[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.

This one is a re-read because it’s the first one of the series I read and now I’ve caught up to it when starting from the beginning. I was pretty sure I didn’t remember most of it and I was right. Still one of the better ones of the series, I think.

This was an Ellen Raskin type puzzle book which is clearly written by someone in love with libraries. Super fun with a bunch of interesting characters and some fun puzzles to figure out.

I liked Hirahara’s last book with this cast, the first in a series, but this one was more uneven. You could see how the plot outline was set up, and then it was filled in irregularly. Some parts of the story felt fleshed out and others felt unfinished. I appreciated the Hawaiian setting and really diverse cast and discussion of the some of the cultural issues. Still got hung up on what felt like confusing pidgin and I’m really not sure if it’s me or the author who has it somewhat wrong.

I finished this book and went to read more about Trachimbrod (actually Trochimbrod) the location in the story where an entire town of Jews is destroyed and the town effectively vanishes from the earth. While the book is non-fiction and has a lot of fun and less-fun literary affectations, it’s based on a real place. When I went to read more, I learned that the movie made of the book was 1) based on a screenplay written by a guy I went to college with, and 2) featured a soundtrack by Gogol Bordello who was also featured in a movie I just finished watching: Wristcutters.

None of this has much to do with the book which I fell into and got stuck in. The recurring theme of memory and how for Jews their memories are like a sixth sense, felt as well as simply experienced. This particular story is two main stories. The protagonist, known alternately as “The Hero” and Jonathan Safran Foer, goes back to figure out what happened to the town where his grandfather lived. There is also the parallel story of the history of this same town, told in a rather fantastical way. I usually dislike books with two concurrent stories because I tent to like one more and flip ahead in the slower story to get back to the interesting one, but in this book both stories are equally captivating.

I have a really difficult time with genre fiction, trying to figure out if I’ve read a particular book by an author before. Picked up this book at a library book sale and it looks like I’ve never read another book by Kellerman and I’m wondering if that’s even possible. It would explain why I somehow didn’t recognize any of the characters. This book was fine. It was an interesting San Fran mystery. The mystery part was good enough, but it concerned eco-terrorism which is a subject that I know a little bit about. And that part was less interesting to me. I don’t know if Kellerman knows a lot about the subject and was trying to simplify it for his readers, or if he’s just not that well informed but it seemed like he had a few generalized opinions about eco-terrorism, dug up a few facts and then created a few two-dimensional characters that had those facts as major personality traits. It was fine, but seemed overly simple to me, and a little too pat as a way to wrap up the whole story line. In any case, an okay book.

This was a great long book for a bus ride and a vacation. This sotory is a YA novel about a weird young man who, from an early age, is nurtured into becoming an evil genius. He goes to evil genius school for a while, he meets a lot of wacky characters. He makes friends (sort of) and tries to muddle things out with a slowly expanding intellect. It’s a fun read with interesting characters and and plot that will mostly keep you entertained.

SO GOOD. I really enjoy Chiang’s forays into “What if things were almost the same but a little different, how would we be humans?” Surprisingly (to me) the title story was one of my least favorite of the bunch. The one that stuck with me the most was about people who create virtual pets with AI that live in a virtual world, and how they deal with that worl’d changing and shifting, and their pets' increasing consciousness. Favorite part was that there’s a little part in the end where Chiang explains what inspired him to write that story, or something else about it. Some of these ideas are, for lack of a better word, weird, and so it was really interesting to hear how he got from these odd ideas to these full-fledged stories.

A “back on my bullshit” kind of book, a space thriller about a luxury hotel on a space station and things that go terribly wrong. Mainly taking place during a very tense 24 hours. I really liked the ideas in it. However, a lot of the explication was predicated on the idea of you understanding the layout of this place. Despite the book’s map, it never really clicked for me so it was confusing and also stressful. The narrative always felt macho despite the female lead, a lot of gratuitous violence that seemed less and less explicable as the book went on. Maybe a good book for someone else?

