Cartographers - Peng Shepherd. I only read 2 pages of it last year, so I am listing it again. There were some nice twists, not all of which were obvious.
Looking After Your Autistic Self - Niamh Garvey. Read the first 47 pages last year. I think it will be what I talk about in therapy for a bit.
Passing for Human - Liana Finck. A graphic novel I picked up at the library. Depressing
The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu. Had trouble getting into it. Well written though.
The Cloven book 1 - Garth Stein & Matthew Southworth. Weird comic about lab-grown half-human, half-goat kids.
Neurotribes - Steve Silberman. Now considered a classic. Felt outdated to me.
Ghost Walk - Melissa Bowersock. A Navajo ghostwalker. A disgraced L.A. cop turned private investigator. Dead children. A boating accident.
Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk - Coyote JM Edwards. The correct book this time. Cute. Short.
Madame Pommery, Creator of Brut Champagne - Rebecca Rosenberg. A fictionalized account of a real person form 1858. Overly romanticized. Describes wine etc. using language not developed until the 1970s.
Mrs. Jones - William Cain. A horribly written gangster novel.
The Jade Dragon - Garrett Hutson. 1935 Shanghai suspense/spy novel.
From Manchester to the Arctic - Sheena Billett. Predictable.
Midlife Illusions - Lorne Tedder. Poorly written in an omniscient voice, but no sense of the passage of time. All moments are this moment that the protagonist is complaining about
A Dream Called Marilyn - Mercedes King. Fiction based on some real events from the point of view of MMs last psychiatrist. Characters one to two dimensional tops. Marilyn had none of her real depth.
The Package - Sebastian Fitzek. Compelling as all unreliable narrator stories are. One keeps reading in the hopes of discovering what is happening to no avail.
Roaming - Mariko & Jillian Tamaki. I love their work so much!!!
Infinite - Charlie Godwyne. Horribly predictable. Characters are 2 dimensional and flip rapidly between being overly slutty or weirdly obsessed with being saved by angels.
Find Me - Melissa Pouliot. A fiction tale about missing teens. Meh.
The Scars We Choose - A. Lee Hughes. Not bad for a “young love” cliche of a book.
How to Get a Girlfriend When You Are a Terrifying Monster - Marie Cardno. Not exactly what I expected. Better.
The Magician’s Secret - Charles Townsend. The story is not bad, but I question why the 3-4 characters who seem to dislike each other stay together. There are so many opportunities for them to just walk away.
Elemental Master - Liane Mahugh. Weird combo of magic, space travel, & area 51. Definitely a young adult book as the emphasis was on feelings and doing what feels right.
Better Living Through Birding - Christian Cooper. I’ve read excerpts before. Now, the whole book!
Helipads in Heaven - Shanti Hershenson. Writer goes on an experimental trip back in time to observe her younger self. Tons of typos.
Daughters of Despair - Andrew Rivas. Told as a series of interviews to an unnamed chronicler. Resulted in never really knowing what is going on or why.
Mr.Bubbles and the Mystery of the Mayan Temple - Chris W. Sears. Weird. Blessedly short.
The Haunting of Quenby Mansion - J.S. Donovan. Woman raised as an orphan inherits house from father. Goes to restore it and keeps waking up somewhere other than her bed in weird circumstances. Then solves a bunch of unsolved murders to free the ghosts of the victims.
The Cybernetic Tea Shop - Meredith Katz. Cute story. Light fluff.
Killing Is My Business - Adam Christopher. Reread
The Daughters of Block Island - Christa Carmen. A sort of Gothic horror story that would be a lot better if the characters didn’t keep saying they feel stuck in a Gothic horror story.
Soil Science for Beginners - Richard Bray. Simplistic, but a great subject review.
White Knight - KB Kirtley. Unnecessarily moralistic. Bad to no transitions between scenes. Might work as a multi-issue comic, but does not as a book.
Ghosts, Toast, and Other Hazards - Susan Tan. How can you go wrong with an opening line like, “I'm not afraid of toast “
Lollipop Monster Shop - Coyote JM Edwards. Cute. Fluffy. All the writing about candy made me want to brush my teeth.
Too Ghoul for School - Sarina Dorie. The writing is good. I don't like the protagonist.
The Blood Run - Brittany Matsen. I am tired of stories where the characters can only see one way forward and are unable to come up with other options. Especially when I can think of several.
Ducks - Kate Beaton. Neat graphic novel.
Eggs for the Ageless - Kyle A. Massa. Absurd story of a writer who accidentally starts a new religion. Tad on the long-winded side
Crosstalk - Connie Willis. Reread
The Neon Octopus Overlord Trilogy - LA Johnson. Attempts at snarky dialogue. Plot missing.
