Note: I rarely tag later books in a series, since I assume you’d want to start with the first one.
A utopian dystopia (dystopian utopia—and aren’t they all?) starts unraveling when Proctor Bennett starts dreaming.
On the one hand, it’s a much-used formula. On the other hand it’s a pretty good formula as long as you haven’t read The Giver or The Hunger Games or Red Rising or watched Elysium or Æon Flux or Pleasantville or played BioShock too recently. And as long as the formula comes with a good twist, which The Ferryman does. I could hardly put it down.
I read The Poppy War for the first time a couple of years ago, but I did not realize it was a series. As soon as I found out I bought the other books and re-read the first one to remind myself of the story.
Rin, an orphan who survived the genocide of her people, tests into the Sinegard military academy where she discovers her unique ability to summon fire before the Third Poppy War breaks out. This book is so very good, and I’m looking forward to continuing the story in The Dragon Republic.
When I read We’re Not Broken I felt like I understood more about autism as a public health issue, but not necessarily what it means to be autistic. It turns out this book is what I was looking for.
Through the lens of science and her own experience, Annie Kotowicz describes what it means to be autistic.
Autistic people process information differently, because our brains are hyper-connected in some places and less connected in others.
…
I miss what others catch, and I catch what others miss.
What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic, pages 15 and 19.
I don’t want to tell anyone what to read (yes I do), but if you have an autistic person in your family, workplace, or circle or friends, I think this book will be really helpful. Maybe that person would even be willing to read it first and circle the parts that especially apply to them, and cross out the parts that don’t, as Kotowicz suggests.
A dark, lovely book about a lonely orphan who sees ghouls everywhere and returns home to find Death waiting for her. And somehow, serendipitously, I happened to pick it up two days before Halloween.
I’ve been playing Starfield lately, which feels a bit like prep for reading a NASAcore adventure about saving the Earth from a sun-space parasite and first contact with a plausible non-carbon-based alien species. You don’t have to play Starfield, though. Project Hail Mary is a pageturner either way.
Lovely book. I mean, it won the Nobel prize for literature. You don’t need me to tell you it’s good. But it is. And it’s not good the way some literature is good, meaning thick and dense and hard to read. It’s good the way good stories are good.
I think maybe the most magical thing about the book is the way the field of view starts small—just two characters and a corpse in a frozen winter village—and grows steadily as the book progresses, taking on scenery, characters, relationships, and more.
It’s also a unique take on murder mystery. I didn’t read the jacket so I didn’t even realize I was reading a murder mystery until two thirds of the way through the book. Not that I minded.
Anyway it’s really good and you should read it.
I found this book interesting, at times heartbreaking and enraging, and ultimately, compelling reading. If you have kids, I think you should probably read this or its companion, Boys & Sex.
In which the princess-in-the-tower trope is turned upside down. Great fun.
I feel like Tamsyn Muir is smirking at her own cleverness as she writes and hoping the reader notices and appreciates it, too. I very much do.
I snapped up this book the moment I saw it, because I already loved R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War. Babel is a hard book to describe but an easy book to recommend. But I’ll try to describe it anyway.
Babel is about communication, colonialism, cultural appropriation, and capitalism. It touches on so many of the conversations we have been struggling to have about those things—especially over the last few years. It is also about magic. The magic of silver working is literally lost in translation. It is a feast for word nerds (like yours truly). And it is a compelling story of unlikely friendships and reluctant heroes.
I loved it, and it’s going straight onto my book recommendations.
I decided to visit Mexico City this year, so I thought I should try to learn more about Mexico. (This isn’t the only book on my reading list; it’s just the first one the library had available for me.)
This book attempts to tell a truer story of the Mexican-American drug trade. Here is how it starts:
[T]he driving force of the drug trade is and always has been economic. America has an enduring and enormous appetite for narcotics.
p. 6
And America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics means there is enough drug money to buy protection, torture, rape, and murder, from corrupt officials on both sides of the border.
Here is how the book ends:
As long as narcotics remain illegal, incentives to produce and smuggle them will outweigh any economic alternatives.
p. 407
Perhaps that could also read “as long as America refuses to address its drug problem at home ….”
If you want to learn more about the drug trade and get angry about it, too, I’d definitely recommend this book. It’s an easy read, even if it left me wanting more.