I am sad to be at the end of these they were all fun and this one tied up the current set of novellas with a satisfying “for now” ending.

this book was so much fun. It’s kind of a straightforward time travel book, but with a couple twists that will keep people interested. This author is really good at creating very clever lengthy plots that go back and forth a number of different ways so that you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen next. I’ve read some of his other books and they’re all very fast-paced and have a lot of interesting back-and-forth where the back-and-forth could be any number of different things. In this case it’s a guy who winds up being able to take a pill and go back in time to when he was really little and is sort of a ghost but not really. Hard to explain but worth reading.

Usually I don’t love books that have an extensive virtual world component, but I had heard good things about this one and like this author and was not disappointed. Often my issue is that once you get into the realm of fantasy or non-real worlds things can just turn into “Well there are no more rules” which can sometimes make for interesting stories but not ones I tend to like. This book has mostly female characters and a story about what you do when someone gets “stuck” in a virtual world, and about the highly trained specialists, one in particular, who go get them. It was an interesting take on the topic, but not so gripping or thrillery that you couldn’t read it before bed.

[review pending]

I liked Andrew Gross' Ty Hauck series but this book was just terrible. His impetus was, loosely, a family member’s suicide that seemed inexplicable. However, he mushed that story (and a bunch of people who are all unreliable narrators due to various mental illnesses which makes for really difficult reading) with what feels like a rip off of the Charles Manson murder story which makes it all seem really schlocky. Don’t read this book.

A really fun noir-y old time mystery but Brown who is often better known in sci-fi circles. Apparently it’s the first of several and I’m looking forward to getting to read the follow-ups in the “Ed and Am” series of mysteries. A great gritty story.

One of those Monkey Paw, “careful what you wish for,” stories, in a YA vein. This was on the scifi shelf at the local college and it reads like a YA book but still interesting enough to be worth reading. There’s a coin, and maybe it grants wishes, but maybe it doesn’t. I read it feeling like it was a standalone and now, hey, there’s another one. OK I will probably read that one too. The author seems interesting and that was part of what drove me to read this.

I was lucky in that when I finished French’s second book, this one was immediately available at the library. So, I read them back to back which was good for remembering small details about the characters since there is a little overlap between books, but not much. This was a terribly sad novel outlining the backstory of Cassie’s boss the guy who runs undercover and how he came from a ratty working class neighborhood and about the teen mystery/disappearance that haunted him and his family. Quite good, very chilling but well done and not at all tawdry. Can’t wait to read her next one.

I’ve heard this is Archer Mayor’s last book and maybe that’s not a bad thing after 33 books. The usual Vermont whodunit with the ensemble cast of folks you’ve known forever (but not most of the ancillary characters that pop up from time to time), but I was more aware of the rampant classism & dirty cop antics with the ends-justify-means plots than usual. Not a huge deal but maybe it’s time for this series to wrap up.

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.

By the end of this book I was very very sick of it. It’s like 1/3 cool story (which is how it starts out), and 2/3 plodding fantasy legend (which is built into the middle and increasingly becomes the major plotline of the book). I have so many questions about why, when you can have a built-it-yourself “uploaded brains” world, it turns into the same old dick-measuring quests and wars. Which are as tiresome to read about in the uploaded-brains world as they are in just the plain old world. I was hate-reading it by the end just to see who won. I think the book may have lost me in the first chapter where I was like “Really a billionaire is going to have a medical procedure done and they tell him not to eat anything and he DOES ANYWAYS and doesn’t tell anyone? Bullshit.”

I waited a long time to read this (it felt) after reading the original. A sequel, mainly about nine neurodivergent genderfluid people navigating past and present trauma set against a backdrop of a ruined world and avenging angels. There was really just a lot of trauma, people getting more trauma, people healing from past trauma, people trying to be mindful of others' trauma. It was definitely too much for me, more fantastical chaos magic than scifi and nothing got wrapped up.

This one was a lot more procedural wonkish than many of the other books. It’s not One Big Job, it’s a lot of little jobs all sort of intermigled with some backstory tossed in. Not as dramatic but overall still enjoyable.

This was a terrific, if occasionally confusing, story about a world in which... the reality timeline splits into two sometime around 1909 and there are (at least) two existing earth. Something happens to one of them and it becomes doomed, someone develops a mechanism to transport a few hundred thousand people from the dying world into the other. This is how a few of them find meaning in their lives. I didn’t like the protagonist and I don’t think you’re supposed to. Everyone’s a little broken and part of this is thinking about the trauma of leaving not just your family or your friends but your TIMELINE and having to learn to live in another one,similar yet slightly different with 100-ish years of difference. Thinky but not TOO thinky.

