Book Reviews on Toast #6 and my Yearly Book List

Welcome to 2020! Below you'll find the annotated list of books and articles I read in 2019. I am pleased I got through as many as I did considering I headed back to school in January (again). I do enjoy learning new things.

1. What Goes Around - Emily Chappell. A London cycle courier's story. I don’t know London, so the distances often meant nothing to me. Very accessible all the same.
2. Ghosts in the Asylum - Roger Alford. The Black Spectre origins volume 1. Eh. Won’t read the rest of the series. 
3. Biketopia - Elly Blue ed. Feminist bicycle science fiction stories. 
4. Turn or Burn - Boo Walker. Some ebook I downloaded, most likely for free. Pretty bad.
5. The Norma Gene - M.E. Roufa. Super goofy clone fun. Good vacation fluff.
6. Parasite - Mira Grant. Really good, if a little creepy.
7. Mastering ArcGIS, 7th Edition - Maribeth H. Price. Learning a new skill, woo-hoo!
8. Neil Flambe and the Marco Polo Murders - Kevin Sylvester. A teen chef with an incredible sense of smell helps solve murders. Fun!
9. Fast Company Dec 18/Jan 19 issue. One of the journals we get at work. Article on Janelle Monae pulled me in.
10. What School Could Be - Ted Dintersmith. Insights and inspiration from teachers across America. Read most of it before I finished cataloging it for the library.
    
11. Critical Hit - Em Stevens. Dungeons & Dragons lesbian romance that also addressed what makes up good relationships. Fluffy but not without substance.
12. Trail of Lightning - Rebecca Roanhorse. Native American writer, characters & language in a post-apocalyptic tale. It. Is. Awesome. READ IT.
13. Blood Sucking Fiends - Christopher Moore. One of my pen pals sent it to me. Set in SF with Moore’s usual wit. I think I may have read it before in the late 1990s.
14. Neil Flambe and the Aztec Abduction - Kevin Sylvester. Second in the series.
15. True Story #24 Memoir of a Used Car Salesman’s Daughter - Nancy A. Nichols.
16. Seaweed Chronicles - Susan Hand Shetterly. Fun to read after all of the research I myself have done on seaweeds.
17.  Lands of Lost Borders - Kate Harris. Another bike adventure book for my book club.
18.  A Field Guide to Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit. I love her writing. One of those books that I picked up because she was quoted elsewhere and I wanted more.
19. Binti - Nnedi Okorafor. This is one of the best sci-fi books I have read in a very long time. READ IT.
20. Creative NonFiction #69 Intoxication. 
21. Rolling in the Deep - Mira Grant. A prequel to Into the Drowning Deep.
22. The Netscher Connection - Estelle Ryan. Eleventh in the series.
23. Ash - Miranda Lo. A retelling of Cinderella that got good reviews somewhere. Much better than I expected.
24. Three long articles on metadata. Trying to wrap my brain around  this topic.
25. *Preparing for International Metadata - FGDC, 2011
    *Institutionalize Metadata before it Institutionalizes You - Lynda
    Wayne, 2005
    *A Comprehensive Open Package Format for Preservation and
    Distribution of Geospatial Data and Metadata - X.Pons &
    J.Maso, 2016
26. Built - Roma Agrawal. A very accessible book about the physics
    behind the way buildings are built.
27. The Emerald Circus - Jane Yolen. Short stories from a master storyteller
28. D.A. - Connie Willis. Short, but funny. 
29. Dr. Who: The Krotons - Terrance Dicks. I found a treasure trove of old novels on the Internet Archive’s Open Library. More good reading while sitting at the reception desk!
30. True Story #25 Suffering Self - Minh Phuong Nguyen
31. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle - Monique Roffey. The description talked about a young couple arriving on Trinidad and living through independence. I thought, cool, I’d like to learn about that even in fictional form. But it said nothing about the 200 pages of “modern-day” arguments, hatred, and death before flashing back 60 years. Ugh.
32. The Paper Magician - Charlie N. Holmberg. Fresh out of magic school, Ceony is apprenticed to work with paper, not metal as she had hoped. Think origami come to life. Hokey, but well written.
33. Bannerless - Carrie Vaughn. Dystopian investigation hoo-ha. Quite different from her werewolf novels. Well written, good world-building, nice mystery, but I probably won’t read the other books in the series.
