An Argentine crime novel about a frustrated architect who is working in a dead end job with a few other co-workers. Over the course of the novel you realize they are bound together by a crime. I had thought the fact that this was a “crime novel” meant it was a mystery/cop story and this is not that. Ultimately I disliked the main character and the way he was objectifying the women around him. You’re supposed to, but it still didn’t work for me. This book was also read in translation and I kept feeling that some of the verbal tics of the characters were supposed to be more meaningful but I wasn’t sure how.

When Logan subtitles this book “the ecstatic skin of the earth” he means it in more of a reverential way. He’s an arborist and nature writer who wrote this gentle collection of essays reflecting on what we know about the soil we stand on, farm in, and walk through. Some of it contains lessons in history, some is more straightforward soil science, all of it is interesting to read and will make you look more at the world around you when you’re outdoors.

This is good like I thought it would be, the second in the Cal Hooper series about a retired American cop who moves to a small town in Ireland and learns about the ups and downs in a community of people who have all known each other forever. I didn’t know there was going to be a second one and was happy to see familiar faces when I started reading. The last one began with a secret. This one starts out with a scam. Figuring out exactly what the scam is, and then what to do about it, as Cal’s connection to the people and the land grows, is the trick. Oh, and it’s really hot out. This story is both timely and timeless and if you like French you’ll love this.

This is a graphic novel about three young women from Canada who visit New York City. They are all sort of friends in different ways but not all three friends together. Two of them hook up, causing a bunch of weird feelings. Lessons get learned, maybe. The Tamakis, as always, do wonderful graphic novels. The illustrations of this one are gorgeous, really lush and interesting. At the same time, the vagaries of young people still figuring it out and being kind of shitty to one another can be a hard story to tell and also to read.

I’ve liked Winters' other books but this one (where all the narrative characters are female or non-binary) just fell flat for me. Great plot, interesting concept but the women just didn’t feel like women, they felt like television’s idea of women. Like, if you have a character who is a domestic abuse survivor and then she gets killed in an unrelated (and ugly) way, you’ve decided she is a plot device and that’s a very specific authorial choice. It seemed strange and all the female characters seemed two dimensional. The non-binary character also turned out to be a plucky smartie but also they were treated in a not-particularly-interesting way. I loved the plot of this book, it was inventive and different, but the way it was handled I just couldn’t get behind.

Ranjit Singh is a taxi driver, a Sikh former Indian Army captain now working in New York City. He hopes to have his teenage daughter stay (and maybe live) with him. Then he gets wrapped in some shit with the boss from his other job, the hair importer. It has to do with a woman who was a Bollywood star and now lives in NY doing... something. He has to clear his name and make it all work out. Been trying to branch out in my crime-solver reading and this was a great one, though I was sorry to find out that it was the second (and, I guess, last) in the series because now I know too much about how the first book goes but I do like the characters.

I grabbed this despite knowing I do not really enjoy the memoirs of awkward young women. This was on me. This is a well done rendition of an awkward young woman talking about her freshman year of college, a year in which nothing momentous really happens (by her own admission, in the afterword) and she talks about how it felt to her. If that is a thing you think you’d enjoy reading about, then you might like this. I thought it was going to be a somewhat different sort of book.

. What if any door were every door? A compelling story about a world mostly like ours except there is a set of magical books that have special powers for those who have them. The Book of Pain, the Book of Joy, the Book of Memories and so forth. Cassie gets given the Book of Doors and discovers that there is a huge shady underworld of people who want these books and will spare no expense to get them. And of course there is a hidden library. There are some pretty evil evil people and that was a difficult part of this, for me. Just the right amount of sentiment and an interesting story.

A “back on my bullshit” kind of book, a space thriller about a luxury hotel on a space station and things that go terribly wrong. Mainly taking place during a very tense 24 hours. I really liked the ideas in it. However, a lot of the explication was predicated on the idea of you understanding the layout of this place. Despite the book’s map, it never really clicked for me so it was confusing and also stressful. The narrative always felt macho despite the female lead, a lot of gratuitous violence that seemed less and less explicable as the book went on. Maybe a good book for someone else?

