A short novel which was written in a response to an event that had happened in Korea. I did not know that aspect of the book and so it just felt like an odd mood piece of a novel that I wasn’t sure I was understanding. The loose idea is that people’s shadows can rise, and it’s very important not to follow them. Also there is a young couple who are just starting dating. Once I read the author’s statement at the end, a lot of it clicked into place for me.

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.

Pargin is someone known to many people online but I didn’t know him. This book is a romp of a weird road trip with a mystery box with a cast of characters many of whom are or were part of the army of the Extremely Online. The story itself is told somewhat through Reddit forum posts which I found charming and real-feeling but might not be to others' tastes. A lot of discussion about online factionalism, with a few good jokes in there. The book has one central mystery throughout and a lot of characters who have some pretty serious flaws so it’s tough to figure out who to root for.

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.

Markoe tries to get back into her own head as a teen by going through her diaries and sketching out her first graphic novel combining what she remembers with what she thought then. She was a horribly awkward pre-teen and teen with a lousy (maybe?) family and the usual “I am out of place, feel weird about boys” feels as well as some actual “I dealt with antisemitism at my school from the school administration” experiences. Illustrations very individualistic and quirky.

Definitely a book up my street. This dense discussion of science and history talks about how some major world shifts happened because of situations involving illness and widespread disease. Like who was able to take over whom because disease had ravaged the part of the population who might fight back. How did 500 guys take over parts of South America? Why some colonized areas get settled and some just get resource-extracted. What helps and what doesn’t. A great read.

Again, after the last book, I read most books I see that are about books. This one is mostly not about books, it sort of fits into the Rivers of London type of “What if London were more magical?” genre only with fewer cops. There is a whole magical London backstory and a lot of magical creatures, some benevolent, others much less so. I liked the bones of this story quite a lot also (the loose plot where the protagonist is trying to track down her father who has left a LOT of mystery in his wake), but ultimately I am not much of a fantasy reader and it felt too “dragons vs wizards” for me at the end (i.e. magical conflicts where it all feels kind of random) but a good book overall.

I’ll read nearly any book with a library/bookshop in it even if it’s in a genre (romance) not normally my jam. The one downside to knowing it’s a romance kind of novel is that there’s usually a premature realization that things are all going to work out. This was one of those “two stories converge” novels where one story takes place in the past and one is taking place pretty much nowadays. I liked the bones of this story a lot, some of the implementation a little less so. There is a lot of trauma (domestic abuse, involuntary commitment) as a backdrop which can be a tough read, as well as people wearing white gloves to read old books which always makes my librarian brain nuts.

This is a weird (in a good way) novella about a world in which aliens kinda sorta come and take over but all they mainly do is help people understand that we’re all in it together. The book mainly covers the time after they’ve shown up, so there’s not a lot of “first contact” sort of exploration. We watch society transform as people make “better choices” en masse. But sometimes people miss the options to make bad choices. There is a small rebel faction. The aliens also enable some magic so that you can grow horns or have hooves or become a baby again. One woman’s wife decides to become a baby and we’re watching her manage that grief (and her right to be sad) in a post-scarcity world. There’s a lot of general metaphor about what does it mean to be truly yourself.

Found on a list of detective-type books that are not by white authors and mainly don’t have white characters. This is about IQ (his initials, real name Isaiah Quintabe) who is a scary-smart young man in a rough neighborhood with a keen problem-solving mind. He gets sought out by people, some of whom pay him and some of whom don’t, or only pay in muffins. I really liked the main character and some of the supporting ones, the book was a little too violent for me and has some roughed up dogs. You get a lot of insight into his backstory in this one. I might read one more to see how they are.

This is a very sweet and well done graphic memoir about the author’s time working at a summer camp for kids with cancer and their families. It’s a bit of a sequel to his last graphic novel “Hey Kiddo” about his life with his mom who has substance abuse disorder. In this book, he now lives with his grandparents and talks about his experiences learning to get outside his own head and his personal set of tough circumstances to support other people who need it. It’s grounded in the real world and the epilogue gives you a bit more information on the real people who inhabit the graphic novel. Very well done.

This book tried to do a lot, and achieved a good chunk of that. It’s about a generation ship that is so old no one remembers how it got started. It tootles along through the galaxy with a strictly delineated upper class and lower class. There is a failed mutiny. They explore a spooky abandoned planet on which something awful happened. An alien ship appears that foils all of their attempts at understanding. It’s so alien they are really not sure if it even knows that they are there. Religious people Have Opinions about all of this and are an entrenched power structure on the ship. The ending is vague which I sort of liked but also after all the build up sort of didn’t.