I don’t know how this wound up on my list but it may have been the cover which has nothing at all to do with the book. The main protagonist is a very nerdy awkward woman who is a “professional fan” (goes to cons, gets paid to write about them etc) who has a friend-of-sort-of-friends get murdered and she and the sort-of-friends try to figure it all out by staging a sort-of con of their own. It’s a little goofy and I did not agree with the cover blurb that it was “laugh out loud” funny, but was definitely the type of story I was in the mood for.

An exceptional spacer mystery thriller about a colony ship in which something goes wrong but it’s not entirely clear what. And the person sent to investigate it is a curious choice. It just kept getting better and better with weird little aspects and additional characters, though it did end what seemed like a little abruptly. I’m really hoping for a sequel. Afrofuturism from an author I hadn’t read before.

This book is the second in Nesbo’s Fart Powder series, a romp through time with two young kids Lisa and Nilly and their friend Doctor Proctor the scientist and some good and bad guys along the way. I started with this book but it’s still fully understandable without reading the first book. Along the way the kids encounter historical figures you might have heard of like Napoleon and Joan of Arc. While there’s a time travel aspect to the book [there is special soap you can mix up in the bathtub that allows you to move through time] it’s much less science fiction and much more of a wacky caper book and Amazon categorizes it under “Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths > Norse” for whatever reason. The book is translated from the original Norwegian.

There are funny fart jokes and other goofiness along the lines of Captain Underpants. This is a thick book, over 400 pages, but the text is good sized, the chapters are short and there are lots of illustrations along the way. Ultimately, it’s a story about friendship and creative problem solving. The two young characters each have distinct and enjoyable personalities and I found myself eagerly flipping pages to see what would happen next.

Second in this series of cozy mysteries that take place in the tiny town of Three Pines. We get to know more about the overarching mystery of what is going on with Inspector Gamache as well as look into a mysterious death during a curling competition.

I was really worried after the last book that I would no longer enjoy this series, that maybe it was ramping up to just be more and more gruesome for whatever reason. This book was significantly less gory. The story was about trying to figure out what happened to a super rare Bugatti that went missing sometime after WWII, maybe in the general area that Bruno is in. There were some other side mysteries, some local policing done well. Lots of good food descriptions, and while there are two corpses, there’s no gore.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a little more complex than the first one in that there’s a little more interpersonal stuff going on and a little less “How do we deal with this catastrophe” There is also a little more random number talking which I am always surprised at (like I get that she is a calculator but lists of numbers when they’re doing “space things” makes for sort of odd reading"). A lot less Nathaniel in this book which is too bad but generally speaking this is about going to Mars, it’s very space-y, it’s a great sequel to the previous book and I look forward to more.

I somehow read this book in 2014 and forgot to write a review for it. I liked it and I enjoy this series about the Culper Ring and all the weird intrigue happening in DC> This one was a little less great than the others because of the inclusion of the mentally ill assassin guy. Any time there is a first person account of someone who is mentally disabled (and not really that realistic but used as a “they could do anything!” wildcard) I lose interest. That said I’m currently reading the newest installment so it didn’t make me give up on the thing, just made me more skeptical.

It seems petty and a bit naive for me to say that this book had a few too many fight scenes. I loved Grossman’s book Soon I Will Be Invincible and I very much liked this one but it felt a little tropey and norm-y and I’m used to more diverse stories nowadays. The one person of color who has any real role to play is referred to as “the black girl” a few times and all the characters seem very cishet. Nothing wrong with that, it’s certainly a choice one can make, it just sees very old fashioned.This was a fun superhero origin tale--here’s when they’re young and cool, here’s where they’re older and jaded--that hewed more towards more traditional superhero types of things.

Loose idea: What if there were wormholes in in IKEA-like store? And this is layered on top of two overworked/underpaid employees managing a trip into one while they come to terms with their own dissolving (or evolving?) relationship. I enjoyed it, it went in and out of being weird. I didn’t quite relate to the main relationship of the two characters, but I enjoyed that it was complicated and that they didn’t quite seem to know what to make of it either. The story ends with a definite “What’s going to happen next?” vibe.

