Another book in the Harbinder Kaur series and, unlike the Ruth Galloway books, this series really doesn’t center the protagonist (a late-30s queer southeast Asian detective in London) as much as I might have liked. It’s a story about a group of popular kids who are some part of a murder in their school days and now it’s 20 years later and... there’s another murder. Plotwise it’s fine, wraps up better than you think it’s going to.

I grew up listening to Gordon Lightfoot and the song he wrote about this tragedy is one of my favorites. This book is about what actually happened before and after the shipwreck with some postulating of what may have happened to cause the wreck. It’s a well-researched, readable book that is very clear about what is known and not known. The author doesn’t speculate, he just lets you know what the facts are, and since so little is known about the actual sinking, it doesn’t turn into a traumafest. It’s a great story about a community and culture with a lot of Great Lakes boat lore tossed in as well.

This book was a “graphic essay.” It’s an overview of the history of abortion rights worldwide, from when abortion was just considered a medical concern, to the currently hyper-politicized fraught topic which it is today. There’s a lot of good information, from an author who is unapologetically in favor of abortion rights and I appreciated the global perspective but it did read sort of like an essay and didn’t make as much use of the graphic medium as I’d hoped. It was nice to get a worldwide perspective on the topic.

Mosher writes Lake Wobegon-type novels about a fictional location in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont “back in the day.” Very evocative of a sense of place and time and the people in that place and time in both good ways and sometimes less-good ways, heavy with nostalgia. This one is more of a collection of shorter stories all with the same narrator with slices of life from when he went to live with his grandparents between the ages of six and 18.

A novella by Scalzi which is short and goofy and a good time. If you liked Kaiju Preservation, you’ll probably like this story of a woman who does constitutent services on a future Earth where the district she is living in is minority-human so there are a LOT of different things to take into account when you’re helping various people of various species help solve their civic problems. Humorous and a quick read, not a lot happens but there’s a satofying and amusing story arc and a good solid ending.

Harrow keeps getting better. This is a story about a legend and the person writing the story about the legend while also becoming part of the story. It’s got time loops and female knights and some academic drama and a mean old queen (and a misunderstood horse) and a lot of ruminations on the nature of freedom and of love. How do you tell the story of a people? How do you perfect that story, if it wasn’t quite right? Hard to talk about without spoilers. Treat yourself.

This is a collection of “poems you’ve probably heard of” set to illustrations by someone you probably haven’t heard of. I went in thinking this would be something different and was a bit underwhelmed, but my partner was flipping through it and felt it made poetry he’d otherwise maybe not be clicking with suddenly make sense or become more accessible. Poems are split up into seasonal sections, illustrations are good, not all the same. A few stand-outs.

I usually have a bright line “no Nazis” in the books I read but a friend really enjoyed this and suggested it. It’s the story of a POW camp in a castle in what became East Germany. The people running the camp played by the Geneva Convention. The people in the camp tried to escape ALL the time, and often succeeded. The war is in the background and the Nazis don’t show up until the very end. I did not know this bit of WWII history and it was a good read. The last bit of it, besides having an extensive bibliography was a longish “what happened to them?” section which is the sort of thing I always like.

Taking place in the mid-late 1800s, this story about a female bookbinder and the web of intrigue she gets mixed up in was up my street but not exactly right for me. There’s a bit of a mystery at the center of it but it’s really not a mystery book. There’s some fancy descriptions of book stuff which I always love, but maybe not enough of it. It seemed to be trying to be too many things at once, so while I enjoyed reading it, it also didn’t stick with me too much.