I should not have finished this book. It started with all the interesting drama surrounding the enigmatic mathematician Grigori Perelman who had solved the Poincare conjecture and refused the Field Medal and the million dollar millennium prize. But then it got bogged down both in the history of the Poincare conjecture and the pedigrees and lives all the men who had tried to solve it. The math was a bit over my head. I like pop math books generally but not this one.

The next Rivers of London installment. These books read a lot like a TV police procedural with our protagonist talking about all the parts of his job being a police officer who happens to investigate (and be a practitioner of) magical stuff. This took us one more step along the path to finding the Faceless Man and figuring out what happened to his partner, once disfigured by magic, now seemingly better but working for the wrong side?

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.

A complicated story about a Maine game warden just doing his job when a brutal crime gets committed and his estranged dad (who was a drunk and a jerk) is implicated. The warden tries to clear his name. A lot of sad and bad families and messy rural bad choices. At the same time, there was some beautiful wilderness of a kind I recognized. I know “thriller” was right there on the cover, but I went into this thinking it was a mystery. Liked it, might not read the next one

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.

This was the first book from my “birthday book suggestions” list over on Bluesky. I liked it. A young adult novel of a magical world in which cursing is real and cursers are punished but sometimes things get out of hand. A pair of teenagers tries to help the cursed but then realizes the plight of the cursers is not quite what they expected. A lot of “who can you trust” and “how do you handle complicated morality” in this one. If you like magical tales, you’ll like it.

I tend to read late at night; this book had a lot going on not all of which I followed. I loved the idea of pocket worlds existing within our own (with slower/faster time in some of them, leading to some interesting clashes) and economies and resource extraction which ensue as a result. I also enjoyed a different take on the horrors of colonization (book takes place in the Dominican Republic and has a lot of references to the Taino people who were the indigenous people of the region). There was a difficult relationship and a (sort of) dead child in this one which was a more fraught/raw part of the story that was challenging. Overall a really good scifi book on some tough subjects.

Khanna is the Congressional rep for Silicon Valley (the only majority Asian district in the continental US). This is a policy-heavy book about how we can use technology not just to make wealthy people wealthier but to allow for more security and opportunity for people all over the US, maybe even the world, without the usual facile “Rural people can all work in help desk call centers!” shallow visions which we often see. These policy approaches are not cheap, but they are necessary and Khanna makes a good case for many of them.

I like most of KSRs books and this was no exception. It’s kind of about Mars and kind of about a mysterious “icehenge” that shows up on Pluto. It’s told from the perspective of three different people (sequential, not interspersed) and an “Is this an unreliable narration and if so why?” mystery slowly creeps in as the book goes on. It’s one of KSRs older books, so quirky in what “tech” they have and what they don’t. Like you see very few digital cameras and no cell phones though there are interstellar spaceships. I skimmed a few parts but overall liked it.

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

The author’s cousin came to the US illegally, via a long and harrowing trip that he took with his mother from El Salvador when he was a teen. He never talked about it. A conversation about the journey when they are both adults is the basis for this story. It’s one of those situations where every person (or most people) has to make many tough/bad choices. The story is well told and drawn but the illustrations have a blurry edge to them that is maybe not intentional.

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.

I knew this book would be a difficult read and it was. It’s a distant future novel about a post-technological world in which some people are invisible and there is huge social stratification between visible and non-visible people. As you’d expect, it’s a commentary on extreme racial injustices and prejudices and just how evil people in power can get, in ways even they themselves might not expect. It’s brutal and full of trauma with a few, not enough, moments of great joy. I liked the world building and the way the author worked with metaphor, but it felt heavy-handed, like more of a YA novel. Our main protagonist is female and she’s subjected to some horrific things and that’s a heavy lift from a male author.

I knew M. T. Anderson from the book Feed and now he writes books for adults. This promised to be a book about grave robbing and a pox epidemic that takes place in *checks notes* 1087! If you’re one of those “Likes to think about ancient Rome” people and that synopsis sounds appealing, then this is the book for you. I liked but did not love it. It had a lot of new words, many of which felt a little extra. There was a slight whiff of the supernatural (I think?) but not much. The basic story line is solid--people have to go steal the body of St Nicholas for reasons, and they undertake a huge quest to do it-- with some fun queer overtones. Few women and none with major roles in the plot.

This book is the LAST in an eighteen book series so it has the sort of “wrap up” quality you might expect in a book like this: a lot of nostalgia; a lot of retreading old story lines and some new facts about them; a decently happy ending even given the setting which is in and around London just after WWII when stuff was still a mess and there’s a lot of grimness. I was happy this series wrapped up right around when I was getting tired of it as being maybe a bit too precious and fairy tale.

