed at it. People told me I could still get a lot out of this book if I don’t have much knowledge of the bible or Catholicism. I’m not sure they were correct.

I loved this book and also wanted it to be 10-15% more subtle. Like there are some mysteries inside it where if you guess that the guy with the nickname is ALSO the other named character in a different part of the story, you kind of know what may be about to happen. It’s a wonderful story about maps and map libraries and the weird line between the map and the territory. And nostalgia. And just a little bit magical, but only a tiny bit. And based on some true history. It had some twists that I wanted to be a little bit twistier. Tiny gripe, great book

This is the second one I’ve tried in this series. It was fine, not great. There was some implausible science--people swear they’ve seen an apparition which turns out to have been created through entirely normal means, I didn’t buy it. It’s too hot to read about people suffering through intense heat waves.

I had mixed feelings about this one. It’s about Vish Puri, an Indian detective in Delhi by a White British author. I enjoyed the mystery generally and the setting was fascinating. At the same time, I don’t know enough about the culture to know if the author was being true to it in any real way (his bio implies that he has background but then of course it would). While reading it I just had an odd gut feeling about it because of the pronouncements it made about India and the quirky nicknames that the main character gave his employees. I will try the next one. Also it was fully too hot while I was reading it and everyone’s sweaty and borderline miserable in the book so it was a poor time-of-year fit.

I confess to not having known that LabLit (i.e. science-y fiction which is not necessarily scifi) was a thing. I am happy I do now! I got this book via Net Galley and stuck through the really weird cover to a thick book I very much enjoyed. it’s about science but you don’t really have to be a scientist to follow it. I admit there were a few places I glossed over the explanations but you can still follow the plot and the interplay of a lot of interesting and (mostly) likeable characters through a scientific mystery that is sort of layered on top of an interpersonal one.

Unlike some other books I’ve read recently (ahem ARTEMIS) this book has a smart female lead who is also believable in her strengths and weaknesses. She studies a very “unsexy” topic (FLV virus) and has a sort of crummy basement lab along with some other oddballs. Then she thinks she’s on to something. Then she tries to figure it out. This book got me continuing to pick it up to figure out what was going on and I liked the ups and downs of her character and the others. It was evocative without being flowery. Scientific without being either dull or didactic. Also, a minor concern, there is only one dead cat in evidence and it’s dealt with humanely and efficiently so if you’re someone with injured-animal-squeamishness (in which case may I suggest this website this book is still okay to read.

This book seemed shorter than some of Mayor’s others and had a huge cast of characters that was a bit tough to keep up with. This time the gang goes to Maine ostensibly to straighten out a cop killing but they wind up finding out some stuff about some of their own when they are up there. I liked the story, enjoyed the cop work but got a little bogged down in the sheer number of side stories even though this book went by pretty quickly.

Second in the series and I think the first book I’ve read from start to finish as an ebook. Also enjoyable.

Reminiscent of Rabbits and another book I can’t remember that used travel-through-mirrors (Rajaniemi?) as a device. This tale is told mainly through the eyes of an unreliable narrator about what might be the end of the world but might also just be a video game or a social media jape. I enjoyed where this book took me and liked the way the tale was told, gradually revealing what is going on. A lot of themes of parenthood and making your own determinations of how to keep people safe. People who don’t want a plot that has aspects of suicide cults, steer super clear of this one.

I read this book as the culmination of a trilogy and did not like it as much as the others. A series of big all-vs-all wars in a mostly-virtual space meaning anything goes and there are shifting rules/constraints. So there would be a few really large battles without obvious constraints like the rules of physics or what-have-you. While some plot holes from the earlier books do get filled in, ultimately, this series ended on a sour note for me. I missed the storytelling of the earlier books.

This is a book named after a book that is in this book. It describes the world in 1899 where something happened and the area between Moscow and Beijing, and now it’s an odd mystery area that isn’t hospitable to humans. But the Trans-Siberian Express still goes through there, on a fraught crossing with a lot of real and imagined perils. There are a lot of people in the first and third classes as well as a lot of crew and people representing the train company who all have to manage what they find there. I enjoyed the train descriptions and the ultimate conclusion, some of the rest of it felt a little flat.

This is the most recent in Silva’s Israeli-assassin series. The enemies this time are “the Russians” which was better than many other books which seem to have some Islamophobia issues. The story has an interesting main plot about money laundering and Swiss banks with a very bolted-on Jan 6th denouement and dramaz at the end which I did not at all enjoy. Clearly the author working out some stuff and he says as much in the afterword. A good but not great book in this series.

[review pending]

Found this book on a list of YA books that everyone should read and was surprised I’d never seen it. Was SO GOOD, one of those great “growing up” books about young kids who have a fantasy life in the woods, one is from a sort of “normal” family and one is ... not. Snyder really captures that whole thing of being a weird kid and wanting your own world where you can accomplish things and not just fit into the mold someone else made for you. I’m surprised I missed this book when it first came out.

Another story within a story here. I like it now that Gunther has moved on to different relationships. This one has a lot of his family who are characters that I really like. It also tangentially involves the budding internet which was a little weird (I generally dislike it when someone does internet-stuff and do it wrong) but it was mostly in service to the main story and didn’t try to get too technical and fail at it.

I both loved and hated this book. Under the best of circumstances I have a hard time with books where alternating chapters are told by different people. I have an even harder time when one of those narrators is compelling and one is totally not. This book has half of it written by what is basically a sentient spider race. And while there is a great thought experiment here “How would a community of spiders who achieved sentience go about evolving?” I just did not care about it and wanted to get back to the humans on the giant ark who were having some real problems. So, this is a great book and well-written and all the rest, but I sort of hated half of it and loved half of it. The ending is satisfying and I am pretty sure I will not read the sequel.

I was looking for a pallet cleanser after Attack Surface, but I don’t think this was it. A good book about food and the French countryside but also some really horrific violence and questionable assertions about Islam. This book has what I felt was kind of a formula. There’s a local story, a “Let’s bring in the Brigadier” story and then some food and drink and other local traditions brought in. I tend to like the stories that stay a little smaller.