Exiles - Ashley Saunders. Really weird usage of adjectives and adverbs. A bumptious face? Can’t get through it due to constantly looking up words that don’t belong there.
Past Present Future - Kyle A Massa. Short stories.
Through Dark Water - KL Abrahamson. A dead whale, a dead kid, a retired teacher and her niece trying to solve their deaths and why they relate to a school shooting.
We Ate the Dark - Mallory Pearson. Not enough explanation of which character is narrating, making it confusing.
Deadly Switch A Stone Suspense - KR Dodd. Might’ve been better if there was only one narrator, or if the switch was marked.
Darker Than Me - Tu Tunics. Poor kid gets in trouble and then works his way out.
A Lot Like Christmas - Connie Willis. Only writer who can get me to read 500 pages of short stories about a holiday I hate
Botany at the Bar - Selena Ahmed, Ashley Duval, & Rachel Meyer. The art and science of making bitters. Written by ethnobotanists!!!
When Women Were Dragons - Kelly Barnhill. A story about love and loss. And dragons. Well written.
The Mystery Writer - Sulari Gentill. Very good. Twists and turns I did not anticipate.
The Pleasure Seeker - Robyn Michaels. Has potential. My e-copy only contained the first 3 chapters.
Heroes & Harbingers - Ark Horton. Another ‘chosen one who doesn’t want to be’ story. It has a few interesting bits that are nullified by the stupid love story: he’s such an asshole, but so alluring! Bleh.
Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop - Roselle Lim. The food descriptions made me hungry. The art descriptions made me want to draw/go to a museum.
What Would Velma Do? - Shannon K. Garrity. Silly fun.
The Tengu and the Angel - Alina Capella. I hope this one is YA, as the plotline is simple. It is mostly about finding a home and friends.
The Bookshop and the Barbarian - Morgan Stang. Floofy. Mostly predictable fluff
Crimson Promises - Jocelyn Bleu. A disgraced angel is tasked with protecting a mortal with healing powers. Of course, they fall in love. That part is dumb. Blah blah, war between Heaven and Hell. Ridiculously dramatic.
The Essential 99 Punctuation Rules for Court Reporters - Kenneth Wick. trying to be a better proofreader
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking - T. Kingfisher. Fun, goofy. Bread gollums galore.
Silence - Jane Brox. A natural history of one of the least understood elements of our lives. I was not expecting it to be about prisons.
Our Missing Hearts - Celeste Ng. In a dystopian future full of anti-Asian sentiment, a young boy tries to find his mother. Very well written.
Past, Present, Future - Kyle Massa. Blessedly short
The Mimicking of Known Successes - Malla Older. A murder mystery set on Jupiter. It has lesbians.
Sure, I'll Join Your Cult - Maria Bramford. I picked it up cuz I heard good reviews. Did not connect with it
Crimson King - Morgan Quaid. The seven layers of hell try to take over the earthly plain and a lying sorcerer is sent to stop it.
The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years - Shubnam Khan. A well-written ghost story. Took a while to get the many characters (in both time periods) figured out.
Do It Scared - Ruth Soukup. Very repetitive. Keeps listing as “faults” things that are autistic behaviors.
The Librarian: a first contact story - MN Arzu. A woman (the librarian of title fame) finds out her husband is an alien? Blessedly short.
The Paintball Club - Harper Greendale. The extremely long sentences. The excessive use of adjectives and adverbs. OMG it made me angry. It was so bad. Did not finish.
Holding Paradise - Fran Clark. The memories/dream sequences could be better delineated. Well written. The majority of the characters are flushed out. Good intergenerational immigrant/home island tale.
Thorn Hedge - T. Kingfisher. A fairy who looks like a toad. A barrier made out of thorns. A changeling who likes to kill for fun. A knight who wishes to be brave.
The First Bright Thing - JR Dawson. What is better than a circus story? One with an equitable mutant circus running through time and space from an evil circus!
A Rip Through Time - Kelly Armstrong. Good, and extremely well-written. I got bored of Edinborough in the 1860s.
Paladin’s Grace - T. Kingfisher. A sappy love story that distracts from the court intrigue and the decapitated head mystery.
The Dead Take the A Train - Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey. The main character took too many drugs. Overall, it was a tad grosser than I was in the mood for most of the time. Well done. Just some graphic violent bits I’d rather not think about before sleeping.
The Continental Affair - Christine Mangan. I thought it was more of a spy story than it turned out to be. It was a slow-burn love story disguised as a spy story.