This was a long book that I read on and after a long plane ride. It’s not as good as Neville’s original book The Eight but pretty good nonetheless. This continues the story started in The Eight only we’re one generation further along and some of the players remain the same and some have shifted around. There are more puzzles, more characters and even more (it seemed to me) stories told from other perspectives in that old “and then he started his tale...” sort of way.

Not a big deal but I felt that the thread of this story was a bit more dismorphous, the tale was a little less understandable and the resolution maybe a little too pat. I liked meeting up with the characters again and getting to traipse all over the world with them. And, as always, I enjoy that many of the main characters are female so you could say this is a book that passes the Bechdel Test. That said it’s not all “I smite him with my heavenly yoni...” either, it’s just a neat thriller type mystery somethingorother that happens to have a lot of women in it.

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.

Another terrific Firebird collection by my friend Sharyn November. This collection of young adult fantasy short stories serves as both a great collection of pieces but also an introduction to many great authors working in YA today. The stories range from super-short almost-poems to long stories that operate on their own as well as chapters or sequels to existing works. Each story has a lead illustration that is a neat addition to this already-rich compilation of stories. Sharyn is a stickler for details and this book is well-chosen and well-edited. Another must-read for fans of YA fantasy.

I missed these characters. It’s funny reading a book about characfers you only know about from TV/Movies. I enjoyed the Firefly series quite a lot and was happy to learn there was a book out. The book is mostly good. Interesting story, some neat character backstory but also a little bit of dumb fight sequencing (like overly blabity bla) and some boring parts in case you didn’t know who the people were. I will read some more of these (presuming there are any) and I hope they improve a little.

This was a fun page-turner that I brought on vacation and never finished. It was good but not terrifically gripping. The loose outline is that there’s a Russian company that is doing an IPO and our hero runs a small investment firm that is bringing the IPO to market. Then there are some concerns about the viability of the company, and then all hell breaks loose. There are parts of this book that are serious snoresville and of course the main character is a strong-jawed former military man with a haunted past who just can’t lose. I picked it up on the free table at a ocal library and thought it was much better than I thought it would be, but still pretty stuck in formulaic genre thriller fiction molds.

Got this at a library booksale, read it in one sitting on a long plane ride. Good book.

Great spin on the time travel trope. What if you kept getting reborn as yourself, in the same timeline, but with memories intact? What could you do? What about the other people who were like you? What if you were hellbent on destruction? What if you wanted to stop that person? This is an interesting thriller which doesn’t get too into the “how?” aspects but tells a really good story that has time travel as one of its elements.

This book came to me in the mail from the publisher for some reason and it was the perfect book for a long series of plane rides. The basic premise is that the President of the US’s doctor has left for “some reason” and the president taps his old buddy with a checkered past to be his personal physician as he’s gearing up for running for re-election. Pretty standard stuff, but it gets into nanotechnology and all sorts of weird blackmailish stuff, better than the average political tome and a lively read.

Jenna’s booklist for last year had this on it. I like YA books, reading about diverse characters, and PUNK. This was a great book about a kid who has to move from the town she loves to a big city where she’s not sure she’s going to make friends and she doesn’t want to change her style. She gets along with her parents but has predictable disagreements with them. She writes zines, only sort of tries to fit in at her new school, and drinks a lot of coffee. I think all zinesters would really enjoy this book with its likeable characters and not totally predictable plot twists.

This book, which takes place in 1989, had a QR code in the front so I could listen to a soundtrack that would accompany it and it was just the greatest thing. I knew most of the songs and I read this book in one sitting. It’s an autobiographical story of a nerdy awkward kid who learns some things about himself and others during a month in Europe before high school. He endured a lot of bullying and some complicated family stuff before this trip and the things that happen to him (which are almost entirely true to his real life) help him learn and grow from it. I especially appreciated the afterword where we learned more about what his life was like after.

This was the second book in a series apparently. I got from the free pile at the library which means it wasn’t circulating terribly well. The loose plot is that a CIA-ish trained psychic soldier needs to figure out why people are mobbing up to attack celebrities and other folks. We learn it’s because of a Dark Web site and then they try to figure out who is behind it and what their angle is. Lively and interesting, if trope-y.

