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.