This is another one of those books which has a cover that is a little wacky (and has cats) but the book is less wacky and has fewer cats (I mean they are in there but not as major plot points). I enjoyed this but got a little hung up in it at times. The main characters is a stocky (tho not on the cover) Latina who runs a cargo ship doing stuff that she tries to keep in the legal realm. But then her sister gets kidnapped and she’s forced to do a bunch of things she otherwise doesn’t want to in order to straighten the situation out. And then it gets more complicated. Meanwhile there’s an inter-species romance and a lot of interpersonal stuff going on with her crew and within her family. Complicated!

Each of these books seems to get a little more intense and I keep thinking “There is no way they are going to make it out of THIS” but they seem to. This is another interesting story of planet colonization (one of my faves) with the wrinkle this time that there are competing colonizers: one group of scrubby colonists and one giant megacorporation with a bit of an army. And then things go wrong. We see a few characters from previous books and there’s a whole lot of activity and action. I enjoyed it but it was nailbiting at the end.

This was a confusing book, not so much because of the physics of it (which are complex) but because it seems to not be sure what kind of book it wants to be. We meet characters from the present, past, and distant future, presented out of time, telling a tale of a possible missing or maybe-it-never-existed very important book which might change the course of history. And there were a lot of homages to Golden Age scifi which were neat but felt gratuitous. If you are someone who appreciates that kind of homage, this might be more up your alley.

Felt similarly about this book as I did about Mieville’s other book. I enjoyed it, it was clearly well thought out, but it didn’t have as much forward momentum as I was hoping for (and I finished it despite that). The premise of this book is fascinating and meted out over time. There are two cities, they occupy nearly similar geographic spaces and yet for “reasons” which we don’t totally know, they are different and people in each city assiduously stick to their own city going so far as to “unsee” things in their own cities. This has, as you can imagine, some interesting consequences for how to deal with crime, new faces and other issues.

The copy of this book that I had also had some Q & A with Mieville at the end of the whole thing which I found really useful because I was curious to know why he made some of the choices he made and it was great to get some extra information about this slightly cryptic title.

I loved Anders last book but this one was a little difficult. It starts out basically telling you some stuff about a particular planet, one that is “tidally locked” (i.e. there is one light side and one dark side) that has been colonized by humans a long time ago. And then, in alternating chapters, it reveals more but not all about their story. There are a lot of mystery animals and everything has an ersatz feel to it. The central characters are two female pairs who have complex relationships. Both are fraught an involve a lot of back and forth, but one is broke and one is not. In that regard, I felt like I was reading a YA novel with all the “I love her but I can never see her again!!” dramaz. And then right near the end, a thing happens which wrecked it all for me, and then the story piddled out, clearly moving towards a sequel, which I will not read. Again, I think Anders is a great writer and the problem with this book lies to a large degree with me, but it definitely fizzled out for me.

I was looking for a long book that would hold my attention and this is one. It’s an interesting coming of age story that is all told in retrospective and I misread some earlier part of it and wound up reading some of it “wrong” (there’s a central issue about it being told to a woman whose father figures in the story and I thought it was about the wrong guy) which was amusing but gave it an odd flavor. In any case, this was fun, long and a very female centered book in mostly the good ways. I appreciated a fun coming-of-age non-romance that had a bit of snazz in it. I am glad I read this. Still haven’t read Eat Pray Love and don’t plan to.

Another great book in the Claire DeWitt series, this one with more backstory and nested cases within cases. You learn more about Claire, more about how she operates and more about what makes her both a brilliant detective and a hot mess. In this book she’s dealing with her own grief as well as trying to solve mysteries past and present. It’s a lot and takes its toll on her.

I read another mystery book where the protagonist had a bit of a mental health issue and did not like it, strongly. This one is somehow different, better written, more diverse with a lot more empathy to more of the characters. It’s a weird complicated story, trying to solve a murder or a disappearance which may or may not have happened during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It was a romp, it was well done and I loved it.

There’s really a schism between thriller mystery type books that were written pre super always on Internet, and books written afterwards. This is a nice mystery surrounding some smart scientist types and something that happens with the space progam. There are flashbacks to when they were all in college together, and then the main story takes place in the late fifties when one person wakes up with no memory in a random park men’s room and has to reconstruct his life. Better than most of the summer reading I’ve been plowing through this season.

I read this stupid book again by accident. Didn’t like it as much the second time.

I liked but did not love this book with a few interwoven story lines about a Europe (and world) falling apart and the people trying to get things done, track down the missing guy, and keep their heads above water. Getting crossed and double-crossed. Three female leads who felt somewhat interchangeable and were not well-described. Good plot that wrapped up in a way that was confusing (to me) with somewhat lightweight characters.

One of the better Bruno books of the recent ones. This one was about solving a case of a mystery skull found the woods 30 years ago using fancy facial reconstruction techniques. That intersected with obvious excuses for Bruno to cook fancy dinners and some international geopolitics & a forest fire. No huge tactical shootouts for the most part and there was a lot more of the town involved in this particular book.

For some reason I always forget how much I love Scalzi’s novels. I saw this one at the library and was stoked to have found a newish novel by him that I hadn’t read yet. And it was funny... the general central plot is all blabla trade war and blabla diplomacy. But it’s told with a bunch of interesting and totally relate=able characters so you really want to find out how the whole thing winds up. And I had a little trouble with the ending, not that I didn’t like it but that I sort of feel I maybe didn’t understand it? So now I have to read about the book in addition to reading the book. And hopefully remember to read more Scalzi before I forget how much I like his writing.

The latest installment in my “problematic fave” series about an Israeli assassin who is also a fine art restorer and artist. I like the books in this series that are more about art and less about the Holocaust and this is one of them. Although there is still the “man who purportedly loves his family more than anything still puts himself in harm’s way while being supposedly retired” aspect. A little nod to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist which I was not expecting. All in all a fairly predictable-in-a-good way spy tradecraft book.