This is a HUGE (900+ page) graphic novel about the author’s experience getting therapy in anticipation of gender affirming treatment. During the course of therapy she found she had dissociative identity disorder and so her therapist postponed treatment while they worked that out. Her main therapist comes off pretty bad in this retelling (some pretty unethical stuff sometimes it’s not entirely clear what’s happening) and while things work out okay in the end, it’s tough sledding as a read, though well told.

Picked this up because I like Hirahara’s other books and there’s one in this series that involves a Japanese baseball player who plays for a California team. This is the first in that series. Mas Arai is a Japanese American Hiroshima survivor who, no surprise, has seen some shit. He’s settled into a quietish life as a gardener in Altadena with a set of friends and clients. It’s a nice life but trouble finds him and he needs to sort it out. There are some confusing parts (for me) involving people from his previous life who may or may not be becoming a problem in his current life. I liked the Ara character and will definitely read the next one of these.

This graphic novel discusses the author’s journey for both himself and the people around him as he works through his feelings and takes the steps to get gender affirming care as a young adult in the UK. Everyone winds up being supportive, but it took a while for some. Those folks are shown in before/after ways where you know they will come around so it makes it a little more okay to see them being non-supportive (or mainly just confused) earlier on. Some of the steps will be familiar (thoughts of “maybe I’m just a butch lesbian?” for example) and some are uniquely his. Really well drawn and well-told.

This is a decade-later sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, an exploration into what happened to a small Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario when... the lights go out. Now it’s ten years later, our crew have been hanging in there, but resources are getting scarcer and a few community members take a long journey to try to find an ancestral homeland they’ve never actually seen. A gentle story with a few terrifying moments. It takes a long time to get going and I didn’t mind the pace but it wasn’t entirely what I was expecting. So happy there was a sequel.

A book I found in a little free library. I did not need to be convinced about some of the positive “ways of seeing” when you look at things through an anarchistic lens (mutual aid, direct action, skepticism of hierarchy) but it’s fun to hear someone from Yale saying it. This book is a series of informal chapters using examples as a jumping off point. It’s more about the negative qualities of the state than the positive qualities of anarchism, and I certainly didn’t need to be convinced, but I’ll take it.

This book was illustrated by LeUyen Pham. I’m a Yang completionist so I picked this up from my library shelf. It’s a sweet story about a young Vietnamese woman who is trying to figure out her destiny in terms of love as she also puzzles out the complicated history of her parents' relationship (having grown up without a mother). Along the way she grows up, learns to lion dance (in both Chinese and Korean styles) and figures out who she is and what she wants. Well told, lovely book.

A mystery/cop procedural novel, sort of, which takes place on a gas giant planet that has been loosely colonized. There’s a lot of world building and a cop and a scholar who must combine forces to figure out how a person disappeared from a transportation platform at the end of the world. But they have some history which also needs to maybe be resolved and by the end of this (the beginning of a series) that starts to happen. I had a hard time visualizing some of this. It was clear the author had a pretty good idea of what it all looked like but never did. However, I really enjoyed the story and I’ll read the next one.

I picked this book up because of the riot of my favorite colors on the cover. It was a really well-done story about a few different Indian Americans, centered in Cleveland, and thinking about Indian American culture versus American culture and how people relate to one another and their own senses of self-identity both within cishet marriages and within gay culture. Starts off in a complex and conflicted place and smooths out over the course of the book. Ultimately a story about friendship(s) and how they work with a lot of different sorts of people.

If you’d like to read a novel about a human poet writing important poetry with a poetry-writing AI, this is probably a great novel to read. I had mixed feelings about it--it was extremely well written and the human poet was a great character with a story that was both quirky and felt real--because I just find “An AI wrote this!” aspects of our real world neither interesting nor cool (yet). There’s a sense, in this story, of this poem, the one which is the center of this novel, being incredibly momentous in some way and yet, the final reveal seemed a weird after-effect and not really a big deal. It was weird. Good but weird. I’ll search out the author’s other books.

A poignant graphic novel about a young couple’s move to a tiny house in Central Idaho. They run a local movie house. They garden a lot. They learn about birds and trees and nature. They meet their neighbors. Then they decide to have a baby and have a soul search about how while they are *visiting* this culture, their child will grow up with it being *their* culture. And they leave. As someone who was that kid, and whose parents didn’t leave, I read it with fascination.

