This is a long prose poem, a tribute to space and the people who go there. It nominally has characters--four astronauts and two cosmonauts, two women, four men--inhabiting a space station as it goes around the world sixteen times. Nothing happens, there is no real plot. This is either up your alley or not. The writing is lovely and evocative, the “this is what space is like” stuff felt true. There’s talk of space euphoria, of clogged sinuses, of who has to clean the bathroom. I kept waiting for it to “get going,” there was talk of a parental death, a destructive typhoon visible from their station, and it never really did. Not really what I was looking for, but a good book.

Been meaning to read this book for a long time. Erica Hall owns Mule Design, a design company notable for keeping it real and really good design. This book talks about just how much research you need to do when you are working on a design project, which kinds are good, which kinds are bad, and which kinds (surveys) can be good but are also tricksy. It’s very readable, often funny, and will teach you some things. This was the “shitty pulp edition” and I love it, the only downside to this edition is that some of the images in it are sort of blurry like a newspaper photo, not a big deal.

A compelling story about menopausal-age women who are... somewhat witchy. They don’t want to walk the path the world has made for them. They live in an island community off the coast of New York where billionaires vacation and are also (surprise!) acting like total privileged assholes. Bit of a content warning on this one since the story has to do with a lot of abused teenage girls (though there isn’t graphic abuse in the story) and the bulk of the story is about trying to make things right. There are a lot of terrible men in this book but they tend to get their comeuppance.

A good next installment in this set of mysteries about a forensic anthropologist who had a baby with a detective who is still married to his wife. A combination of mystery-solving and interpersonal relationship solving. I like the mystery stuff a lot better than the other stuff but it’s still a nice readable and not-too-complex set of novels with a very likable (to me) main character who is a single mom who does her best and doesn’t much care what people think.

A graphic novel about a dancing school in Bucharest and the young women who are trying to figure things out in their lives (mainly relationships with other young women or not-so-young women). Beautifully drawn and very relatable and brought me back to my short time in Bucharest in the nineties. Ultimately, like many of these graphic novels, it’s a story of friendship and growing up and learning to set boundaries and get comfortable with yourself.

A memoir of a sort by Jon King from Gang of Four covering his early life and the early years of the band through their first four albums and their ascension to popularity and US/UK tours. King has a chatty and funny style and this book is super readable, doesn’t feel like a tell-all, and has some nifty photos. It wraps up at a dark time in the band’s history which is too bad (since the band continued on and worked some stuff out) but overall a great punk memoir.

This was a fun one to ILL at the library. My director: “Should I be worried?” The story is about a mysterious school in an unknown location where people receive schooling in the fine arts of undetectable murder (of one’s employer). It follows three students through their experiences at the school. The important catch is that if you don’t accomplish your “thesis” you will, yourself, be killed. Written by Rupert “Pina Colada Song” Holmes. It’s a fun, if goofy, read.

Even though this book takes place in rural NH, it had a very Vermont-y feel to it. A family with generations of single moms with single daughters, all of whom are witchy in some way, live in a farm doing their thing until a tragedy strikes. They are blamed, and the family fractures and things unravel. Can Lizzy, the title character, pull it all together, and does she even want to or would she prefer to go back to her more normal and anonymous life in New York? This book deals with some pretty difficult things but it has a calm and peaceful vibe and I enjoyed getting to know the family and the small town.

This is a short sort of bland mystery about a couple from New York who buys a house in Vermont (he got a job with the Forest Service, she was hoping for a job at the Shelburne Museum which fell through) and come to town like fish out of water only to discover a dead man in their well! They can only move into the house once the murder is solved, so they apply themselves to it, driving around in their Smart car like n00bs, and figure it out. Solidly okay. It was a quick read and I’ll probably try the second one to see if the series improves.

A tedious retelling of a dramatic shipwreck and the very involved project to locate and salvage the gold from the shipwreck led by one “mad genius” type guy who sounds like he is very extra. There is a staggering amount of detail in parts and then a lot of hand wavey “And then they got the rest of the gold” at the end which felt very weird considering how much detail there was in the beginning. Looking up the story on Wikipedia, it seems that the mad genius went on the run rather than pay his creditors and investors. That’s the book I’d like to read.