This book was on a popular reading table at the school I work at and I noticed it was about libraries. I guess Baldacci has a whole slew of these books and this one felt like being dropped in the middle somewhat. It’s a story about cons and rare books and libraries and Washington DC and killers and spies and double-crossers. It kept me interested while I was reading it but one of the main plot points didn’t wrap up and now I feel like I have to consider reading the sequel. I’m not totally sure I want to go all in with this particular series, though I enjoyed some of the scenes featuring the library and librarians and there are little fun parts for library lovers.

I liked but did not love this Grishamesque novel about a high powetred lawyer who decided to do the right thing. Part of it may be that I don’t know Giminez’s bona fides. That is, I know he used to be a Dallas lawyer working for a firm and is now in solo practice but... I don’t know how much he maybe is actually like the slightly clueless main guy. There were a lot of casual racist tropes tossed about and I don’t know the author well enough to know if he did his research or if he was just lazy. Women are treated fairly poorly and not given a lot of agency. So, it’s a good legal thriller, but doesn’t deliver more than your average formulaic one. A good book if you’ve never read the genre before. Disappointing if you’re already pretty well acquainted.

I should have paid closer attention to the fact that this book was classified as horror since that’s a genre I don’t usually like and this book, though inspired in parts, was no exception. It’s an allegory, hard to explain without spoiling the best part of it (the gradual reveal as you figure out what is going on) but has an unsatisfactory ending and just was weirdly short which I guess was okay for a book I didn’t like much. The author is clearly super talented, this was just the wrong book for me.

Was so excited to have a huge long plane ride to go on and a NEW MAYOR BOOK to read. Enjoyed this book, did not love it. It’s the story of a close companion of Gail Zigman’s getting muredered in a hate-crime fashion and a lot of dogged police work to find the killer. I found it a bit more dull than Mayor’s other books. I was mindful of all the rehashing that is done in every book (so new readers know why Willy has one arm, for example) and I think maybe the tension in this book was supposed to be because maybe we were supposed to feel that Gail did it? But I never did. Not a ton of Vermont scenery, a LOT of “interagency cooperation” porn and what looks like a lot of set up for later books where we learn about Gail’s other political aspirations. Liked it but was not nuts about it.

It’s been a while since I’ve read a really good graphic novel. I thought this one was going to turn out to be a superhero type comic but it totally wasn’t. This book is a collection of the first ten Concrete comics. Concrete is the name of a guy made of concrete. You can read more about his origin story in, I think, the second chapter. He decides that since he’s stuck in a super-strong body with keen eyesight, he’s going to try to travel and help people and do some other stuff. He succeeds partly, accompanied by a pretty lady doctor and a “I’m writing a novel” personal assistant guy who is always meeting chicks.

What makes this book stand apart is the excellent illustration -- I can’t imagine how hard it must be to make a 1200 pound man made of cement into a sympathetic character -- as well as the compelling storylines. All the characters are complex and the illustrations are both very good sort of “classic” comic style while also stretching the form somewhat. I finished this book very very eager to pick up the next one.

This one was a little more gruesome than some of the other ones I have read. Lots of interesting overlap between Catholicism and Judaism particularly surrounding the Holcaust. I always appreciate that Silva puts a coda at the end of his books talking about which historical things he talks about are true and which are not true.

A WWII-era mystery that focuses on a lot of spycraft and London during The Blitz. Decent storylines that all kind of fit together, not too twee, good to see familiar characters again. There’s an awful lot of kind of up and down Maisie and her latest guy as well as a pretty big helping of Patricia Is Dramatic (for good reasons but still) so if you’re looking for more of Maisie-the-Detective, this book doesn’t have as much of that.

A freaky near-future thriller about a clone attempting to solve the murder (she thinks) of her “original.” Goes a lot of interesting places with some neat twists and has a bunch of useful/strong female characters. Seems to be set up for a sequel which is almost too bad because this was a pretty great story (with a decent ending) in and of itself. I’ll definitely pick up book #2.

[review pending]

An amazing arrangement of stories from people who you’ve heard of that all have Vermont as one of the extra characters. So great. Perfect for underblanket winter reading.

A great collection of some of Eisner’s earlier work covering, somewhat autobiographically, the life and times surrounding a tenement block in New York City as the population (and the good times) ebb and flow. There’s a lot of pathos but also a lot of extremely good storytelling and illustration. Very grim, very good.

A pretty interesting Korean SFF novel which envisions a future where there is AI and a fancy space elevator but still the same old corporate fuckery and warring factions vying for power. The space elevator is attached to one island and the history of that island, and who tells it, are somewhat in play during this story. I had a little bit of trouble with keeping the names straight (a me-problem) since there are a few generations of folks in the same family being discussed, but there’s a great hard-boiled “external affairs” guy who narrates a lot of this. Very narration-heavy generally.

An Argentine crime novel about a frustrated architect who is working in a dead end job with a few other co-workers. Over the course of the novel you realize they are bound together by a crime. I had thought the fact that this was a “crime novel” meant it was a mystery/cop story and this is not that. Ultimately I disliked the main character and the way he was objectifying the women around him. You’re supposed to, but it still didn’t work for me. This book was also read in translation and I kept feeling that some of the verbal tics of the characters were supposed to be more meaningful but I wasn’t sure how.

This was a sequel to a book I liked decently but this one had a lot less charm and a lot more “This is how NFTs and blockchain are going to save civilization as we know it” (I paraphrase) type of discourse. There was also a lot of that specific “These people are tightly disciplined, there can be no mistakes!” rhetoric coupled with a hothead character who is ungovernable. Well written but rambley and ultimately not for me.