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 was hoping for a MUCH better book. Written in 1981, it was largely the history of the NY, Paris and UK systems. Two chapters at the end are devoted to other subway systems. I enjoyed the details and especially the description of the diplomacy necessary to make early subways work in the United States and in Paris. There was too much details in places, not enough in others. It was reissued 10 years later newly subtitled “Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War” and I suspect the research involved in it was someone’s thesis and the firs tittle just wasn’t a good fit.

This was a short but enjoyable book about a future world where the Earth is only a memory and a collection of artifacts. Our protagonist is a trans woman who likes to track down information about other civilizations particularly her own. She discovers an ancient AI weapon whose purpose is unclear. There’s a lot of zipping around and quick meetings of other people in other species. Would have liked this book to be longer and more fleshed out but definitely enjoyed it for what it was.

I don’t know if it’s me or these books but I do find myself sometimes finishing a book and being like “OK I get the general gist of this but some of the nuance may be lost on me” This is a book which takes place in the 1790s and the 1890s and the beginning of the 1900s and seems to feature similar characters to Pulley’s other novels which I have read. There’s a lot of old tech and smoldering feelings and maybe not enough of a very central lighthouse. The plot skips around and ultimately I am not 100% sure I know what happned but I mostly enjoyed reading it.

This story takes place in a future where we have interstellar travel along with “gates” that go to entirely other parts of the galaxy. A woman who has formerly been a thief takes to the stars with her friend from an entirely other species to try to find an ancient artifact which is deeply meaningful to (at least) two entirely different groups of people who have vested interest in obtaining it. There are many different species interacting to both help and hinder this plot. A bit all over the place, the book seemed to not know entirely what sort of book it was trying to be, but a fun space romp.

A friend’s partner who works as a life coach wrote this. I am someone who does very secular wedding ceremonies and thought I could use some tips along these directions. I have no personal sense of the sacred or the divine, I’m just a tree-hugger who appreciates nature and community. This book is at its strongest when it’s offering ideas for occasions to mark, and ideas for doing those things, offering many people’s stories. It can veer strongly into woo and unintentional hegemonic statements at times but its heart is in the right place.

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 book takes its name, I believe, from the book Natural History of Vacant Lots. This is a lovely series of meditations about the edgelands between the built world and the unbuilt-feeling parts at its edges. Brown is a person you may know, he’s written some scifi, has a terrific newsletter and has a funky house in an industrial part of Austin. He talks about the things he discovers, the way he thought and thinks about these spaces, how his thinking changed when he became a parent. Not just “I wish we were wild” nostalgia. Thinky and worth it

There are 200+ missing spacefarers after a mysterious accident shuttered the space program designed to find a better planet after humans ruined this one. A near-future story about love and friendship and young idealistic people confronted with a conflict not of their making that may or may not affect the future of their world. Not a hard science book. It does talk about multidimensional universes but isn’t distracting about it. A very human-centric sci fi novel.

Sloan has written a few books which I have really liked and this is another good one. We’re 13,000 years in the future, the enigmatic entity from Sourdough is back, there are talking beavers and some dragons who live on the moon and need a nap. There are a lot of delightful nods to other scifi worlds which was one of my favorite parts of this. It’s a hero’s journey, sort of, with a lot going on. Many worldbuilding novels are so serious, this one is less so, in a good way. There are a few confusing parts in that some of the characters inhabit this sort of purgatory-type area and sometimes I forgot whether we were in the “real world” or not.

A fun graphic memoir about growing up in a Mexican American family with eight siblings. The central event is the entire family going to Mexico in an RV and a pickup truck to fetch their grandfather and bring him back to live with them. The siblings mostly get along, the parents are mostly decent people and the kids are often tussling with one another about where they are going to spend their “strawberry [picking] money” (pop rocks? fireworks? candy?). A very warm and funny memoir.

This is a book about healthy binding by Kobabe who you likely know from Genderqueer. It combines the lived experience stories of people’s journeys that involve binding, scientific research, and some summarization and strategies at the end which can help people who are trying to figure out what binding path might work (or not work) for them. Kobabe’s illustrations are excellent as always and this was a short and engaging read for anyone interested in the topic.

If you like Tchaikovsky, this is another book from him! A valet-model high end robot finds that he has killed his master. And then it turns out this appears to be part of some overall societal collapse. Finding answers isn’t really part of the robot’s programming, but not being able to find another human who he can serve is a problem. He goes out looking for another one and finds a lot of deep dysfunction (and maybe a friend) in this occasionally humorous dystopia.

A follow-up graphic novel to the previous one which is all about the author’s trans journey through high school in a smallish UK town. In this sequel he finally gets to leave the house, explore what it is to be a real man ("real man" as he phrases it which is a subject that gets a lot of attention) and find his own niche and place where he feels like himself. There are some good video game framing devices that are well-drawn and occasional visits from the author’s future self saying it’s going to be okay. I appreciated that the author was willing and able to talk about some anecdotes from before they transitioned as well as talking about their life where they are right now.