34. Wires and Nerves - Melissa Meyers & Doug Holgate. A graphic novel about an android with a heart of mechanized gold.
35. Early Riser - Jasper Fforde. So good to have another book from him! The attention to detail and humor are awesome.
36. The Map That Changed the World - Simon Winchester. I think I read this once. Library books be like that. I had forgotten how eurocentric his writing is.
37. How To Draw - Terry Moore. He (along with the Hernandez bros) draws
    women in both the traditional hyper-sexual comic manner AND as regular people, sometimes as regular people who gain weight. Plus half his characters are bi. Found this gem used cheap.
38. MIT Technology Review 122:2. Lots of good stuff on upcoming
    technologies and AI
39. Strangers in Paradise vol 1 - Terry Moore. Reading the above made me want to read the series again.
40. On a Sunbeam - Tillie Walden. Found-family space opera adventure. Oh, and it is also a graphic novel. Awesome
41. An Enchantment of Ravens - Margaret Rogerson. She paints portraits of faerie folk in exchange for enchantments which must be very carefully worded. It started better than it ended.
42. Maphead - Ken Jennings. Charting the weird world of geography nerds. The footnotes are often more interesting than the paragraph to which they refer.
43. Plant science in forest canopies: the first 30 years of advances and challenges (1980–2010) - Meg Lowman &Tim Schowalter (New Phytologist (2012) 194: 12–27). Reading cool things while looking for words to accurately describe shit for a remote sensing map assignment. Woo-hoo!
44. Principles of Remote Sensing - Klaus Tempfli et al eds. Acquiring another skill set. 
45. Women on Wheels - April Streeter. The latest pick for my book club.
46. Nimona - Noelle Stevenson. Funny, irreverent. Exactly what I needed.
47. Lidar 101: an introduction to Lidar Technology, Data, and Applications - NOAA Coastal Service Center. More new skills. Whee!
48. Methods in Forest Canopy Research - Meg Lowman et al. Dreaming and learning.
49. Wired 27(4); 27(6) - Another journal from work. Interesting thoughts on technology, AI and such.
50. American Hippopotamus - Jon Mooallem. The Atavist Magazine #32. Weird true story.
51. American Hippo - Sarah Gailey. A fictional, super queer, account of
    what the south would be like if the above entry had happened. So much
    better than the real thing.
52. A Cul de Sac Treasury - Richard Thompson. A much needed reread.
53. MODIS Vegetation Indicies - Alfredo Huete et al. in Land Remote Sensing and Global Environmental Change. More learning. More incomprehensible maths equations.
54. The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt - Ken Krimstein. A graphic novel about a little known philosopher, perhaps the origin of the Laurie Anderson song about history being an angel (being blown backward - the philosopher as source, not the graphic novel).
55. Giant Days vol. 9  - John Allison & Lissa Tremain. Couldn’t sleep. Pulled this off the tbr shelf. Like visiting old friends. Nice.
56. Bikes In Space 2 - Elly Blue ed. Weird & Wacky short stories.
57. Strangers in Paradise vol 2 - Terry Moore. I don’t know as I remember reading this one.
58. Myra Breckinridge - Gore Vidal. Another book club, another book. Maybe I’ll actually attend this group this weekend...
59. Strangers in Paradise vol 3 - Terry Moore.
60. True Story #26 Marceline Wanted a Bigger Adventure - Shena McAuliffe
61. Hangwire - Adam Christopher. Voices over your shoulder, calling. A strange serial killer. Ted says he’s fine but he keeps blacking out. The carnival is alive. The carnival is hungry. 
62. Trinkets - Kirsten Smith. I picked it off a shelf to amuse me at a coffee shop while the girls were waiting for food. Turned out it was $0.50. Can’t beat that.
63. A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend - Emily Horner. Quirky YA novel about theater nerds and a bike trip. 
64. Strangers in Paradise vol 4 - Terry Moore. Must. Keep. Reading.
65. An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good - Helene Tursten; trans. Marlaine Delargy. Funny shorts about an older woman who gets away with murder.
66. A Spy in Time - Imraam Coovadia. Time travel. Interesting concept. I didn’t feel compelled into the story by the characters.