Got this book from the friends of the library bookshelf because I liked the cover and I figured “Award nominated, why not?” It became one of those books I kept reading not so much because I liked it (it was fine, not great, not terrible) but because I was curious what the message was at the end. The book takes place mostly through the eyes of the protagonist talking about his awful ex-wife and his new life without her, and then she disappears, or does she? The ending was an odd unexpected one, with a pivot to a totally different perspective near the end. And I’m not sure I was there for it. A novel about marriage what it means to be female, and a lot of rich people

Another in the “psychic booking agent” series from Priest who is usually more of a horror novelist. I like the Seattle scenes and locations in this book and the plot was just fine but I didn’t really warm up to the main character. Not a necessary part of enjoying the book, which I did, just an ongoing thing with this series.

You hit a certain age, you’ve read a lot of books and you can say “Another book in the luxury space hotel mystery genre.” Turns out I like that genre quite a bit and this was a good example of it. People wind up on the floating hotel because they’re escaping life circumstances in a dystopia where there’s been one Emperor for 500 years and you’re not allowed to even mention aliens. But... someone’s speaking truth to power. And are they in the floating hotel? And how do you find them?

This is a good book for completists. I was sad reading this book because I knew when I finished it there would be no more Barthelme that I hadn’t read and all I could ever do was re-read him [or drag up old essays from architectural magazines, or go to Texas and dig through his papers] but I think this book is actually a good goodbye. Some of it’s marvelous and all of it’s fascinating, but there are definitely some pieces here that drag.

I mean, in many of his books there is a piece or two that maybe aren’t as spunky as the others, but you can sort of see how they all fit together with the group as a whole. Even though this collection was ably curated by Kim Herzinger, there wasn’t that same sense of “oh this story isn’t so good on its own but combined with the one before it and the one after it, it begins to make some sense in a weird Barthelme sort of way” I just didn’t like some of these stories and that’s pretty much okay. Generally speaking this was a joy to read. The book is attractive, it’s hefty and there are notes in the back which is my favorite part, really, of any short story collection. Where did this story come from? Where has it been?

I really enjoyed this. I like Haldeman’s other book Forever Peace and it took me far too long to get to this one. It’s a little strange. All the characters from the earlier books are long gone and we’re in some far flung future where most people have settled on other planets and a few have stayed nearly as homesteaders on this planet. Then they get restless and decide to explore. I read it a ways ago and so a lot of it isn’t quite clear to me. I do remember the presence of other humanoid people on the planet who were not human, and the fun involved in a future world where people are of varying ages with ranges in the hundreds of years thanks to being in suspended animation during long space travels.

There is a lot of interesting back and forth about whether to stay on the current planet or leave, and Haldeman’s strength lies in the depth of his characters and the complicated nature of their relationships. The last few chapters of the book have a very odd twist to them that didn’t sit totally right with me, but my overall reflection on this book was that I was pleased to have read it.

When you read the afterword Peper confesses that he really wrote this book a sentence at a time with no real idea where it was going and that it was a good writing experience for him. This was a fun book for what it was--a sort of frenetic superspy novel that starts at the end and then tries to tell you how it got there--but also feels like it was written in that way. I enjoyed it but it’s a departure from Peper’s other carefully-crafted novels.

A haves and have-nots tale of a world with “industrialized magic” and the dangers of consolidated power. Told from the point of view of a former slave turned gritty thief. Lots of funky workshops (did not know this was a thing I craved, and yet...) and muck. I think a lot of books really aim to create a cool shady underworld where poor people hang out and there are no rules, but I feel like this messy favela-type place really felt real.

This installment of the Rivers of London series takes place (mostly) away from the usual Folly locale and has a lot more rural policing stuff in it, working on relationships, dealing with small towns. Not as many of the main characters you’ve grown to know and like. Very little Lesley, not a lot of Nightingale. There are some bonus magical animals, but definitely feels more like “one in a series” than a stand-alone even though it can work that way as well. I liked it.

The queer multiverse love story you’ve been waiting for. Maybe. This is a great debut novel that goes in some interesting directions with multiverse ideas while not getting bogged down in the hard science aspects of it. It’s all about a scientist who invents a machine that can traverse multiverses, and another version of that same guy who is NOT a scientist, who is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. At times funny and poignant, but not too terribly confusing (sometimes a problem with multiverse books). There’s a lot of longing and nostagia in it, which are well told. I enjoyed being along for this ride.