This book starts out dark and gradually gets less dark. It’s about a woman who witnesses a crime involving a family member and winds up stuck in a series of backwards time loops trying to figure out how to stop it from happening. Each step helps her figure out a bit more. I don’t want to give a lot away but it’s very well laid out. It’s a roller coaster of a novel. I didn’t really know where it was going to wind up until it was almost there. Very well done.

I have a few categories of books which I love and “Someone tells me more about art theft” is one of them. Finkel also wrote a really good book about the North Pond Hermit which was interesting while also not being tawdry or sensational. This book is about an audacious European art thief who lived in an attic at his mom’s place surrounded by dozens of valuable artworks that he brazenly stole over the course of years. It’s really convoluted and I enjoyed the “how I got these details” recounting at the end almost as much as I liked the book. A lot of good research leads to this tale well-told.

Don’t remember how I found this book but I had enjoyed Chen’s earlier book about superheroes, We Could Be Heroes (Chen loves Bowie which also shows up in this book a tiny bit). This one is a “How do we get out of the time loop, but also we’ve grown closer while caught in the time loop....” sort of book. More romance than science, and plausible romance at that, but not really a romance novel per se. I really enjoyed reading this though I wish there was a little more wrap-up to the ending. As it was, I’m not entirely sure what happened.

From what I gather, this is one book which is assembled from a few short stories that take place in the same general place. It’s a really engaging YA-ish novel about a young woman who grows up on a “seastead” an area in international waters off of the coast of California that a bunch of libertarian types have grown their own societies in. It highlights a lot of the pitfalls of this sort of no-government-with-technology setup. You get a lot of what is essentially slavery along with gross things like skin farms and extreme class divides. Interesting without being too didactic. The image on the cover didn’t seem to be something actually in the book

This novella by Ray Nayler will be hugely appreciated by folks who liked The Mountain in the Sea. That one looked at octopus consciousness, this one looks at (potential, possible?) mammoth consciousness and goes a bit into some of those “We’re going to bring back mammoths from their old DNA” stories that have been shuttling around. But with a twist you both don’t expect and also don’t entirely understand at first. Started off a bit confusing but went a bunch of places I enjoyed.

This is one of those lesser-known books about people who work in mortuary/funeral services. This one is by a guy who worked in the family funeral services growing up and now runs his own business in rural Michigan. He is also a poet, so it’s a little more ornately written than others. I sent the guy an email about a typo on his website (and to say I liked the book) and got a charming email back from him. You’d probably like this if you like the genre generally.

This was a book with a very interesting premise--aliens dispassionately walk among us trying to accomplish their own goals and one of them has to do with radio waves--which gets hampered by too many real-world analogues to things like Scientology and Art Bell’s radio show. I enjoyed the book for what it was, I just felt it didn’t need to hew so closely to things that already exist in the real world. A lot of cool dog characters, if that sort of thing is your thing.

A sequel to another book from a magic-adjacent world where people’s jobs are to oversee that the magic doesn’t get too out of control. Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby (that name!) is a new member of this Auditor group, keeping things stable in Boston’s Department of Unorthodox Affairs. A bunch of stuff goes wrong. There’s a fair amount of ‘Our exhausted protagonist tries to hold on just a bit longer so that things don’t go totally wrong.’ Liked, did not love.

A YA graphic novel about two sisters who fence, and whose dad has died, and who are dealing with some complicated feelings that result in them having a fencing duel. A sweet story and I learned a lot about fencing. Well told, well-illustrated, and a lot fun to read.

This scifi book touches on some pretty dark topics like child soldiers, fascism, and eugenics. It has an interesting throughline story and framework that, combined with a lack of gory detail, make it a great way to engage with these topics, for me at least. It mostly takes place on a rebel microplanet as one group of teen soldiers graduates and receives their adult assignments continuing to fight for what amounts to human supremacy. But things don’t go as planned.

We all know about Ponzi. Fewer know about Leo Koretz, who maintained a decades-long Ponzi-like scheme from Chicago, selling shares in a non-existent real estate and oil venture supposedly in Panama. He swindled his family, he swindled his friends. He died in prison. I enjoyed this book, the author clearly did a lot of research. It suffers a bit from extensive quoting so it feels like every third sentence is in the voice of a different newspaper. Some of the details feel extraneous-but-true like what people were eating at a certain dinner or who was in attendance at various functions. Jobb does a good job at contextualizing what was happening within the other news at the time, so you hear a bit about Al Capone, Chicago mayors and the Leopold and Loeb trial.