Picked this up on a library booksale cart. I’ve long been an admirer of Ellis’s essays but hadn’t read any of his novels. I figured from the title and description this was going to have weird drug stuff in it and... that’s not really it. It’s a fun hard boiled detective story set in more or less current times that has a lot of ancillary “weird shit” happening. Some of that is drug use, some of it is odd fetish stuff, some of it is weird government stuff. A lot of it would have, probably, seemed more weird in 2008 than it does in 2017 with the ubiquity of weirdness thanks to always-on internet and these weird times we find ourselves in. Not that this detracts from the depth of the story. This is a great short lively read and I look forward to picking up more of Ellis’s stuff.

I liked this book okay when I read it, but compared to Reichs' other books it’s not that great. The protagonist is a forensic anthropologist who makes a discovery about some old old bones in Israel. Then the rest of the book goes off on the “Is this Jesus?” angle. Temperance Brennan annoys me. She’s too concerned with her looks and her relationship and for all of her supposed smarts dealing with dead bodies, her attention to criminal procedure and details is always overshadowed by whatever outfreakage she is dealing with. At the outset of this book, Reichs outlines a list of facts -- actual anthropological information about recent digs and discoveries in Israel and Palestine -- which is the basis for this book. It becomes clear at some point that while the story will have titillating aspects as fas as the “Is this Jesus?” direction goes, ultimately the answer would have to be “No.” because she’d wind up alienating all of her Christian readership potentially. For an author whose books rank in the triple and quadruple digits on Amazon.com, this is a point that probably matters. The ending was unsatisfying and way too pat, though I’m not honestly sure what I was expecting.

I heard people discussing this author when I was working at the library and took this book home on the strength of their enthusiasm. It’s basically a Vera-like character. It’s so close, in fact, that I had to check to make sure Griffiths didn’t write those. This woman is an archaeologist not a cop and it’s the EAST of England and not the North but I liked it enough to probably try the second one. There are some dead children in this book which I should point out just in case people find that sort of topic to upsetting. Some interesting archaeology history and not too gory or gruesome.

The last Connie Willis book I read (Passage) was all about missed, vague, or unreliable communication. This one is all about having too much communication, per the title, and had a hectic feel to parts of it which really got the point across but also sometimes made it a bit tough to read. For those who fund the introductory chapter a little difficult (detailing a woman trying to deal with too many text messages, phone calls, and other interruptions) know that it smooths out at least somewhat and turns into a really fascinating story about how we talk to one another and know about each other.

I am inherently suspicious of an author who kills the protagonist’s dog. Sorry for the spoiler, but it’s something you should know about this installment of the Bruno books. In this case, there’s a lot more diplomacy than food talk, and you learn a little (not much) about the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), or Basque separatist group which started out as an armed militia and wound up being disbanded some time after this book was written. Had a bit of a “ripped from headlines” feel. Still good but, man, killing the dog is not cool.

An interesting premise about a galaxy-wide war between “modified humans” (neural nets, DNA mods &c) and what’s become a cult of non-modded humans who want to destroy anyone with mods. The beginning of this book was a few unlinked story lines that were much more interesting once you figured out how they all fit together. Overall there’s a good story arc, a bit slow to get going but with a “pink mist” level of violence that probably wouldn’t lead me to pick up a sequel.

I’ve now gotten the feeling that I know how this series will go. There are the core group of people in the small town and then additional people who you didn’t know were in the town who show up to be part of the mystery/story. I liked this book about a seance gone bad but I found it weird to see new people who I hadn’t really known from before who did things like ran stores and etc. Good story and interesting characters with the usual amount of twists and turns.

I was a big fan of Raybourn’s other mystery series and thought I’d like this one as well. I enjoyed the first book just fine but don’t think I’ll be picking up the second one (though I’d probably like it just fine if I read it). This book has a plucky heroine who is raised and orphan by her two aunts and turns out to have a very interesting backstory. Along the way she befriends the dark swarthy mystery man and... I just felt it was a bit too much like the Lady Jane Grey series. Which, again, I liked, but I felt the forumla sort of heavy in this and I think I’m back to sci fi for a bit.

Found this book in a free pile I think? It is added to the list of “books I picked up that I read on planes that also themselves have plane crashes in them” Basically this book is about a terrorist who is effective at using computers to advance his terrorism. It was also written before a lot of us were really using the graphical web so much and so a lot of it winds up being about virtual reality. That said, as a book with a lot of VR in it, this was not bad. The bad guy is a little more sadistic than I usually enjoy reading about [some nasty torture scenes] but otherwise for a book about computers, I did not find it totally implausible or insuting of my intelligence.

Do not read this book withotu knowing that it is the first half of a two-part novel. That said, i really enjoyed this. I was down with a headcold and read it all in one big weekend day/night. I like getting to read books about technology that have plausible aspects to them, even if parts of them are sci-fi-ish. This book about a dystopic future where a supergenius game manufacturer has set the wheels in motion for an odd world domination scheme. You have to read it to get it, but I enjoyed it, right up until the ending which was no ending at all because even after 650+ plages I was aonly halfway through. Looking forward to seeing how it all wraps up.

The only thing I did not like about this collection of short stories is that I’m a pretty serious an of Millhauser already so I had already read a few of these stories when they were originally published. Thus the book went by too fast and I was left at the end of it sooner than I would hav eliked. Millhauster is an amazing master of several types of stories -- the meticulous explanatory stories, the teen coming-of-age Bradbury-esque stories, the almost-normal-but-not-quite stories -- and it’s always a joy to see what he comes up with. Starting a story of his I’m always wondering just how he’s going to manage to turn the idea on its head just a little bit and I’m always surprised and delighted. Fun book, wish it had been longer.

I would be stopping reading the Dobbs novels at this point except that I have been told they improve. This book is a radical departure from the previous books in a few notable ways 1. many of the major plot points happen before the book (the main character has many HUGE life events that happen before the novel takes place, this is weird 2. Maisie is sort of a jerk to the people who care about her. This wraps up by the end but it’s weird seeing the character be a jerk 3. there is a lot of expository “Let me tell you what I think happened...” sort of lazy writing that I’m not used to in the other books. So, not terrible but not great either. I’ll check out the next one and see if it improves.

