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.