Erosion brought on by climate change has revealed six bodies formerly buried near but not IN the sea. Are they really old, only sort of old, or not old at all? Enter forensic anthropologist Ruth Galloway who has been seconded to the local police to help figure it out. The mystery in this one is almost secondary to the character development (Galloway has had a child that she is raising as a single mom) but there are still some interesting historical aspects. There were a lot of characters with generic names that I had a slightly difficult time keeping straight.

If you’re looking for a lightish book about book banning with a bunch of easily-defeated straw man book banners, this is the book for you. It’s simple, a bit funny, and does its best to describe just how communities can get to the point where they want to restrict people’s access to information, and the knock-on effects of those restrictions. Takes place in Georgia. Did not love this one but I liked it well enough.

This is mostly not a memoir about this man’s body. It’s a series of vignettes, in no particular order, about the life he’s led which got him to where he is now. He’s a guy who has sort of lumped through life. Had some challenges like Crohn’s disease and weirdnesses at art school, trying to make and keep friends, meet women. He paid his way through some of this doing painting at a wooden shoe factory. It’s disjointed at times but a good read overall.

A dense book with two parallel stories: one about an older female historian nearing retirement and dealing with infirmities who finds a hidden cache of documents, the other about a Jewish scribe in 1650s London, struggling to survive as the plague approaches. The historian is joined by a young American Jewish man working on his PhD. A LOT of interesting and well-told Jewish history (from Portugal, Spain, the UK, and Israel) and a story line which keeps you engaged.

This is the second book in a series I started a while ago. It’s one of those “All the books will be at the library” types of series, a straightforward--forensic archaeologist and cops encounter weird stuff on the salt marshes and need both of their skill sets to investigate-- thing. The archaeologist is a middle-aged Vera-style frumpy no-nonsense woman who, in this book, is pregnant and so there’s that subtext as well. There’s some interesting delving into UK and Roman history. A solid read.

Kevin brought a stinky egg to school and now everyone is calling him Eggboy. One of his old friends isn’t talking to him. His other friends are just as nerdy as he is. His grandma from the old country has moved in with their family because his dad left. His seamstress mom is stressed. There’s a school field trip. It’s a tough time to be Kevin. This is a great graphic novel, so evocatively done. Kevin feels real, proud to be nerdy but still trying to figure it all out.

In a small community in Scotland where everyone knows everyone, one of the families is planning a party. We meet two extended families (the laird and the other his childhood friend - both now grown with families) and the folks in their orbits. It’s mostly well-off people and their trials and tribulations as they get ready in the months preceding a very big shindig. I really enjoyed getting to know some of the ins and outs of rural Scotland, at once both familiar and not.

A graphic novel for tweens about a girl going to a new school who wants to do math club but winds up in swim club. She doesn’t know how to swim and eventually learns to swim and learns to be part of a team. This book touches on the racist history of Black people being denied access to pools and beaches (and offers further reading on the topic in the end notes) though it’s not the central point of the story which is about teamwork and overcoming fears.

A book that is about a lot of stressful stuff--a bank robbery, some bad relationships, people with complicated lives--but you can see partway through that it’s heading somewhere sweet and gentle. A little less relentless than A Man Called Ove (if you read that one) but the same type of writing. I enjoyed trying to figure out where it might go. Don’t let the title make you think it might just be a lot of people being nervous and upset. There’s some of that but not too much.

This book was suggested by my librarian after I returned “Big Jim and the White Boy.” This is another Jim-centered reimagining of Huckleberry Finn. My enjoyment of this was only marred by thinking “What is wrong with me that I haven’t read anything by Percival Everett before?” Really well-told, a mixture of his relationship with Huck but also the US’s relationship to slavery and enslaved people just before the Civil War. Hard to read in parts, as you would expect; more humor than you might expect.

A world basically the same as our own except there’s an app where you can hire a person to play a role for you in your life. Usually this is just “Attend a wedding/funeral/party with me” but sometimes it’s “Help me raise my young child, come every Thursday and pretend you’re her dad” Told through the eyes of the stranger/Dad who has his own story that only slowly gets told. I liked it, weird and a little funny with some empathy and some “wtf?”

