I may have given this book an extra half star for finishing the story it set out to tell.
Yes, there's a sequel, but this one goes from beginning of one arc to the end of another and that happens SO RARELY.
If you're looking for comp titles, this is Shadow and Bone crossed with Chinese mythology and it does what it does very well.

I'm never sure how much "constant, low key screaming about history" should count towards the rating. If it does, this should get a five.
I do, however, think this would make a great compulsory read for anyone who is unsure about why modernism failed and postmodernism arose.
And also the tension between making things legible to the apparatuses (apparati?) of the state and being carefully attuned to particularities.
What would it look like to have both?
I keep thinking in terms of halakha and characterizing the modernist shift (drink for Haym Soloveitchik reference) away from memetic tradition to a written culture where the posek has technical knowledge that exists alongside the need for shimush (metis) to educate rabbis how to rabbi.
And in the desire to systematize, the particular gets lost, which creates a situation where rabbis will not publish or be vocal about particular opinions lest they be taken as Truth rather than contingent answers in the moment.
There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here and the most infuriating part is reading a 25 year old book and seeing how prescient it is and how much we just straight up did not learn.
It does occur to me that this book does antedate the Internet and I wonder what we have to say about communities now. Anyway, much to chew on here, especially once one gets past the incandescent rage stage of the High Modernist know-it-all with authoritarian tendencies without a population positioned to resist and, oof, does that have a lot to say about current situations.

It took me like half a day to read the first 80% of this book and then three days to slowly process the final chapters and the more specific conversation about what unmasking looks like.
Also, Price talks at the end about accepting editorial encouragement to write the book for the neurodivergent gaze and not accommodate the neurotypical gaze and, damn, does he succeed. The book would be good no matter what, but the sense that he's not writing to make the neurotypicals comfortable (or uncomfortable; it's just not for them) gives such strength and impetus to how the books calls on its readers to think about their movements through the world.
It was so good and a book that I think I'm going to need to spend a lot more time sitting with.

Hardinge isn't horror, although she is often creeping dread. Or, insofar as she is, she's my kind of horror. She and Kingfisher share a love for doing good set against the backdrop of the macabre.
This is, basically, a book about trauma. It says its a book about curses and that's because Hardinge is VERY good at what she does, but this is actually a book about pain and anger and hate and trauma and that kind of people it can turn us into and the kind of people we can turn ourselves into.
And also an entire Pan's Labyrinth of terrifying creatures and the scariest creatures of all are the perfectly ordinary birds.
I loved it so much.

I've fallen hard for memoirs this year, which I have to admit I didn't see coming.
Samatar has always been a gloriously gifted writer of travel stories, although it is a bit odd to have her writing about real places this time.
She thinks about so many things that I find deeply interesting and, in particular, the way she talks about Mennonite culture and ethnicity and religion is (as she notes) incredibly resonant Judaism. The way she weaves stories together with meditations on how people(s) carry history and the unnoticed or deliberately ignored voices in histories and societies. The tension in Samatar's identities animates the story and allows space for all of the multiplicity of things that come together to make this mosaic of a memoir.
It was beautiful.

I love Chih and Almost Brilliant. 
I also love the way these novellas engage with stories as braids of experience and play with questions of truth versus narrative without making it about what *really* happened. 
Story and history and memory all wound together into small but beautiful collections. They’re all great. 

Another book that I should have read LONG before I finally sat down to it.
If you liked Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell and/or A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows, you will recognize this genre and enjoy it immensely.
And I appreciate books that basically say "what if the concerns of fanfiction, but original story?" And then write it. By which I mean a deep commitment to characters not as exploration of individual psyches but as beloved friends who one wants to see happy, a balance of plot and romance, a recognition that using a trope elegantly is just as delightful as making up a new thing, and an interest in questions like "how would someone experiencing mental illness navigate a different world than ours" in a way that is neither case study nor cure story.
I don't know why fanfic got so caught on that (something between representation and a strong desire to make sense of mental illness), but it has become more mainstream from there and in a good way. (It's a little bit like watching the evolution of how trauma is handled in fantasy, but I digress.)

Anyway, this is all a very long way of saying that I have a type when it comes to romance and that tyle is stories about gay speculative fiction princes (and the occasional Paladin) and I'm not even a little sorry.