First book I’ve ever read on a kindle! I’ve liked this series since I started it and it’s been even more interesting since I’ve been watching Downton Abbey. A lot of cultural parallels and, in this book a pretty straightforward similarity where a woman dies in childbirth and her daughter is given the name of the recently departed mother. Maybe that sort of thing was a regular occurrence but for me to see it happening twice in a week because of being involved with these two series, I was surprised. I also like these books now that the title character Lady Jane is married to the guy she was all intrigued by in the first three books. I like some smoldering romance as much as the next person but not for books and books. There are a lot of interesting discussions and explorations of what it means to be in a partnership or in a marriage that come up that make better reading than smoky looks across stuffy drawing rooms. Liked this book, will read future ones.

Fascinating premise--what if there was a way to determine exactly when you would die and companies competed to sell this information to you--kind of ruined with an unlikable protagonist and a supernatural backdrop that never entirely cohered. I really liked these stories when they were about managing a world in which you could know your death date. I liked the supernaturallish stuff a lot less so the ending was just a swamp of “What the heck is going on?” Promising but didn’t make it work.

Another in the Lady Julia series. Slightly less momentum since her and the mysterious man are now man and wife, solving crimes together, but still a good way to pass a weekend reading.

So weirdly complex and good! I rarely read thrillers that don’t feel somehow like they’re specifically making up a scenario to be as stressful as possible. This odd science-y tale about a guy who sort of figures out how to move around in time--or does he?--scratched an itch for a good “What the heck is happening here?” story that wasn’t also coy or frustrating. Sort of like the way watching Orphan Black took you along with it, giving you enough information to remain involved but not so much that you got bored. Do not want to give a lot away here but I really enjoyed the two nights I read this.

Got this book for a dime at the Des Moines public library booksale. Didn’t have high hopes for it but it turned out to be quite a gripping read. Sort of a “who done it when you can’t remember what happened” story, this tale of a woman whose fiancee leaves her to marry another woman. The finacee is then found brutally murdered [along with the other woman] and the spurned woman attempts suicide, or does she? I thought it was going to be a shlocky sex-crime filled book but okay for the airplane and it wound up being a pretty inteersting twisting and turning crime novel.

Another one of these books down as I plow through the Joe Gunther series. I enjoyed it but I found it somewhat complex. I appreciate that Mayor can take a topic like “Asian gangs in Vermont” and not turn it into a bunch of racial cheap shots (by any of his characters for the most part, not just the main ones) but it was still tough to keep track of a zillion characters with new and unfamiliar names. This book also had very little of the interpersonal Gail/Joe story that I tend to like. So, still enjoyed this and Mayor’s writing is top notch but this was probably my least favorite one so far and hardest to get into and stay into.

Got this book by accident while trying to get the other book about the molasses flood (don’t ask) and it was actually a really good thriller

The second installment of this series, a bit more lively than the last one. Good food, good wine, a vexing mystery on top of a mystery and a quaint old-fashionedness to the storytelling even though the setting is more or less modern times.

[review pending]

This was a re-telling of a classic Breton folktale and, like many folktales, is grim in a LOT of spots. If you like Frozen-style stories of sisters who don’t quite get along, this story from the guy who brought you Feed, should be up your alley. The illustrations by Jo Rioux were completely gorgeous. A little grim and dark for me as a story.

It’s a joke that the rabbi almost-resigns in each book. But now he finally does, seemingly in a good way. As this series progresses the plots get kind of complex with what can feel like too many characters and this one is definitely like that, but I enjoyed this penultimate one.

This was a decent but unexceptional book about a guy who leaves his job to be a day trader when his wife who is about to divorce him gets killed. It’s sort of ploddingly written but the plot is compelling and complex and not so deep that it won’t be good for airplane travel.

A Quaker Spacer! This was an interesting book that rambled in sometimes good and sometimes less good ways. The characters are gentle and thoughtful, possibly too gentle. The book meanders. First we’re leaving earth, then we’re on a colony ship, and then we’re around a planet we might move to. And there’s a lot of thinking and you never stay with one character’s viewpoint (or even timeline) for very long. I liked some viewpoints more than others and was more interested in what was going on at some points than others. The writing is very good, but there’s almost no plot, even though some pretty monumentous things happen.

Working my way through a bunch of Meltzer books on my Kindle. This one was maybe my least favorite. Gory and, as an Amazon reviewer put it, somewhat contrived. Read it to the end, there are some likable characters but neither of the main characters are them.

I got this thinking it would be leaning more sci-fi and less fantasy and that was incorrect. This was an interesting, but ultimately not-for-me story about tracking down a killer in a world where many people are Usuals, but some people are witches. There’s some wry humor and a lot of “Someone with wonky powers learns to use them better” stuff but ultimately too many injuries and too gritty for me.

I’ve read all of Dunning’s bookseller books and enjoyed them a lot. I didn’t really know he’d written any other kinds. This book showed up on the FREE table at my local community college and even though the cover seemed sort of blah, I recognized the name and picked it up. Dunning claims he wrote this book in one sitting--well not exactly but that the entire plot came to him at once. This may explain why it’s such a simple read. It has its own momentum, a cast of characters that you can understand, and a slightly edgy mystery involving the FBI, the Amish and some 60s revolutionaries now decades older. Worth picking up to see what else Dunning can do.

This book put a stop into my “sci fi’s greatest recent hits” reading. I have moved on from Inspector Bruno to Commissario Guido, and from the Perigord (in France) to Venice. So far so good, this was an entertaining mystery with a lot of Italian ambiance. You like the new policeman. You learn some things. You want to know more about what is going on. I’ll keep on with this series.

I enjoyed this second installment of the Marlow Murder Club books, it feels very much like the Richard Osman books only not quite as funny. It’s the same three friends who we mostly have gotten to know by now, so no major reveals in that arena. This one had a bit of a lengthy wrap-up that was all-tell-no-show which is never my fave, but I still enjoy the series and the quirky assortment of characters.

