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.