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.

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 need to get better at reading the CWs before diving in to books. It’s hard to talk about this story--in the luxury space hotel subgenre, usually my jam--without giving too much of it away. It’s one of those gradual-reveal plots that takes place in a nearish future where the world is burning and billionaires make deals and plans about who is worthy enough to move to the Mars Colonies. And there’s a strong Upstairs Downstairs vibe with the majority-Filipino hotel staff who oversee everything their rich clients are doing and talking about. There’s a weird orgy in the middle seemingly for no reason. There’s a theme running through it about people suffering abuse as young people and the roles they start to inhabit as grown-ups.

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.

A graphic memoir from Ai Weiwei which uses the structure of the Chinese zodiac to tell stories from the life of Ai Weiwei. If I did not already know about Ai, I am not sure this book would have helped me learn the facts about his life (though there are some) but it does really give you a sense of, for lack of a better word, why he has the vibes that he does. Gorgeously illustrated with fairly prosaic text, I still would have read this if it were 10x as long.

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.

Janzen grew up Mennonite. She left the church about the time she went to college, got a higher ed degree and got married. Then it turned out her husband was a jerk with mental health issues who left her for “Bob from Gay.com.” As part of putting her life back together, she moves back in with her family and re-immerses herself in the Mennonite world only this time as an outsider, somewhat. It’s a gentle story, at times a bit funny and even as she’s describing some of the odder statements or practices of her family, she does so with love.

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 is a Native vampire tale. Sort of. It’s about multiple generations of people in a small community--dealing with suicide and alcohol use disorder and all manner of bad things--who work on a way forward while bad an inexplicable things happen all around them. Medina is a member of the Tunica Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. This story takes place in a fictional Louisiana tribe. I usually have a hard time with stories that have too much trauma in them but this one kept me reading. Mind the CW at the beginning, it’s no joke.

This was not so much a time travel novel as a novel of what it means to be out of place, not where you’re meant to be, among your people. This is a stirringly poignant novel that hovered just on the edge of “too much” for me. The main protagonist spends a lot of time in an anxious tension about their relationship. It’s got a lot of funny bits, can be a bit uneven, but overall just a well-done story about a near-future earth where we can kidnap people from the past to try to solve current problems. Kind of. I’m not usually a fan of “ripped form the headlines” fiction that only dabbles in historical accuracy but this one has some pretty well-interwoven Franklin Expedition trivia in it too.

I enjoy a good sci-fi space romp that doesn’t get bogged down in too many “But how does the spaceship take off/land exactly?” physics details and this is a good one of those. The Alliance is a big Korean spacefaring concern. A ship takes off with a quirky assortment of misfits with different backstories. There is some drama, a lot of interesting personalities interact, the main character is female and charismatic in an odd way that is hard to pin down. The story seems to end somewhat in the middle, so hoping there’s a sequel.

I did not like this author’s first memoir so it’s on me that I thought “Oh I wonder if this is about the synthesizer guy?” (yes, and also no) and still read it. It’s a memoir about the nature of memory and what we know about someone who is no longer with us, and some looking into family history. Kurzweil’s dad is a transhumanist who, among other things, wrote a chatbot to talk to his own late dad. Many pages are just not that interesting (for someone not part of the family - I’m sure they’re interesting to them), and appear to be transcribed verbatim from interviews. Despite the cover: it’s not really a love story. Definitely not my jam.

This is a pretty ambitious book that mostly worked (for me). It’s a story about memory in a near future where memory editing and storage is possible. At the center of it is a gay love story and some pretty deep thoughts about what it means to share a life with someone, and how much of that is your memories. Since the book is a lot about the life of the mind, there’s a lot of thinky “in your head” stuff about longing and loss. There are some inception-like “Is this real or is it a simulation? Or a simulation inside a simulation?” bits so if those are dealbreakers, this is not the book for you. Got murky occasionally, mostly great.

I somehow picked this up thinking I might learn a bit about trilobites but this was actually a more standard kid graphic novel adventure story about a trilobite and his friend the walking whale as they try to... win a video contest? There is some good trilobite content at the end. It was a fun and well-illustrated read. I may be one of the few people who was not super familiar with Hale before this. Fun book.

This is the second (and last) book in a series where I adored the first book. But where the first book had a decent amount of whimsy & things that are cool to look at and learn about, this book felt like one large slow-motion trolley problem with a pretty high degree of suffering and trauma throughout. I’m the first to admit that this is a me thing, but as much as I love Pulley and her writing, I felt like this book was almost something to be endured. There was a deepening, sort of, about the relationship but the entire thing is making one person anxious and the other person doing a lot of machinations behind the scenes but also being vague and weird a lot of the time. Loved the descriptions of Japan, disliked that it was one long suffering exercise.

