I'm not exactly a yuri expert, but Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon is my favorite yuri series that I've read so far. I love everything about it, from the artwork and character design to the setting to the emotional depth of the characters. It's a tender and relatable story about figuring out your sexuality as an adult, and all of the confusion and questions that entails. Bonus points for introducing a character who is one of the girls' ex/other girl's potential rival (kind of?), but not immediately launching the typical yuri jealousy-and-miscommunication plot.

I downloaded this book on my phone because I needed something to read in small bits while waiting at the hospital, then I realized that it was the same book that an instructor used in a mindfulness workshop I took last year, the one with a poem that made us in the class sigh happily and that I made a mental note to read in full at some point.

It ended up being the perfect book for me and for the time. The poems are observational and grounded in all the ways I like and try to be when I write poetry. I started a spread in my book journal just for quotes, because I was highlighting sections of nearly every poem and knew that I would want to carry the lines with me. This is maybe the only writing about the pandemic that I've ever liked, and the kind of poetry that reassures me that people are still writing good poetry.

An immediate favorite of the year.

In an ideal world, I would have parked my ass with a cup of tea and devoured all of Hell Bent--a book I have been desperate to read from the moment I read the final sentence of Ninth House--in about two days. But the world is far from ideal, so instead I came to it exhausted and in short bits of time in between dealing with family crises.

It's a testament to the book that I still enjoyed it this way, despite it not being the kind of book that benefits from distraction. There are threads from Ninth House, secondary characters that get to play a larger role in the hell heist at the center of the plot, and some murder and demonic trickery that demand a fair amount of attention. When I started reading, I got the sinking feeling that I had somehow forgotten everything that happened in Ninth House and would be screwed because I didn't have time for a reread. However, with a few Google searches to refresh my memory and some patience, things came together and I was impressed with how Bardugo brought characters' pasts to bear on both their present lives and their approaches to the arcane, and I liked the ways she built on the world she established in the series debut.

In short, I think that Alex Stern is one of the greatest contributions to dark academia, a rapidly-bloating genre in which aesthetic threatens to overtake substance. Leigh Bardugo easily stands out with intelligence, style, and teeth.

The interview she did with Goodreads in the run-up to Hell Bent's publication was a great primer for the book itself. It really brought the central ideas of this series into sharper focus for me, and I recommend it.

I read this for my work book club. It wasn't a favorite, largely because it felt more suited to a younger audience and because I found myself annoyed with the amount of Clinton family asides that made their way into the profiles. But I was pleasantly surprised by the number of disabled and queer women included, though of course it falls short in inclusion and discussion of trans women: Danica Roem is the only trans woman profiled, even though in the introduction Hillary says that they also considered Laverne Cox but *heavy sigh* there just wasn't enough space in the book to fit everyone; and a discussion of girls who are excluded from school sports glaringly omits even the acknowledgement that trans athletes face discrimination in this area.

The Book of Gutsy Women reminds me a lot of the books of notable women's biographies that I read in elementary school, and I can see it being an inspiring read for tween and teen girls. Still, I found myself wanting something this book just can't be due to its authorship: farther left, more radical, more critical of capitalism.

I did come away from this with a positive opinion of Chelsea, though, and I admired her willingness to express disagreement with actions of the US government and with her father's administration. She comes across as informed, compassionate, and politically aware. It makes me wonder if she might run for office some day.

I was immediately interested in this book when I heard about it on Reading Glasses because over the past year or so I have been arriving at the conclusion that the way I've existed online for so long is not sustainable and not compatible with my mind functioning in the ways that I want it to, and that I have to change the way that I engage (or, increasingly, to not engage) with social media. It's one thing to have a conviction that something is true and quite another to have research that tells you that you're not just a crazy luddite, and Stolen Focus was that second thing for me. While some sections of the book don't hold up as well as others (particularly the chapter on ADHD which does not include interviews with anyone who actually has ADHD), Hari's reporting on the rise of surveillance capitalism, the behaviorist designs behind how social media hooks users, and the effects of living in a society that is too distracted, divided, and misinformed to solve problems we all face, is compelling. I especially value that Hari's thinking encompasses the big picture and that he proposes systemic solutions to systemic problems rather than fully unload the burden of change onto individuals. Not a perfect book, but an important one.

This year's Reading Glasses challenge includes a prompt to give a book a second chance, and this was mine. I started it on audio last year but bounced off of it hard; it was hard for me to get a grasp of the language and what was going on when listening to it during my stressful commute. For the first 60 pages or so of the print version, I was also confused, a bit lost in the swirling profusion of images and poetic turns of phrase. But once the threads started to weave together into something like a coherent picture, I fell deeply in love. Gorgeous and sad and full of yearning and more hope that I expected.

Before I came out as a lesbian, I used to attempt to enjoy straight romance novels, which, when the attempts were "successful," resulted in me focusing a lot on the heroines while ignoring the heroes as much as I possibly could. Nora Roberts was one author I had success with more than most, because in addition to heroines that I liked, there were always lots of daily details, friendships, and other plot points that distracted me from the heterosexuality. I found it delightfully cozy to read about a group of women running a wedding planning business together or living on a witchy little island with lots of witchy little shops. Since coming out, I've lost my ability to just ignore the dating men part, so I will probably never read another Nora Roberts book.

So I was happy to begin listening to Starting From Scratch and realize that it gave me the same feeling I used to have reading Nora Roberts, with the added benefit of being able to actually care about the central romantic relationship. Here were lots of soothing details of daily life! Here were friendships! Here was a charming dog! Behold, the protagonist baking cookies and taking care of her grandma! And wonders never cease: sex scenes that I actually enjoy, with a love interest that I find attractive!

I wasn't sure what to expect because this was my first Georgia Beers, but I enjoyed getting wrapped up in some fictional characters' emotions and the escapism it provided. Will check out more of her work.

This year I've resolved to read one Pulitzer Prize-winner for fiction each month, and I'm glad that I decided to start this project with Less. Andrew Sean Greer sends his protagonist, nearly-50 author Arthur Less, on a trip around the world, searching in distant locales for distraction from his age, his literary setbacks, and the impending marriage of his longtime lover Freddy to another man. In some ways this is the typical sad-middle-aged-white-man book, but it differs not just because the sad, middle-aged white man is gay, but because Greer brings self-awareness and good-hearted humor to the genre. This humor (sweetness balanced perfectly with the bitterness of loss and indignity) is delightful, as are Greer's playful prose and the well-developed twist. Less's life is not that bad, and Less is pretty great.

I stumbled upon this on audio at work and decided to check it out after learning about the book's lesfic classic status in the reviews here. While it's pretty dated in the way that it depicts characters' biases and a sexual assault, I can see why it was revolutionary for readers in its time. This is a book about a relationship between women and their growing awareness of their own queerness, and it's written with a lot of sensuality and the assertion that sapphic relationships are just as valid as (and perhaps more so than) heterosexual relationships. It ends happily and with the assertion that queer women don't have to replicate the gender roles and expectations of straight relationships. Pretty bold.

This was not exactly the book that I expected, less self-help and more a meandering half-memoir. May considers various topics related to winter/cold and depression/sadness/setbacks, but while I found it interesting, I was frustrated by lack of a satisfying through line. Maybe that's partially the point: near the end, May says that Wintering isn't the book that she wanted to write, because depression wreaked havoc on her writing process, and there are no real conclusions to any of the issues that face her over the course of the book. In the end I felt slightly less alone, but not very helped.