Kathy lived in Bangkok with a Thai mom and an American (and older) dad. Her family is quiet. They do a lot of things separately. They take summer trips to Maine. Kathy doesn’t feel at home in Thailand OR the US and this graphic novel takes place mainly as she goes to her first year of summer camp in Maine and tries to figure out her family, and herself. I liked the storytelling, and there was always a lot going on in every panel. It didn’t feel like the usual introvert’s angsty memoir.

This book was illustrated by Koren Shadmi. A short graphic novel about the rise of video games and who really deserved the credit for them, a tale about Nolan Bushnell (Atari, Chuck E. Cheese) and Ralph Baer (Magnavox Odyssey, Simon). I didn’t know much about this history and liked learning about it. Each man wound up with some credit. The story is great, though told in a slightly weird style with equally not-that-engaging (to me) graphics. A quick read if you’re into the topic.

This was probably a great story IF you had read The Lunar Chronicles series which it is based off of. Instead we got a whole host of characters at the beginning and a lot of unstated motivations which were opaque to me. Well-illustrated and lively, but I couldn’t keep track of the people and places and when I was halfway through it and still not tracking, I decided it was not for me. Nothing wrong with it, it was just made for people who know the series.

A “based on true stories” tale of the friendship between a Sephardic man (Papoo, a first generation Jewish immigrant) and a Japanese businessman, Sam Akiyama, who form an alliance when Sam gets sent to an internment camp. This is all told through the eyes of Papoo’s grandson, who only learned about this story after his grandfather had died. It all takes place in Seattle, so it’s extra interesting for people who are familiar with the area.

This book was illustrated by Marcus Kwame Anderson. It’s a re-telling of the story of Huck Finn but centering Jim and making his story his own, not written by someone informed by all the racism of the time and told by a white man. It’s the 1800s so there’s still a lot of gnarly shit going down but the author and illustrator do a great job showing you another way this story could be told and there are ample notes and reading lists in the back. A quick read and pretty accessible to all kinds of readers.

I had to interlibrary loan this book from Colorado! This is the six-years-later sequel to the first Rabbi Vivian book about a lesbian rabbi in Providence trying to work with her congregation to bring more justice into the world. This one deals with a hurricane (and citywide preparations led by Rabbi Vivian’s partner) as well as the launch of an autonomous robot which, for money-raising reasons, is also having its AI shared with Israel. Written in 2023, hits a bit different in 2025 as far as the Israel stuff goes, but still a very good read

An excellent book highlighting the range of Native Americans doing comedy and the challenges they face, from overt racism, to large amounts traveling, to trying to make jokes about the grim history of colonization, residential schooling, land theft and massacres. Each chapter is an anecdote which builds upon the general theme though the sequence is a bit all over the place. Some standout names who you may have heard of like Charlie Hill and Will Rogers (and attendant controversies) and some new names you’d like to know like The 1491’s.

Another epic tale from Richard Powers. This one appears to be about friendships and class and the competitiveness of young people, the differing trajectories of lives. The kid from the poor Black neighborhood and the kid who grew up privileged but also with parents who kind of hated each other. It’s also about the way the world is mostly ocean and the complex ecosystem that exists there mostly unseen. There’s a woman who likes to go scuba diving who figures prominently as a bit of a third character. But it’s also about AI and there are about two sentences where you realize, you might realize, that the plot is different than you expected or thought it was. And I had all sorts of weird feelings about that. I don’t know what they call it when the book turns out to have a large part of it which seems true at the time but then is shown (maybe) not be true? This is one of those.

Lily is a high school senior who sees a newspaper ad for a San Francisco club with a male impersonator and starts to have some new feelings. She has a friend from school she thinks she can go with. Complications are that Lily is from Chinatown and her family is very traditional and will not understand. And it’s during the Red Scare so there is an awful lot of pressure to not attract attention, pressure that comes from family and from friends. And maybe her friend is more than a friend. The author’s afterword showed how much research she did for this YA coming of age novel and it shows.