Another of the Commissario Guido books which was enjoyable. Where the Bruno Chief of Police books are about food and small town life, these are more about the interrelationship of various parts of Italy, and a lot of interpersonal relationship stuff. This story in particular takes us into the American military base which is nearby, and a crime that some people want to solve and others clearly do not. Good reading.

Happy to see the back of this trilogy which was mostly Holocaust-based, this one being the most Holocaust-y of all. Good books, great series but I was getting worn down by spending a lot of time reliving the terrible atrocities that happened around WWII.

No idea why I couldn’t finish this but it just never got me going. Sort of historical fiction taking place in the Marconi era with a bunch of characters that I guess, from the footnotes, are from other novels. Between the flowery prose, the female character who had a muse that I was pretty sure was imaginary and the footnotes extolling me to read other books by the same author, I could not do anything with this book and evetually put it down.

This is one hell of a great first novel. A generation ship full of mainly women--with some NB folks and male uterus-havers, everyone on board needs to be capable of birthing a child--embark on a one-way trip to a distant planet and... something goes wrong. It’s a familiar story but the characters and backstory about the intense competition to even get to GO on this trip, are really engaging and enthralling. There are some aspects of family/upbringing, some nice descriptions of birds and a little bit of backwards/forwards in terms of the narrative, but not so much that it was distracting or difficult to follow.

Silva seems to write one book that is two books long and then splits them into separate books. This is the second part of the last book, basically going back to get the bad guy who escaped in the previous book. And... I am starting to feel the strong pull of the formula that Silva uses. A big failed project that should have worked except for that one thing and then the assassin goes in and shoots the guy in the head. Weirdly unsatisfying but I keep reading them.

Not a sequel--Cipri has said they are happy to have that be the dominion of fan ficcers--but within the same dystopian interdimensional Ikea-ish universe as Finna. This is a short fun read about one person discovering things about himself and his environment and a LOT about work/life balance. It’s a weird romp and a masterfully woven little story.

I wound up having this book in my hands because my friend found it at an ocean cabin and we realized it had been checked out of the Providence Public Library and never returned. So I grabbed it, determined to repatriate it, and while I had it I read it. It was great. A small collection of very bleak stories about gender and salvation and poverty taking place in the rural south. Poignant and raw without being overly shocking or ... I don’t know, in your face? I have a hard time with stories that are filled with graphic sex and violence and while these stories are often about such things, they are rarely spelling it all our for you, preferring instead to imply what others might write down. I like that choice and I loved this book of stories, but I’m still returning it to the library.

I’d found some of Suarez’s earlier books a little too edgy for me, but this one was in a sweet spot. It could get a little wonky talking about the mechanics and economics of asteroid-mining, but the result is a straightforward near-future story that doesn’t seem that dystopian because it seems more plausible (even though, sure, also dystopian). It looks at the shiny-shiny but also the gritty underbelly of what goes into sending people to go be asteroid miners in a future that is more or less like where we are now (i.e. not a lot of huge tech advancements make this possible). Mostly works, occasionally doesn’t.

This was a terrific palate cleanser after The Librarianist. Written by someone who actually knows what goes on in a rare books department of a university library, it’s a story about missing books but ultimately about power and money and what “progress” looks like. Female protagonist, a lot of complicated characters, takes place in Canada but could be at nearly any large Western university. There’s a mystery at the center of it and a bunch of terrible people but also some redeeming ones.

This was the most-recommended series written by a person of color when I asked about this on my mailing list. I read and enjoyed the first book and will be reading more of them. This is a book written in the 90s about California in the 40s. There’s a lot of grit and casual (and not-so-casual) racism so some of it is tough to read but the plotlines are interesting and I was engrossed all the way through.

I’ve had this book suggested to me for a long time now and finally read it. It’s the first in a series. This one is about a guy who gets laid off from his job and had to scramble to find money, gets wrapped up with some unsavory white men (he’s a black man, WWII vet) and a woman who is nothing but trouble. They’re in LA, but a lot of his friends are from the South and many people move back and forth between locales. A good story, a little violent and a little tough to read just because many of the characters are variants of certain kinds of archetypes and they’re not all nice people. I’ll pick up the next one.

I was a little skeptical when the criminal justice teacher at the school I work at told me I’d like this. It was forensic criminology fiction which I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy. The author’s name, Jefferson Bass, is a pseudoynm that is made up of parts of the names of the two authors Bill Bass, the guy who created The Body Farm in Tennessee and Jon Jefferson a noted writer. They manage to create fiction that is at the same time based on real events and yet not seemingly sensationalized. This story combined a mysterious possible death-by-burning case and a ripped from the headlines mortuary that has been mass burying bodies instead of cremating them (sound familiar). The characters are likeable and the stories are compelling and a little less over the top than some of the other forensic type mysteries available today. I enjoyed this.

Maybe not my favorite of these. I enjoyed it but it was a little high on tawdry-drama (naked lady found dead in a boat floating down the river, maybe something satanic going on) and low on woods-and-food stories, but there was a lot of interesting cave discussion.

Scalzi is also a legend but one of the things I like about him is that his books are predictably up my street and enjoyable. This was a book with a simple premise: murdered people (unlike people who die in other ways) somehow disappear and wake up alive and naked in their beds. This creates an entire industry for murderers in situations where someone might die in another way. Those people being murdered means that they don’t die. Some neat wrinkles. Short, and more fun than a book about murder should be.

Another Mayor book! I think I am slowing down a little bit on these. I liked this one, but like the Asian gang one, there was too much non-Vermont content that was a little confusing. Also I am finally getting to the point where Gunther is always saying “Such a sleepy little town” and I am like “Dude you are getting shot at and people are getting killed around you every year nowadays!” This did have some of that interesting interagency cooporation stuff going on which I enjoyed, but a little confusing to stay on top of, though again a bunch of neat location stuff.