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

I’ve liked Mosher’s other books and this one I had mixed feelings about. I loved the natural world descriptions of a place not far from where I live, I even liked some of the “just so stories” about how things (maybe) used to work in Vermont. I only sort of believed in the female character he created--Mosher only mentions what she’s wearing when it’s important to the plot, she just didn’t seem female somehow to me--and I definitely didn’t appreciate some of the casual racism in the book (anti-Roma in particular) which was just totally unnecessary and weird that it was included. I know the 80s were another time but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to read the book through modern sensibilities

. Probably an interesting story, told in a weird way. There are many popular history books out there where you can tell by reading them what references the author used to assemble their narrative. Long recitations of menu items is a tip-off. In this case there was a fancy well-documented 50th anniversary party feting the guy who created the color mauve. And I assume Garfield read that and did the rest of the digging himself. A lot of long quotes from letters. A somewhat dry story after the initial discovery. The book explains why it was a big deal but a lot of it is about the history of colors and dyes and him being forgotten by history

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.

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?

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.

The book that was suggested to me that the previous book was the sequel to (and I missed a novella in-between them). I liked the concept, that there are these stasis bubbles you can be in where the world ages around you but you remain the same age. People bop around “through” time by letting it pass on outside the bubbles, strategically. So they might advance to millennia in the future to avoid global cataclysms, but they can never go backwards. This is more of a cop story than the last one which was more post-apocalyptic in some ways. The cop (who showed up in the novella I did not read) was trying to figure out how someone had gotten, as the title says, marooned in the past. I liked it in some places, it dragged in others.

I had to go back and read this one so that I could read the second one (which I started before noticing it was part of a series). This is a classic novel from my high school years which has that adorable almost-there social sensibility (i.e. talks about racism but still employs things that are clearly now racist tropes, similar with sexism) surrounding a tale about what is essentially peace-through-facism and the ones who fought it. A little sleepy but a good read.

It’s hard to talk about this book without discussing where it does or does not go but I will say I was expecting it to be one sort of book and it turned out to be another. This story of a dead scientist found in the LHC tunnels had a great plot and super uneven pacing. It also had some expository devices which I didn’t really enjoy (i.e. some of the plot reveal takes place in a holiday play sort of format and I felt like I was in some sort of Shakespeare situation) but maybe they’re right for a different type of person. It nearly entirely takes place at CERN and there’s a lot of fun Swiss stuff and science-y stuff in it but ultimately it didn’t work for me as a novel, I was left at the end not sure if I had understood the plot or not.

I got this book from a local Little Free Bookshelf and it reminded me pleasantly of the brief period of time when I had a motorcycle and also of the positive and negative aspects of motorcycle ownership especially for a woman. I also did not know that the author had been married to an acquaintance of mine, so that was an odd little surprise. A lot of fun motorcycle stories, a little bit floridly told. If you like Moto Guzzis, this is the book for you.

There was so much going on in this book! I picked it up because I liked her other book on a different topic and this one is new. A man who is a ballet dancer immigrates to Mars as the Earth becomes uninhabitable. That’s a whole thing! He learns that people who are “Earthstrong” (i.e. born on Earth with more muscle mass and adapted to more gravity) are in a weird class of “dangerous” people and treated accordingly. Mars natives live in a genderless society where they’ve been genetically adapted to a planet that is dusty and cold. They are tall. They have musculature developed to the gravity. Then there is some palace-intrigue type stuff which is maybe the bulk of the book and I liked it. I figured out some of the conceits and not others. Also there are mammoths but not in a way that was goofy or felt out of place and shoehorned in. Quite good.

I could not remember as much of the previous book as I’d thought I had, but that was fine. This is a “some years later” version of the same world with much less multiversing and much more (by the author’s own admission, in the foreword) rage. It’s a poetic look at intense inequality as seen through the eyes of those who have less, as they interact (or remember, or try to make deals with) those who are more privileged and who have, perhaps, even less of a code of honor.

This is the second in a series. Two woman, a detective and a scholar, wind up solving mysteries that take place on a gas giant planet which has a lot of fascinating world building as you might expect. So there’s some really interesting description of how it all works, which is lovely, and a lot of tasty foods, but then one character is often anxiously ruminating about "defining the relationship"which is less fun to read but maybe good for some? I found the discussion of their relationship somewhat distracting but that may be because I related much more strongly with one of the two characters.