The great thing about this book is that you will know, instantly, from the title whether it is a book you want to read or not.
It is a history of the tomato, looking at ten kinds (not 10 individual tomatoes) of tomatoes being interesting—from the history of pasta with tomato sauce to why supermarket tomatoes taste terrible—Alexander is there and writing a very fun food journey to talk you through it.
I cannot oversell how much this book was a palate cleanser for me and how much I appreciated it for it.
Anyway, are you interested in a pop history of the tomato? Read this book! It's exactly what it says on the San Marzano can.

I...am making a conscious choice not to rate this book because I cannot do so in a way that is fair to the author. Going too low undermines the really impressive close textual reading and often brilliant argument that he makes and going high ignores the upsetting depictions of autistic people and deficit (rather than strength) based approach that characterizes Levine's language.

The fundamental problem of this book is that it can't imagine an autistic person reading it. By which I mean descriptions of what Yosef did and the choices he made felt very true to an autistic neurotype, but the reasons for why Yosef did it and the ongoing descriptions of autistic people as self-absorbed and lacking empathy rather than acknowledging the ways in which the double empathy problem works (the brothers also consistently fail to understand Yosef, but it's framed as Yosef's problem) and the way that Yosef tries to communicate by autistic norms and is rebuffed. There is a version of this analysis that reads Yosef as autistic, meaning that he is principled even at high cost to himself, has a high level of altruism and so expects that in others, and also has sensory issues that would lead his father to give him a fine wool coat that won't upset him. 

To put it another way, why is it that being דן לכף זכות (judging all favorably and assuming best intention) and righteous even in the face of temptation (he's called Yosef HaTzadik for a reason) is a problem when it's an autistic person? It's also extremely weird to me to talk about Yosef's unreasonable daydreams as a mark of his autism when he's right...

Credit where credit is due, the second half of the book gets much better and the way Levine talks about accommodations being necessary for success and also how the brothers themselves make the same social mistakes as Yosef when they are outside of their milieu and destabilized is just *chef's kiss*. But that analysis undermines a significant amount of his first part where he talks about "autistic people are like X" all the time. Are the brothers autistic also then? What's different that we account for trauma and situational stress in their case, but not Yosef's?

The other thing that feels lurking under the surface and like Levine can't bring himself to deal with (and here I am, imputing motives. No idea, maybe?) is what it says about Yaakov and the brothers and every single neurotypical person in this story if this analysis is right. Not, you know, that the brothers come out looking great no matter how you sell this 17 year old, but Levine is stuck in this position where he either tells the story that this autistic kid is so annoying that his brothers had to get rid of him or the brothers are so intolerant of difference that they had to sell the autistic kid rather than confront their own bias.

The perspective shift is dizzying because it makes everyone else in this book (except, interestingly, Pharaoh) way more terrible. Potiphar's wife's sexual assault of Yosef (and, it's true, autistic people do are sexually assaulted at a higher rate), the butler's choice to leave Yosef in jail because he's awkward in company, my previous comment about the brothers...
If you are neurotypical, you almost can't tell the story without saying that Yosef, as the inconvenient autist, brought it on himself through his behavior. Because it's such an indictment of those who build a world based on playing social games and then take pains to make others lose. 

This, incidentally, is part of the argument for #ownvoices. It's not that Levine couldn't or ought not write this. It's that, like many people writing from a privileged position about a marginalized one, he makes assumptions and misses things that someone who has lived this would know. And it's also complicated because I *did* a version of this with Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus where I talked about how he reads as autistic to me and that reading resonated with some and others totally bounced off it, which makes sense. You can't write for everyone. But it still feels like an autistic sensitivity reader would have made a world of difference.

Which brings me back to my original point of not knowing how to rate this book. The analysis is so good, the language is so alienating, and the creeping horror that this is what neurotypical people THINK, which goes unacknowledged by the text except in a few places, made it a very complicated read. I don't usually write that many notes in the margins to hold my attention. A little under 2/3 of those notes are available, should you wish to read them. Anyway, this book did what it set out to do and is going to shape the way I read the Yosef story from now on. It's so good and I wish it had been so much better.

I grabbed this book because Tade Thompson wrote it and I really liked what he did with Molly Southeborne. And then it sat on my shelves because I never actually checked what it was about.
And then I needed something to read last night that...wasn't fantasy and thought "oh, I should see what this book is about".
Space ship locked room murder mystery. Mysteries on a space ship is one of my favorites and this one did not disappoint. It went in all sorts of unexpected places but it was fascinating and complicated and gritty in a way that space ships rarely are (they tend to be either pristine or covered in effluvia). I'm so glad I had it and I'm so glad both of my children napped today so I could finish it.