This is the final book in this series. No love to an author who writes two series and culminates each one with a book with “Last” in the title (i.e. I took the wrong one home from the library at first). This wraps up sort of like you think it will. A little pat and a little zipzip for a 15-series book, but overall for people who like murder mysteries and especially a female protagonist and complex humans, it was a great read. The mystery itself is almost secondary because you know how these things go and you’re just waiting to see what resolution Griffiths chooses for the arcs of her characters.

This was the Vermont Reads book for 2025. Many of the Vermont Reads books have been pretty heavy. Someone assured me this was not like that, even though it deals with catastrophic climate change (as in: there is no more Florida) topics. I thought this was a good book but it was also pretty grim. So many of the characters die or go missing. The main theme is that we need to start living in and preparing for the future world, not the past one we are already missing, but also managing the grief around that. Masterful but upsetting.

I have a big porch Someone gave this to me. I thought “Oh neat, like my porch” but this is very specifically a book about SOUTHERN porches which means it has a certain vibe to it that is at once familiar (Faulkner, Lee, Wolfe, Morrison) but not what I was looking for. It’s a nice commonplace book with lit excerpts about porches (Southern porches) alongside some nice photography of various kinds of porches. There’s also an intro by Reynolds Price who I had not heard of.

Ben Passmore is a Black anarchist and graphic novelist. This book uses the framing of his mostly-absent dad coming back around and trying to school the slightly-politically apathetic Passmore about the history of Black resistance in the US, and Black armed resistance in particular. No punches pulled. The cops are drawn as pigs, a lot of it takes place in and around the carceral state, all the protagonists are complicated. I knew some of this, not all of it.

From the new shelf at my library, written by the CEO of a non-profit company which supports moving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities into supported living situations outside of institutions. Obviously he’s got an angle. This book explains both what his company does (and how) but also why it’s the RIGHT thing to do. Fewer stories from actual clients than I’d like, but still good overall.

This is the penultimate book in this series and the plot points are coming in fast and furious. There’s not really even that much archaeology in this one. Covid is really center stage and just ramping up. Ruth gets a new neighbor and finds out some interesting facts about her. Then there’s a weird connection between a string of deaths that doesn’t even get explained that much. I liked it because I’m mostly here for the people but a bit thin on plot.

Illustrated by Rafael Rosado, this is a sweet YA graphic novel about Ignacio, a kid whose parents immigrated from Colombia, trying to navigate being in high school (and Spanish class) with young women who he suddenly has an interest in, and also his jerk older brother. He connects with the spirit of his Colombian grandfather, who mostly helps him with some of this. This book touches on so many useful concepts (various Latinx identities, DACA, a little bit of US politics) and has a good heart at its core.

No idea where I found this one. It’s a fun book about a disaffected young woman, Alex, stuck with her shitty family looking for a job, any job. And she finds one... working for a genie in a retail kiosk at the mall. He’s selling wishes which, of course, gets complicated really fast. She sort of wishes to go away to college and have a less shitty family. He doesn’t know much about the human world, and she’s got big dreams about leaving this all behind. Better than it seemed like it would be, and much funnier.

It’s hard when you don’t like someone’s deeply personal memoir, but I didn’t. The front cover of this book made it seem like it was about snacks and... er... joy. The back cover makes it more clear that it’s about the author’s lifelong struggle with some sort of disordered eating, an unhelpful bad relationship with a foodie who is always pressuring her to be different from how she is, and a confusing relationship with both her parents and her body. A lot of it was told in a roundabout non-linear style so I wasn’t even sure what was going on a lot of the time. It starts off talking about her doing some form of burlesque which seems like it might be fun, but that’s not revisited until the last few pages of the book. The author thanks her therapists among other people in the acknowledgments at the end, but it’s not really clear how she’s gotten to the place where she is and therapy isn’t mentioned at all in the course of the book (despite me the reader thinking "This person should try therapy").

I knew this book wasn’t going to be great. But I got a used Apple Watch (my partner has one, he likes it, was I just reflexively disliking it?) and I wanted to learn about it without watching a video or reading AI slop websites. It’s an older watch, I figured an older book would be okay. I learned HTML from a Dummies guide, how bad could it be? Well, THEY MISSPELLED THE WORD WATCH, for one. The book had tons of typos, the kind spellchecker should fix. A lot of the text felt copied straight from Apple’s marketing materials, talking about what features would be coming soon. A lot of awful “jokes.” I learned about maybe four features and otherwise feel dumber for having read it.