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.

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 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.

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.