This is illustrated by Erica Henderson who did a terrific job with it and helped make it delightful. A fun romp through adventure and friendship after the (sort of) end of the world. A adorable talking dog, some nice nostalgia trips, and a story that keeps on going in plausible but not terrible complicated ways. Definitely for the younger crowd, it’s just complex enough without being mystifying.

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.

A great story about the quest for a bombmaker in 1880’s London, one who may have been a fancy watchmaker. And there are a few fancy watchmakers in town, one of whom is from a royal family in Japan and has some odd characteristics. Oh and Gilbert and Sullivan are nearby, and there is a clockwork octopus who steals socks. I’m not 100% sure I understood what was happening during this novel, but I enjoyed trying to figure it out. There’s a lot of great description, a bunch of characters who are flawed but compelling and a few women trying to do what is hard to do in old-time London. Ever so slightly magically realist in a way that I enjoyed.

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.

When Logan subtitles this book “the ecstatic skin of the earth” he means it in more of a reverential way. He’s an arborist and nature writer who wrote this gentle collection of essays reflecting on what we know about the soil we stand on, farm in, and walk through. Some of it contains lessons in history, some is more straightforward soil science, all of it is interesting to read and will make you look more at the world around you when you’re outdoors.

This is good like I thought it would be, the second in the Cal Hooper series about a retired American cop who moves to a small town in Ireland and learns about the ups and downs in a community of people who have all known each other forever. I didn’t know there was going to be a second one and was happy to see familiar faces when I started reading. The last one began with a secret. This one starts out with a scam. Figuring out exactly what the scam is, and then what to do about it, as Cal’s connection to the people and the land grows, is the trick. Oh, and it’s really hot out. This story is both timely and timeless and if you like French you’ll love this.

This is a graphic novel about three young women from Canada who visit New York City. They are all sort of friends in different ways but not all three friends together. Two of them hook up, causing a bunch of weird feelings. Lessons get learned, maybe. The Tamakis, as always, do wonderful graphic novels. The illustrations of this one are gorgeous, really lush and interesting. At the same time, the vagaries of young people still figuring it out and being kind of shitty to one another can be a hard story to tell and also to read.

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.

Ranjit Singh is a taxi driver, a Sikh former Indian Army captain now working in New York City. He hopes to have his teenage daughter stay (and maybe live) with him. Then he gets wrapped in some shit with the boss from his other job, the hair importer. It has to do with a woman who was a Bollywood star and now lives in NY doing... something. He has to clear his name and make it all work out. Been trying to branch out in my crime-solver reading and this was a great one, though I was sorry to find out that it was the second (and, I guess, last) in the series because now I know too much about how the first book goes but I do like the characters.

I grabbed this despite knowing I do not really enjoy the memoirs of awkward young women. This was on me. This is a well done rendition of an awkward young woman talking about her freshman year of college, a year in which nothing momentous really happens (by her own admission, in the afterword) and she talks about how it felt to her. If that is a thing you think you’d enjoy reading about, then you might like this. I thought it was going to be a somewhat different sort of book.

. 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.

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?

This is a HUGE (900+ page) graphic novel about the author’s experience getting therapy in anticipation of gender affirming treatment. During the course of therapy she found she had dissociative identity disorder and so her therapist postponed treatment while they worked that out. Her main therapist comes off pretty bad in this retelling (some pretty unethical stuff sometimes it’s not entirely clear what’s happening) and while things work out okay in the end, it’s tough sledding as a read, though well told.

Picked this up because I like Hirahara’s other books and there’s one in this series that involves a Japanese baseball player who plays for a California team. This is the first in that series. Mas Arai is a Japanese American Hiroshima survivor who, no surprise, has seen some shit. He’s settled into a quietish life as a gardener in Altadena with a set of friends and clients. It’s a nice life but trouble finds him and he needs to sort it out. There are some confusing parts (for me) involving people from his previous life who may or may not be becoming a problem in his current life. I liked the Ara character and will definitely read the next one of these.

This graphic novel discusses the author’s journey for both himself and the people around him as he works through his feelings and takes the steps to get gender affirming care as a young adult in the UK. Everyone winds up being supportive, but it took a while for some. Those folks are shown in before/after ways where you know they will come around so it makes it a little more okay to see them being non-supportive (or mainly just confused) earlier on. Some of the steps will be familiar (thoughts of “maybe I’m just a butch lesbian?” for example) and some are uniquely his. Really well drawn and well-told.

This is a decade-later sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, an exploration into what happened to a small Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario when... the lights go out. Now it’s ten years later, our crew have been hanging in there, but resources are getting scarcer and a few community members take a long journey to try to find an ancestral homeland they’ve never actually seen. A gentle story with a few terrifying moments. It takes a long time to get going and I didn’t mind the pace but it wasn’t entirely what I was expecting. So happy there was a sequel.

