This was another time travel/loop novel where I’m not entirely sure what happened but I enjoyed it. It’s also got a Wikipedia aspect, done well so I’m a fan. This connects two time periods: 2016 Bay Area and 1930s Vienna (including the political upheval and the rise of fascism) with a few side visits to other times and places. I liked getting to experience both of the main places/times through this novel which is about math and power and who actually gets to write history. Strong female characters round it out, though the message is ultimately about, in some ways, the invisibility of women.

I somehow misread the blurb and cover and thought this would be a very different sort of book. It was essays about the author’s life in the context of “the bigger picture” for lack of a better phrase. She discusses religion, her father’s death, her cancer, prozac, the birth of her children. Many classic texts were cited and quoted from at length which I am sure works for hte right kind of audience but not me. It was very much not my thing, too “literary” by half, using words like chthonic when many simpler ones would do. The author seems like a nice person and her thoughts about life were interesting, but I thought this would be more about the natural world and less about introspection and what people from the canon had to say about those topics.

Emily St. James has written one hell of a first novel. A teacher in rural South Dakota has decided, mostly, to do something about the fact that she is trans. The only other trans person she knows is a 17 year old girl who had to threaten the school district to be able to go to school--they form an unlikely alliance. She goes to support groups. She gets in her own head a LOT. She wavers. She has moments of bravery. She meets others like and not like herself which itself is a great part of the book. A masterful novel.

A good “talking heads” style graphic novel about the history of trans people and trans identity based on actual “what we know” history (which is often, sadly, not much b/c of colonizers and active suppression). The author does a good job explaining the things that are still unknown. Not all the history is great, of course, but the authors emphasize the positive and also try to get more than just the usual voices, actively reaching out to many kinds of transfolk to create this wide compendium of histories.

A nice small town novel about a peninsula in Ireland which is slowly losing the population in its smaller villages and the Council is thinking of ways to centralize which the villagers mostly don’t want. The librarian, a woman who came from London after a messy failed marriage and lives with her hard-to-please mother is the central character, driving a mobile library and meeting all the locals and trying to figure out what to do. I was expecting more bookmobile content, but was happy to get to know this new area and start this new series.

A book about connected farm buildings of New England, though focusing primarily on Maine. I grew up in exactly this sort of place, one that my folks bought from the original farming family. Never thought much about it. Apparently the way it was arranged was like that for a number of interesting reasons, very few of which were “Because it’s cold in the winter.” and having to do with New England history. An absolute delight to read and learn from.

Another in this series of a forensic anthropologist often called in to work on a dig that happens to mirror some real life crime situation. She’s a frazzled working mom. Her daughter’s dad is married to someone else. There’s a whole cast of characters who live and grow through these stories. This one is about motherhood and the tension between doing your job, having childminders (babysitters), and balancing what’s in your heart with what’s right in front of you.

This is the sequel to Assassins Anonymous. One of our recovered assassins has been remanded to a dark prison for reasons unknown and the remaining ones have to decide what to do and see if there are any non-lethal ways to get their colleague out. A little too much fight blocking for me in this one (I return a high kick to the right side of his head making him fall down and to the left...) but it’s a small nit to pick, another fun book about a dark topic.

Kind of like what it says on the cover. A guy who used to be an assassin enters recovery and finds it difficult because there are still some people who are trying to kill him. How to respond to this while still staying "in recovery"?There’s some violence, some 12 stepping, some light romance interests, a cat, and a lot of figuring how how you can actually make amends in this life if you did some pretty difficult stuff. I found it compelling and funnier than I was expecting.

I have liked these books in the past, a little bit of French history, a little bit of delicious food descriptions, a nice cozy community where people get along, a mystery somewhere along the lines, moral law enforcement. This one is not great and maybe that’s a me thing, but there seemed to be walls of “tell me don’t show me” about French history, not much of a mystery, a big dramatic flood which was a nice story of civic engagement but otherwise felt bolted on. There were a lot of unresolved threads throughout the story and maybe that’s setting us up for a future book but it’s all very unclear. This one felt muddled and not really up to the standard of the Bruno books.

There are books of poetry that I read where I think “I like these poems but I probably wouldn’t like this person” and this was one of those. Some excellent short poems about birds and rural living and growing up with an abusive dad and traveling on a shoestring and using the word “augur” far too many times, but I’ve been enjoying getting back into poetry and I’m glad I read this.