I occasionally get books from Library Thing’s Early Reviewers program. Free books in exchange for an honest review. This book’s blurb did not match what I found inside the book, or maybe I got the blurb wrong. The author wants to talk about the idea of being a blessing, of oneg, of embodying the idea of joy through being a conduit (somewhat) for the divine. But it’s VERY Bible-heavy and Israel-heavy and thus not right for this secular pro-Palestine Jewish person.

Ted Kooser was getting cancer treatment and had turned a corner in a positive way. His doctor told him to exercise and avoid the sun so he took walks by his home in Nebraska in the early mornings and wrote short poems also mailed to his friend Jim Harrison. They take place every day and discuss usually the things that he sees. This collection spans December through March and was so familiar to me, living through my own winter both in the weather and at large. Some lovely observations and elegant turns of phrase which stuck with me. I sent Kooser and email thanking him for writing these and got a very nice note back.

This is a very sweet set of gentle vignettes about people who are living unfulfilled lives in various ways. They take different paths but wind up at the community center’s library where an odd librarian gives them some reading suggestions and a small felted item. They each view this librarian in slightly different ways which reveals something about their characters. These things help them get unstuck. The vignettes overlap barely but subtly in fun little ways. Anyone who has done library work will enjoy these calm stories that go good directions. I was told later that books like this, with gentle themes and sort of soft approaches are called “cat books” and that makes a whole lot of sense to me. I’ll seek more of them out.

A story place in a world where magic is real but restricted. That restriction is unequally enforced along racial lines in some parts of the country including where the book takes place. A group of mostly women and girls from many backgrounds (queer/non, disabled/non, trans/cis, Black and Choctaw and Chinese American) compete in underground broom racing to help raise much needed cash. There is a lot of supportive nurturing in this one, about people being able to make their own choices even in the face of a lot of pressure. A balm

This book has a well-crafted plot, a lot of interesting female and NB characters, and is a non-stop sufferfest which I should have guessed from the title and somehow not only decided to read it but decided to finish it. The author admits in the afterword that she was “going through some stuff” and I think that shows in the story, no one emerges unscathed. One of those “this is probably a great book for someone else” novels. Approach with caution.

This is probably a teen/tween level graphic novel about a young bi goth woman who has a family situation that isn’t great (overworked mom, absent dad) which leads her to seek connection with people who may not have her best interests at heart. A guy with a girlfriend gives her a lot of attention. A teacher gives her a copy of Lolita, sends inappropriate texts. She knows there are issues but not how to talk about them. The situation(s) work out ultimately, but its a real-seeming conflict.

A book I liked okay. I’m not really a fantasy person; I like some and I don’t like others. This, at its heart, is a mystery story. Or, rather, a few mysteries. The world described is interesting and somewhat fantastical with no modern tech and with recognizable elements; a city under siege from unseen beings. A maybe-autistic detective and her maybe-dyslexic assistant have to figure out a puzzling set of murders. I liked the world, but wasn’t compelled by the mystery and the whole book felt grimdark in a way that was ultimately a bit of a downer.

This was both delightful and also a little all over the place. Which makes sense, there are a lot of different parts to RPGs (war games, role playing, D&D, fan groups, theater, figurine painting) but I was thinking it might be a bit more linear and in some cases had trouble keeping track. The author and illustrator each came to RPGs from different avenues (and are themselves in parts of the book) which made it more enjoyable.

Raymond Ditmars was one of the early founders of the Bronx Zoo and nuts about reptiles and other animals. This is a book he wrote in 1935 which shows its age (Ditmars was not entirely sold on evolution for example, also he was racist towards people in other countries when he deigned to mention them) but is a fun read otherwise for some of his experiences dealing with the complexities of zoos, animals, and international travel so long ago. A few dull interludes about the weather towards the end seemed out of place.

This was a nice light story about a woman who lives in a flat in London and one day she comes home from a night out to find that she has... a husband who has appeared in her flat (complete with retconned history). Weirder still, when he goes into the attic to fetch something, a different husband comes down with a new history that everyone but her remembers. She has to manage this situation as best she can, keeping some husbands for a while and turning some back immediately, learning a bit about herself in the process. It gets weird at the end but overall a fun story.

