It's like I looked up and accidentally finished another book in this series. I feel like this book promised rather more than it delivered in terms of "how these two got together" and also I find it fascinating that, in a world without homophobia, so much of the story is structured in order to keep the protagonists apart.
Which, romance, but also it feels like there's enough plot to keep them occupied. Still, it's fun and nice to get to read more of Scott's works.

Not the point, but I was so pleased with the depiction of autism in this book. It is a very specific neurotype, but it was excellent. And Tingle also hit the precise notes of not making this a story about autism while still recognizing that autistic main characters will alter the progression of the story because of who they are and how they live in the world. The story is different because of who Rose is. It also sticks every landing.
So does the rest of the book. In news that surprises no one, Tingle is a very good writer and knows how to tell a story with a moral.
It's interesting that the two genres that are most moralizing in that they engage with reward and punishment most explicitly are horror and romance. (Which is often why I have a lot of feelings about who I read in both genres; they are hard books to enjoy if your morals and the author's are at odds.) Naturally Tingle writes both. This is very much a horror story in that vein, reifying the horrors that the religious community visits on their queer kids and telling a story of what it takes to exorcise your demons. It's such a good premise and Tingle gets it.

About halfway through this book , I looked over at my spouse and said "I'm not going to bed tonight until I finish this book." And his response was "you know, you absolutely don't have to stay up." No no. I did.
This book is both difficult to put down and difficult to look away from. Of course it is; Kuang us a genius with character and has never pulled a literary punch in her life and this book is no different. 
What is so good about this book is that Kuang isn't particularly interested in talking to the reader; she trusts us to read the story of June making choice after choice and justifying each one to herself and then being furious that maybe those choices have consequences. She also trusts us to see the connections between power as something an individual has, privilege as something a group has, and hegemony as something an industry has. The story and the excoriation both of entitlement and an industry that seeks to make marginalization into capital that it can use work hand in hand.
I don't love spending time in the heads of awful people and it's a testament to Kuang's skill that she brought me along on this journey the entire way.
Also, I mean, yes Athena is Kuang's stand in. Both her successes and her flaws. I do think that part of what

Candace is doing at the end is properly taking down the idea that Athena is a genius, because it's always just something that June says over and over again. Athena is good, but she's also a magpie and that critique stands throughout the entire book. And Candace's voice exists in order to remind us that June is lying to us—about Athena as much as everyone else

. But why the book works for me gets back to the fact that, while this book gives us all the tools with which to make judgments, it never once justifies any character's behavior. It is, more than anything, a critique of an industry and the choices people make within it. Also, again, a very fun novel, especially if you know how online drama works.

It's not so much that this book is sad or depressing, more that holding out hope for a shift towards a more equal society and making the kinds of changes that Piketty proposes seems...difficult.
He himself notes that changes like this tend to come in response to massive crises and, well, we're definitely developing enough of those. 
Informative, but in a way that leaves you angry at the absence of willingness to make change.
I just...the prospect of being ABLE to get super rich by exploiting others seems like a much less worthy goal than the prospect of acheiving radical equality and more equitable distribution of resources.

This was a surprisingly slow building mystery novel...which is not usually what I've been trained to think I'm getting when two dudes with swords stand back to back on the cover.
It mostly worked for me and I think most of my problems were getting my brain back into a different generation of fantasy novels.
It's weird to think about style as a feature of contemporary (ish) books, but this book felt very 90s in a way that took a while for me to get back into.
Still fun, still gonna read the rest of them eventually.

This is Therin's fifth book in this universe so, by now, it is very clear what we are getting into and I am extremely fond of all of these characters, both the new ones and the old ones. 
Everyone acts shockingly sensibly for a romance novel (with like one small exception) it was just a lot of fun and good to overall have a lot of external drama with most of the internal stuff being the careful work of building relationships.

This book should win every award it was nominated for and also maybe some of the ones it wasn't.
It's so good and the comparisons to The Broken Earth trilogy are not misplaced.
It's weird and new and steeped in familiar stories and also one of those books that proves that I will like anything in the hands of a good enough author.
Because this book had two of my least favorite tropes - a redemption arc and second person perspective - and I still loved it.
And it's because Jimenez gets everything I don't like about those two things and flips them on their heads.

Jun's redemption arc is about the impossibility of redemption and the recognition that you get to and have to go on living anyway. And Jimenez uses the second person sparingly enough that I don't hate it AND, instead of using it to try to bring the story closer to the reader, he uses it to situate the reader/audience as part of the story; we are addressed by the story in the story and it plays with narrative in all sorts of cool ways.

I thought it was brilliant and does everything right. And THE ENDING.

This book definitely gets better on reread and I did really like it first time around. I think knowing the kind of bonkers necromantic mashup that it turns out to be definitely helps and, more importantly, the twists aren't that necessary to enjoying the plot. Knowing what's going to happen makes it fun because you see the tropes play out.
Also, I mean, Moira Quick KILLS IT with the narration.
My plan for next week is to see if Harrow improves on aural acquaintance and then I can finally read Nona.

Apparently it's "books about the Middle Ages riffing on darkness" o clock this year. Having read The Light Ages about science in the Middle Ages, I'm now onto The Bright Ages.
Which is complicated, because while I am not a medievalist, I was Victorianist for a while and that means that 1) I am very familiar with the misuses of history at the hands of the 19th century and 2) all my friends were medievalists and renaissance scholars. So I followed the controversy around this book and read the critiques and, I mean, they're right. This book has a problem imagining an audience that is not white or christian. I am, in my own way, very familiar with the Middle Ages as the era of the Rishonim and that means that the inclusive project of the book—other people were here *with* us—is fundamentally uninteresting. The stories individually were interesting, but it doesn't live up to the sum of its parts.
On the bright side, M. Rambaran-Olm's review does have some great recommendations for what to read next. So on to Oliviette Otele's African Europeans once this current crop of "everything you've put on hold just came in right now" clears.

I'm suddenly pleased that my usual procrastination has meant that I read this close to when the next book came out and so my wait time between books is much shorter.
This was very different from the previous book in a good way and I also just delighted in women getting the same romance treatment that men usually do in this genre. (There are plenty of queer woman in fantasy, thank goodness, but they rarely get books that feel like romances and this is one of them. Which is nice to see.)
I was also very pleased to have guessed the protagonist of the next book and also very excited about it.