I suppose after you listen to someone on a podcast enough times, you can’t help but like their stuff. Moren’s book is right in my wheelhouse: space opera and sarcastic characters. What more can one want?

This was supposed to be my Yom Kippur book, and it sort of was. Except I stayed up after kol nidrei and finished the whole thing on Friday night because it was that brilliant. It was definitely the right choice for a day not merely of atonement but of introspection. And it was incredibly done.

So this was preposterously cute. It’s a YA romance novel that’s cute and funny and just a joy to read because Dimple is amazing!
What I really appreciated about it was the balance that Menon struck between writing a deeply particular story about Dimple and Rishi and their culture(s) and experiences and a larger story about being the children of immigrants in America and balancing expectations about intimacy and marriage and future careers, all of which resonate in different ways, as if viewing them through a glass shifted 90 degrees. Rishi’s complaint about the everpresent Christianity in the US calendar and his small ways of fighting back was, to this Jewish reader, a funny and poignant moment. This book doesn’t precisely try to be deep, but it takes on deep issues with a very light touch.

This book is fundamentally unrateable. It’s an academic chronicle of Tolkien’s approach to the story of Beren and Luthien so it is both the narrative and about the narrative. The story sections are good, if sometimes frustrating in brevity, Christopher’s glosses are either far too short to provide meaningful context or repetitive.
And yet it’s Tolkien. And when the stuff gets out of the way and the epic poetry fades through...well, if that is your thing, this will most certainly be your thing.

Gladstone is such a genius when it comes to epic fantasy and no one comes close to what he’s doing with magic and souls and capitalism. Ruin of Angels very obviously follows earlier books and draws on them, but it also breaks with the sequence in an interesting way. It’s as though Gladstone has been setting the world up until now, even though that does the complexity of the books a disservice, and now he’s putting pressure on the seams to see how it breaks.
Gloriously, of course.
One of the other things I love about the Craft Sequence is Gladstone understands revolution and break and change in the fabric of society. He often uses magic to make change...faster, but the trajectory and overall workings of revolt feel real. It’s not a polemic, but as he says at the end, we need our narratives to imagine our futures in a way that is both fantastical and deeply real even if lacking in...verisimilitude.

We all know how I feel about Bujold by now, right? It's nice to get some resolution to the love story (which, to be fair, we all knew where it was going). The story itself was...fun albeit Milesian. And Milesian is not a criticism because I love Miles deeply and forever (even if I would murder him if I had to live with him).
There is an interesting thing I want to write about Miles versus Penric as models of...an overinhabited mind, let us say. And as people who are constantly in over their heads and getting themselves out with a truly extraordinary and unexpected skillset.
But later. For now, I'm much more interested in Bujold's recent focus on...for lack of a better term, polyamory.

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen is the most explicit in terms of working out how the arrangement would go, but I counted three different triads in this novella, each of which was negotiated in a different way. (I would like some confirmation that Nikys and Adelis's mothers were lovers--representation is good, after all--but that might require a POV shift and I think the subtext is there, but I also think that we don't really have the models for homosocial bonding in polygyny, but whatever.) So Tanar/Sura/Adelis as a future possibility and Penric/Nikys/Desdemona at the close of the book. And none of these triads are love triangles in the traditional sense of choice; they are all left somewhat open-ended with the presumption that resolution is negotiation and not choice. Which I find fascinating, though I'm not quite sure where it goes from here. There's a kind of "Beta colony's attitudes towards sex are more codified and in the open than usual, but human beings have been figuring this kind of thing out for a very long time" feel to it, but I'm trying to figure out what these four models--Aral/Oliver/Cordelia as the fourth--are saying.

I️ had a hard time not fangirling over this book. Kurshan's relationship to learning, to texts, to literature both Jewish and British utterly captured how I️ feel about books and learning. Reading this book was a kind of religious experience in itself and her ability to truly live the Torah she learned and find it in her every day was incredible. But, mostly, I️ appreciated how she gave voice to so many things that were kicking around my mind.

I’m almost angry that I’m not teaching my science fiction soon because I️ really really want to teach the stories in this book. All of them are fascinating in their own way and as a collection that illustrates how different Butler is from anyone else writing then. Her approach to fiction as a way of refusing a kind of naive optimism without allowing her pessimism to end in nihilism makes her work unlike anyone else's. And her commitment to working out the implications of her premises and their effect on people and on how we see the world—rather than a facile description of new tech with old ideology—is part of why I️ think she’s the best.
I️ also loved the afterwords on this book; Butler's dry observations about her own work are almost worth reading just for themselves.

If you go into this book knowing what it’s about, you will think you know a lot more than you do. There is a joy in matching the characters to the writers you get to know later through their works, but Valente is very clear that she is not interested in telling a Victorian child's tale. She could evoke the language of Alice, but she consciously chooses not to, drawing instead on her own brand of joyful preposterousness.
Having said that, the more you suspend your disbelief about the history and, paradoxically, the more you know about the Brontes and their juvenilia, the more this book will delight you.

This is one of those three by average books - most of it was a 4, but it had a few things that bothered me a lot about it and so it averages out to a three. I thought the conceit was brilliant, I thought the main character was...like old cheese where you can't tell if there's something off about it or if its supposed to smell that way and it's just not to your taste, I thought the supporting cast was awesome, and I hate the [spoiler]trope of disfigured villain who is evil because no one loves them. Seriously, can we just not?[/spoiler].
Jama-Everett has written a very interesting response to the superhero genre--see Abigail Nussbaum on this series--and I like much of what he is doing. It's just frustrating to see him successfully interrogate certain aspects of the genre while still perpetuating some of the problems inherent in the original.