If you’d like to read a novel about a human poet writing important poetry with a poetry-writing AI, this is probably a great novel to read. I had mixed feelings about it--it was extremely well written and the human poet was a great character with a story that was both quirky and felt real--because I just find “An AI wrote this!” aspects of our real world neither interesting nor cool (yet). There’s a sense, in this story, of this poem, the one which is the center of this novel, being incredibly momentous in some way and yet, the final reveal seemed a weird after-effect and not really a big deal. It was weird. Good but weird. I’ll search out the author’s other books.

A graphic novel about grappling with the early days of Covid, police brutality, and navigating complicated relationships. Originally released as a series of panels on Instagram and there’s a big afterword talking about its reception there. Not quite my jam, really uneven and I didn’t like the illustration style, but I hope it finds its audience.

A 2012 book about a worldwide plague which kills nearly everyone, told from the perspective of a survivor, who has a Cessna. He has a little life carved out for himself, and his dog, and another random guy who lives near him. It’s a very “day in the life,” except occasionally when the marauders come. And then one day he goes traveling, and comes back. A surprisingly gentle story, well told.

Still on the gross side, these books are nonetheless fun to read. This one is about the underground system of kidnapping young girls and getting them into the hands of truly awful people. Super yikky but the plot is interesting and the lead character (away from her partner this time) gets to do a lot f what she does best. An ending that confused me until I read the next book.

After getting the last Gross book y accident, I got this one on purpose. Another thriller, not quite as great as the last one and with a seemingly higher body count of close friends who wind up dead but still a fast-paced good read.

Picked this up right after the previous book because I liked the way this guy’s mind worked. This book reminded me more of Stephen Millhauster, a lot of tiny details that make up one whole weird story. I didn’t really love what happened to the women in this book (or the last one, come to think of it) but enjoyed the weird city with the weird rich guy and the sort of low affect kid who was trying to figure it all out.

I’ve enjoyed this series but absolutely can’t recommend this book with its super problematic treatment of sex work and male transvestite sex workers in particular. The mystery hinges around a man found dead, dressed as a sex worker. While it’s supposedly using people’s dismissive treatment of them to highlight that treating sex workers this way is wrong, there’s enough causal crappy speech about sex work that I found it overall pretty offensive. Finished it but suggest you don’t start it.

A neat take on a post-contact future where translators have to be employed to help the aliens communicate with people from Earth, on Earth. And translating makes them woozy. And it’s a real JOB job. When a crime is committed against one of the people from another planet, this set up gets complicated fast. I feel like the wor5ld that Robson built is believable and yet somewhat foreign. This book is ambitious but I think it delivers on what it’s trying to do.

A YA graphic novel about two sisters who fence, and whose dad has died, and who are dealing with some complicated feelings that result in them having a fencing duel. A sweet story and I learned a lot about fencing. Well told, well-illustrated, and a lot fun to read.

This book was on my dad’s nightstand during my childhood seemingly forever. I picked it up when I was too young to get it and hated it: confusing names, nothing happens in the first 1/5, snoresville. Finally picked it up again at the suggestion of a friend of mine and didn’t hate it, even liked parts of it. It was a little long and dragged in parts but I appreciated the “palace intrigue” quality of it and a lot of the worldbuilding. Wished for more female characters because even though there was a lot of gender diversity, it felt like a very masculine book. Not going to read the other seventeen books (possibly a few, certainly not all), but might now go watch the movie.

I read Dune earlier this year and was looking forward to seeing a graphic novel treatment of it, but I gotta be honest, I wasn’t wild about this. There’s a lot jammed in there & I think I’d have had trouble following it if I hadn’t just finished the book. For a desert planet, there were a lot of blues and greens in the illustrations and the style just wasn’t to my liking. I found the book a lot more evocative and the graphic novel a lot more kind of standard comic book fare with really busty improbably built women and lots of brooding and.or evil dudes.

This is one of those books I don’t know how it made it on to my Kindle but it was just there on my laptop. It’s a “mission to mars” type of book, as written by the ship’s psychologist. It’s really interesting, though not exactly lively. It wasn’t until I had suggested it to another friend that I realized the book was nearly as old as I am! It’s a great mix of big ideas about travel and space and the day to day grind of being on a hostile and even somewhat foreign planet with the unknowns and sudden shifts of fate. Very much enjoyed it.

Loved and did not love this book which has two timelines, one from the past and one from almost-now. This is a story that is fiction but it’s clearly getting a LOT of the information in it from real-life things. A group of radicals in the 60s bombs a house where someone is killed and they go underground. That is one story. The two people who went underground (you figure out later this is who they are) are now living near each other, unbeknownst to them, in Seattle in the 90s. Which was weird for me because *I* was in Seattle in the 90s and so much of this both rang true and also didn’t feel like fiction. I made the mistake of reading others' reviews before writing my own and I have to agree that there was a lot to like about this book but keeping the big reveal (what they actually DID back in the 60s) until the last few pages felt a little constructed. I wanted to know more, sooner, I felt a lot of the people had a lack of agency and vagued their way into things. I think this was good and I’d recommend it to people but I might also warn them about some of it.

I got a little bogged down in this book. I was really excited that there was another book by Peter Watts that I hadn’t read after finishing two of his others from the Rifter series and really enjoying them. However this book was a lot more like Blindsight which I found a little dense and very thinky in a good way but not quite what I like for nighttime pleasure reading. That is, Watts discusses a lot of really interesting things about consciousness and religion but a lot of it wound up being a little deep for me, when I was expecting something that was a little more like first contact stories. Great book, but I went into it expecting something different.

If you would like to read a dramatized story about some editor feuds on a very Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia (I did!) then this book is for you. There’s a teen admin, a Chinese American paid editor, a Uyghur young man, a journalist trying to live up to her dad’s legacy, and a social justice-motivated librarian. Oh and a crank who tried to take it all down, motivated by his own personal backstory. And a billionaire (of course) and the well-meaning doofus who set the whole thing up. You might know the author, he’s a journalist who has written a newsletter about Wikipedia stuff for a while. He sent this to me after asking me to read a sample chapter a while ago. The final product was even better than the chapter. I’m not sure how this book would read to people who aren’t fairly deep-in Wikipedia culture nerds, but I enjoyed it a lot.