The Spellshop - Sarah Beth Durst. Low-stakes fluff. I kept getting frustrated that the magic used on the plants produced fruit without pollinators and that the main character watched the sunrise and sunset from the same spot while looking in the same direction.
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver. It has been a while since I enjoyed one of her books. It did get tedious towards the end.
The Bootlegger’s Daughter - Nadine Nettmann. 1920’s prohibition police drama. Decent. It would be better with lesbians.
The Woman in the Library - Sulari Gentill. Split narrative between writers makes it hard to know what is really happening and what is fictional. A good read.
The Moonflowers - Abigail Rose-Marie. A woman goes to a small town in Appalachia to paint a portrait and winds up learning her family's history.
You Shouldn’t Be Here - Lauren Thoman. Suspense thriller about companies ruling everything and ruining lives. A bit overdramatic
Welcome to the Fae Cafe - Jennifer Kropf. It did not live up to its potential. I started to hate the choices made by the characters and wanted to throw it against a wall.
Sands of Ruin book 1 - RM Mueller. Another poor teen against the regime tale. The endless chapters of oh it is so bad, followed by the running and hiding saga.
Over My Dead Body - Greg Melville. Unearthing the hidden history of America's cemeteries.
Behind the Eyes of Dorian Gray - Beth A. Freely. A predictable romance.
Murderous Means - Lida Sideris. A decent mystery. It seems to be part of a series.
The Lost Legends - Cait Marie. A kingdom where the kids believe their father is evil and they rebel. The main character does that irritating melt when near the bad boy. Ugh.
Corset Factory - Valerie Anne Hudson. A Victorian setting with modern attitudes about rights and freedoms, something that always irritates me. Also, the ending is predictable.
Barking Up the Wrong Tree - Joyce Farinella. I enjoyed what I could read; the font size was about 4pt and unadjustable.
Untypical - Pete Wharmby. How the world is not made for autistic people and what we should all do about it.
The Farm - Andrea Heckner. Needs several more drafts; repeated phrases; grammar mistakes; abrupt ending.
Club Lithium - CR Allen. Tries too hard to hide the obvious vampires.
The Legend of Sebastian Chiffon - Jonash Jemson. The tale of a courageous soul who never lived until he faced death. Too wordy. Few likeable characters.
Animal Vegetable Criminal - Mary Roach. Animals who break human laws.
Seducing Steve - Harry Applebottom. Implausible gay porn.
My Best Friend, Marty - M. Jandreau. The entire point was that guys have feelings too. It was a tad insufferable.
Frostbite - Nicola Twilly. How refrigeration changed our food, our planet & ourselves. Excellent!
Bad Grammar/ Good Punctuation - Margie Wakeman Wells. Will mostly be using as a reference after I read through it once.
Dead to Rights—JW Spencer. A closed-room murder mystery in which the famous detective is killed, and the sidekick writer guy tries to solve the case while being the main suspect.
The Lost Bookshop - Evie Woods. Narration by three characters. Took one of them quite a while to have their own voice. A tad too heterosexual for my tastes.
Bookshops and Bonedust - Travis Baldree. Found family and helping others like his first one, yet different enough to be its own thing.
The American Way of Death Revised - Jessica Mitford. Written in the 60s and revised in the 90s, the examples are a tad jarring. They are either old, or really old. There is a lot of justification for the original publishing inserted. The writing does not flow smoothly.
Hollow Kingdom - Kira Jane Buxton. Narrated by a crow. Not enough there to make me care about the story.
The Elias Network - Simon Gervais. Well-thought-out espionage thriller where everyone has a secret agenda.
The Blue Bar - Damyanti Biswas. A police drama set in Mumbai. Took me a while to get into it. Quite enjoyable.
The Canopy Keepers - Veronica G. Henry. What is better than a futuristic, magical, environmental tale where trees talk? One with a Black protagonist.
Otter Country - Miriam Darlington. In search of the wild otter. I did not expect it to be set in the UK.
Lay Them To Rest - Laurah Norton. On the road with the cold case investigators who identify the nameless. Very easy to read.
The Hidden Language of Cats - Sarah Brown. Very accessible writing. I was disappointed that I didn’t learn anything new.
Fathomless Pursuit - Eric Kercher. Not quite enough description in spots to get a full picture. Main character is kind of feckless and unlikeable.
Punch Girl - JM Reilly. An interesting take on the superhero genre. Did not see one of the twists coming, which is always nice.
Why Fish Don’t Exist - Lulu Miller. The author talks about a childhood hero and ichthyologist who became a raving eugenicist and most likely murdered his boss, Jane Stanford.
The Hunter’s Daughter - Nicola Solvinic. Serial killer mystery with a twist. Pretty fantastic.