This book was illustrated by LeUyen Pham. I’m a Yang completionist so I picked this up from my library shelf. It’s a sweet story about a young Vietnamese woman who is trying to figure out her destiny in terms of love as she also puzzles out the complicated history of her parents' relationship (having grown up without a mother). Along the way she grows up, learns to lion dance (in both Chinese and Korean styles) and figures out who she is and what she wants. Well told, lovely book.

A book I found in a little free library. I did not need to be convinced about some of the positive “ways of seeing” when you look at things through an anarchistic lens (mutual aid, direct action, skepticism of hierarchy) but it’s fun to hear someone from Yale saying it. This book is a series of informal chapters using examples as a jumping off point. It’s more about the negative qualities of the state than the positive qualities of anarchism, and I certainly didn’t need to be convinced, but I’ll take it.

A mystery/cop procedural novel, sort of, which takes place on a gas giant planet that has been loosely colonized. There’s a lot of world building and a cop and a scholar who must combine forces to figure out how a person disappeared from a transportation platform at the end of the world. But they have some history which also needs to maybe be resolved and by the end of this (the beginning of a series) that starts to happen. I had a hard time visualizing some of this. It was clear the author had a pretty good idea of what it all looked like but never did. However, I really enjoyed the story and I’ll read the next one.

I picked this book up because of the riot of my favorite colors on the cover. It was a really well-done story about a few different Indian Americans, centered in Cleveland, and thinking about Indian American culture versus American culture and how people relate to one another and their own senses of self-identity both within cishet marriages and within gay culture. Starts off in a complex and conflicted place and smooths out over the course of the book. Ultimately a story about friendship(s) and how they work with a lot of different sorts of people.

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 poignant graphic novel about a young couple’s move to a tiny house in Central Idaho. They run a local movie house. They garden a lot. They learn about birds and trees and nature. They meet their neighbors. Then they decide to have a baby and have a soul search about how while they are *visiting* this culture, their child will grow up with it being *their* culture. And they leave. As someone who was that kid, and whose parents didn’t leave, I read it with fascination.

This book starts out dark and gradually gets less dark. It’s about a woman who witnesses a crime involving a family member and winds up stuck in a series of backwards time loops trying to figure out how to stop it from happening. Each step helps her figure out a bit more. I don’t want to give a lot away but it’s very well laid out. It’s a roller coaster of a novel. I didn’t really know where it was going to wind up until it was almost there. Very well done.

I have a few categories of books which I love and “Someone tells me more about art theft” is one of them. Finkel also wrote a really good book about the North Pond Hermit which was interesting while also not being tawdry or sensational. This book is about an audacious European art thief who lived in an attic at his mom’s place surrounded by dozens of valuable artworks that he brazenly stole over the course of years. It’s really convoluted and I enjoyed the “how I got these details” recounting at the end almost as much as I liked the book. A lot of good research leads to this tale well-told.

Don’t remember how I found this book but I had enjoyed Chen’s earlier book about superheroes, We Could Be Heroes (Chen loves Bowie which also shows up in this book a tiny bit). This one is a “How do we get out of the time loop, but also we’ve grown closer while caught in the time loop....” sort of book. More romance than science, and plausible romance at that, but not really a romance novel per se. I really enjoyed reading this though I wish there was a little more wrap-up to the ending. As it was, I’m not entirely sure what happened.

This novella by Ray Nayler will be hugely appreciated by folks who liked The Mountain in the Sea. That one looked at octopus consciousness, this one looks at (potential, possible?) mammoth consciousness and goes a bit into some of those “We’re going to bring back mammoths from their old DNA” stories that have been shuttling around. But with a twist you both don’t expect and also don’t entirely understand at first. Started off a bit confusing but went a bunch of places I enjoyed.

From what I gather, this is one book which is assembled from a few short stories that take place in the same general place. It’s a really engaging YA-ish novel about a young woman who grows up on a “seastead” an area in international waters off of the coast of California that a bunch of libertarian types have grown their own societies in. It highlights a lot of the pitfalls of this sort of no-government-with-technology setup. You get a lot of what is essentially slavery along with gross things like skin farms and extreme class divides. Interesting without being too didactic. The image on the cover didn’t seem to be something actually in the book

This is one of those lesser-known books about people who work in mortuary/funeral services. This one is by a guy who worked in the family funeral services growing up and now runs his own business in rural Michigan. He is also a poet, so it’s a little more ornately written than others. I sent the guy an email about a typo on his website (and to say I liked the book) and got a charming email back from him. You’d probably like this if you like the genre generally.