It’s been a while since I read some non-genre fiction that really captured my attention. I read this on my Kindle and I admit if I had known how long it was I might not have picked it up. This is a great rambly story about one woman who leaves home after getting punched int he face by her father (almost put the book down then, glad I did not) and what she does and what happens to her. She’s a complicated character both simultaneously in charge of her own destiny but also making a lot of choices that made me go o_O. There’s a lot of backstory about Korean culture and class which I found incredibly fascinating. The character is really “thinky” and so I got to learn a lot about a culture I don’t know much about--and a lot of different aspects of it. Glad I read it, think more people should.

Was a little worried when I picked this up that it was going to be the totally lackluster sequel to the book I really enjoyed, Daemon. There is a part in the middle where it just seems like it’s going to be motorcycle war forever but that part fades away and this book has a lot of the same thought-provoking social-engagement stuff as the first one. I liked it and it’s nice to read techie fiction written by people who really understand tech.

Watts swears this is a novella but it’s got enough going on in it to really seem like a full on book. In fact I sort of wanted more of this weird story about a long term (think millennia) space voyage to install wormholes where the human crew is regularly put into and out of suspended animation by the not-that-bright AI. And maybe something is wrong? And given that, how do you plan to shake things up? I liked Watts' attention to this especially because a lot of the time I find his stories a little on the dark side for me but I love his plots and so I pick up his books hoping I’ll find a thing that I can dig into. This was that thing.

This book was a sequel to The Spaceship Next Door about a small town Massachusetts after the spaceship (from the last book) departed. Similar story arc to the last one where there is a lot of character and plot development and then a lot of action and drama and uncertainty in the last third of the book. Also, like the last book, it wraps up decently with a door open to more sequels.

A 1960s-era set of mysteries about a Massachusetts rabbi which I decided to read because I was getting a little tired of “ambitious” scifi for now. Jim suggested this series and I like it. The Rabbi of a small town in the North Shore of Massachusetts gets drawn in to local mysteries but it’s not like he’s an amateur sleuth but more like he uses rabbinical tactics to help figure out what happened. Very much a product of its time but a good story overall.

I first became aware of Faith Erin Hicks when I read the graphic novel that she illustrated, Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong. This story about a homeschooled girl’s transition to a regular high school while dealing with the absence of her mom is written and illustrated by Hicks. It’s a great story that looks at a lot of various gender roles and expectations without bogging you down in a politicky story. The high school felt real, the story felt realistic and not preachy. Very well done.

Another Alaskan mystery, this one was maybe a bit harder to take. It was less good to read, because it deals with possible sex work, mental illness and complicated and failing relationships. It sets the groundwork for a few of the later books, but that’s very unclear at the time. It was still a good read, but not as coherent as the other ones.

Sanderson usually writes fantasy stuff which is not usually my bag. However this book veers much more towards sci-fi and humorous sci-fi to boot and it was EXACTLY my bag. Funny, with an interesting plot line--you can kind of tell what it is by the title--and a gradually revealed main character. Only suggestion for future readers: splurge on a print (or at least color) copy because there are many adorable illustrations that should not be missed

Plowing through some Archer Mayor to make the days go by. Deciding to read them in order and this was the one I had skipped earlier because it was rapey and I usually don’t trust authors to write sympathetically about rape but rather to use it for shock value and that always bothers me. This book was better. It’s got all of Mayor’s trademarks--lots of stuff takes place in places you know about in Vermont, Joe Gunther and Gail figure prominently and move the general series arc along even as the crime is getting solved, there is a big cast of characters and some political backdrop. I enjoyed it and it wrapped up a little more cleanly than the last one.

Heyyy more Murderbot! I found this one easier to follow than the last one. Fewer characters, especially ones with names the same. On the other hand, this felt more like the older novellas than the longer novel, so my main complaint was just: too short! It was good to see Murderbot back at it, solving mysteries and awkwardly trying to figure out how to interact with people. No ART or 3 which was too bad but that just means more to come.