This book was dark, not quite too dark for me but close. It takes place in a near future pandemic-ravaged dystopia where some people are immune from diseases for reasons no one knows. These “hardy” genes are sought after and one way to make income is to sell your genetic material. Our female protagonist, who has a very flat affect, does this and things go in a weird way. There are an awful lot of really hard things and a grim resignation to the way things are. With a more emotive narrator this would have been unreadable. As it was, it was tough but good.

This is a graphic memoir about Deborah (Jung-Jin) Lee a Korean American young woman who is trying to muddle her way through high school while dealing with school and family expectations, bullies and racists, complicated friendships, and an abusive parent. She attempts suicide, she slowly crawls out of the hole she was in and, like many of these stories, she realizes there’s a bigger world out there once she gets out of high school and away from her family. Beautifully drawn.

This book reads like it was written by someone with a PhD and sure enough that’s what it was. It’s a “hopepunk” story about a future world ravaged by climate change and people trying desperately to create enough sustainable energy to power the planet. But something’s affecting the AI-managed power grid, and power engineer Lucia Ramirez is determined to figure out what is going on. A lot of explications of various energy options, wonky but ultimately a good story.

A regency period graphic novel about three young people who are getting close to coming of age where they have to figure out what their plan is. They are all expected to marry (a good match) and one of them does not quite feel that is the path they want, that being a recency woman at ALL is not the path they want. There is a lot of discussion of class and societal expectations as well as the usual regency “smoldering looks” and missed connection types of interactions. Better than I was expecting.

Claire is a kid who gets the “Are you a boy or a girl?” question a lot. They were raised Catholic and get a lot of bad attitude from family and most of the kids at school. They develop a drinking problem and wind up in youth rehab likely related to these things. Rehab works for them, and they meet other people there who have similar emotions, if not backstories. This is MUCH more of a story about rehab than a story about figuring out your gender but it is both. It’s raw and real and tough at times, well told if sometimes a little overly vague about things.

This is a fairly academic book about classification as infrastructure and it looks at a few specific instances (international death classification, tuberculosis classification, new nursing tasks trackers) and the way they both show and shape culture. It’s heady and interesting at the same time as it’s uneven and a little slow going. Most of the chapters were great but one in particular seemed out of place. The writers of the book have big vocabularies which was great but sometimes off-putting. This book gave me some new ways to think about edge cases in classification systems and the social assumptions that surround them.

I enjoyed this tale of, what it says, futuristic violence for its humor and curious world building. The future contains Blink an always-streaming network that everyone contributes to and people are always doing stunts to get more cred there. Zoey grew up in a trailer park, turns out her dad was one of the wealthiest men in Utah. He dies and she has a quest to deal with, one that isn’t entirely welcome. And she has all the resources in the world at her disposal. The author voice shines through as very white and male and not particularly socially conscious which is a thing you may not mind but I found sort of grating over time, especially with a female protagnoist.

How did I wind up with this book? Unclear. It’s an unthrilling tale of scientific intrigue (did someone cheat at science to make it seem more like their lab found what might be a cure for cancer?) which felt as slow-motion as the process itself. What saved it, for me, was that it takes place in and around where my partner works, real life places that I’ve been which FELT real. That said, if I read one more book by a Harvard grad talking at length about Cambridge.... A good book, maybe not a great book.

This was a sequel to a book I enjoyed. It’s a YA-ish tale about a young poor Black woman (in Scotland) who is trying to keep a caravan roof over her family’s head while also learning more about how to do magic. And this magic is not just the “ghostwalking” that she learned from her grandma, something we learn that “real” magicians don’t even consider magic. There’s a cool weird library and a lot of other interesting scenery and ultimately there is a narrative about class and who belongs. I was concerned the sequel might not be as good as the first but it was.

Book 1: The Midnight Club. What if there was a way to see the future when you were younger, or see the past when you were older? And what if there was a thing in your collective past which made you really really want to do those things and maybe see if you could get a better outcome? This is about a group of friends who went to college in Vermont in the late 80s and who get back together there in 2014, looking for answers. It’s about the fallibility of memory and the curse of nostalgia. I liked it and the Vermont-y parts seemed real.