67. Everfair - Nisi Shawl. A steampunk reimagining of the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo featuring a girl on a bicycle, steam- powered bicycles that pull carts. Cool. 
68. Strangers in Paradise vol 5 - Terry Moore. I know for certain I have not read this one before.
69. Forest Canopies - Meg Lowman & Bruce Rinker. New obsessions are awesome.
70. Tasmania, Australia Sketchbook Diary - Tyler Burgess. Watercolored sketches of one woman’s walking &biking adventures.
71. Binti: Home - Nnedi Okorafor. Second in the series.
72. Strangers in Paradise vol 6 - Terry Moore. The end of the saga.
73. The Roubaud Connection - Estelle Ryan. Twelfth in the series.
74. MIT Technology Review 122(3). Specifically the fiction by Paolo Bacigalupi
75. Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds - Gwenda Bond. Not really what I expected. Still decent.
76. Codename Villanelle - Luke Jennings. The book that the tv show Killing Eve is based on. Different from the show in good ways.
77. Cicada - Shaun Tan. I love his work
78. You Are Here - Katharine Harmon. Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.
79. That Ain’t Witchcraft - Seanan McGuire. Eighth in the Incryptid series.
80. Geospatial Analysis - Michael de Smith et al. A comprehensive guide to principals, techniques, and software tools. Another fun textbook!
81. The Magic Order, book one - Mark Millar & Oliver Coipel. I read issues 1 and 2 and fell off. This is a collection of the first 6 issues.
82. True Story #27 Where Am I? - Heather Sellers. Topographical dysphoria. Huh.
83. A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness. Well written, but I am not liking it. Everything about it irritates me.
84. Tailor-Made - Yolanda Wallace. Fluffy romance novel to pass the time. I skipped the 20 chapters in the middle. Too much drama when the reader already knows they will end up together.
85. The Culinary Cyclist - Anne Brones. A reread as this is the next book club pick. The author is supposed to be at the meeting, so I want to brush up like the nerd I am.
86. Unspoken - Sarah Rees Brennan. A goofy teenage drama that is so over the top I can actually enjoy it.
87. The Island of Bicycle Dancers - Jiro Adachi. New York, bike messengers, English as a third language.
88. Creative Non-Fiction #70 Home.
89. Neil Flambe and the Crusaders Curse - Kevin Sylvester. Light, fluffy, predictable YA with a happy ending.
90. The Wolf in the Whale - Jordanna Max Brodsky. A really good story that blends Inuit life and legends with Nordic Viking life and legends. 
91. Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars - Miranda Emmerson. How does Iolanthe go missing and why? Unexpectedly good for a free book.
92. The Martian - Andy Weir. People have been telling me to read this book since it came out. It is better than I thought it would be, very sciency. 
93. Tiger Flu - Larissa Lai. Great world-building. There are slang, and things that make sense in context, but not out. Wild. 
94. Storm of Locusts - Rebecca Roanhorse. Second in the series. Just as good as the first. Read these books!!!
95. Storm Cursed - Patricia Briggs. Eleventh in the series. 
96. The Wicked + The Divine - Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie. Volume 8 Old is the New New.
97. Blood Orbit - K.R. Richardson. A bit of a reread. I got partway through last year and gave up when nothing made sense. For some reason, I get it this time. Weird.
98. Articles for school (hundreds of pages) GIS-Based Soil Erosion Modeling - H. Mitasova et al
    Hydrology modeling - ARC
    Collaborative Watershed Planning in Washington State - C. Ryan +J. Klug
    Map Algebra - ARC
    Soil Erosion and Deposition Modeling - H. Mitsova et al
    From Isovists to Visibility Graphs: a methodology for the analysis of
    architectural space - Turner et al.
99. Foundryside - Robert Jackson Bennet. Lots of good magic, but I got a little bored with the explanations of how it works or doesn’t. A few of the
    characters were not flushed out.
100. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers - Robert Saplonsky. I try to learn things, but it so often stresses me out to read about stress, even if the book is about how stress works and how you can use that knowledge to your advantage in managing it.
101. True Story #28 The Sfumato of Captain Jeff - Dave Zoby
102. The Hours - Michael Cunningham. I watched the movie (yay, Meryl Streep!) and thought there must be more to the inner dialog of these characters. There is. 