I picked this up in an airport because I was desparate not to have nothing to read on the plane and this wasn’t a self-help book. The blurb said it was a “feminist version of the DaVinci code” or something and I was not totally psyched about that but it turned out to be a fun airplane read. It sort of IS like the Dan Brown books -- it’s a historical romp with a big-scale mystery driving the action - but most of the main characters are women. And they’re not women in some like super-feminist matriarchy, they’re just female characters. There are a lot of male characters too, they’re just not primary. And it’s about chess but instead of it being a totally cerebral novel with a bunch of chess in-jokes, the chess in this book is mostly understandable to someone who has at least played the game once or twice. As a random airport book this was a pleasant surprise. I’ll probably pick up Neville’s next book when I see it.

Eight Perfect Murders. A great twisty “wtf is going on here?” mystery. The author is same age as me and clearly grew up where I did, so it had nostalgia twist as well. A mystery book about mystery books, set mainly in Boston. If you haven’t read all the mystery books that are on “the list” you may find that some of them are spoiled for you. I don’t think I’d read a single one but I enjoyed that a lot of this mystery thriller took place in a bookstore. Did not go where I was expecting which is always a joy.

A fever dream of an art project + novel about an alternative history of LA where dirigibles roamed the skies after climate disasters that I never quite got a handle on, but mostly enjoyed being along for the ride. Great art accompanies this novel which is told as a bunch of overlapping vignettes, not so great on my ancient B&W Kindle.

A book with one central conceit: an anthropologist goes back to check on an older Earth colony on another planet. His tools and knowledge make them think he’s a wizard. They can’t communicate well enough to clear it up. They have to solve some problems. It’s a really well-done story. Some humor, a great tale, not too long.

Eleanor is weird and you don’t know why. She has a job and an apartment and a life but just barely. She has a sense of humor. This book follows her as she gets a little less weird and learns things about the world. I really enjoyed the narrator’s voice in this one, appreciated some of her routine-based rigidity and her matter of fact way of talking about a lot of it. Didn’t much care for the big reveal at the end and was super curious about the author’s personal backstory. Very good for a book I’d just randomly picked off of the library shelves.

this was an amazingly poignant book about a boy who grows up under somewhat impoverished circumstances in that UK carries this with him his whole life, through a trip to the US and back again to the UK. It’s a very provocative and interesting set of stories within stories. Beautiful and sad.

Another good book in the series. This one deals with a lot of interesting issues of poverty as well as the encroaching awfulness about what is up with the Nazis. The main character seems to be learning some things about herself and even though some of her relationship stuff seems like it may be getting a little wrapped up in a too-pat fashion, I enjoyed this book more than the one which preceded it.

Hey my landlady illustrated this book, and my other (deceased) landlady wrote it. NY Review reissued a few of their books including this and the Pushcart War and sent me a copy, I am not sure why. It was a five minute read, but a very enjoyable short tale of resistance and compromise. Lovely reprint.

Another random “This looks like it will be a fun read on the bus” sort of popular novel and indeed it was. A political thriller with a lot of crossing and double-crossing was occasionally hard to follow but a gripping read about a deep cover CIA operative and his last (or second to last) mission.

[review pending]

Very much enjoyed this first novel by Stephen Carter which has been on my “to read” list for years. A great thriller about upper class Black legal society and the disruption sown when the father of the protagonist dies in what may be a mysterious way. The narrator, while reliable, is standoffish in a way that makes him interesting to read the perspective of and I liked the various settings (DC, Martha’s Vineyard, suburban whereveritwas) that populate the novel.

A really interesting mood piece about a woman with a difficult past and one (difficult) best friend who winds up married to a probably-gay man and living a nearly self-sufficient life in the Galapagos in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s got odd pacing but is good reading. The afterword which talks about how the author came up with the idea is, itself, fascinating.

A book about a killer virus (that kills only men, but 90% of them) that was written before COVID but published during the pandemic, and before there was a vaccine. A really interesting look at the various ways this scenario could play out ranging from how dating apps have to adapt to what infrastructure looks like now. Women finally get bulletproof vests that fit them. Medicine works better for them. There is a lot going on and a lot of the people you know die, but this story, told in chapters from various women’s perspectives, doesn’t dwell on the horror aspects of all of it, though it’s not just a flat infrastructure examination either.

Another one of those books taking place in a near future where people with genetic modifications and people without them fail to get along. In this case there was an all out war, called The Stupid War that is in the country’s near past. Now something else is going on and there’s a group of plucky teens who tries to figure it out. This is a weirder-than-usual spin on that trope, nearly YA in its approach. Readable and somewhat strange.

Crowley has written one of my favorite books and I was hoping there would be some of the same flavor to this earlier book of his. Instead, I found it confusing as if I were failing to grasp subtle metaphor after subtle metaphor and the whole book never really cohered for me.

I like the Allon books when they talk more about art and less about Nazis. This one has some of both but I basically enjoyed it though it slipped a bit too much into some sadistic violence than I am usually ok with.

These get harder and harder to differentiate. I first got introduced to Silva via The English Spy (coming up, same orange cover) and so I got confused. This is a more classic Silva novel. An interesting disappearance, some intrigue. a few campaigns to sort things out, but not a lot of political blabla and not a lot of sketchy torture stuff. I enjoyed seeing where this one went.

Pulled this off right off of the “new” shelf at my library. It was decent, totally okay, but it’s one of those stories where there’s this incredibly hard-to-kill person and they move heaven and earth to try to kill them and it’s all crazy and there’s a huge build up and then something goes wrong and the hard-to-kill guy stays alive and the denoument is that he winds up being killed sometime later. I found the characters a little hard to follow and there was a lot of spycraft stuff that was not to my tastes. It’s easy to see why this guy is a popular writer and it’s possible I just need to start earlier in the series than the total end but it just didn’t grab me though it was fine reading for a train trip.