I have a lot of feelings about this book (once again we rate on vibes), although they range primarily between kinship and frustration because it is, at its heart, a book about carving glorious bas reliefs into the walls that confine you. Or, more precisely, an attempt to understand how one can. And I do think that one of the most unknowable things in the world is the peace that others find in the compromises of their life.
And I'm struck in so many ways by the narrative Swamy constructs to seek that meaning and also the unbridgeable gulf remains.
Also I get very weird about people attempting to convey through style the experience of being a child with a child's thoughts and this was no exception so this book took me significantly longer to get into than I expected.

I am and will always be a sucker for books about books. And while this is not Jasper Fforde (and even Fforde is not really ffording these days as he did in days of yore), it is a very fun story about stories and what they are for.
I do have many many MANY remaining questions about the mythology/cosmology/theology of this universe because it can't seem to decide if it's aiming for montheism, monoloty, or a smorgasbord of the Divine and I just have questions.
On the flipside of information, if you are the kind of reader who gets very annoyed when something is obvious, but the characters have not yet worked it out...this book may annoy you.
So many questions that I somewhat regularly got distracted from the book by wondering about them.
But on that I DO digress. And I did have a lot of fun listening to this one.

The thing about this book is that you know what it's about when you go into it and then it just...keeps being about that.
And also it's an absolutely fascinating premise and Kleid plays out the implications incredibly deftly.
The community's callous response was *particularly* on point in all the ways that it excoriates the community while asking the reader to interrogate ALL different kinds of dishonesty and trickery.
And I found the language of "spiritually pure" to not actually reflect how the community talks around either yichus or good middot. But also I see what Kleid is trying to do. But it didn't feel authentic enough to me and I got a little grumpy about it.

Another round of "it's been long enough between adding this book to my TBR and reading it that I forgot what it was about" so, um, possibly I should not have been surprised that it was poetry.
It was lovely and I wish I had been in the right frame of mind for it. But the way that Zoboi captures (and sets free) Butler as a strange and determined child is so good.

I’ve been meaning to read this for forever and then I missed the chance to download it the year that worldcon was/n’t in NZ and now I have it in paperback and I am very glad that I finally read this weird and glorious book that never did what I expected. 
Also I sort of love biologically based horror. And this isn’t horror per se although it is very very weird and it clearly fits into that era where everyone was slightly terrified of mushrooms. 

This book has a lot of math that I was cheerfully willing to ignore because I was listening to it and perfectly happy to trust that it was correct. 
If you are the kind of person who needs to understand the mathematics when they are explained to you…possibly read this book more slowly than I did. 
But still read it—Falk’s study of the science of the Middle Ages and specifically how he locates it simultaneously within John of Westwick’s life and in the sociocultural context of what knowledge production was like is fascinating. I’ve hung out with enough medievalists that this was less a debunking and more a deep dive into what was known and thought. 
And also it was absolutely fascinating to see medieval monks grappling with many of the same astronomical questions as the rabbis of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. 

I blame Wizards versus Lesbians for this one.
And myself for getting the kindle version of a book that I really needed to sit down with in a print version and just spend time on rather than read in small spurts throughout my day.
I don't know if I would have liked it more, but I would have appreciated what it was doing more. Or possibly followed it better and thus appreciated it more.
And if you want complicated thinky scifi that is, unfortunately, getting more relevant rather than less, this is very much that.

One day I'm going to reread this trilogy and see how it lands knowing everything I know about how it all turns out.
Anyway, this book was "come for more Muntadhir and Jamshed, stay for...more Muntadhir and Jamshed" honestly. Because given the choice between enemies to lovers and mutual pining, mutual pining will win out every time. 
But it was actually really nice to get this glimpse into the characters and their lives in more quiet ways. Now I really DO want to reread the trilogy. (But it's BIG.)

I was not expecting this book to be so thematically similar to Children of Memory, but here we are. 
I'm also mad that no one told me how much this book was riffing on Frankenstein. Well, by way of Rocky Horror. Yes, it's more obviously Pinocchio, but come on. VICTOR?
This is also very much a book for people who like to get references. It's me. I'm that person.
Anyway, it was Klune through and through--for all that it was also its own very weird thing--and I'm really loving this unofficial series he's doing on what it means to be human through the lens of monsters, death, and robots.