103. More thick articles for school Geographic Information Analysis - David O’Sullivan and David Unwin
     Spatial Autocorrelation - Michael Goodchild
     Analysis and modeling of Spatial Dependence - Fernando Sanchez-Trigueros
104. March Violets - Philip Kerr. I talked to someone who adored this series. The main character was a poor imitation of Sam Spade. The story was set in Germany in WWII (of which I am bored). Bleh.
105. Calculating Stars - Mary Robinette Kowall. One of my pen pals. This book won the Hugo Award. Her writing is awesome.
106. Our Bodies, Our Bikes - Elly Blue ed. Bought it cuz my buddy did the cover and wrote a piece for it. Come to find out the daughter of another friend also
     wrote a piece for it. Small world.
107. More articles for school and work Autocorrelation and spatial regression - Fernando Sanchez-Trigueros
     Bivariate association with spatial dependence - Fernando Sanchez-Trigueros
     Spatial Econometrics - Luc Anselin
     High Sierra Ecosystems - Pacific Southwest Research Station FWS
     Small stream ecosystem variability in the Sierra Nevada of California
     - Hunsaker +Eagen
     California Riparian Systems - Richard Warner and Kathleen Hendrix.
     Started cuz I was researching a reference question but found myself
     reading the rest of the book.
108. Reread large chunks of, but not all of California and Pacific Northwest Forests - John Kricher +Gordon Morrison
     Audubon Society Nature Guide to Western Forests
     A State of Change - Laura Cunningham. Dang, I love this book.
109. Shapes and Colors - Richard Thompson. Reread
110. Nation - Terry Pratchett. I was told it is super funny. I am enjoying his writing as always, but I found it more sad than funny.
111. The Labyrinth of Spirits - Carlos Ruiz Zafon. The final installment in his Cemetary of Forgotten Books series.
112. Yukon Ho! Bill Waterson. A reread.
113. Injection vol 1 - Warren Ellis & Declan Shalvey. Folklore injected into a non-human AI that started to take over and the 5 people who created it. Really quite cool.
114. GIS-based land-use suitability analysis - Jacek Malczewski. Fun with urban planning!
115. DIE v.1 Fantasy Heartbreaker - Kieron Gillian & Stephanie Hans. This is a pretty dang awesome DnD style adventure.
116. Stumptown - Greg Rucka & Matthew Southworth. Rereading v.1-2 before getting into #3 which I just bought.
117. No Tomorrow - Luke Jennings. Another of the books that Killing Eve is based on.
118. More articles for school: Geographically weighted regression, modeling spatial non-
     stationarity - Brunsdon et al
     Regression modeling and adaptations to spatial analysis
119. The Collector - Sergio Toppi. His linework is sublime. I want to draw like him when I grow up.
120. The Luminous Dead - Caitlin Starling. “Horror-tinged speculative fiction”. The cave will swallow them whole.
121. Cat - Freya North. An odd novel about a young journalist covering the Tour de France because she loves cycling. I’m not keen on omniscient narration. I probably wouldn’t finish reading this one if it weren’t the book club pick.
122. True Story #29 Stumbling Into Joy - Kate Hopper
123. Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me - Mariko Tamaki +Rosemary Valero-O’Connell. AWESOME. READ IT.
124. Extraordinary - Cassie Anderson. Cute story of a princess ‘blessed’ by a fairy to be ordinary.
125. The Power - Naomi Alderman. Girls suddenly (re)discover the ability to control electricity. meh.
126. Make Me No Grave - Hayley Stone. A magical re-imagining of the old west. Quite good.
127. Nocturna - Maya Motayne. Nice use of almost-places. Not really Spain and Sweden, but it could be. Some editorial inconsistencies.
128. Magic for Liars - Sara Gailey. PI investigates a murder at the magic academy where her sister teaches.
129. Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon. Long, though the length is necessary for the complexity of the tale. Good stuff.
130. The Emperor’s Edge - Lindsay Buroker. Fairly predictable, but amusing at first. Then it just got ridiculous, yet kept taking itself seriously. Painful...
