Night of the Living Trekkies is a fantastically funny read, peppered with bits of Star Trek trivia. The premise of a gaggle of Star-Trek themed optimists trying to survive a zombie outbreak was a really neat way to explore genre conventions in science fiction. It was very meta in that vein, especially with the final page.

The illustrations in this book are beautiful! It's a gift of Jan Brett's across the board, but the end papers of this book in particular are wonderful. I love the lichen and mosses! The plot is okay. I am definitely not the intended audience age, but I enjoy the message of conservation of nature.

I really loved Sourdough. Robin Sloan's books offer me some semblance of home in this weird and shifting world of technology. I'm not sure I liked Lois's ethos of getting rich at the end of the novel, as it seems antithetical to the lesson she seemingly learned about greed from the starter, but it was overall a good read. I think the characters who work in the Marrow Fair are very interesting in their diversity and creativity. I really enjoyed how this novel plays with reputation, ambition, happiness, and where/how people seek to streamline their lives. The slurry and lembas subplot was funny, endearing, and a bit terror inducing at the same time. I look forward to reading more of these Penumbraverse and Penumbraverse-adjacent books!

Orbital follows 24 hours in the lives of six astronauts abord the International Space Station. Like so many books, much of the story this novel tells is about grief.

Early on, the audience learns that Chie, an astronaut from Japan, has lost her mother while aboard the ISS. I sat on my floor and cried reading the early sections of the book featuring Chie. I just lost my 17 year old dog, and I had to watch her be put down over zoom. Orbital follows Chie's grief and anguish in such an tangible and empathetic way. She's so sad and is stuck so far away, unable to do anything but grieve and yearn to be home again, as it was. Sometimes, she ponders not wanting to leave the ISS because if she doesn't go back to Earth, than she will have never experienced a world without her mom in it. When the book switches to Chie's mother's point of view, as she lays dying on the steps to their house, she looks up into the sky, trying to find the spat that is her daughter on the ISS. She chooses to let go because she can only think how sad it would be fore Chie to come home only to watch her die. As Chie grieves, she brings the reader through the traditions to be followed, to lay her mother's body to rest. They will pick out the bones from her ashes, and while Chie doesn't want her family to wait for her to be back, her longing for there to be a piece of the long bone of her mother's arm, like a piece of her mother's strength is so sad.

The crew members aren't perfect paragons of humanity. They're flawed, jealous, and proud, and they have to deal with the rules enforced because of national competition between Russia and the US. They grapple with religion, lack of religion, and the fallibility of their human bodies against the void and beauty of space.
 
Orbital ends on a neutral note, not really coming to an end because it's just the end of the synthetically adhered to day on an the international space station that experiences 16 sunrises and sunsets over those 24 hours.

I'm not sure that I like this style of writing in long form. Often, by the time we get to the end of a section, I've lost the thread introduced in the beginning, that was supposed to tie them together. Still a good podcast

If you've listened to the first few dozen episodes of the podcast, you've read this book.

The Cat Who Saved Books is a very interesting divergence from my normal reading, as of late. I generally enjoy magical realism, but this was unique even within the genre. The author's writing style has a far different tone and pace than most Western authors. The characters are refreshingly direct and sincere, and the plot handles grief and the differing reactions one can have to grief with grace and humor. I greatly enjoyed following Ringtaro's journey through the labyrinths and seeing him grow to understand that people care about him and figure out that he cares for them in return. I also enjoyed learning more about the concept of hikikomori, and I appreciate the efforts through which the translator went in order to retain the author's message and the nuances of the Japanese language as they differ from English.

I almost put this book down in the first third. It was written in 2012, when Google was a beacon of progress and not yet semi universally viewed as an evil mega corp that wormed its way into our lives. At 37% of the way through I wrote the following journal entry:
"The first third of this book made me violently anxious. I don't like Clay's love interest. I think Google should be the villain. If it's not, and it's anything other than a tool to start the actual plot, I'll be upset. "

Having finished the book, I'm very glad I didn't put it down. Kat Potente grew on me, especially when Clay stopped viewing her as a manic pixie dream girl, and Google was, in fact, a tool to further the actual plot.

This book is a beautiful example of exploring the human condition and experiencing what it means to strive to not be forgotten. It's story about friendship, about how one's life doesn't need to be anything other than lived to be of value, and about what comes next after the mystery is solved. This book is a good reminder that immortality really is the friends we make along the way.

I am grateful to have read it, and I highly recommend.

This was a good but sad read. In the last chapters, Kalanithi's hope for his future and the longevity of his survival gave me hope that he had survived long enough to see his daughter grow, at least a little bit. Finishing the book and learning it was published posthumously was heartbreaking. Kalanithi is eloquent and transparent about his struggles with grappling with the loss of a life he treasured right at the cusp of what should have been him thriving.

This is definitely recommended to be read with the show, which I have not yet seen