In BECAUSE INTERNET, Gretchen McCulloch has encapsulated some distinctive and fascinating things about how the English language is changing as it develops online in a variety of social media. I especially enjoy recommending it to people my age and older, who might not understand that ending a text message with a period connotes a gruff, upset tone for most people younger than we are. I'm grateful for the review copy from NetGalley.

As dizzying a spectacle as the city itself, Craig Taylor’s NEW YORKERS is a fixed record of the fleeting present, a curated selection of those numberless “stories in the Big City”. If you’ve scrolled through Humans of New York, you’ll relish the chance to get beyond the photos. Some stories stand me in awe of the city, and some of them make me very glad I don't live there. People make their living getting nits and lice out of people's hair because the pests have evolved to resist remedies that work elsewhere—no thank you! But maintaining a midcentury World’s Fair scale model of the entire city in a Queens museum? That sounds like a fascinating job.

You’ll meet homeless New Yorkers, and you’ll meet an elevator repairman who has seen how many empty spaces the city holds, enough to house everyone in the city, except the landlords are trying to keep up their reputation by keeping the rents too high to fill the building.

You’ll meet, one after the other, a “cop” who prides himself on not being a “police officer” (his badly-motivated co-workers), and then a trans Latina who sees the whole NYPD as a lethal danger to her and a lot of other people, unaccountable to any real justice—and then a far-right militia member who makes excuses for old racists and says “a black” shot his friend.

You’ll meet a personal injury lawyer who waxes rhapsodic about arranging for the author to accidentally trip and fall over an officially documented crack in the sidewalk, and how eloquently he would describe the author’s face as maimed, tragically disfigured!, you know, hypothetically. You’ll meet the mother of a man who’s incarcerated at Rikers Island, and an ex-con who did time there, and a car thief who’s still on the outside.

NEW YORKERS is only a tiny sample of the fascinating lives in New York City, of course. But that’s all the more reason to savor every story. I did. And I can tell you, if I ever get up to New York City again, I’m gonna savor every slice on a Scott’s Pizza Tour (Chapter 8, “Life is a Parade”). That’s a thing that exists in New York. Because of course it does. It’s New York.

I am grateful to NetGalley for a free advance copy.

House to Home is both the story of how the author reshaped her own home and a guide to how you can think like an architect while reshaping your home. She points out things most people overlook: for example, that accessibility is essential for any home, since most currently able-bodied people plan to get old, and most of us won’t be able to handle stairs with quite the same agility as we age.

Interstitial pages between chapters offer you a place to make notes and sketches, if you’ve bought a copy in print. (You mustn’t do that to a library copy, and good luck doing that to an e-book.)

Whether you’re planning to build or remodel a house, or you’re just curious what goes on behind the scenes on HGTV projects, House to Home will give you the insights you need.

I am grateful to NetGalley for a free review copy.

Sometimes you’re better off letting people lie to you, and even lying to yourself. That’s the surprising, but well-argued, conclusion of Useful Delusions. Some people, for example, corresponded with romantic pen pals for years, sending money and other gifts. But their pen pals didn’t actually exist. They were fictions created in a scam called the Church of Love. Were the gift-givers, then, victims of fraud? You’d think so. But some of them resented that the letter-writers had been arrested and even testified in their defense. The belief they were in a loving relationship had been a positive one, they said.

Okay, that’s an extreme case. But the authors point out so many other ways in which self-deception is actually helpful to us.

Most of us act as if we’re happy to see customers and co-workers, even when we aren’t—and they do the same for us. We get more enjoyment out of things we pay more for, even when they’re identical to lower-priced options. Patients who believe they’ll live longer than the data would suggest do, in fact, tend to live longer.

Here’s the thing: Our brains are great at passing on our genes to the next generation, and not so great at perceiving objective reality in every detail. The mental shortcuts baked into our operating system give us a somewhat accurate and mostly useful idea of what’s going on. When we find ourselves in a truly dystopian situation like being a civilian during a genocidal civil war, experiencing a ritual for bulletproofing might actually help to keep you alive. On the other hand, patriotic and religious beliefs can preserve an entire society even as they cost individual people their lives.

This book is well-organized, and easy to pick up again after a break. A few fascinating stories of extreme self-deception (like the pen pals) weave throughout the narrative, showing up to illustrate a point or to delve deeper into the case study. Since it isn’t designed for academic use, there’s no index—but the well-planned organization of chapters certainly helps.

I am grateful to the authors, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

If you’re interested in learning more about South Korea, How to Live Korean is a great place to start. From an overview of thousands of years of Korean history to the latest in technology and creative arts, the author takes you on a tour of Korean life that includes food (with recipes!), beauty and fashion, relationships, and society. Vivid photographs pop with color, showing the wide variety of life in South Korea from traditional to ultra-modern. Although it’s not meant as a tourist guide, How to Live Korean points out places and sights worth including in any trip.

Korean meals usually include small side dishes called banchan (반찬), which come in a wide variety and are meant to be shared. How to Live Korean is like that: a wonderful sampling of many different topics, with enough explanation to give you an enjoyable taste of each, and knowledge that you’ll want to share.

I am grateful to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance copy of this book.

Mushrooms are hardcore. They turn death into life. Some of them are delicious; some of them can clean up hazardous waste. (Don’t get them confused. The wrong one could turn life into death.)

In Search of Mycotopia is a rollicking tour of the science of fungi and the fittingly from-the-ground-up communities of people who grow them. Like any good science writer, the author mixes a modicum of salty language (the first of a few f-bombs is on page 3), humor, and descriptions that are just technical enough to get the point across. And he doesn’t flinch at erudite but expressive vocabulary, making me feel smarter not only from learning about fungi but also by remembering—and learning—rarely-seen words. (I didn’t know duff, tarn, and lots of fungus-related terms. I find this delightful. Readers who would yeet Foucault’s Pendulum will occasionally want a good dictionary.)

Beyond the science of fungi, Bierend focuses on the people and organizations who have come together to promote knowledge of mycology, and the multifarious modes in which they’ve learned to function together. That’s what I found most fascinating by the end: people who appreciate mushrooms and the threads of mycelia from which they sprout tend to take life tips from the subject of their fascination.

This book would shine on an undergrad syllabus for Science and Society.

I am grateful to the authors, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

Queer Icons and Their Cats does what it says on the tin, mostly: a page or two about a famous queer person and the beloved animals in their lives, with a photo filling the opposite page depicting them with a cat. Frequently it's their own companion; sometimes it's a cat who lives with someone else. But with one appalling exception, it's always adorable.

Unfortunately, the copy I saw also included a certain self-proclaimed “man with a pussy” along with a glowing description of him. That guy isn’t a queer icon, he’s a jackass who was assigned jenny at birth. He said non-binary people like me don’t deserve access to hormones, and he said that when a trans woman is murdered by her date, it's her fault if she didn't disclose beforehand that she has a penis. I’ve explained to the publisher that he’s no angel, and my opinion of the book will be heavily influenced by his inclusion or removal.

I am grateful to the authors, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

Oh my stars, it's breathtaking. Luke throwing his lightsaber like a dagger to stab a fleeing foe in the back? Leia demanding to be euthanized like a "steel kitten" and then getting off a sniper shot that caught Vader completely by surprise? This is atrociously anti-canonical but it's a wild ride.

Listened to much of the audiobook while Jodi did, and as a Gen-X geek I appreciated gags like "reindeer flotilla setec astronomy".