131. Creative Non-Fiction #71
132. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid. Recommended by a friend. So much better than I expected it to be. Ended somewhat abruptly
133. True Story #30 Bought and Sold - Renata Golden 
134. Python Scripting for ArcGIS - Paul A. Zandbergen. More new skills. Confusing ones.
135. The Toll - Cherie Priest. Gothic horror. Not as creepy as I had hoped. It was kind of cute.
136. Middlegame - Seanan McGuire. Cuckoos trying to get to the Impossible City. Only better than that sounds. Even just the quantum entanglement is worth it. I want to read it in one sitting and savor each page for weeks.
137. Beginning Programming with Python for Dummies - John Paul Mueller. I was hoping it would help me figure this shit out. Not so far.
138. Codependent No More - Melody Beattie. I hate self-help books, but I like learning things.
139. More Than Two - Franklin Veaux et all. Reading things to understand some of the people in my life better. 
140. Borderline - Mishell Baker. The Arcadia project recruits people with mental illnesses to monitor and deal with the fey in Hollywood. Extremely well written.
141. Come As You Are - Emily Nagosaki. More self-exploration. Just  ignore me.
142. True Story #31 Pig, An Essay - Sonia Hamer
143. You Are a Badass - Jen Sincero. Inspiration and motivation.
144. The Living Company - Aire de Geus. Has the principles on which the firm I work at is based. Just trying to figure it all out.
145. Biomimicry in Architecture - Michael Pawlyn. A book of principles and action for the 21st century, or so it claims. I just like the intersection of biology and architecture.
146. Getting to Know Web GIS - Pinde Fu. This class looks just as challenging as the last. This book,at least, is easy to read.
147. The Devil You Know - Mike Carey. Freelance exorcist slumming as a birthday party magician gets handed a huge case. A nice unfolding of details.
148. Encyclopedia of GIS, specifically “Internet GIS” by David Moretz + “Web Mapping and Web Cartography”, by Andreas Neumann. More school learning.
149. Writing Architecture - Carter Wiseman. Technically, I bought it for the library at work. Secretly, I bought it for me to read,
150. The Body Keeps Score - Bessel Van Der Kolk. More personal learning. Yay.
151. Writing About Architecture - Alexandra Lange. Another one that I technically bought for the library at work. Of course, I am reading it before I catalog it.
152. Designing a Neurodiverse Workplace - HOK. Written by another architectural firm, it covers some of the basics that will allow a neurodivergent workforce to thrive.
153. Virals - Kathy Reichs. Her YA series. The kid is a science nerd, so that part is highly enjoyable.
154. An Unkindness of Ghosts - Rivers Solomon. The below deck slums of a giant spaceship. Nice world-building.
155. True Story #32 Everything Gets Worse - John O’Connor
156.  A Study in Honor - Claire O’Dell. Consider a Watson/Holmes retelling where they are both black women during a future New Civil War investigating why certain discharged veterans arebeing secretly killed off.
157. Wired. 27.12 
158. The Red Tree - Caitlin R. Kiernan. A creepy urban legend about an evil tree. I was expecting the “editor” character to return at the end of the
      story, but they did not. Odd.
159. The Hound of Justice - Claire O’Dell. Second in the series.
160. Articles for school: Ethics and Privacy Issues in the Use of GIS - Amy Blatt, from the
     Journal of Map &Geography Libraries
     Defining Web Ethics - Marsha Woodbury, from Science and Engineering
     Ethics
     A GIS Code of Ethics - URISA
     The Geospatial Approach to Cybersecurity - ESRI
     Cybersecurity Regained - EY
161. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humbolt’s New World - Andrea Wulf. I’ve always liked this guy. Wulf adds some context to his life that I
      have always been missing. Worth a read if you are into natural history.
162. The Starless Sea - Erin Morgenstern. I have always loved books about books, and stories within stories. I don’t like one of the main characters very much, which takes away from the joy of reading this one.
163. Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow. I like this one much better than #162, though both are about doors - as if the authors attended the same workshop, or read the same online prompt. Idk why this one resonates more with me.
164. True Story #33 My Monument - Ander Monson
165. Cuckoo Calling - Robert Galbraith a.k.a JK Rowling. The first in the Strike series follows a private investigator with troubles of his own and hs unexpected Gal Friday. I saw the tv show first and wanted to read all the thoughts and shit they cut out.
166. Creative Non Fiction #72 Games: the Power of Play.