I Contain Multitudes - Ed Yong. Highly recommended book on microbes. Yay!
The Six - Loren Grush. The untold story of America’s first women astronauts.
Yellow Tape and Coffee - Pat Luther. Good at conversations, less good at describing people and places. A lot read more like a TV script. I lost interest when they used pepper spray and mace interchangeably, that and a lack of police procedure.
The Naturalist Society - Carrie Vaughn. Set in a late 1800s when taxonomy and magic are the same thing. A few twists I did not predict.
The Curse of Belar - Marcel M du Plessis. Poorly executed horror story. There are trains and a mine, but no one has electricity. The town is hidden in a triangle between two mountains and a lake, yet it is a thriving trade center. Ugh.
Devil’s Defense—Lori B. Duff. I don’t like protagonists who are hard-nosed lawyers one minute and unsure, ditzy pushovers the next.
Our Limnal Spaces - Poornima Manco. Relationships, family, and how we fuck it all up.
Deeper Than Dead - Debra Webb. Everyone is lying about something. Makes it hard to like some of the characters.
Colored Television - Danzy Senna. Such a good writer.
Mutt’s WInter Diaries - Patrick McDonnell. Yesh!
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries - Heather Fawcett. The main character kept doing stupid shit when there were so many other options.
Just Writing - Anne Enquist, Laurel Oates, & Jeremy Francis. Grammar, punctuation, and style for the legal writer.
The Silent Watcher - Victor Methos. Creepy story with elements of x-files and the man from the train.
Unrooted - Erin Zimmerman. Botany, motherhood, and the fight to save an old science. Very good.
Murder Your Employer - Rupert Holmes. The McMasters guide to homicide. Silly
Framed for Murder - Marla White. More of a romance novel than a mystery. Bleh
Defector - Peter Kozmar. Having a spy named Andy in Russia is a dead giveaway. Poorly written, not edited.
Our Secrets Die With Her - Simbi Feyisara. Too many grammatical errors for me to escape into the story.
The Light from Uncommon Stars - Ryka Aoki. Absolutely fucking superb. I need to buy a physical copy since I have to return the library book.
The Bog Wife - Kay Chronister. Weird tale about family lies. I didn’t like any of the characters.
Smothermoss - Alisa Alering. Interesting. I found it hard to find a plot.
The Cabaret of Plants - Richard Mahey. Very British. Much of the book is set in the 1970s. Did not learn all that much.
The Road to Roswell - Connie Willis. While good, this was not what I was expecting. A little less compelling than her other works.
The Devil’s Queen - Jeanne Kalogridis. A fictional history of Catherine de Medici. Too much heterosexualness.
Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic - Emily Monosson. Good. Little I didn't already know.
Nine Globlins - T. Kingfisher. A silly novella
The Secret War of Julia Child - Diana R. Chambers. I don’t know if it was the vocalizations of the audiobook narrator or the intense focus on heterosexual relationships that irritated me more.
Meet the Neighbors - Brandon Keim. Animal minds and life in a more-than-human world. Interesting anecdotes. Not a lot of new-to-me information
Flourishing Kin - Yuria Celidwen. Indigenous wisdom for collective well-being. Good. Lots of interactive concepts.
Playing Possum - Susana Monsó. How animals understand death. Written by a philosopher not a biologist, so not as good as I had hoped.
Oregon Discovery - Rachel Wesson. Fictional tale of early Portland. I hate it when the “good” characters have 21st century political views.
Every Living Thing - Jason Roberts. A decent history/comparison of Linnaeus and Bouffant. Not enough about animals.
Gay the Pray Away - Natalie Naudus. Based partially on her life growing up in a religious cult
We Refuse - Kellie Carter Jackson. A forceful history of Black Resistance.
The Medicine Woman of Galveston - Amanda Skenandore. Okay. Predictable
The Reformatory - Tanarive Due. Gothic ghost story set in the racist South. Well written.
Chicano Frankenstein - Daniel A. Olivias. A modern version, with a MAGA-like twist.
Leonard (my life as a cat) - Carlie Sorosiak. A fun alien as cat story.
This Great Hemisphere - Mateo Askaripour.
Stiff - Mary Roach. A book about cadavers.
The Wizard and the Prophet - Charles C. Mann. Comparing two views of ecological thinking. No wonder I'm always confused.
Some regular blogs with essays a/o links to articles that I read several times per week
Book Riot Libraries
Literary Hub
The Walrus
Some regular podcasts I listen to. They often lead to me reading portions (or all) of articles and sometimes Wikipedia pages
Lost Women of Science
Gastropod
This Podcast will Kill You
Who Said What Now?
No Such Thing as a Fish
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