This was a book with a very interesting premise--aliens dispassionately walk among us trying to accomplish their own goals and one of them has to do with radio waves--which gets hampered by too many real-world analogues to things like Scientology and Art Bell’s radio show. I enjoyed the book for what it was, I just felt it didn’t need to hew so closely to things that already exist in the real world. A lot of cool dog characters, if that sort of thing is your thing.

A sequel to another book from a magic-adjacent world where people’s jobs are to oversee that the magic doesn’t get too out of control. Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby (that name!) is a new member of this Auditor group, keeping things stable in Boston’s Department of Unorthodox Affairs. A bunch of stuff goes wrong. There’s a fair amount of ‘Our exhausted protagonist tries to hold on just a bit longer so that things don’t go totally wrong.’ Liked, did not love.

This scifi book touches on some pretty dark topics like child soldiers, fascism, and eugenics. It has an interesting throughline story and framework that, combined with a lack of gory detail, make it a great way to engage with these topics, for me at least. It mostly takes place on a rebel microplanet as one group of teen soldiers graduates and receives their adult assignments continuing to fight for what amounts to human supremacy. But things don’t go as planned.

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.

We all know about Ponzi. Fewer know about Leo Koretz, who maintained a decades-long Ponzi-like scheme from Chicago, selling shares in a non-existent real estate and oil venture supposedly in Panama. He swindled his family, he swindled his friends. He died in prison. I enjoyed this book, the author clearly did a lot of research. It suffers a bit from extensive quoting so it feels like every third sentence is in the voice of a different newspaper. Some of the details feel extraneous-but-true like what people were eating at a certain dinner or who was in attendance at various functions. Jobb does a good job at contextualizing what was happening within the other news at the time, so you hear a bit about Al Capone, Chicago mayors and the Leopold and Loeb trial.

My library had two copies of this and I got one. It is both an amazing piece of writing and a painful read. We follow the story (of post-mortem plagiarism, and the snowballing mess it creates) from the inside of the head of an unlikable character who is just self-aware enough to know what she is doing is wrong but not wise enough to stop digging. And she’s a white lady so it’s wincey watching more things work out for her than they should, the support network of awfulness that helps her maintain her weird and bad takes on things.

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.

Bell grew up with a White mom who was always getting mad at people who were racist to her son, storming in to the school to yell at people, for example. His folks were divorced and Bell also had a Black dad who didn’t really talk to him about racism. He experienced a lot of shitty treatment from classmates, cops, and authority figures and discusses how he grew up learning to stick up for himself but also trying to determine what the “right” way was to deal with racism and awful people, how that affected his professional and personal life, and how he talked to his own kids.

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 am not great at tree identification. I mentioned this to a friend. She suggested this book which is so much more than just tree id-ing, it’s more like “Can you tell what went on in this forest before you got here?” puzzles which come with a lot of explanations about forest ecology. You see a picture of a part of a forest and then that chapter is about what you can learn from the picture. You learn about things like blowdowns and pest invasions, fire damage and beaver signs. I’m not sure my tree ID will be any better but I feel like I know the forest better.

A cute, fun romp predicated on the idea “What if all the parameters that run our lives are in a big shell script somewhere and could be adjusted?” This includes things like not only where you are, but when. You can probably see where this is going. It’s a fun doesn’t-take-itself-too-seriously story about wizardry and Medieval England. Despite almost no female characters (the one that is prominent is badass) I really enjoyed this. Fun and funny.

Another book in the Rivers of London series, this one had to do with a large council high rise and some weird goings on with some of the earlier characters you’ve grown to like. There is a lot, like more than the usual amount, of destruction and chaos. A little less “hanging out in the Folly making fun of Molly’s food.” The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger which I did not mind since I am enjoying this series. Am curious to see how, or if, they resolve it.

This was a slender book which I finished late at night, more of a long short story really. It’s a fun short romp that readers of Sourdough will likely enjoy. I picked it up because someone said they’d enjoyed “Sloan’s latest” and I think maybe this wasn’t it but I was glad I read it anyhow.

Deb doesn’t just understand infrastructure--how it works, how it got built, what it needs, why it’s important--but she has VISION. This not only a book about what we have, it’s a book about where, if we care about a more just world for everyone, we can go. She positions herself as both an engineering professor but also a woman of color, living in a world where many people don’t have her level of privilege and access. It’s a surprisingly hopeful take. Read it.

I’d been eagerly awaiting this book. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t quite the Murderbot book I was expecting. May have been a me problem, it was a long time since I’d read the last one and I had to re-learn who the characters were and this novel seemed short on “get to know the characters” stuff. I did talk to other Murderbot fans who has the same general issue, this book felt more like the second half to the last book and not a standalone novel. A lot of Murderbot’s inner mind, some of their relationship with ART, the usual clusterfuck on a remote planet.