This was a very weird book to read, especially on Yom Kippur. 
But also a very helpful book to read on Yom Kippur as a series of stories about existence and possibility and…people, mostly. So weird and so Kate Atkinson asking questions about what makes reality the way it is. 

I love AJ Demas so much! Her books are always incredibly gentle even when they have complicated themes (like disability and sort of sex work). Or especially because they do. They are the kind of books I want to read right away and to save for when I need them. (Given the publication date and the date read on this one, I’ll let you figure out which this was.)

I’m enjoying the turn that the gothic novel has taken in what constitutes the horrible and horrifying (namely race to racism) because it’s a narrative medium that is so right for talking about what is horrible without necessarily being horror as such. 
I found our viewpoint character’s voice to be interesting albeit…frustrating sometimes, in the way she spoke to herself but first person narration is always such a tricky one to pull off so I get it. Having said that, the pull-no-punches approach to describing stuff that goes on in women’s bodies was very much appreciated and felt like an exactly right use of first person. 
What can I say, I like a creepy house and threatening dude and a mystery. (Am mildly confused by the description “strikingly original” on the cover of a gothic novel about race, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). 

This book felt like the author was working backwards from “how can I create a believable revolution against an evil empire?” and then filled in the details of the plot accordingly. 
It’s not so much that it was bad; more that it felt contrived. Or like things were happening because that author wrote them (yes I know!) rather than because the world of the book spins on its axis and so of course that’s what has to happen next. 
The food and tea sounded amazing, though, 5 stars to those descriptions. 

It’s very hard to have any expectations of Alexis Hall because every time you do, he subverts them. 
This is a romance without a romance plot. I have no idea how he managed to separate the aesthetics of the regency romance and apply it to…fantasy horror?
The man never ceases to impress me. But also it’s hard to recommend a book with “don’t go in with expectations”. 

This book was exactly the level of intro that I wanted into thinking about history and the ways that historians approach the process and also felt like it gave me a lot of languages and frameworks for articulating what I felt like I knew from my own backgroun , but didn’t KNOW. 
And the examples themselves were fascinating. 

I definitely appreciated the interlude about 3/4 of the way in that could have been titled "A Short Course in Linguistics and Why Noam Chomsky is Wrong".
Not sure why I hadn't been expecting it.

This is one of those books that has much food for thought in it. The way Everett talks about the Pirahã and their lives fascinates me; especially as the ways in which cultural expectations and priorities are such an integral part of the conversation. That is a point that is made explicitly long after it is noticeable in everything Everett says.

I don't know what to make of it, beyond the ways in which I find the questions it raises about the intersection between biology, language, and culture to be deeply interesting in the way that, for example, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis just isn't.
I also find the theological aspects, which are very much NOT the point of the book, to be deeply fascinating because of course I do. But, again, not that I know what to do with it. (I can't wait until my book chavruta finishes this one and we can discuss it.)

I am also torn because the audiobook is...fine, but there's no way I could have actually heard Pirahã as a spoken language without it so I don't know which to recommend. 

This book is doing an extraordinary amount even by 2020 standards and I’m very impressed it’s over 30 years old. 
It’s…kind of Jane Eyre and interested in disability in a way that I, for obvious reasons, find to be super interesting and it’s for sure not perfect, but it’s honestly one of the best I’ve seen in romance even when it’s trying. 
Also I read it straight through one night when I had horrible insomnia so I’m not sure what it’s like when you are not silently having a lot of feelings at the characters. 
Anyway, shoutout to the My Word as Vorkosigan discord for recommending this one; I’m not entirely sure I can explain why this book works for Bujold fans (especially of her fantasy work), but I absolutely agree. 

This was a "damnit!" book because, as I should have known from having read Brennan's other book, she enjoys being delightfully hilarious and then twisting the knife. But this was also so good and fun and such an excellent send-up of the portal fantasy in a way that feels like if Guy Gavriel Kay had a) read Game of Thrones and b) was an incredibly sarcastic millennial woman. But what she does with the idea of story and main character syndrome and the way we judge as readers/human beings is so fun to watch.

Moreno-Garcia is one of those authors I will read no matter what, which is a bit inconvenient because she is also someone who bops around genres so I never entirely know what I'm getting.
This time I got historical fiction and also a crash course in second temple Jewish figures who I had already been introduced to in some podcasts lectures on the kings and queens of Israel.
This was definitely a Friday night book - trying to read it piecemeal over the week was, as the pokemon say, not very effective, but as soon as I had an evening, it just started to pull me in and gave me a real appreciation for the way that Moreno-Garcia pulls narratives together.