Book one in the Charlie Hardie series otherwise known as “How much pain can one guy take?” I liked it. Lots of twists and turns and a premise that is pretty novel and leaves you wondering wtf is going on a lot of the time. You don’t love Hardie but you really do want to know what happens to him.

I grabbed this off of the new book shelf, didn’t realize it was the second in a series of detective mysteries. I thought it might be about funeral train generally. Instead, it was about a small town train wreck during Dust Bowl times in Oklahoma. A great period piece if a little pat for my tastes. Nice descriptions and interesting characters including a lot of female characters. Very slow motion in a way that appealed.

A fun time travel romp with the central conceit being “Hey if you could go back in time to right some historical wrongs, but on a more subtle level than killing Hitler, what would you do?” This is a feminist tale through and through and while there is time travel with restrictions, explaining how it works is not what this book is about. Soft science and heavy history (you’ll notice favorite feminist icons along the way) with a little bit of graphic assault, in case that’s something you’re concerned about.

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.

Mary Roach is sometimes a little too jokey for me, but in this book that talks about how humans and wildlife manage to interact with each other when wildlife are bothering the humans, I actually liked it just fine. The chapters range from looking at how we try to keep bears out of our dumpsters, to how we keep mice out of our houses to how they try to keep monkeys out of basically everything in parts of India. I enjoyed her approach and learned a lot about robot birds and other odd techniques to try to manage wildlife and our incursions into their spaces.

It’s cool that PK Dick’s books are being reissued with cool cover art and nice formatting. Some of his books, however, are stronger than others. This one, for example, is a great story of paranoia and “what the hell is going on?” but it doesn’t cohere as nicely as, say, Ubik or his other more popular books. There is some really excellent humor in it, which I’m not used to getting from his books, but overall there are a lot of weird tedious parts as the characters argue over what the main monster-type character is up to. Good story, good to read anything that Dick has written, really, but not superfantastic.

I really like Chambers' work but I find a lot of it confusing. She’s talking about alien life forms who all interrelate to each other and she clearly has an idea in her head about what they look like and how they interact but kind of dribbles that information out slowly and I find that there’s a long while in the beginning of her books where I have trouble really getting a visual image of what is going on in the book.

This book is a nice wrap-up with some people you know from this universe, unlikely folks tossed together b/c of a crisis and then have to manage a crisis. Good to see these folks again. Book was good, though since it’s been so long since I’ve read her earlier books, I got the feeling that there were characters here that I maybe should recognize but I did not.

SO GOOD. This one was another by Crummey and more of an epic tale than Sweetland which was a bit of a “man vs. Nature” book. Loved the long rambling story about multiple generations of people in a down and out Newfoundland and some slightly fantastical things which happen within their community.

A friend suggested this series and for whatever reason the book I wound up with was one that was way in the middle. Historical fiction type of mystery with the premise that Sherlock Holmes has a very capable wife who he solves mysteries with. This book, though it started off with a sort of titillating “Oh my god the main character is going to die” sort of teaser which I could have done without, was a really interesting sort of mystery sort of history book that takes place in India under British rule. Lots of neat little factoids and settings and I liked Holmes' wife Mary Russell a great deal. Don’t know if I’m going to have trouble reading them out of order, but I’ll probably pick up another one.

I usually like these ecofeminist books. This one was on the free table at the local college and I picked it up and slogged through parts of it and just couldn’t get excited about picking it up again. Too much weird theatrical overlap (you know the kind where the characters are preparing for a play and there are PAGES of play text in there?) and I couldn’t get over it.

Liked this one because it game me a chance to get to know more about Sammie Martens. Unfortunately what we learn about her is that she’s impetuous and frequently puts herself in dangerous situations that she needs Kunkle or Gunther to get her out of. There was also a “wow you’ve clearly never done drugs before” description of an ecstacy trip and a sort of “And that’s how it all went down” summary at the end. I liked but did not love this one though I was happy to learn more about Martens even if it wasn’t all good.

I found this book in a waiting room somewhere and it was on my shelves unread until I finally needed a small paperback to take on my trip. This book was great. It’s set in a post-sharecropper era in the South in a plantation town that is pretty much only occupied by elderly people who used to work on the plantation. There is some sort of altercation and one of the plantation owners is killed and there is a big to do about who will take the blame and for what reason. The old black men in town all assemble with their rifles, ready to say “I did it” in the face of what they are assuming is going to be violent opposition from the usual suspects. And that’s sort of what happens except the usual suspects are far from usual and there is a lot of change in the air and what happens isn’t quite what you expect.