My library had two copies of this and I got one. It is both an amazing piece of writing and a painful read. We follow the story (of post-mortem plagiarism, and the snowballing mess it creates) from the inside of the head of an unlikable character who is just self-aware enough to know what she is doing is wrong but not wise enough to stop digging. And she’s a white lady so it’s wincey watching more things work out for her than they should, the support network of awfulness that helps her maintain her weird and bad takes on things.

I pretty much know what I am getting into with KSR novels. This one was about a massive generation ship and the issues they face seven generations in when it turns out the planetary system they are aiming for isn’t what they’d hoped. I guess for people who are more familiar with it, they see it as a long novel about why generation ships as a concept won’t work. This book is basically three novels in one. To my read, they don’t cohere so well and the one in the middle is mostly a stream-of-consciousness from an AI which I could have done without. The book has an odd ending, not really where you think it will go, but it’s still good reading.

Bell grew up with a White mom who was always getting mad at people who were racist to her son, storming in to the school to yell at people, for example. His folks were divorced and Bell also had a Black dad who didn’t really talk to him about racism. He experienced a lot of shitty treatment from classmates, cops, and authority figures and discusses how he grew up learning to stick up for himself but also trying to determine what the “right” way was to deal with racism and awful people, how that affected his professional and personal life, and how he talked to his own kids.

The sequel to Angelology, taking us a little further in to that story. However, it was more of a thriller and maybe trying to do too much? We didn’t get to know any of the characters much better and while the plot was complex and fascinating, a lot of it was told with one of the characters monologuing to the other characters who are often injured or tired or in a hurry. And there were a bunch ofdisparate threads which I felt didn’t resolve well. I liked it but was not surprised it didn’t have a sequel despite an ending that implied one was coming.

I am not great at tree identification. I mentioned this to a friend. She suggested this book which is so much more than just tree id-ing, it’s more like “Can you tell what went on in this forest before you got here?” puzzles which come with a lot of explanations about forest ecology. You see a picture of a part of a forest and then that chapter is about what you can learn from the picture. You learn about things like blowdowns and pest invasions, fire damage and beaver signs. I’m not sure my tree ID will be any better but I feel like I know the forest better.

A cute, fun romp predicated on the idea “What if all the parameters that run our lives are in a big shell script somewhere and could be adjusted?” This includes things like not only where you are, but when. You can probably see where this is going. It’s a fun doesn’t-take-itself-too-seriously story about wizardry and Medieval England. Despite almost no female characters (the one that is prominent is badass) I really enjoyed this. Fun and funny.

This was a slender book which I finished late at night, more of a long short story really. It’s a fun short romp that readers of Sourdough will likely enjoy. I picked it up because someone said they’d enjoyed “Sloan’s latest” and I think maybe this wasn’t it but I was glad I read it anyhow.

Another book in the Rivers of London series, this one had to do with a large council high rise and some weird goings on with some of the earlier characters you’ve grown to like. There is a lot, like more than the usual amount, of destruction and chaos. A little less “hanging out in the Folly making fun of Molly’s food.” The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger which I did not mind since I am enjoying this series. Am curious to see how, or if, they resolve it.

Deb doesn’t just understand infrastructure--how it works, how it got built, what it needs, why it’s important--but she has VISION. This not only a book about what we have, it’s a book about where, if we care about a more just world for everyone, we can go. She positions herself as both an engineering professor but also a woman of color, living in a world where many people don’t have her level of privilege and access. It’s a surprisingly hopeful take. Read it.

I’d been eagerly awaiting this book. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t quite the Murderbot book I was expecting. May have been a me problem, it was a long time since I’d read the last one and I had to re-learn who the characters were and this novel seemed short on “get to know the characters” stuff. I did talk to other Murderbot fans who has the same general issue, this book felt more like the second half to the last book and not a standalone novel. A lot of Murderbot’s inner mind, some of their relationship with ART, the usual clusterfuck on a remote planet.