Gaines' characters are interesting and full of complications and depth and the story is told in successive chapters by many different people, giving you somewhat differing perspectives, but not in the usual “who is telling the truth?” sort of way. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy the multiple perspectives but it turned out to make this story even more compelling than it would be otherwise, affording many differing views of the same day full of events.

This ship has been en route to a potentially-habitable planet for 250 years with strict rules in place for working and living including a maximum life expectancy. Now with the new planet within reach, there are a worrying number of survey probes that approach the planet and then... vanish? Or something, it’s unclear because the flow of information is spotty for various reasons. Factions arise about how to manage this possible problem. A very lively novel and one of the few where “one story told through multiple perspectives” didn’t bug me.

A fun YA novel a lot like the one that came bafore it. A lot of scene setting, some intrepid “what’s going on stuff” a big scary chance and a nice resolution. I’m not sure if I will like the third installment of this book since the first two follow a fairly familiar narrative structure, but I enjoy the character of Cadel Piggot and I like listening to pretty much any author who can convincingly write about technology whether it’s being used by a band of savvy teens or something else. Jinks maintains my interest and I feel that I should check out more of what she’s written.

I read this book after a friend whose opinion I greatly respect had already told me it was a disappointment to her. I liked it a little better than that, but not a lot better. It seems there is some sort of genre of books about ordinary guy caught up in some sort of deep mystery concerning Ancient Objects, Hot Women and Research. The researcha gnel always appeals to me, and some of the ancient stuff, and I’m sort of “eh” on the hot women angle, but the stories are usually interesting enough. This one was pretty good.

It might have been better if I hadn’t been reading a proof copy and had had illustrations of all the alchemical -- I hope I’m not giving away too much here -- objects rather than just a blank box with “TK Illustration” written in them. At the end of it all though, you don’t quite have the sufficiently zing-y wrap up to make it all come together and think “man I read a good book.” I liked the charachters, liked the story, enjoyd it while I was reading it, but I’ve read better versions of the same general plot and don’t think I’ll think about this book much after it’s faded from recent memory.

Picked it up because of a bookshelf on the cover (apparently not on the cover of another version which has a more Vermont-y farmhouse on it). I liked this simple story of an old house and the two couples that lived in it and the ins and outs of their relationships. I hadn’t read Norman before but I think I’ll try more of his books. This book definitely seems autobiographical in some ways but I don’t know enough about him to be sure of what is and what isn’t from his life. There are some real life people who inhabit this fictional tale, some of whom I know personally. It was neat to see them.

Wanted to like this but it was already up to three different perspectives and a little too strategic for me and I’m trying to get better at cutting my losses.

I picked this book off the library booksale shelves and did not know it was about a librarian. It’s not only that, it’s by a former (sort of) librarian turned novelist. She writes quite poetically about this smalltown New England librarian living a life of solitude who becomes somehow connected to the local boy who has a growth problem, eventually reaching over eight feet tall. The boy is clearly based on Robert Wadlow, the tallest man who ever lived, though there are similarities, this is not biographical but rather historical fiction. I kept pulling out phrases in this book that i found particularly evocative as a librarian and the added quirky romance if you could call it that propels the book forward fairly well. A quick, easy and fascinating read.

A story told in oral storytelling fashion about a Stone Age culture right on the cusp of the Bronze Age and the day to day things they do to trade and survive. This was suggested to me from someone who saw that I liked teh KSR novel Shaman. I also enjoyed this one. Many branching tales with (perhaps) one central true thru line. Well-told.

What a weird funny book. I decided to spend a day looking at graphic novels because I’ve been bogged down in one book the rest of the time. I went to the library in the summer town I’m in and they had almost none! So I got a series about John Lewis and then picked this one up. It’s fun! And weird. At first it starts out seeming to rhyme and I was concerned but then it turns into this super strange story about a guy with a beard that grows and won’t stop, and it becomes a metaphor for all that is safe and all that is unknown and scary. Liked it. Great illustrations.